In two minds about Boris
Michael Tanner
Boris Godunov Royal Opera House Thais ENO, Barbican
Musorgsky's Boris Godunov is a masterpiece; it would be absurd to deny that. Yet it is one about which I always find myself in two minds, except when I'm actually witnessing a great performance of it. When Tarkovsky's production was unveiled at the Royal Opera in 1983, with the authoritative and inspired Claudio Abbado in charge of the music, it constituted one of the supreme events in a contemporary opera-goer's life. In its newest outing, the first since 1991, it impresses, but leaves one plenty of time — and gives one the inclination — to ask those questions which when Abbado was conducting were unthinkable.
Semyon Bychkov's conducting has a lot to recommend it: the orchestra plays wonderfully throughout the whole extremely lengthy evening, just as it did when he conducted Elektra last March. There were people who felt then that it was too polite an account of that ferocious work, and I felt often during Boris that I wanted things to be rawer, gutsier, above all harsher. Maybe Rimsky's version of the opera would suit Bychkov better. The crowd, magnificently as the chorus sang, was a bit tame; those jarring dissonances that alarmed Musorgsky's contemporaries were exquisitely balanced, no more; there was a lack of momentum.
The most fervent advocate of this score has to admit that, given the urgency of the subject-matter, the mode is somewhat ambling. It's not, I think, a matter of longueurs, because I can't think of anything I would like to see disappear — though I do find having both the St Basil's Cathedral and the Kromy forest scenes, with their identical endings, a mistake. It's rather that Musorgsky seems to be the servant rather than the master of the expansively epic style. The kind of subtle and continuous variations of tempo that Abbado commanded elude Bychkov, so that, though I was rarely in fact bored, I felt perpetually on the verge of boredom, which is nearly as bad.
The soloists are a good lot, but not more than that. Purists tell us, always, that the hero of the opera is not Boris, let alone Grigoty, but the Russian people, but the performances that have moved me the most have had a towering central presence, and John Tomlinson isn't that, nor, at this stage of his career, would his voice allow him to be. He has long lost the ability to sing quietly, but some of his mezzoforte delivery in the central scenes was effective. When he shouts, he also wobbles, so authority is lacking. Even so, he plays the role sympathetically, leaving us in no doubt that Boris is indeed the hero of the piece, active, tormented, crumbling but with a core of dignity and seriousness. The Russian people are tormented, as they always have been and look as if they always will be, but in their fickleness, mass idiocy, casual brutalities and preparedness to listen to every latest rumour, they hardly interest us.
In the second performance, which I saw from the amphitheatre (and was most impressed by the sound up there), Vladimir Galouzine was a decent workaday Grigory, mature for the role and lacking the passionate ardour which differentiates him from the rest of the schemers. In the Polish scene he encountered in Olga Borodina a singer who seemed somewhat bored with the part, as opposed to Marina Mniszek who is a bored character; she might have been more seductive if she had exerted herself more — an exciting but undependable artist. At the end of their scene together, the Jesuit Rangoni, sung by Sergei Leiferkus with oily power, turned round to _the audience and went 'Ooh!', an unscored failure of taste which showed how uncertain is the touch of the current director, Irina Brown. Still, all told there are quite enough worthwhile things in the performance to make it a scandal that there were so many empty seats.
ENO's season at the Barbican continued with a couple of concert performances of Massenet's Thais. a work the quality of which is succinctly indicated by the sugary 'Meditation' for violin and orchestra, supposedly depicting Thais's movement of heart from courtesan to religious zealot. If Massenet's tooth hadn't been so addictedly sweet, he could have got a lot of mileage, some of it ironic, from the collision between Thais's conversion to chastity, and the reverse change which she inadvertently creates in Athanael. As it is, she initially simpers, he thunders, and then things are different.
The most interesting character is the young philosopher and hedonist Nicias, well sung in this performance by Paul Charles Clarke. Richard Zeller made an underpowered and ineffectual Athanael, and perhaps wasn't helped by the conductor Emmanuel Joel urging the orchestra to give its all whenever he sang. Joel seems to have the conviction that Massenet needs pepping up, but the overall result was that the actual idiom eluded him, without his finding another. However, Elizabeth Futral gave so thrilling a vocal display, and is so gorgeous to look at, that the event was worthwhile just for her — and it would be fun to see it staged, as it almost never is.
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