I Capuleti e i Montecchi/Chelsea Opera Group – review

I Capuleti e i Montecchi was reckoned to be Bellini's problem piece until recently, and even though its popularity has grown in recent years, we are still apt to find it something of a curiosity. Dating from 1830, it offers a variant on the tale of Romeo and Juliet. It leaps back over Shakespeare to the play's original sources, from which it draws a new, very different narrative that offended Shakespearean and Romantic sensibilities for decades.

Bellini, usually a painstaking, finicky composer, flung the opera together in a matter of weeks, recycling material from previous flops. Stagings at Covent Garden and Opera North have proved, however, that the work is anything but the ramshackle affair this might suggest. Now we have the Chelsea Opera Group's fine concert revival, which offered further significant perspectives on the score.

None of Bellini's works has suffered quite so much from the received, if erroneous idea that he was primarily an elegist. Numerous interpreters have tended to rein the piece in. Conductor Robin Newton, in contrast, opted for a big-scale, high-voltage performance that more than made up in power and excitement for what it occasionally lacked in finesse. Bellini places his feuding families on either side of a civil war, and the pervasive sense of tension and uncertainty, so often played down, was wonderfully sustained.

The casting was exemplary. Catherine Carby's Romeo and Ana Maria Labin's Giulietta voiced their doomed passions with sumptuous tone, immaculate technique and formidable intensity. As Tebaldo, Christopher Turner couldn't or wouldn't sing softly, though his aggressive style worked superbly in the context of Newton's interpretation. Graeme Broadbent was the ferocious Capellio, David Soar the principled but dithering Lorenzo. A terrific evening, and one of the Chelsea Opera Group's finest achievements.