Opera
The Capture of Troy (Opera North, Leeds) The Mikado (Coliseum) Simon Boccanegra (Glyndebourne Touring Opera)
Sound and vision
Rodney Milnes
Adescription of the decor by Antony McDonald and Tom Cairns for the new production of the Trojan part of Berlioz's epic in Leeds — the first panel in a joint venture by Opera North, the Welsh National and Scottish Opera — might very well put sensitive readers off, but it shouldn't. There is no attempt at grand- opera spectacle — lack of money and the exigencies of touring alone preclude that. The set is a textured, concrete-grey box barely decorated with the sort of paint slashes one might encounter in an urban underpass, across which a wall of metallic, shell-pocked panels is lowered. The punk- ish chorus, filthy dirty and suffering from any number of unpleasant diseases, wear black rags; the principals are in bright, poster-colour monochrome — screeching red for Cassandra, purple for Priam and Hecuba, royal blue for Choroebus, etc. But within Peter Mumford's elaborate lighting plot the whole constitutes one of the most strikingly beautiful and dramati- cally apt designs, at once (like Berlioz) neo-classical and romantic, that I have seen for years.
In Tim Albery's production there are coups that could almost be described as operatic — the arrival of the (unseen) horse and the final holocaust, which hacks have for once not ruined by describing them — and none is more stunning than the way Andromache's personal grief sparks off an act of communal mourning. No, I won't describe it, lest I start snuffling again. But these coups do not detract from the simple, classical strength of Mr Albery's direction: there is a clarity, a brilliance of outline in his staging that in the way it matches Berlioz's vision is profoundly musical.
Musically the evening is equally success- ful. In the past I have often sat through The Trojans at Covent Garden numbed with boredom, not through any fault of the performers but because the scale seemed wrong: the music got lost in that huge house. But in the Grand Theatre, Leeds, the scale is right: the pungency of Berlioz's instrumentation comes pinging out at you in all its corruscating brilliance and origin- ality, uncompromised by either a sound characteristic or, occasionally, a musical approach that tended to turn the composer into a Gallic equivalent of Wagner.
For David Lloyd-Jones, then, and his outstanding chorus and orchestra, nothing but praise: together they do full justice to the composer. So, on the whole, do the principals. The American soprano Cristine Ciesinski turns in a powerful vocal per- formance as Cassandra, and her de- meanour is properly statuesque, cleverly avoiding any suggestion of mere hysteria; the rest of the cast is soundly satisfying. An extra scene for the Greek captive Sinon, cut by Berlioz and surviving only in piano score, has been included in an orchestra- tion by Hugh Macdonald, whose excellent new translation is also used. In terms of a complete performance it might prove a little too much, but as part of the Trojan section alone it added significantly to the dramatic texture; we shall learn more when the whole work is given in Cardiff next February — an event for which I can hardly wait.
The ENO's Mikado is great fun, a crisply produced, riotously choreographed romp that should ensure packed houses for the dozens of performances scheduled — which was probably the idea. There are a number of fairly funny over-the-top per- formances, and two really witty ones from Jean Rigby (Pitti-Sing) and Bonaventura Bottone (Nanki-Poo). But it doesn't seem to have an awful lot to do with the piece, and for the first time Jonathan Miller might be accused of devising a production `about' an opera rather than actually of it. It seems to be 'about' the attitude of our parents' generation to Gilbert and Sullivan, about what super fun it all is, so pretty my dear. To which end it is set in an inter-war hotel lounge, part Delvaux, part E. F. Benson, with well-meaning (and -heeled) amateurs as it were putting on a show.
But The Mikado isn't set in a hotel: it's set in Bradford Town Hall, and in its strong first act (the second tails off) has some very sharp things to say about muni- cipal power, corruption and — ever a fertile furrow for Gilbert — class. There are funny accents galore here, but they aren't used purposefully; in advance I hoped they would be, in conjunction with Mr Miller's intriguing arriere-pensees about toilet-training, infantilism etc. If I'm being too solemn, it is because I think Gilbert a better satirist than he is given credit for. But the music goes very well, with many charming instrumental details I have never heard before; the conductor Peter Robin- son has plainly had a peek at the closely guarded autograph score. Yes, great, not to say super, fun.
I wish I could devote space to the cast of GTO's Boccanegra, which is more ba- lanced and in one case significantly better than in the summer, but the poor things have been upstaged by 'super-titles'. When first introduced two years ago I suppose they were quite a good joke, qua talking point; last year the joke wore thin, and this year the whole business is quite intoler- able. In case readers don't know, super- titles are snippets from the libretto in pure record-booklet translator-ese (the author of these semi-literate gobbets understand- ably prefers to remain anonymous) pro- jected at the top of the proscenium open- ing. They are fatally distracting. Even more depressing is the miasma of half- truths about audiences' and singers' reac- tions put about by their supporters, and most depressing of all is an essay in the programme defending them by, of all people, Sir Isaiah Berlin. But since he quotes jocularly from a translation that has not been used for 20 years and attributes the words of Prince Gremin's aria to Pushkin (they are, as he should jolly well know, by Tchaikovsky himself), I didn't take the rest of it very seriously.
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