Review

Les Vêpres Siciliennes review, Wales Millennium Centre: spectacle and a lusty chorus fail to salvage this Verdi dud

Jung Soo-Yun as Henri and Giorgio Caoduro as Guy de Montfort in WNO's Les Vêpres Siciliennes
Jung Soo-Yun as Henri and Giorgio Caoduro as Guy de Montfort in WNO's Les Vêpres Siciliennes Credit: Johan Persson

Welsh National Opera was asking for trouble when it decided to complete its tripartite cycle of works from Verdi’s middle period with the seldom heard Vêpres Siciliennes. It’s a protracted and unwieldy affair, in which the composer was newly grappling with the suffocating conventions of Parisian grand opera and  the result is slackly paced and narratively sprawling, peopled with confusing, charmless characters and uninspired arias. 

I guess that end-to-end it runs twice as long as its predecessor, La Traviata, and it’s not even half as good. Why did WNO not programme the far more tractable Simon Boccanegra – also from Verdi’s middle period – instead?

The director David Pountney has addressed the problems with his customary bravado and those familiar with his productions will recognise the recycling of many of his visual trademarks (masks, ladders, gore, puppets, Fascists). 

The setting is couched in a style of minimalistic modernism – against a bare backdrop, three large, neon-lined frames, like hollow cinema screens, are wheeled round to indicate changes of scene. But Marie-Jeanne Lecca’s sumptuous costuming broadly updates the period from medieval Palermo, where the natives are revolting against the occupying French, to the mid 18th-century, with the Governor Guy de Montfort presented as a leathery Gauleiter. 

Marine Tournet as dancer and Giorgio Caoduroas Guy de Montfort
Marine Tournet as dancer and Giorgio Caoduroas Guy de Montfort Credit: Johan Persson

It’s a fine spectacle, beautifully lit, but Pountney struggles to clarify a plot in which a nationalist son is hesitating to take revenge on his imperialist father (shades of Il Trovatore); and despite National Dance Company Wales’ spirited efforts, the extended ballet sequences merely slow things up, contributing to the muddle.

I was also slightly disappointed by the conducting of Carlo Rizzi, a seasoned Verdian. His tempi were often on the stately side and he never established an underlying dramatic pulse (there must have been 20 breaks for perfunctory applause, exposing the weaknesses in the opera’s construction). Five minutes could usefully be knocked off the running time, without cuts. But the orchestral playing was brilliant, and it’s not a score that anyone would find easy to pull together.

The cast’s one outstanding member was the Armenian soprano Anush Hovhannisyan, as the militant heroine Helene. Blessed with an alluring ruby-red timbre, she sang with a refinement of phrasing and musical imagination absent from her male colleagues Jung Soo Yun (a stylistically coarse barnstormer of a tenor, as the tormented hero Henri); Giorgio Caoduro (short of authority as de Montfort); and Wotjek Gierlach (plodding through the ill-defined role of the partisan leader Procida). My beloved WNO chorus sang lustily, but scarcely a syllable of French was clearly audible anywhere.

A brave but misplaced effort, then, in sum: and it’s Verdi (as he would have been the first to admit) who should shoulder most of the blame for the evening’s longueurs and shortcomings.

Until 22 February, then touring to Llandudno, Bristol, Southampton, Milton Keynes, Plymouth, and Birmingham. Tickets: 029 2063 6464; wno.org.uk

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