Il Viaggio a Reims, Royal Opera, Covent Garden, July 2012

This anniversary gala concert united Jette Parker Young Artists with several earlier performers from that programme who have since gone on to international careers, and Il Viaggio a Reims (The Journey to Rheims) was the perfect piece to bring them together. Written by Rossini to celebrate the coronation of Charles X in 1825, it all takes place at a spa hotel, where the staff are preparing their international guests for onward travel next morning to the coronation at Rheims, where French kings had for centuries been anointed. None of the bon vivants actually get to Rheims, owing to a sudden lack of transportation, but they create their own celebration at the hotel before going on to festivities in Paris.

Daniele Rustioni conducted the ENO orchestra on stage, producing just the right tempi and occasionally joining in the fun himself, acting as a stooge for the singers.

With eighteen solo parts this is quite something to put on, but when Madeleine Pierard came on as the French Countess, concerned about the apparent absence of her fine clothes, the performance moved superbly into high gear. She was wonderfully expressive, her coloratura excellent and her voice effortlessly changing amplitude. Marina Poplavskaya was equally fine as Corinna the French poetess, appearing first at stage rear in an elegant grey skirt and jacket and giving a lovely rendering of Arpa gentil. In Part II after a complete absence of transportation has been announced she changed into a long dress for the celebrations they will all make in the hotel itself.

Among the men, Jacques Imbrailo sang in an appropriately commanding voice as the retired German major Baron Trombonok, and at the end of Part I, Lukas Jakobski as the antiquarian Don Profondo gave a wittily entertaining fast monologue, with the conductor hopping up and down on his podium in a Hoffnung-esque performance. Jakobski’s duet earlier in Part I, with Matthew Rose as the Englishman Lord Sidney, was terrific and Rose himself sang with huge power — his rendering of the National Anthem done with a ready wit.

Among the smaller roles I particularly liked Jihoon Kim as the doctor Don Prudenzio, Daniel Grice as Antonio the maître d’hotel, and Zhengzhong Zhou, who appeared as Zeferino on the conductor’s podium to announce the complete absence of horses, upon which Ailish Tynan as a strongly sung countess invites the whole company to Paris. The ending celebrations at the hotel with the various national anthems was super fun, and the whole evening immensely enjoyable.

Good lighting design by Nick Ware made the proscenium arch glow in gold, with the dome above in blue, and house lights low throughout. What a pity it was only a one-off performance.

Rusalka, Royal Opera, Covent Garden, February 2012

Can a force of nature acquire a soul? This is what Rusalka wants, to become human. As she says to the water spirit Vodník, humans have souls and go to heaven when they die. But souls are full of sin, says Vodník, …  and of love she responds. She has seen her prince and wants him to love her.

Dvořak’s opera Rusalka pits the powers of nature, particularly water, against human feelings and emotions. Like Ashton’s ballet Ondine it is loosely based on Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s fairy tale Undine that tells of a water nymph who falls in love with a prince. After acquiring human form, she loses her ability to speak, and at their wedding spurns his advances, feeling unable to compete with the fatal attraction of the articulate foreign princess. She abandons her prince, and though he searches for her and they are briefly reunited, his fate is sealed by his own unfaithfulness, and he dies in her arms.

Camilla Nylund made a lovely Rusalka, and Alan Held a very powerful Vodník. Both these performers sang the same roles in the original version of this production at Salzburg in 2008, and here at Covent Garden they enjoyed huge support from the other cast members. Bryan Hymel’s gloriously melodious voice was perfect for the Prince, and Petra Lang was superb as the foreign princess. Her body language is wonderfully expressive, and this singer who has made such a marvellous Ortrud in Lohengrin at both Covent Garden and Bayreuth, is perfectly suited to the role of a princess who feels not love but anger, determined that if she can’t have the prince then he shall be denied happiness. Compared to the princess he’s a weak man and instead of happiness he finds death as he begs Rusalka to kiss him at the end.

The power that allows this water nymph to turn into a human is the witch Ježibaba, strongly sung by Agnes Zwierko, and the singing of the three wood nymphs was beautiful, Madeleine Pierard in particular. Underlying it all was the conducting of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who imbued the music with huge emotional intensity at just the right moments. This was a terrific performance, and the singers were loudly cheered at the end, though the production team was roundly booed.

A bizarre production, photo Clive Barda

The production itself was brightly kitsch in parts, and like many other productions imported from the Germanic world, it presumably had a Konzept — in this case perhaps a brothel with Ježibaba as the madame, carefully checking the banknotes at one moment — but what’s the point? The ethereal nature of Rusalka and the watery forces of nature are better viewed without such a concrete representation. They inhabit a dark and mysterious world, yet the lighting at some points in Act III was extremely bright in a way that might work in Cosi fan tutte, but not in Rusalka.

This is a Czech opera — the very word of the title means water nymph in Czech — and does not fit easily with this Germanic-Italian production by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito. The theme of nature here is very much a Slavic one, and the term rus has an ancient Indo-European origin, meaning dew or humidity.

Do look beyond the superficialities of the production to the deeper meaning of the opera and don’t leave at the interval as several people did, because the performance is superb.

Performances continue until March 14 — for details click here.

Cendrillon, Royal Opera, Covent Garden, July 2011

The solid-looking walls in this production carry the text of Perrault’s fairy tale Cinderella, as if to reassure us that our lovely heroine will indeed eventually get her prince. For there is delicious uncertainty in Act III of this Massenet opera when Cinderella’s nasty step-mother and sisters assure her that after the bold intruder made her rapid exit from the ball, the prince decisively rejected her.

Off to the ball, all photos by Bill Cooper

This is too much for her father, who notices her grief and finally finds the backbone to defy his wife. In a tender duet with his daughter he promises they will return to his country seat and leave this town where he’s seen her cheerfulness fade away. Rather than allow her father to share her pain, however, she decides to run away and die alone. Her plaintive soliloquy Adieu, mes souvenirs de joie was most beautifully sung by Joyce DiDonato, ending with quietly sweet regret. The woodland scene that follows was played among roofs and chimney pots, and it worked well as the fairy godmother conjures up a gradual recognition between Cinderella and her prince, most gloriously and strongly sung by Alice Coote. Their duet was fabulous.

Elves surrounding Cendrillon

Why do we not see this opera more often? Preliminary plans were made in 1896 at the Cavendish hotel on Jermyn Street when Massenet and his librettist Henri Cain were in London for the premiere of La Navarraise. Upon its completion three years later a lavish first production was given in Paris at the Opéra Comique and was a great success, yet its first UK production was not until 1928, and this is amazingly its first performance at Covent Garden. In this version of the Cinderella story by Massenet and Cain, the two young principal characters are portrayed as desperate, lost children, hence the musical reason for not casting a tenor as the prince, yet the most widely available recording at one time did precisely this, and as Rodney Milnes writes in the Grove Dictionary of Opera, “there is neither authority nor tradition for this reprehensible practice”. Could this be partly a reason for the neglect of this opera? To be sure, Massenet was viewed unkindly at one time as a composer of drawing room romances, reflecting the personal and intimate nature of many of his works, but failing to credit their well-organised dramatic element, and the composer’s uncanny ability to fit music to words in a way that seems utterly natural. Cinderella’s Vous êtes mon Prince Charmant is a delightful example. And then there is the wonderful orchestration, such as the off-stage use of a lute, viola d’amore and ‘glass flute’ for the entrance of Prince Charming in Act II. The orchestration of this scene even reminded me of the meeting between Octavian and Sophie in Strauss’s Rosenkavalier. Ballet lovers will also recognise some of the music from Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet Manon, which was arranged by Leighton Lucas to music entirely from Massenet’s works.

The prince kneels to Cendrillon, surrounded by her rivals

But this is an opera that needs to be seen rather than just heard, and Laurent Pelly’s production, first staged at the Santa Fe Opera in 2006, is superb. I love the set designs by Barbara de Limburg, the choreography by Laura Scozzi, and the unnatural fairy tale element expressed by those extraordinary red costumes designed by Pelly himself, along with the red make-up on the footmen, and the absurd derrière of Madame de la Haltière, the stepmother. She was gloriously performed by Ewa Podles who used her vast range of pitch to the full, giving us low notes that seemed to run along the floor of the stage.

The nasty sisters were vivaciously played by Madeleine Pierard and Kai Rüütel, both in the young artists programme, and Eglise Gutiérrez exhibited wonderful top notes as the fairy godmother. Jean-Philippe Lafont was a quietly engaging and immensely sympathetic father who gained vocal strength as the evening progressed, and I loved his gravelly tone. Altogether this was staged to perfection with a wonderful cast, and the fact that it is a co-production with Barcelona and the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels speaks for its international attraction. Well-known operas occasionally attract very odd and self-indulgent productions, but this relatively unknown work has been given the magical production it needs to engage us. Do not miss it, because although it will surely be revived, this is a terrific cast, with very fine musical direction from Bertrand de Billy.

There are only five further performances, the last being a matinée on July 16 — for details click here.