Review

A production to change hearts and minds - Semiramide, Royal Opera, review

Semiramide
Jacquelyn Stucker (Azema) and Lawrence Brownlee (Idreno) Credit: Alastair Muir

This is a thrilling occasion: grand opera, grandly sung, played and staged. And I speak as someone who always approaches Rossini's serious works with trepidation.

Like Mosé in Egitto or Maometto Secondo, Semiramide is over-extended and marred by a few passages of rum-ti-tum banality and mere showiness. The genius of David Alden’s production is that it exploits these lapses as an element of black comedy, applied to an apparently earnest classical tale of a murderous queen at war with an old lover and blinded by a passion for a young soldier of whose identity as her son she is unaware.

Without overplaying his hand or resorting to caricature, Alden punctures any pretension to tragic pomp and plays out the plot as a naked power struggle, in which the corrupt get their comeuppance and the innocent suffer too.

In Paul Steinberg and Buki Shiff’s sumptuous designs, the original setting of Ancient Babylon is plausibly translated to one of those tinpot dictatorships like Turkmenistan, where women are kept in purdah, the military holds sway and tyrants are commemorated in giant statuary. The result is a sharply witty spectacle that never seems gratuitously gimmicky.

From the first bars of the Overture – magnificently executed by the orchestra – the conductor Antonio Pappano demonstrates complete command of the sprawling score, pacing it with an ideal combination of panache and clarity as well as sensitively providing the singers with the support they need to interpret extremely demanding music.

Semiramide
Joyce DiDonato (Semiramide) and Michele Pertusi (Artur) Credit: Alastair Muir

They meet all its challenges triumphantly. In the title-role, Joyce DiDonato is wonderfully expressive in her big aria “Bel raggio” , making this apparent monster of a woman credibly human and vulnerable. In two sublime duets that set my spine tingling, she blends exquisitely with the darker tones of her beloved Arsace – a swaggeringly virtuosic Daniela Barcellona – before electrifying us in a confrontation with her erstwhile partner-in-crime Assur, powerfully incarnated by the young bass Mirco Palazzi (standing in for Act 2 after an ailing Michele Pertusi withdrew).

Lawrence Brownlee makes a brilliant show-stopping debut in the secondary role of Idreno, proving himself a resourceful actor as well as a superb technician. The minor characters are cast from strength, and the chorus is back on top form.

This is a production to change minds and hearts: I’ve previously found Semiramide rather a bore: after this knockout performance, I can’t wait to hear it again.

In rep until December 16. Tickets: 0207 304 4000; roh.org.uk

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