★★★★★
If you want escapist bliss — and who doesn’t right now? — the Royal Opera’s new staging of Donizetti’s comic opera is almost perfect. Almost, because it slightly runs out of steam just before the end. By then, however, I had been richly entertained by Damiano Michieletto’s clever modern-day staging, dazzled by mostly brilliant singing and the scintillating playing of the orchestra under Evelino Pido’s seasoned direction and touched by the acting of a top-notch cast.
The latter is most surprising because I thought myself impervious to the “fun” of an opera in which an old man who craves a pretty wife is tricked, bullied and humiliated. Yet his treatment doesn’t feel cruel here. In part that’s because Olga Peretyatko, as the marriage-brokered bride