Cherevichki
Royal Opera
Tolomeo
English Touring Opera, Cambridge
Semele
Royal Academy of Music
The week’s operatic rarity was Tchaikovsky’s Cherevichki, inaccu-rately translated as The Tsarina’s Slippers. It is an adaptation of the Gogol story ‘Christmas Eve’, and is slightly more familiar in Rimsky-Korsakov’s version, which was mounted in a spirited production at ENO in 1988. Though I never thought I’d say so, the Rimsky score turns out to be considerably more engaging, certainly more suited to his temperament, and his flair for orchestral colour. Tchaikovsky was devoted to his own opera, which had a mild success as Vakula the Smith, and which he subjected to extensive revision. Some ardent Tchaikovskians, of whom it appears Francesca Zambello, director of this production, is one, also make high claims for the piece, even alleging that it is among the composer’s finest works, if not the finest of all. It seems to me an extraordinarily feeble affair, lacking all of the qualities for which we adore Tchaikovsky, and not revealing any that we didn’t know about. The claim, repeated several times in the programme, that it shows a gift for comedy was the only thing that made me smile all evening. If there were a comic centre, it would be the scene in which the witch Solokha gets one importunate lover after another to hide in a sack — the Royal Opera seems to be staging a season with this as the theme (i.e., the other one, L’heure espagnole). In fact, it is sadly laboured, despite the spirited efforts of Larissa Diadkova, here in her element. The banter that takes up much of the first two acts is set to music of almost embarrassing heavy-footedness, and still more painful, contains not a single memorable melody. And even the one area where one can almost always rely on Tchaikovsky’s professionalism, the orchestration, is barren of interest. One feels that his fondness for the score was that of a parent for his disabled child.
No need, however, to feel that it was short-changed. Most of the cast are Russian, and so is the conductor, Alexander Polianichko. As soon as the leaden overture began, the sound was right, and in the few passages where Tchaikovsky indulges in his capacity for overwrought string writing, or delicate wind chattering, we might easily have been listening to the Bolshoi orchestra. The central figure, a kind of Russian Nemorino, the smith who is hopelessly, helplessly in love with the village glamour girl Oxana, is finely taken by Vsevolod Grivnov — how one longed for him to be singing Lensky! Oxana, as sung by Olga Guryakova, was unworthy of his ardour. She (the role is shared over the run) is loud, shrill and quite often off-pitch, nor has her acting much charm. Otherwise the singing is all that it could be. So, I suppose, is the dancing — Acts III and IV are virtually a ballet, beginning with a wholly irrelevant water-sprite scene, which, like the rest of the opera, is staged in an attractive way by Mikhail Mokrov. The grand court scene is fairly grandly staged, with a huge Buddha-like icon of the Tsarina dominating. Though I have spent many more tedious evenings in opera houses, I was left wondering why on earth this particular corpse had been chosen for exhumation.
Handel came to Cambridge with a vengeance, English Touring Opera bringing five operas on consecutive evening to the Arts Theatre. I chose Tolomeo, and was lucky. This moderately convoluted drama — the hero and heroine are in disguise most of the time — was pruned intelligently, so the whole evening was only slightly over two hours; that does seem a very good idea. John Andrews conducted with precision but also with admirable, rare flexibility, and carried his singers with him. And the general director of ETO, James Conway, produced with a strong feeling for the complexity of the characters, and for the complexity of Handel’s response to them. A lot is made these days of Handel’s sly humour, about which I am often sceptical. But in this work of predominantly tragic feeling, there are many moments where, if you don’t encourage the audience to laugh, they will anyway, so Conway went for it and helped us to be more flexible than this operatic idiom usually leads us to be. The result, thanks to an extremely good team of singing actors, was one of the most enjoyable and enlightening evening of Handelian opera I have had since Poro several years ago at the RCM.
At the Royal Academy of Music Semele was a mild disappointment. Oddly, Act I, the least inspired of the three, was the liveliest. Somehow neither the satirical bite of this marvellous work, nor its deep concluding pathos, came across at more than half power. Sir Charles Mackerras conducted, but the singers seemed ill at ease, though none of them had voices to complain about. This opera (well, not officially that) seemed long, as it usually doesn’t.
A performance of Cherevichki will be broadcast on BBC2 over Christmas and on Radio Three on 5 December at 6 p.m.
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