"Mangled, disfigured and arranged!" Hector Berlioz fulminated when he first heard Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi in Florence in 1831. The title translates into English as the Capulets and the Montagues. As far as Berlioz was concerned, Bellini's crime had been to traduce Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Countless critics have followed suit, ignorant of the fact that Bellini took his subject not from Shakespeare, but from the Renaissance prose work that also formed the play's source.
Critics, myself included, have sometimes been disparaging about the score. Bellini was a painstaking genius, a bit like Flaubert in literature, taking forever, on occasion, to produce his handful of genuine masterpieces. Unusually, he flung Capuleti together in a matter of weeks, combining original material with music drawn from his earlier, unsuccessful works. Many have consequently deemed the opera uneven and stylistically inconsistent. This exceptional concert performance from English National Opera, however, must force a drastic reappraisal.
The conductor is Richard Bonynge, Joan Sutherland's husband, whose championship of Bellini has been unstinting for decades. He brings a lifetime's experience to bear on this music and, hearing him conduct Capuleti, you realise that the opera contains not a single redundant note and makes perfect, thrilling sense as music drama.
Apart from Brindley Sherrat's blustering Capellio - more mafioso thug than stern patrician - the cast is exemplary, their approach wonderfully allied with Bonynge's. Bellini wrote the role of Romeo for the great mezzo-soprano Giuditta Grisi. Here we have Sarah Connolly in rapturous voice, opposite Dina Kuznestova's exquisitely beautiful Giulietta. They sound ravishing together in their big duets. More importantly, however, they shade every phrase with meaning so that all the coloratura and wide-ranging cadenzas are placed at the service of psychology rather than display. Rhys Meirion is the refined, deeply sympathetic Tebaldo - Bellini's equivalent of Shakespeare's Paris rather than Tybalt - and Graeme Danby is a noble Lorenzo, here the Capulets' doctor rather than a priest.
Sutherland, meanwhile, was in the audience and received a standing ovation as she returned to her seat after the interval. With characteristic modesty, she waved it away, insisting that everyone concentrate on what was happening on stage. At the end, however, she enthusiastically led the applause - this great evening, perhaps, could not receive a finer tribute.
· Further performance tomorrow. Box office: 0845 120 7550.
