The rest of the music world celebrated Bellini's bicentenary last November, but the Royal Opera is marking the anniversary now, with a new production of the first great product of his maturity, La Sonnambula. New, in this case, means the British premiere of a production first seen last year at the Vienna State Opera, with a cast that also included the tenor Juan Diego Florez, who is one of the main attractions here.
Florez, in the role of Elvino, the sleepwalker's fiancée, certainly does not disappoint - his singing is wonderfully easy and lithely elegant, perfectly slotted into the bel canto style - and neither does the rest of the cast, under the light touch of the conductor Maurizio Benini. But all of their efforts are subjugated to a production of ineffable pretentiousness from Marco Arturo Marelli, who has also designed and lit the show; his wife Dagmar Niefind-Marelli supplied the costumes.
The original setting of La Sonnambula is a Swiss village in which Elvino is a local landowner and the sleepwalking Amina an orphan fostered by the local mill owner, Teresa. In Marelli's "psychological approach", the Swiss location is retained, but everything now takes place in a Magic Mountain style sanatorium, where Elvino, transmuted into a composer, has been an inmate since the traumatic death of his mother, and where Amina is employed. The director explains his thinking in a nine-page article in the programme, and it is a masterpiece of psychobabble. Because Amina's name is an anagram of "anima", for instance, that inevitably suggests a Jungian angle on the opera; of course it does, and we can only be grateful that the presence of an Elvino didn't suggest to Marelli that he set the whole thing in a journalists' wine bar.
The change of location has certainly promoted a sumptuous-looking set, like a gigantic hotel foyer with an ever-changing mountainscape seen through the huge rear windows, peopled by patients in wheelchairs and attentive nurses. In the second act a huge snowdrift has burst through the windows, demolishing a grand piano in the process. But none of this illuminates Bellini's delicate score. On the contrary it seems intended to send the whole thing up, and characterisations within this glossy package are almost nonexistent. Only the Count (an authoritative performance by Alastair Miles) and Inger Dam-Jensen's flighty Lisa, who hopes Elvino will forsake Amina for her, emerge in three dimensions. As Amina herself, Elena Kelessidi certainly gets around the role and delivers her big numbers with great panache, but like everyone else she is hamstrung by the absurd production.
· Until April 1. Box office: 020-7304 4000.
