Il Trovatore, Royal Opera House, London

White-hot Verdi without the sizzle

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Never mind the plot; feel the temperament. What is it a director and designer must put above all else when trying to stage Verdi's Il Trovatore? What is it that drives the reckless narrative from crisis to crisis, improbability to improbability? It sure as hell isn't credibility or attention to dramatic detail. No – surprise, surprise – it's the music. It's Verdi, aged 40, working at white heat; it's the cumulative effect of one bravura number after another driving this stonking, char-grilled melodrama to meltdown. Swift, spontaneous, stirring.

All the things that Elijah Moshinsky's new production for the Royal Opera is not.

It looks impossibly handsome. The set designer Dante Ferretti comes from the movies. You could almost roll cameras on it as it stands. The post-Napoleonic updating features a series of painterly tableaux: canons aligned across the stage like great steel mammoths; gigantic boilers to suggest an iron foundry for the Gypsy scene. But, of course, not even modern technology can shift these sets in the blink of an eye – or even, or so it proves, a five-minute cat-nap. And so we have interminable pauses between scenes draining away all the impetus of Verdi's score.

And for what? The singers are no more real as characters than tradition has made them. They act and behave like... well, opera singers. And that's fine, too, if their motivation and physical presence amounts to something. We all know what Caruso famously said: that all Il Trovatore needed was the four best singers in the world. Well, we could dream. There were a couple of moments during Count di Luna's beautiful Act II romance, "Il balen del suo sorriso", where Dmitri Hvorostovsky spun that long-breathed legato of his and all was well with the night. The Verdi style – which demands a meaningful sostenuto to the end of every note value – suddenly came alive.

Hvorostovsky was the best singer on the stage by a mile. The object of his obsession, the Leonore of Veronica Villarroel, did not have a good night. This Chilean soprano is an old-world stylist, and the plangent colour of the voice is affecting. But its reach and security were, on this night, nowhere near the demands of the music. But then, she was hardly nursed by the conductor, Carlo Rizzi, who seemed hell-bent on making up time lost in the between-scene hiatuses. On his own terms, he was fine: rhythmic, disciplined, precise. But co-ordination between stage and pit was not fine, and if I felt his impatience, I'm sure the singers did.

And so, to the can-belto merchants. Like mother, like son. Yvonne Naef's Azucena duly went for the jugular, chest notes deployed like lethal weapons. You don't cast an Azucena for her subtlety – nor a Manrico. Just as well. José Cura doesn't do elegance but he does do testosterone, and that's largely what the role is about. Puzzling, then, that his big "shout" – "Di quella pira" – was with- out its second verse. I think we got the high Cs, but the big-money exit note was curious, squeezed out in a kind of dress-rehearsal falsetto before being launched, so to speak.

At the fateful close, Moshinsky has Count di Luna himself pre-empt the firing squad to despatch Manrico, only then to discover that he is in fact his brother. A telling director's moment, but way too late. Another one for the pyre, I fear.

To 14 May (020-7304 4000)