When I interviewed Antonio Pappano in Rome in 2011, he jokingly admitted to being a bit of a cultural traitor. “I’ve done productions of Wagner, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Britten and Birtwistle at Covent Garden,” he said, “but maybe not as many of the Italian classics as they expected me to.” During his second decade as music director of the Royal Opera he made amends, with new productions of works by Bellini, Rossini, Verdi and Puccini, and now he bows out with a revival of Giordano’s red-bloodedly Italianate Andréa Chenier, which he conducts with both stormy energy and tender empathy, abetted by three singers who provide their own firework display of ballistic B-flats and blazing high Cs.
The characters are operatic archetypes, ricocheting between heaven and earth, metaphysical rapture and convulsive despair. Chénier, a poet guillotined in 1794 during the Terror, is here a grandstanding tenor whose role mostly consists of lyrical tirades which he claims to be improvising on the spot. His soprano partner, the aristocratic Maddalena, writes him anonymous letters which are unsung arias, then consummates their abstract affair by sacrificially joining him on the scaffold. The doctrinaire Gérard occupies a lower terrain, specialising in baleful rages that suit the baritone’s vocal register. The drop cloth in David McVicar’s 2015 production quotes Robespierre’s justification for executing Chénier: Plato, it declares, also banished poets from his republic. Here, however, it is these obsessively impassioned, high-flying opera singers who question the revolution’s egalitarian creed and have to be eliminated.
