I was one of the few not dressed as Dennis the Menace or requiring a booster seat The proximity and enthusiasm of a youthful audience seemed to add an extra shot of adrenaline. The orchestra, returning for a third year and now attuned to this semi-outdoor venue – street noises, trains and, if you’re lucky, sunsets adding to the ambience – played the Holst with exciting vigour. Each year, this pioneering enterprise makes improvements to the acoustic, and pushes yet further the boundaries of its programming.
See it live in cinemas on 13 June or repeated on Sunday 18 June.īold Tendencies, nicknamed the concrete concert hall on account of its south London car-park setting, opened its 2023 season last weekend with Gustav Holst’s The Planets, performed by the Philharmonia and conducted by Finnish rising star Emilia Hoving (b.1994). Monsters and sprites are part of life’s brittle impermanence we disregard them at our peril. You may see it as a flippant take on the opera, or – as I did – a serious attempt to express the concerns of Verdi’s 19th century as well as the story’s 15th-century setting. Chorus, superbly drilled and highly physical, are dressed as Bosch-like deviants, or as crusader-style soldiers who move jerkily behind their shields. Three frames surround it, as if to contain the vying tales of witchcraft, love and religion. The action takes place on a staircase that fills the stage. Ludovic Tézier, Riccardo Massi, Marina Rebeka and company in Il trovatore: ‘vying tales of witchcraft, love and religion’. Equally, he allows the heaving oompahs of the Anvil Chorus, one of the work’s many familiar tunes, to surge and swing with gusto. Pappano encourages the richest, most melancholy sounds from the orchestra – that ominous bass drum and timpani roll at the start the ever loquacious woodwind, notably clarinets. The approach is fresh, highly professional and nothing like any other Trovatore you might have encountered. With designs by Annemarie Woods and choreography by Emma Woods, the production – first seen in Zurich in 2021 – finds echoes in the hellish fantasies of Hieronymus Bosch, as well as in the dark materials and omnipresent daemons beloved of Philip Pullman.
Leave behind preconceptions and rationality and travel with her, or be frustrated.
In a new staging for the Royal Opera House, conducted by Antonio Pappano, the director Adele Thomas has deftly lassoed the work’s wildness into a new coherence and invited us into a parallel world of storytelling. The story is muddling but passions are stark and raw. It requires exceptional singers – chorus, as well as soloists – of rare stamina and virtuosity. J ealousy, obsession and ancient rivalry, churning around like toxic vapours, make Il trovatore one of Verdi’s most dangerous and combustible works.
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