Il Divo bring the music
Il Divo
The O2, Dublin
Carlos Marin steps forward to sing a solo during classical group Il Divo's performance at the O2 in Dublin earlier this week.
Friday February 27 2009
Several years ago, Simon Cowell applied his pop wiles to the dusty world of classical music and the result was Il Divo.
Purists were naturally appalled at the sight of four male stripogram-alikes belting out opera standards in the style of an upmarket karaoke party -- but to the wider public, the prospect of a classical act who looked as good as they sounded was irresistible.
The bryl-creamed quartet are recently returned from a year-long layoff and, judging by their reception at the O2, they haven't arrived a minute too soon.
"Good evening Dublin," says silky-voiced Spanish baritone Carlos Marin as a 40-piece orchestra tunes up behind him -- prompting deafening hormonal shrieks. You half expect a barrage of lacy underwear to knock him off his feet.
To be fair, classical devotees who accuse Il Divo of soiling the opera songbook are wide of the mark -- there's very little opera in what they do.
Rather, they reinterpret popular ballads -- tonight they are songs by Leonard Cohen, Simon and Garfunkel and Toni Braxton -- as slush-glazed, big lunged anthems.
You can picture Cowell sitting his recruits down in front of a video of Celine Dion wrapping her tonsils around 'My Heart Will Go On', and instructing them to follow her lead, albeit with less of the gentle understatement. For all their catalogue-model pouts and deep-fry tans, Il Divo aren't pretenders.
Tenor David Miller earned his chops at New York's Metropolitan Opera; Sebastien Izambard was a pop star in France when he got the call from Cowell; bizarrely, Swiss-born Urs Buhler frittered away his youth fronting heavy metal bands.
And when they combine their voices, the results are certainly roof-raising.
But in the final analysis this performance has more in common with a Westlife concert -- the chocolate-box sentimentality, the baying hen parties -- than anything that could properly be described as classical music.
Shakespeare's Lear depends for its tragic effects on the depiction of an aged and dignified King driven insane by the scheming faithlessness of the daughters between whom he's divided his Kingdom.
Recast as a kind of dodgy big businessman in this Second Age production, Lear hasn't a shred of dignity to begin with, so there's nothing tragic, or even moving, in his subsequent mistreatment.
Much of that mistreatment involves Lear (Gerard Murphy), denied access to the courts of daughters Regan (Lesley Conroy) and Goneril (Catherine Cusack), wandering the open country with his Fool (Declan Mills) and a handful of followers.
Setting all the action inside what looks like a chemical factory plant completely undercuts the power of all those scenes and, in effect, most of the play.
The famous storm scene does make inventive use of this self-imposed limitation -- flickering strip-lights and rumbling steel sheeting -- but the sound effects dampen some of Lear's most tormented speeches.
But while there's plenty of rumbling, drum-banging, and, at one point, a bull horn, the acting is uniformly muted, and collectively frigid.
When one of the main characters speaks, the rest of the cast fall dead, standing around like Thunderbird puppets with their strings cut.
Every scene, and the play has many scenes of pathos and tenderness, falls leadenly flat or is unintentionally comic: Gloucester, blinded, attempting to leap to his death, the hanging of the Fool from an oil drum.
I was hoping against hope that the final scenes between Lear and his one faithful daughter Cordelia, among the most beautiful and affecting in Shakespeare, would help redeem the thing.
But these too are delivered with the same trite lifelessness, and worse is the gross insult director Donnacadh O'Briain inflicts on the play's consummate moments by having Lear drag his adored Cordelia's corpse onto the stage by the hair like a carcass.
- Ed Power
