Opera
Beatrice Cenci
(Trinity College of Music, Spitalfields)
Incitement to murder
Michael Tanner
It may sound perverse to say so, but Spi- talfields Market is a most attractive venue for opera, so much so that planners are at work on 'developing' it. Ministers and report-writers who go on interminably about 'access' and 'outreach' would do well to visit it and stroll through the assorted stalls and small restaurants, the areas where basketball is being played, and reach the large shed — one can hardly call it more — where Spitalfields Market Opera performs. Seats are steeply raked, comfort- able; and, though the acoustic is not ideal, somehow few noises from outside interfere, and the atmosphere is intensely one of an audience who turn up only because they are devoted to, or highly curious about, the work to be performed.
Trinity College of Music, which staged Berthold Goldschmidt's Beatrice Cenci there last week, insisted in its accompany- ing blurb that there is no specialised opera course at the College, and that some of the participants are in their first year. They hardly needed to apologise or explain, and insisted that they weren't doing the former. The all-round standard of the performance, at least in its musical aspects, was so good that one could form a confident judgment of the opera, which can be reinforced by Sony's decent recording of it. The staging and acting were less impressive, but never inept.
Layout was strange, a good idea in prin- ciple but one that, on the opening night at least, failed to work out fully. The acting area was on the left, on three levels, with minimal but sufficient scenery; from top right there was a long walkway over the orchestra, with steps descending to the main stage. That jutted, wedge-like, into the orchestra, which thus partly encom- passed it. So the singers needed a television monitor to see the conductor, who was off to their left. The idea was, I think, partly that the orchestral sound should be dis- persed, partly that the singers shouldn't have the daunting task of projecting over a considerable number of players, quite a few of whom engaged in hitting noisy percus- sion instruments.
In fact the singers needed no help: all of them had quite large voices. And though the closeness of their contact with the audi- ence was good, nothing was gained by hav- ing such aggressively divided sound, as in the early over-enthusiastic days of stereo. It meant, for half the audience, looking side- ways throughout the evening, and being deluged with the Schreker-style excite- ments of the orchestra, which was given its head by the conductor Gregory Rose. With such disparate forces to command, it was not surprising that he lived for the bar, and that Goldschmidt's conscientiously crafted structures went for little. He elicited aston- ishingly eloquent playing from his orches- tra, with plenty of abandoned espressivo. The singers, their attention partially divid- ed between monitor and stage, were rudi- mentary in their acting, but one got the message, and there were few stock operatic poses.
Not that Goldschmidt gives much of a chance for them. Having taken a play by Shelley which makes Sardou seem like Pinero, he was determined that it should not be sensational, so the programme note informed us. To that end, he kept offstage the rape of Beatrice by her father, the mur- der of Cenci by two killers — heavy shad- ows of Macbeth without the suspense and indeed anything that might be called action until the execution of Beatrice and her mother near the end of the opera. The effect is strange, especially with the music Goldschmidt contrived. The violence comes over in orchestral interludes, brief and Bergian, while the singers are shown consideration by being mainly lightly accompanied. They have mellifluous but not on the whole melodic vocal lines, so the total effect is rather decorous. Perhaps the dramatic impact, at any rate in the first two acts, would have been stronger with a more imposing Cenci; but while Stephen Bowen looked magnificent, attractive and threat- ening, he sung stentorianly and with poor diction, so precisely which of his horrid plans his wife and daughter and son (an unsuccessful trouser role) were recoiling from was usually obscure. After his deserved despatch in Act II, and a rather routine horror-and-vengeance finale to that act, in Act III we had the two condemned women in the score's most effective music, by far. Goldschmidt's lyrical vein blossoms here, and Beatrice has a song which one leaves the theatre humming.
Otherwise, and for much of the time, Goldschmidt's score bears a film-music relation to the action and the singing, more of an incitement to the audience to respond to what they would be witnessing if he had the bad taste, as he saw it, to put it on stage than an extension of the charac- ters' verbal expression. The overall effect is of a piece all-too-timely, calculated to appeal to Festival of Britain audiences while giving the impression of being advanced; which now seems irremediably dated.
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