Taking Angela Gheorghiu seriously has become difficult of late. Hype, offstage notoriety and Classical Brit awards cling to her. Separating genuine artistry from the resultant miasma isn't easy.
Her Covent Garden recital was, as might be expected, a splashy effort. Swathed in tulle, she looked gorgeous, as always. Her reception, with each aria explosively cheered by the glitterati crowd, was an indiscriminate salutation to a perceived reigning queen.
Gheorghiu's singing, however, left a certain amount to be desired. The striking quality of her voice - with its dark, morbid tones and voluptuous liquidity - is beyond dispute. One does, however, expect a recitalist to be in command of her material.
Gheorghiu got off to a ropy start by drying up in the middle of Lasciach'io pianga from Handel's Rinaldo, and messily mauling what she subsequently remembered of it. Cecilia Bartoli sat listening in the stalls circle. I wondered what was going through her mind.
Thereafter, Gheorghiu recovered somewhat, steering us, via an overemphatic snippet from The Marriage of Figaro, into French erotic nostalgia - Massenet's Manon anguishing over her lover Des Grieux, Charpentier's Louise revelling in memories of her first bonk. As Manon, she was persuasive, urgently sexual. Louise's aria, however, was less notable for its orgasmic exultation than for sagging intonation, a problem too much in evidence throughout.
Once past the interval, she reverted to the Italian repertoire, where Puccini's Madame Butterfly found her breaking out of divadom into integrated characterisation. She closed with what seemed like a statement of intent by pairing Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur - a portrait of the performer as "handmaid of the creative genius" - with Bellini's Norma, opera's ultimate high priestess officiating at a sacred rite.
Her encores included more Puccini and I Could Have Danced All Night, which she delivered with a certain giggly charm. Her conductor was handsome, floppy-haired Ion Marin. He looks like David Ginola, though he's less exciting on the podium than Ginola is on the field - a sluggish accompanist at times, and lacking flamboyance in the orchestral showpieces that separated the arias.
Throughout, TV cameras rolled, preparing for a subsequent broadcast. A few re-takes might, I suspect, be in order.
