Another turn around the block for David McVicar’s handsome 1830s Figaro at the Royal Opera — the sixth since the production’s 2006 premiere — scarcely raises an eyebrow, let alone a pulse. But a quick glance down the cast list of the current revival reveals some curiosities.
First to catch the eye is Kangmin Justin Kim — the first countertenor in the company’s 250-year history to play sexually rampant page Cherubino, traditionally a trouser role for a woman. Read on and you’ll see starry German baritone Christian Gerhaher making an unexpected mid-career role debut as Figaro, as well as a main-stage house debut for his Susanna — young American soprano Joelle Harvey, who bewitched last summer as Glyndebourne’s Cleopatra. Oh, and the whole lot is conducted by John Eliot Gardiner.
So does it live up to its promise? Yes and no, and neither in quite the ways you’d expect. Kim is the quietest, most unobtrusive of revelations. After an initial adjustment (tonally it’s still hard to let go of the warmth and bloom of a really good mezzo) he slots imperceptibly into the action — albeit action whose sexual ante has been decisively upped. To transform Cherubino into a real boy is to double down on Mozart’s joke, to replace farce’s flaccid pretence of threat with drama’s priapic reality. The frisson of the dressing-up scene is delicious, and Kim’s upstart rivalry with Simon Keenlyside’s predatory alpha-male of a Count clouds Tanya McCallin’s elegant sets with the unfamiliar fug of testosterone.
In Keenlyside and Harvey we have a near-perfect pairing. Wearing the role as lightly as the Count’s billowing brocade housecoat, Keenlyside sings it with craggy magnificence. Even Act Three’s demanding ‘Vedro mentr’io sospiro’ feels easy, though it’s an ease he translates into character rather than beauty.
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