Opera Review: I Puritani - Welsh National Opera at Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff ✭✭✭✭✭
I PURITANI
Vincenzo Bellini
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| Rosa Feola and Barry Banks |
Welsh National Opera at the WMC
Review by Sebastian Petit
4th October 2015: What a frustrating work Bellini’s
“I Puritani” is! Musically it flows with invention and some of the finest,
yearning, ineffably sad music that Bellini wrote putting it on a level with
“Norma” and “I Capuleti”. But, alas, it is saddled with an absolute dog of a
libretto which forces a ludicrous about-turn happy ending at the last minute
with a Royal Messenger, seemingly borrowed from John Gay’s “The Beggar’s
Opera”, effecting a scaffold reprieve in the nick of time. Mysteriously he
knows exactly where to find the hero despite the fact that it has taken the
remainder of the Roundheads three months to lay hands on him!
Despite this problem laying
almost insuperable problems at the door of any director hoping for even a
modicum of verisimilitude the opera is far more regularly revived than some of
Bellini’s other masterworks because the music is so fine. While the parts are
certainly fiendishly demanding they do not present the near insoluble problem
of the superhuman diva required to fill the central role in “Norma” (or that of
the unsympathetic tenor lead, for that matter).
Any director taking on the work
has to decide whether to opt for picture book traditionalism or to try to
achieve a cogent dramatic framework on which to hang Pepoli’s shaky structure.
Fortunately Annelise Miskimmon opted
for the latter. I should, in the interests of balance, note that several of the
older members of the audience close to me were far less enthusiastic than me.
Clearly the Aspic Opera Preservation Society is still flourishing. Miskimmon
re-imagined the work as split between the reality of a grim Northern Irish
Orangemen hall and the fractured fantasy of the heroine imagining a romantic
Civil War liaison between Roundhead daughter and dashing Cavalier. As this
fantasy takes over the walls of Leslie
Travers’ ingenious set splinter and close in. In act 2 we are wholly in the
twilight world of Elvira’s fantasy gone wrong and the small hall has become
monstrous and stained black. In Act 3 we return to the realism of the original
setting before her world is irrevocably broken on the wheel of sectarian
violence. Miskimmon alters the unconvincing happy end to a full blown tragedy
as Arturo is murdered and Elvira is left alone, madly singing of her happiness
at his return. A liberty? Yes, but one which I found wholly convincing and left
me emotionally shattered. I suspect Bellini who wanted people to “die with
singing” might actually have approved.
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| Rosa Feola |
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| David Kempster |
