Once is enough
Michael Tanner
Last week I accidentally sent the wrong review of La Traviata for publication — one of a performance at the Royal Opera a year ago. What appears below is a shortened version of the right one. Many apologies to all concerned.
Second Movement Covent Garden Film Studios Carmen Tower Hamlets La Traviata Royal Opera House
‘Second Movement’ is the name of a three-year-old opera company, whose main aim is to provide ‘a professional platform for young singers, administrators and practitioners on the cusp of their professional careers’. That word ‘cusp’ is vital in such mission statements. Second Movement also hopes to introduce new audiences to opera ‘in a short and easily accessible format’. New Labour jargon again, and the infuriating goal of easy accessibility. Anyway, last week, in the Covent Garden Film Studios, the audience seemed no less elderly than opera and concert audiences almost always do. We were rewarded with excellent performances of two pieces, both of which I could easily do without, but it was, as it invariably is, good to hear and see such fine young singers though the proportion of those whom I see at the ‘cusp’ that I never see again, and conversely the number of established singers I encounter on the stages of the major opera companies whom I would be happy not to see again, but do, remain a mystery to me.
The first piece was Menotti’s The Medium, which had a long career on Broadway in 1946. The two main characters here are Baba aka Madame Flora, the Medium, and her daughter Monica, who does many of her tricks for her; there is a silent role, brilliantly taken by Sean Clayton (a tenor, who sings in the other piece). And there are three small parts for the Medium’s clients. Allison Bell, the Monica, delivered a scintillating performance, though her voice was often too big for the modest hall, and sometimes it sounded as if she needed to be kind to it if it is to stay in its present shape. She is an impressive actress, too. But the Baba of Hannah Pedley, though she has fewer vocal challenges to meet, was still more impressive: it’s a part that not only permits but also demands scenery-chewing, and Pedley left no furniture unturned. More than that, so far as the tacky music and plot allow, she created a vivid and disturbing portrait of a woman who finds that her fakery has touched an alarming reality which she can’t control.
As usual with Menotti, there is a serious subject here, but all he can do is abuse it for cheap theatrical effect. His operas are depressingly ‘well made’, but utterly without heart. He is a manufacturer, too, of tunes which sound catchy but turn out to be instantly forgettable. When the singers aren’t engaged in ‘haunting’ musical soliloquies, they have some very sub-Puccini hamming to do. This set seized all their chances, and the very small orchestra, conducted by Nicholas Chalmers, gave them all the support they needed. Once is enough.
Mozart’s The Impresario is a difficult case: a small amount of music, of high quality, and a lot of dreadful dialogue. Second Movement scrapped the dreadful dialogue and came up with a whole new lot, just as bad. Michael Flexer provided a contemporary comedy about a lesbian investment banker, once more brilliantly played by Hannah Pedley, and her girlfriend, a clapped-out soprano, actually with a striking and strong voice: that was Jane Harrington. Her rival was Allison Bell, even noisier than she had been in The Medium, but giving a virtuoso comic performance. But the play itself is a May Week sketch excruciatingly extended, and a mediocre one at that. It encouraged overacting, and certainly got it. I would like to see these gifted performers in a work or works worthy of them, where they might also calm down a bit.
A more heartening experience the next day was in Tower Hamlets. At the Brady Arts and Community Centre, Children’s Music Workshop is staging its own version of Carmen, attended by classes from local schools, which have been primed in the opera’s plot and characters, and have heard some of the tunes. This enterprise has been going for several years, but unfor tunately I have only just come across it. The 45 Bangladeshi pupils aged ten or 11 of Canon Barnett School who attended on the first day seemed to be much more absorbed in the proceedings than the opera audiences I’m used to normally are. The performance was a vivid one, sung in a mixture of English and French, by four excellent singers. It may be invidious, but I must single out Elin Thomas’s Micaela and Robert Davies’s Escamillo; and I have unlimited praise for the pianist and music director Howard Moody, who not only accompanied extremely well, but after the 70-minute performance also involved the audience by asking them skilful questions, and got them on to the stage, where, helped by the singers, they took up the drama and re-enacted parts of it which had especially excited them. Hard to know how long-term the effects of such an experience might be, but I found it immensely enjoyable, partly because everyone else seemed to, too. If it means that in the future when they hear the word ‘opera’ a few at least of these children will respond positively and want to find out more, then the efforts of this superb team will have been vindicated.
The Royal Opera is doing its annual run of Traviatas, the least strenuous way, one supposes, for it and perhaps for its clients to launch their operatic new year. Not only is this still Richard Eyre’s 1994 production, though directed this time round by Patrick Young, but two of the three principals are the same as last year. The Puerto Rican Ana Maria Martinez is petite, fragilelooking, and with a voice to match. She doesn’t sing with much individuality, in fact is an old-style coloratura soprano without actually managing to dazzle in the home stretch of Act I. Her Alfredo is the American Charles Castronovo, and if he isn’t exactly a piece of undercasting, it is a close-run thing. His upper reaches are insecure, and in the cabaletta of his Act II aria his voice let him down embarrassingly.
The most impressive of the principals is Zeljko Lucic, who manages a Germont père of considerable subtlety, combining pompous conventionality and a streak of sentimentality with a conviction which his last few predecessors at the Royal Opera haven’t achieved. Though nothing can make the character less than loathsome, on this occasion I found Violetta’s acceding to his demands less alienating than usual, and that was to Lucic’s credit more than to Martinez’s. He began his big scene with Violetta with stentorian force, but very soon modified it in the light of her dignity and self-possession.
The conductor Philippe Auguin was a big help there, and kept the score flowing in a way that some of his recent predecessors haven’t. Yet he failed, finally, to bring anything fresh to a score which demands it. The result was yet another evening at the Royal Opera which left me with a feeling of classy routine.
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