Lucio Gallo / Reviżjonijiet

Es una escena trepidante, de vibrante pulso, vistosidad y detalles. Acorde con el libreto y el preciosismo musical que vuelca Mozart en una ópera (dramma giocoso) que combina humor y lirismo, bufonería y honduras. Todo, todas las aristas de la obra maestra fueron recreadas por un Barenboim en noche de gracia, animado también por un engrasado sexteto vocal sin fisuras. Ni siquiera la mezzosoprano Marina Viotti (hija del desparecido director Marcello Viotti y hermana del también director Lorenzo Viotti), de la que se anunció que “se encuentra indispuesta, pero cantará”, dio muestras de ello.

Orendt impressed once more, if anything still more so than as the Count. His dark, virile baritone was well complemented by Bogdan Volkov’s sweet-voiced tenor, ardent and imploring as required, as Ferrando. The latter’s duet with Evelin Novak’s Fiordiligi was a particular vocal (and orchestral) highlight for me. Fiordiligi’s journey, traced in finest Egyptian vocal cotton, was throughout as involving as Huguet’s banalities permitted. I was less sure about Marina Viotti’s contrasting Dorabella, though concluded that to be more a matter of taste than anything else, her degree of forthrightness in, say, ‘E amore un ladroncello’, a valid interpretative choice (if not necessarily mine). Lucio Gallo made for an effortlessly stylish, verbally acute Don Alfonso. Barbara Frittoli shared the same virtues and offered a welcome change as voice of experience rather than irritating soubrette. She felt no need to resort to silly voices for Despina’s other ‘characters’, employing subtler transformations of tone and colour.

You sometimes hear people describe Don Pasquale as a ‘cruel’ comedy – though they’re often a bit vague as to what they mean. Pin them down and the complaint seems to be that the 70-year-old gentleman who belatedly gets married in the plot is treated cruelly. But Don Pasquale begins the opera by attempting to impose his will upon his nephew’s choice of wife, and disinheriting him when he refuses to comply; any cruelty in the opera starts there. There are undoubtedly tricky moments for director, cast and even the audience to negotiate collectively, most notoriously when during their battle of marital wills in Act III, Norina – Pasquale’s fake bride, whom he has willingly married as part of his scheme to disinherit nephew Ernesto – slaps her elderly husband’s face.

If you want escapist bliss — and who doesn’t right now? — the Royal Opera’s new staging of Donizetti’s comic opera is almost perfect. Almost, because it slightly runs out of steam just before the end. By then, however, I had been richly entertained by Damiano Michieletto’s clever modern-day staging, dazzled by mostly brilliant singing and the scintillating playing of the orchestra under Evelino Pido’s seasoned direction and touched by the acting of a top-notch cast. The latter is most surprising because I thought myself impervious to the “fun” of an opera in which an old man who craves a pretty wife is tricked, bullied and humiliated. Yet his treatment doesn’t feel cruel here. In part that’s because Olga Peretyatko, as the marriage-brokered bride