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Friday 9 January 2009

Scottish highs and lows

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
Usher Hall

Ysaye Quartet
Queen’s Hall

The Two Widows
Edinburgh Festival Theatre

The next morning at the Queen’s Hall we had, as so often, a compensation for the large-scale trials. The Ysaye Quartet gave immaculate, deeply felt accounts of four adventurous but appealing masterworks by Haydn, Stravinsky, Szymanowski and Debussy. This cleverly chosen programme showed how many different ways there are of writing fine quartet music, with Haydn operating as a norm from which the others all drastically and successfully depart. These welcome concerts all used to be broadcast live, but now some appear on radio during the autumn and some disappear altogether.

In the evening we had one of the very few operas of the season: a new production by Scottish Opera of Smetana’s The Two Widows. Unusually, Smetana chose a non-Czech text, but made sure the music was permeated by polka rhythms and that the action was framed by plenty of central European peasants. There are four characters, and the subject is serious: how does one cope with bereavement? The widow Karolina looks for another man, while Anezka mopes. Both fall for the same roguish poacher Ladislav; the gamekeeper Mumlal is a purely comic figure, unromantic. Anezka finally has to accept that she is in love with Ladislav and Karolina graciously relinquishes him, just as well since he reciprocates Anezka’s love.

It’s a slight though not a short piece, characteristic in every bar of its composer’s good nature — I wish he had had a bit less of that. The setting is elegant, the production annoying, with a running pseudo-mirror gag that isn’t funny at any stage. The dialogue (this too was in English) sometimes sounds like Coward, and he might have approved of the wallpaper. The atmosphere is gentle and genteel, and neither grief nor burgeoning passion enlarges the range of feeling unduly. Francesco Corti conducted with energy, and when the finest part of the score was reached half-way through Act II, as Anezka realises that she can’t spend the rest of her life in mourning, indeed has fallen in love, he provided Jane Irwin, who had begun tentatively but by then was superbly in her stride, with sensitive support. The tenor was an uncharismatic bleater. Kate Valentine as the would-be merry widow has a fluttery tone which I don’t think she was employing to convey the role’s brittleness. It made a harmless but hardly a festive evening. It’s a long gap before any more opera turns up in Edinburgh. Let’s hope that Gergiev, who is conducting, has been having a rest.

More articles from: Michael Tanner | this section

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