Opera
Medee (Covent Garden)
Heavenly lengths
Rodney MiInes
The nasty scrunching sound you heard last week was the musical press putting its collective bovver-boot into the Royal Opera's new staging of Cherubini's master- piece with, I thought, a shade too much relish. It could perhaps be argued that Mike Ashman's production wasn't a suc- cess in every aspect, but for me this remained one of the most thrilling evenings in Bow Street for many a month, and I salute unreservedly the management's courage in mounting, at a time when full houses are de rigueur, a work whose box-office appeal is not obvious and, what is more, compounding the risk by mount- ing it in its original language and form instead of in the bastard, botched version in Italian with recitatives by another com- poser (which is what Callas used to sing).
The French Revolutionary period re- mains one of the great unexplored areas of operatic activity, and simply in the matter of volume that activity was bewildering. Once the theatre monopolies of the ancien regime had been overthrown in 1791, anyone could perform anything they liked anywhere. It has been estimated that in the ensuing decade around 1,500 new works were premiered in an orgy of positively Thatcherian free enterprise, and all shack- les of accepted form were gleefully shed. In the case of Medee (1797), Cherubini estab- lished that subjects of high seriousness could be presented in opera-comique form, i.e. with set numbers separated by spoken dialogue, pointing the way directly to Fidelio, Freischiitz, Faust, Carmen and beyond. This was an act of crucial artistic liberation, and there were others of which we shall doubtless learn more as further light is shed on the period.
Med& was also performed substantially uncut at Covent Garden, and it was a long evening — in minutes, that is. But one of the mysteries of theatrical performance is that the more a piece is cut, the longer it can seem (this applies to composers as diverse as Rossini, Meyerbeer and Wag- ner), and Medee at Covent Garden skipped along at twice the rate of the much-cut version heard at Buxton five years ago. I found it absolutely gripping as a musico- dramatic structure, its form and its pace both sui generis and inalienably right. If some of the audience felt restless, one could only echo Bruckner, who is said to have answered the reproach that his sym- phonies were too long with the remark that, on the contrary, the listeners were too short. The titanic scale of Medee does demand a bit of input from the auditorium.
I utterly fail to understand, people's objections to the updating of the action to the time of the Revolution. Medee simply is the Revolution in sound. Ashman prop- osed no systematised analogies, but to someone who has just visited the fabulous David exhibition at the Louvre (until February, unmissable) and been deeply troubled by the close proximity there of the `Death of Marat' and the 'Coronation', Ashman's identification of Jason with Napoleon and Medea with, if you like, the spirit of the Revolution sparked off any number of resonances. Bernard Culshaw's designs, using visual references from David, Regnault and Gericault, seemed again — absolutely and unarguably right. There are one or two miscalculations in the production, but in general I found far more to admire in it than otherwise.
Similarly, there was little sense of `period' in Mark Ermler's conducting, but its thrust and vigour showed just why Beethoven admired Cherubini so much, which is perhaps the more central issue, and his skilful control of balance meant that every word could be heard, at least from those who could sing proper French (Claire Powell, for one, as Neris). The orchestra played as though the devil was on its tail. Rosalind Plowright had a brave stab at Medea; her tone was, to put it as politely as possible, a little unyielding on the first night, but she went for the spoken dialogue tooth and claw to thrilling effect. Alexey Steblianko (Jason) was miscast and unwell; Robert Lloyd's cleanly projected, unobtrusive Creon was wholly admirable. The vocal honours were effortlessly stolen by Renee Fleming, who sang Dirce's long, hideously difficult opening aria with beauty `We must be approaching Christmas. It's a pantomime seahorse.'
and ease, launching the evening on a high note from which, for me, it seldom de- scended. This is, I realise, a minority report, but it is submitted with unquench- able fervour.
Monteverdi's Ulysses is another long evening, but with fewer problems: this is David Freeman's most successful produc- tion to date of a serious opera, and Paul Daniel's conducting of his own edition must satisfy the sternest `period' freaks. Anthony Rolfe, Johnson's singing of the title role is of gut-wrenching beauty, and if no one else in the cast can quite match his use of vocal colour, eloquence of phrase and crispness of diction — all three essen- tial to Monteverdi — then Jean Rigby (Penelope) and Sally Burgess (Minerva) come jolly close. An austere, profoundly satisfying evening.
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