In this production of Andrea Chénier, love, liberty, revolution and death are all ingredients to create strong emotions: with a final ovation for the conductor.
Andrea Chénier can seem more a series of scenes than a dramatic whole and it relies on exciting, charismatic luminaries to hold it together and keep the interest high. This revival of Nicolas Joël’s staging is a noble effort, but disappoints.
Love and death are the two basic ingredients of the standard opera plot, and the more tragedy involved from the first to the last, the more likely it is to spur composers to set it to magnificent music. Andrea Chénier is a textbook example of this although it is not anywhere near as popular as La traviata, Carmen or La bohème, and explicably so.
Yesterday I went to see a convoluted story about French revolutionaries, as belted out at top volume to serviceable but hardly creative ballads. No, I didn’t go to the Les misérables movie. I went to see Roberto Alagna in Opera Orchestra of New York’s concert presentation of Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier.
Cette nouvelle production munichoise d'Andréa Chénier donnée en version concert au TCE a su convaincre par sa juste distribution et par la grande qualité de l'ochestre et des choeurs du Bayerische Staatsoper qui l'accompagnait. Bien que laissant quelque sentiment de frustration du fait de l'absence de mise en scène, cette oeuvre peu programmée ces dernières années ne perd en rien de sa force réflexive
