Romeo et Juliette has been particularly celebrated for its four love duets and the passion and sentiment that they revel in. It is a French opera with no sophisticated gallic restraint but is instead laced with syrupy undulating strings; an open-hearted, gushing, high Victorian, sonorous, often camp artefact. It lapsed terribly out of fashion many years ago so it is exciting to see it performed again and have a chance to divine that which was best left in the coffin of discarded Victoriana and what still has life. Unfortunately, the Royal Opera House’s decision to revive it with medieval dress and with sets which look like rejected templates for Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, means the task of appreciating the flavour behind the syrup is made very difficult indeed. There are some marvellous performances, particularly from Piots Beczala’s Romeo and some stunning arrangements of the chorus but the audience laughs unbidden at several points in this opera and that is surely a sad testament to the director’s failure to bring the staging up to date.
      Gounod was noted for his chorus work, and many people will know him for his religious compositions and for the fact that his ‘Gounod chorus’ was the house band at the Albert Hall for the last decades of the 19th century. It is no surprise then that for a modern audience it is with the chorus that this production really shines. The opera opens with two still bodies, a Montague and a Capulet lying tumbled over each other at the front of the stage. They have both been killed in a knife fight and it is around this scene that the chorus arranges itself and hauntingly performs the famous preface to Shakespeare’s play in monk’s robes with each lit by a single flame. The effect is chilling, and the anticipation high. Again, at the end of Act III when Mercutio and Tybalt lie slain on the streets of Verona, the calls to the Duke for justice and the solemnity in which the two gangs denounce their own doom is deeply impressive.
      Nino Machaidze takes the role of Juliette in her Covent Garden debut. She has a voice that seems to carry effortlessly – she can cut through the stalls and hit the back of the auditorium with single soft sigh. This is a powerful instrument and when she sings the aria where she first realises Romeo’s identity, her cadences ache with the sad weight of doomed love. She is miserably compelling. However, as well as bouts of melancholia, the opera is decorated with festoons of ornamentation and Juliette’s trills are definitely less of a thrill: she delivers the high notes with an abandon which comes wincingly close to a screech.
       With Piotr Beczala’s Romeo we are in much firmer hands. His technical accomplishment, balance and diction are satisfyingly sure and his aria to the balcony – though ludicrously staged half-way over a suburban trellis – is moving and rich. Nevertheless, the famed love duets fail to ignite. They just don’t seem to be able to light the emotional touch paper for a modern audience in the way they should. It is the opera’s melancholic air and the choral arrangements which you remember. Perhaps with different staging Daniel Oren’s conducting might have achieved more excitement amongst the Opera House’s audience, but four hours worth of medieval wigs, sandals, surplices, long scene changes and dodgy sets, and this production edged dangerously close to a parody of what bad opera can be.
Charlie Taylor