L’Elisir d’amore review – great singers hindered by set and staging

The homegrown favourite soprano, the superstar bass-baritone, the matinee-idol tenor: the main cast for the Royal Opera’s latest revival of Donizetti’s comedy looks like a winner. On stage, it’s perhaps less than the sum of its parts, though that is still enough to breathe life once again into Laurent Pelly’s production.

Revived by Daniel Dooner, the staging plays out not in a nosy, cosy village but against a flat farming horizon, from which the characters seem keen to escape. Pelly keeps the visual gags coming, and the novelties too, including a pointlessly cute dog and a real tractor which Nemorino ploughs onto the stage while off his face on “elixir”. Daniele Rustioni sets snappy tempos that suit the production’s brittle style, occasionally letting his orchestra free to indulge their dreamier side. It’s just about possible to root for Nemorino as the hero, despite his early characterisation as a real village idiot, less so for the ruthlessly flirty Adina or her aggressive suitor Sergeant Belcore who, vocally and physically, leads with his crotch.

None of the voices are flattered by Chantal Thomas’s set – their sound tends to be either absorbed by the giant pyramid of hay bales or lost in the vast space behind – and the principals have shone more brightly here recently in other roles. The exception is Vittorio Grigolo. His is a beefier tenor than is often assigned to Nemorino, but he uses it to great effect, turning from loser to winner in resonant, romantic style. His Adina is Lucy Crowe, who shapes her music as beautifully as we have come to expect from her, and plays for laughs gamely; but her voice is as yet too compact for this role, in a theatre this size. Levente Molnár, lumbered with a relentlessly one-dimensional characterisation, brings a supple baritone to Belcore.

How many Wotans also sing Dulcamara? Bryn Terfel’s greasy con-man is finely observed, his patter niftily sung, and from anyone else this would be ample; but from Terfel, anything less than outright scene-stealing seems a bit subdued.