Fizzy yet fervent, gloriously sung and impishly staged, the Royal Opera’s new-to-the-UK production of Cendrillon — Massenet’s Cinderella — is a delectable divertissement for a summer evening. And sometimes even more than that. I’ve not heard more ravishing singing all season than when Alice Coote’s ardent Prince Charming and Joyce DiDonato’s feisty Cinders are entwined in the voluptuous love duet, with Eglise Gutiérrez’s Fairy supplying a pinpoint-perfect coloratura descant.
Coote, especially, has a dream night. She looks terrific in white tie and tails, plays the lovelorn prince touchingly, and is in thrilling vocal form. If only she could turn it on like this in every show.
Cendrillon is an odd opera. Its farcical scenes are straight out of Feydeau and Offenbach. Yet in Act III, as the Prince and Cendrillon pray for release from love’s torments, Massenet deepens and darkens the drama until we are not far from the anguish of Werther.
Musically, too, it’s a bit of a hotchpotch. There are scintillating patter-ensembles, particularly for the pouting stepsisters — Madeleine Pierard and Kai Rüütel, waddling gamely in the preposterous spinning-top frocks designed by director Laurent Pelly. There are lugubrious, pastiche-Baroque numbers for Cendrillon’s hen-pecked father (Jean-Philippe Lafont, approximate but characterful), and barrel-chested outbursts for her stepmother — hurled out with (in every sense) huge gusto by the Polish contralto Ewa Podles. Yet there are also passages in which Massenet’s evident delight in this large assortment of high-voiced characters inspires a Straussian sumptuousness.
All that is delivered with a deft touch by the conductor Bertrand de Billy. Some early ensembles wobble, but one forgives that when orchestral textures are so idiomatically coloured.
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On stage, too, Pelly maintains a fair balance between wackiness and sugary sentimentality. Laura Scozzi’s choreography, featuring a vintage array of silly walks, camp courtiers and rapacious ballerinas, is mad and hilarious, even if it doesn’t always quite fit the music. But when Barbara de Limburg’s cheap but resourceful set — the pages of Perrault’s original fairytale — parts to reveal a Mary Poppins-style rooftop of glowing chimneys, Pelly stages the duet between the two lovers who never meet with real poignancy.
And by occasionally flooding the stage with doppelgangers of the Prince and Cendrillon, he subtly reminds us that, though this is a fairytale, the pains of love are real and universal.
Box office: 020-7304 4000, to Jul 16. Live on 12 BP Big Screens around the UK on Wed (roh.org.uk/bpbigscreens) Sponsors: Michael Hartnall and Judith Portrait