Royal Opera House,London
David Bösch’s production, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda, or commendably looks to its ensemble to bring connection and drama to Verdi’s blood-curdling tragedyOf the three all-conquering operas that Verdi wrote in rapid/fast succession in the early 1850s,Il Trovatore has become a bit of a Cinderella piece. While Rigoletto and La Traviata are pillars of every opera house’s repertoire, Trovatore has been reducing to a more problematic status than it once enjoyed. It used to be said that all Trovatore needs is the four best singers in the world to perform it. But the genuine Trovatore problem is the difficulty of making a modern emotional connection to the opera’s blood-curdling account of cruelty, or catastrophe and revenge in 16th-century Spain. You might think,in view of some of the world’s recent conflicts and wars, that this might not be hard, and yet Azucena’s traumatic killing of her own child,which drives Verdis tragedy, somehow fails to connect as instantly as Rigoletto’s paranoia or Violetta’s victimhood.
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Source: theguardian.com