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Fidelio: English National Opera: Review

September 26, 2013

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Two hundred years after its premiere, Beethoven’s Fidelio continues to thrill audiences with its many echoes of the composer’s symphonic works, powerful orchestral imagination and exquisite melodies. This very clean and tidy version from the very fashionable director Calixto Bieito is oddly soporific, having removed all the sense of set place and time and replacing it with the complex and visually arresting neon lit climbing frame cage of a set by Rebecca Ringst. Bieito succeeds in bringing an acute sense of isolated repression to the Coliseum but fails to embed the operas main themes of tyranny and liberty into the action.

I was underwhelmed by the staging and all the more so as I was excited at the idea of seeing what Bieito would do with this most emotionally thematic of operas.  Bieito is famed for his verve and shock tactics on stage and it would have been a welcome jolt to have a little of that spice up some of the action in this offering.  The set moved a little, and then flipped over but did little else other than pulse and flash on occasion as if someone had fallen asleep over the controls. It certainty gave a sense of being lost in some wretched bureaucratic sameness whose rules were deliberately obscured to ensure more torment, but failed to establish real ideas of different places in the story and also failed to highlight the Prisoners liberty too, the music struggled against this confusion before overcoming it with raw emotional power. What it did do well was to summon up the idea of prisons both real and imagined that each and every character inhabits and thrust this idea deep into the music.

See production information, images and some musical highlights here:

9249302986_cc3438fc5b_kThe singing was sublime and both Emma Bells Leonore and Stuart Skelton’s Florestan were fluid and arresting in voice and convincing in character. Bell delighting in throwing out the complex vocal demands with ease and grace, her breath control is a study of perfection and she drives the narrative forward with her conviction and moral force. The rather strange replacement of most of the spoken dialogue with chunks of depressingly dark surreal prose made them both seem slightly wide eyed and pedestrian while speaking.  Philip Horst’s Pizarro was muted and seemed to get swallowed up in the labyrinthine set and failed to deliver the powerful projection excepted of this tyrant, he was outshone by Roland Wood’s Fernando which was simply great and James Creswell’s touch perfect Rocco.

You can watch the director talking about the production here:

9249305680_44eeca9de5_kThe chorus were spot on, as usual, and delighted and thrilled the audience with their each and every moment, the final scene being breathtaking and worth the whole evenings attendance in itself. The appearance of the Heath Quartet dangling in cages during the tentative reawakening of intimacy between Leonaore and Florestan was a peace of delightful theatre and I loved it.

Edward Gardner at the helm of the orchestra drove them on from the opening sublime rendition of the Leonora No 3 Overture into some emotionally tense playing with breathtaking reach and clarity and seemed to be fully in control of the players even when the music had been redirected by the director into divergent places, Gardner brought us back, time and time again to the pure urgent beauty of Beethoven’s score and offered a more cohesive idea than that presented on stage.

ENO Fidelio - Emma Bell Stuart Skelton  Tristram KentonSo over all a musically profound production of Beethoven’s only opera with some fine singing but stripped bare of content and wrapped in this metaphorical maze of cold confusion it fails to offer the gasp out loud moments promised, although there are challenging and physiologically complex hues to the directors interpretation that are relevant to us today. The orchestral playing is simply flawless and offers real connection to the narrative journey but it’s the chorus of the ENO who do their damnedest to offer moments of pure exhilarating thrill.

It’s certainly not dull and I’d recommend going along for the experience and the music.

For more information or to book tickets see the ENO website here:

Until October  17

27 Sept, 1, 3, 6  (at 3pm), October 12 & 17

ENO, London Coliseum

Signed performance October 3 Pre-performance talk 27 Sep.

 

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