I haven’t been to the Royal Opera for a while, and took the opportunity to break my return journey from Cambridge to catch the opening night of the revival of their production of Andrea Chénier.
The closing days of the Terror have been fruitful source material for composers, with Chénier being executed a few days after the nuns in Dialogues des Carmélites and a few before Robespierre’s own death. This production is faithful to the period, and from my seat high up I admired the skill of the set designers who have to conceal their artifice and make the detail look realistic from every angle in the house.
I went to see a cinecast of the first production, and the revival was apparently unchanged, except that I think the anachronistic absinthe may have gone from Act II. Alagna was worth hearing, even if a little rough around the edges, and I had no complaints about Sondra Radvanovsky or Dimitri Platanias either. The orchestra, conducted by Daniel Oren, was its usual high standard, though they are not really the stars of the show as Giordano didn’t go in for interesting orchestration.
The ROH assembled reviews here. The negative comments are mostly from people who don’t like the opera much because it isn’t Dialogues.