REVIEW: L'Amore Dei Tre Re, Opera Holland Park ✭✭✭✭✭

Aled Hall as Flaminio, Mikhail Svetlov as Archibaldo, Simon Thorpe as Manfredo and Natalya Romaniw as Fiora in L'Amore dei tre Re L'Amore Dei Tre Re (The Love Of Three Kings)

Holland Park Opera

28/07/15

5 Stars

Holland Park Opera has a distinguished record in reviving works from the Italian operatic repertory that were once renowned and have now more or less sunk from view. This year the focus is on The Love of Three Kings by Italo Montemezzi, first given at La Scala in 1913, and much revived not least at the Metropolitan Opera, New York until after the Second World War. It is not an easy work to place. The temptation is to make a comparison with Puccini, given the shared time-frame and focus on melodrama; but in fact that is ultimately unhelpful.

This work owes much more to the delayed reception of Wagner and Richard Strauss in Italy in the first decade of the twentieth century than it does to either Puccini or Verdi. In fact anyone coming to this work with these last expectations is bound to be disappointed. The focus is on elaborately piled up harmonic complexity and short melodies or fragments that seethe and writhe in, around and over one another in chromatic complexity. We do not find the kind of long-breathed ever-expanding melody for which Puccini was famous.

The orchestra is much more prominent, and at times, dominant than is the case is most verismo opera of the period, and indeed there are sections in which the composer seems to be almost quoting and elaborating from the German composers. For example at the beginning of Act Three there is a specific reminiscence of Death and Transfiguration by Strauss, and the steamy love duet at the centre of work is unimaginable without Act Two of Tristan and Isolde as both precedent and model. However, this is not in any way a derivative piece once the musical palette is set against a full-on melodramatic plot with great narrative drive. There is also a political agenda which is specifically Italian rather than German, and which is brought out strongly, and rightly so, in this excellent production.

Simon Thorpe as Manfredo and Mikhail Svetlov as Archibaldo

The opera is divided into three acts but as each lasts no more than half an hour the creative team have decided to run it straight through. Again this is a good call. There are powerfully descriptive orchestral preludes before each act and they can do good service as interludes instead to keep the action continuous. The intensity of the music and the performances given by the four principals are such that you come out thinking the opera has lasted far longer (in a good way!) than a mere ninety minutes. The setting is allegedly Medieval Italy where some years before Archibaldo (Mikhail Svetlov) has invaded from the North and conquered Altura/Italy. He has compelled Princess Fiora (Natalya Romaniw) to marry his son Manfredo (Simon Thorpe) even though she is already engaged to a native Italian, Avito (Joel Montero).

The action depicts the consequence of this misalliance both personal and political. The production relocates the action to a contemporary Latin dictatorship, and loses nothing along the way, given that the main themes of revenge, forbidden love, chivalric daring-do, murder and desperate suicide are hardly bounded by time or space. In Manfredo’s absence Fiora resumes her connection with Avito but incurs the enmity of Archibaldo who has guessed the truth but on account of his blindness is powerless to prove it conclusively. Things end badly with predictable speed and the corpses gradually accumulate as Archibaldo is punished definitively through his own cunning gone wrong. The action gains a political edge as the chorus of citizens become involved in avenging Fiora and here there is more than a trace of the irredentist sympathies of the librettist Sem Benelli, a disciple of Gabriele D’Annunzio, determined to wrest territory back for Italy from Austria.

Natalya Romaniw as Fiora and Joel Montero as Avito

For a production to work for this kind of steepling melodrama all concerned need to commit totally to it and - just as in light comedy - believe in its conventions completely for the duration of the performance. It will not take irony or bracketing devices without collapsing the whole bizarre edifice. The strength of this production is that Opera Holland Park DO convey sovereign commitment to the cause, and therefore it is a triumphant success on all fronts.

The set demands a castle tower in which Fiora resides and from which she has to display a large white banner to signal farewell to Manfredo. It needs to be a forbidding symbol of male and royal power as well as a flexible space. In this director Martin Lloyd-Evans and his team mostly succeed. The concrete block that dominates the stage is both forbidding and flexible. Its arrow slits double poignantly as locations for flowers of mourning and the external staircases allow some of the most important scenes to be both elevated and front and centre – though I did have a few anxieties over the health and safety implications for the singers! All the cast are on fine form, with particular honours going to Romaniw and Svetlov, whose scenes together had real power, and who individually had to project across the orchestra going at full tilt. Thorpe and Montero have less opportunity to develop nuances of character – their roles are more functional to the plot than developing a separate identity. But the composer gives both men some very fine vocal moments, both in steamy duets with Fiora and then together in the final immolation scene. They took those moments with flair. The minor roles were filled very capably, and the chorus projected both mourning and aggression towards an occupying power with effective vigour and suitably simmering resentment.

The refulgent star of the opera though was the orchestra: the City of London Sinfonia under the deft and precise baton of Peter Robinson had a banner evening. The concerted moments had a real thrill and sense of risk-taking about them; but there were also many quieter moments, particularly with the woodwind, which offered effective and delicate underscoring of character and emotion. Montemezzi may have been something of a one-work composer, but this performance made the best case possible for his masterpiece, and we can only hope that the repute of this revival will stimulate a wave of further performances at home and abroad. The whole evening showed Opera Holland Park at its very best.