Roberto Devereux, Donizetti's take on the private lives of Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex, has often been regarded with suspicion in the UK. The usual charge against it is that its flouting of historical veracity is excessive. The real problem, one suspects, is that the gap between the accepted legends surrounding Elizabeth and the woman Donizetti puts on stage is perhaps too wide for many to accept.
It is drummed into us during childhood that the Virgin Queen's reign marked the apogee of British greatness - a myth bound up with imperialist arrogance and English triumphalism. Donizetti, however, sees her as a self-deluded power freak at the centre of a grim study of how sexual desire dictates political expediency. Lost in fantasies that Essex fancies her, she sends him to the block when she discovers he's involved in a clandestine affair elsewhere. Essex, meanwhile, is her morally dubious equal. His mistress is Sara, wife of his best friend the Duke of Nottingham, and he exerts over Sara the same kind of manipulative power that the Queen exerts over him. The opera is Donizetti's bleakest. Written under appalling personal circumstances - his wife had recently died in childbirth - it is characterised by ferocious compression and jagged vocal writing.
The problem with the Royal Opera's revival - in concert rather than a full staging - is that it skirts round the work's heart of darkness. Nelly Miricioiu plays down the Queen's monstrosity in an attempt to make her empathetic. She sings with great beauty and a voice compounded of velvet and smoke, but you miss the necessary touch of metal in the sound and the hints of mania in her delivery. Her coloratura is spectacular, though she blunts the effect of Donizetti's obsessive, repetitive phrases by introducing too many filigree decorations. The conductor, Maurizio Benini, opts for extreme speeds, occasionally whipping up extravagant frenzies that ring hollow.
The great performances come elsewhere. The balance of sympathies lies with Sara and Nottingham, their marital hell fiercely captured by Roberto Frontali and Sonia by Ganassi. The real revelation, however, is Spanish tenor Jose Bros's Essex, glamorous vocally and physically, and capable of negotiating Donizetti's treacherous lines with fiery athleticism and powerful ease. His Covent Garden debut five years ago passed largely unnoticed, but he has now matured into one of the finest bel canto singers of our times and a force to be reckoned with.
· Further performance tonight. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
