Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
don pasquale
Danielle de Niese (Norina) with Alessandro Corbelli in the title role of Don Pasquale at Glyndebourne: ‘he almost brought the house down’. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Danielle de Niese (Norina) with Alessandro Corbelli in the title role of Don Pasquale at Glyndebourne: ‘he almost brought the house down’. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Don Pasquale; BBC Proms 6 & 8 – review

This article is more than 10 years old
Glyndebourne, east Sussex; Royal Albert Hall, London

Donizetti's Don Pasquale is a comedy with a tragedy trying to get out. At one point it's observed that Pasquale is "caught in a cage of his own making", and this also describes an opera in which the music is superior to, and always threatening to topple, the commedia dell'arte plot. Mariame Clément, whose 2011 Glyndebourne touring production makes its festival debut, is a highly accomplished, sensitive director committed to bringing out what she sees as the humanity of the piece, making Pasquale more than a buffo figure and highlighting, in so far as they exist, the subtleties of his story. With the Italian baritone Alessandro Corbelli in the title role it seems, at first, that she may be on to a winning streak.

Corbelli's performance is a tour de force – though force doesn't describe his Pasquale. He presents him as a vulnerable old fool but does not overplay his feebleness, doddering gait and sudden seizures of the heart. His singing is superb: he almost brought the house down in the last act with his complaining – at breakneck speed, at length and without drawing breath. As Dr Malatesta, Nikolay Borchev offsets him well. He's lively, bordering on criminal, with terrific vocal energy. As he takes the old man's pulse he prescribes Norina as a wife (surefire way to get it racing). Pasquale's ensuing humiliation is more poignant than funny – age his greatest fault. But the problem is that the compassion he excites in us is inconvenient: it has nowhere to settle as the plot's shenanigans thicken.

Julia Hansen's 18th-century French sets are filled with amusing details: an oil painting of a grinning skull – ironic memento mori; a witty carrier pigeon who descends with a love letter in its beak; a rocking horse Don Pasquale keeps in the melancholy hope that children will eventually materialise. We first meet Norina (who is in love with Pasquale's nephew) in a charming bathroom, a merry widow in camisole and knickerbockers. Danielle de Niese is a vivacious beauty with voice to match who dominates Pasquale and the stage as she becomes a monstrous shopaholic wife. But subtlety is entirely missing here. It would have been more sympathetic to have had one or two more human, quieter, less over-the-top moments to balance Don Pasquale's performance.

Ernesto, Pasquale's nephew and Norina's true love, is less challenging as a role. Enea Scala replaced an ailing Alek Shrader and stepped into Ernesto's pistachio breeches with aplomb. And in a nice nod to Glyndebourne's picnics he and Norina settled down beside a hamper and demonstrated that their ardour is not so extreme that it couldn't be interrupted with dainty sips of coffee as they sang.

A sweltering Tuesday night at the BBC Proms started with a cooling opener: the premiere of David Matthews's A Vision of the Sea. Matthews has a lyricist's ear, and the piece, a portrait of the Kentish coast, was filled with the sounds of rain, the swell of the sea, the cry of herring gulls, the rumble of shingle. It brought out the affinity between air and water, and the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Juanjo Mena, played with sensitive equilibrium. The beauty of it was its self-possessed unity, allowing the sea to be itself, with no histrionic storms. Anchored in tradition and referring to Debussy, it also had radical drama in ingeniously reproducing the sound of two pitches on which the sun, according to scientists, is said to rise.

Marine romanticism was followed by the unparalleled excitement of hearing the 24-year-old Japanese pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii, blind from birth, make his Royal Albert Hall debut with Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No 2. It was one of those rare performances where player and music seem one – a definition of virtuosity. Although one has to guard against being fanciful, it was hard not to think that being unable to see had allowed Tsujii to "see" the music with unmediated intensity. He played with passionate inwardness, and a respectful orchestra exquisitely supported every note. This well planned prom, an exploration of the sublime, ended with an impressive performance of Nielsen's symphony The Inextinguishable (1914-16) which should be renamed "The Insatiable". Nielsen wrote to his wife saying he wanted it to represent everything that "carves" life. For all its lofty moments it seemed defined by hunger.

Thomas Adès was the linchpin holding together Prom 8 – conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a programme that included the premiere of his new composition, Totentanz. An evening of glittering morbidity opened with Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem (1939-40), springing from an anything but passive pacifism. It was immaculately played, but even more compelling was Lutoslawski's enigmatic Cello Concerto (1969-70), with cellist Paul Watkins as soloist under siege, playing with characteristic verve. He made the cello seem a persecuted character, with the orchestra's massed forces (communist?) gathered against him. Amazing to hear the expiring sound near the end – the cello has never sounded more human.

Adès's Totentanz ("The Dance of Death") is dedicated to the memory of Lutoslawski and his wife, and sets the anonymous text from a 1463 wall hanging destroyed when St Mary's church in Lübeck was bombed during the second world war. Reproductions show death as an antic skeleton who minces up to his victims as an unwelcome dance partner. Adès, with unfaltering dramatic instinct, has seized on the piece's dark playfulness, taking the satisfying decision to have the living victims sung by a single woman (the fine mezzo Christianne Stotijn) and death by a man (superb baritone Simon Keenlyside). What is most striking is how frightening the music is, the entire orchestra in uproar, fighting for its life. Then silence, until you just make out the faintest news: death does not call all the tunes.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Glyndebourne 2013: Don Pasquale - trailer

  • Glyndebourne 2013: Don Pasquale, starring Danielle de Niese - trailer

  • Glyndebourne 2013: Don Pasquale podcast - audio

  • Glyndebourne 2013: Don Pasquale - synopsis and cast/creatives

  • Danielle de Niese: 'I'm ripe and ready for Donizetti now'

  • Glyndebourne 2013: Don Pasquale - Do I hear a waltz?

  • Don Pasquale – review

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed