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Conducted by
Martin Andre
Directed by
David Pountney
Designed by
Johan Engels
Giorgetta
Nina Pavlovski
La Frugola
Susan Gorton
Luigi
Leonardo Capalbo
Michele
Jonathan Summers
Tinca
Nicholas Sharratt
Talpa
William Mackie
Song-seller
Richard Coxon
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Sadler's
Wells
Opera North: Eight Little Greats
22 - 26
June 2004 |
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Between the brooding darkness of Michele's jealous grief and Puccini's musical evocation of the damp dank riverine life of the bargeman, only one sentiment can prevail: a sense of tragedy, foreboding, a realisation that the terrible fate awaiting Luigi and Giorgetta in their doomed love for each other is inescapable. And it comes relentlessly forward in the music, whose regular footsteps bring the night on, intermitted by impassioned soaring arias and duets ‚ vintage goose-pimpling Puccini ‚ which hold everything still for the duration just of that outpouring, only to resume inexorably: footsteps of approaching horror, or drips of water in a torture-chamber, ceaseless and menacing.
Giorgetta is Michele's wife. They loved one another, and had a child ‚ now dead ‚ and all three had huddled together in Michele's giant cloak when the nights were cold and their love kept them warm. But things have changed. Giorgetta is stifled and choked by the damp tiny cabin on the barge. She has fallen in love with Luigi, poor but ardent and handsome, and they snatch secret moments together. Michele suspects; he is wracked by jealousy; and his jealousy has become poisonous. On the night of the crisis depicted by Puccini he waits until Giorgetta has descended to their cabin before hissing to himself, with terrible venom, 'Slut!'
The signal agreed between Giorgetta and Luigi for his visit that night is a lit match. Michele strikes a match to light his pipe as he broods on the barge's deck, and Luigi hastens to him. They struggle, and Michele kills him, first extracting a confession. He then hides Luigi's corpse in his giant cloak. Giorgetta, repenting her earlier coldness to Michele, comes on deck, and asks him to wrap her in his cloak as he used to do, to comfort her. The denouement comes when he opens the immense flaps of the cloak to reveal her lover's body within.
Leonardo Capalbo has a thrilling voice and a strong stage personality. He and Nina Pavlovski generated a palpable mutual chemistry, and sang beautifully together. But the show was stolen by Jonathan Summers, whose magnificent voice and brooding presence dominated the whole. At the end, a vast shape in the fatal cloak, he was representative of everything bleak in the story: its fated failure, its devastation of spirit, its evocation of the doom that lies at the heart of love.
AC Grayling |
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