Opera
The moor the merrier
Rodney Manes
first To be booed by a Covent Garden, the 'night audience is, I suppose, one c),,,.iaro, few remaining honours left to MO be and. Colin Davis was much to of congratulated after the premiere his N abucco on achieving it so earlY oot career as musical director. It w3 loco deserved, of course, even if wasn't awfully good. Less trivial, to—tiat than the little faction of the audience is planned it is the fact that Davis jog understandably not too happY about takfoi solo curtain calls. It is not a c,..11eeefirr5t experience. He demurred after tne,A4en night of Otello last week, but had he rtely the risk the cheers would have corrIP'e" wiped out that distasteful memory. This was his first bash at the IW l or'llarind was conspicuously more successfu it Al of the e earlier work; there is a ritastidiousness about Davis's musical f lease up that is uneasy with the take-toresa it rum-ti-tum of early Verdi. The tensenfof of his Otello should be no cause and tsurprise, for he is a tense conductor b h ut e opera is a masterpiece of tension, for luckily the tenseness here alloy/cc'at .°co, some agreeably spacious tempi — P effectively in the last scene for tej already well:seasoned musical as an ideal springboard for Jon urst London Otello and Kostas s lam Both 'boast clean and vs,ices, and formidable techniques Sing the notes, and not all around and both have the power to ride ohaVIS's orchestra in full flood. The t;,s Of Joan Carlyle's Desdemona "e Purest; it is just that there are 'h e0 You fear she has not the sheer Control over her voice to carry t to the crotchet. The Wakhevitch 'seventeen years old, remain ideal. then, was this not the near perfect h-,se of those rare evenings in the se when all the elements gell? tla'1.1,,year., 0 fthe acting. Jon Vickers's tert,"er )s highly idiosyncratic. There .4e"in movements and stances he ets: the swivel on right foot, arms ▪ tse,hed as if carrying a pile of I,' right arm raised, left foot slightly ns oref right, in the manner of the rn Augustus; and a slow amble 1, Stage like a nervous panther. All tin ue fine in some expressionistic ri °list drama, but they are not in °Peratic, and the fact that his rs 9f the title roles of Parsifal and aor,i,Nes are similar — considerably si`,11an the parts themselves — leads ron'sPect that he has worked out an Lse operatic performance that is t,:iu regardless. 48 Paskalis, a gadfly of an Iago, good standard operatic performlers°ITle of the double-takes, mocking th„ahd posturing are overplayed, at 440' are big. Joan Carlyle does Hollywood ingenue, whose ilre little runs encompass both ttria(,,Ac,t 1) and anguish (Act 3). Each eroe valid. What is needed is a h Who, in the rehearsal time avail" Weld them into a coherent whole. 11 I.
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