Arts
Directionless
Rodney Milnes
Der Rosenkavalier (Covent Garden)
Georg Solti first conducted Rosen- kavalier for the Royal Opera a quar- ter of a century ago. I didn't go in those pre-freebie days, having strong reserva- tions about some of the casting, but its success led to his engagement as a music director in 1961, when he declared that his aim was to make Covent Garden 'quite simply the best opera house in the world'. I am not quite sure what that means, am less sure that he was the right man to do it (he was, in a sense, the first conductor created by the gramophone industry), and on the evidence of what happened in Bow Street last week am damned sure that he didn't succeed in the long run.
While not entirely going along with one of his younger colleagues who recently described him to me privately as 'a very bad conductor indeed' (which is more or less how Solti, rather less privately, once described Reginald Goodall), I never cared for his Strauss, which tended towards bombast, flatulence and gluey sentiment, all of them characteristics calculated to encourage the sort of foam-flecked anti- Strauss philistines recently unleashed half- seriously (I hope) by my old mucker Geoffrey Wheatcroft in Another Maga- zine. (The tasteless remark about Solti and orgasms, by the by, was made by Wieland Wagner, not Walter Legge.) All of which is a churlish and ungrateful preamble to remarking that Solti's Rosen- kavalier ten days ago was one of the best performances of a Strauss score that I have heard. It was hard to believe that this was the same conductor of the Sixties and Seventies; gone were the thick, glutinous textures, the ponderous tempos, the con- stant worrying of the music, like a dog with a particularly succulent bone, all familiar both in the theatre and on.his really rather frightful recording. In their place came diaphanous orchestral sound, fleetness of overall speed, benign relaxation and, above all, wit and an infectious sense of pure enjoyment. When, after moments of stunned disbelief at each curtain-rise, I could scarcely bear to look at the stage, I concentrated instead on the pit, where the dear old boy, smiling contentedly, was plainly having a whale of a time. One especially treasurable moment was the flick of the elbow and the near-wink when he demonstrated precisely why Strauss set the word geliihmt with the wrong stress, something that had always puzzled me.
Here at last was the real Rosenkavalier, a conversation piece, a 'comedy for music' as subtitled, in which every word was audible, even in those treacherous opening pages, while underneath the orchestral commentary on those words sparkled, purled, glowed and, very occasionally, swooned, though without ever quite faint- ing dead away, as in the bad old days — the trio and final duet were kept moving briskly. The playing, especially from the woodwind, was exceptionally accom- plished, and anyone who sat in on orches- tral rehearsals will have been greatly pri- vileged.
And so it turned out, perhaps by chance (which seems to play an increasingly un- warranted part in ROH planning), to have been a good idea to invite the former music director back to celebrate his 25th anniversary with a new Rosenkavalier. But all else was horror. A series of mildly sensational bad films and one third-rate production of The Tales of Hoffmann seem to me insufficient grounds for inviting John Schlesinger to produce a notoriously com- plicated opera. I suppose his name will guarantee a contract for -video. In the event, long stretches — notably the finales of the outer acts — looked as if they hadn't been directed at all, and those that were fell victim to the senseless hyperactivity of supernumeraries. Kin i Te Kanawa sang beautifully, but the character of the Mar- schallin eluded her (it will come when she meets a proper director); Agnes Baltsa was sadly out of voice on the first night, frequently looked at a loss as to what to do, and tended to play Octavian as an ill- tempered hunt terrier rather than a highly bred pointer. Worst of all Aage Haugland, vocally a fine Ochs (with a real top F), was made to play him as a thick-witted oaf, and without an interesting Ochs, without an awareness of the class structures in the piece, there is no point in performing it. A good new Sophie in Barbara Bonney; otherwise it was depressing to see such talented singing-actors as Cynthia Buchan, Jonathan Summers and Robert Tear floundering helplessly.
Similarly, I am not convinced that the worst decor in the ROH's current reper- toire (Don Giovanni) and some dubious efforts elsewhere make William Dudley the obvious choice as set designer; he disregarded the piece's Jugendstil pro- venance, so winningly saluted in the old Visconti production, and instead went altogether too successfully for Bishop's Avenue Baroque. The tasteless results were ill-executed and ill-finished — it looked as though the money had run out half way through. Setting Act Three in a brothel was not a good idea, the less so as it set up a fourth-wall convention mindlessly broken when it suited, or rather didn't suit, the director. An air of suburban vulgarity permeated proceedings •throughout — again, just the sort of thing to encourage Strauss-haters. Rosenkavalier, though less good than most of the later operas, is a much, much better work than this. At the behest of Priestley, the Garden has recent- ly appointed an administrator; on this evidence what it desperately needs is some artistic direction.
This was by chance emphasised by a remarkable week elsewhere. The WNO's Greek Passion and From the House of the Dead have been exhaustively praised la these pages, and both made enormous impact. I was still flummoxed by parts of the Berghaus Don Giovanni, but on second viewing found it one of the most riveting productions of the post-War period. When I have seen it half a dozen times, I may find something sensible to say. The ENO's latest revival of The Makropoulos Case is the strongest yet, thanks mainly to Richard Armstrong's ma" gisterial conducting. There are two mof! performances only, both next week, an' you should fight tooth and claw for tickets.
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