I Puritani review – Oropesa dazzles in Jones’s engaging Bellini staging
Bellini’s tale of Roundheads vs Cavaliers requires vocal gymnastics on an Olympic scale. Lisette Oropesa rises effortlessly to the challenge in Richard Jones’s detailed new production
Forget Puccini and Nessun Dorma: the right opera composer for a World Cup has to be Bellini. The extreme high notes, the agility, the endurance involved as the singers spin endless melodies before firing off vocal curlicues like a gymnast swinging round and round the bars – it’s the closest there is to opera as sport. Getting the right players together at this level isn’t easy, which is surely one reason why it’s been nearly 35 years since Bellini’s final opera, I Puritani, was last staged at Covent Garden.
There’s enough fantastic singing in the Royal Opera’s new production to satisfy anyone who sees opera singers as elite athletes. But there’s more to it than that, thanks partly to the conductor Riccardo Frizza, in his house debut. Bellini’s 1835 opera may be a singer’s showpiece but it’s the orchestral detail that really makes this score shine, and Frizza lays it out superbly, creating buoyancy without ever pushing the voices and a spinning visceral momentum from Bellini’s pulsing accompaniments.
Richard Jones’s production manages an engaging immediacy, too, even if it doesn’t hang together quite as neatly. The original story pits Roundhead against Cavalier in 17th-century Plymouth. In Jones’s interpretation, we’re certainly in a civil war, but which one is uncertain thanks to the allusive nature of Hyemi Shin’s sets and Nicky Gillibrand’s costumes: English? American? The Cavaliers wear bandoliers and look like straggly haired cowboys; the Roundheads are a drably attired herd who dress for battle in iron helmets and something resembling modern flak jackets. Granite slabs with pointed arch windows roll across the stage to make Elvira’s bedroom or, almost indistinguishably, the prison cell, and a nice touch is the way the words of the all-important letters emerge from the page in elegant, sometimes playful ribbons, courtesy of Sasha Balmazi-Owen’s video projections.
It’s not surprising that Jones doesn’t give us the opera’s original happy ending – the idea that Elvira, who spends much of the opera in a state of fiance-induced psychosis, can be defibrillated back into perfect mental health by true love in time for the final chorus, is pretty much unworkable. But what does eventually jar is the extent to which her unwanted suitor Riccardo, the Roundhead general, is characterised here as so thoroughly dishonourable.
Still, the baritone Andrzej Filończyk does a fine job in the role, wrapping a thuggish characterisation in sustained, velvety vocal lines. As our hero Arturo, Francesco Demuro fields a high tenor that’s less plush-sounding but laser-focused, even if his glory-grasp at the optional high note in the final scene doesn’t quite pay off. Woman of the match, though, is Lisette Oropesa. Elvira is fast becoming a signature role for her, and her performance, dazzlingly well sung and consistently dramatically involving, is the best reason for reviving this tricky, fascinating opera.