![\"Agrippina,](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/criticscircle.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/0785-Joyce-DiDonato-as-Agrippina-and-Franco-Fagioli-as-Nerone-in-Agrippina-C-ROH-2019-Photographed-by-Bill-Cooper-1080x675.jpg?resize=1080%2C675\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nJoyce DiDonato as Agrippina and Franco Fagioli as Nerone – \n (C) ROH 2019. Photo by Bill Cooper<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By Paul Levy<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Among my regrets is that I am old enough to have seen and heard Maria\n Callas perform at Covent Garden, but young enough at the time to feel I\n could not afford the tickets. It goes some way to make up for this \nlapse that I have seen Joyce DiDonato several times at the ROH, \nincluding what I expect will be remembered as an historic performance of\n the title role in Handel\u2019s Agrippina <\/em>in the ROH premiere of \nBarry Kosky\u2019s production. DiDonato is not only technically assured, with\n pitch-perfect coloratura, astonishing breath control, and complete \ncontrol of dynamics, but she is also a superlative actress. When the \nlibretto calls for her to be sexy, to seduce not only her henchmen, \nPallante and Narciso, the servant, Lesbo, her returned husband, Claudio \nand even her son, Nerone, you can almost feel the pheromones circulating\n in the opera house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The most notable thing about Kosky\u2019s production, indeed, is that \nevery member of this ensemble can act. When the two women, three \ncountertenors and three basses are on the stage, in Rebecca Ringst\u2019s \nflexible set that looks a bit like a DIY storage unit on the outskirts \nof West London, they behave as an ensemble. Except for librettist \nCardinal Grimani\u2019s dramatic soliloquy arias, every one sings to<\/em> someone (only rarely, but significantly, to the audience, in House of Cards<\/em> fashion), and whoever is on the receiving end has been carefully directed by Kosky to listen<\/em>.\n There\u2019s a bit too much stage business, a little too much \u201cthey were \nonly playing leapfrog\u201d, and the occasional over-exaggerated gesture; but\n the comedy is there, in the words and the music, and it works, \nespecially in the scene when Lucy Crowe\u2019s superb Poppea has to hide her \nthree rival lovers, Ottone, Nerone and Claudio, from each other in the \nsame room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It seems it\u2019s been 244 years between the first-run of Agrippina<\/em>\n in Venice and the \u201csecond-run\u201d at Halle, Handel\u2019s birthplace, in 1943. \nThis is a demanding work, for the audience as well as the singers. The \ntimings are given as 100 minutes of Act 1 and Act 2, part 1, then an \ninterval of 30 minutes, and 85 minutes for the rest. That\u2019s more than \nthree hours in your seat, and nearly as long on stage or in the wings \nfor some of the performers. We expect to sit, attention riveted, \nwatching and listening, completely focused on what\u2019s happening (mostly) \non the stage. We thus receive the piece in a different way from Handel\u2019s\n 18th-century audiences, who no doubt came and went as they pleased or \nneeded; whereas the audience in London or Munich has fixed times before \nthe start and during the interval to relieve or refresh themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\nraise these irrelevant-to-the-opera-itself topics, the more to praise the\nperformers, and the director who has welded them into such a firm ensemble. You\nknow from the first chords played by the relatively small Orchestra of the Age\nof Enlightenment, conducted by Maxim Emelyanychev (who is a skinny as the tie\nhe wore at the first performance), that you can have confidence that everything\nmusical that is to come will be precise, elegant, but as tender and beautiful\nas Handel\u2019s passages between DiDonato and the solo oboe. Apart from a little\nunsuitable choreography for Lucy Crowe (a jolly little dance when she\u2019s being\nneurotic, feeling murderous, and taking it out on Ottone), she shows herself to\nbe just as much the diva as Agrippina. How she manages her breathing is a\nmystery, especially when she has repeatedly to climb the long stairway and\ncircle the set a few times before tossing out \u201cthese bravura arias\u2026 awash\nwith coloratura, sequences and energetic dotted rhythms\u201d (says Panja Mucke in\nher fine programme note). Lucy Crowe\u2019s is a virtuoso display, as is that of\nIestyn Davies (Ottone). Davies is a countertenor with a true trill \u2013 thrilling\nto hear. His reflective arias are ravishingly beautiful, and his\npost-athletic-feat breath control as mind-boggling as Crowe\u2019s, equalling that\nof Franco Fagioli as Nerone, the second countertenor in this crew. (The third\nis the minor role of Narciso, sung by Eric Jurenas). All the men except Claudio\nin this staging are as camp as Christmas \u2013 though I\u2019m not clear why Kosky has\ndecided on this reading of the libretto, it does make the comedy even funnier \u2013\nalthough some of the mannerisms could be damped down to the profit of the plot.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nerone\nhas the hots for Poppea and, clearly, also for his mother, Agrippina, a\nperfectly respectable reading of the Freudian Oedipal situation. His costume by\nKlaus Bruns, however, separates him from the rest of the ensemble, as Nerone\nhere is an effeminate but straight leather-boy, with tattooed head, steel\nnecklace, skin-tight trousers and body-piercings galore. Fagioli has some of\nthe best tunes, and sings one of his arias from the foetal position, something I\u2019ve\nnot seen before. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Claudio\n(the terrific bass, Gianluca Buratto) electrifies the house when he appears in\nmilitary garb as the Caesar rescued from the sea, but spends much of part two\nwith his trousers round his ankles. Still he\u2019s the sole butch character on the\nstage \u2013 until Agrippina arrives in the final act in dinner-jacket drag. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAt the close,\u201d says Kosky in his ROH programme interview, \u201cwhere \ndances were played in Handel\u2019s time, we play a slow piece from his \noratorio L\u2019Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato<\/em>.\u201dThe \nmoral of the story would be clear, except that Kosky and Emelyanychev \nhave decided not to end with bang, but with the mysterious sigh of this \norchestral piece, in which Agrippina is not murdered on her son\u2019s \norders, but sits alone as the shutters descend and the lights go out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Agrippina, Royal Opera House Joyce DiDonato as Agrippina and Franco Fagioli as Nerone – (C) ROH 2019. Photo by Bill Cooper By Paul Levy Among my regrets is that I am old enough to have seen and heard Maria Callas perform at Covent Garden, but young enough at the time to feel I could not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1706","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-rw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1706"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1707,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1706\/revisions\/1707"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}