What better time is there than the festive season to embark upon a pilgrimage to London’s finest opera institution, where lofty tones and intricately-crafted songs are uttered with exacting dexterity and harmony, amidst the dramatic dome-like backdrop where audiences meet operatic stars in all their vocal glory.

The society centrepiece within the Royal Opera House’s hallowed walls is unequivocally the Paul Hamlyn Hall Bar, incorporating the Perrier-Jouët Champagne Bar. Regarded by many as the most magnificent and stately bar in London, its spacious iron and glass atrium construction gives audiences, released from the opulent main auditorium action during intervals, an altogether more cosmic stage to view whilst sipping their Belle Époque champagne.

Christmas may be over now, but Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House is still in jubilant carnival mood. And in the spirit of New Year jollity, a resolution to cautiously provide Lusso readers with opera highs and lows at various intervals throughout the year has been christened by my visit to witness Gioacchino Rossini’s bombastic reworking of the Cinderella story in his La Cenerentola.

Having to contend with the throng of piazza crowds and London’s hectic West End arteries, I very nearly missed the starting overture and subsequent curtain opener, always an ambient moment for eager viewers as they catch their first glimpse of that sumptuous Royal Opera House stage, magically enhanced with a touch of La Dolce Vita’s Fifties feel by Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier, a revival which first appeared in 2000. However, the fairy tale had already cast its spell and miraculously, I was seamlessly ushered into the 2262-strong main auditorium and my comfortable, regally-red upholstered seat before Evelino Pido (returning for a second time to lead La Cenerentola) lifted his baton to energetically welcome in the production for its fourth outing at the Royal Opera House.


But it seems I’m in good company when it comes to a brush with the transience of time, Rossini himself appeared nonchalant to the pressures of a deadline and indeed resolutely declared that his overtures were never ready well in advance but instead were prepared on the evening the opera [was] scheduled for performance. Nothing excites the imagination more than necessity! he quipped. I suspect this procedure caught up with him in La Cenerentola, a last-minute commission for the 1817 carnival season from Pietro Cartoni at Rome’s Teatro Valle. Just two days before Christmas 1816, Cartoni summoned both Rossini, and his writer, Jacopo Ferretti, to his home where Cinderella was eventually chosen from a selection of 30 possible melodramas. Due to the dearth of time, Rossini borrowed his own overture from an opera he wrote in Naples earlier in the year, La Gazzetta. To think Rossini was a true pioneer in the art of recycling (La Cenerentola was not the only opera in the Rossini pantheon to benefit from this surprising approach!) long before bottle banks appeared at every Waitrose car park! The grand new Cinderella story was launched barely a month later on 25 January 1817.

The mixing of ingredients didn’t stop there, for Rossini’s Cinderella story is no plain fairy tale, despite the simplicity and directness of his music; instead it’s a subtle fable satirising the importance heaped on social status and appearances through the appropriate carnival framework. Rossini, together with his librettist partner-in-crime, Ferretti, sought to combine the traditional comic aspects of the opera buffo, including disguise, role reversal, anarchy, licentiousness and dangerously high spirits, together with the formal, elevated musical structure of opera seria (literally ‘serious opera’) evident in the main ‘good’ characters, but with an undercurrent of altogether darker forces at play – witness Angelina’s (Rossini’s name for Cinderella) stepfather, Don Magnifico, declare the “third sister is dead” to Alidoro when queried on the records stating three, not two, eligible females lie in residence in Don Magnifico’s castle – this all adds up to an impressive, energetic cocktail of dramatic elements.

Wiping the slate clean of much of the fairy tale’s familiar motifs, one transformation in particular, from glass slipper into a pair of bracelet love tokens, helped to reinforce the worthiness of the title role heroine as well as to acquiesce the Roman church censors who would have objected to the vision of an unshod female foot on display. Cinderella is given the executive role of presenting her true love (the Prince disguised as the valet) with a matching bracelet of her own before she leaves the ball… Rossini, ever the innovator who revelled in shocking the musical authorities and audiences of his day, was paving the way for a new genre, semiseria (defined as related to the comic genre through the presence of a basso buffo (Don Magnifico), but also containing elements of pathos amidst a generally pastoral setting), to emerge. Even the lovers, Angelina and Don Ramiro assume more sentimental features, the characteristics of romantic heroes, not comic.

In fact, both principal characters present notable debuts for this production: the sultry mezzo-soprano, Magdalena Kozena, hailing from the Czech Republic, takes on the title role of Angelina in her Royal Opera debut. Kozena succeeds in introducing a gawky innocence to the obedient and passive daughter trapped in her cruel family, before allowing her more spirited self to emerge as the opera develops, displaying a daring and transgressive streak as her wish to attend the ball is granted. After a somewhat awkward start to the season, documented in previous review performances, Kozena now seems to have relaxed into her role, although her even, velvety tones still prove restrictive to the full coloratura range required whilst some ornamental details (trills, roulades etc.) clearly proved cumbersome.

England’s own Toby Spence added the swoonsome factor to Don Ramiro, Rossini’s Prince Charming, with his dashing Darcy looks and noble mien. His tenor notes pack a good punch and he certainly kept up with Rossini’s brilliantly breathless showstopper, tipping the scales with those high C’s, in his Act II aria.

But vying for the paparazzi attention, a frenzy of stage snappers to rival a stateside trip to the Golden Globes, the “Ugly Sisters”, Clorinda and Tisbe, played with a refreshing fusion of girlish haughtiness and siren sassiness by Australian/Greek soprano, Elena Xanthoudakis in her role debut and Welsh mezzo-soprano, Leah-Marian Jones, who once again reprises her role respectively, let sparks fly in their vain attempt to lure Dandini’s “Prince” away from each other.

Rags and cinders in the pristinely ornamental opera house cannot survive for long. Cinderella’s metamorphosis from laundry to luxury takes on a far more opulent turn with a white crinoline gown and mature self confidence to match that would serve any discerning Crillon Ball debutante well. Who needs a pumpkin when a sparkling bright turquoise Rolls Royce awaits?

Rossini famously boasted: “Give me a laundry list and I will set it to music” and with his kitchen-confined opera heroine, his music (and Ferretti’s story) transforms her rags into musical riches and with that releasing an exquisite, noble creature worthy of a Prince.

As DH Lawrence once said:
“I love Italian opera – it’s so reckless…I like the Italian who run all on impulse!”

So here’s to a chaotic, eclectic and ultimately entertaining cultural start to 2008.


PHOTO OF ROH EXTERIOR by Peter Mackertich
PHOTO OF MAIN AUDITORIUM by Rob Moore
PHOTO OF TISBE & PAPARAZZI by Johan Persson
PHOTO OF ANGELINA IN ROLLS ROYCE by Johan Persson