Werther, Royal Opera House, review: Juan Diego Flórez lights up an otherwise staid evening

Two very fine performances in the leading roles make this revival of Massenet’s Werther well worth catching – especially as there are hundreds of seats available in all areas of the auditorium.

Juan Diego Flórez takes the title-role for the first time in London. Although he isn’t the world’s most naturally imaginative actor and his voice doesn’t spread across the richest palette of colours, he sings with marvellous clarity and elegance of line, attentive to the French text and scrupulously musical throughout. His big aria, ‘Pourquoi me reveiller?’, was wonderfully shaped, and his gentler soliloquies were warmly expressive. Flórez nobly resists the temptation to grandstand the breast-beating melodrama in this music, and his performance is all the more moving because of it.

The American mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard makes a belated debut at Covent Garden as the conflicted Charlotte. Instantly warm, unaffected and sympathetic in personality, she too rose to the challenges of the opera’s latter half, wringing agony out of her reading of Werther’s letters and communicating a vivid sense of someone flailing out of her emotional depth. The voice is light in timbre and not particularly distinctive, but conceals reserves of power. She looked enchanting.

Nobody else in the cast matters very much, but Jacques Imbrailo admirably makes Charlotte’s boring husband Albert less of a stuffed shirt than usual, and Heather Engebretson twitters very prettily as the pert Sophie. Benoît Jacquot’s production, revived here by Andrew Sinclair, is a bland affair, offering no social context or depth to the characterisation. Audiences like it, however, as it is very attractively and realistically designed (with reference to the Danish school of domestic interiors) by Charles Edwards.