Lucio Silla Ruben Martinez Giunia Eva Oltivanyi Cecilio Anke Vondung Cinna Dorothee Tsalos Celia Orla Boylan Aufidio Marwan Shamiyeh Conductor Fabrizio Ventura Director Brigitte Fassbaender Designer Bettina Munzer Opera for Europe is the touring company of the European Opera Centre, an advanced training programme for young singers supported by the EU. The tour of Lucio Silla in the UK and Ireland is "to celebrate the UK presidency of the European Union". This performance at the Shaftesbury Theatre was supported by ICL. I'm as pro-European as anyone, and ICL gave me my first real-world job, but I couldn't get excited about this production. In fact, I can't really see what it has to offer the audience at all, and I doubt if it will pack them in on tour. You could also ask whether it will be as useful to the performers as it's supposed to be as well. It's a high-value production and they will be able to develop as an ensemble as they tour. But I'm not sure that performing for dutiful assemblies of the usual supects around these islands will really be an enriching experience. Lucio Silla isn't an opera to thrill a modern audience. There are some proto-Mozart arias with potential, and a good spooky graveyard scene. But the allegedly necrophile librettist Gamerra wasn't da Ponte, and the stock conspiracy-and-clemency plot (see Flavio, Artaxeres and Tito) doesn't provide the grown-up emotions that make the grown-up Mozart's arias incomparable. Lucio Silla (aka Sulla) is in love with Giunia, the daughter of Marius, whom he has defeated in the civil war. Giuinia's betrother Cecilio has been exiled, and returns secretly with the help of Cinna. Silla's sister Celia is also in love with Cinna. Cinna tries to persuade Giunia to marry Silla then kill him on their wedding night. (What was that about dynastic marriages?) She refuses. Cecilio and she try to kill Silla, while Cinna fails to join in. Cecilio is imprisoned, but when he comes to trial, Silla surprises everyone by saying that he's tired of people trying to kill him. He pardons everyone, and the two couples can marry. (Aufidio is a sinister courtier who encourages Silla to be vile whenever he hestitates.) Giunia is a very difficult soprano role, described as a mixture of the queen of the night and Donna Anna. Eva Oltivanyi was very impressive in the way she got feeling into the music. Anke Vondung was suitably heroic as Cecilio, with a strong controlled high mezzo. I think she's the only mezzo I've ever seen shaving on stage. Orla Boylan sang well, even though she had the silliest characterization of the production, as an infantile girlie with overwhelming appetites. In fact, the production could be described as well-bred Eurotrash. I think the concept was Silla as the head of a mafia family (suggested mainly by his facial hair and a scene where everyone eats spaghetti). The set might have been a house front laid flat on the stage roof towards the audience. The windows became the graves in the graveyard where Cecilio first meets Giunia to the singing of ghosts. The costumes were modernish (baggy check pants, Biba outfit for Giunia, tutu for Celia, all white for Silla). And the da capo arias were done in full with business galore. Most of this was painless, but pointless. For some reason I found Celia doing silly things with stuff in a sewing box irritating, perhaps because it seemed to assume that a sewing box is a normal thing for a young woman to have around. One thing that was missing, and missed, was the idea of Silla's nobility. Making him a thug lost the point of his clemency. Though the final parade of Roman citizens surrendering their weapons of assassination, including a two-handed axe and an Uzi, was pretty funny. ------------------------------------------------------ I was amused by James Jorden's comment on Aretha Franklin's Italian. I'll probably be set to nopost for admitting this, but I heard a performance of the Italian Don Carlos at the Proms a couple of years ago without bothering to look at the cast beforehand. I was sure from his Italian pronunciation that Richard Margison was Russian. The same performance had Dimitri Hvorostovsky as Rodrigo. I don't know much about Verdi baritones (though he seemed loud enough from the stalls). But in one respect he was ideal in this role. It's normally puzzling quite why Rodrigo is so influential when he's such a goody-goody. But with Hvorostovsky it's obvious it's because everyone fancies him like crazy.(Including the Grand Inquisitor, of course.)