Private and public pleasures
Rodney Milnes
Orfoo ad Euridice, Don Giovanni (Sadler's Wells)
Coal fan tufts, Norma (Covent Garden) What is known as 'reverse-touring', or regional companies showing off their wares in London, is unsubsidised by the Arts Council and has to be privately supported. It is much encouraged by roving columnists, who like what they see in Glasgow, Cardiff and elsewhere and believe it could have a generally gingering-up effect if seen in the metropolis. It was unfortunate, then, that Scottish Opera's short guest season at the Wells should have been rather dispiriting. The musical standards were certainly unrepresentative of the company's work; they are in the process of setting up their own orchestra to avoid having to borrow what is available on an ad-hoc basis, but the band they brought to London was very ad-hoc indeed. There seemed little Sir Alexander Gibson could do about it, and the general standard of singing was, with too few exceptions, merely competent.
Despite what the programme said, Orfeo was given in the Ricordi version of Berlioz's version of Gluck's French version of his own original, with an interval arbitrarily inserted where none is called for in any of them. Although Gluck never intended Orpheus to be sung by a woman, there is some excuse when an outstanding mezzo is at hand; Mira Zakai was very promising, no more.
All of which could be described either as a defiant gesture in the face of fashionable Werktreue, or as something less complimentary. The producer managed to render the story-line, which for heaven's sake is simple enough, incomprehensible to the uninitiated (and there will be some such in every opera audience), and the idea of representing the Blessed Spirits as overmade-up nuns in see-thro' habits struck me as less than wholly appropriate. The choreography was unspeakable. Felicity Lott (Euridice) and Marie McLaughlin (Amor, in a long red frock) sang nicely. Ave atque very difinitely vale.
Why the London press should have jumped quite so hard on David Pountney's production of Don Giovanni it is hard to say. It could just be that for once an opera about sex and violence was sexy and violent. If there is a British equivalent to the European 'new wave' of opera production, then Pountney rides on the crest of it: his work is provocative, capable of development (more so than, say, that of Peter Hall, which tends to be more set), and always strongly theatrical. Like his European confreres, Pountney is keen on context; he is not content to leave the action of Giovanni as the working out of individual destinies, but sets it in a community: thus the horde of extras and thus, mainly, the discontent of the critics. What with the denizens of the inn at which Elvira lodges and Giovanni takes his pleasures (Pountney will have none of Einstein's view of Giovanni as a sexual failure) and the Commendatore's well-populated household, very little takes place in private. Leporello's public humiliation of Elvira amuses the townspeople, who respond with the laughter that the audience would supply were the opera being given in English; maybe the cruelty is thereby diminished, in that Leporello's goosing of a wench during the Catalogue aria should really be for Elvira, but perhaps Felicity Palmer (who provided the most distinguished singing of the evening) felt she should draw a line somewhere — not, however, before having a banana thrust into her mouth in the supper scene.
Many were disturbed by the Commendatore's funeral, which lasted throughout the first-act quartet and 'Or sai chi l'onore', but at least the extra activity was discreetly controlled and having both Anna's unmasking of Giovanni and the corresponding discovery of Leporello in the second act take place in public added a new and not irrelevant dimension.
Part of that dimension suggested that the, populace was as healthy and normal as all idealised proletariats — indeed there was se much enthusiastic working-class snagging (to put it mildly) that one colleague described this as 'a massage-parlou. r Giovanni' — one inference being that otti,Y the ruling class was hung up about sex la, concentrated course of News of the Woria reading might temper this starry-eyed Wel; tanschauung). Apart from his being so murderer, Giovanni's crime seemed not much that he violated women (cosi fano given half a chance, tutti) but that he was:. foul to them afterwards: his taunting 01 patently ravished Anna was revO1tlJ cruel, and his treatment of Elvira suggcoe that he despised her specifically because_seur`i enjoyed his ministrations so much, g°11Deity Lloyd, in rough voice, managed the er be but not the superficial charm that nritiSir,` he part of every Giovanni's character. reio master-servant relationship with Leff, and (Willard White) was nicely observeu„,o) Ottavio (Robin Leggate, quite exehei;oc. was surprisingly something of a swas,esoro' ler, though the last section of '11 min ",,,farin points plainly in that direction. ;cog Slorach (Zerlina) was a ennv working-class heroine. Two things separate Pountney from the hard-line ripple towards the left of the new wave: his compassion and his refusal to set a neatly cut-and-dried interpretation before his captive audience. Thus his sensitive direction of 'Non mi dir'. showing Anna and Ottavio starting to rebuild their shattered lives, was for me the highlight of the evening, and throughout there were things for members of the audience to work out for themselves (or not, as the case may be), Maria BjOrnson's untidy set suggested a building site; was it a matter of construction or demolition? Giovanni's corpse. unceremoniously dumped under his dining-room tablecloth, showed signs of life at curtain fall; was his gesture an appeal or a threat? Why did Giovanni, like Pountney's Pasha Selim, live at the top of a spiral staircase? Why, as in his Seraglio, was there so much sword-play? It could simply be because Pountney likes spiral staircases and fencing; it could mean something more profound. Either way, I rather fear for his first Cost fan tutte.
Karl Bohm's Cost at the Garden distils almost literally a lifetime's love and understanding of the score, He takes his time (to the wide-eyed amazement of his Despina, faced with a near-adagio for each of her arias) and he sanctions more cuts than are customary here: three arias from Act II, reducing Ferrando to almost a minor character. While his gently erotic. deeply searching direction of what is left is a rare delight, it is a pity to have to hear it in conjunction with the joky production, which is now showing its 12 years. But Bohm is at one with Lilian Sukis's wonderfully accurate and tenderly phrased Fiordiligi, and with some lovely mezza-voce singing from ROdiger Wohlers as Ferrando. Brigitte Fassbander (Dorabella) gives a good old-fashioned display of persistent cuty-pie up-staging — an evening for connoisseurs, then, in more ways than one. In keeping with its current sackcloth-andashes demeanour, the Garden has re-staged Norma in permanent slate-grey flats: these Druids are plainly worshipping in Blaenau-Ffestiniog. No complaints, though: Pier Luigi Pizzi's old sets were ghastly and his new version concentrates the mind wonderfully. Unfortunately what it concentrates the mind on is only fair routine conducting from Lambert° Gardelli (with a hideously unidiomatic climax) and average singing. Shirley Verrett never sounds like a soprano, her efforts are always audible, and every gesture of her applique acting is pure, but good, soap opera. Josephine Veasey, although indisposed, managed some more subtle up-staging by singing her verse of 'Mira oh Norma' in a fit di voce:poor Miss Verrett's attempt to follow suit foundered. Charles Craig sang Pollione's notes extremely efficiently but with little involvement. The only complete performance comes from Cesare Siepi, an °roves° who knows how to stand, gesture, and sing Italian —basic essentials one would have thought, but not today.
Previous page
