★★★★☆
Now in its third revival, Mariame Clément’s production of Don Pasquale is as sharp as a paper cut. Balancing the charm and the cruelty in Donizetti’s most Rossinian comedy is an interesting challenge. Where L’elisir d’amore and La fille du régiment tell us that love will prevail, the moral of Don Pasquale is that romantic delusions are hazardous for the old.
Puffed up with censoriousness and improbable dreams of late fatherhood, the elderly antihero is bullied and bamboozled into a hasty marriage by his doctor, his indolent nephew and his pretty termagant of a new wife, Sofronia, aka Norina: the doctor’s sister, the nephew’s sweetheart, a widow with an acute awareness of her ability to seduce, outsmart, outspend and outsass the stronger sex.
While Giacomo Sagripanti’s conducting is all stops and starts, languorous sighs and hectic accelerandi, with a hazily summery trumpet solo at the opening of Act II, Julia Hansen’s set designs revolve crisply, revealing the vulnerabilities of characters who are caught candidly in repose while Dr Malatesta (Andrey Zhilikhovsky) creeps through the house of Don Pasquale (Renato Girolami).
The walls are thin, the egos more so. Ernesto (Andrew Stenson) is trapped in permanent adolescence, sulking sleepily on his cot bed. Pasquale slumbers on a couch, pale and flabby, under the watchful eye of his exasperated servant (Anna-Marie Sullivan). Norina (Lisette Oropesa) dozes at her writing desk. Did her husband die of natural causes? It seems unlikely. All greed, wit and wide, sexy eyes, with a sweet, fast vibrato, trills as neat as pinking shears and a prodigious appetite for the texture and flavour of the Italian language, Oropesa holds the performance.
To Donizetti’s pithy take on the Malatesta siblings’ venality, Clément has added a Manon Lescaut hint of incestuous attraction. There is scant physical resemblance between the two singers, but Zhilikhovsky matches Oropesa for smartness and he scintillates in Cheti, cheti, immantinente.
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The Glyndebourne chorus, with onstage guitar duo and sombre tambourine, sound divinely haughty in the postmodern Fragonard playground of Act III. If Stenson and Girolami have yet to find equivalent oomph, Don Pasquale has the feel of a show that will settle and shine across the run. Little details, such as the vanitas painting that is flipped over to reveal a Dutch still life of aphrodisiac foodstuffs, are the sort of tiny luxuries that make this company’s best productions special.
Box office: 01273 815000, to August 23