This year’s Christmas offering at the Royal Opera is yet a further revival of Richard Eyre’s production of La Traviata, which began the season and is being revived again early in 2012. The main reason I went again to an opera for which I usually feel distaste was to see and hear Simon Keenlyside in the role of Germont père, hoping that he might make me see the opera in a different light. And, with a few gestures and in magnificent vocal form, that is exactly what he did.
Normally I object strongly to Violetta’s giving in to the old bully, and then asking him to bless her, when if there is any blessing to be done it should be the other way round. He has just morally and psychologically blackmailed her into renouncing Alfredo, and she has allowed herself to succumb to his ruthlessness. That is, of course, in the text, but the miracle in this particular revival was that Germont was the more emotionally fragile of the two, so one felt in the end that Violetta was taking pity on him. When she asked him to embrace her he recoiled, shockingly, showing the depths of his conventionality and anxiety in the face of true feeling. But a few minutes later he tentatively stretched out his hand towards her, and she hesitated to take it.
After she left and Alfredo returned and realised the horror of the situation, his father attempted to embrace him and was shoved away so hard he almost fell to the ground; at last he was forced into genuine feeling, and his incursion into the party scene that followed made more, and more complicated, sense than it usually does.
That could all have been crude, but the three singing actors involved were so reined in their intonations and in their movements that it became moving at a level one hardly ever finds in Verdi. Ailyn Pérez, who saved the Royal Opera on its tour of Japan last year by singing Violetta when its first two were ill, is not an ideal Violetta — she is more of a Gilda — but she is lovely to look at, a natural actress, and she has the right ideas about singing the role.
What she lacks is strength of voice for the big climaxes, which are rare but should he a knockout, and breath control: time after time a phrase that should have reached a beautiful ending just disappeared as she took in air. In a smaller theatre her performance would be even more affecting. The suave, impassioned Alfredo was Piotr Beczala, who, though he has plenty of laurels to rest on, doesn’t do that, but gives life and colour to a role that often lacks both. Fortunately in the pit there was Patrick Lange, a young German who lavished on Verdi’s score all the care it needs, and among other things brought out several points of telling orchestral detail. But it is Keenlyside for whom any lover of this opera is under an obligation to go this time round. It is as successful and moving a revival as the last one was wretched.
I went to the Young Vic with the highest hopes, all of them dashed. Scottish Opera and Northern Ireland Opera have been touring a co-production of Offenbach’s masterpiece Orpheus in the Underworld, taking it to 18 Scottish locations and five Northern Irish ones, and ending with eight in London. The text has been translated, in the most generous possible sense, by Rory Bremner, for whom my admiration is almost as unlimited as it is for Offenbach. There is a team of ten first-rate singers, and a piano accompaniment, played on the night I went by Ruth Wilkinson, with a verve and pulse that any of the accompanists of OperaUpClose would do well to emulate. The result was a disaster, or something so close it doesn’t matter. An audience that was willing the performers to make it laugh was almost continuously disappointed.
Bremner’s biting wit has been replaced on this occasion by a crude skit so bland and vulgar at the same time that the sheer idea it might upset any of our present politicians, celebrities or media-men is absurd. In the end I resorted to the conspiracy theory that it is only by showing how feeble this famous satire is that Bremner will ensure he is invited back to do another series of Bremner, Bird and Fortune.
The idea here is that Orpheus is an effete violinist, though a gifted one, whose playing drives his ghastly wife Eurydice into the arms of Pluto, disguised as a personal fitness trainer. Mount Olympus is a champagne bar overlooking the City. Public Opinion is a bustling bitch, furiously overacted by Máire Flavin, so wide of the mark that she created bewilderment rather than amusement in the audience. Jane Harrington is a fine Mozart singer, but as Eurydice merely seemed to be common instead of acting the part.
Offenbach is so rarely performed, apart from Hoffmann, and when he is it’s like this.
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