REVIEW OF THE ARTS
Rodney Milnes on the failures of our opera houses
No one is quite sure if Renderecki's The Det'ils of Loudun it a 'real' opera, and I am even less *ire if music critics, who have exhaled much hot air on the subject, are necessarily the best judges. I am perfectly certain that John Dexter's production did everything possible to reveal what musico-dramatic power there is in the piece. Meanwhile, many indisputably 'real' operas have been newly produced or revived in 'stagings that seem designed to conceal their dramatic possibilities, and apart from the odd comment, critics seem to accept this as the norm. Having suffered untold tortures over the past few weeks, I am damned well going to share them.
First, lphigenie en Tauride, one of the most eloquent, economic and noble music dramas devised by man, though not on the evidence of the latest revival by the Royal Opera. The sets have always been hideous, but we cannot demand a new production for a work that, devoid of conventional love interest (unless homophilia and incest now count as such) or gratuitous vocal display, has never been good box
office. Nevertheless, the management might have done Gluck the honour of ironing those few drapes that are not flatly painted: they looked as creased as if they had been taken out of the skips that very afternoon.
The production is unacceptable.,
The soi-disant ballet is neither eighteenth century, contemporary nor BC Scythian in style. It is simply a vaguely post-Fokine mish-mash. The aimless amblings in the last act in no way, suggests preparations for a human sacrifice — rather a rehearsal for a royal wedding. The staging of Orestes's torment by the Furies, an operatic episode of unique power, would disgrace any village hall in the land, and the subsequent entry of priestesses, distracting fatally from Orestes's narration of those unfortunate goings-on in far-off Mycenae, seemed to be timed simply from the fact that they had doffed their Furies' overalls. There was little contact between the
characters; indeed Orestes's "adieu" to Pylades, one of the most heart-rending farewells in dramatic literature, was addressed, for reasons I am unable to fathom, to lph igen ie.
Sena Jurinac is a sensitive and authoritative artist, but she now finds the title role a strain and sings much of the music with her chin glued firmly to her throat, which must have given the gallery a boring evening. Her acting was restricted to a few stock operatic gestures, and the French language is not in her repertoire. We had to wait for the entry of Robert Massard, a brilliant singing' actor, for any distinction in the delivery of the text. His Orestes is alone worth the price of a ticket, even if you leave after the first act, when with merely one line to sing and. an upward glance he conveys searingly the spiritual anguish of the tormented matricide and failed lover.
I found the conducting of John Eliot Gardiner, making his Covent Garden debut, polite and dainty, failing in its response to the emotional drive of the score. There was, of course, a harpsichord in the pit: de rigueur nowadays in any eighteenth century work. They will be using the confounded thing in Wagner next. Historical excuses there may be for the sub-I stitution of a tame march in place' of the infinitely more powerful funeral rites as the close of Act 2, but this struck me as an example of musiological chi-chi.
Almost more frustrating than the wilful castration of this masterpiece was what happened to Elektra. With Rudolph Kempe conducting, there was orchestral playing of boundless subtlety and discretion: the cast could have whispered much of the text had
they chosen so to do. But Heather Harper was sadly miscast as Chrysothemis, and Danica Mastilovic a sturdily conventional Elektra, while Clytemnestra was, as usual, played as a sort of Hampstead meths-drinker for reasons that escape me. The fact that Elektra levered herself up from a recumbent position with the business end of her property torch is fair indication of the general level of dramatic presentation.
As for Monteverdi's acid Coronation of Poppea, the piece never quite works at the Coliseum, where the luscious orchestral realisation swamps both musical and dramatic content. Motivation and characterisation are not sharply enough etched, and I miss a directorial point-of-view to bring this horrid immorality tale into twentieth-century focus. The Nazi salutes and Third Reich eagle in the finale may be saying something (and if they are, it is the wrong thing) but all before is. played as a harmless historical pageant. There are dramatic nonsenses in plenty; "here are my heart and soul" sings the baritone without so much as a glance at the proposed recipient, and the would-be orgiastic slow-motion multi-sexual groupings would be embarrassing if they were not so funny.
Poppea was one of the seven opera productions by Colin Graham seen in London in the last ten weeks. While not wishing to refer this to the monopolies commission, there may be a higher court to pass judgement on what he did to Tchaikovsky's lolanta for the English Opera Group. The received opinion is that this composer wrote.two good operas and five bad ones, so the press consensus ran that Iolanta is a pretty rotten piece and Cohn Graham did all he could for it. In fact, lolanta is a very good piece indeed, and Mr Graham nearly succeeded in disguising the fact. Of considerable psychological sophistication, the opera is about a blind princess whose over-loving King-father takes steps to see she remains that way by threatening death for anyone who reveals the cause of her unexplained misery. In the course of a beautifully written duet, she learns the truth from a passing tenor, the King is tactfully put straight by a Moorish physician, and all ends happily.
Without actually mentioning the word 'Freud,' surely the most blinkered, critic might guess that there is more to this carefully paced one-acter than meets the eye, even though it was presented as a straight mediaeval fairy-tale in fussy costumes and set, undersung, and weighed down with fidgety chorus movement, inept make-up (little to distinguish the Moor from the rest) and an intermittently dreadful translation. Poor Iolanta didn't stand much of a chance.
Whatever a 'real' opera may be, a real opera production is one where the dramatic potential is realised and this fact conveyed directly to the audience. There are precious few of them about.
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