London Coliseum, 30 September 2016

Richard Jones has directed a wide range of productions for ENO over recent years and while they are often challenging they are normally highly sensitive to the work concerned. Unfortunately he seems to have come unstuck with his approach to Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It is quite reasonable to paint a corrupt world within which Giovanni operates but another altogether to suggest that there is not a single likeable person on stage. In his opening scene we see two rooms; Anna is setting up a sex game with Giovanni while next door her father is with a prostitute. How are we to have any sympathy for Anna in her emotional out-poring to Don Ottavio when we know she brought the whole situation on herself? The same is true of virtually everyone else on stage and as such we are consistently alienated from the action. When we add to this the use of black clothing throughout and the dank, if vast, interior sets and brutalist lighting, there is little to make us engage with the narrative. Added to this, the constant sweep of walls and doors, with the cast endlessly moving about, cuts across the structure of the score.

Thankfully the singing is excellent throughout with Christopher Purves a slimy if sure-footed anti-hero. He does not need to seduce any of the women; they simply throw themselves at him. Caitlin Lynch and Christine Rice as Anna and Elvira respectively are heroic in voice even when they are required to act against the score. Most at ease is Allan Clayton’s mellifluous Ottavio, whose refined Dalla sua pace is one of the few reflective moments in the first half. Clive Bailey’s Leporello seems deliberately to mimic Michael Caine though he creates a credible comic follower not averse to acting independently of his master. Nicholas Crawley and Mary Bevan are finely cast as Masetto and Zerlina, their relationship uneasy from the start, though there is no sense of class differences in this production.

Mark Wigglesworth takes a speedy approach to the score as if he wants to ensure there is no time for us to think or applaud between numbers. The orchestral playing is fine but the endless attack becomes wearing after a time.

With fewer new productions this season there was a hope that Richard Jones’ reputation would launch things in style. Perhaps this was not quite the style we were expecting.

Royal Opera House  13 September 2016

This version of Rossini’s 200 year old comedy is (originally directed by Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier, now revived by Thomas Guthrie) is fresh and crisp. There’s a lot of bright colour both in costume and lighting with much of the action set in a candy striped inner stage box to represent Rosina’s “prison” in Dr Bartolo’s house. Of course windows and doors open within it as characters enter often clandestinely – this is comic opera after all. There are also some imaginative ideas such as raising the inner box of the set several feet above stage level and rocking it with the entire cast on board to suggest confusion although I couldn’t help wondering what such a gimmick/coup de theatre (depending on your point of view) added to production costs.

The chorus of guards (reminiscent of the policemen in The Pirates of Penzance) exposed upstage is fun too, especially when they dance with their truncheons. And the translation of the Italian libretto for the surtitles by Kenneth Chalmers is good value. “The cheese has landed on the macaroni” declares Figaro gleefully at one point.

Il barbiere di Siviglia dates from 1816 when Rossini was only 24 and weaving charismatic musical magic around intrigue, trickery and witty dialogue. Sung here in Italian, as usual at the Royal Opera House, it employs a full range of appropriate musical vowel sounds – a strand in the sound texture which disappears as soon as you start translating the words.

It’s a familiar and pretty simple story. Count Almaviva (Javier Camarena) is in Seville to court a beautiful girl Rosina (Daniela Mack) who is due to be married to her guardian Doctor Bartolo (Jose Fardilha). Three hours of shenanigans and misunderstandings later, led by the local barber, Figaro (Vito Priante) we arrive at a happy ending of a sort. Those who know Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, based, a generation earlier, on the second play in Beaumarchais’s trilogy will be sceptical. And of course you have to take at face value this world in which  passionate – randy, even – women are imprisoned by buffoonish manipulative men until they are rescued by other rather sexier manipulative men. There’s a lot of it in classical opera.

Camarena is a show-stopper as Almaviva. His sapphire-sharp tenor voice sustains some astonishingly long notes and his dynamic control is top notch.  He’s also an accomplished actor and his music lesson scene with Mack is very funny. A wide register mezzo, some of Mack’s top notes threaten to break glasses while at other moments she plumbs rich claret depths. She too is warmly convincing in character, petulantly throwing darts at the set walls and flouncing about in pent-up frustration in her first real scene, for example. And Vito Priante provides an enjoyable mercurial Figaro for balance. He sings his act one entrance patter number – always tricky because it’s so well known – by coming in from the back and flirting with audience members on his way to the stage which works beautifully. And his comic timing is perfect.

All this is accompanied by the magnificent Orchestra of the Royal Opera House in the pit under youthful-looking Henrik Nanasi. He really brings out the colour and detail in the music. The fortepiano continuo from Christopher Willis is especially fine in its accuracy and responsive sensitivity.

The Royal Opera House claims to be “world class” and of course it is – working here with an outstanding cast of principals from all over the world.  It’s a very enjoyable production which I am happy to recommend enthusiastically although the fly in the ointment – as always at ROH – is that the stalls seat I sat in on press night would have cost over £150.

Susan Elkin