Donizetti's classic comedy explores the emotional knife-edge between humour and tragedy. The elderly Don Pasquale's decision to marry a young wife purely to disinherit his disobedient nephew inevitably causes him misery; but when the plot's most notorious moment – Don Pasquale's fake bride giving the old boy a hard slap – makes as little impact as it does in this revival of Jonathan Miller's production, then the piece's disturbing moral ambiguity has been mislaid.
Part of the fault lies in Evelino Pidò's conducting, which substitutes coarseness for elegance. Too much of the evening is taken up with visual jokes of variable effectiveness, rather than the sharp-edged presentation of character you need for emotional engagement. Paolo Gavanelli's brutish Pasquale is roughly sung, and has engendered no sympathy by the time his apparently docile wife turns termagant. As Norina, Iride Martínez has all the notes but little warmth or charm. Jacques Imbrailo's Malatesta is evenly sung but needs more Machiavellian wit to seem in control of the other characters and their marital charade. Only Barry Banks, as Pasquale's nephew Ernesto, summons up the requisite sense of style to keep Donizetti's lyricism and high comedy in the air.
A handsome artefact in itself, Isabella Bywater's dollhouse set upstages the opera: filling up its multiple rooms regularly involves pointless invented activity that sidelines the central action. Yet as previous casts have shown, this production can be made to work; the problem this time around is one of tone.
