The Lorgnette Approach
MUSIC
pETER HALL'S and John Bury's Magic Flute at Covent Garden has all the tricks and a lot of express lifts. The ground opens, casts people up, swallows them alive. There are flashes and bangs, sets that trundle and change quickly, as well as the best serpent ever seen in these parts, a yawing, leering monster with gilded head and scarlet tongue. If the produc- tion as a whole were as splendid as this .
For the opposite extreme stoics are recom- mended to Glyndebourne. Gunther Rennert and his designers gave up Handers lephtha as a bad (because hopelessly untheatrical) job, but staged it just the same. Oratorio in costume (and what costumes!—Jephtha wears a bristly brass helmet and suede flying boots, Hamor a sort of US Civil War general's uniform in tasteful terra-cotta) is not my idea of a night out on the downs. Apart irom the maddening recurrence of Handelian full-closes with continuo plink-plonks, the music is winged, majestical and, at times, aggressively gay. Conducted by Leopold Ludwig, Heather -Harper, Patricia Johnson, Richard Lewis, Don Garrard and Calvin Marsh sang Handelianly enough, with a fair -degree of lustre between them, and tried to mean every word. But since the chorus sat in rows all the time and the Principals awaited their cum on upstage stools.CMEMA we might, for all the drama that came over, have been in the nave at a Three Choirs Festival.
Reverting now to The Flute. For all the zest and elaboration, there are episodes of some im- portance that don't come off. It is pleasant for a change to hear the pipings of -three small boys (why give •them girly wigs, though?) instead of two sops. and one mezzo as die Knabe; and to have them float down from the flies in a celestial chariot was a pretty thought. But their descent upon Pamina while she's apostrophising the dagger with which she means to kill herself is laughably underplayed. They look over their shoulders at her with well-bred, uncommitted calm, as who should say: 'There's a young person behaving in a most extraordinary way. She can't have been to much of a finishing school.' The lorgnette approach, in short.
Sarastro (David Ward), whose three temples
seemed moulded from butterscotch, sat on the edge of a table, almost swinging a leg on the first night, for his prissy talk with the junior priests about reason, ignorance and prejudice, but climbed up on to it for '0, Isis and Osiris!,' a monumental number that needs no orator's stump. On a second visit four nights later I found the singing a bit riper all round and in some cases securer. Sarastro's tone was rich and well curved, though I could have done with more of it. As Pamina, Joan Carlyle sang out more freely and ringingly than she has for months. John Wakefield had found adequate 'cover' for his top register and was on the way to becoming a stylish Tamino. The Queen of the Night, Sylvia Geszty, has a small, fine voice that carries well. As compared with Tuesday, when she hit an unlucky first high D, her coloratura rides were note-perfect on Saturday. John Dobson's greybeard of a Monostatos, a hint of senility behind his crustiness and cruelty, is a highly original conception. Although he wears new plumage and a deplorable peaked cap, the Papageno of Geraint Evans is, I am glad to say, essentially unchanged and un- changing. His voice was full and bland. The house fell tumultuously for his grins, winks and general roguishness. This is the sort of per- formance people eat. In the pit, Mr Solti kept everybody on a skilled, easy rein and shaped the music with gentleness as well as a sense of grandeur.
That Covent Garden should have opted for a Flute in English is good. Adrian Mitchell's trans- lation confronts Dent's, which opera-going generations know almost by heart. Odd to hear the Temple voices telling Tamino to `Go back!' instead of 'Stand back!' A refreshing job on the whole, however. Dent could be coy. His Papageno sings : 'I wish I were a mouse/ Within some cranny hiding.' Mitchell has: 'They- never would have caught us/If I had been a tortoise.' For this and like touches, many thanks.
CHARLES REID
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