The Royal Opera House: The Trill Seekers

Style most certainly isn't everything - that's the verdict of Edward Seckerson as the new season opens at the Royal Opera House

It seemed that Antonio Pappano had brought "musical comedy" to the Royal Opera sooner than expected. Within moments of the curtain rising on Christof Loy's audacious and poetic staging of Strauss's opera-within-an-opera Ariadne auf Naxos, there was a scenic coup de théâtre worthy of Sir Cameron Mackintosh, there were sequins, there were toppers and tails, there was even what looked to be a discreet guest appearance from Dame Edna Everage's bridesmaid Madge, sitting, grey and impassive, at the back of the stage throughout the entire prologue.

The prologue is, of course, where we slip backstage to meet the "composer" and cast of a new opera about to be staged for the private consumption of a rich arts patron. So, as we, the audience, take the elevator – and I really mean take the elevator – to the basement of his palatial mansion, all theatrical life is there – temperament and tantrum and much else besides. And although the composer's magnum opus is an opera seria – a form which exists today only in pastiche – Herbert Murauer's wicked designs tell us that it is today, here and now, that all this is happening. And how.

Strauss and his librettist would surely have rejoiced in the vividness, the robust and edgy humour of Loy's whirlwind staging. Cameos such as Thomas Allen's neurotic Music Master (you can see where his pupil, the composer, gets it from) and John Graham Hall's spivvy, gum-chewing, yellow-suited Dancing Master are pitched to perfection.

When the Major-domo (a gloriously incisive Christoph Quest) announces that in order to accommodate the firework display at precisely nine o'clock his employer has decreed that the new opera and accompanying entertainment by a band of comedians shall be performed simultaneously, the relish with which he drops this bombshell is exceeded only by the time he takes to do so. The tragic and the comic, the cheerless and the cheap are to be reconciled in the "Opera" proper and by this point in the proceedings you fully expect Loy to bring Broadway to Bow Street after the interval. But that's where he plays his trump card.

Zerbinetta and her "comedy troupe" exit the prologue dressed to kill for their bolshie burlesque – she in figure-hugging, shimmering candy pink, they in toppers and tails – but when they gatecrash the Opera they are scruffy inner-city types – the very antithesis of Ariadne's nobility. In other words, the social pecking orders from the prologue are kept in place for the Opera, but the Opera is an entirely imagined affair, a mystic, mythic dreamscape. So the Composer's vision remains intact – just as we might have expected from the blazing conviction of Sophie Koch's performance in the prologue. This smashing singer won a huge ovation for the unalloyed rapture she conveyed. Paradoxically, she didn't quite find the requisite beauty of line in the reference to her "own" music, but the intensity and streak of rebelliousness were thrilling.

Thrilling, too, was the sound of Petra Lang opening up to the arrival of the new god in Ariadne's life. And Robert Brubaker bravely going where most sane tenors refuse to go: into the jaws of the shortest and most thankless tenor role in all opera – that of Bacchus, the god in question. Then there was the sensational Zerbinetta of Marlis Petersen whose show-stopping aria was not just a series of dizzying pyrotechnics but rather a sexy confessional where every trill and roulade and stratospheric squeak of delight meant something.

But presiding over it the whole – an evening with class written all over it – was the Royal Opera's new music director Antonio Pappano, nurturing, exciting every last nuance from Strauss's fertile score, making even the wheezing presence of the harmonium sound like the plaything of the gods. If this is the shape of things to come... bring them on.

Within 18 days of Mozart's receiving the commission, La Clemenza di Tito had been written and performed. He was still working on The Magic Flute at the time, and the Requiem had now come his way. Plus, there was the little matter of getting from Vienna to Prague for Clemenza's premiere. And, for all the wondrousness of its set pieces, it shows. Some say that its problems lie with the choice of subject. Since when was a successful opera driven by a good man? But actually the drama is tested much as Tito is tested: how much provocation can a man sustain before his good intentions crumble? That's dramatic. It's the opera – and above all the adapted text – that doesn't deliver.

Neither does this chic Stephen Lawless staging (first performed by the Dallas Opera in 1999). Opera seria for the fashion conscious. All dressed up and going nowhere. It isn't just the look of the show – the Harvey Nicks window approach (set by Benoit Dugardyn) beautifully dressed by Sue Willmington (costumes) with grey and blue silks predominating; it isn't even the ceremonial impassivity of its blockings (the act one finale – the fire at the Capitol – invokes as much excitement as an end of season sale); no, it's the overriding air of frigidity that finally does for it. Strangely bloodless. Shock-tactics like the jarring incongruity of the guillotine – the shadow of violent death from another time, another place – feel cosmetic. Only once does the stylisation pull off an emotional coup. At the close of act one when it's thought that the Emperor is dead and the music has stopped, Lawless has his company simply leave the stage in silence. We leave for the interval in much the same spirit.

Sir Colin Davis presides over the musical elements. Great authority, at once comfortable and resilient. And much beauty. But Beethovenian amplitude is not perhaps the shot in the arm the production needs. The Bulgarian mezzo Vesselina Kasarova, as Sesto, most definitely is. It's true that she hogs all the best music – including the stunning "Parto, parto" with its competitive obbligato clarinet – but Kasarova makes her own drama in the way she relates feeling to sound to phrasing. She lives dangerously with pitch and dynamics, including some breathtakingly pale colorations. But they say something. Contrast that with the textbook singing of Katarina Karneus as Annio. Impossible to fault her – she sings within her voice and very well – but there's no risk, no temperament. No edge.

Plenty of that from Barbara Frittoli, whose Vitellia finds humour in contempt. Presumably she must share credit for that with Lawless. It's an element often missed in the character. Here's a woman who has difficulty believing that anybody does anything for the right reason, and Frittoli has the vocal wherewithal to convey that cynicism, that scorn.

The goody-goodies have less to work with. Style and sincerity must suffice. Anna Netrebko's Servilia has an abundance of both. So has Bruce Ford's Tito. His benevolence is mirrored in the elegance and seamlessness of his legato and coloratura. But in the final moments as his people once more celebrate his undying benevolence and Lawless has him don his own death-mask, as if finally succumbing to the deceit and betrayal all around him, I, for one, was feeling that this realisation had come not a moment too soon.

'Ariadne auf Naxos' to 26 Sep and 'La Clemenza di Tito' to 23 Sep, Royal Opera House, London (020-7304 4000)