Records (1)
Epic performances
Rodney Milnes
The disaster of Reginald Goodall's departure from the Coliseum Ring has given fresh significance to the live-recordings made by
EMI and sponsored by the Peter Moores Foundation. No longer merely useful adjuncts
to stage performances, they are now all we are going to get — always supposing the recalcitrant master can be lured into the theatre for
enough performances to complete the project. Three quarters of the cycle is now in the bag, and the second instalment, The Rhinegold, ha Just been issued on EMI SLS 5032 at the ridiculously cheap price of £6.95. The sound is superb, with an excellent stereo spread. Even the most determined audience cougher is barely audible. Only some fleeting moments of dubious string ensemble in Loge's Music and some tired brass lips at the end remind listeners that they are hearing not some Vienna or Berlin Philharmonic with the benefit of countless studio retakes, but our very own ENO orchestra, whose extra-warm Goodall sound is well caught in a natural theatrical balance with the voices. The fact that this Rhinegold is on four records as opposed to every other recording's three tells you one unsurprising thing about Goodall's Wagner: he takes his time, and the composer's. Only once did I question a tempo — that for the Rhinemaidens' final lament —
fortuitous with its sparse accompaniment and
Tortuitous distancing, seemed to lack forward nl°tion. But the speed fits all that has gone .before and what little is to come; a conductor less concerned with structure might even adjusted the pace, then changed gear, or, v worse, compromised the weight of the follied
grandeur of the final pages. The measured pace brings one advantage over all others: it emphasises the sheer beauty of this most orthodox Wagnerian score, one that is too easily scampered through as a long, bald recitative. String figuration, often hustled and turned into aural Polyfilla, becomes music. Even a directly disobeyed instruction has its reasons. The second interlude (the descent into Nibelheim) is marked sehr schnell; by no stretch of the imagination is Goodall's tempo schnell, let alone sehr, yet the lumbering, effortful gait he adopts depicts exactly the agony and numbed oppression of the world we are about to enter.
Then there are the vocal dividends. It cannot be said too often: the singers have time not only to enunciate the text but to point it, colour it and invest it with dramatic meaning. Listen to the extraordinary sensuousness of Flosshilde's mock seduction in the first scene (the horrid little teaser fully deserves to lose her gold of great price), or to Alberich all-too-clearly specifying what he is going to do with his new-found power, a passage that proposes the central moral dilemma of the piece and one that I trust formed part of the evidence when the US Senate was debating Angola.
The ENO cast siezes its opportunities with relish. The way Alberich's malevolence gives way to natural dwarfish playfulness in the matter of transformation — and thus to his downfall — is just one detail in Derek Hammond-Stroud's epic performance, and the way self-interest gradually emerges through the whining self-pity of Gregory Dempsey's Mime is another indication of the depth to be relished in this masterly reading. It remains to salute the powerful Loge of Emile Belcourt and the rest of the fine cast, and to remind all those whose lives have been enriched by these performances in the theatre to get their cheque books out and invest in what is much, much more than just an aide-memoire, , Political and philosophical dilemmas as horny as any in Rhinegold are examined in Moses and Aaron, and in rather more concentrated form — too concentrated, maybe, for the theatre, but Schoenberg wrote for the theatre and the first thing to be said aLut the new Boulez recording (CBS 79201, £5.79) is that it has a distinctly theatrical feel to it. He does not dissect the score, he plays it. The acoustic is warm, immediate and resonant, too resdnant for orchestral clarity when everything is going on at once, but ideal in all other respects, Only those who wish to study the piece from an academic point of view will need to look elsewhere.
The forces are those of the Prom performance of last season: BBC Symphony Orchestra and Singers, Orpheus Boys Choir (very good) and a largely British supporting cast, amongst whom Gillian Knight (Invalid) and Richard Angas (Priest) are outstanding. Giinter Reich pitches the speech of Moses with tragic intensity (and takes the singing option in the second scene) and Richard Cassilly's Aaron, stentorian of tone and a little unyielding in the first act, comes into its own with eloquent wheedling in the final scene of self-justifica"tion. Faced with the ten tribes in lynching mood, most of us would give them a golden calf and hang the consequences, just as most of us would relieve Alberich of his gold before he ravished our womenfolk and chained us to the factory floor, and some of us would like to shoot down a few of the MPLA's Migs. Exotic and irrational, my foot.
Bargain basement. Those who just want the soupy bits of Rosenkavalier for late-night wallowing (and I know many for whom even that is a great deal too much) should investigate a Classics for Pleasure recording of Scottish Opera's production (CFP 40217, a snip at £1.25). Helga Dernesch, Anne Howells, Teresa Cahill and Michael Langdon are the capable 'soloists, and the Scottish National Orchestra's no-nonsense yet affectionate play ing of the obvious highlights under Alexander Gibson is well recorded. There is a fine bargain in a Decca re-issue of La Forza del Des tino (GOS 660-2, £5.97), all-but complete on three records, in which good, solid old-fashioned singing from Zinka Milanov, Giuseppe di Stefano and Leonard Warren is allied to extremely exciting conducting and playing from Fernando Previtali and the Santa Cecilia Orchestra.
A full-price record from which I have derived much rather guilty pleasure this year is Massenet's one-act La Navarraise (CBS 76403, £2.99), a hunk of wham-barn verismo with blood 'n' guts, local colour and some really good tunes, all contained within a faultlessly paced forty-minute structure set in the Carlist wars. As the eponymous heroine, Lucia Popp sings like an angel and goes spectacularly mad in an echo chamber, and Antonio de Almeida, conducting the LSO, keeps the whole preposterous yet irresistible farrago under fairly strict control. A much announced rival version from RCA has been as long coming as Melba was going — and it will have to be good to beat this one.
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