Les Contes d’Hoffmann
Royal Opera
Der fliegende Holländer
Barbican
Astonished delight was the first reaction, of everyone, I think, at the Royal Opera’s latest revival of John Schlesinger’s production of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann: astonishment that Rolando Villazón seems not only to have overcome his vocal and possibly other crises, but to be, in all respects, in finer fettle than ever before. He acted with a nonchalant spontaneity, walking casually and unharmed backwards off tables when drunk, tireless in his surmounting of William Dudley’s copious, cluttery sets, and using every limb to express his hopeless ardours, while maintaining a glorious stream of tone which — it is no disrespect to Villazón Mark I — might have been that of a thrilling new tenor we had never heard before. The role of Hoffmann, whose capacity to fall in love with the wrong woman is extraordinary even by operatic standards, might have been written for him.
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