The Guildhall School of Music and Drama is outdoing itself in putting on a triple bill of little-known operas, two by Massenet and one by Martinu. What is still more remarkable is that GSMD has put them all on before, though I think in different productions. This time round the designer Yannis Thavoris has produced a set of which the main ingredient, a heap of miscellaneous broken or discarded objects, remains throughout the evening, while other props are introduced that are sufficiently striking to create a quite different mood as the curtain rises on the three little operas.
The first, Massenet’s La Navarraise, goes so against everything we associate with the composer that it must have been written partly in order to demonstrate how wide his range was. Not that he hadn’t already demonstrated that pastel-shaded love stories with a harrowing conclusion after a couple of hours of build-up were not the only thing he could pull off, but none of the very wide range of other varieties of subject-matter seems to have kept his creative attention, with the exception perhaps of Thais, the ultimate sex-and-God concoction, and given the material most of that is pretty tame stuff.
La Navarraise used to be compared with, even paired with, Cavalleria Rusticana, but it was sent packing by I Pagliacci, a much stronger work. Still, Navarraise made a sufficiently strong impression at its first London performance in 1894 for the Prince of Wales to order a royal command performance at Windsor, not a remote possibility now for any opera. It begins promisingly with gunshots and fanfares, we are plunged into a Spanish civil war, and there is no danger whatever that the name of action will be lost. The heroine Anita is so passionately in love with the hero Araquil, a brave soldier, that she is prepared to assassinate the enemy leader to win 2,000 douros, to pay her own dowry to her beloved’s hostile father. Araquil thinks she must have sold herself to the leader, and curses her, before dying of his wounds. Anita goes mad, but the curtain comes down before she has a chance for a proper mad scene, which wouldn’t be in the idiom of the piece.
Massenet comes up with angular phrases, special effects, fast-moving music, but all to no avail. Dramatically La Navarraise is inert; and that remained true even of the excellent performance it received on the first night of the GSMD’s brief run, with Magdalena Molendowska as Anita, but looking as if she couldn’t wait for Scarpia to appear so she could sink a knife in him. This singer has a powerful voice, the kind of personality that is made for operas of the period, and a striking appearance. Adam Smith was equally convincing as Araquil, all the singing was on a high level, and the GSMD orchestra is in much better shape, under the baton of Peter Robinson.
In Le Portrait de Manon, also from 1894, Massenet is on his favourite territory, indeed the only memorable melodic idea in this brief work is taken from Manon. We find Des Grieux unable to cope with his prolonged grief for Manon, to the point where he forbids his nephew Jean to pursue his love for the delightful Aurore. The young lovers briefly contemplate suicide, but decide on more light-hearted expressions of their passion, and when it is discovered that Aurore is Manon’s niece Des Grieux melts, as the music has been doing for the previous 50 minutes. More of a challenge in some respects, Le Portrait was carried off at least as successfully as Navarraise, Adam Smith showing his versatility by turning up in a quite different role from Araquil.
So far so fairly good. Then came Martinu, an opera of his written in 1937 for radio called Comedy on the Bridge, sung in English where the two Massenet pieces had been sung in various kinds of French. It’s astonishing how rapidly a piece by Martinu can become tedious, especially when you reflect how promiscuous his idiom is, so that you might always wonder which composer he is going to sound quite like next. You don’t, though, because whoever it is Martinu is the great leveller, and he always levels down.
Once more we had a first-rate production and decent singers in vocally undemanding parts. The comedy is on a bridge that connects the two warring factions in a town, and one character after another gets stuck on it as they are allowed past a barrier on to it but not off again. It’s a quite good joke at the expense of military idiocy once, but it does wear thin, and nothing whatever is added, apart from length, by having it set to music, and certainly not to that music.
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