A rts
Revolutionary entertainments
Rodney MIInes
La Cubans (Sadler's Wells) Die Zauberfitite and Cosi fan tuttelGlyndeboume Tour) Lord Macaulay would have found something to say about the London musical Press in one of its periodic fits of po-face-ism, a portmanteau word that Hans Werner Henze can pronounce any way he likes. They have for the most part sat hard on his Sprightly `vaudeville-' La Cubana, though there seems little point in an elephant sitting on a pear-drop. It profits neither party much. It is also no good complaining that there isn't enough music in it: there isn't meant to be, and much of what there is is good. La Cubana (subtitled 'A life for art') is Henze's hommage a Weill. Much deft pastiche of the master is balanced on one side by more general parody (including a dazzling send-up of Romberg-type 1930-ish operetta) and on the other by ethnic episodes for beggars and 'witnesses' (department of messages, very brief) scored for an unusual on-stage ensemble of mouth-organ, muted tuba, ocarina, mandollue, guitar, accordion and bamboo flute. But the vaudeville is largely carried by dialogue (Hans Magnus Enzensberger's). Rachel, an ageing star of cabaret and musical, reminisces about her past triumphs to the sound of off-stage gun-fire. The date is 1959, the place Havana (the implications of course wider) — 'it's only a revolution,' she remarks querulously in passing. The music is for the most part restricted to her stage aPPearances. I may not be noted for my starrY-eyed enthusiasm for the principles of revolution, but I would far rather be entertained by Henze's enthusiasm, as here, than lectured about it as in We Come to the River. hi any case, the message about the irrelevance of Rachel's 'art' is equivocally delivered. When her theatre is closed, she °Pens a brothel, which is presumably H_ enze's last word on middle-class culture. _Yet he has worked in and still works in that brothel with rare skill. Perhaps this is an expiatory self-portrait. At the end Rachel enjoys a triumphant and unironic apotheosis, saluted by the whole company (fists clenched, natch). We love her as much as Henze does, unless Cohn Graham's production is wildly off-beam. I mean, I presume the fatuous slogan-toting student is also Henze's last word on rich middle-class revolutionaries. Rachel treats him as a sex object, which seems to me quite sensible. Copulation and revolution are old enemies. , The English Music Theatre gets better as Its subsidy gets smaller. There are some Most accomplished performers in the huge company. The show-girls wear body stockings (shame) but Penelope Mackay as Rachel does not (bravo) when she delivers her unconscious verdict on operetta by waving her bum at the conductor. Miss Mackay has a brave stab at a role that perhaps needs the combined talents of Gertrude Lawrence and Lotte Lenya. The rest of the company disports itself as pimps, critics, policemen etc with conviction. I especially admired the young baritone Glyn Davenport's skill in stilt-walking in the circus scene. The fireeaters were, I believe, guest artists. I found the whole evening huge fun, which is what it is intended to be. Anyone going in that frame of mind (performances on Thursday and Saturday) should have a ball. Back to the brothel. The steady and continuing emergence of first-rate British singers must be causing Glyndebourne no end of a problem. There they go every summer, hiring amazing international casts for the festival, and then sending the same operas on tour in the autumn with home-grown soloists. In the two operas seen at Oxford last week, three of the singers in Cost were really rather more accomplished than their festival colleagues (it would of course be invidious to say which) and there was precious little to choose between summer and autumn casts of Zauberflote. I exaggerate the preponderance of exotic foreign names in Sussex —they get fewer and fewer —but if and when the time comes that there is little distinction in quality and nationality between festival and tour, then what is going to happen to the former's box office? It must be some sort of comment on our times that the wretched Hockney Flute — a fair attribution in that it does Mozart no service and pulls the rug smartly from under the producer's feet — has been attracting. even larger audiences than the Hall Cost. At least the sight-lines at Oxford spared us some of the designer's conceits (Sarastro's swimming pool was one), and some neces sary adjustments to the fire and water scene rendered it less adequate than before. I fear we have not seen the last of this visual mon strosity. Musically the performance was good, verbally — in a bewildering variety of German accents — less so, save for Richard Jackson's idiomatically enunciated and sung Papageno, which was nearer the mark than the festival casting. We had a remark able Queen of Night in Lynda Russel: a real voice, accuracy and musical delivery. Richard Berkeley Steele's mellifluous teen-age Tamino lacked only a little in penetration, and Helen Walker (Pamina) once more showed a promisingly rich soprano that has not quite settled down yet. The three Ladies were very good. The performance was dominated by Nicholas Braithwaite's conducting — decidedly brisk yet not unfeeling — and the cleanly articulated orchestral playing.
The Cost was by any standards a stunning evening. Simon Rattle's conducting was rather more unbridled than Haitink's fastidiously classical (and beautiful) reading at Glyndebourne, and the emotional intensity missing on the first night in Sussex was here supplied in spades. Felicity Lott sang Fior diligi unfailing beauty of tone and phrase: she is an artist to treasure. It is a long time since I have heard a Ferrando as technically secure as Keith Lewis; maybe he and Mr Rattle between them made `LIn aura amorosa' sound a little too like Brahms, but why not once in a while? Kate Flowers's sour Despina was warmly sung and brilliantly funny. I fancy that John Rath (Guglielmo) and Michael Lewis (Alfonso) could have changed roles to vocal if not physical advantage. It is brave of Hall to play the false farewells of the first act so seriously, since this demands a great deal from the singers in the second to balance it. Here they gave it, from an uncomfortably violent 11 mio ritratto' onwards. What a horrid opera.
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