Giordano: Andrea Chénier

DVD

1. GIORDANO: Andrea Chenier
    

The title role in Giordano’s opera Andrea Chénier, an epic of the French Revolution, demands much of a star tenor. He must strike a convincingly romantic figure as a doomed poet while also proving a full-blooded, but sensitive interpreter of three magnificent arias and two sumptuous love duets. As might be expected, in his debut as Chénier at London’s Royal Opera House in January 2015, Jonas Kaufmann rose superbly to the challenge.

The Guardian wrote: “It’s hard to imagine him bettered. His striking looks make him very much the Romantic and romanticised outsider of Giordano’s vision. His voice, with its dark, liquid tone, soars through the music with refined ease and intensity: all those grand declarations of passion, whether political or erotic, hit home with terrific immediacy.” The Financial Times, having likened Kaufmann to a portrait by the Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David, said: “He has never sounded better in London. His dark tenor smoulders with the heat of a poet’s unfulfilled ardour and his top notes ring out effortlessly (one of them goes from the softest thread of sound to a blazing forte).” The Independent wrote that “with his convincingly heroic presence, and the sheer beauty of his singing, he simply brings the house down … each aria is perfection incarnate.”

Andrea Chénier, first seen in Milan in 1896, is loosely based on the life of the poet André Chénier, born in Constantinople in 1762. Caught up in the turmoil of the French Revolution, in 1794 he became one of Robespierre’s last victims during the Reign of Terror. In the opera, Andrea falls in love with an aristocrat, Maddalena di Coigny, whom he first meets at her mother’s château in Act 1, which takes place in the earliest days of the Revolution. His rival for Maddalena’s love is Carlo Gérard, a servant in the Coigny household who goes on to become a powerful revolutionary.

The production, the work of Sir David McVicar, is an operatic spectacle in the grand tradition, with a large cast, atmospheric decor, lavish costumes and expansive emotions, and the conductor is Sir Antonio Pappano, Music Director of the Royal Opera House; shortly after the run of Andrea Chénier in London he joined Jonas Kaufmann in Rome to record Warner Classics’ multi-award-winning recording of Aida. The New York Times praised his interpretation of Giordano’s gripping score as “dynamically alive to every possibility”, adding that: “Like many a Pappano night at Covent Garden, it suggested a conductor in command of everything he undertakes, whatever period, style or provenance.”

The role of Maddalena is taken by the rich-voiced and impassioned Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, a favourite at Covent Garden in works by Puccini and his contemporaries, while the emotionally conflicted Gérard is sung by the charismatic and vocally authoritative Serbian baritone Željko Lučić.

The impressive supporting cast includes three powerful mezzo-sopranos: Denyce Graves, glamorous of presence and timbre as Maddalena’s faithful maid Bersi; Rosalind Plowright (who, as a soprano in the 1980s, sang Maddalena to José Carreras’ Chénier at the Royal Opera House) is the Contessa di Coigny, and the compelling Elena Zilio takes the role of old Madelon, who sends her grandson to fight for the Revolution.

With all these crucial musical and scenic elements in place, this is just the kind of full-blooded performance that brings the sweeping drama of Andrea Chénier irresistibly to life.