US Edition 
La Donna del Lago, Royal Opera, Royal Opera House, review
The staging may be a little too silly for some, but Rossini's music has never sounded better, writes Rupert Christiansen.
I regret to say that my most vivid recollection of the last occasion on which I saw this opera - in 1985, also at Covent Garden - is of Marilyn Horne remonstrating at her curtain call with some hooligan who was wantonly booing her. There was more booing 28 years later, but that’s not what anyone will remember about the evening.
The piece is of the second class, but charming nevertheless. Drawing freely on Walter’s Scott’s once fashionable poem The Lady of the Lake, it’s a slice of romantic tartan hokum, set in a Never-Never-Scotland, where rebel clans are fighting the legitimate king.
A standard plot unfolds, wherein A (Uberto) loves B (Elena, she of the lake). But B loves C (Malcom, whose second “l” gets lost in translation) - an amour complicated by the fact that A is the King and at war with C, and that B is both betrothed to D (Rodrigo) and unaware of A’s regal identity. Come on, it’s Italian opera, keep up!
Around this silly stuff, director John Fulljames and his designers Dick Bird and Yannis Thavoris have woven an over-elaborate but not unintelligent conceit, which excited the wrath of the Gods - unfairly, I thought.
Their idea is to locate the opera inside an Enlightenment museum in which the characters are historical specimens emerging from vitrines to be observed by a chorus of antiquaries. Within this decorative frame, the action is treated in relatively straightforward fashion, with the king represented as a Hanoverian. Fulljames has a point, even if it is just a gloss.
But it’s the music that matters, and here the production triumphs. Rossini’s score, brightly coloured with hunting horns and Celtic harps, hits its stride after a slowish start. The highlights include an exquisite duet for the two mezzo-sopranos and an astonishing trio for two tenors and mezzo, interspersed with a run of lyrical and virtuoso arias that show this laziest of great composers putting his best foot forward.
Can he ever have heard - or imagined - his music better sung than it was here? The sun shines out of Joyce DiDonato’s voice, and her ravishingly beautiful Elena caps the show with a sublime account of the lilting “Tanti affetti”. The technically impeccable Juan Diego Florez is all fire and ardour as Uberto, incandescent in runs and roulades, tireless in his production of rock-steady top Bs and Cs. The house went mad with joy for them both.
Scarcely less good are Daniela Barcellona as a soft-grained yet formidable Malcom, and Michael Spyres, a high tenor who can call on a cavernous lower register, making an auspicious debut as Rodrigo. Underpinned by Michele Mariotti nimbly conducting a spry orchestra, the result was a stupendous display of belissimo canto.
Until 11 June. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; roh.org.uk