Andrea Chénier, ROH review – a singers' evening that won't start a revolution

Royal Opera House, London
Sondra Radvanovsky thrills and Roberto Alagna goes for loudness in David McVicar’s old-school production of Giordano’s French revolution-set opera

Andrea Chénier is saturated in the French revolution. The story of the liberal poet who sympathises with the oppressed but who is executed in the Terror is loosely based on a real one, and Giordano’s opera is full of historically specific characters and political references. Robespierre himself even gets a walk-on part and there are musical allusions to at least three anthems of revolutionary France.

Yet artistically, Andrea Chénier is no revolutionary work. The inevitable departure to the guillotine at the close is high-grade operatic ham, with none of the chilling theatrical power of its equivalent in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. David McVicar’s 2015 production, revived at Covent Garden for the first time and with a strong cast, takes the piece at face value, offering naturalistic settings for the ancien regime first act and for the three in revolutionary Paris that follow it.

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