Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.There is a moment at the end of the first half of Il trovatore that changes everything. Leonora is poised to enter a convent, when she sings a long, soaring line that lifts the opera into a higher sphere of expression, a pre-echo of the great Verdi of his later operas.Sung with a limpid radiance here by Rachel Willis-Sørensen, it is one of those passages that imbue the opera’s convoluted plot and impassioned, but one-dimensional characters with a depth that few other composers could have imagined, let alone achieved.Fortunately, the singing at this revival mostly compensated for the production. Il trovatore is a director’s graveyard. The Royal Opera has had repeated failures with it over the years (how many remember the giant polystyrene rocks in Piero Faggioni’s shortlived production?), but even so Adele Thomas’s production from 2023 bids fair to be the worst of the past half century.Poised on a perilously steep staircase, the principal singers seem more motivated to engage with each other this time, but the chorus and dancers are as distracting as before. Playing hellfire ghouls who have leapt out of a Hieronymus Bosch canvas, they gesticulate, bound around, and wave and wink at the audience. Whatever else Verdi meant Il trovatore to be, he never saw it as a comic-strip romp.Last seen as a fine Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Willis-Sørensen has returned with vocal power and authority enhanced. The role suits her well at this point in her career, a Leonora of shining, bright radiance, lyrical but also agile enough where required, though there was an unwanted, sharp-edged vibrato to the voice in passing.As at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, she was paired with the Manrico of Michael Fabiano, with a tenor similarly bright in quality. He brings youthful energy to the role, matched by strong vocal projection, which he varies with a very welcome tenderness. Manrico’s last scene with Azucena, as prisoners together, was unusually touching.There have been larger-voiced singers as Azucena in the past at the Royal Opera, also deeper-toned ones, but Agnieszka Rehlis used her keen, well-knit, higher-than-usual mezzo to striking impact. This production presents Azucena as a feral, unkempt woman and Rehlis channelled that barbarity fearsomely.There was a sturdy Conte di Luna from Aleksei Isaev, a touch gruff of voice, though his top notes ring out confidently. The bass Riccardo Fassi sang a clear, authentically Italian Ferrando.With conductor Giacomo Sagripanti charging Verdi’s accompaniments with meaning and impulse in every detail, there was plenty to keep the musical side of this performance alive. A double run of 15 performances of this ill-judged production before the end of the season is a considerable commitment. The following casts will need to be equally persuasive.★★★☆☆To July 19, rbo.org.uk
