Opera
Borderline Cases
By DAVID CAIRNS
As I suggested last week, the irony of Cos) fan tutte (put in its simplest form) is that, as sometimes happens in life, the wrong people marry each other. I am not claiming that this is made consistently explicit throughout the opera. One would not expect it to be; the point precisely is it takes place below the level of consciousness—the characters are largely un- aware of what stares us, or should stare us, in the face (in this sense only are they puppets, in the sense that, through, their common human frailty, they are powerless to direct their destinies in the right direction). But there are hints too strong to be mistaken.
Ultimately, I think, a production should be judged by how far it makes this central point clear. And the Crux is the great scene between Ferrando and Fiordiligi. If the audience splits its sides, all is lost. Professor Ebert's pro- duction at Glyndebourne goes a good way towards presenting the characters as real individuals, and its humour is mostly organic, not contrived. But at the vital point he lets us (or at any rate me) down. At the central moment of the drama, the moment of supreme importance—the yielding of Fiordiligi—we are fatally distracted by the antics of the watching Guglielmo (and played with Geraint Evan's masterly sense of timing, they are inevitably very funny). It is as essential that the focus of interest should not shift from the intensely moving drama being enacted in the middle of the stage as it is that Leporello should not draw attention to himself and set the house laughing during Don Giovanni's tremendous colloquy with the Statue; other- wise we miss the deep seriousness of the proceedings. Nor did John Pritchard's .con- ducting, on the first night, give us the full glow and intensity of this scene; he was too intent on making the music move forward at the one point where its heart should seem to stand still. In general, after a restless beginning (in which the woodwind clipped their quaver phrases short throughout the overture, and the clarinets snatched at their upbeat at the beginning of 'Ah guarda sorella', instead of drifting in dreamily, the suspicion of a fraction late), Mr. Pritchard conducted with admirable poise and spirit; but the sheer warmth and leisurely physical wellbeing of this superb score (which are delightfully present in Rolfe Gerard's setting) were,, to my ears, missing. If Cosi is an ironic comment on human blindness, it is also a celebration of sensuality ,and youth and thoughtless beauty; and in this respect the conception seemed to me less than perfect.
The weakest of the cast is the tenor Oncina, who is pleasantly adequate except at those moments when we ask most of Ferrando-- 'Un aura amorosa' and the great duet—where his head notes sadly lack intensity. Carlos Feller is a lean and hungry Don Alfonso, rather too young and too anxiously involved in it all and lacking the urbane assurance of victory, but it is expertly done. Among the women Ilva Ligabue is a charming and thoroughly competent Fiordiligi who may well mature into a good one, Gloria Lane is already an uncommonly good Dorabella (though on the first night she was inclined to force her tone in the first act), while if the Despina of Graziella Sciutti will only sing a few more of the notes (which she can easily do without dulling the edge of her brilliantly piquant characterisation) and abandon that lazy Italian tendency to parlando which would be quite intolerable in anyone else, she will be as satisfying to the ear as she is tormenting to the eye.
All in all, an enjoyable performance which will certainly ripen as the summer advances. But I still wait for one that, without dimming the wit and elegance of the surface or over- loading this most delicate of comedies with a burden of 'significance', makes it plain where the true irony of Cosi lies.
The brunt of the blame for the failure of The Borderline, a disappointing ballad opera which had four performances at the Scala Theatre the other day, has fallen on Wilfrid Mellers' music; unfairly, in rriy opinion. The rather rambling, Delian arias may not do much to crystallise the dramatic situation, but they are better than David Holbrook's lyrics deserve; the point is that there is virtually no dramatic situation to crystallise. On the rare occasions when the libretto offers him a chance Mr. Mellers writes music of some wit and force, as in the quick-fingered chorus of gossiping women at the parish meeting or the jazzy confessions of Willy Wood, the village Teddy boy, whose appearances (in the hands of Mr. Andrew Gold) jerked a moribund book into spasmodic life. Willy Wood is supposed to be someone who has 'never known what it is to be a child.' It is interesting that only he and the whited sepulchre Solomon Grundy have any dramatic vitality, while the 'good' characters, who have roots and restore the ancient country virtues and are either children or have brought the 'innocence' of childhood with them across the borderline of adolescence (a rather literary idea which is never worked out in theatrical terms), are limp as old balloons.
How far a score of moderate quality can go with a really good book to carry it was splen- didly demonstrated a few Sundays ago iri a programme of one-act American operas at the Royal Court Theatre. In The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (Lukas Foss), In A Garden (Meyer Kupferman) and Gallantry (Douglas Moore) the music (well conducted by David Tidboald) is deft and skilful but without much originality or invention; but so lively and well made are the librettos (by Jean Karsavina, Gertrude Stein and Arnold Sundgaard) that, while one is sitting in the theatre, it does not matter. The variety of subjects (a saloon bar contest in the far West, a piece of slightly sinister 'nonsense' about a schoolgirl who imagines herself a Queen, and a skit on commercial television drama), the genuinely dramatic treatment they get, and Mr. Richard Stuart Flusser's racy handling of a large and exuberant cast (in which Andrew Gold and Ruth Petter excelled) gave an enviable im- pression of the vitality of American opine.
Previous page
