Music
Highbrow singing
Rupert Christiansen
One all-redeeming triumph: the Mark Morris Dance Group from the USA, pre- senting their version of Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas. Little-known in Britain, Morris's barefoot choreography is supremely musical and unstintingly inven- tive, with a broad and open emotional range. His Dido is built on a totally individ- ual neo-classicism which draws on the aus- terity of Minoan friezes and the flamboyance of Hollywood camp, as well as dazzling step-dancing virtuosity. Madly funny, dazzlingly beautiful, formally rigor- ous and yet strangely moving, it illuminates Purcell's score at every turn, focused on Morris's own unforgettable doubling of the roles of Dido and the Sorceress. This is an epic performance in a grand, ancient tradi- tion of female impersonation, both slyly vampish and awesomely dignified -- queenly in every sense of the word. If you hate the dreariness, the earnestness, the pomposity, the cliches, the sheer unmusi- cality of modern dance as much as I do then watch Mark Morris. He has genius, and that is not a word I use lightly. The vocal element of this Dido was strongly led by Della Jones, also doubling as Dido and the Sorceress. She sings with a sincerity which inclines one to overlook the occasional hooty gear-change and exagger- ation of consonants, but for me this is music indelibly and eternally marked by the 'Admit it, Edna, he's brain-dead. Let's turn off the machine.'
lineaments of Dame Janet Baker. Lively playing from the Scottish Ensemble under Gareth Jones and strong support from Rebecca Evans, James Maddalena and Rosemary Joshua in secondary roles brought further distinction to this wonder- ful work of art — and those are not words I use lightly either.
There isn't much else in the way of opera at Edinburgh this year, as the Festival's new director Brian McMaster has presum- ably decided to hold back until the city's new opera house (to be called, deplorably, the Edinburgh Festival Theatre) opens in 1994. This is probably wise, but that spirit of holding back seems to pervade the whole programme: the note it strikes is a mite cautious and sensible for something that calls itself a festival. Of course, McMaster has to re-establish a certain gravitas after the slapdash jamboree approach of his predecessor, Frank Dun- lop; he also has to steer a recession and keep the lid on a deficit. It's his first bash at a difficult job. Nevertheless, I hope that next year's programme will take a few more risks, particularly in the areas of late-night cabaret and morning concerts. To date, it's all been too politely highbrow, weighted towards sensible, familiar names like Peter Donohue and Elizabeth SOderstrOm, lack- ing exotic spice and rule-breaking novelty. Russian music and musicians have fea- tured strongly, with special emphasis on
Tchaikovsky (jumping the gun on the cen- tenary of his death next year). I'm sorry to have missed a coupling of The Nutcracker (presented by Adventures in Motion Pic- tures) and the one-act opera written in the same year, Yolanta (presented by Opera North, with Joan Rodgers in the title role), which has been livening up the King's The- atre this week; and 1 would love to hear the mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina at the Queen's Hall on 1 September — but I can't feel myself short-changed after Dmitri Hvorostovsky's recital at the Usher Hall.
Still in his twenties, winner of the Cardiff Singer of the World competition, Hvoros- tovsky has won a lot of publicity on the tail of his recording contract with Philips and devilish good looks. Well, it's all justified. On the evidence of his singing of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov I can only bow to the miracle of a great voice, an instrument of astonishing tonal richness, used with consummate technical accom- plishment. A certain lack of emotional vari- ety was inevitable given the relentlessly Slavic soulfulness of this repertoire, but Hvorostovsky is not a one-dimensional per- former. He phrases with subtlety, pointing the musical punctuation as well as shaping the larger paragraphs, without allowing his impeccable bel canto smoothness of pro- duction to deaden his responsiveness. He managed the necessary eye-rolling, arm- flailing gestures with both tact and intensi- ty; he seems to love the music he is singing and to be possessed by it. Whether he will make a major operatic career I have no idea (his debut at Covent Garden last May, in I Puritani, is best forgotten), but on a bare stage with only a piano to challenge him, he sounded fabulous.
A concert performance at the Usher Hall of an early opera by Tchaikovsky, The Oprichnik, brought another first-class Siberian singer to Edinburgh. Galina Gor- chakova is a real spinto soprano who makes a big, gorgeous noise, securely controlled and wide in dynamics. She gives one hope that the role of Aida might once again be adequately interpreted, and she redeemed an otherwise numbingly banal evening. Mark Ermler did his best with the Scottish Opera Chorus and Orchestra (augmented, I guess, for the occasion), but the poor tenor was souffrant, and the opera itself, an empty melodrama set in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, became increasingly tiresome — over-scored and over-heated, all breast- beating and wham-bam climaxes. I don't want to hear it again.
Anyone lucky enough to be in Edinburgh for the last week of the Festival would be well advised to hear both the American soprano Dawn Upshaw at the Queen's Hall on 31 August and the Festival's closing concert, of contemporary Scottish music, at Usher Hall on 5 September. Evelyn Glen- nie will be the soloist in James MacMillan's new Percussion Concerto, enthusiastically reviewed when it was presented at the Proms earlier this month. I hope it goes down as well in Edinburgh, because the youthful, glamorous, home-grown talent that Glennie and MacMillan embody is something that forthcoming Edinburgh Festivals will badly need.
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