★★★★☆
Fate comes knocking, literally, at the start of David Pountney’s pulsating new Welsh National Opera staging. A female master of ceremonies bangs three times on the floor with a big mace to match the three baleful brass blasts at the start of Verdi’s famous overture. She will reappear in the guise of several doom-mongering characters throughout the next three hours, making sure we don’t forget that what drives this opera is exactly what the label on the tin says. The fickle and invariably tragic force of destiny.
If Tolstoy and Hardy had collaborated on an opera libretto, it would surely have been just like the one that Francesco Maria Piave supplied for Verdi. There are epic scenes of war and peace. Pious clerics are