Crowe one, dove nil: Mitridate at the ROH
Mitridate, re di Ponto
The Royal Opera
Royal Opera House
Orchestra Stalls C2, £15 (staff offer)
26 June 2017
ROH page
A recurring thought I had throughout Mitridate was on how great it is that we can experience in performance a juvenile work from an opera prodigy – a work that provides further proof, if any were needed, of Mozart’s extraordinary gift. Of course that cuts both ways, and I’m sure there are many opera seria from around the same time that are equally entertaining but whose composer’s names I’ve never even have heard of. But even if we have Mitridate only because it’s by the composer of the Da Ponte operas, still, we have it – and not only that, but, revived here by a troupe of magnificent musicians. What a treat!
Knowing what Mozart would go on to write, it’s obvious in various ways that Mitridate is not a mature work. But taken on its own terms it always entertaining (even with the silly story), always polished and often astonishing: a handful of arias inhabit the same realm of exalted beauty as the music of Mozart’s later years. They’re given a leg-up by the cast The Royal Opera has assembled, and its conductor, no less than the astute and ever tasteful Christophe Rousset.
Mitridate is a show-off work, with arias carefully distributed among the cast and each outrageously fiendish in one way or another. I’ve been excited about how this particular cast would fit that brief for more than a year and on the whole my anticipation was rewarded. Michael Spyres as Mitridate and Bejun Mehta as Farnace are both wonderful; Salome Jicia as Sifare, after a few first-night nerves, sang very beautifully; and Rupert Charlesworth as Marzio, a last-minute substitute for a sadly indisposed Andrew Tortise, seemed to be having a whale of a time even as he assayed the horrendously ridiculous ‘Se di regnar’.
But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have favourites. I don’t think I’ve ever been less than awed by Albina Shagimuratova’s singing and she burst out of the blocks with Aspasia’s Act I aria ‘Al destin che la minaccia’. So many notes, so much volume, such a great sound – I couldn’t deal with it. I was overwhelmed. I could have died right then and not been too disappointed.
Little did I know, though, the best was yet to come, in the shape of Lucy Crowe as Ismene. I often ponder on how to describe Crowe’s sound and I think this evening Richard came closest with his suggestion, ‘flute-like’ – as opposed, I suppose, to the rich oboe of Shagimuratova. Even ‘flute-like’ I wouldn’t think of as particularly flattering to a singer but in Crowe it works like nothing else, especially in this role. Her sound has a haunting hollowness (I mean this in a good way!) and is astonishingly loud all the way through her range; and on top of that she sings with absolute precision. Act III’s ‘Tu sai per che m'accese’ was sublime – there’s no other word for it.
So I had a great evening. But I’m afraid my other recurring thought throughout Mitridate was how much I hated Graham Vick’s production. I acknowledge it has some attractive scenes and is generally bright and colourful. But holy moly he seemed to be hell bent on making the singers’ jobs even harder. The massive costumes are impressive but also incredibly silly (and not even an original idea!), yielding inevitable malfunctions as singers mummified themselves in swathes of labyrinthine velvet. The same excess applies generally: there are innumerable supernumeraries who swish about needlessly; Crowe in her first aria was forced to compete with an extremely distressed-looking dove. The comparison of opera seria with kabuki I don’t think goes anywhere apart from making Mitridate even more static than it is already. But, hey ho – at least they staged it.
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