LSO St Luke’s
Michele – Simon Thorpe
Giorgetta – Sarah-Jane LewisLuigi – Charne Rochford
La Frugola – Fiona Mackay
Tinca – Robin Jeffcoat
Talpa – Arshak Kuzikyan
Song-seller – Luis Gomes
Ella Marchment (director)
This was a May Day performance
of Puccini’s opera to match what one might hear in the most exalted of houses,
with all the advantages of observing the action at close hand. In this concert
staging. there were no sets, but there was keen, telling direction (Ella
Marchment). Imaginative use was made of the space too, the chorus and certain
other solos being heard from above and around, reinforcing the sense of being
trapped, fatally so, upon a river barge.
The Melos Sinfonia under Oliver
Zeffman offered a duly hypnotic, post-Debussyan opening, the Seine immediately
announced as a major, arguably the
major, character. Zeffman’s care for orchestral balance was a richly rewarded
as his dramatic pacing throughout; try as I might – and of course, I was not
really trying – I could not find anything to fault. Dramatic tension and the
needs of the moment were as well balanced as the orchestral lines (both with
each other and with the voices). Just when one began to think that Puccini might
be veering a little too close to Debussy for comfort, orchestral swells
proclaimed his identity all the louder. The twists and turns in the score, for
instance when Luigi offers his men a drink, were navigated with a sharp ear for
rhythm and colour – and splendidly executed by the orchestra. Rhythm, perhaps
in this of all Puccini’s score, proved properly generative, progenitor of as
well as aqueous participant in the drama.
There was no doubt, moreover,
of the existential tragedy when Luigi took to the stage to respond to Tinca;
one could have cut the atmosphere with a knife; Paris, another existence,
certainly called to the lovers in their duet. A duly symphonic conception that
yet did not forget this was an opera underlined, indeed in every sense
underscored, the inexorable human tragedy. The icy chill of the strings’
knife-twisting thus took its place not as a mere ‘effect’ but as a necessary
outcome of what had gone before. Stravinskian ostinato – surely at least as
much to the point as the organ-grinder’s colourful reminiscence of Petrushka – looked forward to Œdipus Rex.
I had no more reservations
concerning the singing than I did the rest of the performance. Simon Thorpe’s
darkly tortured – and torturing – Michele was at least as powerful a portrayal
of the role as I have heard. The same could be said of the rich-toned Giorgetta
of Sarah-Jane Lewis, whose plight and character could not have done more to
engage our sympathy. Charne Rochford’s powerful yet subtly attentive Italianate
reading of Luigi’s part was to be heard at just as impressive a level. Fiona
Mackay and Arshak Kuzikyan developed their characters, La Frugola and Tinca,
with excellent eyes and ears for detail: there was nothing incidental about
their roles. Nor was there in the case of Robin Jeffcoat’s lugubrious yet, in
more than one sense, ‘realistic’ Tinca or the finely-observed Song-seller of
Luis Gomes. The small chorus, well trained by William Cole, was on equally
excellent form, whether corporately or in the case of other solos. At no point
did it occur to me to miss this panoply of full staging.
