What delights: Agrippina at the ROH
Agrippina
Royal Opera
Royal Opera House
Stalls Circle D51 standing, £13
11 October 2019
ROH page
Maybe somewhat to my shame as an excessively professed opera lover, the greatest delight of Agrippina was the revelation of Handel’s score, superbly performed by the OAE under Maxim Emelyanychev (of whom I’m similarly ignorant). This is music of dramatic richness, narrative variety, timbral ingenuity and all those good things that make you smile on encountering a composer using the constraints of their* time as fillips to uncover ingenious creative realms. All credit to Emelyanychev and the OAE for an interpretation that throws this vivid fecundity into the spotlight.
The other treats in this box of delights were more expected. I know, dispassionately, there have been times when Joyce DiDonato wasn’t quite as good as I expected her to be, but they have been very few and far between and this was not one of them. As in Semiramide it is impossible to imagine her on better form. Agrippina’s relative egalitarianism means it isn’t quite such a breathless Joycefest as Semiramide but there is nonetheless plenty to relish. There is maybe not more than one singer on this earth who could not only handle being asked to make use of a microphone for their main aria but also as near as possible make a musical virtue of it: Joyce, as singer, as performer, is the one.
I’ve not always been sure about either Franco Fagioli or Iestyn Davies as opera performers but both acquit themselves. Fagioli has less to play with as Nerone: the opera and Kosky’s production call for a spoilt malevolent man-child and that’s the sum of what Fagioli gives, but his voice is excitingly loud, throbbing and high, for all his strange gurning mouth movements. Davies as Ottone in fact does rather more than acquit himself; as in The Exterminating Angel there is a fitness in his cold, intellectual delivery (surprisingly for Ottone) that combines with his zeroed-in pitching, rock-solid volume and exemplary musicality to make a most satisfying performance.
Lucy Crowe usually sends me into raptures. I don’t think my hopes were too high this evening; she sang with that same hollowed, unsettlingly direct sound that is unlike any other singer and gives me the screaming heebie jeebies, in a good way. But maybe she was encouraged by Kosky a bit too much to play up the diva of Poppea; she most certainly pushed it too far in her arias, overshooting her usual exquisite accuracy to the extent that her peculiar sound felt more raw than anything else. Still, I shouldn’t complain too much: it’s always exciting to see this committed and unusual performer.
Kosky’s production is as expected and perfectly fine. The sets by Rebecca Ringstad are, like Katrin Lea Tag’s for Kosky’s Carmen, austere and plain, but here much more expensive-looking. Kosky does his directorly thing of finding new interpretations and motivations for each character, which are expressed with absolute clarity. It makes for often great combinations with Emelyanychev’s concise and precise conducting but can be a bit silly; only parts of this opera, I feel, respond to the farcical as much as Kosky wants them to.
* I’m moving to using ‘they/them’ for non-gendered singular pronouns. As a grammar fundamentalist I feel a reflexive regret about it, but nevertheless it is the neatest current option to express that fundamental parity.
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