L’Ange De Nisida review: Interesting, but not very

L’Ange De Nisida                                                       Royal Opera House, London

Rating:

 It’s not often you get a world premiere of a piece written almost 180 years ago by a composer as celebrated as Donizetti. But L’Ange De Nisida is just that, and Covent Garden was full of enthusiastic people for this concert performance.

This is a fitting tribute to Sir Mark Elder and Opera Rara’s well-cast performance and to the devoted work of Italian musicologist Candida Mantica, who spent almost ten years piecing together an 800-page score containing 96 per cent of what Donizetti wrote, and which he partially destroyed in 1838/9.

Joyce El-Khoury (above) looked and played the part of Sylvia in Donizetti’s opera 

Donizetti had just moved to Paris and wanted to make an impact. Which is why it’s such a surprise that this semi-serious opera, with a great comic part for a bumbling courtier, Don Gaspar, brilliantly sung here by Laurent Naouri, isn’t actually that good. Plenty of rum-ti-tum stuff, pretty solos and well-worked choruses but nothing that sticks in the memory.

So the verdict has to be: interesting, but not very. Which may be why Donizetti dumped it. True, the theatre that was due to put it on went bust. But there were plenty of other theatres. Donizetti just broke it up, then put a lot back into one of his successes, La Favorite. In that, he disposed of the comedy, which on this evidence was probably a good shout.

David Junghoon Kim (above) sang beautifully as Leone, but struggled to project a sense of character

So I can’t say it’s a work of genius. But I can say that no one could have done it better than Mark Elder, a real bel canto expert, and his team, in which Joyce El-Khoury, looking and singing radiantly as Sylvia, shone throughout.

The Korean tenor David Junghoon Kim once again, as in Romeo And Juliet at Grange Park, sang most beautifully as Leone but really does need help in projecting some sense of character. The Italian baritone Vito Priante was a first-class King Fernand, and the young Russian bass Evgeny Stavinsky made an auspicious debut as the Monk.

But will we see L’Ange De Nisida fully staged somewhere important any time soon?

Mystic Mellor doubts it.

 

ALSO WORTH SEEING

Saul                                                                          Glyndebourne, East Sussex

Rating:

When Saul appeared to general acclaim three years ago, I described it here as ‘one of Glyndebourne’s greatest successes of recent years’. And it still is, despite the inevitable cast changes, not least because the director, Barrie Kosky, whose show this really is, has returned to ensure that the colourful anarchy on stage – which so delighted us all first time out – flourishes. 

Stuff like the opening of Act II, a ravishing forest of candles from which emerges a baroque organist pounding away like a Hanoverian Liberace. 

Michal (Anna Devin, left) looking at the body of her deceased father Saul (Markus Bruck, right) in horror

Markus Brück as the king is no Handel specialist, and isn’t a patch on Christopher Purves. And Karina Gauvin and Anna Devin as Saul’s daughters Merab and Michal are an ill-contrasted pair compared to Lucy Crowe and Sophie Bevan in 2015. (Bring back the Brits, say I.) But the arrival of Allan Clayton, tenor of the moment, as Jonathan, is all gain. He works brilliantly with the one major returnee, counter-tenor extraordinaire Iestyn Davies as David.

 Until the end, and Saul’s decline and fall, most of the detail of the oratorio passes us by. However, what you see and hear is still so remarkable that it doesn’t really matter, showing fusty old Handel in an entirely different light.

Form is temporary but class is forever, they say. Well, Kosky’s Saul is class. 

 

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