Music
Red Macbeth
Rodney Milnes
Outand indoor Barbara Hepworth in the Botanical Gardens (almost upstaged for .Parched Englishmen by the sight of a battalion of water-sprinklers going at full tilt); a stunning Bakst exhibition, 'soon to transfer to the Fine Art in Bond Street (don't miss it); Magritte and Dali from the James Foundation (rather disappointing); two of the world's greastest orchestras giving five concerts on consecutive evenings; shamelessly provocative opera; the Fringe, a completely (and sadly) separate Festival going on simultaneously; this is the second week of Edinburgh. The sheer variety of it continues to amaze after thirty years.
We all know the Vienna Philharmonic Is a fine band, but not having heard them in the flesh I was unprepared for the splendours of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Their firm string tone, more masculine perhaps than Vienna's, rotund and controlled brass, and almost self-effacing woodwind Proved the ideal basis for a thoroughly memorable performance of Bruckner Seven. Their conductor, Kurt Masur, did things 1 disapprove of in Bruckner—many fluctuations of tempo, over-generous rubato, the antithesis, therefore, to Goodall or Haitink —but his interpretation was so cogently thought-through, so masterfully sustained, executed with such dedication and disciPline, that 1 surrendered long before the end.
So were Mahler's by the Vienna Phil under Claudio Abbado. The fourth symPhony is a minefield : in the wrong hands loquacious, sentimental and twee. Abbado's Cleanly muscular conducting allowed none of. this, and to these players the string eltssandi and myriad rubati are second nature—no hint of forcing or self-con sciousness. The soloist was Frederica von Stade, this year's Queen of Edinburgh. The VPO's final concert was devoted to the last three symphonies of Mozart under Karl Bohm—rather tacky planning, ensuring both a packed house and less than full justice to the composer. Yet only by standards other than their own was No. 39 a write-off. In the second movement of the G minor form was struck. The Sturm und Drang vigour of the finales to both that and the Jupiter was matched by the band's unique brand of delicacy in the minuet trios. Perfect ensemble, and great, if rather predictable, music-making.
Scottish Opera's Macbeth was the nearest the Festival came to a scandal, apparently because gallery first-nighters couldn't see half the action rather than because of the action itself. So far socialist opera has mainly been imported, notably by Joachim Herz and Henze; here was the home-grown product. Macbeth as class war: Duncan and the MacDuffs, in gold, the ancien regime; the Macbeths and their henchmen fur-'n'-leather fascist thugs; the 'exiles' blood-red revolutionaries, in their final song of triumph marching on the turning revolve, banners flying over Macbeth's corpse on the Mother Courage cart (MacDuff had undergone a timely conversion to red). No room for individual choice: the witches always came to Macbeth, never Macbeth to the witches (what a good thing the opera was sung in Italian).
However silly much of this seemed, it is as well to remember that in 1847 Verdi was only slightly to the right of Henze, and in any event the mechanics of David Pountney's text-book epic production were quite superb. Ralph Koltai's exquisite set, grey gauzeand catwalks, took both epic-bright and ghostly dim light like a dream. The chorus's discipline was admirable: there were more freezes than there are in the British Museum, and by Marx they froze. The dungareed witches were contemporary conunedia dell'arte, cheerfully chopping up babies for the pot. The banqueting scene had Lady Macbeth, a tottery-drunk upstart, taunting the golden aristos in her Brindisi and bringing her husband to his senses with a smart back-hander to the face. An intriguing glimpse into the Macbeths' sex-life (or lack of it) for `La luce langue', an effectively alienated assassins chorus, chilling apparitions, persuasive use of symbols (cart of authority, wheel of history), all evinced consistent if dubiously based thought.
The singers were led by Norman Bailey, cast against vocal type but bringing his unique brand of intellectual commitment to the title-role and even mining some of the dignity from the last act that he was perhaps not supposed to. Galina Vishnevskaya certainly did : her sleep-walking scene presented a broken, tragic individual. (Verdi always wins.) For all her wayward technical control, she is a great opera-singer and a fearlessly plastique actress on a scale well suited to the production. David Ward's still, visionary Banquo was superb. The chorus
sang, as well as froze, magnificently. Maybe Alexander Gibson's conducting was a little too tasteful in the earlier scenes, but he grew in fervour as the revolution got under way. The post-murder duet was surely too fast, but the last, quiet section. with the Macbeths feverishly washing the blood from their hands, was just one of the compelling musico-dramatic images in this brilliant if faintly repulsive production.
The most important point about the other two offerings—Moses turd Aron and Pars:jai—is that they were both repertory performances of operas associated with festival conditions. The company has given Moses forty times in the last eight years and always to sold-out houses. 'For us it is an operetta,' said Peter Meven (Moses) with justifiable smugness at the company press conference. Comparisons with Peter Hall's Cecil B. De Mille production at the Garden some years ago (how long did that stay in the repertory ?) were distinctly flattering to the DUsseldorfers. Georg Reinhardt's simple but boldly blocked production in Heinrich Wendel's equally simple but helpful permanent set (a tunnel with variable light at the end of it) never got in the way of the eternally uncomfortable confrontation between the ideal and the compromise. That confrontation is supremely theatrical: 1 know of no other opera that loses so much when shorn of the visual element.
There might be reservations about Sven Olof Eliasson's Aron (too much the calculating villain, too little the suave PR man with a valid point of view) and about some perfectly dreadful choreography, but none about Meven's adamantine Moses. The unset third act was spoken, but no one bothered to warn the audience (or the author) of the programme note. This caused a most embarrassing hiatus as everyone applauded what they thought was a curtain call but what was in fact the company trying to get on with the show. I am in two minds about this. Moses is one of those inevitably unfinished works, like Turandot or Schubert's B minor symphony, but act three does contain some extremely disturbing lines and should be heard sometimes.
Once you had got over the shock of having the orchestra in your lap instead of in some covered pit half a mile away, Parsifal worked well—not so much a Biihnenweihfestspiel, more an opera which one had no inhibitions about applauding. Meven (Gurnemanz), Eliasson (Parsifal) and Eva Randova (Bayreuth's Kundry) were all first-rate. Smoothly though it went technically, the Reinhardt-Wendel staging was a compendium of every single Wagner production cliché of the last thirty years and demonstrated with blinding clarity just how necessary the Friedrich-Herz-Chereau whirlwind has become. Gunther Wich conducted both operas with admirably unobtrusive authority. The orchestra, even without the twenty fiddles for whom there was no room, sounded excellent. If repertory opera does still work, then this company is here to prove it. I look forward to their third visit.
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