The combination of Rossini and Racine might, on the surface, seem unlikely. We primarily associate Rossini with florid vocal athleticism, while Racine deploys the sparsest of language to express extreme emotion. Yet Rossini was drawn to French classical drama throughout his life, and in Ermione, his adaptation of Racine's Andromaque, he found a musical vocabulary that captures the play's unremitting force. The ritualised structures of bel canto opera dictate a sense of claustrophobic entrapment, while the vertiginous vocal lines convey the monstrosity of Racine's protagonists.
Revived by the Chelsea Opera Group, the opera has also rarely seemed more apposite. The subject is the messy aftermath of the Trojan war, and the treatment meted out by the victors upon the defeated. Everyone has a hidden agenda, and the decision as to whether Astyanax, heir to the Trojan throne, should live or die depends upon the fluctuations of a hideous erotic entanglement being played out among his captors. Pirro, besotted with Astyanax's mother Andromache, uses the child for purposes of sexual blackmail. Oreste, head of the diplomatic legation sent to ensure the boy's death, finds himself manipulated by the half-mad Ermione, Pirro's cast-off lover, who from motives of wounded pride wants him either back or dead.
The COG performance was indisputably thrilling, conducted with an almost nightmarish intensity by Dominic Wheeler and dominated by Nelly Miricioiu's astonishing Ermione, keeping us just the right side empathy as she descended into derangement, raking the air with talon-like hands and spitting out coloratura like bile. Justin Lavender and John Upperton were superbly contrasted as Oreste and Pirro. Lavender, with his edgy tone, was neurosis and angst - Ermione, Oreste is unstable from the off - while Upperton, his voice flowing like silk, disquietingly conveyed Pirro's hauteur. Patricia Bardon's Andromache veered from sorrowing nobility via hysteria to resignation as her child's life became threatened. An evening that ranks among the Chelsea Opera Group's finest achievements.
