The Fairy Queen
The Proms
Gluck double bill
Wigmore Hall
Purcell’s The Fairy Queen has been a big success at Glyndebourne this year, in a production by Jonathan Kent, and with William Christie conducting. I decided to wait till it came to the Proms, where it was presumably a very different experience. In the Royal Albert Hall you’re almost bound to be so far away from the singers that you have to look at their mouths to see which one is performing, especially if, as here, all the sopranos seemed, for much of the time, to be emulating the bird-like tones of Emma Kirkby. Nor was any of the scenery brought from Glyndebourne, and this is supposed to be a visual as much as an aural feast. Perhaps in an attempt to compensate, the actors rampaged around the stage, shouting and desperately gesticulating, with the exception of the gracefully understated Oberon of Joseph Millson and the swallow-like Puck of Jotham Annan. At the opposite extreme from them was Sally Dexter’s Titania, flouncing and yelling in a perpetual tantrum. And of course the Mechanicals, above all the Bottom of Desmond Barrit, started over the top and never looked back: their play was a merciless 25-minute affair, without a note of music.
I could have born the histrionics better if there had been a higher proportion of Purcell but, of the four hours, he occupied only about one, and then it was often little marches. It isn’t until Act V that we get the sublime ‘O let me for ever weep!’, an extended version of Dido’s Lament, and wonderfully sung by Carolyn Sampson. Of course there is other fine music too, but, when you are waiting for it to happen to stop the flow of the tiresome spoken drama, it has to be instantly stunning to stem the irritation, and with such an intimate performance as Christie and his forces were giving it had little chance. I shall never again attempt to sit through a complete Fairy Queen, I shall content myself with some of the music. But the audience, a capacity one, adored it: not only clapping and laughter but also the slapping of many thighs greeted the arrival of a group of white human bunnies on stage, whose vigorous simulation of copulation was for many Prommers the high point of the evening. That must have been exasperating for Radio Three listeners, who presumably thought that some astonishingly resourceful comic display was happening. I’m sure there will be a DVD of it soon.
I enjoyed much more — though it was still not a great evening — Bampton Classical Opera’s double bill of early Gluck at the Wigmore Hall, a predictably poorly attended event. La danza and Le cinesi are comic divertissements, dismissed by Martin Cooper, in the best book I know on Gluck, in the haughtiest terms. Musical parody is notoriously a form in which success is rare, and Gluck may be the least likely composer, together with Bach, to bring it off. In fact, he incorporated several of the arias we heard here in later, serious works. Even so, the send-up of Andromache being the tragedy queen, of artless pastoral amorousness, and self-advertising conceit make for interesting, characteristically inventive music, and the performance, a purely concert one, was continuously enjoyable, with lively accompaniments under Christian Curnyn, though the natural horn player had an unhappy night. The singers were mainly excellent, with the commanding Martene Grimson making a strong impression, while Tom Raskin provided a classic case of the bleating-cum-neighing English tenor.
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