La Cenerentola, Royal Opera House; Cecilia Bartoli, Barbican
The Royal Opera may have hoped to raise spirits, or to contribute to their liveliness, by reviving Rossini’s La Cenerentola in the Leiser-Caurier production of 2000, but it seems to have run out of steam — the production, I mean, and Christian Fenouillat’s sets. Something has gone wrong when a large car is driven on to the stage at Covent Garden and no one laughs. Admittedly, it was towards the end of the huge Act I, when everyone was wilting: Rossini in rather diffuse comic mode is exhausting in an unusual way. Laughs had been rare all evening, however. And though it is now fashionable to take a ‘dark’ view of this particular opera, that wasn’t the reason for the audience’s glumness. By the interval (at which point I had to leave) there was a mild sense of desperation, that things weren’t really getting anywhere.
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