Patriots, pianists, monsters
I.
Verdi’s opera “The Sicilian Vespers” (“Les Vêpres siciliennes”, 1855) is a rarity in the operatic repertory, especially in its francophone original. So it’s remarkable that the Royal Opera’s 2013 production has now been revived twice, in 2017 and now in 2025 - more remarkable when you see how bonkers Stefan Herheim’s production is.
Verdi (1813-1901) was a patriot who lent much of his career to the great cause of freeing Italy from foreign occupants and unifying the nation. In “The Sicilian Vespers”, he dramatised one of the greatest and most tragic (though successful) moments of Italian freedom-fighting, the Sicilian Vespers of 1282, in which thousands died. So (of course) Herheim relocates the action to the Paris Opéra at the time of Verdi’s premiere there, when France was stable under the rule of Napoleon III. Maybe Verdi could sense that Garibaldi’s great liberation of Italy would begin in Sicily five years later, but that doesn’t interest Herheim. Instead, a corps de ballet of twelve women keep infiltrating the action - so (of course) the production omits this opera’s ballet, which (“The Four Seasons”) was the longest and most varied of Verdi’s career. The corps women have a very limited vocabulary, presented in choreography so thinly tedious that I cannot be the only observer to make a note to avoid André de Jong’s dances in future. The conductor, Speranza Scapucci, does not lift the music - as others have done - above the oompah.
Verdi’s opera remains. Its tragic patriotism is one of its two most remarkable threads; the other is that, of the few operas in which Verdi dramatises a father-son relationship, this is the one in which tragic tensions between father and son are most fully developed. The Sicilian Henri discovers that his hitherto unknown father is Montfort, the French governor and leader of the island’s hated foreign occupants. Also part of the drama are two Sicilian patriots: Procida (bass) and the duchess Hélène. These four characters come together in the quartet, “Adieu mon pays”: Verdi’s mastery of character is so sure that the same sentiments of patriotic lamentation are expressed one way by Procida (rhythmically propulsive), another way by Hélène (suspending her slow poignant melody like a canopy of gossamer above the plot). It was unlike Verdi, especially at the height of his European fame, to recycle some of his own recent music, but in the anguished mood that follows this quartet he redeploys a memorable figure from Act Three of “La Traviata” (his immediately previous opera) - a descending series of descending (sighing) appoggiaturas for the violins, which here becomes even more effective in expressing the plight of a country than the pathos of a heroine dying alone.
Perhaps the finest and most interesting virtue of the current Covent Garden cast is the excellent French diction, particularly of baritone and tenor, beautifully demonstrating how well Verdi knew how to project a French libretto. (As a friend pointed out, although Verdi became synonymous with Italian patriotism, he was born in a stretch of land that at the time was French.)
At Covent Garden, the most three-dimensional performance comes from the American baritone Quinn Kelsey, often and admirably sounding very Sherrill Milnes as Montfort. (In New York, I’ve heard him sing a riveting and powerful Rigoletto.) If a house director would help the Ukrainian tenor Valentyn Dytiuk to register as an actor, he’d make four times the impression he currently does: his French is stylish and communicative, he projects all the role’s highest notes and varied dynamics without strain, and commands Verdian line with beauty and eloquence. But he’s so blank onstage that you hardly register how good he sounds. The Italian bass Ildebrando d’Arcangelo, as Procida, spent too much of the role sounding as if his voice were mired in gravel. The Lebanese-Canadiansoprano Joyce El-Khoury could be excellent in some roles - her voice itself, though not large, has an arrestingly affecting quality - but she was (as Costard puts it in “Love’s Labour’s Lost”) a little overparted as Hélène: she slid loosely down the longest scale, and screamed some high notes.
And yet, and yet…. Thanks to Verdi, the whole - the despair of patriotism, the anguish of bloodlines - adds up to much more than the parts.
II.
On Monday 22, the Wigmore Hall presented two different piano recitals with pianists new to me. At 1pm, Simon Tprčeski (in his forties) played Tchaikovsky (October from “The Seasons” and Mikhail Pletnev’s suite from “The Nutcracker”) and Ravel (“Valses nobles et sentimentales”). He’s an elegant and affectionate player: though inclined in these scores to slowness, he fills the music with suspense. My only complaint is that the Wigmore Hall’s programme writers assume that Pletnev’s suite from “The Nutcracker” contains the same numbers as Tchaikovsky’s, whereas Pletnev’s contains several of the score’s most grand and colossal items. Endearingly, for his second encore, Trpčeski played his first-ever piece by Elgar, “Adieu” - his tribute to the British and to music-making in Britain.
At 7.30pm, Igor Levit (in his late thirties) with a greater freedom than I have heard from any other pianist: a violent kind of spontaneity - abounding in changes of tempo) - and occasionally coming close to coarseness. (He was dressed more informally than any other Wigmore Hall pianist, too.) He played three scores from 1828-1844, by Schubert (sonata D 960 in B flat major), Schumann (“Nachtstücke” op.38), and Chopin (sonata no 3 in B minor). In the Schubert he found a greater number of different voices than I have ever heard, the Schumann was, in the words of Stephen Hough (present in the audience) “fresh, crazy, tender, thrilling”, and the Chopin had its own kind of demonic force and speed - even, at times, demonic grace.
III.
The plays of Joe Orton (1933-1967) are classics of a peculiar genre, poised between Harold Pinter’s modernism and the high camp of Kenneth Williams. They outraged many when they were new; today their irreverence and political incorrectness will shock others. The all-too-willing landlady Kath (“I’m in the rude under this dress”) verges on more than one kind of caricature; her brother Ed speaks of women, Kath included, as endangering male virtue in ways that push further and further into misogyny; while the ultra-hunky and initially seemingly innocent young Mr Sloane reveals more and more criminal propensities.
The balance of power keeps shifting as each of the three reveals further capacity for amoral monstrosity - I’d forgotten Orton’s gift for suspense.bIt’s still a shocking play. Your response to it depends on whether (as with Dame Edna Everage, only more so) you’re prepared to laugh at what shocks you.
In the new Young Vic production by Nadia Fell - opening her regime as the theatre’s artistic director - the most pitch-perfect performance comes from Daniel Cerqueira as Ed: wonderfully conveying shifting degrees of both desire and panic - and an unexaggerated sense of his slippery place in the English class system. The role of Kath is so marvellously written - just how artless or artful is she? - that Tamsin Outhwaite gets plenty of the audience’s laughter; but her accent (“common”) and facial expressions as yet are exaggerated. Since the audience wants to applaud her anyway, she should relax without effort into a subtler kind of performance.
The production makes Mr Sloane (Jordan Stephens) a harbinger of the new. He’s given a dance to music that’s decades ahead of the play’s 1964 era, yet he justifies it, with breathtakingly virile grace. There’s never any doubt why both Kath and Ed fall under his spell. Yet they, and the play, have surprises in store for him. When Orton has them agree each to possess him for six months of the year, he (steeped in the classics) probably was thinking of Demeter and Hades dividing Persephone, but he does so lightly. “Entertaining Mr Sloane” is a lewd ménage à trois, for moral monsters.
<First published in Norman Lebrecht’s “Slipped Disc” on September 26>
@Alastair Macaulay 2025