Opera
Cavalier treatment
Rupert Christiansen
To Glyndebourne, where we were shown round Sir George Christie's new opera house, designed by the Michael Hop- kins Partnership. I am no good at describ- ing buildings, but this one is, well, sort of round and reddish on the outside and round and woody on the inside. Its charm is modest and Nordic: the atmosphere is clean, simple, summery and refreshingly free of the gloomy pretensions of the South Bank's maximum-security bunkers. The seats are comfortable, with generous leg- room and good sight-lines; the stage is large but unencumbered by the technologi- cal excesses which have hampered so many new theatres of the last 25 years. I liked it very much indeed, although it should be said that as yet there have been no signifi- cant acoustic tests. How wonderful to have achieved this without public money; the fact that a privately financed opera house of such éclat can provide standing-room at £10 and at least 200 seats at £30 or less should make the Royal Opera House blush.
My only worry is the loose talk I have heard to the effect that the management is contemplating productions of Tristan and Isolde and Lulu. This seems to me crazy. Let Glyndebourne cultivate its garden! It has overdue appointments with Handel, Rossini and Gluck; it has no need to swim into Wagnerian waters. If it wants to sur- prise us and broaden its scope, may I sug- gest Manon with Felicity Lott, Norma with Carol Vaness, or Tippett's King Priam?
Der Rosenkavalier would be a jolly good opera if it were about an hour shorter. Or so it seemed at the London Coliseum last week, where much of the nuance and com- plexity of Hofmannsthal's immense text was lost behind the elaboration and weight of Strauss' reputedly 'masterly' orchestra- tion. This was not altogether the conductor Yakov Kreizberg's fault, even though his pacing of the first act dragged uncon- scionably; it is more the fault of a compos- er who tries to spread the Mozartian cake with Wagnerian icing and ends up with sticky fingers.
I did, however, like Jonathan Miller's new production. It was lucid and it was unpretentious. Updated to the time of the opera's composition, circa 1910, the piece shed some of its more precious pseudo- rococo artifice and effortlessly made dra- matic sense. Several of my colleagues have been annoyed by the liberty taken with the closing moments — instead of the Marschallin's page returning to pick up the handkerchief, we see Annina distributing payment to the children who participated in the charade against Ochs — but I found this an acceptable little joke which did no violence to the music. Elsewhere I appreci- ated the absence of the usual Rosenkavalier frippery and fidgetiness; and the sense of a strong plain focus on the action and char- acters was enhanced by the elegant austeri- ty of Peter J. Davison's sets and Sue Blane's costumes.
Musically, the evening was a slight disap- pointment: on paper, it had looked so promising. The Russian-American Yakov Kreizberg, much praised for his Jenufa at Glyndebourne in 1992, only seemed to gal- vanise the orchestra in the second act (inci- dentally, is the music for the wounding of Ochs not a parody of Aegisthus' murder in Elektra? I have never noticed this before), and throughout I wanted the shimmery, icy, silvery aspects of the score given more prominence. The cast was good, but not as good as I'd hoped. Anne Evans sang the Marschallin impeccably, but it all sounded a bit careful, lacking in the ardent sensuali- ty which must be a large part of the charac- ter's motivation. The wonderful Sally Burgess turned out to be slightly miscast as Octavian: the role lies too high for her, I guess, and she sounded stretched. A pity, because she played the young officer boldly and had great fun disguised as Mariandel, complete with Eliza Doolittle cockney accent. I have never heard a bad Sophie, and Rosemary Joshua didn't break my run of luck. John Tomlinson wisely didn't make his Ochs too ingratiating: the Baron is not a Falstaff, his venality has no charm, and Tomlinson's coarse-grained bass didn't pre- tend otherwise. The singers of most of the smaller roles, all of them momentarily vital, had their pennyworths drowned by the orchestra. All round I think the perfor- mance needs time to settle.
This is an opera which really does not work well in English, and I sympathised with the cast's plucky efforts to get an unsatisfactory translation across the pit. I waited all evening — who doesn't? — for the `Hab'mir's gelobt' trio, but it failed to move me because the vowels sounded all wrong and unblended. I'm sorry if you think I'm being poncey, but it does make a crucial difference.
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