Opera
The Marriage of Figaro The Pearl Fishers (English Touring Opera)
A modern marriage
Michael Tanner
The Cambridge Arts Theatre, only 150 yards from where I live, is ideally situated for opera. Unfortunately it is too small for any but touring companies, though I am strongly in their favour, so long as they don't use their mobility as an excuse for anything. English Touring Opera, at its best, clearly needs no excuses. In their new production of The Marriage of Figam and their four months' old one of Bizet's The Pearl Fishers they are sonic way below their best, though I think remediably in the lat- ter. Figaro is directed by Stephen Medcalf, and most of its inadequacies are his fault He has opted for a contemporary version, with a modified text. Thus the Count is a photographer. an excuse for a vexatious number of flashes in the final scene; his wife an actress, Marccllina runs his mod- elling agency, and Basilio is Susanna'a aer- obics instructor. The Countess prepares to sing her first aria by watching a video of Renee Fleming singing it in the current Glyndehourne production (also by Med- calf) and one need hardly say Bartolo delivers his aria into a mobile phone.
At that point, though, the adaptors' courage has deserted them, and we still have references to Susanna's virtue, the Count's blessing her union with Figaro, his abandonment of the droit de seigneur and all told a context which simply doesn't make sense in the present day. Laughter was generated only by the wrong sort of incongruity, and the possibility of being moved, as for instance by the beauty of the moment in which Susanna arrives with the money to pay off Figaro's debt, was elimi- nated. A pity because on the whole the musical execution is of a high standard, even if the orchestral playing is a bit rough, and the strings undernourished. The star is undoubtedly Mathew Hargreaves as Figaro, a completely accomplished account, sung with the right mixture of the sardonic and the trustful. His Susanna, Anna-Clare Monk, is good too, but without the evident promise of great things to come that Harg- reaves shows. The upper orders are less impressive, with the Countess, Elena Fer- rari singing far too loudly throughout, but especially in her opening aria. The Count lacks authority, and since the opera is largely about the undermining of it, it is important that he should possess some in the first place. Michelle Walton's Cherubi- no is more of a visual than aural delight. Whole stretches of the work survive the silliness of the director's conceit, but a Figaro which is not virtually unalloyed plea- sure, and which doesn't persuade one that this opera is the heart of all love of life and music, is a failure. Being concerned cen- trally with forgiveness many minor inade- quacies can be forgiven in a performance whose heart is rightly placed. This is per- verse.
Bizet's The Pearl Fishers is a charming and extremely silly piece. In the ETO's production, the singing is mostly charming, the staging unmitigated silliness. At the mere level of competence, surely we can expect rocks not to tremble; does the cho- rus need to look like Woody Allen's troop of sperm in Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex? The High Priest is severely underage, despite having his hair bedecked with flour. The direction is a car- icature of provincial opera, and should be abandoned before it does any more harm. Meanwhile, a performance of Bizet's uneven score proceeds that does credit to the company's resources. That duet, as the programme book puts it, in the course of making out a half-hearted case for the opera being an attack on organised reli- gion, is sung well enough to survive rigor- ous comparisons. Leila. th0 heroine, has some unrewardingly tricky material which Christine Bunning dispatched with aplomb. If such marginal work is to be done, fanati- cal conviction in every aspect of the doing is the only way.
Not strictly my province, but the perfor- mance of Berlioz's 'sacred trilogy' L'Enfance du Christ at the Barbican was of the highest order, the only distraction being the amount of tiptoeing the soloists had to do to get back to their seats after their contributions. This work, bizarre even by Berliozian standards, in which it is any- one's guess as to whether a given passage will be sung by the relevant character or by the omnipresent narrator is so full of lovely things, and so rarely allows itself diversion into the grotesque, that a performance of this degree of radiance, under the persua- sive baton of Philippe Herreweghe leads At the Anorexia restaurant me to think it is Berlioz's finest large-scale achievement, though he wrote more stir- ring music elsewhere. The unaccompanied choral epilogue has a quality shared by nothing in its century.
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