‘I am the humble handmaid of the genius of art,” Anna Netrebko sings, eyes raised chastely heavenwards. But when you’re the most famous soprano of your generation, humility looks a little different. An “intimate recital” involves more than 2,000 fans, guest stars, the stage of the Royal Opera House and, at the centre of it all, Netrebko herself: a vision in silk and diamonds.
Protests may have greeted the Russian soprano’s controversial return to the Royal Opera in Tosca last autumn, but the streets were quiet and there were only cheers from a sold-out house to welcome her this time. No programme was announced in advance (Why bother when you can fill the seats with your name alone?) but there was something for everyone in this crowd-pleasing set – substantially toured in various versions over the past five years – whose two halves clustered loosely around themes of day and night.
Day was all trembling girlish ardour and spring abundance. Pianist Pavel Nebolsin might be anchored to his grand piano, but Netrebko roamed hither and yon – now caressing Kurt Mitterfellner’s violin as the bemused young musician dispatched his obbligato solo, now shielding her face extravagantly from the sun in the Melting Scene from Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden, before wandering in imagined meadows with mezzo Elena Maximova (grainy and strained) in Lakmé’s Flower Duet.
You can mock the melodrama, the high camp, the occasional lapses of taste (Strauss’s “Ständchen” lurched and swayed, nearly dragging Nebolsin’s filigree semiquavers down with it), but this voice is still the real deal. Released into a sequence of Rachmaninov or Tchaikovsky songs its plush, dark beauty and endless legato swell irresistibly; moments later that darkness is forgotten, swapped for silvery bel canto brilliance and delicacy in Bellini, or fired up to blazing full-power in Gounod or Charpentier.
Above all, Netrebko has fun. And she gives us permission to as well. Kicking off her shoes she scampered on for an encore of the closet scene from Figaro, bundling Maximova’s Cherubino out of the window with gleeful, giggling urgency. Was it all too much? Absolutely. Would we all go back again tomorrow? In a heartbeat.
