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Review
Luisa Miller, ENO, London Coliseum, review: fantastic singing, but no wonder the production was booed
Verdi lovers have reason to be grateful to ENO for this new production of Luisa Miller – and also reason to be enraged. Last staged in Britain 17 years ago, it’s a significant work. Loosely based on a play by Schiller and composed in the wake of the 1848 revolutions, it follows a story-line that also shapes George Eliot’s contemporary novel Adam Bede and the ballet Giselle – the disastrous seduction of an innocent rustic lass by a smitten gentleman who should be marrying his own kind.
The theme represents Verdi’s move away from the blood-and-thunder nationalism that dominated his early style towards a more intimate domestic focus. Its treatment of difficult relationships between parents and children foreshadows the ensuing masterpieces Rigoletto and La Traviata, notably in the supple extended duets that comprise much of the score. But to make its emotional impact Luisa Miller requires a more sensitively nuanced interpretation than it receives at the Coliseum.
Commissioned by ENO’s now departed artistic director Daniel Kramer, it represents an exercise in a tired theatrical idiom that audiences are now heartily sick of, and it was duly booed at the curtain call. Barbora Horáková Joly is a Czech director based in Germany who has worked extensively with Calixto Bieito (he of the notorious “pants-down” version of Verdi’s A Masked Ball that appalled the Coliseum in 2002). She and her designers have removed the libretto from its historically specific setting in 17th-century Tyrol and transported it into that old standby, the empty deconstructive white box, over the walls of which blood and graffiti are lavishly smeared.
This is only one of many clichés to which Horáková Joly resorts in her effort to give the story “contemporary relevance” – though by eliminating any sense of the class distinctions that give the plot its ideological focus, she has in truth reduced it to a blank sheet.
Costuming is broadly modern, but the chorus is white-face and dressed as for a carnival or circus; spectral children represent the characters in their happy infancy; a trembling near-naked youth is sadistically threatened with immersion in a barrel of oil; and there are further gratuitous outbreaks of gore. Need I say more?
Alexander Joel conducts very fluently. He couldn’t compensate for Verdi’s failure to reach his full stride in the long first act, but he brought the magnificent third act to the boil, fired by the super-charged singing of Elizabeth Llewellyn in the title-role and David Junghoon Kim as her lover Rodolfo.
Llewellyn has been absent from the Coliseum for too long, but she returned in triumph, singing throughout with a full-throated ease that amply filled the auditorium and portraying the character with a vivid naïvety that even the production’s vacuity couldn’t blur.
Kim is a tenor of enormous promise, and his acting seems to be improving too. He sang the beautiful “Quando le sere al placido” (in English) with compelling ardour and pulled out all the stops for his death throes. Together they made my spine tingle. Equally impressive was the American bass Soloman Howard as the lugubrious villain Wurm, though Verdi doesn’t allow either him or Christine Rice, classy in every sense as the duchess Federica, much chance to shine. As the two father-figures, Olafur Sigurdarson and James Creswell were vocally rough-edged but effective enough; the chorus sang very well under chorus master Mark Biggins.
So musically the show more than passes muster. But, after its poor showing in the autumn and what by all reports is a duff revival of Carmen, this is precisely the sort of production that ENO doesn’t need right now.
In rep until March 6. Tickets: 0844 871 2118; Telegraph Tickets