Andréa Chenier – Royal Opera House
David McVicar’s spectacular staging of Umberto Giordano’s epic verismo opera of revolution and forbidden love from 2015 is brought back to life by Revival Director Thomas Guthrie with the orchestra under the baton of Antonio Pappano in his last production as Music Director of The Royal Opera.
At a glittering party in 18th-century Paris there are distinctly two tiers of society on display from the lowly footman Gérard (Amartuvshin Enkhbat) who follows in the footsteps of his father who has been in service for sixty years, to the sumptuous host, Contessa di Coigny (Rosalind Plowright), whose daughter Maddalena (Sondra Radvanovsky) straddles both as she eschews the fancy dress and faux manners in favour of intellectual discussion, so when the poet Andréa Chenier (Jonas Kaufmann) delivers ...