Preview Verdi's Don Carlos
As many ingredients as a fine paella in this intriguing Spanish serving
Preview: Verdi's Don Carlos
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Tim Albery’s 1993 take on Verdi’s Don Carlos for Opera North shows it can be hard to keep a good production down. Here it receives a second revival - the first came in 1998 - and memories of this regal Spanish setting for Opera’s timeless conflict of love versus duty remain very green. The composer took great pains over it and it was 15 years after its premiere before he finally declared it finished. For the mature Verdi, the intellectual issues and historical basis of the drama - the unbending absolutism of Philip II’s rule, the feared excesses of the church’s Inquisition and the struggle for liberation in the Spanish-occupied Netherlands - were not to be mere background wash for an emotional front, however entangled.
The 1867 first performance was a Paris Opera commission, which meant five acts, grand spectacle and ballet music. Verdi created and developed no fewer than six major roles: the King, his new Queen, Elisabeth de Valois, his heir, Don Carlos, and the Princess Eboli, who constitute between them something approaching a love quadrilateral; the fifth is the Grand Inquisitor, bent on pitiless repression, and, finally, there is the seditious heretic Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa, a confidante to all at home, yet a perpetrator of shameless high treason in the Low Countries. Great demands are made on the singers. Unsurprisingly, it is the composer’s longest opera, but ON offer a more accommodating abridged version of Verdi’s own devising.
Tenor Julian Gavin, who sang the title role successfully in 1998, resumes the part, as does Alastair Miles as the King. Janice Watson, who has recent acclamations for her Strauss, takes on Elisabeth, a part for which she seems particularly well-suited. The most intriguing casting choice is William Dazeley as Posa. He had the non-singing part of Vice-President Throttlebottom in the company’s two recent Gershwin musicals. ON’s music director, Richard Farnes, conducts. The production is sung in English, but to assuage those intent on opera in its original tongue, may I point out that, in this case, that would be an adaptation of Schiller’s original German play into performable French, a language its Italian creator never set wholly convincingly?
2, 8, 13, 21, 23 May and 24 June, Grand Theatre, 46 New Briggate, LS1 6NZ, 0113 222 6222, 7.15pm, £10-£58
Posted on Thursday 16th April 2009
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