At the stirring midpoint of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, the eponymous doge of Genoa begs for unity: plebs, patricians, can’t we all just get along?
In this performance there was no disagreement from the latter, who it’s fair to say make up the home crowd at Grange Park Opera in West Horsley and have, by and large, paid for this festival to happen.
Perhaps this is why the plebs (here sometimes translated in the surtitles as simply “the mob”) who storm into Boccanegra’s council chamber seem like a rather feeble bunch, waving some suspiciously clean pitchforks. Anyway, during a long interval of smoked salmon and Nyetimber nobody wants to be menaced by thoughts of populist revolutions. We can get that on the news.
The show that opens GPO this year is actually billed as a double Simon show — “Simon Boccanegra with Simon Keenlyside”. Thankfully, the veteran and knighted baritone doesn’t disappoint. Twenty-five years go by during Verdi’s unwieldy drama, but Keenlyside is striking both as the skulking buccaneer of the prologue and then, weighed down by years of office, threatening yet careworn as the doge who tries to keep order over a fractious city.
There are moments of dryness in his upper range and not everything is vocally supported, but he etches practically every word with meaning. Once a sea dog, always a sea dog, this Boccanegra keeps the salty energy to his dying breath.
He’s backed up by a solid team. The Gascoigne Orchestra, GPO’s home band, play with muscle, sensitively conducted by Gianluca Marciano, and the men’s chorus are a glowering but sonorous bunch. And as Boccanegra’s old nemesis, Jacopo Fiesco, the bass James Creswell bristles powerfully; he can’t help that this elusive character’s final volte-face never quite convinces.
Spare yet precise in gesture, Keenlyside is a singer-actor who holds the attention. The same can’t be said for this reheated David Pountney staging. The director was present but not involved in this revival: his 1997 Welsh National Opera production is now steered by Robin Tebbutt.
Ralph Koltai’s abstract designs sometimes hold the eye but give us very little context (and next to no sense of Genoa’s maritime location), and Sue Wilmington’s cod-medieval costumes are dated, sometimes unflattering (though I do like the patricians, in blood-red robes, stalking around on stilts). Too often Elin Pritchard’s otherwise impassioned Amelia flings herself from one side of the stage to another; her beloved, Otar Jorjikia’s slightly squally Adorno, resorts to old-fashioned arm-waving. Sir Simon remains compelling, but Grange Park have done much better music drama than this.
★★★☆☆
To Jul 11, grangeparkopera.co.uk
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