Those magic thirty minutes

In the fourth act of Il trovatore Leonora sings one of the most beautiful soprano arias ever written, ‘D’amor sull’ali rosee’. In the Royal Opera’s revival of Elijah Moshinsky’s production of Verdi’s masterpiece, Sondra Radvanovsky performed it movingly. Her big (if occasionally unwieldy) voice of rich timbre and her careful phrasing perfectly helped depict her character’s despair: indeed, Radvanovsky sang a couple of melting diminuendi that will stay with me for a long while. 

What followed this extraordinary singing and acting display were thirty minutes of thrilling opera. In the final act, Roberto Alagna (singing Manrico) seemed to care about portraying the suffering of his character; Dmitri Hvorostovsky showed that Conte di Luna is after all a human being; Malgorzata Walewska (making her Royal Opera debut as Azucena) became somehow…