Don Carlo, Royal Opera House, review: 'under-directed but with much to enjoy vocally' 

The management hasn’t had much luck with this revival of a work that many would rank as Verdi’s greatest achievement. Both the star baritone and soprano scheduled to sing Rodrigo and Elisabetta dropped out a month or so ago, and this week the mezzo-soprano singing the page Tebaldo went down too. I doubt whether Bertrand de Billy was anybody’s first choice of conductor either: he’s doubling up here with duties on L’Elisir d’amore later this month, and his lucid, well-paced but essentially lightweight account of Verdi’s magnificent score suggested that Donizetti’s comedy might be his more natural habitat.

In the circumstances, it’s not surprising that the cast didn’t gel on the first night and the performance generated little dramatic urgency. Nicholas Hytner had returned to rehearse his slickly efficient and generally handsome 2008 production, a staging that falters badly only in a faintly ludicrous presentation of the problematic auto-da-fé scene. But nowhere does it scratch beneath the surface or bring the human tragedy and its political dilemmas home: all we witnessed here was opera singers standing where they’d been told to stand and carving conventional gestures – nowhere more so than in that enthralling life-or-death encounter between Philip (Ildar Abdrazakov) and the Grand Inquisitor (an under-powered Paata Burchuladze). The show remains, in other words, under-directed and earthbound.