Simon Boccanegra, English Touring Opera, (Telegraph Review)

Simon Boccanegra by English Touring Opera is a brave try but a misguided choice for these testing times.

 

By Rupert Christiansen

4:51PM GMT 17 Mar 2013

No opera of Verdi’s is darker in musical colour or emotional tone than Simon Boccanegra, a convoluted tale of a pirate-turned-Doge in medieval Genoa, persecuted by his old enemy and haunted by both the loss of his wife and his failure to placate warring factions.

It’s certainly no recipe for a fun night out – there’s no grand opera flummery, no jolly drinking songs or rum-ti-tum – and although its solemn beauty and moral seriousness can make it extremely moving in a great production, it’s a work difficult to animate, and I do wonder whether it’s a wise choice for English Touring Opera’s spring season, especially at a time when we all want cheering up.

Uncluttered and unpretentious though it is, James Conway’s staging doesn’t resolve the problem of the libretto’s inherent lack of narrative clarity: setting it in the post-war period in neutrally modern costumes makes it no more credible or lucid than medieval doublet and hose, particularly when the generally low standard of acting leaves so many crucial relationships and motivations ill-defined.

Only one element of the performance truly comes alive. Elizabeth Llewellyn’s Amelia shines brightly: as well as negotiating one of Verdi’s trickiest arias with elegant aplomb and crowning the wonderful Council Chamber ensemble with glory, she also makes the girl’s hopes and fears vivid, suggesting that innocent womanhood can point the way out of the mess that men have made of the world.

Grant Doyle radiates saturnine malevolence as the churl Paolo, and Charne Rochford sings robustly as Gabriele Adorno, the coming man. But the centre does not hold: although Craig Smith and Keel Watson sing dutifully as Boccanegra and his nemesis Fiesco, neither of them radiates much vocal authority, let alone personal charisma, and their two momentous confrontations, which bookend the opera, carry little emotional impact.

Michael Rosewell conducts with a firm and sensitive baton, but the reduced orchestration inevitably drains gravitas and grandeur from the score and much of what should sound sepulchrally awesome ends up pallidly churchy. A brave try overall, but a misguided one.

Simon Boccanegra, English Touring Opera, at Hackney Empire (Telegraph Review)

James Conway has mixed success updating Verdi's Simon Boccanegra to Seventies Italy


By Peter Reed

In his first Verdi production for ETO, James Conway has chosen Simon Boccanegra, in its usual, much-revised 1881 version. He’s updated it from Renaissance Genoa to Italy in the Seventies, a decade of extreme terrorism and corruption, with the plot’s political machinations, abduction and violent death speaking forcefully over 500 years.

This is high-definition black Verdi, with four of the six main roles sung by baritones and basses, a father-daughter relationship every bit as fraught as that in Rigoletto, and a web of intrigue as knotted as in Don Carlos.

Its brutalism is reinforced by Samal Blak’s fascistic set of concrete blocks; it concentrates the mind effectively on an opera that – with few stand-alone arias – moves forward through some powerful ensembles and choruses, in particular the riot scene in Act 1 (when the mob bursts into Boccanegra’s council chamber).

Two of the cast were very good. As Amelia, Boccanegra’s long-lost daughter caught between two love rivals, Elizabeth Llewellyn continues to fulfil her promise. Although she looked ill at ease in her skirt and cardigan, some awkward acting was not matched by her powerful and lyrical soprano.

Grant Doyle’s sinuous Paolo (Boccanegra’s murderous henchman obsessively in love with Amelia) summed up the opera’s unremittingly dark character with panache, and rather stole the title role’s thunder.

This was sung by Craig Smith, who only fitfully projected Boccanegra’s nobility, with a voice that had everything except Verdian heft, and he was more at home with the older Boccanegra of the main action than his 25-years-younger self of the Prologue.

The bass Keel Watson, as Fiesco (Boccanegra’s sworn enemy and, unwittingly, Amelia’s grandfather), found the fullness of voice to match his imposing stage presence in the second half; and Charne Rochford, the opera’s lone tenor, was Amelia’s ardently sung love interest.

Michael Rosewell’s conducting had a strong feel for the opera’s headlong flight into tragedy.

Simon Boccanegra, English Touring Opera (Arts Desk Review)

A consistent and cohesive production of Verdi's problem opera

by Roderic Dunnett

Simon Boccanegra has, as English Touring Opera’s director James Conway points out, never quite made the running outside Italy amid Verdi’s output. It went through three to five different versions in a short space of time. Despite the Romeo and Juliet era setting (14th-century Genoa battling it out with Venice) there are naivetes in Piave and Boito’s plot which, despite the frenetic story’s many merits, generate more than the usual operatic implausibilities. These render some of the quickly changing political frummeries all but comic, so that Otello and Falstaff tend to make better running amid post-Don Carlo Verdi.

Conway has had a go at sharpening the opera’s dramatic and political intensity by relocating the action of Boccanegra to modern times (just as his Donizetti The Siege of Calais seeks affinities with wartime Stalingrad). This has merits, though Boccanegra’s dottier misunderstandings or non-recognitions seem even less plausible – even ludicrous - in an age of quick communications.

There is something Lear-like about Boccanegra’s dilemmas, and his failures

The era chosen is one of appalling Italian political violence – the period of Andreotti, Togliatti and the assassinated Aldo Moro; tensions between communist-socialist left and nearly neo-Fascist right; and the ruthless two-way slaughter by the Red Brigades and their rivals (Bologna station bombing, Moro’s maimed body found in a car boot).

As an evocation of that era, from the Jonathan Miller Rigoletto-like, Mafioso-style plottings of the opening scene, it does rather well. A major asset – some might disagree violently – is the immovable pillared set, with shades of Mussolini-type architecture, by the immensely gifted Faroese born set and costume designer Samal Blak, a Linbury-prize winner with a background in sculpture (it shows) and from Central St Martins.

Once Craig Smith’s Boccanegra, after a curiously unprepossessing prologue, becomes leader, he spends a lot of time stuck on a central placed curule chair, in which he finally expires, poisoned. The effect is static, almost monolithic. And I found it wholly apt, magisterial, impressive. There is something Lear-like about Boccanegra’s dilemmas, and his failures, and the grizzled Smith (unconvincingly young at the immediate postwar outset) has an isolated look - political, familial, emotional - which Conway strives to underline.

The fact that Smith has (unknowingly) lost, before the action starts, his wife or lover, daughter of his enemy (the always robust but now vocally magnificent Keel Watson) and then almost carelessly mislaid his baby daughter (the glorious Elizabeth Llewellyn, in a ghastly, ill-designed turquoise skirt that never changes and annoys at every turn - pictured above right), only underlines his comparable failure, or rocky efforts, to hold the creaking state, and its shifting allegiances, together.

The librettists spare us Shakespearian onstage battles – no Macbeth and Macduff: revolution breaks out and then simply concludes - so we never see Boccanegra with teeth bared, sword (or Kalashnikov) in hand. Smith remains a stern, angry but strangely placid leader, accepting his end (it’s a long death) a bit like Derek Jacobi’s Claudius swallowing the poisoned mushroom.

So this is a Boccanegra you will love or ridicule. A plonky prologue is redeemed by the magnificently cast Polish bass Piotr Lempa in a small(ish) role and the Australian-born Grant Doyle. Doyle is a number one performer, as Simon’s estranged former ally Paolo, who pays with his life for a collapsed coup. The opera picks up with Act I, and the story – Conway likens it to fairy tale or fable and is in many respects right – despite its twists and turns is no more complicated than Shakespeare.