BROADCAST OPERA
THE production of Verdi's The Force of Destiny by the B.B.C. last week was one symptom of a recent and welcome' change in the Corporation's operatic policy, which had tended to play for safety and rely on the hackneyed. After all, it is no light task to prepare for one performance an opera which is not in the repertory and will therefore be unknown to the singers. This is the weak point in our present position, for our established operatic companies (of which another, the Carl Rosa, this week succeeds the Sadler's Wells Com- pany in central London) are at the moment limited by circumstances to well-worn favourites. Until we have a permanent opera-house, freed from the more acute financial worries, we cannot expect adventurousness in artistic policy.
It is all the more important that the B.B.C., which has the stability, should be enterprising in its choice of operas for broadcasts, and it might well reconsider its present practice of limiting its productions to a single performance. For, though at first sight it might seem improbable that an unfamiliar work like The Force of Destiny would appeal to more than a iimited and specialised audience, I have been given evidence that it was listened to with great enjoyment by large numbers of people of small operatic experience.
The performance was excellent so far as it went, by which I mean that severe cuts eliminated much of the characteristic music with which Verdi enlivened this grim tale of revenge, in which accident, coincidence and disguise play too prominent a part for credulity. In the old days the opera was used at Covent Garden as a grand field-day for Caruso and Scotti (Mme. Destinn intervening), and no one cared tuppence for the choruses or for Preziosilla and her " rataplan " song, and the comic Melitone. But with more modest principals, who nevertheless sang with a real sense of Verdi's vocal style, more space should have been given to the subsidiary characters and the chorus. It was, I presume, a matter of time, and it would, perhaps, be unfair to press the criticism against an organisation which allotted two hours and a quarter to the performance. And I feel the less inclined to do so in view of the really splendid performance on the following evening under Sir Adrian Boult of Schubert's Symphony in C major, which was given not only complete but with all the repeats, except that in the finale. How much it gains from this full deployment of its beauty in space with unhurried ease DYNELEY HUSSEY.
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