UK Edition
Review
Andrea Chénier, Opera North, review: 'a thrilling evening'
Snooty purists may justifiably complain about its clichés and pretensions, but when performed with the passionate conviction that Opera North brings to it here, Andrea Chénier exerts irresistible visceral power.
Although its composer Giordano was no genius (Alexandra Wilson’s programme note emphasises how much he was indebted to Puccini’s Manon Lescaut), he certainly understood how to use music to build drama and make characters vivid. Here he tells the torrid tale of a real-life poet of the French Revolution whose idealism falls foul of the Terror, with the aristocratic Maddalena and her disaffected family retainer Gérard embroiled in his downfall.
At Covent Garden last year, David McVicar staged the opera with conventional theatrical realism as a vehicle for Jonas Kaufmann, and despite the German tenor’s marvellous vocalising of the title-role, it all felt a bit creaky. On a fraction of the budget, Annabel Arden and her designer Joanna Parker have created something far more interesting – and no, that doesn’t mean they’ve updated it to the Fascist 1930s.
Gently stylising any sense of period – the decadent noblesse in the first scene appear to have been shopping at Alexander McQueen – the production frames itself with brief recitation of Chénier’s actual poetry and dropcloths evoking the turmoil out of which he wrote.
Downplaying any sense of romantic melodrama, Arden focuses on the violence and paranoia of Robespierre’s Paris, drawing from the chorus and soloists such as Fiona Kimm (doubling as a Countess and a wretched proletarian) and Daniel Norman (as an Abbé and a turncoat) strongly etched portraits of both its victims and persecutors.
The kangaroo court of the third act becomes chillingly convincing, as does the almost crazed exultation with which Maddalena and Chénier await the tumbril. In other words, this is a tragedy that in the heat of the moment you can believe in.
Oliver von Dohnányi’s conducting matches this approach: devoid of spurious rhetoric, it follows an edge of nervous tension in the music and never lets it sink into sludge. Robert Hayward struggles manfully with the muscular intensity of Gerard’s monologues, and Annemarie Kremer is all womanly fervour as Maddalena. Rafael Rojas, a Mexican tenor with a tang of his compatriot Domingo in his vocal timbre, makes a warmly noble Chénier, singing with admirable steadiness and clarity.
This is Opera North at its imaginative and resourceful best – a thrilling evening that richly deserved its enthusiastic reception.
Until Feb 24, then touring to Newcastle, Nottingham and Salford. Tickets: 0844 848 2700; operanorth.co.uk