Opera reviews: Rossini’s La Cenerentola and Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel
ALTHOUGH Cinderella inspired Rossini’s La Cenerentola the composer’s fertile imagination transformed it.
Out went the fairy godmother, pumpkin carriage and glass slipper. The Prince’s tutor Alidoro, having spotted the heroine’s essential goodness, enables Cinderella, here named Angelina, to go to the ball, despite opposition from her unkind sisters and greedy father.
From the start Oliver Platt’s staging hits the right note. It opens to Neil Irish’s design of the faded interior of Don Magnifico’s house, with father slumbering in bed and the sisters slamming in and out of adjoining doors.
Victoria Simmonds as Angelina is seated among the cinders in the kitchen, but by no means the meek victim of her sisters’ abuse. One of the most significant differences to the traditional Cinderella is the way, given the chance, that Angelina asserts herself and rebels against her situation.
Simmonds is superb, her voice encompassing the smoky wistfulness of the first aria Once Upon The Time There Was A King and the dazzling coloratura of the final aria where Angelina, in glittering silver and jet black ball gown, forgives her appalling family.
The young Maltese tenor Nico Darmanin is a thrilling Prince Ramiro and possesses the ringing high notes that suggest a promising future in bel canto opera.
Australian baritone Nicholas Lester as his valet Dandini captures the character’s headiness when impersonating his master in the marriage stakes, together with his deflation when the game ends and he is a servant again.
Jonathan Veira is sensational as Don Magnifico, especially in the character’s underlying vulnerability when he suspects disloyalty by the spoilt daughters on whom he pins his ambitions to rescue his tottering fortunes. His plea that they “must not abandon their magnificent daddy” has a touch of King Lear about it.
Fleur de Bray and Heather Lowe are a competitively bitchy pair of sisters and Barnaby Rea a sonorous Alidoro.
The City of London Sinfonia gives an inspired performance under the young Australian conductor Dane Lam. The zip never falters and the pace is sustained on stage by the chorus.
Opera Holland Park should be proud of this dazzling Cenerentola, which captures Rossini’s generous spirit.
Opera: the facts
La Cenerentola’s light and sparkle contrasts with the Royal College of Music’s production of Humperdinck’s Hansel Und Gretel based on the original Grimm’s fairy tale.
The RCM production directed by Liam Steel is darker than any other staging of the opera I have seen. Myriddin Wannell’s designs featuring video cartoons of dismembered and tortured dolls are gruesome indeed.
Kamilla Dunstan’s Hansel and Gemma Lois Summerfield’s Gretel are a couple of dead-end kids living in squalor and lacking affection. Mother Gertrud (Elspeth Marrow) is pregnant again by her feckless drunk of a husband Peter (Timothy Connor) and has had just enough of them.
The uneasiness continues as the children encounter Maria Stasiak’s spooky Sandman and a blissfully sloshed Dew Fairy (Louise Fuller) before Richard Pinkstone’s Witch imprisons them in her gingerbread house.
Once restored to their parents, far from welcoming back her children Gertrud scowls at them and picks up the Witch’s stick.
Not a happy ending then but one that provides much food for thought.
VERDICT: 4/5
Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music, London SW7 (Run ended)
Rossini’s La Cenerentola Opera Holland Park, London W8 (Tickets: 0300 999 1000/operahollandpark.com; £45-£70)
