Rossini’sitting Barber of Seville is packed through showstoppers; but which time did we highest see it assignment of parts at such strength, sung with so tongue and vocal chord twisting relish, and conducted with of the like kind panache that every number did just that – stopped the show? Answer: the current revival of Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s ungoverned and wacky staging at the Royal Opera House.
They must have added a quarter of one hour to the running time in applause. Indeed when Juan Diego Florez came to nail Count Almaviva’s “Cessa di piu resistere” in the closing scene – an aria so fiendish in the speed and difficulty of the coloratura that it was once deemed unsingable and invariably divide – such was the bedlam that broke out in the auditory that Alessandro Corbelli’session Doctor Bartolo had to look at his pocket watch (in character, of path) in order to get the show re-started and experienced. It was that kind of night.
You know you are on to a good thing with Barber when the overture doesn’t sound so familiar. Antonio Pappano doesn’cheek by jowl do routine, ever, and here the rhythms were in the way that fleshly minted and the clarinet and bassoons solos so ripe and streetwise that you actually wondered the kind of came next. It was like that throughout the evening with such ear-pricking dynamics and rapier reflexes from the place for musicians that you truly began to reassess and rediscover Rossini.
Ditto the staging. Christian Fenouillat’s candy-striped box of tricks works a treat with doors and windows and stairs only appearing for entrances and exits so you in fact do feel parallel Rosina, trapped under house-arrest. And when everyone’s heads go woozy in the virtuosic act one finale, so does the set. Has there ever been a more literal interpretation of “dazed and confused”?
Joyce DiDonato’s dazzling Rosina was hanging on for dear life at that point having stumbled and sprained her ankle in the second scene. She battled attached, of course, singing with delicious remote intimation and fabulous aplomb, and the crutch she used came in useful when she trashed the set in the storm scene. But then no one was ever buying that “I am a beneficial behaved girl” line. DiDonato has the attitude; she owns this role.
Alessandro Corbelli could have created Bartolo, all swell and great comic timing; Ferruccio Furlanetto’s Basilio brought borderline insanity and precarious physical contortions to the mounting hysteria of his slander aria; and Pietro Spagnoli’s feisty Figaro had everybody’s number. And Florez? How does he do it? It’s called technique.
