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Garsington Opera’s impressively alert Un giorno di regno ought to preserve you amused and absorbed – Seen and Heard Worldwide


Garsington Opera’s impressively alert Un giorno di regno ought to preserve you amused and absorbed – Seen and Heard WorldwideUnited Kingdom Garsington Opera 2024 [4] – Verdi, Un giorno di regno: Soloists, Garsington Opera Refrain, Philharmonia Orchestra / Chris Hopkins (conductor). Garsington Opera at Wormsley, 1.7.2024. (CR)

Christine Rice as La Marchesa del Poggio © Julian Guidera

Forged:
Cavaliere di Belfiore – Joshua Hopkins
La Marchesa del Poggio – Christine Rice
Barone di Kelbar – Henry Waddington
Edoardo di Sanval – Oliver Sewell
Giulietta di Kelbar – Madison Leonard
La Rocca – Grant Doyle
Servant – Daniel Vening
Delmonte – James Micklethwaite
Il Conte Ivrea – Robert Murray

Manufacturing:
Director – Christopher Alden
Designer – Charles Edwards
Lighting designer – Ben Pickersgill
Video designer – Matt and Rob Vale (Illuminos)
Choreographer – Tim Claydon

For this season, Garsington has stored the most effective to final, with this effervescent interpretation of Verdi’s hardly ever seen Un giorno di regno (1840) – his second opera, however the one comedy he would write aside from Falstaff on the different finish of his profession. Even so, it’s a late instance of an opera buffa, within the mould wherein it had been perpetuated by Rossini and Donizetti because the nineteenth century superior, at a time when tragic – or a minimum of semiseria – opera turned more and more favoured.

Christopher Alden’s manufacturing maintains the fizzing excessive spirits of that style persistently from begin to end, with intelligent wit and slapstick; even when, superficially, it seems to resort to gimmick, its dramatic or visible concepts will be tied all the way down to one thing within the libretto or as operating satirically parallel with the underlying state of affairs. He rightly identifies the thrust of the opera – as it’s of all the opera buffa custom – as being the satirising of patriarchal authority (on this case as exercised by the status-mad, money-driven Baron Kelbar, who needs to marry his daughter, Giulietta, to the distinguished and affluent treasurer, La Rocca). However Alden seems to overlook, or doesn’t actually draw out, the weird truth for this style that it’s not a lot the ladies who cleverly plot to subvert the lads’s plans, however Belfiore, working undercover in disguise because the disappeared King Stanislaus. As a result of Kelbar and La Rocca are so subservient to authority themselves, the disguised Belfiore is ready to invoke ostensible royal fiat and switch issues round in order that Giuletta might marry her beloved Edoardo. Additionally, after some misunderstandings as a result of he isn’t in a position to step out of his disguise sooner, Belfiore can marry the younger, widowed Marchesa del Poggio, with whom he has lengthy been in love.

Garsington Opera’s Un giorno di regno © Richard Hubert Smith

Kelbar’s doubtful train of patriarchal energy is reinterpreted right here by his being the pinnacle of a weapons firm, ‘Kelbar Defence Restricted’, which appears to be no merely random conceit however takes its inspiration from the altercations and threatened violence between him and La Rocca within the libretto the place the metaphor of gunpowder is used. Act I is ready within the firm’s board room and adjoining drawing room, an embattled enclave that’s closely patrolled by gangster-ish, besuited guards wielding weapons – a confinement as overbearing as Physician Bartolo’s watch over Rosina in The Barber of Seville. Belfiore is conceived as one thing of a cheerful secret agent, prompting Giuletta and Eduardo to reply with their very own radical makes an attempt to free themselves and produce destruction by ordering a pack of dynamite by mail supply, the shock being that the anticipated explosion on the finish doesn’t happen. The make-believe of a king in disguise is rendered laughable – to us, the viewers, a minimum of – as the primary act ends with Belfiore’s reappearance as a camp celeb, virtually a drag queen in his glitzy gown, referred to as in to police the primary brouhaha between Kelbar and La Rocca.

Belfiore’s provisional authority is mocked by a video show of portraits of previous leaders similar to William the Conqueror, Robert Mugabe, Vlad the Impaler, Donald Trump, Richard Nixon, Genghis Khan, Joseph Stalin, Mrs Thatcher, in unsavoury, grimacing poses – the form of folks you wouldn’t belief an inch along with your youngsters. It’s solely a marvel that Liz Truss was missed out, or for that matter Rishi Sunak or Sir Keir Starmer; however maybe the sequence can be tweaked after the overall election.

Though there are components of Rossini and Donizetti within the rating, it’s terser than the latter composer, and the melodic profiles and orchestration are recognisably Verdian, even when the numbers aren’t fairly memorable in the way in which that these of his acknowledged masterpieces are. David Kimbell’s verdict on the opera (in New Penguin Opera Information) is that ‘as a substitute of sparkle, the orchestral colouring has a monochrome stridency, and rhythms that may have danced are merely galumphing’. Actually it feels extra heavy-handed than the comedies by his two operatic predecessors. However what was maybe the younger Verdi’s deliberate try to outdo and satirise the conventions of their works to make a reputation for himself at its La Scala premiere – particularly the bluster of Act II’s opening – is turned to good benefit right here by Alden in that he emboldens any such galumphing or long-windedness with comical absurdity. As the marriage preparations are underway, Kelbar and La Rocca come to blows on account of the insult given by the latter in rejecting the Baron’s daughter in spite of everything, by staging a meals battle, which should certainly pique the curiosity of the viewers having simply returned from their lengthy dinner interval. After that squabble comes one other operatic set piece with Edoardo’s expression of affection and craving to marry Giuletta. Alden satirises that conference by turning it into the rehearsal of a crooning love-song on the marriage ceremony karaoke to come back, with the microphone handed amongst different singers too, and hammed up phrases projected on to a display to imitate such repertoire.

Oliver Sewell, as that younger lover, is among the standout singers in a high-quality forged, with a agency, resonant voice, even forceful, reasonably than precisely a lyrically elegant, romantic lead, however that fits the larger-than-life nature of this manufacturing. Joshua Hopkins is a charismatic, quirky faux king, each in his gestures and singing, though the half isn’t in depth. Henry Waddington and Grant Doyle are properly matched, the previous brashly assertive because the Baron, the latter keen and obsequious as his would-be son-in-law however holding his personal cogently in opposition to him, as soon as Belfiore has cajoled him to face apart in order that Edoardo might marry Giuletta in his stead. Madison Leonard turns in a blazing, defiant efficiency because the pissed off younger girl, at the same time as she seems resentful and browbeaten on stage. Christine Rice – indisposed not too long ago for A Midsummer Evening’s Dream – is again on vivid, unstable kind because the Marchesa, giving a strenuous efficiency right here.

Chris Hopkins, changing Tobias Ringborg owing to harm, makes a reputation for himself along with his spirited conducting of the music with the Philharmonia Orchestra. There’s a distinct distinction in character between the light-touch and wit of the primary act, and his making a advantage out of the ‘galumphing’ nature of the second, by taking part in that as much as wring each final ounce of comedy from the work, which notably helps to have interaction a probably somnolent viewers after a ninety-minute eating interval. Along with the clearly enthused Garsington Opera Refrain, the music runs hand-in-glove with the irrepressibly animated motion on stage.

If any side of Verdi’s opera buffa appears hackneyed or outdated, then it’s compensated for – and even redeemed by – this impressively alert manufacturing which brings it endearingly to life. It stored me extra amused and absorbed than even the Verdi Pageant’s manufacturing on the composer’s hometown, Busseto, in 2018, and it convinces that this a piece which, in the fitting palms, is price an outing extra continuously than it receives in apply.

Curtis Rogers

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