Opera: Treachery, confusion and extortionate tunes

Opera

SEMIRAMIDE

QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL

LONDON

THE STARTING time originally announced for last Saturday's performance of Rossini's Semiramide was 7.15pm, late for an opera that doesn't give much change out of four hours, and Chelsea Group wisely decided to start 45 minutes earlier (the opera still didn't finish till nearly 11.00pm).

Unfortunately, news of the change failed to reach this quarter, and your correspondent missed most of the opera's first hour. It's a measure of Rossini's leisurely approach to narrative development that Act 1, Scene 1 was still in the process of unfolding at that point.

That's not a criticism. Far from it: the whole point is to give the singers room for extravagant display, that being the dramatic mode. It's all very well to complain that Rossinian bel canto allows no character development, but that's not what the composer was after. As Rossini stacks up the 15- minute spans of music, the notes tumble forth in gorgeous profusion, and every one of the characters (the term seems too emphatic) move from emotion to emotion, each aria embodying a different state, each ensemble a conflict.

But "development"? Hardly. Once you manage to get a grip on the usual array of treacheries, supernatural apparitions and mistaken identities, you could summarise the plot of Semiramide in a couple of sentences.

Premiered in 1823, Semiramide was the last opera that Rossini composed for Italy, and he went out with a bang: the opera is a summation of everything he had achieved to that point, and makes the most extortionate demands on its singers. None of the soloists here emerged unscathed, but all of them attacked the music with an acute grasp of the peculiar dram that bel canto generates, while Grant Llewellyn, conducting like a man possessed, had a proper sense of the gradual accumulation of tension through those long, almost sexual spasms of melody. He bent orchestra and chorus to his will while paying minute attention to his soloists' vocal decorations. While there were rough spots, they mattered much less than the overall impact.

We were lucky to have Nelly Miricioiu as Semiramide. She has tremendous presence: even her walk to the centre of the platform carried dramatic weight, and concert performance is no obstruction to her imperious theatricality. Some of the colour drains from the lower reaches of her chest voice, but she cuts through the coloratura like a knife, embellishing the line with tremendous flair.

She was all but matched by Patricia Bardon who, in the trouser role of Semiramide's long-lost son, sang with poise, the mezzo voice weighted perfectly against Miricioiu's soprano: their duets were the evenings highlight.

The opera's one out and out villain is the schemer Assur, and if George Emil Crasnaru's bass lacked a clean outline, he nevertheless radiated sulphurous malevolence, nowhere more so than in his hallucinatory mad scene.

Given that nobody seems likely to stage Rossini at his grandest, the capacity audience was clearly grateful for what proved to be one of Chelsea Group's most successful evenings. Long may they flourish.