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Fierrabras (Playhouse, Oxford) Die Loreley (Bloomsbury)
On the fringe
Rodney Milnes
During a slack period in London's opera houses — a bewhiskered Salome at the Garden and a faded Butterfly (but livelier Boheme) at the Coliseum — while both prepare new Wagner productions, It was refreshing to turn to University opera, or what there is left of it. General belt- tightening has affected the fringe as much as the metropolitan houses, witness the disappearance of Nottingham University Opera, in the past responsible for revivals of such out of the way but once important pieces as La Juive, Robert le Diable and Gretry's Richard Coeur de Lion. But, money from local industry has simply dried up. While the number of forgotten master- pieces awaiting the kiss of life and a return to the repertory is probably small (if an opera hasn't been performed for a century there is usually a very good reason), the revival of once popular works does provide a context against which the significance of those that are still valid can be re-assessed, and it cannot be emphasised too often that the only way to judge if a piece is any good Is to see it staged, however modest the resources involved.
Not that universities are the only pur- veyors of rarities. The Camden Festival is a long-famous resuscitator (Pacini, Donizetti by the yard, Ricci, more Gretry) and is about to stage two Weill one-acters for the first time here — The Tsar has his photo- graph taken and The Protagonist, opening on 12 March. The London music colleges also play their part, with the Guildhall's forthcoming staging of Maw's brilliant comedy The Rising of the Moon not to be missed: it has been neglected recently only because the British army in Ireland has suddenly stopped being a suitable subject for comic opera. Dedicated opera-goers, then, can root out all manner of succulent truffles if they put their minds to it. Schubert is an especially interesting truf- fle: just why did he fail so signally in the opera house, despite trying nine times? The Oxford University Opera Club (past tnumphs include Sphor's Jessonda, a com- plete Trojans, and the British premieres of L' Enfant et les sortileges, Bush's Men of plackmoor, and Hans Heiling) presented important evidence with their staging of Fierrabras and the reasons have to do with the balance between music and plot. Josef Kupeli,vieser's libretto, involving warring Pranks and Moors, two sets of serious lovers, their assorted heavy fathers and the °id-man-out Moorish Prince of the title, is simply too crowded with event for the music to have time to breathe. When it does so, it is out of proportion to the demands of the dramatic situation, as in the second-act finale when captive Franks should be escaping through a prison gate helpfully opened for them by a renegade Moorish Princess, but instead hang around to sing a lot of inappropriately jolly music (the 'yes, but you don't go' syndrome). 'Hey get caught, so we have to have another escape finale in Act 3. Yet in amongst the many clumsinesses there are as many passages of extraordi- nary beauty, none more so than the tenor hero awaiting his illicit love in a garden at night with a minor-key serenade out of Schnbert's top drawer. Enter his lady love singrug it in the major — a magical, if simple, effect and not the only one in 150 Minutes of music. But too often one mused ?U what Weber might have done with this libretto (cut half the characters for a start), ar,in°t irrelevant consideration given that Fierrabras and Euryanthe are contempor- -v. A matter of context. Oxford did Fierrabras proud in a good new translation-by-seminar supervised by i °In Warrack, most persuasively con- ducted by Clive Brown and amusingly (but responsibly) produced by David Gann. To save money, Franks and Moors were turned into undergraduates and punks, the former with breastplates under their gowns and the latter bemusingly bizarre: Fierra- bras was bare chested and sported a bright blue cockscomb hair-do. The game double chorus made a worthy noise, but the young professional singers were upstaged by' an undergraduate, Christopher Parke, with an astonishingly mature bass-baritone. The only thing wrong with the evening was a soi-disant sophisticated audience tittering knowingly at lines that were not funny (in context).
University College Opera — past suc- cesses Chabrier's Gwendoline (a knock- out), the British premiere of Verdi's Ober- to and indeed Euryanthe — fields so strong a chorus and orchestra that one suspects unrevealed professional stiffening: be that as it may, standards are extremely high. All that was missing this year was a decent opera. Max Bruch is usually described as a `conservative' composer, and in this case the adjective appears to be a euphemism for thunderously boring. Loreley is full of decent, four-square, mostly undramatic music composed long after Weber and the Wagner of Lohengrin, though one wouldn't think it. As a colleague re- marked, one ended up screaming for a fix of chromatic harmony. There is a memor- able overture, a lovely entr'acte towards the end, a final duet that gets some steam up, and some good choral writing. It is not enough. The plot is a mixture of Undine and Giselle, and what interest there may have been was scuppered by an incoherent and pretentious production and the fact that it was sung in incomprehensible Ger- man. The set, though, a huge Symbol com- bining masculine and feminine properties to an alarming degree, was rather fun.
Christopher Fifield conducted with de- votion, and the soloists were decent. The male lead removed his shirt in the finale, thus making this the week of the topless tenors: not, I think, a practice to be encouraged.
`It must be nice for Mrs Thatcher to know that if all goes wrong she can go and stay with Reagan.'
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