Simon Boccanegra review – Opera North’s staging of Verdi’s knotty score is a brooding triumph

Royal Festival Hall, LondonThe Leeds-based company stages Verdi’s dense political drama with a no-frills set-up that sees a stand-out performance from debut soprano Sara Cortolezzis‘I had to read this libretto six times before I understood any of it,” fumed the great Italian opera scholar Abramo Basevi in 1859. The work that had defeated him? Verdi’s opera Simon Boccanegra, based on a play by the same Spanish writer as Il trovatore, the longstanding sitting duck for potshots at contorted opera plots. Even the composer diagnosed Boccanegra as “too depressing”. Yet he was persuaded to return to his poorly received score, overhauling it with the help of Arrigo Boito (subsequently the librettist of his final operas, Otello and Falstaff). That revised version was a roaring success in 1881 and is staged quite regularly today – although marshalling its heavyweight lineup of principal basses and baritones, with only a single tenor and soprano to leaven the texture, remains a serious challenge.No stranger to those, Opera North has taken Boccanegra as the latest candidate for “concert staging” treatment, after its success with Wagner in recent years. This performance at Royal Festival Hall was the finale of a tour that has already stopped off at concert halls across the north and midlands. Directed by PJ Harris, the opera’s dark doings in Genoa played out across the three “rooms” of a subtly lit metal frame stretching across the front of the stage, with marble columns, plinths and benches for a touch of civic pomp and banners for rival political factions hanging overhead. In a gesture Basevi would presumably have appreciated, characters wore election-style rosettes to show which side they were on. The 25 years that elapse between the opera’s lengthy prologue and its first act saw one character’s parka switched for a different vintage anorak and Simon Boccanegra’s sailor peacoat swapped for a political leader’s shirt and tie. But we were otherwise rooted in a historical no man’s land of ill-fitting suits. Continue reading...

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