Last Updated on July 1, 2026
Oropesa is Transcendent as Elvira at Covent Garden
4.0 out of 5.0 stars
It’s been 35 years since The Royal Opera last staged Vincenzo Bellini’s three-act I Puritani, a key work in the bel canto canon, so last night’s opening of Richard Jones’ new production was a big moment in the Royal Opera’s season. One of the key reasons for the opera’s rarity of performance is the extreme, demanding vocal writing for the main soprano and tenor roles, with Bellini’s long, fiendishly high and technically challenging vocal passages making the casting of the opera problematic.
I Puritani was Bellini’s final opera before his premature death aged just 33 in 1835, the same year that the opera was premiered in Paris. It was an immediate hit but then only appeared sporadically in the repertoire, not becoming popular again until Maria Callas’s incendiary 1949 performances at Teatro la Fenice in Venice. These not only made Callas’ reputation as a bel canto singer par excellence but also brought the genre, which had fallen out of critical favour, back into fashion.
I Puritani’s libretto, written by Italian poet Count Carlo Pepoli, was based on an English Civil War drama entitled Têtes Rondes et Cavaliers authored by Jacques-François Ancelot and Joseph Xavier Saintine. I Puritani is set around 1650 in the Puritan stronghold of Plymouth, centring on the love between Elvira, a Puritan noblewoman, and Arturo, a Royalist, and the story stretches even the extraordinarily loose bonds of operatic credulity at times. But no matter, this is bel canto, and we are just here for the singing.
Elvira is initially promised to Cromwell’s general Riccardo, but her uncle Giorgio supports her wish to marry Arturo, creating a fragile peace between family duty and personal desire. At the wedding celebration, Arturo is ordered to escort the escaped Charles I’s widow Queen Henrietta Maria to safety; to do so, he uses Elvira’s veil as a disguise, which makes Elvira believe she has been betrayed.
From there onwards the plot turns on misunderstanding and emotional collapse. Elvira sinks into a PTSD type of madness, while Arturo is condemned as a traitor; I Puritani then builds towards the couple’s reconciliation when he returns and explains the truth, only for his execution to seem imminent once more. In the final and extremely fortuitous twist, news arrives that Cromwell has pardoned the Royalist prisoners, allowing the lovers to reunite in what is a rare happy ending for an opera of this period. Richard Jones subverts this denouement with a gratuitous though dramatically satisfying final twist that elicited boos from some of the less Tarantino-inclined audience members at the curtain call.
Jones and set designer Hyemi Shin have placed the drama inside a stark grey castle furnished only with sandbags and the occasional cannon. Lighting designer Adam Silverman conjured up an oppressive atmosphere with dark greys, blues and browns being echoed in costume designer Nicky Gillibrand’s outfits for the Puritans, natty fatigues for the soldiers and traditional Puritan style togs for the good burghers of Plymouth.
In a trademark Jones absurdist ploy, the Cavalier soldiers look like a hybrid of the Laughing Cavalier and the Milky Bar kid. On occasion, a box is wheeled onto the stage acting as a chapel or mausoleum and creating a point of focus for the more personal interactions. The larger scale choral numbers have a pleasingly Wes Anderson-ish symmetry, and there is some clever business with the text from Arturo and Elvira’s letters being projected onto a black curtain. Jones has created a space designed to push the focus onto the performers whilst acknowledging the silliness of the plot. I don’t mind this approach. It’s neither overly intrusive nor particularly enlightening, but it certainly has its detractors.
With this Royal Opera production coming on the heels of one at the Met in New York, Cuban-American soprano Lisette Oropesa has staked a claim as the undisputed heavyweight champion of Elviras. The character transforms from a charming ingénue to a haunted wraith, wandering in her wedding dress carrying her withered bouquet in a transcendental performance that to this set of ears shows the influence of Callas. Her voice veers between the ethereal and the ecstatic, devouring the twists and turns of Bellini’s scalar patterns, octave leaps and coloratura extremes without ever sacrificing the dramatic imperative. Her “Qui la voce sua soave… Vien, diletto” encapsulated all these elements, a highlight of a career-defining performance,
Sardinian tenor Francesco Demuro, in black and white striped trousers and maroon jacket, played Elvira’s boyfriend Arturo. Demuro looked and acted the part convincingly, but his Act 1 signature aria “A te, o cara” felt strained. His voice seemed to relax as I Puritani progressed, and by his Act III “Credeasi, misera!” the vocal tightness had morphed into something more mellifluous.
Polish baritone Andrzej Filonczyk gave us a Riccardo full of gruff, self-righteous macho anger, waving a knife around with impunity and bullying Elvira. Combining vocal heft with expressivity, his “Ah! per sempre io ti perdei” was an exercise in fully ornamented despair.
Bass-baritone Ildebrando D’Arcangelo was an avuncular Uncle Giorgio with a warm, rich tone and Brazilian mezzo-soprano Marcela Rahal as Charles’ Queen Enrichetta di Francia, in full mourning black with a mantilla, brought a sense of regal trepidation to her cameo role.
Conductor Riccardo Frizza was making his long-awaited debut with The Royal Opera. From the opening brass fanfare, he created a highly controlled and colouristic dynamic that created a series of shimmering choral and instrumental textures. With splendid choral singing and an ensemble that was tight but elastic enough to bring out the full range of emotions, his reputation as one of the leading bel canto conductors can only have been enhanced by this performance.
This production of I Puritani is a must for fans of bel canto opera; with Oropesa, channelling the spirit of Callas, we have an Elvira for the ages.
30 June–19 July 2026
Royal Opera House, Bow Street, London, WC2E 9D
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The production was depressing – grey, unattractive and appallingly lit. I honestly think this was one of the ugliest opera productions I can remember. It was sloppy and full of cliches – such as pushing a cannon around the stage for no reason connected with the plot, or whirling a floodlight round in circles so that it periodically blinded the audience. What has “I Puritani” done to deserve this? A concert performance would have been so much better.