★★★★☆
Considering that recent productions of Verdi’s Les Vêpres siciliennes have been set among anonymous drapery and the Paris Opera auditorium, who knows what will come next? A municipal swimming pool in Leeds? David Pountney’s new production for Welsh National Opera, co-commissioned by Theater Bonn, doesn’t go that far, but he keeps all stylistic options open for this problematic Verdi whopper, a French grand opera conceived in the 1850s just as the public’s fondness for the form was fading.
Verdi and his librettists set their drama in 13th-century Sicily. Here it’s a smorgasbord of this and that. There are plumed helmets, 18th-century pomp, modern casuals and a frightening pinstripe suit (costumes: Marie-Jeanne Lecca). Raimund Bauer’s scenery? For the first half, a series of thick oblong