Opera
Don Giovanni (Deutsche Grammophon)
Lords and masters
Rodney Miles
What are we to do about the ruling classes on stage now that we don't have any in real life? I remember the mild shock some years ago, when Glyndebourne used to perform Tchaikovsky operas and import Bulgarians to sing them in Russian, seeing artists who had had to learn how to stand and move and gesture in a vaguely aristo- cratic way, and thus accomplish it with a certain verisimilitude, and comparing them with native singers who imagined they knew all about that sort of thing and supposed it would come naturally. It didn't, always. In the straight theatre the emergence of the classless actor 20 years ago led to any number of faintly embarras- sing evenings in the theatre, with classical or drawing-room drama played with over- weening confidence and all the wrong vowel sounds.
The television Brideshead started to get things right, though Lady Julia would never have thrown a lighted cigarette on to the front drive, and Ryder would no more have put his hands in his pockets when first meeting Lady Marchmain than fly to the moon. Details, I know, but they bring me laboriously and with only marginal rele- vance to my point abot the latest revival of Jonathan Miller's production of Figaro at the Coliseum. The point of reference for Count Almaviva would appear to be Boy Mulcaster as so memorably portrayed on television by Mark Sinden as a great gallumphing oaf with a brain as small as his self-confidence was gargantuan. Well yes, maybe Almaviva is a French version of the Spanish equivalent of a British minor- public-school rustic landowner, loud of voice, short of grace — a Tony Lumpkin, an embryo Baron Ochs.
Jacek Strauch, making his house debut, played this version of Almaviva horribly persuasively, preening, portly, hilariously brainless and wholly without menace. But was he Mozart's Almaviva? The music suggests a certain dignity, a certain natural authority, both singularly lacking here. He seemed to have been set up as a mere Aunt Sally, a figure of fun to be knocked down repeatedly, which is all very well but hardly the stuff to engage the attention for nearly four hours in the theatre. If there is no substance to the character, no bat-squeak of integrity or even sympathy, then a vital element of the drama is missing.
This curious interpretation left the field open to the rest of a rather mixed cast, and Valerie Masterson leapt into the gap with a beautifully modulated portrayal of the Countess, each changing mood deftly sug- gested with minimum fuss and maximum effect. John Tomlinson's bass is sadly too vast and unwieldy for Mozart and Figaro (though I look forward to his Ochs and his Hagen with much interest) and Kathryn Pope didn't quite project her Susanna across the footlights on the first night. Stuart Kale and Donald Adams projected their Basilio and Bart°lo right up to the back row of the gallery — good knock- about stuff — and Anne-Marie Owens's ineffably imperious Marcellina is alone worth the price of a ticket. Whatever one's doubts about his reading of the Count, Mr Miller's re-rehearsal of the show is as crisp and pointed as Mark Elder's conducting. On the new DG recording of Giovanni, Samuel Ramey's singing of the title role is aristocratic almost to a fault. His suprema- cy in Rossini means that his shaping of Mozart's lines has uncommon pliancy and beauty, and his tone is as always gloriously warm and closely focused. But does he sound remotely like a rapist and murderer? Don Ottavio doesn't think so, so why should we? Yet as the second act pro- gresses, so Mr Ramey's velvet takes on an edge of metal, and he rises to the chal- lenge of Paata Burchuladze's stentorian Commendatore with proud defiance. This is a thoughtful, convincing and supremely musical performance.
The rest of the cast is similarly mixed. Ferruccio Furlanetto's Leporello, positive- ly reeking of garlic, is the most pungent I have heard since the great Giuseppe Tad- dei — but then Italian Leporelli have a head start on all others. Kathleen Battle's Zerlina is in the Erna Berger/Elisabeth Schumann tradition, but her light and airy soprano is capable of lovely colour in the lower registers: her singing is utterly en- chanting. Like Mr Tomlinson, Anna Tomowa-Sintow (Donna Anna) is now up and away beyond Mozart (the beat in the voice compromises the lines) and Gosta Winbergh, accomplished though his sing- ing may be, doesn't quite counter Ottavio's undeserved reputation as one of opera's all-time great wets.
As in so many Karajan recordings, there is one eccentricity of casting, in this case that of the mezzo Agnes Baltsa as Elvira. I know there were no such things as mezzos in Mozart's time, the equivalent then being seconda donnas (and as one mezzo put it so forcefully to me the other day, who wants to be a seconda anything?), but a modern mezzo still isn't quite the same thing. Miss Baltsa sings the notes perfectly well, but the high tessitura means that there is a constant sense of strain, lending an air of pressure, and thence of hysteria of not quite the right kind. But such eccentricity is as nothing compared to that of the conducting: time and again a phrase, a paragraph (the modulation at the entrance of Anna and Ottavio in the second-act sextet is just one) reminds you what a great conductor Karajan can be; just as often his effects are so mannered, so downright silly, that you want to leap out of your chair and shake him (yes, CD does make it sound as if he's there in the room with you). Again as in so many Karajan recordings, levels vary widely. You really do have to jump out of your chair to turn the volume down when the statue arrives for supper, only to have to jump up again to turn it up for the final sextet. Record producers presumably listen to tapes in sound-proof studios; ordinary mortal record buyers are likely to have neighbours.
The Berlin Philharmonic play wonder- fully well. I still think the old Giulini Giovanni is probably the best all-round buy.
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