Review

The Force of Destiny, ENO, review: 'indisputably powerful'

The Force of Destiny performed by English National Opera
The Force of Destiny performed by English National Opera Credit: Alastair Muir

This opera has never been easy for anybody. Verdi grappled valiantly with La Forza del Destino, but a plot based on epic distances of time and location as well as implausible coincidences defeated him.

The result flickers fitfully: there’s a marvellous role for soprano, an overture in the grand style, a stirring tenor-baritone duet and tremendous final scene, but also a meanderingly weak central act and too much note-spinning folderol as well. It’s an opera I’ve never seen coherently, let alone cogently performed.

Calixto Bieito – the Catalan director whose fixations on graphic sex and violence have frequently caused a frisson of scandal – circumvents the problems to some extent by stamping his own concept to the narrative and ignoring any question of the composer’s intentions or the score’s implications.

Anthony Michaels-Moore as Don Carlo in The Force of Destiny
Anthony Michaels-Moore as Don Carlo in The Force of Destiny Credit: Alastair Muir

Translating the setting from the mid eighteenth century to the Spanish Civil War, he paints the stage almost exclusively in grainy black-and-white, eliminating any trace of romance, comedy or humanity: everyone here is vile, abject or psychotic, and pity or mercy are only the hypocrite’s mask.

The monk who takes the desperate heroine Leonora into his care becomes a creepy pervert who strips her and crowns her with barbed wire; the cheerful vivandière Preziosilla is a sadistic capo who kicks a pregnant woman in the belly for no reason. Bieito refuses to believe that war has any honour or grandeur, and rightly chooses not to sentimentalise. But the light and shade in the score suggest other aspects of humanity too, and arresting and impressive though Bieito’s bleakly cynical vision is, it is simply not Verdi’s.

The sense of monochromatic reduction is thrown into relief by Mark Wigglesworth’s richly energised and boldly colourful conducting, electrically taut in its dramatic thrust but also imbued with a dignity and nobility entirely absent on stage. From the first urgent bars of the overture (in its less celebrated original version) to the final dying fall, the orchestra played gloriously.

Rinat Shaham as Preziosilla and Anthony Michaels-Moore as Don Carlo in The Force of Destiny
Rinat Shaham as Preziosilla and Anthony Michaels-Moore as Don Carlo in The Force of Destiny Credit: Alastair Muir

The American soprano Tamara Wilson makes a magnificent debut as Leonora, sailing through the arched phrases of her arias with supreme confidence and shining tone. Can we hear her as Aida at Covent Garden, please? Gwyn Hughes Jones is not a subtle singer or actor, but as the half-caste Alvaro he too projects with a full-throated fluency that gets close to the heart of the matter, in potent contrast to Anthony Michaels-Moore’s chillingly horrible Carlo.

The other stars of the show are the chorus, forced into some undignified postures by Bieito but singing throughout with thrilling clarity and commitment. The audience’s response was rapturous: after the damp squib of La Bohème, ENO is firing on all cylinders with this indisputably powerful if horribly unlovable production.

Until Dec 4. Tickets: 020 7845 9300; eno.org

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