I had the unusual opportunity of seeing two productions of Il Trovatore in one day last week, the circumstances of them about as contrasting as could be when they were within a couple of miles of one another. Both were richly rewarding, though naturally in quite different ways. The first, at lunchtime, took place in Brady Community Centre in Tower Hamlets, the annual production of the Children’s Music Workshop. It was attended by about 50 Bangladeshi schoolchildren, aged ten or so. They had been primed in the story and to some degree the music, and were encouraged to join in the choral sections. As always Howard Moody had fashioned an abridged version of the opera, though not much was missing, and it was sung in English and in moments of abandon in Italian, while Moody provided a bravura piano accompaniment. The staging consisted of drapes, and the characters were in theatrical costume some of the time, the rest of it not.
Under these conditions, sitting behind an enthralled audience, I found it happily impossible not to listen to the music as if I were hearing it for the first time, and marvelled at the staggering prodigality of Verdi’s melodic invention in this most unrestrainedly vital of his middle-period operas; and at the way the arias propel the action, as they don’t always in his works of this period.
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