King Idomeneo
Birmingham
Osud
Royal Albert Hall
Last year Birmingham Opera Company imported La traviata from Verona, and performed it to huge and enthusiastic audiences. Result: the Arts Council, in its infinite malignant imbecility, axed its grant, along with that of many other institutions which survive on an annual budget that would keep one of the metropolitan ‘centres of excellence’ going for a week or two. Gratifyingly, the outcry was such that the BOC was ‘reprieved’, and, to demonstrate how up and running it is, has staged one of Mozart’s most impressive but lengthy and demanding operas in a disused rubber factory on the outskirts of Birmingham. The local community has been heavily involved, as usual, and any visitor from elsewhere has as his first task finding where the Sherborne Building is and getting there, encountering on the way the amazing ghastliness of the city’s spaghetti junctions. Once arrived at the industrial estate, in a cloudburst as it happened, I waited until a ‘guard’ told me I was a Trojan captive, and stuck a yellow label on my lapel. Let into the huge cold leaky building, forbidden to sit, so standing on large hillocks of earth (the guards moved us constantly), I saw a good account of King Idomeneo, as the translation by Amanda Holden has it. Paul Nilon, hero and veteran of many comparable occasions, sang the cruelly tough title role with unquenched virtuosity and his passionate commitment, and acted it, so far as possible under the circumstances, with equal conviction. He is a marvellous artist. As his son Idamante, who released us from captivity so that we were free to roam, some way into the action, Mark Wilde was just as fine, a major operatic artist in the making. Ilia, his Trojan beloved, was the intense Anna Dennis, and the central quartet was completed by Donna Bateman as Electra, dressed as a Christmas tree fairy but dispatching her terrifying arias with aplomb. It was both strange and nice to hear old-fashioned warm-toned playing from the small but strong orchestra, conducted by William Lacey. The acoustics are not reliable in such a place, but most of the time I found it possible to get myself into tolerable auditory contact. Many scores of locals writhed, danced, gesticulated, sang, shoved people around politely, and anyway kept fit.
Graham Vick was, as usual, the inspiration and director of the proceedings. The sell-out audiences show how successful, and deservedly so, he is. Yet I wonder if one — anyone — does finally get into a closer, more concentrated relationship to a complex work by having its action dispersed over a large space, so that the audience has to spot where the next bit is going to happen. A static, fairly narrow acting space may distance us, but doesn’t it also save us from distraction, enable us to absorb what is taking place, educate us into expecting certain conventions to be observed, which are the way into such a highly wrought masterwork? I realise that a community project can hardly abide by the usual theatrical rules, but did the many citizens who participated in a marginal way get to know the piece better than they would have done if they had sat and watched it, perhaps been told about it and the myth from which it was made, and so on? I ask in a spirit of fervent admiration for what Vick and his teams accomplish, but I would like to know.
The Proms mounted Fate (but why call it Osud, when the characters refer only to ‘Fatum’?), Janacek’s problem opera, and it came over very well as a great musical experience. That is probably all it can come over as, but, though someone was credited with a concert staging, that was confined to exits and entrances, and the positioning of mad Mother some way up the stairs, which may have accounted for Rosalind Plowright’s disastrous missed screams and interjections. Jiri Belohlavek conducted with the intensity which the piece demands. I think it is almost certainly a failure, but the music is so consistently inspired, more so than in some of the dramatically more cogent later operas, that any lover of this extraordinary isolated genius must place it at the centre of his output.
Janacek’s obsessions, with innocent exploitable young women, with dreadful, lunatic older imperious ones, and with bewildered, dithering men stuck between the two, here have both their most complicated, let’s-try-to-be-fair-all-round outing, and are shown to be finally unconquerable. The beautiful background of normality and quotidian flirting and quarrelling, figured in the many choral interjections, mainly serve to make at least some aspects of the central triangle more harrowing, though in the end the composer-figure, Janacek’s one indulgence in autobiography in his art, is too pathetic to have bestowed on him the transfiguringly ecstatic music that the others are all awarded. He is punished with a viciously hard tessitura, which Stefan Margita coped with better than Janacek deserved. Amanda Roocroft was adorable, on old form, as the wretched Mila, and Plowright, omissions apart, spectacularly unhinged and forceful as the Mother. All the innumerable minor roles were perfect. This, or a performance based on it, should be issued as a recording.
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