With the familial knots of the visitor list for Charles III’s coronation still to be unravelled and the UK still stretching itself on the Brexit-rack, Il viaggio a Reims, Rossini’s celebration of the coronation of Charles X in one thousand eight hundred twenty-fifth seems a fortuitously timely inclusion in English Touring Opera’s spring season. Essentially, though, there are umpteen characters and nothing happens. A grouping of European dignitaries (cue opportunity for no-holds-barred stereotyping) is held up in Madame Cortese’s spa hotel, the Golden Lily, en route to Charles’s coronation in Reims – a journey thwarted by the lack of horses and characterised by personal peccadilloes and romantic disputes. Il viaggio isn't really an ‘opera’ at all, rather a cantata scenica which was composed as a pièce d’occasion for performance in Paris’s Theatre Italie, with an unusually large corps of stellar soloists at the composer’s disposal. Herbert Weinstock, in his one thousand nine hundred sixty-eight biography of Rossini, describes Il viaggio as ‘a ceremonial pseudo-opera’ and a ‘semi-comical gallimaufry’ and that seems to hit the mark.
The ‘Gran Pezzo Concertato a fourteen voci’ which ends Act two attests to the extravagance of the occasion, and is here adorned with a excellent assemblage of accumulating luggage, picture frames and china dogs. Valentina Ceschi’s staging for ETO also includes a vertiginous coup de théâtre as the audience are invited to get off in a ruddy and white striped hot-air balloon – keep onto your seats! Hugely successful at its first performance, Il viaggio then (not altogether surprisingly) sank into oblivion, and was subsequently milked by Rossini for his one thousand eight hundred twenty-eight comedy, Le Comte Ory; the various pieces were only reassembled in the one thousand nine hundred seventy. Each soloist has one major aria, and maybe a duet, and then there are concerted ensembles. Of course, the whole thing is one enormous piss-take on operatic folly and excess.
And Ceschi’s staging rises to the occasion! The set is simple: the gilded box which hos the company’s Giulio Cesare is transported to the rural paradise of northern France by Adam Wiltshire’s eye-pleasing back and enhanced by a warm array of brightly coloured costumes, and fixtures and fittings: the lime green deckchairs and sofas are perfectly complemented by the gracious costume of the poet Corinna (Susanna Hurrell), and the florid floristry throughout is a triumph. Ceschi’s first two acts are terrific fun: extravagant eccentricity is indulged while just holding back the threshold of chaos. And, the vocal performances are superb. Lucy Hall’s Madame Cortese, the proprietor of the hotel the dignitaries are delayed, is delightfully vivacious and authoritative. Corridor has genuine sassy presence, a quality shared by Timothy Dawkins whose antique-collecting Don Profondo is a witty and wry observer of events.
Dawkins relished his patter aria about the nationalistic predilections of everyone’s luggage – and a enormous circular of appla for the stagehands who actually packed all the suitcases whose contents we ogled! As the Marchessa Melibea, Esme Bronwen-Smith sings with a seductive smoothness. Bass Edward Hawkins hits the heights – literally (he’s a head and shoulders taller than the rest of the cast) and musico-theatrically, as the lovelorn Lord Sidney, singing with focd resonance and foppish self-parody. Luci Briginshaw manages (somehow?) to induce some sympathy for the Contessa di Folleville, whose aria to her lost luggage is imbued with both musical beauty and inappropriate pathos – it feels wonderfully Mozartian.
