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Don Carlo
“Simon Keenlyside as Posa is the best I've ever heard him…” MusicOMH
“Simon Keenlyside's dauntlessly hyper-energetic Posa raises the dramatic temperature onstage whenever he appears” The Guardian
“Simon Keenlyside is almost beyond praise in the excellence of his singing and concentrated acting...” The Stage
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Composer |
Guiseppe Verdi |
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Librettist |
Joseph Méry and Camille du Locle after Schiller’s drama, Cormon’s drama and
Prescott’s history. Revised in 4 acts by du Locle, translated into Italian by Angelo Zanardini based on Achile de Lauziéres’ original version) |
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Venue and Dates |
Royal Opera House, London 6, 11, 14, 17, 20, 26, 29 June, 3 July 2008 |
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Conductor |
Antonio Pappano |
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Production |
Director: Nicholas Hytner Designs: Bob Crowley Lighting: Mark Henderson |
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Performers |
Don Carlo: Rolando Villazón (except 20 June) Alfred Kim (20 June)
Elisabetta di Valois: Marina Poplavskaya (except 26 June) Victoria Nava (26 June) Rodrigo: Simon Keenlyside (except 17 June due to illness) Dmitri Tiliakos (17 June) Philip II: Ferruccio Furlanetto Princess Eboli: Sonia Ganassi Tebaldo: Pumeza Matshikiza (except 17 June) Paula Murrihy (17 June) Conte di Lerma: Nikola Matišic Flemish Deputies: Jacques Imbrailo Grand Inquisitor: Eric Halfvarson Monk: Robert Lloyd Voice from Heaven: Anita Watson
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Notes |
July 3's performance will be broadcast live on screens in Trafalgar Square and Canary Wharf in London, and Clayton Square in Liverpool |
Rehearsal shots
Nicholas Hytner, The Guardian, Friday May 30, 2008
http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/story/0,,2282775,00.html
Between the lines
Twenty years ago Nicholas Hytner directed Schiller's Don Carlos. As he takes on Verdi's opera, he finds the play transformed by the passion, yearning and fury of the music
The received wisdom that stage adaptations of movies are bad things that reveal the imaginative poverty of their creators took a battering recently with Kneehigh Theatre's Brief Encounter. Who'd want to see a West End knock-off of an acknowledged cinematic masterpiece? Why not write your own story instead of plundering the genius of others? To these questions, Kneehigh provided the answers in the form first of an exhilaratingly theatrical celebration of all the film's virtues: its sincerity, sense of place and throbbing undertow of frustrated longing. To all this the show added a mischievous wit, and a captivating dialogue between stage and screen made possible by video technology that would have been beyond the imagination of the original film-makers. It is as complete a reinvention of the film as the film was a reinvention of the one-act play, Still Life, that Noel Coward cannibalised for his screenplay.
If there is today widespread confusion about what constitutes originality, past dramatists would barely have recognised the problem. The shock of the new lay for them largely in the telling of the story, not in the story itself: audiences delighted in the unfamiliar presentation of familiar material. When Shakespeare opened Henry V at the Globe, his was at least the fourth Henry V play to run in London in 10 years. He probably borrowed from all of them; and he lifted scenes wholesale from the only other Henry V play, besides his own, to have survived. He would certainly have been run out of town by the modern plagiarism police.
Nearly all his plays are adaptations, and the quickest way to the core of any of them is to contrast the play with its source. In the difference is the energy, even the essence of the play. In the translation of historical reportage into verse drama is the thing itself.
Just as verse transforms a story, so music transfigures it; and the musical theatre has always been drawn more to the adaptation of old stories than to the invention of new ones. Musical dramatists have always looked for stories that can be remade with a musical motor. Their primary concern has rarely been for narrative novelty, more often for the excitement that is to be found in the acquiescence of a story to the musical form.
Wagner aside, it's hard to think of many successful operas with original librettos. There are nearly 300 operas based on Shakespeare. Puccini set a couple of Broadway hits by David Belasco - Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West. Mozart, with the Marriage of Figaro, seized on the previous year's succès de scandale in Paris. Figaro, on the face of it, is as faithful a musical adaptation of a play as has ever been composed. Much of its libretto is simply the Beaumarchais text translated into rhyming Italian by Lorenzo da Ponte. Da Ponte's chief conceptual contribution was to placate the authorities by cutting from the play, as he put it, "anything that might offend good taste and public decency." He need barely have bothered. Mozart's interests were far more in sexual politics than in the pre-revolutionary sentiments of the original. The emotional life of the members of Count Almaviva's household is in the music they sing. You might even say it is because the Countess sings that she can plumb as deeply as she does her heartsick nostalgia for the days when her husband loved her; that it is because the adolescent page Cherubino can sing that he is so febrile with the need to get his hands on a woman, any woman. The opera throbs with an erotic tension that is directly identifiable with its musical tension. It is erotic because it is musical.
I am in rehearsal as I write for Verdi's Don Carlo at the Royal Opera House. Verdi plundered the theatrical repertoire more rapaciously than the modern popular musical theatre plunders the movie catalogue. He repeatedly set Shakespeare and Victor Hugo as well as Schiller, who wrote the play on which the opera is based. Twenty years ago, I directed Schiller's Don Carlos at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester. I came to the play because I knew the opera; and in this country, at least, the opera had entirely supplanted the play, which hadn't been produced professionally for decades. The play turned out to be a gripping political thriller, and has been successfully revived at least three times since 1987. Returning to the opera, I'm struck once again by the transfiguration wrought by a musical score.
Schiller, needless to say, didn't conjure up his play from thin air. There had been Don Carlos plays before his, including one by our own Thomas Otway, which is more or less unreadable. All of them dealt with the Spanish Infante, heir to Philip II, who was in reality unstable, violent and prone to harming himself as well as others.
According to Protestant legend however (and it was the Protestants who wrote the history), he was an idealistic ally of the Flemish freedom fighters who were the mid-16th century victims of Spanish colonial oppression. For this crime, so rumour had it in Protestant northern Europe, he was assassinated by the Spanish Inquisition under the direction of his tyrant father. Out of this material, Schiller fashioned in 1787 an Enlightenment melodrama that vibrates with the excitement of the age of revolution. In the play's final scene, the king hands Carlos to the Inquisition for execution, but the playwright leaves the audience in no doubt that his ideals survive his death. "I am a citizen of times to come," says Carlos's revolutionary friend the Marquis of Posa, who dares to preach freedom of thought to the tyrant king himself. And though both Posa and Carlos end up dead, the play is confident that two centuries later their ideas are poised to sweep Europe.
Eighty years after Schiller, Verdi can still give stirring musical life to the confrontation between the king and the young idealist, and he writes one of his most famous tunes for Carlos and Posa's hymn to liberty. But it is a striking irony that a musical dramatist who was himself more politically engaged than any of his peers (he was heavily involved in the Risorgimento and sat for a time in the Italian Senate) seemed in his mature operas profoundly pessimistic about the possibility of political progress. The ultimate failure of all human endeavour is a given: it is the furious and impassioned struggle against the inevitability of misery and failure that drives Verdi's operas.
Schiller's Carlos is gripped by hopeless love for his stepmother Elizabeth, the young French princess to whom he was betrothed before his father decided to marry her himself. Verdi and his librettists add an entire act to the start of the opera that brings the two young lovers together for a short evening of cloudless ecstasy. They look forward to a life of unalloyed bliss, and Verdi, whose love duets are generally about passion snatched hungrily from the jaws of disaster, walks them through the paradise garden before the agents of political necessity arrive and carry the princess off to the old king's bed.
The memory of a happiness that might have been pulses through Verdi's Don Carlo. "Miserly Heaven gave me a single day, then stole it from me!" says Carlos, and in Verdi's setting it becomes a primal scream of despair. But despair is never where Verdi leaves it: in all his operas, and in Don Carlo above all, he writes about people who, knowing of the insuperable odds stacked against them, struggle ceaselessly for love, for justice, for life. So Carlos fights on, plunging into a musical world that swings wildly from delirium to rage, from romantic infatuation to violent revolution. Every chord in him vibrates with the will to live. Even the king (where Schiller's king, more conventionally, worries that he may not be the father of his baby daughter) longs for the love of his young wife, aware though he is that he is doomed to the solitude of the grave.
Schiller's soaring rhetoric and political optimism probably found its closest musical equivalent in Beethoven's setting of the Ode to Joy. Verdi would not have dissented from the idea of Universal Brotherhood, but his opera Don Carlo sees it happening nowhere soon. His catchy hymn to liberty comes back repeatedly, but each time with less conviction, crushed eventually by the full-throated roar of the crowd at a public burning of heretics. The strangest character in the opera is a doom-laden monk who insists that misery pursues us everywhere and ends only in heaven. This monk may or may not be the Emperor Carlos V, the abdicated father of Philip II (Verdi could never decide), but it seems appropriate that he is. In a world where man hands on misery to man, only the very oldest has accepted the vanity of human wishes and retired to a monastery, and even he seems not to be going gently into that good night. The rest, in music of unparalleled passion, fury and yearning, refuse to bow to the inevitable.
Verdi wrote Don Carlo for the Paris Opéra in 1867; he tinkered with it repeatedly for nearly 20 years, finishing with it only in 1886 (in the Italian version that is being performed by the Royal Opera). You feel that he could barely let it go: in no other opera is his profound spiritual and political pessimism in such dramatic tension with his determination that to be human is never to give in. And it is in his music that the refusal to surrender finds expression. It is in the very act of adaptation that Don Carlo becomes itself.
What the critics say
Michael Church, The Independent, 7 June 2008
Rating: 5/ 5
Furlanetto commands centre stage as Hytner fulfils all expectations
Nicholas Hytner worked box-office magic for ENO with his endlessly revived productions of Handel's Xerxes and Mozart's Flute. Covent Garden must be praying that he'll do the same for them with his long-awaited Don Carlo. On last night's showing, I think he may.
Supported by designer Bob Crowley's dazzling coups de thêatre, and by Antonio Pappano's band in scintillating form, he directs with such vivid forcefulness – and such psychological acuity – that Verdi's great rumination on theocracy, and on the battle between patriarchy and the brotherhood of man, emerges in its full beauty and menace.
Taking a few liberties with the historical truth, Verdi's opera, based on Schiller's play, focuses on the fatal father-son relationship between King Philip II of Spain and his emotionally deranged son Don Carlo. But Carlo's derangement has a Hamlet-like cause in that Elisabetta, the young woman he loves, is forced to marry his father.
Playing opposite Marina Poplavskaya as Elisabetta – regal in voice and bearing – Rolando Villazon's febrile Don Carlo is the utterly believable protagonist. Spinning out his lines with soaring grace in the cloudlessly happy opening scenes, he seems to shrink and freeze as fate's hammer-blow falls and his Oedipal plight is revealed: he then switches convulsively from crazy elation to pleading, head-banging despair.
But the other side of Carlo is the crusader for freedom, shoulder to shoulder with his blood-brother Rodrigo, the revolutionary Marquis of Posa, sung here with vibrant passion by Simon Keenlyside. Their rousing hymn to liberty reverberates through the evening.
But the drama's centre of gravity is Ferruccio Furlanetto's King Philip, a commanding presence conveying as much by his stillness as by his gloriously resonant voice. Presented here as a bookish prince of darkness surrounded by the coffins of his ancestors, he is one of Verdi's most convincingly complex characters, more than half in love with death, but also locked in a hopeless battle with his deceased father, the Emperor Charles V. As Furlanetto sings it, underscored by its lovely cello solo, the tortured but exquisite soliloquy in which he faces up to his political and sexual impotence becomes the majestic performance we have all been hoping for.
But what gives this work its dialectical power is how Verdi balances and contrasts voices. Rodrigo's baritone becomes the ideological foil to Philip's deep bass, while the death-dealing Grand Inquisitor (the excellent Eric Halfvarson) and the monk who welcomes Carlo into heaven are basses of highly contrasting stripes. Meanwhile Elisabetta's radiant soprano is offset by mezzo Princess Eboli, sung by Sonia Ganassi with all the fury of a woman scorned.
This full five-act version is a long evening, but time flies thanks to transcendent performances by Poplavskaya and Villazon, and to the beauty emanating from the pit.
Meanwhile, Hytner's dark world full of extraordinary visions feels uncomfortably modern, now that religion and politics are once more poisonously intertwined.
Dominic McHugh for musicalcriticism.com, 7 June 2008
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/opera/roh-carlo-0608.shtml
Rating: four stars out of five
Since the Italian version has not been performed by the company since 1989, it's about time that Don Carlo returned to the repertory of the Royal Opera. Considered in some quarters to be Verdi's supreme achievement, the piece juxtaposes the inner turmoil of the heart with the external dual dominating forces of the Church and the Monarchy: this is chiaroscuro on a grand scale.
The occasion is distinguished thanks to Antonio Pappano's absolutely magnificent conducting of the score: he's never done finer work here. But Nicholas Hytner's new staging – a costly co-production with the Metropolitan Opera and the Norwegian National Opera – is, for me, a disappointment. Many years in the planning, and a rare venture back into opera direction by the National Theatre's current Director, the production satisfies few of Verdi's more interesting dramaturgical ideas, says nothing new about most of the themes elaborated in the libretto and strikes me as rather limited in its stagecraft.
Almost without exception, the big arias and monologues were delivered with no attempt at expressing of the text, be it Elisabetta's 'Tu che le vanita' or the King's great soliloquy. The fourth-act quartet is more effective, with Filippo supporting his wife while she lies on the floor in distress, and elsewhere there is some exploration of Carlo's epilepsy and fits of madness. The opening tableau is arresting enough – Elisabetta and her companions are seen hunting in the forest – and it's relatively effective to have a huge wall come down before the end of Act I to divide Carlo from Elisabetta and literally imprison him at the moment when his true love is cruelly taken away from him. The same wall will literally become his prison wall later in the opera and it comes down in other scenes to remind us of his aching heart.
But for an opera which has such potential for beauty and grandeur, Bob Crowley's designs are curiously lacking in inspiration. Act I shows us white plastic trees, two white tree stumps and a piece of white sheeting on the ground to represent snow; the cloister of San Yuste is represented by a pitifully basic tomb with 'Carlos' written on the side; the wall in Act II, Part 2 looks as if it's been made out of giant Lego bricks with a cross-shaped hole in the middle; and the King's Study scene has rarely been so emptily or dully staged in my experience. All the symbolism has been too broadly painted – religion and the loneliness of power are represented but not explored to their full potential – and on the other hand, the loud shouting and jeering of the chorus during the condemnation of the heretics in Act III is wildly excessive. Some of Verdi's most sinister and beautifully crafted music here is drowned out by an unnecessary pantomime, which adds nothing and is at the same time less effective than the more exciting burning of the heretics found in the previous Luc Bondy staging of the French version of the work, which was seen at Covent Garden in 1996.
And yet, the musical performance was so refined, especially from the orchestra, that the opening night was still a noteworthy event. The most complete and impressive performance came from Ferruccio Furlanetto as Philip II. Vocally, he was as intense and powerful as you could possibly want, while his stage presence and complex understanding of the role helped lift the production to another level during his scenes. The highlight of the evening for me was the sensational duet between Philip and the Grand Inquisitor, who was played in an even more sinister way than I've found before by Eric Halfvarson in magnificent voice. His red papal costume and dramatic make-up gave his portrayal a rare edge of terror that reminded us of what the production lacked elsewhere.
Without doubt, the most classy, arresting singing came from Rolando Villazón in the title role. A couple of cracked top notes and hints of strain at the top end notwithstanding (it sounded as if he was slightly unwell, though no announcement was made), Villazón's voice was on display in all its beautiful glory from the word go. The opening aria was delivered with an elegance of line; the friendship duet with Posa was less successful, but the final duet in Act V was sung with classical nuance and was deeply moving. Villazón was occasionally a little too neurotic in terms of acting, but this may have been either a conceit of the production or an understandable attempt to give the production life, and it by no means took anything away from the performance.
Carlo's relationship with Posa – here sung with customary commitment and lavish vocal resources by Simon Keenlyside, even if it's not his most imaginative dramatic interpretation – was more emotionally drawn than that with Elisabetta, to the detriment of the production. If we don't believe in the inexorable attraction Elisabetta and Carlo feel for one another, where is the central tension of Don Carlo? Here, I found that Marina Poplavskaya's relationship with her husband was instead unusually, and fascinatingly, intense. Her performance throughout was more than respectable, and in Act IV, Part 1 her singing was extraordinarily secure whilst she had to lie down during the taxing passage where Elisabetta's line is an octave apart from Eboli's and the two run in parallel motion. Whenever she had dramatic lines to deliver, Poplavskaya did so with a fiery spirit and strong tone. Less wholly successful for me was the performance of the Act V aria and duet, which require ease and a more cantabile line in the top register, and there was strain during the latter part of Act I, too, but Poplavskaya did extremely well in a very taxing part.
Sonia Ganassi's Eboli was just too nice a person for my taste. The vocal performances of the Veil Song and 'O don fatale' were excellently controlled and executed with finesse, but for my taste the character needs to be portrayed with more vigour and feistiness in order for us to believe she has enough venom to concoct her fatal plot (isn't she meant to have seduced the King and incriminated the Queen?). Robert Lloyd was an excellent Monk – at 68 his vocal powers seem scarcely diminished, if at all – and in Jacques Imbrailo, Krzysztof Szumanski, Kostas Smoriginas, Daniel Grice, Darren Jeffery and Vuyani Mlinde, the company has an above-average team of Flemish Deputies. Anita Watson also makes a very good Voice from Heaven, while Nikola Matisic is a confident Count of Lerma.
Yet the reason why it all gels together so well is Antonio Pappano's inspired leadership. Truly, I've rarely seen him so comfortably in control of his forces: the expanded chorus really raises the roof, the Spanish colours in Eboli's first aria are genuinely sultry, the offstage banda is well coordinated, the chamber music-like passages in the King's Study scene are finely projected, the solo arias are sensitively accompanied but the hand of fate is always allowed to emerge in the climactic passages. The production is to be broadcast on Radio 3 and on the big screens around the country: it's unmissable for the music making.
Simon Thomas, musicOMH, 8 June 2008
http://www.musicomh.com/opera/roh-don-carlo_0608.htm
Rating: 5 our of 5 stars
The first Italian Don Carlo at Covent Garden in nearly two decades, Nicholas Hytner's no-nonsense traditional staging is marked by superb singing and acting performances from an outstanding cast.
Conducting the wondrous score, surely one of the most beautiful in not just the Verdi repertoire but the whole of opera, Antonio Pappano achieves a quite miraculous blend of passion and refinement.
A bigger question even than whether Rolando Villazón would make it to the first night was if Marina Poplavskaya would justify the faith the management had invested in her by handing her the role of Elisabeth de Valois. Despite her startlingly good debut as Donna Anna last season, this seemed a huge leap for a relatively inexperienced singer but the answer is unequivocally positive. She commands her every scene and sings with great beauty and a fragility that brings enormous tenderness to her scenes with Carlo. "Tu che la vanità" is stunning and it's altogether a very impressive performance.
A few wobbles and cracked high notes early on suggest that Villazón may not quite be ready for the role of Carlo but he soon settles and produces some truly magnificent sounds. He also brings tremendous vulnerability to the part, innocent passion jostling with child-like bewilderment at the churning of fortune's axle. Simon Keenlyside as Posa is the best I've ever heard him, resonant, powerful and more physically restrained than we're used to, and all the more focused for it. Perhaps it takes the Director of the National Theatre to draw out the Horatio/Hamlet nature of the relationship between the two men, which is here both complex and very moving.
Ferruccio Furlanetto's Philip II is a great creation of booming intensity. He stoops slightly, his tyranny born of fear, and his head-to-head with Eric Halfvarson's excellent Grand Inquisitor, all trembling confrontation, is electrifying. Sonia Ganassi's Eboli is slightly characterless in her early scenes but she rises to the challenges of "O don fatale" with vivid finesse.
The scenes flow seamlessly, changing with noiseless efficiency, and displaying the sort of artistry that has made the best of Hytner's work across the river so remarkable. In his regular collaborator Bob Crowley's designs, a frosted Fontainebleau landscape nips young love in the bud, denying it the chance to blossom. Chiaroscuro gloom follows, the darkness of the crypt pierced by an explosion of pencil-thin slashes of light.
A burst of colour accompanies Eboli but it's not the ladies-in-waiting who glow, garbed instead in funereal black, but luscious sun-filled fields kept at an unattainable distance from the court. For the auto-da-fe scene, a huge painted Christ leaking blood competes with His Church, symbolised by the garish opulence of an all-gold cathedral façade. The grisly consequences of religious zeal are seen through Christ's gauzy face, the clash of goodness and its corruption key to the interpretation.
Dominating all is Pappano's magnificent reading of the score, full of both fervour and delicacy with the Royal Opera Orchestra following his bidding with brilliance and great sensitivity.
As with Zurich Opera's recent concert Rosenkavalier on the South Bank, some people might want a little more rawness round the edges but few will fail to be won over by the stylishness of the whole package. This is an enormously impressive and enjoyable night at the opera and a production that we'll hopefully see regularly revived.
Richard Morrison, The Times, 9 June 2008
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/opera/article4092095.ece
Rating: Three out of five stars
An epic political tragedy that starts well then somehow fizzles out, after problems with two central characters
Like the bold scheme for liberating the Flemish masses planned by the excitable Don Carlo and his steadfast chum Rodrigo, the Royal Opera's new production of Verdi's epic political tragedy starts well, then somehow fizzles out.
After two acts, with Nicholas Hytner's staging unfolding this Habsburg power-struggle so cogently in Bob Crowley's handsome, uncluttered period sets, I thought this might be one of the great nights in the theatre. But after five acts (for Covent Garden has opted for Verdi's five-act 1886 revision in Italian) I could hardly wait for Robert Lloyd's baleful ghost of Charles V to come and put Rolando Villazón's broken Carlo out of his misery.
What goes wrong? Very obviously, two of the central characters.
Villazón and his adored Elizabeth, Marina Poplavskaya, perform stunningly in their heartstopping Act I meeting, where they find instant mutual love in a magical, silver-tinted Fontainebleau. They have chemistry, ardour, spirit, sensuality.
That, however, turns out to be the zenith of their evening.
Villazón certainly radiates the aura of unstable volatility that Carlo needs, but his grainy voice sounds more and more pressurised. And as Poplavskaya tires in Acts IV and V, her tuning problems and threadbare top register aren't pretty to hear. The role is beyond her at present, as the Royal Opera hierarchy should have realised.
But Hytner's production must also shoulder some blame. He elicits wonderfully assured acting in intimate scenes. You can really feel the shuddering clash of ideologies, for example, when Ferruccio Furlanetto's brooding, sinister and repressive Philip II confronts Simon Keenlyside's magnificently forthright, clean-cut Rodrigo - “the only true man in this swarm of humanity”, as Philip rightly says. Or when Philip finds himself, doubtless to his surprise, speaking up for idealism and kindness in his verbal punch-up with Eric Halfvarson's splendidly grotesque, palsied Grand Inquisitor. Or when Sonia Ganassi's forceful Eboli is bewailing her own treachery in a hail of knockout top notes.
Yet as the opera progresses, and the chorus - the mob - should increasingly make their disruptive presence felt, Hytner's staging seems bland and tokenistic. The sudden, lurid lighting of the burning heretics at the end of auto-da-fé scene is more akin to one of those comically gruesome waxworks in the London Dungeon than convincing theatre. And there's no sense of menace or impending anarchy about the mob's intrusion in the last act. They seem a docile bunch.
That's a pity, because one longs for the stage action to match the intensity of what Antonio Pappano delivers in the pit. The orchestral playing is superb, from the offstage hunting horns at the opening and the beautifully gauged ebb and flow of the love music to the sepulchral creepiness of the slithery sounds conjured up for the Grand Inquisitor.
Not for the first time, Pappano delivers a Verdi masterclass. That's worth catching on Radio 3 on June 28.
Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 8 June 2008 17:11 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b6eb4d06-356e-11dd-998d-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
Opera: An inquisition devoid of opinion
There are two ways of reading the Royal Opera’s new Don Carlo. The first goes something like this: tenor-of-the-moment Rolando Villazón returns to the stage after months of indisposition and crowns a front-rank cast in a subtly delineated version of Verdi’s Spanish drama, masterminded by “the most influential arts figure in the UK” – Nicholas Hytner of London’s National Theatre.
The alternative reading submits that Villazón puts more nervous energy into the title role than his less-than-ringing voice can sustain, that Antonio Pappano’s musical direction labours under its own weight and that Hytner’s staging, while admirably focused on text and character, looks 30 years out of date.
I tend to the latter view. Covent Garden has ended up with another of its eminently consumable department-store productions, devoid of grist or opinion. The best of it lies in a few isolated moments when the principals break free of collateral constraints and show flashes of Verdian temperament. The two most notable examples at Friday’s opening night were Marina Poplavskaya’s Elizabeth de Valois in the achingly arched phrases of her opening duet with Carlo, and Ferruccio Furlanetto’s Philip in his epic confrontation with the Grand Inquisitor.
But they have to contend with a conductor who adopts leaden tempi, who fusses over the score’s inner workings and refuses to let go. Don Carlo – heard here in Verdi’s five-act version in Italian (1887) – should bristle with lyricism and drama; here it sounds cramped, subdued. Some of the most touching moments in this wonderfully touching score are not touching at all. It is as if Pappano, previously a reliable Verdian, is losing confidence in himself and his colleagues – a contagious disease that needs addressing.
Hytner does what most theatre-trained Englishmen do when handed a budget: he works on creating credible stage characters while leaving his interpretative intelligence outside the stage door. Bob Crowley’s period costumes (black tunics, Spanish ruffs) and pictorial sets tell us nothing beyond when and where the historical drama takes place. We get a whiff of the imprisoning aura of the Spanish throne through the walled enclosures of Acts Two and Four (lighting by Mark Henderson), but the cathedral façade for the auto-da-fé and the tomb in the finale are stage-bound reproductions that stifle the imagination. Does Hytner, who has previously directed the Schiller play on which the opera is based, have any opinions about this piece? You do not need to have seen the Royal Opera’s memorable previous productions to realise how unambitious his staging is.
Villazón’s Carlo is a whelping hothead who showers intensity and elegance on a role that really demands a top-voice of burnished ardour – which the Mexican tenor cannot supply. Sonia Ganassi’s Eboli sounds like a Rossinian trying to move up a notch: the vocal decorations come across well, but for all Ganassi’s spunky acting, she is too lightweight to set the heart racing. Eric Halfvarson’s well-fed Inquisitor is properly chilling and Simon Keenlyside’s Rodrigo – more French than Italian baritone – offers a beautifully fresh-off-the-page portrait.
Furlanetto’s handsomely intoned, intelligently acted Philip emerges as a complex figure who, beneath the trappings of power, yearns to love and be loved. Poplavskaya, girlish in the Fontainebleau scene, regal thereafter, is blossoming into a true lirico spinto. Thanks to these two we catch occasional glimpses of the great Verdian conflict – between public duty and private longing – at the core of Don Carlo.
Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph, 9 June 2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/arts/2008/06/09/btopera109.xml
Don Carlo: measured masterpiece
Verdi's Don Carlo has special resonance at Covent Garden. It was here, 50 years ago, that a legendary production, directed by Visconti and conducted by Giulini, both vindicated a then little known work and brought the presentation of opera in London to a new level of splendour.
In the mid 1990s, we saw another fine staging, directed by Bondy and conducted by Haitink, which reverted to Verdi's earlier French versions of the score (he fiddled with it for nearly 20 years) and featured revelatory performances by Karita Mattila and Roberto Alagna as the unhappy lovers.
So expectations ran high for this new production, with a strikingly strong cast conducted by Antonio Pappano and directed by Nicholas Hytner. The audience was not, I think, disappointed. Whatever one's reservations and some first-night blips, this was indisputably a magnificent account of one of opera's supreme masterpieces.
Hytner's interpretation isn't greatly different from Bondy's in either visual or spiritual approach. Bob Crowley's starkly stylised and sometimes rather ugly sets portray counter-Reformation Spain as a sort of prison, its high black walls studded with tiny windows.
Scenes move fluently, the confrontational duets that propel the action are sensitively staged, and thoughtful characterisation makes the dilemmas emotionally compelling.
There are, however, some lapses of taste - the auto-da-fé, for example, set in front of a solid gold cathedral façade, with the inauthentic addition of a Jesuit ranting at the whimpering heretics, goes way over the top.
And even the canny Hytner is defeated by the opera's intractably bizarre denouement, sung here in Verdi's final version.
It is Antonio Pappano's wise conducting that holds the performance together most decisively. The Royal Opera's music director has a tendency to whip up superficial excitement by taking things too fast and loud, but here he chose measured, mature authority over hysterical frenzy, drawing excellent playing from the orchestra and instilling confidence in the singers.
Centre of attention was Rolando Villazón, making a welcome reappearance after a period of withdrawal from the stage.
Some nasty cracks at climactic moments suggested that he wasn't in best vocal health, but they seemed a small price to pay for the passion and musicality of his singing and his moving embodiment of Carlo's boyish naïveté, vulnerability and ardour.
As his beloved Elisabetta, Marina Poplavskaya was rich in timbre, subtle in phrasing and lovely to look at, floating gorgeously above the stave and easily dominating the ensembles. Murky enunciation was the drawback.
Simon Keenlyside isn't a born Verdi baritone, but his Posa radiated nobility and virility; as Eboli, Sonia Ganassi pulled the stops out for a thrilling O don fatale; and Ferruccio Furlanetto was a haunted, fearsome Filippo, locked in the misery of his supreme power. A beautifully blended sextet of Flemish deputies was among the evening's several minor pleasures.
The booing of Villazón and the production team was cruel but isolated, and far outstripped by the general warmth of the reception. An exceptionally fine achievement overall, which further performances will surely enrich.
Colin Anderson, theoperacritic.com
http://theoperacritic.com/tocreviews2.php?review=ca/2008/rohcarlo0608.htm
Covent Garden's new Don Carlo is impressive both musically and dramatically
This has long been a standout date in the Royal Opera's diary; we were not disappointed. True, most interest was focussed on Rolando Villazón, and not just because he took the title role. He did well on this first night; well-acted and well characterised, his golden sound and easy phrasing in place as early as his first appearance - and Don Carlo is the first personality we meet, here in a snow-clad forest. True, Villazón's voice did prove to be a little gruff at times and his pitching wasn't always exact, and he was not quite as secure as Simon Keenlyside when Don Carlo and Rodrigo swear an oath of allegiance. If anyone was flat or slightly behind it was Villazón - ironic then that immediately after this duet he is left alone on the stage and Rodrigo has departed. The audience gave Villazón a long ovation but the more-deserving singer had departed! But, then, applauding in mid-act does not do the long line of an opera any favours.
And Verdi's operas are thought-through; Don Carlo may be an editorial minefield, but it deserves to be heard uninterrupted. Antonio Pappano links Acts I and II, and Acts IV and V, the two intervals framing Act III. It's a long evening by the clock (something like four and a half hours, including intervals), and you will now know that Pappano conducts the five-act Italian version (1886 Modena) - there are quite a few editions of the opera (in four acts, and five, in Italian and in French). It is however a short evening, dramatically riveting and notable for a strong cast working well together. It isn't just about Villazón (he portrays an suave, gallant and impassioned Don Carlo - well befriended by Keenlyside's Rodrigo) and bonded by Pappano's exacting and dramatic conducting that is rewarded by some superb brass playing, which, indefinably, has the right sound and rhythmic guile that is echt-Verdi. The clarinet and cello principals were stars, too. The strings produced some wonderfully moonlit timbres.
The first act is the one that can be dropped; but it was needed here - but only in retrospect, for the unfolding tragedy really makes its mark when one remembers the almost-idyllic circumstances of the first and love-at-first-sight meeting between Don Carlo and Elisabetta. Marina Poplavskaya plays her, and is regal of stature and of tone. Don Carlo's father, Philip II, is taken by Ferruccio Furlanetto - very impressively. He rather than Don Carlo marries Elisabetta and is a troubled figure, such emotions seeping out, not least when discussing grave problems with the Grand Inquisitor such as the proposed execution of Don Carlo (his own son, that is). Eric Halfvarson gives the all-powerful Inquisitor - despite him being blind and requiring the company of two helpers - significant presence.
Nicholas Hytner directs and Bob Crowley provides the designs; it's a good team - there is little that doesn't seem to belong to the drama while the scene-setting (whether garden, town or cathedral) have both a storybook look and also a potent sense of presence and significance; Valladolid Cathedral is a striking scene, with heretics and golden spectacle - Boris Godunov is not far away. This is an epic and complex opera - these qualities are retained here but the narrative (both historical and revealing about human emotions) is an absorbing one and the dimensions of the work never seem overlong or verbose; even those (few) moments that seem too much a diversion (albeit pleasing ones) make their points eventually when a moment of drama is the inevitable follow-through.
There is much to admire in the pit - from subtlety to power - and the singers have come together to form an ensemble that serves the story. A curiosity is that the singers' dynamic range changes dramatically if they move very close to the front of the stage in a manner that is more to do with the acoustic rather than considered changes of volume. A small point this; and I also wondered about Sonia Ganassi as Princess Eboli; but not when she had 'grown' into her part and really established herself and her character.
All in all, this is a Don Carlo that reminds as to Verdi's great achievement and that The Royal Opera has assembled a stellar cast and, in Tony Pappano, has a conductor really appreciative of Verdi's genius for characterisation and dramatic impulse. Performances are until 3 July (and should you be in London, or Liverpool, on the evening of the final performance, this is screened to Trafalgar Square, Canary Wharf, and Clayton Square (Liverpool), both live and free, and BBC Radio 3 broadcasts the opera on 28 June.
Don Carlo is a relative rarity - it has been absent from Covent Garden for 20 years (although the French-language version was performed in 1996, under Bernard Haitink, although he went on to record the Italian five-act version), and its 'rehabilitation' is found here to be well-timed and thoroughly impressive in both performance and staging.
Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 9 June 2008
http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/operalivereviews/story/0,,2284515,00.html
Rating: Four out of five stars
Any production of Verdi's most monumental work that reminds you it is one of the very greatest of all operas has to be accounted a success. The Royal Opera's new production sees director Nicholas Hytner return to Covent Garden after 20 years, and it's almost that long too since Don Carlo (sung in Italian) has been seen at the ROH rather than the original French version of the score, Don Carlos. Antonio Pappano conducts the five-act version that Verdi himself approved for a performance in Modena in 1886, and delivers an implacably powerful, mordant drama.
The casting of Rolando Villazón in the title role attracted much of the advance publicity, but the glitzy tenor is the only disappointment. Some of his singing is outstanding but there's never a hint of emotional engagement and with an acting style that begins and ends at his eyebrows, mixing in a few semaphore-like flailing arms for good measure, Villazón reduces the character of Carlo to little more than a stroppy, lovesick adolescent, hardly hinting that there is also a political dimension to his personal tragedy. The object of his obsession, Marina Poplavskaya's Elisabetta, is sometimes beautifully sung too, but she projects such a permafrost-like froideur that the attraction between Carlo and his stepmother is hard to believe.
Paradoxically, that vacuum at the romantic heart of the work makes the dramatic balance far more interesting. The unresolved struggle between church and state in Philip II's Spain, which is embodied in the king's crucial confrontations, first with Rodrigo, the Marquis of Posa, and then with the Grand Inquisitor, is the engine that drives Hytner's intelligent, unshowy production. It helps immeasurably too that those three roles, like Sonia Ganassi's unusually sympathetic Eboli, are so superbly sung. Ferruccio Furlanetto's profoundly troubled Philip dominates. Simon Keenlyside's dauntlessly hyper-energetic Posa raises the dramatic temperature onstage whenever he appears, and Eric Halfvarson's black-toned Inquisitor is the perfect incarnation of evil masquerading as divine truth.
The visual framework is generally a naturalistic, 16th-century one, though Bob Crowley's spare sets occasionally shift into something more stylised.
Pappano has always conducted Don Carlos with tremendous sweep and an almost Wagnerian intensity; it's the power of Verdi's astonishing score, driven by his withering critique of the evils of organised religion, that one takes from this production, and it's no disgrace to any of the performers that that is how it should be.
Fiona Maddocks, Evening Standard, 9 June 2008
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/music/show-23394646-details/Don+Carlo/showReview.do?reviewId=23492252
Rating: Five out of Five stars
Passion unlocked in Don Carlo
Moments into Covent Garden’s new Don Carlo, the Mexican tenor Rolando Villazon takes centre stage for his first urgent outpouring of love for a woman he’s barely met. It sets the tone for an impassioned evening in this absorbing staging by National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner, superbly designed by Bob Crowley and conducted with tender intensity by Antonio Pappano.
Hytner first directed Schiller’s verse drama 20 years ago. In Verdi’s hands, this dark account of the Infante Carlo — whose betrothed, Elizabeth of Valois, instead marries his father Philip II of Spain — becomes a magnificent grand opera demanding top voices, including three deep, dark bass roles. Verdi reworked the piece over two decades and this was the later, Italian version. The bitter politics of 16th century Flanders and Spain, expressed through the outpourings of the (excellent) chorus, provide a backdrop to the individual agonies of king, queen and son.
Thoughts of these intrigues call up a shadowy Spanish baroque world spiked with glints of gold. So it proved here: Mark Henderson’s glittering Zurburanesque lighting pierced the darkness.
Crowley has updated doublet-and-hose tradition with a deft twist of redsplashed Japanese modernity.
From the opening, a frost-crystallised Fontainebleau forest, to the gloomy monastery and the fantastic gilded spectacle of Vallodolid Cathedral, all was of a piece. Casting was impeccable. Russian soprano Marina Poplavskaya, so statuesque and cool yet trembling with pent-up agitation, looked stunning as Elisabetta. She has a smooth, ivory vocal tone, a little scuffed at the top but gleaming in mid and low register. Her stillness is the counterpoise to her lover’s febrile vehemence, as expressed by Villazon.
Ferruccio Furlanetto’s proud Philip II mesmerised with his intelligence and vocal beauty. As Eboli, Sonia Garnassi’s had gutsty vitality. Winning extra thunderous applause, Simon Keenlyside’s Rodrigo showed customary perception and verve. Robert Lloyd, Eric Halfvarson and Jette Parker Young Artist Pumeza Matshikiza gave excellent support. The production team attracted a few incomprehensible boos amid cheers.
Holding all together, with a fine handling of the score’s own chiaroscuro display of darkness and light, was Antonio Pappano. He unlocked the compassionate heart of this work, while steering Verdi’s monumental edifice forward with drive. The ROH orchestra would have been the star, were there not already so many jostling for the title.
George Hall, The Stage, Monday 9 June 2008
http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/20931/don-carlo
The Royal Opera might have earned more brownie points for performing Verdi’s grandest opera in its original French. But here, using the edition he made for Modena in 1886, when it was sung in Italian, they score on everything else.
Designed by Bob Crowley, Nicholas Hytner’s production is cogent and detailed, a succession of close-ups of the central characters within the grander panorama of religious conflict and political intransigence centred on the court of Philip II of Spain. The Catholic Church, responsible for the brutality of the Inquisition, comes off particularly badly, as Verdi meant it to, but the people, whooping on the burning of the heretics, don’t escape either.
All the main performers distinguish themselves, though Rolando Villazon’s Carlos sometimes sounds stressed and even out of tune. It’s a role too big for his lyric tenor. Simon Keenlyside is almost beyond praise in the excellence of his singing and concentrated acting, even revealing that Posa’s idealism leads him to exploit the vulnerable prince. Ferruccio Furlanetto’s Philip is a complex, secretly lonely tyrant. Sonia Ganassi is a flamboyantly intelligent Eboli. Eric Halfvarson’s Grand Inquisitor is a combination of decrepitude and malevolence. Artfully sung though Marina Poplavskaya’s Elisabeth is, the top of her voice lacks bloom and her portrayal remains cold.
Still, it’s a mightily impressive evening for chorus and orchestra, and Antonio Pappano once again demonstrates his mastery of Verdian musical drama.
Warwick Thompson, Bloomberg, 9 June 2008
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aWvormrw.fuE&refer=muse
Tickets were changing hands for 900 pounds ($1,777) on the Internet. The Royal Opera foyers crackled with anticipation. Nicholas Hytner's new production of ``Don Carlo'' was clearly going to be the highlight of the London music season.