Nabucco, Royal Opera/Royal Opera House, review

At the tender age of 72, Plácido Domingo gives an impressively vigorous performance in Verdi's third opera, says Rupert Christiansen.

Marianna Pizzolato stars as Fenena in Nabucco at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in Londo alongside Placido Domingo in the title role.
Marianna Pizzolato stars as Fenena in Nabucco at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in Londo alongside Placido Domingo in the title role. Credit: Photo: Catherine Ashmore

At the tender age of 72 and apparently unstoppable in his second career as conductor and baritone, Plácido Domingo has now added to his repertory the role of Verdi’s Nabucco – the crazy Nebuchadnezzar familiar from the Old Testament book of Daniel.

Domingo’s stock-in-trade for Verdi is a comportment of anguished nobility, and here, clothed in the double-breasted suit of a retired bank manager, he milks the character more for Lear-like poignancy than Neronian monster-raving looniness. But this is an impressively vigorous performance, sung with stentorian force and some of his former tenorial glow in the final aria of remorse: the effect will be even stronger when he doesn’t need recourse to the prompter.

I don’t envy any director attempting to bring convincing theatrical life to Nabucco’s setting in biblical Babylon, but Daniele Abbado’s production makes no attempt to rise to the challenge. Instead he seems to have grabbed at the easiest option of “making it relevant to today” – in other words letting the singers strut their stuff ad libitum and instructing his designers to produce imagery which evokes the Holocaust and other instances of tragic mass exile and persecution.

There’s nothing aggressively offensive here, but the visual approach – drearily grey and under-energised – scarcely inhabits the same world as Verdi’s wonderfully impassioned and robustly defiant score or the purely melodramatic libretto, focused on the trope of the insane tyrant and innocent of the horrors of modern anti-Semitism or racial ideology.

There are admirably fluent and assured performances by Andrea Care and Marianna Pizzolato as the secondary figures of Ismaele and Fenena, while Vitaly Kowalajow is sonorously eloquent as the High Priest Zaccaria, even if he scarcely radiates a prelate’s spiritual gravitas. The excellent chorus sings with rapt intensity in “Va pensiero”, and elsewhere with brilliant panache.

Nicolo Luisotti’s crisply confident conducting keeps a tight grip on a score which under a weaker baton can run wild and woolly: he is an authentic Verdian, and the orchestra duly honoured him.

But it is Liudmyla Monastyrska’s vocally scorching Abigaille, grandly of the old school in volume, tone and technical bravado, who raises the temperature of the evening.

Steady as a rock and fearsomely implacable, with a searing top register and cavernous low notes, she steals the show – and the biggest ovation – from its notional septuagenarian star.

Until 26 April.

Tickets: 0207 304 4000; (roh.org.uk)