This production of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra was another in Opera North’s excellent series of slightly-staged concert performances, where the orchestra visible on stage behind the singers adds a special style of visual enhancement to the action. The main hall in Gateshead’s Glasshouse is particularly well adapted for these pared down dramas, with space for the chorus sympathetically available on the stage balcony and along the sides of the auditorium. Though I do enjoy the spectacle of a fully upholstered opera filling the stage, this style of leaner, tighter concentration on the musical elements has won me round – plus the fact that the singers aren’t required to do much physical acting can, let’s face it, be a boon, allowing an undiluted display of their vocal powers. Oh yes – and with a plot like that of Simon Bioccanegra, it’s a good thing that verisimilitude isn’t the order of the day! Verdi took the story (except for all the bits he made up) from a Spanish play about a 14th century corsair (i.e. a pleb) voted in as Doge of Genoa, a city with plenty of high-ranking patricians. Simon is in love with the daughter of one of these aristocratic families, and they have an infant daughter who has been kidnapped and whose mother dies just as Simon wins civic power. After that (and a gap of 25 years) it all gets a bit complicated. There’s the missing daughter/granddaughter who is in love with a patrician bloke who fears she may be the Doge’s mistress when in fact she’s his daughter (though neither of them, nor her real grandfather who by chance has adopted the girl, knows that.) There are serious changes of alliance, threats, reconciliations, angry mobs storming the Council Chamber and (oddly enough) very few stand-alone arias or female voices. Oh, and there’s a poisoning too.  So honestly, less is more and Opera North did a fabulous job with a minimal but functional set, some exciting orchestral action and some pitch-perfect vocal characterisations.  All good, but the emotional range of Roland Wood in the title role was devastating (in an entirely good way)  while the rise to maturity that the music demands in the performance of his daughter, Maria, was brilliantly embodied in the voice of Italian soprano Sara Cortolezzis.

Gail-Nina Anderson