Photo by Tristram Kenton
Antony Craig reports from the English National Opera's Fidelio:
I have a recording of a rather splendid Otello conducted by the incomparable Carlos Kleiber at La Scala in 1976 (Music & Arts CD-1043) with Domingo and Freni in which the first 10 bars of Act 3 are missing: the music was inaudible because of a noisy demonstration that broke out in the audience.That’s Italy for you. It didn’t use to be the English way. It came as quite a shock when I witnessed prolonged booing at the opening night of Covent Garden’s musically riveting Rusalka last year. But then, three months later, Robert Carsen’s new Falstaff was jeered.
The booers were at it again at the Coliseum this week when English National Opera launched its 2013-14 season with a co-production new to London of Calixto Bieito’s Fidelio — and I call it Bieito’s rather than Beethoven’s Fidelio deliberately.
Bieito, who doesn’t do conventional, has chosen to depict a world in which we are all confined within our own psychological prisons. He has replaced much of Sonnleithner’s spoken dialogue with texts by, principally, Jorge Luis Borges; uses (quite appropriately within the context of his production) the Leonore No. 3 overture instead of the final Fidelio one – and has the Heath Quartet in suspended cages playing the Adagio from Beethoven’s String Quartet, Op 132 between the Dungeon Scene and the final scene which, in turn, is no traditional joyful release from the tension and drama of all that has gone before. Bieito’s characters are in modern clothing – except for the Minister, Don Fernando, who is an utterly incongruous effete monstrosity in 18th-century garb, who randomly shoots Florestan.