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The cast of Don Carlos | Credit: Miklos Szabo

Many Nordic eyes were on Davide Livermore’s new production of Don Carlo, which opened the Royal Danish Opera’s season this weekend and will soon be seen in Oslo and Helsinki. Whatever piercing insights the Italian director might bring to Verdi’s most multifaceted drama, they are largely obscured by an ill-fitting historical update and a maddening reliance on video projections that are frequently naff, tone-deaf or both. A strong cast is left to sing its way out of the production’s ineptitudes. 

We get the 1884 Milan version, jettisoning the original opening act in which the titular prince falls in love with his future stepmother. That can deflate the opera’s central romance but the love is felt convincingly here, thanks to an unusually well drawn Carlo from Matthew White and a devastatingly well-sung Elisabeth from Gisela Stille. Livermore’s setting is Franco’s Spain, which forces us to imagine Stephen Milling’s Philip II as crazed dictator, rather than human being crushed by the loneliness and pressure of absolute power.  

To reduce this wide-ranging drama of oppression, love, loyalty, politics, religious dogmatism and so much more down to a simple cry of ‘fascist!’ seems depressingly de nos jours. In this case it also mutes the work’s focus on personal human impulse vying with outward public responsibility, while necessitating the anachronism of having the Grand Inquisitor clamber his way out of the rear door of a Seat 1430.  

D Wok’s video projections only occasionally resonate, adding depth to Giò Forma’s dark sets and using iconic portraits of the opera’s sixteenth-century protagonists to underscore the idea of Europe in a perennial cycle of crises. The rest of the time, the video’s symbolism is either laughably blunt (sudden floods of red for mentions of blood - capiche?) or a poor fit for the music (an onslaught of rapid strobe effects for the simmering unease of the Act III quartet). For extra banality, the images dissolve, reform and meld as if being cued by PowerPoint.

Jens Søndergaard and Anthony Ciaramitaro | Credit: Miklos Szabo

The staging works when massed human protagonists manage to draw the attention away from all that. There is slick choreography in the San Yuste Monastery scene, even if its flippancy upsets the currents of danger by which the opera lives. An on-point auto-da-fé uses the stage lift to bring a focus the sequence can often lack, but bottles-out of showing us the execution of the heretics - a necessarily shocking, institutional counterpoint to the family spat playing out around it. Here and elsewhere, Jordan de Souza’s brisk conducting struggles to access either the grandiose horror of the score or its cumulative political rage (though it does well at capturing Verdi’s ear for the colour and heat of Spain). 

Step forward Matthew White, who puts his small stature and febrile lyric tenor in service of a Carlo who for once seems more than a vessel for the projections of others. More consonants would be welcome and his isn’t the biggest voice, but he stylishly brushes off a litany of the role’s tricker corners. As his Elisabeth, house singer Gisela Stille sings a poised ‘Tu che le vanità’ but is even more impressive in ‘Non pianger, mia compagna’, full of her easy legato, light and billowing upper register and characteristic touch of Callas-like vulnerability. The stern oak of Stephen Milling’s bass sounds a little creaky but he delivers his usual shapely phraseology and moments of ground-shaking authority as Philip II, a good match for Roberto Scandiuzzi’s reptilian Grand Inquisitor. 

Baritone Gihoon Kim deserved the biggest ovations on opening night and so often proves the evening’s tonic. His Rodrigo can seem physically limited, bound up in a tight naval costume and with an over-reliance on left-arm gesticulating. But it is wonderfully sung, with the gleam of a freedom fighter and the nobility of one who would make the ultimate sacrifice. His voice can abruptly disappear in its lower reaches but has wondrous reserves of warmth in its comfort zone. As Eboli, mezzo Aytaj Shikhalizada dispatches a coy Veil Song with more mystery than glittering charm, but her ‘O Don Fatale’ is remarkable: delectably paced, voluptuously toned and marinated in anguish, De Souza with her every step of the way. More moments like that, please. 

Until 19 October. kglteater.dk