A feast for eyes and ears: Damiano Michieletto’s new Tales of Hoffmann at The Royal Opera

Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann is often considered a difficult, sprawling work, but no-one seems to have told Damiano Michieletto. Not only is his latest production a visual feast and a riot of fantastical ideas, but it also achieves coherence around the narrative thread of Hoffmann’s character changes as he ages with each successive love affair.

From the very beginning, Michieletto comes up with ideas that are gorgeous to look at as well as full of cultural references. Clearly, the drinkers in Luther’s tavern have been on the absinthe as well as their usual beer and wine (not unlikely for Offenbach-era Paris, where it was known as “la fée verte”), because candy-green fairies are dancing around the stage under the beady eye of Christine Rice’s richly characterised and equally candy-green Muse. Chiara Vecchi’s splendid choreography includes briefly giving the dancers mouse heads, to remind one of the Hoffmann story most often seen on this stage: The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.

The flood of ideas keeps coming. Julie Boulianne’s Nicklausse is incarnated as a parrot (presumably Lindhorst’s parrot from The Golden Pot). A torrent of mathematical symbols surrounds Olympia the mechanical doll in Professor Spalanzani’s classroom. Antonia and her mother are ballerinas rather than singers – far more credible for “your art can kill you” and the cue for more gorgeous choreography, plus a fabulous ballet tableau vivant concocted by designers Paolo Fantin and Carla Teti. The costumes for the Venetian masked ball are as elegant and striking as you could wish for, with Giulietta’s high-slit gold affair the most spectacular, carried off with aplomb by the very tall and slim Marina Costa-Jackson. And watch out for the stilt-walker.

Through all this eye candy, Juan Diego Flórez ages, both in the colour of his voice and in his temperament, from the callow lad barely out of short trousers in the Olympia scene to the ardent but only marginally less inept lover of Antonia, to the world-weary (but still vulnerable) victim of Giulietta. Paradoxically, since Flórez is 51, his voice is so youthful that he is most compelling as the younger Hoffmann: the ringing brightness of his tenor works wonderfully at all points except when he is painting the old, disillusioned and drunken poet in the tavern.

The biggest success of the evening, however, was Alex Esposito, who portrayed the Four Villains with unadulterated demonic relish. Never has an operatic villain combined malicious snarl, vocal beauty and mesmerising body language so persuasively.

All three sopranos were thoroughly enjoyable. Olga Pudova earned the biggest ovation of the night for the boundless energy she put into Olympia’s “Les oiseaux dans la charmille”. As Antonia, Ermonela Jaho successfully chalked up yet another tortured woman to her long list of tragic heroines: her ensemble singing with Flórez, Esposito and Alastair Miles as her father Crespel was nothing short of sublime. Costa-Jackson and Boulianne sang us a delightfully weighted barcarolle – Costa-Jackson particularly impressed at the difficult low end of her range. Smaller roles were also well up to the mark: I’ll give special mention to Christophe Mortagne’s splendidly camped up performance of Frantz in the guise of dancing master. The chorus were exceptional, truly blasting the roof off in their incarnation as Hoffmann’s student buddies.

There are so many versions of The Tales of Hoffmann that conductors and directors have innumerable choices, so one’s never going to agree with all of them. Antonello Manacorda chose fairly spacious tempi, which had the advantage of allowing the orchestra to produce plenty of vivid instrumental colour, but use of the 1976 Oeser edition (most current productions use more recent critical editions) and a relative lack of cuts meant that the Prologue and Act 1 felt on the long side at an hour and fifteen minutes. In contrast, the Venietian act felt over barely before it started.

But cavils aside, this was a splendid piece of all-round singing, turned by Michieletto’s staging into wonderful all-round entertainment. This is the third leg of its co-production tour, which started in Sydney last year and passed through Venice in the summer. Catch up with it in this run if you can – otherwise, you’ll have to travel to Lyon at some point as yet unspecified.