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Friday 9 January 2009

Mozart undersold

Die Zauberflöte
Royal Opera House

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Linbury

The Linbury Studio revived Olivia Fuchs’s production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for a short run, having first staged it in 2005, when I didn’t see it. Though it lacks any evocation, onstage, of woodland or indeed of any kind of location in particular, the talented and enthusiastic young cast brought it as fully to life as can be managed. This is surely, and by some way, Britten’s weakest theatrical score. The music seems all to be incidental rather than integral: none of the characters is illuminated from within by the music that they sing, or are accompanied by. I have difficulty seeing why the play is rated so highly, but Britten seems to have welcomed the opportunity to show his professionalism by writing the score at Rossinian speed, though his interest was mainly in mood-painting. The sleep music, which recurs often, too often, adds little to his other excursions into nocturnality. And the music he awards the Rustics has a patronising quality exactly analogous to upper-class people’s thinking they can imitate successfully working-class accents. Despite which, Matthew Rose’s Bottom was the ripest portrayal on the stage, making me feel, instantly, that he is going to be a great Falstaff as soon as he chooses to sing the role. He has the warmth, the authority and the rotundity of voice and presence. Everyone was at least satisfactory, though one sympathised with Katie van Kooten having to cope with the murderously unattractive music that Britten spitefully gives Helena. The fairies were an especially enchanting collection, members of the Tiffin Boys’ Choir, several soon no doubt to be promoted to Miles in Screw. Performers on this high plane make one realise how little scenery is needed in all but a few operas, and thus how much money could be saved by some of the ‘centres of excellence’ and even allotted by the Arts Council to such richly deserving causes as the Birmingham Opera Company.

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