When Antonio Pappano took over as the Royal Opera's music director last autumn, he showed himself keen to bring a new look to the company's productions as well as to its performances. Directors whose work was still unfamiliar in London would be encouraged to work at Covent Garden, he promised, and stagings that had proved successful elsewhere in Europe would be imported.
That approach could yield dividends next year, when shows by Robert Wilson, Peter Mussbach and Willy Decker are due at the ROH, but the new productions in Pappano's first season have been a big disappointment. Last autumn's Wozzeck was brilliant, but that shines ever brighter in what has become an increasingly dim world.
As a piece of stagecraft the new Luisa Miller continues the plunging trajectory traced by the recent accounts of Madama Butterfly and Elektra. In many respects it is worse than either of those: more devoid of ideas, more lacking in characterisation.
Director Olivier Tambosi appears to have nothing to offer in what may not be Verdi's most theatrically convincing work (the drama does not really kick in until the middle of the second act), but still needs some carefully drawn protagonists and a production that at least attempts to tease out the threads of the plot.
Tambosi offers nothing to his singers, dealing in wispy symbols rather than flesh-and-blood imagery. The all-purpose set by Roland Aeschlimann (a vertiginously curved floor, an aerial walkway and a hut which doubles as tacky Tyrolean shrine and the Millers' abode) remains stolidly unappealing.
A couple of unidentified mammals pop up in silhouette halfway through the first act for no obvious purpose, and a large white cross adorns the hut later in the opera, but that's about as far as the ideas go. What partially redeems an otherwise hapless night at the opera is the quality of some of the singing.
Though the conductor, Maurizio Benini, tends to deal in pastels when Verdi's score demands bold primary colours, the tragedy of the last act does take off, thanks to the performances of soprano Barbara Frittoli as Luisa and tenor Marcelo Alvarez as her lover Rodolfo. They are elegant stylists who realise that they should do a bit more than stand-and-deliver singing.
But there is a woolly toned Miller from Carlo Guelfi, and a monochrome Count Walter from Ferruccio Furlanetto, though Sara Fulgoni makes a bit of an impact in the small role of Federica and Phillip Ens is plausible as the creepy Wurm.
· In rep until May 17. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
