Frozen form
MICHAEL NYMAN
If, as Alexander Goehr recently pointed out, it is uniqueness that accounts for the constant fascination of live performance. then the sub-species, concert performance of opera, outdoes almost everything else in this line. Useful for doing one-off jobs on rari- ties too costly, too futile, or simply impos- sible to stage, this kind of presentation tends to deodorise and anaesthetise what, even in the opera house, may need all its natural smells, and even wonder drugs, to keep it alive. Glyndebourne's Prom Giovanni justified the transfer; the Aldeburgh Ido- meneo. under Britten at the Queen Eliza- beth Hall last week, did not.
There was not much left of Colin Graham's original production, but in an case these concert versions have their own conventions and mechanics, some good. most bad. I particularly liked the neatness and effectiveness of half the (seated) choir turning at an angle of forty-five degrees into the wings, to simulate the offstage cries of drowning sailors in the first act. Other attempts to reproduce the realities of the opera house were less successful, and props are a problem: at the Albert Hall Leporello carried his own one-legged stool: on the restricted acting area at the QEH a simulated marble bench came in handy. Physical gestures were mostly static—the eye fixed on a motionless fly on the ceiling: legs permanently crossed until otherwise required. Apart of course from Peter Pears. whose grey-green, blizzard-torn, craggy face, wild and demented of eye, showed that he too regretted the tameness of the surroundings, and that I had missed a great performance in situ at Aldeburgh.
Idomeneo is a particularly poor candi- date for concert performance—a succession of songs and choruses, punched out of card- board, full of holes, all narrative or 'per- sonal' interest drained off. Britten had made a number of cuts which, even though sanc- tioned by Mozart's own revised version. took away much of the weight from a work whose slow, ancient engine, one feels, can only be moved by weightiness. And the experience was all the odder because. ob- jectively, the performance was so good.
The English Chamber Orchestra played with a rare cohesiveness, determination and warmth in response to Britten's intense and careful reading. This took into account the dualism of the opera : the fact that Mozart at twenty-five was doing more than just `putting on the style', adopting the tricks of the opera .seria trade—was, indeed, renewing and adding to them in the process of be- coming, operatically speaking, himself. So that the score contains sudden accents. un- expected types and shifts of material which disturb the placid exterior of the opera.
These Britten acted through, and slightly overplayed, achieving by slight but percep- tible fluctuations of tempo the precise dra- matic characterisation of each musical idea —and these are spread pretty richly throughout. He had obviously communi- cated something of this 'romantic' commit- ment to the singers, who—especially Pears. Heather Harper and Rae Woodland—sang with an intelligence and involvement which made it the sadder that what they were involved in should be the photograph of an event, not the event itself.
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