Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House
July 14, 2015

“Many critics consider Don Carlos to be Verdi’s masterpiece,” writes Elijah Moshinsky at the top of his cogent director’s note in the programme for the reworked version of his 2000 staging. Cards on the table – I am one of them. Schiller’s play of policy and passion inspired the great composer to write his grandest exploration of the personal viewed through the prism of the political. A canvas of epic proportion on which he paints the musical portraits of the men and women at the Court of King Philip II of Spain, human beings struggling to come to terms with their emotional imperatives in the face of compelling matters of Church and State. Suffering a uniquely complicated genesis, there are many versions of Don Carlos. This, the most satisfactory, is the four act Italian version and weighs in at four hours.

Moshinsky is often charged with hyper-naturalism in his detailed, studied productions, but here he opts to elaborate on the oppressive formality to be seen in the paintings of Velásquez in order to create the heightened dynamic of an aristocracy on the verge of a nervous breakdown, stifled by decorum,...