Arts
Drastic surgery
Rodney Milnes
Cosi fan tune (Glyndebourne) Norma (Covent Garden) First things first: for all the fascination of Peter Hall's new production of Cost fan tutte, it is the musical side of the performance that is most immediately striking. Of course Bernard Haitink and Hall have shared and developed ideas on what they wanted to do with this perennially enigmatic masterpiece, but simply taken on their own the singing and the playing gave boundless pleasure. The LPO has not sounded so warm and expressive this season as it did on the first night; within Haitink's steady speeds and urged on by his unfailingly sensitive moulding of the music, the players phrased the notes with a clarity and love all too seldom heard even in this opera house. Maybe we miss something of John Pritchard's suave elegance, but in its place there are both classical purity and emotional truth.
In past seasons the management has been criticised for some slap-dash casting in Mozart, but there is no cause for complaint here. Hakan Hagegard, that most musical of baritones, justified on vocal grounds alone the substitution of Guglielmo's longer first-act aria in place of the customary Siate ritrose' — though I fancy there were other reasons as well. Maria Ewing, the Dorabella, has a gorgeously fruity mezzo which she lets fly with in the arias but scales down for the ensembles. The Fiordiligi, Bozena Betley, we have heard before and welcome back; her delivery may be less than heroic, but she is accurate, extremely beautiful to look at, and has a most sympathetic stage presence. With Stafford Dean as Alfonso and Nan Christie (no relation) a Despina who makes up with personality what she may lack in vocal experience, the circle is almost perfect, and it will be once Max-Rene Cosotti (Ferrando) delivers the goods throughout with the flair that he does in `Tradito, schernito'. What an absolute brute that role is.
Whether justly or no, Hall has been getting a less than enthusiastic press for his work at the National Theatre as both administrator and director. Much of his best work seems to have been in opera, and I selfishly yearn for some bloodless revolution on the South Bank to release him for still more of it. The lyric theatre has greater need of him than the legitimate. As a comparative outsider, he performs two functions: he strips away traditional operatic accretions, revealing the bare bones of text, and then clothes those bones with fresh, firm, succulent meat. Or at least he does when he has time — such drastic surgery is
not completed in hours. The first act of his Cost is one of the most perfectly sustained pieces of production 1 have seen. The second act seems not quite finished; having set up an emotional situation of uncomfortable intensity, he fails to see it through to its painful conclusion — whatever that may be. Perhaps he responds more readily to the heroic dimension of Don Giovanni than to the domestic framework of Cost.
And domestic it is in John Bury's decor. The sisters are no be-wigged, beWatteau-ed scions of minor aristocracy in a seaside stately home. By pushing the period roughly ten years forward, Bury can put them in plain, ankle-length frocks with mob caps. They are very ordinary, rather unsophisticated girls, easy prey for a couple of glamorous, rich foreigners who can afford to put on an alfresco serenade at the drop of a turban. They can probably only just afford a maid in their little villa, and no wonder she's an unsatisfactory one, fired by every decent family in Naples and without a reference to her name. Girls like this are taken for granted as little more than property by army officers. However can Cost ever have been thought anti-feminist? In this School for Lovers the men learn, and need to learn, far, far more than the women.
But I digress. Hall plays the first act absolutely straight. The quintets and trio of the false departure are the most touching moments of the evening. Age-old gags are rejected. Despina works hard (no Goonvoices) to make her disguise convincing. Laughter is not solicited — it comes only because the audience thinks it ought to be laughing. The four lovers are seen in the round. There is no question of Dorabella and Guglielmo being the quasi-comic couple as a foil to Fiordiligi and Ferrando. Dorabella is the demonstrative sister, heart-on-sleeve ('Smanie implacabili' is delivered almost in spasm), and Fiordiligi the introspective one. Guglielmo is the most thoughtful, and thus most vulnerable character on stage. Ferrando is the joker, and gets his come-uppance. The fascination of the foreigners is partly their pretentiousness (thus Guglielmo's aria) and ridiculousness; if your lover is a comedian, then the affair isn't really serious, is it?
The marginal falling-off in Act Two is not just a matter of the laugh-hungry, postprandial Glyndebourne audience, which would snigger at the last trump itself. At the opening, the girls share the spoils in `Prendere' as a bit of a _Ogle, locking away their sweethearts' portraits in their trunks. Some greater degree of emotional commitment is needed here; laughter was the means, not the end. It was tragic that the tenor should have slipped on a piece of foliage at the
dramatic crux of the act mio ritratto! Ah, perfidar) and released the tension built up by the sensuous mystery of the Dorabella/Guglielmo duet. Things never quite picked up, and the confrontation between. Fiordiligi and Ferrando lacked the pain it should, and must, engender. But Hall's ending is fascinating. Of course the four return to their original loves, as they must, but the way the men retained their Albanian disguises throughout the sextet of reconciliation was curiously unsettling. We hadn't heard the end of the story. I hope we haven't, either, from Hall: if he could continue work on the second act this would be the Cost of one's dreams.
Norma at Covent Garden also came ja two acts on the first night. The first was horrible, with Cabana" singing flat and the tenor proving a disaster. Even so it is no use booing the poor man —why not find out who cast him and scream at them? Maybe this unusual sound galvanised Mme Caballe:10 the second part she was magnificent. The way she strings notes together into that matchless legato and uses her limited range of gesture — and even more her eyes — t° express tragic stature seems to be infinitelY better suited to this classic-romantic genre than the busier verbal and histrionic approach of some past-mistresses of the role. From 'In mia man' onwards, as knife" in-hand she circled the hapless tenor, her eyes flashing fury and contempt, she didn t put a foot wrong. Grace Bumbry is a flue singer in a different mould: whoever thought her vibrant tone would blend with, or be flattered by, that of Caballe needs his/her head examining. Jesus Lopez-Cobos has the grandeur and pace of the work in his grasp, and the orchestra played well for him. The staging was unspeakable.
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