In the celebratedly short time in which Rossini wrote The Barber of Seville, he got into a time capsule and took a short trip to twenty-first century London; on his return to 1816 Rome, he wrote the part of Rosina for Lucy Crowe's voice. Or at least, that's what it felt like at ENO last night, as Crowe turned in a performance which outstrips my ability to find superlatives.
No-one pretends that The Barber is a work of great depth: it was written in a hurry (thought to be three weeks), borrowed a fair amount of music from other operas and follows Rossini's formula pretty closely. It is, however, a work of comic genius, and provides a vehicle for star singers. And singing Rossini well – really well – is fiendishly difficult. It's one thing to be able to sing all the notes in the complex decoration – jumps to dizzying heights, death-defying swoops and intricate semi-quaver runs along the way, and to do so while staying perfectly on pitch. But what really distinguished Crowe's performance was to achieve this with perfect control of dynamics and phrasing: you never lost a note which went quiet in the middle of a run, there was always a lilt to her delivery, her timbre was smooth and all this was done with excellent acting of Rosina's soubrette character, shifting back and forth between "butter wouldn't melt" sweetness to devious and steely resolve.
This was a performance to remember. It would have outshone many casts; it outshone this cast by a great deal. As Almaviva, Andrew Kennedy had a attractive and strong voice, lovely in the slower lyrical passages, but I felt he lacked a little of the required flexibility in the faster, more decorated lines. The same was true of Benedict Nelson in the title role: Nelson has good looks and a pleasant baritone voice, but he was often nearly inaudible in the buffo patter lines. This is an opera in which the action should revolve around Figaro, who is pulling all the strings, and I felt that Nelson simply failed to command the stage. The biggest cheer of the curtain calls went to Andrew Shore, who entertained the audience thoroughly with a vivaciously hammed up acting performance as Dr Bartolo. It was delivered very much in a Gilbert-and-Sullivan style with a lot of speech interspersed with the singing; I enjoyed the fun, but I'm not sure the singing style was quite right for Rossini. For me, the best of the supporting singers was David Soar as the hypocritical Don Basilio, who only gets one big aria (his entrance aria, a paean to the power of calumny) and sang it with power, flexibility and comic relish.