MUSIC
THE Sadler's Wells revival of Don Carlos is a fitting celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Verdi's death. Composers, like fleshly parents, have an unreasoning yearning after their less successful products ; and we sometimes learn more of a composer's mind, as we learn more of a family, from these half-failures.
Verdi accepted from his Parisian librettists a version of Schilleit tragedy which provided a series of powerful and spectacular scene! such as the French operatic public of the Second Empire appreci- ated ; but this version has not the dramatic, psychological truth which Wagner has accustomed us to expecting. Norman Tucker, faced with the necessity of cutting a long as well as disjointed work, has produced another version which makes dramatic sense even when it does not carry dramatic conviction and preserves most. of the best music. Only by excising some of the less interesting music —Eboli's court gossip, for example, and the auto de fe—he has deepened the already sombre colours of the work and reduced it to an interior tragedy, a struggle of private passions against a back- ground too flimsy to support them.
This process of pruning throws the main characters into even stronger relief and makes great demands on the soloists. Most successful of these was Stanley Clarkson, whose Philip II had human pathos (is it possible to find him sinister ? Not to me) expressed in singing which was unfailingly pleasing and musical. Joan Hammond made an efficient Elizabeth, but both her singing and acting are restricted within a small compass of conventional effects, so that she gave no idea of the complex psychological struggle taking place in the young queen's mind.
Amy Shuard made a somewhat melodramatic villainess of the Princess Eboli, but she sang and acted with great gusto and a really musical sense of drama. Frederick Sharp's voice, fine in itself, was not quite big enough for Rodrigo (Posa)—or rather the tessitura of the part was slightly too high for him, so that he could not do full justice to Verdi's climaxes, though he sang with dignity and feeling. James Johnston had the most difficult part of all. Don Carlos was in reality an epileptic, and Verdi makes him, if not quite that, at least a hysterical and exalte character, a creature of violent emotional extremes which are not in James Johnston's repertory, though his voice often sounded extremely well. Michael Mudie conducted, and the orchestral playing was generally excellent, though (as on other occasions) it sometimes seemed designed for robuster singers and a larger theatre. Don Carlos was designed for the Paris Opera, but if it is transposed to a smaller house the orchestral dynamics surely need some adjustment. George Devine's production, too, was hampered by the smallness of the stage but generally successful. Only must Philip wear his crown the whole time like a fairy-story.king ? Perhaps the famous etiquette of the Spanish court demanded this ; but it looks comic rather than regal.
At the Mysore concert in the Kingsway Hall on January 22nd Igor Markevitch conducted a suite from Stravinsky's Pulcinella. What prestige still resides in Stravinsky's name ! Here is a suite of rather uninteresting eighteenth-century small talk (probably not even by Pergolesi according to the findings of modern scholarship) orchestrated and occasionally guyed or distorted by Stravinsky 10 make what was, no doubt, a pretty ballet for Diaghilev in his last neo-classical phase. In the concert-hall it is simply soporific, without even the schoolboy humour of the Second Suite which followed it and sounds to English ears like a French cousin of Walton's
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