Opening a season with Cherubini’s Medea is a bold choice, and the Teatro di San Carlo meets it head on. This is the first time the opera has been performed here and Mario Martone’s production aims high and often succeeds, although not without some imbalances.
The director offers a sophisticated interpretation that is intellectual but not cold. His Medea is set in a 19th-century world, slightly fractured: picture-perfect gardens suddenly give way to a menacing, leaden sea, suggesting an unresolved psychological crisis. This is not a historical reconstruction; the focus is modern, on themes of broken identity and the vain attempts of a bourgeois façade to conceal the intrusion of ‘otherness’. Medea is immediately presented as an alien figure walking from the back of the Stalls; dark, masked, almost feral, she carries the seed of catastrophe from her first appearance.
Martone’s direction alternates between moments of still suspension and sharp emotional jolts, with psychological details verging on hyperrealism (strangled laughter, subtle physical collapses). Carmine Guarino’s set designs, Pasquale Mari’s lighting and Alessandro Papa’s video projections create an environment that is refined yet unsettling. The production's high point is the final scene, with a gloomy, tempestuous backdrop where the tragedy explodes in a clash of planets, a direct homage to Lars von Trier's Melancholia. Here, Martone successfully merges concept, image and sound into a powerful synthesis.
However, the most debatable choice is the breaking of the fourth wall. Martone has the wedding procession moving through the theatre’s corridors, involving (and in some cases obscuring) the audience. While the intent is to dissolve distance, the result feels contrived rather than truly inclusive. The gesture remains quite external and fails to create a genuine emotional connection.
In the pit, Riccardo Frizza’s conducting honoured the neoclassical style of the score: clear, measured and transparent. The orchestra played with precision and balances were well-judged. However, this very rigour, though legitimate, created a noticeable distance from the dramatic intensity of the staging and the protagonists’ vocal approach. The chorus, prepared by Fabrizio Cassi, was incisive, but a lack of alignment between the pit and the stage persisted.
Sondra Radvanovsky commanded the stage with magnetic dramatic charisma. Her Medea, however, leaned into a heavily expressionistic register, at times resembling a character from Strauss: nervous giggles, sobs and broken vocal lines. This choice, consistent with contemporary music theatre, clashed with the neoclassical framework of Cherubini's music. While her top notes were secure, the weight of the dramatic expression often compressed the vocal line, her diction suffering. The performance was theatrically powerful but musically dissonant.
As Giasone, Francesco Demuro offered clear diction and moments of delicate phrasing. However, his bright natural timbre became metallic in more intense passages. His volume appeared limited, lacking the vocal heft required for the role, and his characterisation remained incomplete. Giorgi Manoshvili’s Creonte was far more centred: a noble, dark-hued voice with incisive phrasing, making him the evening’s most convincing performance. Désirée Giove, seen some months ago in Cimarosa's Il matrimonio segreto, was a Glauce who impressed with her vocal brightness and stage presence; her collapse scene was finely executed. Anita Rachvelishvili delivered an intense performance as Néris, despite occasional veiled emission, and revealed her true stature with her great aria “Solo un pianto”.
This Medea is fascinating and provocative, but it presents three distinct visions – neoclassical in the pit, expressionistic on stage and conceptual in the direction – that never fully merge. While it was moving at times, it left an impression of irresolution. Perhaps this unresolved tension is precisely what made it memorable.
