A night at the opera

The Marx Brothers got it right. If any opera is worth relishing it is Il Trovatore.  For some people, it’s true, it remains “Verdi’s Potboiler.” For others, however, it is the opera of operas, a tremendous work that transcends the supposed inanities of its melodramatic plot, and gets better all the time, so long as it receives the superb performances it deserves.

The Berlin State Opera’s recent production conducted by Daniel Barenboim is one that captures its greatness to the hilt. Now that it is out on DVD you can see it for yourself. The performance searingly reveals all the music’s glories with the help of a thrilling cast, a great orchestra, and a compelling chorus (how has Scottish Opera hoodwinked itself into believing that it can flourish without a chorus  when at one time it hired the services of its own excellent chorus to the Edinburgh Festival for Jean Pierre Ponnelle’s racy production of Rossini’s Cenerentola? This season the company  is solving its self-created problem by importing a foreign production of Rossini comic masterpiece).

The Berlin State Opera’s chorus, choreographed to perfection inside the panelled wooden box in which the entire production takes place, is one of th glories of the performance. Never, to my eyes and ears, has the Anvil Chotus taken fire more fiercely.

But to say that the cast lives up to the chorus is an understatement. As Leonora, Anna Netrebko makes us hang on her every note. Placido Domingo, his voice coaxed by Barenboim down into its new baritone regions, is a grizzled but passionate Count di Luna, bringing a desolation to his villainy that only a great artist can supply. As Manrico, Gaston Rivero rises to the lyrical beauty of the role as well as to its high noes, and the flame-haired Marina Prudenskaya, her feet seeming scarcely able to hold her up,  shows herself to be the Azucena of our time.

Philipp Stolzl’s production, a mingling of Velasquez with circus, top hats with suits of armour, swords with pistols, shadows with trapdoors, is a miracle of surrealism. Even what looks like Salvador Dali, complete with twirled moustache,  puts in an appearance.

So buy the disc  swiftly. At £10 from Amazon, it is a snip, searing in impact, fascinating in design, costing infinitely less than a theatre ticket. What was once dismissed as operatic tosh now speaks for itself as a Verdi masterpiece of the choicest sort.
5 October 2014