Celebrating freedom

Albert Herring
Royal Academy of Music

La bohème
The Cock Tavern, Kilburn

Whenever there is a new production of Britten’s great comedy Albert Herring I go to it and then carry on at some length about how wonderful the opera is, and this particular production, whichever it may be. And it is always true. For several obvious reasons, Herring is an opera that producers mess around with very little — mild and harmless updatings are just about all that it is subject to; and, though it would be catastrophic to impose a radically new interpretation on it, it would be no worse than what is visited on many other stage works which should be just as directorially unmolested. The Royal Academy of Music has been very lucky to get John Copley to stage its production, which has alternating casts, of which unfortunately I was able to see only the first. The set is less detailed than, say, Glyndebourne’s, but all necessary props are present, including Sid’s bike — odd how someone cycling on to a stage invariably raises a laugh. And of course it has a young cast, this one uniformly excellent, and not inclined to overdo the semi-parody of East Anglian manners.

What always gives me a surprise is the prodigal, Mozartian inventiveness of this score. Britten’s later operas, most of his later works in any genre, are notable and celebrated for their economy, for the composer’s capacity to build large structures out of very little basic material. That is all very well, but is there anything wrong with having lots of material, especially if it’s on a high level of inspiration, and sometimes elaborating it, sometimes teasingly letting it go, so that one never hears it again until the next time one hears the whole work? Britten’s veneration of Verdi, as well as of Mozart, might surely have led him to emulate those masters in their prodigality? I would argue that up to Herring, and culminating there, they were his models, but that afterwards he decided, for various reasons (one probably being the desire to create a claustrophobic atmosphere), to be as stingy as possible with the material out of which he made his larger works, Owen Wingrave being the terminus of that line.