by Giuseppe Verdi (libretto Salvadore Cammarano)
seen at Covent Garden on 9 February 2017
Richard Farnes conducted David Bösch's production of Il Trovatore (here revived by Julia Burbach) with Lianna Haroutounian as Leonora, Anita Rachvelishvili as Azucena, Gregory Kunde as Manrico, Vitaly Bilyy as the Count di Luna and Alexander Tsymbalyuk as Ferrando. The set was designed by Partick Bannwart and lit by Olaf Winter, and the costumes designed by Meentje Nielsen.
This famous opera, often lampooned for its structural awkwardness, narrative complexity and gruesome subject matter, remains both popular and powerful. The original 15th century setting has here been modernised - there are guns, a tank and a rather dinky gypsy caravan - but the pervasive cruelty and lawlessness of war, and its insidious encouragement of vendetta and vengeance, is by no means diminished. The setting, apart from these props, is not especially detailed or realistic - no forbidding prisons or romantic balconies, but rather an open wintry expanse with denuded trees, relieved occasionally by some startling back projections which resonate more with the psychological state of the characters than with any real physical environment.
