Opera
Weird and wonderful
Rodney MIlnes Now, I must be very grown up and get through a whole column without mention- ing super-titles. (Incidentally, how darkly ironic it is that Gabriela Benackova should now have 'withdrawn from' — press- release euphemism for 'walked out of — the forthcoming new production of Jenufa at Covent Garden, since her participation was advanced as the main reason for the Royal Opera performing the work in Czech instead of, as always in the past, English: punters would for the first time, we were told, get the benefit of the full and deeply authentic flavour of the Moravian text, and the fact that few of them would understand a single bloody word of it would be compensated for by very wonder- ful super-titles. It has always seemed to me that if punters wanted the full authentic flavour of Moravia, then they should jolly well get on a plane and go there, leaving opera companies here free to get on with the serious business of presenting dramatic works in such a way that audiences could appreciate them without artificial and, indeed, prophylactic aids. As it is, we now face the prospect of a Jenufa sung in deeply authentic (?) Moravian by a cast that is with one exception English-speaking, in addition to which the one exception is not noted for his — or, as the case may be, her — clarity of diction and might with just as much profit be engaged to sing the role in deeply authentic Serbo-Croat. Heigh ho for the weird and wonderful ways of opera.) All of which is by way of saying that I have a bad conscience about ignoring the excellent cast of GTO's Boccanegra a fortnight ago in favour of banging on about you-know-what: after all, it is hardly the singers' fault if the touring management decides to insert English letters between their performances and the audience. One must instead try and look on the bright side, which is that the same management is consistently nudging up vocal standards with the help of ever more proficient native singers — to the extent that they seriously challenge those of the festival itself. Mal- colm Donnelly frankly knocked spots off his summer colleague in the title-role: his baritone sounded firmer and more full- toned than ever before, and he curbed a natural tendency towards 'operatic' gesture to give an ideally restrained, inward inter- pretation of this most subtly drawn of Verdi heroes.
All hail, too, to Marie Slorach, as tough and vibrant vocally as Carol Vaness at the festival, but rather more vulnerable of demeanour as Amelia. There is a beautiful moment — new to the touring production — when she sits in a chair and draws her feet up under her, looking the very image of a little girl threatened from all sides and not knowing quite what to do next. This was a breathtakingly touching effect. Anthony Roden, too, sang a steadier, more smoothly phrased and warm-toned Adorn° than either of the European tenors engaged earlier in the year. The rest of the cast was more homespun, but efficiently so, and it was only sad that the conductor Graeme Jenkins — perhaps misled by the super-titles' mention of the Corsair Boc- canegra — seemed to think he was con- ducting II corsaro, to which his brash, up-front approach would have been in- finitely better suited than it was to this sombre and muted mature masterpiece.
Titles caused even more problems in Don Giovanni, in that the audience fre- quently fell off their seats laughing at jokes flashed up before they had been sung: how do the poor singers cope with having the responsibility of communication arbitrarily taken away from them? But here too there were artists to marvel at, among them a young bass, Peter Rose, with astonishingly mature tone as the Commendatore, and a Masetto (Patrick Donnelly, no relation) once again unarguably superior to the one we heard at the festival. Kim Begley sang Ottavio exquisitely, but it is odd that, as an ex-actor, he should seem to act less the better his singing gets (the same thought struck me after his curiously blank Alfredo for New Sadler's Wells last year). Faith Elliott, who was the understudy for Mary Stuart at the Coliseum in the summer and indeed went on after a Greek soprano had stepped in for Rosalind Plowright on the first night and sung in Italian (I trust this was an isolated case of the weird and wonderful ways of opera infecting the ENO), was an outstandingly good Elvira, firm of tone and accurate in fioriture. The piece was authoritatively conducted by Martin Isepp.
There is one hilarious mistranslation in the Giovanni titles that is going to launch Opera magazine's 'Super-title of the Month' column, a regular feature that will run from December until these ludicrous objects are laughed off the stages of Great Britain (and then the world). Luckily they were not used in Albert Herring, a late entry into the touring repertory following the postponement of Nigel Osborne's new opera The Electrification of the Soviet Union, which I trust is not about the introduction of titles at the Bolshoi. Her- ring is well cast vocally — with an especial- ly impressive Lady Billows from Phyllis Cannan and a witty, very musical Vicar from Philip O'Reilly — and brilliantly conducted and played by Oliver Knussen and the London Sinfonietta. The produc- tion, alas, has fallen apart: the cast know they are being funny, which is death to good comedy. Still, there is enough for punters to relish in these three touring operas, now on their way to Norwich and Manchester. There, I've hardly mentioned titles at all.
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