Opera
National Opera Studio (Queen Elizabeth Hall) Mose in Egitto
(Royal Opera House)
Shrill drill
Rupert Christiansen
alent shows, from Opportunity Knocks upwards, always leave me a bit tearful and over-excited: I live in hope of telling some- one's faintly interested grandchildren that I spotted the great so-and-so long before she'd hit even Tuesday night at the Wig- more Hall. So far no luck. But I tremble with anticipation every time the National Opera Studio's annual end-of-term jam- boree comes up at the Queen Elizabeth Hall: out with the clapometer, and will there be any straight sixes this year?
The NOS doesn't actually award marks or prizes: it simply coaches 12 advanced post-graduate singers in collaboration with the nation's main opera companies. Cur- rently under the directorship of Richard Van Allan, it has developed a distinguished record and plainly does useful work. Last Sunday's show was, however, a disappoint- ment. If anything, I felt that these young singers had been too well drilled and pol- ished. All safety precautions were observed, nobody did anything silly. Every voice exhibited a nice healthy regularity of sound; there was some lively acting, good diction and plenty of As for effort. What I didn't sense was any imagination, daring or originality. Here was a bunch of young things who without exception had the potential to make decent provincial, sorry, regional careers: jolly good luck to them, and all credit to the NOS and their teach- ers. I just wish that one of them had rebelled, said no and gone their own wilful way, taking the music into themselves and getting personal with it. Did, for instance, the two well-scrubbed neophytes attempt- ing the Violetta-Germont duet from Travi- ata have the faintest idea of what an emotional journey Verdi wanted them to travel? Had any of them ever starved in a garret, wept for lost love or faced the enemy? It didn't seem so. We live in iron times — and perhaps the ungracious acous- tics of the QEH didn't help.
Still, I can't resist singling out Susannah Glanville and Ian Storey, enjoying them- selves in Act in of La Boheme; Susan Legg, who had a real bash at `Va! laisse couler mes larmes' from Werther: and Katarina Karneus, who sang the Composer's notes elegantly in an excerpt from the Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos. But I was hunting for someone who seemed to live to sing; all I found were competent young professionals.
I'm afraid I didn't enjoy Rossini's Mose in Egitto at Covent Garden. I must apolo- gise to the lady behind who tapped me on the shoulder and sharply demanded that I stop wriggling, but quite frankly I had to do something to stop myself entirely succumb- ing to spasms of yawning and droopy eye- lids (a battle lost, I fear, by various mighty personages sitting around me). Oh dear, it was dull — slow, samey, low-octane stuff, quite lacking in the composer's usual swag- gering vulgarity and vivacious wit. All the music seems to be wearing its best bib-and- tucker, which is not garb that sits comfort- ably on Italian opera. Even the much-admired opening scena and the preghiera in the Third Act, for all their hymnal impressiveness, are pretty thin and why does the sublime always need to be signalled by a series of harp arpeggios?
The plot provides some sort of version of Moses's wrangles with the Pharaoh, plus some inter-racial love interest and a couple of Egyptian nasties flung into the stew as well; at the end, the Red Sea parts and there are more arpeggios. What can be done with such tosh? Aggressive updating to the contemporary Middle East has proved hopeless (as in Keith Warner's dis- astrous production for the ENO a few years back) and it is probably wiser to stick to a conservative line. At Covent Garden, director-designer Hugo de Ana provides some massive granitic walls, rocks and period costuming. There was plenty to snigger at — all the Egyptians were bald and the cast looked altogether more fright- ened of the scenery than it did of omnipo- tente Dio and his feeble flashes of lightning wrath — but I can't see any easy alternative to such a quaint approach: at least it wasn't pretentious.
The performance was respectfully con- ducted by Paolo Olmi, but owing to my acoustically dud seat in the Stalls Circle, I can't make any confident judgments of the singing. As Moses and the Pharaoh respec- tively, Ruggero Raimondi and Simone Alaimo were OK and Bruce Ford in the jeune premier role again suggested that he is one of the very best of the new school of Rossini tenors (unfortunately, he was got up to look chillingly like the Mekon, of fearsome memory to all those who remem- ber The Eagle). Both a shrill Ann Murray and an insecure Anna Caterina Antonacci sounded below par, but the rest of the audience went wild for them, so I shall say no more. Except to pray to omnipotente Dio that I never hear this opera again, and that the next time Rossini's number comes up at Covent Garden, the management plumps for La Gazza Ladra.
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