UK Edition
Review
Angela Gheorghiu should be wonderful here, but she isn't - Adriana Lecouvreur review
What on paper looked like being the strongest aspect of this performance transpired as the weakest.
Playing the title-role in an otherwise satisfying revival of Cilea’s spoony melodrama, Angela Gheorghiu is celebrating a quarter-century of appearances at Covent Garden. David McVicar’s staging of the piece was specially mounted for her here in 2010, and the character of the capricious but enchanting actress of the Louis Quinze era could have been created with her in mind: the music certainly massages her ability to produce a steady flow of softly beautiful tone and the story allows for numerous changes of flattering costume. Granted these gifts, Gheorghiu should be wonderful. But she isn’t.
The problem wasn’t her customary reluctance to draw on more than 50 per cent of what’s she got in the tank, or her costive refusal to risk a note that might imperil her immaculate coiffure or toilette: for once, she is positively animated.
As a prima donna of the old school, Gheorghiu clearly identifies with Adriana’s emotional nature – her whims, her jealousies, her passions – and she acts out the Sturm und Drang vividly and even touchingly. But she is 51 now, and even allowing for the possibility of an off-night (something that normally leads her to withdraw), she cannot bend her voice to her will as she did when she first sang here in the early Nineties.
Through the first three acts, her intonation was insecure and attempts to launch airy subtleties went adrift – sounds that once evoked the velvet of a vintage Port turned vinegary, and phrases that had seemed spun gold emerged tarnished and lumpy. Her big aria “Io son l’ umile ancella” made scant effect. Only in the final minutes, as Adriana unwittingly inhales the poison sent by her rival and evanesces in one of opera’s most protracted death scenes, did she strike top form and justify her reputation.
Otherwise she was out-sung (and out-applauded) by her fellow principals: Brian Jagde virile and plangent as her lover Maurizio, flashy newcomer Ksenia Dudnikova as the scheming Princesse de Bouillon, and especially that truly great artist Gerald Finley, wasted but wonderful as Adriana’s long-suffering impresario and confidant Michonnet.
Daniel Oren conducts with plenty of verve if not ideal rigour, and McVicar’s elegant production, sumptuously designed by Charles Edwards, has been crisply resuscitated by Justin Way. It’s a longish evening for something of little musical substance, but the spectacle guarantees a good night out.
Until March 2. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk