Opera

Con-man

Rodney Mimes

Gianni Schicchi and Duke Bluebeard's Castle (Colisium) Ariadne auf Naxos (Covent Garden)

The operatic up-dating process continues apace. We read about Aida and Otello set in nineteenth-century Europe, and it is becoming virtually impossible to find a mythological Ring: the standard setting for Rheingold and Walkiire nowadays is Wahnfried, a conceit that might, or might not, have brought a smile to the collective face of that household. The general aim of updating.to time of composition is, I presume, to make the action more 'relevant', or rather to prevent audiences from escaping its implications. The action of Gianni Schicchi is set on the cusp of the Renaissance, but Colin Graham's new production substitutes the Risorgimento and David Collis's grand town house (with some improbable views of Florence) is mid-nineteenth century. I imagine the notion of setting the piece in the post-first-World-war Italy of the first performance was rejected because the new age then hoving over the horizon had a nasty blackshirted tinge to it, and that would not have been intellectually fashionable, at least not this year.

It was one of Puccini's better jokes to make his symbol of the brave new world a shabby confidence trickster on the make, and to manipulate his audience into enthusiatically applauding a crime — committed of course so that the dear young lovers could be operatically united. The end justifies the means, and I bet the train that takes Lauretta and Rinuccio on their honeymoon runs on time. Perhaps Mr Graham should have gone lotus porcus after all: he might have got even nearer the cynical pessimism that permeates all Puccini's work.

The main danger of up-dating is not literal anachronism — though perhaps a mule would not have been one of the ripest plums in this Donati's will, and 1 missed the specific Dante connection — but that costume becomes a substitute for characterisation. The audience learns about the people on stage from what they look like rather than from how they behave. For instance it would be nice to see Thomas Hemsley, one of the most intelligent character-singers and an extremely funny Schicchi, performing without help from his loud check suit and dashing whiskers. Did Sesto Bruscantini's interpretation at Covent Garden two years ago lose anything by a simple costume that told the same story? I think not — indeed there was a gain in concentration. The other danger in this particular piece is of small-part singers over-playing, a danger not altogether

avoided in a welter of overstated costumes, mamma mia gestures and determined upstaging. Honourable exceptions included Harold Blackburn (Simone), Stuart Kale (Gherardo), Malcolm Rivers (Marco) and Eric Shilling as the lawyer.

One of the most exciting things about the evening was the emergence of a new young tenor, Henry Howell. He has already had an under-rehearsed shot at Pinkerton in the same house which hardly prepared one for the dramatic ease and full-throated freshness of his Rinuccio. Tenors are getting rarer by the month: Mr Howell must be most carefully nurtured. Joy Roberts was a wholly enchanting Lauretta: no-one could hope to resist her aria, which is the point of it. In the pit Mark Elder might have missed the last refinements of crispness and wit, but he achieved a nice flow and some sumptuous lyrical outbursts.

I must not be a kill-joy: this Schicchi is highly entertaining (apart from the ghastly in-character curtain calls). But although Suor Angelica presents problems, I wish managements would stop splitting up Puccini's crime-and-punishment Trittico. If they must, then Bartok's one-acter is a fair partner. It is not, thank heavens, up-dated to George Steiner's Cambridge, but performed in Ralph Koltai's abstract kaleidoscope: nothing comes between text and audience. 'I must have your complete attention,' warns the disembodied voice at the opening, and he gets it. Sir Charles Groves's considerate but by no means bloodless accompaniement means that the majority of the words were heard, and Elizabeth Connell and Gwynne Howell sang their roles quite beautifully. But there is a hideous dramatic inevitability about those seven doors.

The Covent Garden Ariadne was not universally liked last season, but has a far better chance this time round. Heather Harper

(Ariadne) and Yvonne Minton (Composer) are both much more at ease in their roles, and Alberto Remedios, in fine form, has joined the cast as Bacchus. Even more of a help was Britt-Marie Aruhn as Zerbinetta: she not only sings the notes accurately but has a real, warm lyric-soprano voice as well.

This was a vocal treat, but dramatically she seemed a little tame: this is the Denis Quil

ley role and may as well be played as such.

John Copley has adjusted some of his climactic up-stage movements, and the brief eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between Ariadne and Zerbinetta is most slyly directed. But I still think it a mistake to have

supernumeraries doing the commedia quar

tet's work for them, and not even Max Reinhardt himself could overcome the mind-boggling hideousness of the decor. Bernhard Klee conducted very slowly, which meant that the singers had to take breaths in some very peculiar places as far as the sense of the words was concerned. He certainly revelled in the musical beauty of the score, but that is not necessarily the conductor' function in the theatre. Maintaining forward momentum is; he didn't.