Glyndebourne Opera House
Figaro – Adam Plachetka
Susanna – Laura Tatulescu
Bartolo – Luciano Di Pasquale
Marcellina – Anne Mason
Cherubino – Lydia Teuscher
Don Basilio – Timothy Robinson
Countess Almaviva – Amanda Majeski
Count Almaviva – Joshua Hopkins
Antonio – Nicholas Folwell
Don Curzio – Alasdair Elliott
Barbarina – Sara Lian Owen
First Bridesmaid – Charlotte Beament
Second Bridesmaid – Annie Fredericksson
Michael Grandage (director)
Ian Rutherford (revival
director)
Paule Constable (lighting)
Ben Wright (movement)
Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus
master: Jeremy Bines)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Jérémie Rhorer (conductor)
What a pity! On a glorious –
well, by recent English standards – summer’s day, there can be few more beautiful
English countryside settings than Glyndebourne, with the added bonus, as alas
much of the audience appears to understand it, of an opera house attached.
Still, they had clearly made the most of their interval picnicking, about which
a little more anon. To see The Marriage
of Figaro, the first opera staged at Glyndebourne, and the first staged at
the new house too (preserved on a wonderful DVD, with Bernard Haitink as
conductor) ought to have been the icing on the cake. Of course, it ought to
have been the other way round, Mozart and Da Ponte coming first, but Michael
Grandage and his revival director, Ian Rutherford had no intention of
permitting that to happen. (As shorthand, I shall refer to Grandage, but it may
be that Rutherford modified an initial conception to a considerable degree. The
curious may consult a DVD from last year now available; I do not think I can
bear to see it.)
For no apparent reason, the
action is shunted into the 1970s, the decade, which, everyone seems to agree,
taste forgot, whatever its virtues may have been. It seems a peculiar
substitute for the eighteenth-century. No attempt seems to have been made
either coherently to re-imagine the action – the intricate comedy based upon a
society of orders, let alone the droit de
seigneur is, as much as possible, simply ignored – or boldly to present
something new. For the former, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle remains a magical DVD bet,
aided by Karl Böhm, the Vienna Philharmonic, and a cast, headed by Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau, Kiri Te Kanawa, Hermann Prey, and Mirella Freni, for which the
phrase ‘to die for’ might have been made. (The aforementioned Glyndebourne
production, directed by Stephen Medcalf, has a fair share of magic too.) Claus
Guth’s superlative Strindbergian retelling from Salzburg heads the other
camp; it should not work, but it really, really does.
Chez Grandage, at best what we have is a
pointless updating, with nothing to say either about Figaro or about the 1970s. Much of the time, however, the situation
is far worse; this most perfect of operas – give or take a Così – is treated as fodder for a variety of slapstick at which
even the lowest common denominator might cavil. With a few design hints of the
original Spain – it seems no more specific than that – what we see resembles a
particularly un-amusing episode of the little-lamented British sitcom, Duty Free. The Overture endures the
arrival of the Count and Countess in a sports car – presumably, because the
budget can. Hideous outfits, sometimes with a vague ‘Spanish’ air, sometimes
not, come and go. No context is suggested for the coexistence in a villa-like
location of alternatingly strange and uncharacterised people. Even an
ill-behaved audience thought it beneath itself to laugh – perhaps the sitcom
custom of ‘canned laughter’ should have been adopted – at Susanna reacting to
Cherubino’s malodorous socks. The nadir,
however, was reached when, at the end of the third act, quite deaf to Mozart’s
score, some of the most embarrassing disco dancing I have ever witnessed – and even
if ‘embarrassing’ were the point, that does not excuse it – was foisted upon
the work. As if that were not enough, some sections of the audience started
clapping along, albeit with a disturbing lack of rhythm. We seemed to have
moved from Duty Free to Hi-de-Hi! (For those innocent of the ‘heyday’
of the British sitcom, Youtube may well have clips; I should recommend spending
the time with Ponnelle and Böhm instead.) It was well-nigh impossible to hear
the orchestra for such loutish behaviour: doubtless encouraged by the staging,
but nevertheless the responsibility of the perpetrators.
And, just to make things even
worse, the surtitles alternated between the embarrassingly demotic (Susanna again,
being compelled to comment approvingly on Cherubino’s ‘moves’); the absent (far
too much of the recitative); and the often wildly inaccurate (why a ‘signature’
for the army officer’s seal?) Whoever is responsible needs to address the
problem, since it is not an exception; the titles for Ariadne
auf Naxos made almost as much a mess of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s
exquisite text. It is a problem that can readily be corrected, and certainly ought
to be.
Musically, things were
better, though far from what we all know Figaro
can be, whether from great recorded performances or memories in the theatre. To
be fair, the production did its best to overshadow the music, so there was
little scope for outstanding assumptions of almost any role. Adam Plachetka
seemed a little neutral as Figaro to start with, but warmed up; Laura Tatulescu,
whom I admired in ENO’s
Castor et Pollux, similarly as
Susanna, in a lively performance. Much the same could be said of the Almavivas.
Joshua Hopkins offering genuine rage without bluster in his third-act aria, and
Amanda Majeski sang well enough, if not quite in style: either a little bland,
or a little tremulous. Lydia Teuscher’s Cherubino was fine as far as it went,
but was not helped by certain tempo choices and suffered somewhat from a lack
of tonal richness; it was difficult to believe in her as a boy. I should not,
however, be surprised if performances improved considerably during the run;
they often do, and there was in any case nothing really to complain about here.
In this context, it was perhaps unsurprising that the stock buffo characters came off best, Anne
Mason’s Marcellina and Luciano Di Pasquale’s Bartolo particularly noteworthy.
Jérémie Rhorer’s conducting of
the London Philharmonic Orchestra had its moments, but they were moments. There
was little sense of Mozart’s tonal architecture, so crucial to delineating the
drama; moreover there were a good few perverse choices of tempo, whether
considered in themselves or in context. I do not think I have heard ‘Non più
andrai’ taken either so lightly or so quickly; it is certainly not an
experience I wish to repeat. Another problem, in some ways still more serious,
was of general listlessness, the music swimming along somewhat aimlessly; it
often seemed genuinely uncertain whether this were what Rhorer had insisted
upon, or whether it were what he had fallen into. A related issue was that of
far too many cases in which stage and pit fell apart. The odd instance might be
ascribed to a singer, but not a persistent problem. When it was permitted to do
so, the LPO played with spirit and with warmth, provided one could take the
rasping of natural trumpets (though not horns). How one longed, though, for
this fine orchestra, with so splendid a pedigree in Mozart, to be reunited with
the likes of Haitink. One longed still more, of course, for a staging that
began to do justice to the work.
This is a co-production with
Houston and the Met. It will be interesting, to say the least, to see how it
goes down across the Atlantic.
