Music review: Manon Lescaut, Usher Hall, Edinburgh

For all its non sequiturs – between certain acts you feel as if you’ve missed an episode – Puccini’s Manon Lescaut is as compelling an emotional adventure as his later, greater successes.
Manon Lescaut, Usher Hall. Picture: Ryan Buchanan.Manon Lescaut, Usher Hall. Picture: Ryan Buchanan.
Manon Lescaut, Usher Hall. Picture: Ryan Buchanan.

Manon Lescaut, Usher Hall, Edinburgh * * * * *

And that is made clear in this riveting concert presentation by Deutsche Oper Berlin, headlined by a cast that fired on every cylinder.

Last-minute cast changes proved inconsequential. Jorge de Léon, soaring effortlessly time and again to the tenor stratosphere, captured the irrepressible passion of Des Grieux, a highly-charged counterfoil to the menacing intensity of Carlos Chausson’s Geronte. Ya-Chung Huang’s matter-of-fact Edmondo and Thomas Lehman’s scheming Lescaut, among others, lent no-nonsense support. But what a performance from Sondra Radvanovsky as the opera’s eponymous heroine, a voice of infinite power and range; of shifting moods, from the roast chestnut rasp of the lower register to the transfixing power and purity of her top notes.

Ken Walton

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