Britten Theatre
Count Almaviva – Thomas Isherwood
Countess Almaviva – Eleanor
Dennis
Susanna – Catriona Hewitson
Figaro – Theodore Platt
Cherubino – Anna Cooper
Marcellina – Holly-Marie
Bingham
Dr Bartolo – Timothy Edlin
Don Basilio – Glen Cunningham
Don Curzio – Samuel Jenkins
Barbarina – Milly Forrest
Antonio – Peter Edge
Two Bridesmaids – Camilla
Harris, Jessica Cale
Sir Thomas Allen (director)
Lottie Higlett (designs)
Rory Beaton (lighting)
Kate Flatt (choreography)
Royal College of Music Opera Chorus (chorus master: Leanne Singh-Levett)
Royal College of Music Opera Orchestra
Michael Rosewell (conductor)
A lively, enthusiastic young
cast, as skilled at acting as at singing, proved the definite highlight of the
Royal College of Music’s end-of-term Marriage
of Figaro. There was no weak link, each of the singers offering something
particular in roles many of us perhaps know all too well. At this stage in
their careers, singers will always have a good deal of vocal development to
await. Nevertheless, from the stern and angry Count of Thomas Isherwood to the
decidedly luxury casting of Milly Forrest’s Barbarina, there was much to enjoy
here. Eleanor Dennis, an RCM alumna deputising at the last minute, offered a
noble Countess: poised, dignified, pained, and compassionate, an object lesson
to her younger collaborators. Theodore Platt and Catriona Hewitson sparkled as a
likeable, stylish pair of servants, Figaro and Susanna, Holly-Marie Bingham’s
Marcellina and Timothy Edlin’s Bartolo perhaps giving a splendidly knowing hint
of where the characters, if hardly the singers, might find themselves in a few
years’ time.
Michael Rosewell’s conducting was
sane enough: something to be grateful for in an age of perverse, often
downright ugly Mozart ‘interpretation’. It lacked charm, though, orchestral writing too often going unshaped, even barely phrased at all. A few too
many disjunctures between pit and stage were skilfully retrieved, yet all in
all – and this is quite a different thing from minutes on the clock – the pace
somewhat dragged, a greater sense of the musical whole proving elusive.
There was not much to glean,
either, from Thomas Allen’s production. It was less aggressively, even
offensively ‘traditional’ than the Figaro
I last saw at the RCM (Jean-Claude
Auvray, 2012), yet it would be difficult to claim any great
insights. (Not that an extraordinarily disruptive – drunken? – audience,
laughing and applauding almost every bar, seemed to seek insight; alas, the
Glyndebourne Guffaw Brigade seemed very much to be at large.) Notwithstanding a
strange initial preoccupation with babies, soon dropped, as it were, the production
was very much school of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, albeit on a necessarily less
grand scale. What worked in the mid-Seventies – in many ways gloriously, as we
may still see on film, Karl Böhm’s presence certainly not hindering – does not
necessarily ring so true four decades later. Why would it? Additional elements
of something bordering on silliness did not help. There was not much more to it
than that. I have little doubt that the cast would have learned much from
working with Allen; I have little doubt, moreover, that that showed in their
own character portrayals and their interaction.
For a greater idea, be it of
the eighteenth century or any other, I sought in vain: a pity, given that two
other London conservatoire performances of the last few years have offered much
food for thought. The Guildhall (Martin
Lloyd-Evans, 2013) offered, in retrospect, chilling presentiments of
#MeToo in an American electoral campaign, whilst the Royal Academy’s gentle
updating to pre-revolutionary Cuba (Janet
Suzman, 2015) brought forth perhaps the single finest, all in all, Figaro I have seen and heard. Claus
Guth’s Strindbergian Salzburg production of the previous decade
doubtless changed the work forever. It need not, indeed should not, be
imitated. Some awareness and communication of the work’s savage darkness,
however, is now for many of us a crucial starting point, as much as it would be
for Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. Mozart never suffers
from sharply etched chiaroscuro. Still, there will surely be another
opportunity before too long – and better this than the incoherent nonsense I
endured from Johannes Erath in Dresden a couple of months ago.
