UK Edition
Review
This glamorous Rosenkavalier is a much-needed hit for Covent Garden – review
Whatever else you think about his work, Robert Carsen is a director who knows how to put on a good show, and his handsome new production of Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier will delight audiences sick of carnage, rape and mayhem being scribbled over their favourite operas.
True, Carsen doesn’t play the game as the composer intended. Here he updates Maria Theresa’s 1740s rococo Vienna to that of Franz Josef, a few anxious years before the First World War – the period of the opera’s composition. The Marschallin now inhabits an imperial palace furnished with ancestral portraits; Baron Ochs is a jack-booted officer in the Austro-Hungarian army; and the arriviste Faninal has commissioned a fashionable Secessionist architect to design his town house.
Several other stagings have followed these lines, and since Hofmannsthal’s comic libretto can justifiably be interpreted as a parable of the Hapsburgs’ crisis of conscience and culture, the historical transplant works plausibly.
Perhaps Carsen over-eggs things by implying that Faninal’s fortune is based in arms manufacture (Howitzers have pride of place in his salon) and presenting the third act’s seedy suburban inn as a five-star brothel offering entertainment worthy of the Reeperbahn; I certainly deplored the vulgar dream ballet that accompanies the Silver Rose duet.
But Paul Steinberg and Brigitte Reiffenstuel have designed sumptuous sets and costumes, and Carsen directs with psychological sensitivity as well as showbiz flair. This isn’t the hardest or the sharpest Rosenkavalier ever, but it scores high for vivacity and glamour.
It is also splendidly conducted by Andris Nelsons – once past that dratted hurly-burly prelude, he gives the score a brilliantly mercurial reading, alert to its delicacies of orchestration and virtuosic figuration. The orchestra, on terrific form, is put through its paces and must have been shattered by the end.
Now in the autumn of her career, Renee Fleming more than compensates for what she has lost in sheen and amplitude with richer grace and subtlety – her chastely sung Marschallin is supremely elegant and gently moving. Her Octavian Alice Coote is all boyish ardour, over the top when disguised as Mariandel and at times short of vocal polish. Sophie Bevan makes a perfectly gorgeous Sophie and the excellent Matthew Rose is a memorably unpleasant Ochs – more vicious bully than rustic buffoon. Buttressed by many strongly defined supporting performances, this is a much-needed hit for Covent Garden, rapturously and deservedly acclaimed.
Until January 24. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk