April 28, 2002
No way, Jose
The new Domingo? Judging by the Royal
Opera¦s tedious Il trovatore, Jose
Cura is nowhere near, says
Hugh Canning
The Sunday Times
The Royal Opera¦s recent roll obviously
had to come to an end sooner or later, and it does so ˜
resoundingly ˜ with the production of Verdi¦s Il
trovatore it has staged in collaboration with the Teatro Real,
Madrid, where Elijah Moshinsky¦s grand but plodding mise
en scene was unveiled 15 months ago. The central panel of Verdi¦s
celebrated "triptych" of mid- period operas, the others
being Rigoletto and La traviata, Il trovatore was, until quite
recently, one of the most frequently performed of all operas. In
the past 20 years, it has become almost impossible to cast
consistently at the highest level, as Verdi singers with the
weight of voice, beauty of timbre and expansiveness of phrasing
have become increasingly scarce. Since Placido Domingo and
Luciano Pavarotti renounced the title role of the
warrior-troubadour Manrico, the heroic Italian-style tenor has
become virtually extinct, and the contemporary public is asked to
put up with no more than serviceable substitutes. The Royal Opera
fields the Argentinian Jose Cura, now in his late thirties, who
has for some time now been ear-marked as Domingo¦s natural
successor in the heavier Italian repertoire ˜ but after his
hammy and vulgar Otello at Covent Garden last season, and now
this casual, coarse, stylistically anachronistic Manrico, he
doesn¦t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath.
This is a tragic waste of vocal and physical endowments that
certainly had the potential to replace Domingo¦s in this
central repertoire. But now Cura lounges about the stage, smoking
a cigar, barely reacting to Azucena¦s horrifying narration
of her mother¦s burning at the stake and her fairly
astonishing revelation that she has thrown her child into the
flames.
Worse than his "faxed-in", histrionic performance,
though, is his crude singing of the troubadour¦s music.
Cura¦s bag of vocal tricks includes under-the-note
crooning, the sort of whiny gulping that even makes Gigli sound
like the most fastidious of Verdian purists, and explosive
fortissimo yelling for the crowd-pleasing high notes. Not
everyone in the first-night Covent Garden crowd was pleased,
however: he brought the house down with the unwritten high C at
the end of his famous cabaletta, Di quella pira, but his
unmusical, choppily phrased singing of the preceding romanza went
unapplauded. Not for a moment did he suggest that he was the
swashbuckling hero of the blood-and-guts melodrama that is Il
trovatore. He merely played himself, a narcissistic male prima
donna, swanning about the stage exuding generalised Latin
machismo. It¦s not enough.
Nor were his colleagues sufficiently strong to compensate for his
shortcomings, though Yvonne Naef, looking absurdly young and
glamorous as the batty old gypsy, wielded a powerful voice,
occasionally too roughly, and at least hinted that she knew that
her role is the most interesting, dramatically, in this otherwise
conventionally characterised love-triangle opera. The young
Icelandic bass Tomas Tomasson seemed to have been cast as the
Count of Luna¦s old retainer, Ferrando, for his dry, worn
voice, rather than for any frisson he might have brought to his
opening narration.
Dmitri Hvorostovsky, as the young Count of Luna , Manrico¦s
mortal enemy and unwitting brother, supplied the most shapely
Verdian singing of the evening, but this role makes him force his
voice in a theatre as large as Covent Garden, and for all his
handsome looks, he¦s a stolid, operatic "actor",
uninterested in anything going on around him. But who could blame
him in a production where the object of his, and Manrico¦s,
desires is the Chilean soprano Veronica Villarroel, ambling about
the stage as if in a trance, singing with pallid tone, painfully
under the note in her attempts to float high pianissimi and
descending into an almost comically disjointed chest voice?
Moshinsky¦s staging will undoubtedly satisfy those who
want to see mindless opulence rather than intelligent theatrical
ideas on stage. Whether he could have achieved an interesting
dramatic presentation of Il trovatore with this cast is
questionable, of course, but it is bitterly disappointing that
this once probing director now settles for minimal
characterisation of the principals and conventional blocking of
the chorus against the monumental sets of Dante Ferretti, which
involve lengthy breaks for scene changes, thus destroying the
momentum of Verdi¦s music-drama.
The theatrical (concept¦ transfers the action to the
Italian Risorgimento, the uprising against Austrian rule, but it
doesn¦t go much further than supplying the excuse for
spending a lot of money on spectacular railway-station and
industrial settings.
The conductor, Carlo Rizzi, does his best to energise the music,
theorchestral playing is fiery and alert, the choral singing
thrillingly full-bodied ˜ but fights a losing battle against
the laboured action on stage. A grisly evening.