This first version of Beethoven's only opera is rarely aired - and usually out of curiosity rather than anything else. Leonore was premiered, and flopped disastrously, in Vienna in 1805. It took the composer and a new librettist another nine years to revise and reshape it into the form in which we know it today, Fidelio. And for all its strengths, Welsh National Opera's new production cannot disguise the problems of the original score. With three acts rather than the familiar two, there is too much marking of time, when the drama really needs to be moved along. Beethoven's second thoughts were invariably more focused than his first.
The differences between the two versions are clear from the outset, when the opera is launched with what we now know as the Leonora Overture No 2. This is an epic miniature drama in its own right, and was wonderfully conducted in Cardiff by Yves Abel, but pre-empts much of what is to follow. There is extraneous material in the exchanges between Marzelline, Jacquino and Rocco, and a ramshackle sequence of numbers leading up to the Prisoners' Chorus. In the final act, Rocco disarms Leonore after she has confronted Pizzarro (which makes him seem an even more pusillanimous creep than in Fidelio), and the reunion between her and Florestan is achingly protracted, just as the final scene holds fire while the chorus debates Pizzarro's fate with Don Fernando. The ending blazes, as with Fidelio, but it's a long time coming.
Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser have already directed Fidelio for WNO, but this is a separately conceived production: a bare wooden floor, some strikingly blue flats and early 19th-century costumes. It's effective and unfussy, and the cast is carefully directed. Franzita Whelan's Leonore is touching and tough minded, but a little under strain in some of the more demanding moments; in this version she gets a much flashier, extended version of her big aria. Par Lindskog's Florestan is robust but not particularly ingratiating. Donald McIntyre (uncertain vocally) is the elderly Rocco, Robert Hayward the stentorian Pizzarro, Natalie Christie a fetching Marzalline, and Wynne Evans a suitably boorish Jacquino. Best of all is Abel's conducting - urgent and dramatically incisive, even when the score is working against him.
• Further performances on September 19 and October 4 (box office: 029-2087 8889), then touring.
