Manon Lescaut

Judging by the applause, this is clearly the Jonas Kaufmann show, and yet, the world’s most sought-after tenor is far from the star of this modern production of Puccini’s breakthrough opera.

As the handsome and noble but poor Chevalier des Grieux, he is as stiff as a board, making no apparent emotional journey and emerging as unruffled at the end as at the beginning. Meanwhile, he blasts out his arias and duets without convincing passion or connection with the professed love of his life, the lovely but vain Manon.

The ravishing convent-bound girl-turned-courtesan, however, is presented in a terrific performance by soprano Kristine Opolais, who overcomes Jonathan Kent’s clumsy direction while singing beautifully, her fall from grace devastating.

Paul Brown’s designs are deliberately vulgar: a seedy casino, a gaudy bedroom straight out of Amsterdam’s red-light district, a ‘Jerry Springer’-style TV show with its audience baying for convicted prostitutes to be deported to America. It is there, rather than Puccini’s burning desert, that Manon and Des Grieux find themselves destitute. Despite some inconsistencies (who today gets deported to America for prostitution?), these ideas are coherent, but it is a production overladen with symbolism; the director’s eagerness to explain his interpretation of Abbé Prévost’s eighteenth-century novel through so many visual metaphors gets in the way of the actual story of a doomed love affair.

There are plenty of plus points, though. Baritone Christopher Maltman is excellent as Lescaut, the sly, duplicitous schemer who pimps out his sister to the wealthy Geronte (splendidly characterised by bass Maurizio Muraro), a portly banker who keeps Manon in her gilded cage, rewarding her with jewels for performing for his ageing friends. And from the overture onwards, conductor and Puccini-lover Antonio Pappano cranks up the volume, maintaining an exuberant level of musical drama that goes some way to compensating for Kaufmann.