A Masked Ball, The Coliseum, London
Deft and daft touches in turn for this Verdi
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Your support makes all the difference.The 1790s were not great for monarchs. George III went dotty; Poland's Stanislaus Augustus got squashed between Germany and Russia; Louis XVI found himself at the razor-edge of political deconstruction.
So spare a thought for Gustavus III of Sweden, who, spared the axeman, fell to a bullet from his chief minister, Anckerstroem. This provides the plot for Verdi's A Masked Ball, which opened last night in the garish new English National Opera production at St Martin's Lane. First staged in 1859 (Napoleon III's censors were only mollified by a ludicrous shift of the assassination to Boston), it confirmed the arrival of the mature Verdi.
Deconstruction, misconstruction or plain destruction? After a rocky season last year, Nicholas Payne's ENO has bravely, or rashly, stuck with Catalan director Calixto Bieito, whose lavatorial obsessions and neo-Ionesco fads makemanic German opera directors appear pillars of rectitude.
Well, we survived. OK, so Bieito often just can't stand still. He has an infuriating way of making characters imitate Verdi's rhythms – even Mary Plazas's Oscar (a bimbo here) twiddles to the trumpets. Can't he just leave them alone? There's a fair bit of gratuitous, silly, half-baked sex: it is less an affront than a bore. Yet some bits work: the much-trumpeted male rape and garrotting sets the scene as well for Amelia's gibbet scene as his pirouetting sailors seem specious.
And if the real emotional drama was shaped by Andrew Litton's fabulous, thoughtful overseeing of ENO's orchestra, whose playing eclipsed even the gorgeous clarinet and cello soli and ricocheting brass; by a chorus that bit the bullet and delivered stupendously, and by a line up of terrific soloists, Bieito did know when to shut up.
His frenetic activity for the fortune-teller (here a brothel-keeper, naturally; he must have his eye on Lulu) made way for astounding stillnesses. Each time Gustavus (the beautifully-intoned tenor John Daszak), Amelia (Claire Rutter, her gorgeous cadences capping two fabulous arias, her high notes as impeccable as Daszak's) and the Anckerstroem of David Kempster (a baritone in the very top flight) essayed an aria, he froze the scene. Verdi's dazzling duets and trios, the love-triangular tiffs and stand-offs, were as stunning as ever. At these points Bieito was content to let the singing speak, set in clear relief. No high jinks. That, at least, is good direction.
No harm in setting a marital bust-up in a bathroom, though why hide a gun in a toilet if he's finally bumped off with a knife? None of the sex made me horny. And for all the special pleading and a shift to "post-Franco Spain", we learned nothing of Spanish politics. But ignore the fuss: OK, this was a brutish, at times lumpen, production. But overall, it worked.
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