A jolly good stab at this unwieldy opera: La forza del destino, Welsh National Opera, Wales Millennium Centre, review

Forza is by common consent the most unwieldy of Verdi’s mature operas, a writhing torso that never settles into shape. The composer struggled with revisions throughout the 1860s and never got it right – parts of the third and fourth acts show a distinct slump in both his musical inspiration and theatrical nous that no conductor or director could ever redeem.

But Carlo Rizzi and David Pountney have certainly had a jolly good stab at the problem, and this new production for Welsh National Opera is just about as successful as one could reasonably hope.

Rizzi has Verdi in his blood, and from his cracking account of the celebrated overture to its final seraphic cadences, he conducts a fast-paced and vividly coloured account of the score, played with exceptional clarity by WNO’s wonderful orchestra. Pountney can be a brash and slapdash director, but he is relatively restrained here, his most flamboyant idea being to turn the camp follower Preziosilla into a harbinger of fate – half cabaret magician, half grim reaper – who prowls balefully throughout, prescient of what is past and to come.

Otherwise the staging (designed by Raimund Bauer) is austere, focused on a large white panel that oozes the blood of vendetta and marked by allusions to the black and white Fascism of the Spanish Civil War. It’s a pity that more isn’t made of Alvaro’s Inca ancestry – surely his outsider status is a key to the drama.