Don Carlo review – Lise Davidsen doesn’t disappoint in Verdi’s sprawling masterpiece

This is the fourth time that Nicholas Hytner’s staging of Verdi’s sprawling masterpiece, first seen in 2008, has been revived. As before, it’s the final version of Don Carlo that’s being performed – in five acts, and sung in Italian – and in most respects it is a routine revival. Though it is conducted by Bertrand de Billy with requisite attention to the score’s astonishing colours and fluctuating dramatic pulse and superb orchestral playing, the problems of the staging remain unresolved. In particular the third act’s auto de fé, which should be one of the climactic set pieces – a vivid depiction of the opera’s central clash between church and state – is still visually and dramatically a mess, cluttered and unfocused.

But the selling point of these latest performances was always going to be Lise Davidsen’s casting as Elizabeth de Valois, her first major Verdi role, and she at least doesn’t disappoint. But the whole performance takes a while to stir into dramatic life, and Elizabeth’s meeting with Brian Jagde’s Carlos in the opening Fontainebleau scene is rather prosaic – it’s loud certainly, for Jagde shows more concern for volume than elegance, but lacks a sense of who either of these young people is.

That’s at least partly down to the production, which has never been too bothered about defining character. But even though Jagde’s hero remains unconvincing and unsympathetic to the very end, Davidsen’s performance grows steadily in authority as she moves through the opera, until her aria in the final act is a tour de force of glorious singing, a perfect crystallisation of the emotional journey that her character has undertaken.

No one else in the cast comes close to matching this dramatic intensity or vocal power, though John Relyea’s dark-toned Philip II (blacker sounding even than Taras Shtonda’s Grand Inquisitor) conjures up a plausible picture of an embittered, cruel monarch, and Luca Micheletti makes a noble sounding if rather stiffly acted Rodrigo. Yulia Matochkina’s delivery of Eboli’s Veil Song is less compelling than her account of her great fourth-act aria, which really does have dramatic presence, a rare commodity in this performance. The reds and blacks that dominate Bob Crowley’s designs may promise the fierce intensity that drives this drama of irreconcilable opposites, but Davidsen apart, too little on stage delivers on that.