Blissful and hard-boiled: I Capuleti e i Montecchi at English Touring Opera

If you are in search of true bel canto, opera where the pure beauty of the vocal lines is paramount, it’s difficult to do better than Vincenzo Bellini. Within Bellini’s output, for a glorious combination of soprano and mezzo voices, I Capuleti e i Montecchi should be at the top of your list. And when that combination is sung as well as it was by Samantha Price and Jessica Cale for English Touring Opera last night, it’s an unbeatable bel canto experience.

The performance came to life with Cale’s entry as Giulietta. Preceded by a gorgeous horn solo, her meditative entrance aria “Oh! Quante volte” lit up the Hackney Empire with the sweet timbre of the long-breathed notes, the poise of her phrasing and her glittering decoration. When she was joined by Price’s Romeo for their big duet “Si fuggire: a noi non resta”, where Romeo pleads for Giulietta to elope with him before it’s too late, the result was blissful, the two voices perfectly matched. Tragically, Romeo’s plea falls on deaf ears because Giulietta is conflicted between her love and her familial duty – Felice Romani’s libretto is based not on Shakespeare but on an 1818 Italian play by Luigi Scevola.

With just five roles plus chorus, the opera’s plot is considerably simpler than Shakespeare’s, which makes for tauter, more condensed drama. Still, with the opera heavily focused on the two lovers and their travails in the midst of a bellicose chorus, there’s less opportunity for the male voices to shine. Masimba Ushe’s Lorenzo (the Capulet family doctor in the opera rather than a friar) was the pick of the low voices, with a gravelly bass filled with authority.

Romani’s libretto sets the Capulet and Montague families as belonging to the warring Guelph and Ghibelline factions in 13th-century Italy. Director Eloise Lally transplants this to rival Mafia families in mid 20th-century New York, which provides a good bridge between the narrative and today’s culture, with everything that we’ve absorbed from mafia movies. Designer Lily Arnold gives us an Italian café (“Capellio’s”) where the clan has its headquarters and Lorenzo and Giulietta work the bar: in Act 1, we see an angled composition, reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting Nighthawks. This provides a suitably edgy, oppressive atmosphere when filled with violent men singing of hatred for the rival clan. In Act 2, we will see the same café, ruined, from the outside after the Montagues have torched it. 

Broadly speaking, it’s a very effective staging. However, it doesn’t all work. The idea of Romeo’s plea to the family being conducted by telephone strikes an odd note, and to quote from a recent Bachtrack review from La Scala, “sword fights simply do not translate well into gun fights”. Having rival gangs waving guns at each other makes a nonsense of the libretto during the fight scenes, which are not improved by the cliché of running portions of them in slow motion. The small scale of this production compounds the difficulty; it’s hard to create gang warfare mayhem when you only have a chorus of seven to work with. 

The small scale also poses problems for some of the orchestral music: twelve string players aren’t really enough to fill a good-sized theatre like the Hackney Empire with powerful martial music, and although conductor Alphonse Cemin kept things brisk and lively, the sound was tangibly thin, particularly in the overture. Where the orchestra excelled was in the woodwind playing, with a series of beautifully phrased solos to provide a counterfoil to the singers. 

We don’t get to see as much Bellini as I would like (although the Viennese might dispute this, with two new versions of Norma currently on the go), and I Capuleti e i Montecchi seems very much underrated – maybe because people are too aware that it was a rush job, composed in just six weeks. This production makes a strong case that this work can provide compelling drama even as it seduces you with the beauty of the human voice. And that’s what real operatic magic is all about.