ROYAL OPERA HOUSE, LONDON. DON PASQUALE REVIEW – BRYN TERFEL SOFTENS DONIZETTI'S HARD EDGES

Royal Opera House, London

Terfel sounds wonderful and is deeply touching as the elderly bachelor in Damiano Michieletto’s overly fussy, modern-dress staging

Not nearly as funny as it might be ... Markus Werba (Doctor Malatesta), Olga Peretyatko (Norina) and Bryn Terfel in the title role of Don Pasquale. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Damiano Michieletto’s Royal Opera staging of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale is a co-production with the Paris Opéra, where it was first seen earlier this year. Its transfer to London to some extent forms a vehicle for Bryn Terfel, strikingly cast as the elderly bachelor conned into thinking he is marrying a supposedly demure convent girl, only to find her a domineering even tyrannical wife the moment the ring is on her finger.

A work that is easy to admire but often hard to love, Donizetti’s hard-edged little comedy is nowadays apt to make us uneasy. For all the brilliance of its music, its depiction of the amatory follies of age and the unthinking certainties of youth has a sardonic quality that tips towards cynicism and cruelty. Its shifting balance of sympathies makes it a difficult prospect for directors, and Michieletto’s modern-dress staging is hampered by uncertainties of tone and a busy quality that sometimes hinders its impact.

Paolo Fantin’s set presents us with the strip-lit framework of a house where we first encounter Terfel’s Pasquale getting ready for the day under the watchful eye of his elderly, chain-smoking maid, who resentfully flaps round him, helping him into his trousers and encasing his tummy in an alarming-looking corset. Olga Peretyatko’s Norina, who clearly has her eye on a glamorous lifestyle, works as a dresser in a fashion photographer’s studio, and later replaces Pasquale’s clutter with minimalist chic, presenting him with extravagant bills for the couture gowns she now gleefully wears. We don’t quite understand the reason for her attraction to Ioan Hotea’s Ernesto, played as a sulky brat, fond of his teddy bear, which flies in the face of the score, which presents him as a romantic dreamer. Markus Werba’s Malatesta, meanwhile, is a handsome if dangerous charmer, though his role as Pasquale’s doctor remains curiously ill-defined.

Michieletto’s approach, however, is often overly fussy. An onstage camera crew films Norina’s fashion model posing, projecting the footage on to a screen at the back of the set, and later, under Malatesta’s direction, produces the evidence of Norina’s supposed infidelity which brings Pasquale’s mock marriage to an end. In act two, a puppet show accompanies the chorus’s gossip about Pasquale’s fortunes, leaving the discarded puppets for Terfel and Werba to play with during their patter duet. The whole thing, however, is curiously charmless and not nearly as funny as it might be, and the ending, with the enraged Pasquale confined to a wheelchair in a care home, bitter in the extreme.

Within the context, however, Terfel makes a fine, sympathetic Pasquale, deeply touching in his expressions of affection for Norina and genuinely heartbroken, and indeed heartbreaking, when she turns on him in act two. He sounds wonderful, singing with handsomely focused tone and brings considerable panache to his duet with Werba, which is denied its traditional encore here. Peretyatko negotiates Norina’s coloratura with great brilliance and security, though Hotea’s Ernesto sounded effortful on occasion on opening night. Werba’s voice has lost some of its lustre since I last heard him, though his singing remains attractively stylish. In the pit, Evelino Pidò conducts with admirable precision and grace.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/oct/15/don-pasquale-review-bryn-terfel-royal-opera-house-london