Pountney’s vivid Simon Boccanegra finds a welcome new home at the Theatre in the Woods

Wasfi Kani is a shrewd hustler. Want an opera house built? She’ll raise the millions. Want some seats? She’ll acquire some knock-offs from Covent Garden. For Grange Park Opera, she’s also bought in productions wisely: Katie Mitchell’s Jenůfa from Welsh National Opera and now, Sir David Pountney’s long-forgotten staging of Simon Boccanegra (WNO, 1997). Revived by Robin Tebbutt, it makes a handsome opening to GPO’s festival.

Ralph Kotai’s original set consists of a pair of suspended walls; one translucent, reflective, tarnished; the other opaque, suggesting stonework, with a giant fissure running through it. These walls rotate and slide to form various palaces or to separate patricians from plebeians. They eventually close in on the dying Doge. A giant pebble and Tim Mitchell’s watery lighting effects – plenty of aquamarine – suggest the Ligurian coast. Against such a spartan set, Sue Willmington’s period costumes look sumptuous.

In the final scene, the writing is literally on the wall for Boccanegra; in this case, a huge chunk of Petrarch’s Canzone 128, which calls out the Italian nobility and their addiction to warfare, pasted across the back of the set.

Pountney untangles the knotty plot surrounding medieval Genoese politics. He uses the body of the dead Maria, high in a tower of Fiesco’s palace in the Prologue, as a link to Act 1, her shroud held in the hands of her daughter, Amelia, who brings it tumbling to the ground as she welcomes the dawn 25 years later.

Vivid stage pictures are created, none greater than the Council Chamber scene – Verdi’s crucial addition to the opera when he revised it with Arrigo Boito in 1881. Here the Patrician senators – only four, alas – are on stilts, their billowing robes held by attendants, dwarfing the Doge. Mitchell’s lighting casts towering shadows, emphasising the effect. In Act 2, the shadows of the goblet and flask of water on Boccanegra’s desk loom large… the water that the embittered Paolo has poisoned.

Gianluca Marciano, a safe pair of hands in Italian repertoire, conducted the Gascoigne Orchestra in a performance with plenty of fluidity and drama, the excellent Grange Park Opera Chorus singing with their usual vigour.

Where Wasfi Kani is not frugal is in her casting, splashing out big bucks for the Joseph Callejas and Bryn Terfels of this world who attract the punters. I’m not convinced that the Wasfinomics add up when it comes to Sir Simon Keenlyside, who is clearly the raison d'être for this production… and sadly the single hole in an otherwise excellent cast.

Keenlyside is not a Verdi baritone. His voice is wiry and uneven and, especially in the first half of the opera, there was barely a phrase which didn’t contain an unsupported note or one which sounded nasal or was almost spoken, delivered Sprechstimme-like. The Council Chamber scene was where this declamatory approach worked best – Keenlyside imparted a powerful curse – but long legato lines were largely conspicuous by their absence.

Elin Pritchard sang splendidly as Amelia, her creamy soprano sounding rich, spanning the long lines of “Come in quest'ora bruna” luxuriantly, touching in duets. Georgian tenor Otar Jorjikia gave Gabriele Adorno baritonal heft and heroic swagger in “Sento avvampar”, although he was a little ungainly in the aria’s middle section. Jolyon Loy’s towering Paolo – no stilts required – made much of Boccanegra’s henchman-turned-rebel and David Shipley was a sonorous Pietro. James Creswell sang an imposing Fiesco, his thunderous bass resounding around the small theatre.

Ah yes, that resonance. The acoustic in the Theatre in the Woods is remarkably lively. There are spots towards the side of the stage where the voices become so loud, the uninitiated would be convinced they are amplified. Perhaps some of the concrete needs a bit of velvet cladding to tamp down the sound. Kani’s next project?

This review was amended to correct the fact that David Alden's Kátya Kabanová was a different production to his ENO one.