Opera
Miller delights
Michael Tanner
El. nglish National Opera's last season this millennium opened with a revival of Jonathan Miller's production of that lengthiest, most succulent of nostalgic works, Der Rosenkavalier. I hadn't seen this production before, and was delighted by its straightforwardness, its lack of directorial intrusions, with an egregious exception to be deplored later. It all takes place in notably uncluttered sets, too, indeed they could be thought to verge on the frugal, Making a slightly unhappy contrast to the fruitiness of the music and the feelings of the characters, indeed to the social status of the Marschallin, who seems here to eschew self-indulgence except for her taste in lovers. However, with so much excess baggage in the orchestra, a cleanly lit and almost empty stage might help digestions that find Strauss hard to cope with.
The last performance of this opera I saw was in Glasgow in February, where Richard Armstrong did what he could to sort tex- tures out and give the illusion that Strauss had written a lean score; he chose singers whose voices were light, especially that of the Marschallin, sung by Joan Rodgers. It was a clever and partially successful attempt to take a new look at the blowsy old beast. Paul Daniel, who conducts at the Coliseum, is either happy with the tradi- tional view of the work or else determined to rub our noses in it by giving as rich or overripe an account as the ENO orchestra can provide. Actually that turned out to be very ripe indeed, some scrawny string play- ing early on aside. I have never heard this orchestra play with such refulgent tone, blending rather than separating the tex- tures: to the question that Stravinsky asked when he saw the opera in 1962, 'How long can this false counterpoint go on?' Daniel's answer seemed to be to disguise the exis- tence of the counterpoint by homogenisa- tion. In its way it works. My only reservation would be that Daniel some- times, as in other scores he conducts, goes for extremes of contrast, so that the cham- ber music textures of much of the latter part of Act I and some of Act III after Ochs's welcome departure seem to exist in a different work from the absurd density they come after. There was no doubting that whatever happened was what the con- ductor had thought very carefully about, and it was his biggest success at the Colise- um to date.
In Yvonne Kenny he has a Marschallin who is singing the role now as well as she ever will. Quite suitably for contemporary tastes, who find Strauss's account of his heroine's age too young, she looks an inde- terminate 35-50, well preserved (to use that repulsive idiom which makes mature people sound like fruit), and is an expert at keeping her feelings on a fairly tight rein, except when she is alone. She might even be felt to be a bit anonymous, certainly lacking the temperament and pathos of a Lehmann or Crespin, or the barely con- cealed bitchiness of Schwarzkopf. One can readily believe that Octavian won't be the last youngster to whom she will teach a thing or two, and there is a moving hint in her performance that she is willing to be hurt as often as she will be, if that is the price of keeping her passions alive. What a pity that her diction, like everyone else's, was such that only a tiny fraction of her words could be heard. So much of this score flirts with an abyss of final boredom that the only hope is that we should be able to savour as much of Hofmannsthal's loquaciousness as possible, or Alfred Kalisch's excellent Englishing of it. Even in her monologue, and in the delicious exchanges with Sophie in Act III, I had to rely on my memories of the German, light- ly scored as these passages are.
This unintelligibility afflicted everyone except Andrew Shore's highly individual, fussy but sympathetic Faninal. Stephen Richardson's Ochs was intermittently clear, but not in the central stretches of Act II, the opera's most tiresome stretch up to that point. A country cad, tweedy and sporting a deerstalker, this was an original and thoughtful portrayal of a role which has simply ceased to be as amusing as one must assume it once was. He stood up for himself better than Strauss does for him in the showdown with the Marschallin, where Kenny too made it clear that things might not go her way. Their similarities in taste if not in method are much closer than the Marschallin wants to admit.
The two young lovers have, in this pro- duction, just the right degree of character- lessness. Octavian, looking extremely plausible both as himself and as Mariandel, was Susan Parry, rich in voice and restrained in the farce of Act III; his Sophie was Linda Richardson, not yet an effortless soarer, but that may well come at subsequent performances. The meeting in Act II still managed to be a true highlight, aided by the prurient interest of Faninal's entire household. The only jarring touch — I can hardly believe it happened — was that the Marschallin returned after making one of the grandest of exits in opera, in order to indulge in some silly play with sev- eral small children. Is this Miller's last-sec- ond way of rejecting the whole meretricious contraption? If so, it is too lit- tle too late; if not, it contributes a further element of meaninglessness to something already sufficiently rich in that negative quality.
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