St John’s, Smith Square
(performed in English, as Pride and Pretence)
Rosina – Aoife O’Sullivan
Don Cassandro – Nicholas Merryweather
Don Polidoro – Robert Anthony
Gardiner
Giacinta – Caryl Hughes
Ninetta – Nathalie Chalkley
Fracasso – Adam Tunnicliffe
Simone – Gavan Ring
Jeremy Gray (director)
CHROMA
Andrew Griffiths (conductor)
Bampton Classical Opera’s
annual visit to St John’s Smith Square this year offered La finta semplice, the twelve-year-old Mozart’s three-act opera buffa to a Goldoni libretto as
modified by Marco Coltellini. Coltellini had settled in Vienna in the early
1760s, having been appointed as Metastasio’s successor as court poet. Libretti
included that for Tommaso Traetta’s 1763 Ifigenia
in Tauride, in some ways a precursor of Gluck’s reform operas,
incorporating as it did many elements of French tragédie lyrique into the typically more Italianate Viennese opera.
Indeed, Gluck would set Coltellini’s Telemaco
in 1765, and Salieri his Armida in
1771.
La
finta semplice, composed
in 1768, came between those two works. Though rehearsed in Vienna in 1768, it
was not performed, seemingly the victim of Leopold Mozart’s failure to gain a
contract, Mozart’s father having acted upon Joseph II’s suggestion – Joseph was
now Holy Roman Emperor, and Co-regent of the Habsburg lands with Maria Theresa,
though she still very much wore the imperial trousers – that Mozart might write
a work for performance by the court opera. Intrigues that would not have been
out of place in Amadeus thwarted the expected
performance, and the Mozarts abruptly returned to Salzburg, where La finta semplice would be performed the
following year at the Archbishop’s Palace, probably on 1 May. We can be
reasonably sure that that performance, employing local musicians including
Michael Haydn’s wife, Magdalena Lipp, as Rosina, was the only one during
Mozart’s lifetime.
Though occasionally staged
since, it remains a rarity. My only previous theatrical encounter with it
having been during the heavenly anniversary year of 2006, when Salzburg staged
all of Mozart’s operas, though this particular opera received an anything-but-heavenly
staging, recitatives being ditched in favour of a gameshow format, in which a squeaky-voiced
woman clad in a bright yellow jumpsuit shouted directorial inanities. Michael
Hofstetter’s conducting of the Camerata Salzburg was not much better, abrasively
harrying an orchestra that bore all too readily the wounds of its Norringtonian
passion. (Though I have proved unable to bring myself to return to it, the
production is available on DVD, lest the reader think it a figment of my
fevered imagination.)
It was, then, with eagerness
that I travelled to Westminster for a second chance, sad perhaps that the opera
was being offered in translation, yet grateful that it was to be performed at
all. The ‘new English translation’ by Gilly French and Jeremy Gray was one of
those translations more akin to a new ‘version’: not a problem if it works and
proves a thoroughgoing recreation, but in this case tended more towards the merely
silly. Words and sometimes whole couplets seemed chosen more on account of the
opportunity for an attention-seeking rhyme, such as ‘boozing’ and ‘snoozing’,
than because they were dramatically fitting, let alone faithful. Nevertheless, when
making a mental comparison with the jumpsuit gameshow ‘version’, one could
breathe a sigh or two of relief. Gray’s staging, insofar as one could tell,
given its transporting from Bampton to Westminster, offered manic – sometimes a
little too manic – action against a vaguely surrealistic backdrop. In that, it
was doubtless consistent with the conception apparent from the translation of
kinship to farce, though I am not sure that it thereby displayed any real
appreciation of Goldoni’s buffa form,
Coltellini’s revisions, or indeed Mozart’s music. Partly for that reason, I
shall not delve more deeply into the plot; synopses are readily available, and
in the circumstances, the musical performance became more evidently the thing.
Certain overheated moments
apart, though, it did not particular harm either. Andrew Griffiths was able as
conductor to show a far keener appreciation of the score, pacing it well,
offering both contrast and, especially during the second and third acts, a
proper sense, even at this stage in Mozart’s career, of dramatic development.
Griffiths yielded where appropriate, without succumbing in any sense to the
mannerisms that so bedevil present performances of eighteenth-century
repertoire. If there were occasions when one missed the sound of a full
orchestra, the CHROMA ensemble offered for the most part finely honed,
sensitive playing: stylish without affectation. Charlotte Forrest deserves special mention as the excellent harpsichord continuo player. A young cast offered
an ensemble that was definitely more than the sum of its parts, not that they
were negligible. If in many cases some numbers proved more strongly sung than
others, there was a high level not only of promise but accomplishment. Aoife O’Sullivan’s
account of Rosina, the baroness, was perhaps the high point, its musical
sensitivity matching that of the players. But a general sense of commitment and
exuberance went a long way.
