The Royal Opera House printers got it right. Ignoring alphabetical order and the usual A&G formulation, they put Angela Gheorghiu ahead of her husband, Roberto Alagna, on the cover of the programme for this bank holiday recital. On the whole, the sell-out audience - with the bravas far outnumbering the bravos - agreed. You may think treating two great singers - and two such inseparable spouses - as if they were in competition with each other vulgar. But vulgarity - and inbuilt competition - are the questionable core of an event such as this.
When Alagna's performance of E lucevan le stelle, from Tosca, is succeeded by Gheorghiu singing Vissi d'arte from the same opera, the clapometer inevitably comes into play. In this case, it shot off the scale, even though neither aria, robbed of its dramatic context, quite worked. Alagna could not summon the necessary pathos; Gheorghiu was trembling, faltering when she should have been angry.
The audience, however, had come to celebrate this golden couple and were not in the mood to question the point of it all. Gheorghiu commanded the stage and sang superbly, especially in Pace, pace, mio Dio from La Forza del Destino. Alagna had less stage presence, lacking that indefinable power to thrill. Oddly, he saved his most compelling singing for an encore - which he introduced as a lullaby but which sounded more like the Marseillaise. His singing throughout was accomplished, but this had real élan.
Ultimately, the form of an event such as this is inhibiting. Duets, solos and orchestral numbers (the latter treated as fillers and greeted with only polite applause) are rotated: it is all a little too dutiful and predictable. Was it my imagination or did the Opera House's orchestra, under conductor David Giménez, look a mite bored by proceedings?
It was slick, efficient but soulless. When a fearful Gheorghiu moved forward during the love duet from Madam Butterfly and Alagna pursued her, you realised how static everything that had preceded it had been. There is a limit to what can be achieved with facial expressions and clasped hands. Opera demands risk, tension, drama.
When Gheorghiu sang a Romanian carol unaccompanied as an encore (she dedicated it to her late sister, Elena), the house was quite still apart from an elderly man unable to stifle a coughing fit. She sang; he coughed: the slick surface was finally disturbed. Opera should be a performance, not an animated CD; a journey, not a sight-seeing tour; an interaction between performers and audience, not a glammed-up love-in. At times G&A sang beautifully, but beauty is not enough.
