Jonathan Miller’s production of The Barber of Seville has been an English National Opera mainstay for almost three decades and its clever stagecraft has outlasted the modish takes on the work that have come and gone elsewhere. However, both it and Rossini’s prequel to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro have been better served than on the first night of its latest revival, where it seems as if things needed to settle before its full impact can be felt.
Restaged by Peter Relton, it has retained its commedia dell’arte-type humour, but has lost some of its underlying seriousness of intent. It plays down the unease that previously accompanied Rosina’s immurement in Bartolo’s world of medical equipment and specimen jars and the once premonitory ending, in which we realise that the preening toff she has married is not the person she actually loves. The mood has become brittle, which allows Andrew Shore’s outrageously funny Bartolo – a constant of the production’s recent outings – to seem over the top rather than naturally contained by the surrounding ensemble.
Musically, it is also uneven. On the plus side, we have Kathryn Rudge’s classy Rosina, an unctuously sonorous if unusually young Basilio from Barnaby Rea and a fine Almaviva in Eleazar Rodriguez, who is bigger voiced than most. Figaro is played by Morgan Pearse, a handsome Australian baritone with a nice line in dry, understated irony. His voice, although wonderfully agile, is on the small side. He is not helped in places by conductor Christopher Allen, who, in this opera of crescendos, is in danger of turning up the volume too high and obscuring him. It is still well worth seeing, and the problems will hopefully sort themselves during the run.
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