Silk Street Theatre
Lucia – Alexandra Lowe
Mother Bayard, Ermengarde –
Carmen Artaza
Roderick, Sam – Michael Vickers
Brandon – Bertie Watson
Charles – Frederick Jones
Geneviève – Emily Kyte
Leonora – Madison Nonoa
Nurse – Meriel Cunningham
Lucia II – Lucy Anderson
Roderick II – Eduard Mas
Bacardit
Earl of Dunmow – Samuel Carl
Errand Boy – Filipe Manu
Mrs Kneebone – Emily Kyte
Countess of Dunmow – Lucy
Andreson
Susan – Zoe Drummond
Prince Philippe – Eduard Mas
Bacardit
Grand Duchess – Lucy McAuley
Ashley Dean (director)
Cordelia Chisholm (set designs)
Kevin Treacy (lighting)
Laura Jane Stanfield (costumes)
Victoria Newlyn (movement)
Orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London
Dominic Wheeler (conductor)
Stuck record time again: much
of the best London opera comes from our conservatoires. That is not to belittle
what I have heard at Covent Garden since returning to London; much has been of
a very high standard. ENO: let us hope the benighted rule of Cressida Pollock
has now been put behind it. Opera Holland Park continues to go from strength to
strength, most recently with perhaps the finest all round Così fan tutte I have seen and heard for well over a decade. These
things are not competitive, whatever capital might tell you. Moreover, our
conservatoires tend to offer rather different, complementary fare. A particular
strength of the Guildhall has been its repertoire choices – and so it continued
to be here. If, in this double bill of two operas I had neither seen nor indeed
heard, one proved far superior to the other, I was immensely grateful to be
afforded the opportunity to acquaint myself with both, especially in such fine
performances as these.
Hindemith and Thornton Wilder
might not seem the most obvious of collaborators. The Long Christmas Dinner, however, works very well. Wilder, it
seems, worked hard to convert his 1931 play into a libretto. (I say ‘it seems’,
since I am relying on secondary literature; I shall certainly try to read the
play before long.) The concision is striking, but so is its suitability for
Hindemith in particular. That may, of course, also be a matter of Hindemith’s
adaptability too. At any rate, what came across strongly, in work, performances,
and indeed staging was the somewhat tedious repetition of Christmas in a
bourgeois New England family, the Bayards, over ninety years – without in any sense
proving tedious itself. The cyclical aspect may be seen in a revolving set,
centred on the dinner table, to which characters in slight decline – far less
dramatically so, and surely this is deliberate, than in Buddenbrooks – come and from which they go. Behaviour varies and
repeats; one feels a certain sympathy, and yet a certain ennui, or rather feels their ennui.
Hindemith’s forms mirror and/or incite this: softened Kammermusik, in a sense, the post-Bachian motor rhythms still
present, albeit without noticeable aggression, drawing one in to action and
atmosphere alike, in a harmonic language that is, doubtless unsurprisingly,
closer to Die Harmonie der Welt. Time
passes: their time and the world’s. Until, that is, Ermengarde, the final
member of the family resident, learns that another branch – by now, with
children Roderick III and Lucia III – are building another house, another
story. Whilst reading the letter informing her, she dies. It is a very
difficult task to bring off, to portray such people in such a situation whilst
retaining one’s interest, but the company – and this seemed to me a true
company achievement – did just that. For that reason, I shall single no one out
in particular, other than to say Dominic Wheeler’s conducted framework proved
just what the team required.
Hindemith’s opera was first
performed in Mannheim, in 1961; its first performance in English came two years
later, at the Juilliard, in 1963. Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement had its premiere a few years earlier, in 1954,
at Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall. It seems, frankly, to be very much an opera
written for the insular, xenophobic world to which those trying to force us out
of the EU would have us return. Not out of intent, I am sure, whether from
Berkeley or his librettist Paul Dehn. But its fluent, pleasant, vaguely Gallic boutique
musical style palls after a while, not least on account of the absence of any
dramatic grit. A diplomat and his wife plan to marry off their daughter to the
son of the Grand Duchess of Monteblanco. (Don’t ‘foreign’ places have funny
names?) That son, Prince Philippe, thinks the daughter is a maid; they get on,
and they decide to marry, the lack of a handsome dowry notwithstanding. His
mother does not even object. If ‘heartwarming romantic comedies’ are your
thing, even you might look for a little more in the way of a plot twist. The only
‘joke’ is that the ‘foreigners’ are – well, foreign, so speak or rather sing
with ‘silly’ accents. Some food burns too. Performances were again very fine,
Eduard Mas Bacardit and Zoe Drummond skilfully teasing out what level of
lyrical excitement the score permitted as the two lovers. Once again, moreover,
there was an excellent sense of company. But there are limits to what might be
achieved, even with a resourceful kitchen set design, when the material is sub-Carry On – without the jokes.
