ARTS Opera Don Giovanni; La Boheme (Metropolitan Opera, New York)
Moses und Aron (New York City Opera) Alceste (Lyric Opera, Chicago) Die Zauberflote (Glyndebourne Touring Opera) Attila (Covent Garden)
Coughs and splutters
Rupert Christiansen
New York was still deadeningly humid last week, and the level of barometric pressure seemed to invade the air- conditioning of the Metropolitan Opera, casting a pall of listlessness over the proceedings: why, whither, and whereto- fore, I cried as I inwardly perspired, this vast expenditure of money and effort and talent, if the net result yield so little pleasure, let alone spiritual nourishment? The roots of the problem lie not in the house's musical standards, which under the directorship of James Levine remain very high, but in two other departments. The Met's audience, at least the section which sits in the posh seats, is a disgrace. Coughing and wriggling and asking each other idiotic questions about the plot and applauding before the music has ceased and leaving halfway through so as to get to their beauty sleep or restaurant on time, they drove me, quite literally, to distrac- tion — it was impossible to concentrate. The phenomenon recalls the worst exces- ses of the Second Empire, and the only practical remedy I can suggest is the introduction of surtitling, which might serve marginally to prolong the five-second attention span of these atrociously man- nered Philistines.
Sorry about that: now for another splut- ter about Zeffirelli, who designed and directed the Don Giovanni and La Boheme that I heard, and whose mode of extrava- gant and meaningless realism dominates the Met's house production style. Quite how this intelligent man, a pupil of the great Visconti who did such fine work in the late Fifties and early Sixties, can have sunk to these empty cavalcades of vulgarity I do not know, but it provokes a sad shaking of the head. All that paste jewel- lery, all those twinkling lights and cheeky ragamuffins and well-behaved doggies re- mind me of nothing so much as Gamages' Christmas window; worse, they lie leaden on the music and its drama, leaving even the best singers with no space to project their own presences and interactions. Domingo, Studer, Hampson, Blochwitz, McLaughlin — they went for nothing. Only Mirella Freni got through. What a soprano! What sense of a phrase, what warmth and shade! In the third act of B. oheme, she spun a ravishing expressive intensity, pulled at the heartstrings, and left me properly oblivious to everything except poor little Mimi and Puccini's sweet genius. Her rich, ripe morbidezza, her blazing sincerity and musicality are mira- cles, and Covent Garden should pay any- thing she asks so that we can hear them. _ At the New York City Opera, I heard sehoenberg's Moses und Aron. It remains a difficult piece, all dialectic and no irony, dramatic but not theatrical, perhaps more an oratorio than an opera. In the context of the restless flummery of Manhattan cul- ture, it stands like a granite for on a barren heath, stark and out of all proportion. I was deeply impressed by its magnificence, as well as by the hard-edged conducting of Christopher Keene, the commitment of chorus and soloists and the way that the Not loud enough: Giorgio Zancanaro as Ezio in Attila at Covent Garden producer Hans Neugebauer and designer Achim Freyer had allowed the composer to mould — to dictate, one might say — their austere staging, exquisitely lit by Hans Toelstede.
The Lyric Opera of Chicago is an institu- tion with a breezy self-confidence appropriate to the tone of the city. Its presentation of Gluck's Alceste justified the puffing. Frankly, I don't buy Robert Wilson as anything more than an animateur of tableaux vivants and remain sceptical that the esoteric gestures and 'dream-like' symbols he favours have any significance higher than decoration, but his production looked very nice and moved in time — no, let's be fair, in harmony — with the music. As the protagonist, Jessye Norman be- lied recent reports of her vocal decline by producing a flow of gorgeous sound, supply shaped and sustained, but I don't remember her French being so cloudy. She looked tremendous, of course, but com- municated little of the urgency with which Janet Baker so memorably invested the ' role. Gary Bertini's conducting may not have pleased purists, but as the late Harold Rosenthal would have said, it made a positive contribution. A lot of buts, I know: but to be honest I was relieved not to be bored by a composer who I am ashamed to say means little to me — hurry up, Mozart, I keep thinking, and bring some chromaticism and counterpoint with you.
And when he came, I was back at dear Glyndebourne, paying an extortionate amount for supper and watching the tour- ing company's revival of Peter Sellars's version of Die ZauberflOte, much disliked when it opened the Festival last May. I had disliked it too, but the first act has tight- ened up considerably, due in some mea- sure to the oomph in Ivor Bolton's con- ducting and some promising performances from Amanda Roocroft (Pamina), Barry Banks (Tamino) and Gerald Finley (Papageno). In the second act, it all fell away again. Sellars's fatal mistake, I think, is to set up a scenario the logic of which he cannot fulfil. The opera's libretto is full of contradictions, inconsistencies and loose ends. To pretend that it is much more than a rambling old panto, its innocence its sublimity, to snip off dialogue and squeeze the remainder into a pint-pot of intellectual coherence, is to kill it stone dead. The addition of a spurious duet for Tamino and Papageno is a dreadful lapse of taste, and if Parnina and Tamino are to go naked to their last trial, could they please be naked and not shrouded with ludicrous 'invisible' modesty garments?
I cannot share the general enthusiasm for the Royal Opera's new production of Verdi's Attila, since I did not feel that the creditable conducting (of Edward Downes) and staging (of Elijah Moshinsky) suc- ceeded in disguising the fact that the piece contains possibly ten minutes of good music to an hour and a half of crashing, banging and walloping cliché — elemental, if you like that sort of thing; coarse and tedious if you don't. Well, I don't, and I don't think anyone else would either, were they not possessed with hindsight on the glories that followed (Macbeth, for inst- ance, composed only months after Attila). The singing of Josephine Barstow, Dennis O'Neill, Giorgio Zancanaro and Ruggero Raimondi was accurate and intelligent, but none of them was loud enough. I am not being flippant. Listen to recordings of Galeffi and Pacetti — long dead, alas and you will hear how a great deal of volume serves to add dignity to the banal.
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