CONTEMPORARY ARTS
MUSIC ' Queen of Spades. (Royal Opera House.) TCHAIKOVSKY'S Queen of Spades returned to the repertory at Covent Garden on January 23rd. This is a very patchy work, with a senti- mental and melodramatic libretto, unusually full (even for a Russian opera) of diversions ; but much of the melodramatic music is excellent and the diversions charmingly pretty—though Covent Garden cuts the best, a full-scale pastiche of an eighteenth-century pastoral. Hermann is an amorous tenor of the lachrymose, suicidal type, only galvanised into activity by the prospect of getting rich quick by means of a preternatural gambling secret and driven crazy by guilt when he has got it. Lisa should by rights be a worthy successor to the Tatyana of Eugene Onegin; but her music is very inferior to Tatyana's and she herself is wmuch vaguer, less sympa- thetic figure. The opera depends on these two, plagrd on this occasion by Ljuba Welitsch and Edgar Evans, and on the Countess, which has been one of Edith Coates's most successful roles. Mme Welitsch was not well cast as Lisa, the innocent and tender young girl who falls victim to an unscrupulous and finally mad lover. Wearing her own bright red hair, thoroughly mature in appearance and dressed in a brilliant blue, she struck the wrong visual note from the start. This, however, was of less importance than the startling falling-off, in both quality and quantity, of her voice. As Aida or Salome she was in the past easily able to dominate a large fortissimo ensemble, vocal and orchestral ; but, except when she stood well to the front of the stage and faced her audience squarely, much of Lisa's music was lost, and there was a noticeable discomfort, shortness of breath and tendency to hurry in all her singing.
Edgar Evans was more successful in the melodramatic than the amorous passages of Hermann's role, and excellent in the nocturnal barracks-scene, when Hermann is viSit0 by the Countess's ghost. The central scene of the opera, where he conceals himself in the old woman's bedroom and frightens her to death with his demands for the gambling secret, was ruined by injudicious lighting. Pushkin described the room as lit by " the lamp in front of the ikon," Tchaikovsky's stage-directions give lamps in the plural ; but in any case the scene loses most of its point and all its atmosphere if the face of Hermann and the Countess are brightly lit, as they were at Covent Garden. Her abject terror is made less probable, and the senile mouthings and writhings, executed so admirably by Miss Coates, are not meant to be spot-lit but merely glimpsed in the half-light.
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The London Symphony Orchestra's Sunday-evening concert at the Festival Hall on January 25th introduced an unfamiliar work by a contemporary Dutch composer. Hendrik Andriessen is a sixty- year-old organist and choirmaster, much of whose music has been written for the church. His Ricercare owes more than its title to his intimate knowledge of the polyphonic music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It shows him to be master of a lively and lucid contrapuntal style, based on tradition but by no means profes- sorial, and a bold and effective orchestrator, with a preference for French brilliance even when treating such severe and venerable themes as the traditional B-A-C-H. MARTIN COOPER.
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