Puccini: La bohème/ Royal Opera, 30th April 2012

The most affecting moment in this, the 24^th revival of John Copley’s 1974 staging, occurred after the performance had finished, during the curtain-calls, at the end of which Copley himself was ushered onto the stage, first for a solo bow, and then – with the curtains raised again – presented with an enormous decorated cake in celebration of his fifty years’ activity as a producer at Covent Garden. Tony Hall made an enthusiastic speech in appreciation of Copley’s achievements in the House, closely observed by a silent-but-present Antonio Pappano; and then the director himself rather reluctantly took the microphone to express both his gratitude and astonishment at this unexpected homage, in the process managing to tell a characteristically juicy story about a previous onstage birthday celebration of his at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, when the company had decked Turandot’s throne with the Union Jack and hired a stripper (male, naturally) to show him the full extent of the company’s appreciation. You can’t quite see this happening with Peter Konwitschny or Christof Loy in forty years’ time, can you?

Indeed, other than mouthing platitudes, one might well enquire of the ROH’s management why they don’t instead employ the man they have otherwise ignored since 1987 (the year of his admittedly unsuccessful Norma, the last time the opera was seen in the house to date) and give him a new production to mount. If not, they could do all of us with a memory- and attention-span longer than five minutes – a great favour and revive his incomparably fine Così fan tutte rather than rehash the visually sterile, hair-shirt modish rubbish that’s been dished up in this opera’s name for the last fifteen years; or his gorgeous Faust, a far better staging (and performance text, too) than the McVicar mish-mash we’re currently stuck with. But just as the dread Gelb pays onstage homage at the Met to Zeffirelli (during, co-incidentally, his Bohème) who, bless him, had the wit to enquire why then, if his shows were so much loved, the management was doing nothing but progressively strip them out of the repertory, so we might well ask why has such a clearly well-liked and respected practitioner been ignored for 25 years?

There’s another moving spirit behind this long-lived show who also needs a mention, and some kind of recognition for her contribution: the late, great Julia Trevelyan Oman, who also gave the house her exemplary designs for Eugene Onegin and Die Fledermaus, both, alas, long-since gone (but, in the Tchaikovsky’s case, effortlessly superior to either of its grisly replacements). Indeed, watching her characteristically detailed and four-square, architecturally accurate, split-level sets is fast becoming the operatic equivalent of encountering an extinct species. When contemplating the ROH’s recent Manon, say, the biggest single visual innovation of which was to install ramps everywhere – making it the world’s first wheelchair-accessible Massenet staging – and reset the period so that the Cours-la-Reine looks like a provincial revival of Hello Dolly!: or the Don Carlo with its mobile funerary monuments, cardboard trees, and walls and benches of red Lego; to say nothing of more upfront deconstructionist trash such as Loy’s Tristan or the recent Rusalka, perversely repulsive and hideously ugly the pair of them, you’re left with the sinking feeling that there is genuinely now no-one who either knows, or even cares. Stage design in general and that of opera in particular seems to me at such a low ebb today, obsessed with tat and trivia, neon and novelty, video and viscera, that the largely illusionist representational theatre on which the whole visual basis of C19th opera rests gets nary a look-in, dismissed out-of-hand by the usual spouting suspects as “irrelevant” (the mantra for the congenitally ignorant-but-bullish).

So: if you want to see what a carefully lit, subtly evocative, architecturally and temporally accurate account of Puccini’s opera looks like, better hurry along to the ROH before someone decides it’s old-hat and commissions something set in a medical research laboratory in outer space. You’d be doubly well advised to do so, in fact, because the staging and the sets are considerably more persuasive in promulgating Puccini’s shameless, tear-jerking cause than any of the actual performances by the singers. Or the conductor. Dear me, yes: the conductor. I remember when Carlos Kleiber lead the work at the ROH in 1979 to universal adulation: I hated it, more like a vivisection than a performance, the work unpicked and left that way, without any sense of organic growth or impulse, just a series of localised musical inspections leaving the Rodolfo and Mimi (Aragall and Cotrubas) pretty much hung out to dry. Semyon Bychkov does not, mercifully, fall into this trap: no, he falls straight into the other one: hyper-inflation of the Karajan type. No aria can go too slowly, or start so slowly that it still can’t get a whole lot slower in the unfolding. No detail can be left unexamined and then not highlighted in the orchestra – I never knew that Act II was in fact a harp concerto – nor can any climax be too loud or agonisingly prolonged in the coming. This bloated, overblown style of conducting is at the furthermost remove from what Puccini – as evidenced by Toscanini’s recordings (he premiered the work in 1896) – had in mind: quicksilver, thrusting, conversational, very sparingly overtly emotional throughout, and keeping your powder dry for the no more than two or three passages where it really needs to explode. Well as the orchestra played tonight – a miserable trumpet lapse in the last three bars apart – this isn’t Puccini: it’s what Puccini has been turned into by certain conductors whose natural mode of expression is one of permanent exaggeration and endlessly intrusive micro-management. Of a naturally unfolding, organic sense of the music-drama, not a trace.

So if this revival could well have dispensed with anybody’s services, it was Bychkov’s: instead of which he busied himself with dispensing with his sopranos. Exit Anja Harteros. Exit Celine Byrne. Enter Carmen Giannattasio. I’ve heard her live before, twice in concert – Parisina and Ermione in 2008 and 2009 respectively, in the RFH – and once on stage – Vitellia in Clemenza at Aix last year – and have always thought reasonably highly of her. But the Mozart in 2011 was quite a squally business at times – though easily excusable given the nature of the role, opera’s greatest cow – and I had been wondering how a women whose home repertory is quite specifically Caballé’s bel canto (Giannattasio’s new Il pirata is released this week) would fare in the rather different world of verismo, where no vocal pyrotechnics are either required or even allowed. Of course, a genuine pianissimo is the one useful attribute hereabouts, as would be length of phrase (as Caballé proved on the magnificent Solti /RCA recording).  Alas then, on this showing Giannattasio isn’t in command of either. The sound is surprisingly edgy, and very short-winded, the phrasing entirely at the mercy of the need to break lines up into manageable little chunks. The Act I aria was a bumpy, ill-drawn business, all bulges of screamy tone in alt. and recourses to a rather mewling, vaguely-defined middle elsewhere, for all that she looked the diminutive, frail consumptive to the life (the strapping and remarkably tall Harteros would have had her work cut out for her). She did improve somewhat as the evening progressed; D’onde lieta uscì in Act III – you know, the aria everybody thinks is called Addio senza rancor – had the emotional trajectory born of a securely-drawn line, but still no intrinsic beauty of tone or any noticeable individuality of phrase or colouring. And in Act IV she died as she had lived, hard-toned and a bar at a time.

This is a shame. But it does clear the way for a half-decent Rodolfo to walk off with the work. Certainly, come the curtain calls, that was the audience’s verdict. But it isn’t mine, I’m afraid, because for entirely different reasons I no more liked Joseph Calleja’s poet than I did Giannattasio’s seamstress. I’ve no argument for the most part with either his artistry – considerable – or his commitment – ditto – or with the way in which he uses his voice, which is pretty much exemplary (though the way he launches O soave fanciulla at maximum can belto is hardly his finest hour). It’s simply the voice itself, which lands upon my ears in such a throttled orgy of goat-bleat that it’s all I can do not to head for the exits straight away. These things are exceptionally personal, I know: most hear it and don’t mind; some hear it and actually like it (!!!!); and some – of whom there were alas plenty on hand tonight – are so cretinously stupid (clapping early in Act III despite a deliberately delayed curtain-fall and actually starting to clap BEFORE Mimi had even died in IV, half-witted morons) that they don’t hear it at all. But for me, it’s practically all I do hear, so I’ll just stick to the fact that the oppure high C in Che gelida manina was a thinnish, strained affair, the equally oppure offstage one at the end of the act rather better, and that when, as artistry dictates, he attempts to sing softly, all that’s audible is a tremulous little shudder rather like a pigeon cooing. The problem is, I heard Domingo, Carreras and Pavarotti all sing in this staging in their primes, and it doesn’t help (the young Carreras was absolutely glorious, never really equalled since in my experience). But Joseph Calleja, fine as he in some ways is, simply for me isn’t in the same league.

I applied my habitual blind-tasting test to the Marcello, the house-debuting Fabio Capitanucci: shut your eyes and work out how old the singer is from the sound alone, and then see if it matches the reality. To my surprise, the bearer of such a well-worn, slightly effortful in alt. woolly baritone turned out not to be about 55 but in his mid-thirties, which is hardly encouraging. Still, he was as a piece of vocal rock compared to the incomprehensibly-cast Thomas Oliemans, more-or-less voiceless as Schaunard. And much as I would like to report positively on Matthew Rose as Colline – subbing for an absent Yuri Vorobiev, who’ll instead turn up later in the run – I can’t say his notably un-Italianate tone, lean and light, brought much to Vecchia zimarra in Act IV, though his intrinsically lugubrious stage persona worked well for the character (and England’s cricket team should know where to turn next for a star batsman, six out of six lumps of baguette duly batted cleanly out of bounds). Nuccia Focile gives us the usual shrill tart as Musetta, still capable of some vocal delicacy when not under pressure to project (alas, then, not all that often), but gratingly hard-edged and short-breathed in Quando m’en vo’ (taken, like all the score’s major arias and set-pieces, at an ever-slowing snail’s pace that would have taxed the breath control of even Caballé and Cappuccilli, let alone this lot).

The children’s chorus – new to the house this season and grandly entitled the ROH Youth Opera Company, 51-strong, and aged between 9-13 – are certainly an ebulliently positive presence: but they, like the soloists, found that keeping in time with an ever-dragging beat was difficult, and  got out of tempo in Act II (not disastrously, but enough to notice). In fact, if there’s one thing that characterises this revival, it’s the fractional mis-timing of almost everything, whether musical or dramatic. Everybody’s timing seems to be just ever-so-slightly off. The key wasn’t found on cue, the wrong candle went out, Alcindoro’s acquisition of Musetta’s dog was too late for the curtain, and the overlong pregnant pauses caused at least one twerp to start clapping prematurely. Nothing quite “gels”. I’m sure this is down to Bychkov rather than any inherent problems with an otherwise foolproof production and some very stage-savvy performers, both of which seem unsettled by the very grand presence in the pit. Luckily for the on/off/on lurve couple in June’s revival, the altogether more saisonné and get-on-with-it Benini will be on hand. Pity he wasn’t tonight.

**

Stephen Jay-Taylor

Opera Britannia

Photographs © Bill Cooper

Weber: Der Freischütz/ Barbican, 19th April 2012

As regular readers all know, I spend any amount of my time taking trips down memory lane: now I’m going to pack you off on one instead, and refer you back to my review of Weber’s opera as performed at last year’s Proms. In it, having given an overview of the miserable provision of the greatest pre-Wagnerian German opera on London’s stages, I had this to say:

“Now, of course, after what feels like an eternity of waiting, two Der Freischützes – at least in concert – come along (almost) at once, evidently the operatic equivalent of London buses. Well, perhaps not quite. When Sir Colin Davis conducts the piece next April as part of the LSO’s 2011/12 season at the Barbican, it will be with a seriously heavyweight Wagnerian cast – including Christine Brewer and Simon O’Neill in the leads – and, as written, in German, with the original spoken dialogue (the latter I am assuming: if instead we get the services of some smart-arse narrator, in any language, I will personally commit murder).”

You know, I sometimes think I should set up shop as a sort of operatic Reader of the Runes – Mystic Meg Page, perhaps – for guess what? That’s right. We did indeed “get the services of some smart-arse narrator”. All the original score’s careful, and carefully paced, interleavings of song and dialogue were replaced by an omniscient storyteller. So, as I am in critical duty bound, murder will be duly committed, if only here in prose rather than in person. How anyone so obviously fond of and attuned to Weber’s idiom as Sir Colin Davis could sanction such a monstrosity, God alone knows. And having done so, could it have been executed any worse? I should add rapidly that I have no particular beef with Amanda Holden’s accurate summaries of the contents of the dialogue sequences in themselves – regrettable as they are – nor with Malcolm Sinclair’s personal manner of delivering them (though he thinks Kilian rhymes with Gillian), both many happy miles away from the kind of conspiratorially knowing, wink-nudge-leer drivel extruded by the likes of Jeremy Sams, for instance, more keen on sucking up to an audience and taking the piss out of the work concerned than conveying information. No, it’s simply a matter of the musico-dramatic damage, the loss of the minutely calculated differences and significances attaching to when people sing and when they speak and why, not to mention the intolerable visual nonsense of hearing a man, placed not with the soloists but behind the band, microphoned and therefore in a different acoustic from everybody else, actually impersonating the missing dialogue in extensive passages of “and then she said, and then he said, then she said” when the very characters to whom he is referring and paraphrasing ARE SITTING THERE, staring vacuously into space, evidently considered incapable of human speech or dramatic interaction with each other. It kills the opera stone dead from the word go as any kind of meaningfully enacted drama.

And let no-one try telling me that neither Brewer nor O’Neill haven’t got sufficiently fluent German to handle it: or that it would alienate a largely monoglot Anglophone audience. The two singers between them have sung, or are in the process of singing, the entire Wagnerian repertory between them: they’d better have good German is all I’d say. And as for the punters’ comprehension, that’s why God invented surtitles, in use here throughout, but only for the sung sequences. The reduction ad absurdam of this preposterous approach was, of course, what happened to (the entirely dialogue) Act Three Scene One: it vanished altogether, the jaunty Entr’acte suddenly dove-tailing into the opening of Scene Two, a musical non-sequitur if ever there was one. And though we were informed that the performance was being recorded (for LSO Live) – polite House Management-speak for “For God’s sake keep your mouths shut and don’t cough” – I don’t see how such a compromised and partial account of the “opera” (as opposed to the “score”) could have any commercial validity or appeal in a marketplace long-since kept happy with both the Kleiber and Kubelik studio recordings, exquisitely crafted artefacts the pair.

Even the – all-important in this work – sound effects were in large part fudged or fumbled. Yes, we got the dramatically necessary bell, tolling first midnight and then 1am on either side of the Wolfsschluchtszene (though a spavined, tubular-tinny specimen it was): but of the endless rifle-cracks that punctuate all three acts and serve no less a dramatic function, not a pop. The chorus – who as invisible ghosts aren’t even supposed to be on stage in the Wolf’s Glen, and didn’t need to be so here either – were instead ridiculously invited to sing their “Uhui”s through black paper megaphones, dinky ones for the women, big ones for the men. Er, why? If the intention was to mimic offstage ululation, it failed miserably: indeed, as any fool could tell you, put a megaphone in front of someone’s mouth and far from sounding further off or somehow mysterious, they will of course sound even louder and more prosaic. All they needed to do was turn around and face the upstage wall immediately behind them and lower their heads to the floor (sticking their hands over their mouths if they were still too loud) to achieve the proper result. But no: it’s at times like this that I genuinely wonder when, and why, everybody became quite so practically clueless.

Samiel’s offstage contributions in II were similarly bungled, given to the light-toned Stephan Loges (doubling as a weak-voiced Ottakar in III) who was then improperly amplified anyway. Of the absolutely terrifying voice-of-doom that killed the woman sitting behind me at the ROH in 1978 (her head landed on my shoulder with a sudden thump, I yelped and she then keeled over into the aisle: this is true, by the way) there was not a trace: and if the astonishing epitome of Schauerromantik, composed entirely out-of-nowhere Wolfsschluchtszene can’t conjure a few corpses in its course, then something’s gone badly wrong.

Ah well, there is always Sir Colin and the LSO to hand to rescue the day musically, though as I said last year, in tones prophetical, in the same Proms review: “There will be a lot of proto-Wagnerian sonority, both vocal and orchestral, as Sir Colin assuredly angles the axis of interest towards the music the opera anticipates rather than recalls. This is fair enough: the score sits there like Janus, facing in two contrary directions simultaneously, one forwards, one back”. And this was indeed exactly the case tonight. Fielding a string band of 60 – much larger than the Kirov did for late Wagner and Verdi, please note – the LSO gave a performance that was in essentials massively Wagnerian, with fat, rich tone and much thickly-blended melos. It’s impressive as sheer sound: but Weber – writing, please remember, in 1818, not 1878 – wouldn’t have even recognised the half of it as his own music.

I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have known what the singers were up to either, since the principals were all miscast as part of the general Wagnerian inflation of the work’s scale. Thus, Sally Matthews was singing Ännchen when she should have been the Agathe: Lucy Hall, who was bizarrely conscripted to sing the parts of all four different Bridesmaids in turn, should have been singing Ännchen: and poor Christine Brewer, singing Agathe, shouldn’t have been singing in this work at all. Much as I love Brewer – and I do: to whom else have I ever given 5 stars here? – she is all wrong for the role. Huge, heroically–sized (um, vocally) with a steely, air-cleaving tone and an inescapably mature, almost matronly tone, she is hopelessly wrong for Weber’s demure teenage Jungfer: Even Matthews’ voice is really too big for it (let alone the role she actually did sing); but she would have been a much better bet even so, younger-sounding, more lithe and limber in turning tight corners (much laborious manoeuvring hereabouts chez Brewer, alas) and capable of manifesting confused innocence rather than projecting imperious, oracular grandeur. Leise, leise fromme Weise found Brewer short of the necessary length of breath to get to the ends of some lines: and Und ob die Wolke became an exercise in treading on eggshells, all reining in and holding back (and in fairness, very expertly done too: but the strain shows, and the result nowhere penetrates to the heart of the character’s very vociferous-but-simple piety).

I thought Sally Matthews’ Ännchen quite fabulously well-sung: rich, even, a real full-bodied, juicy lyric soprano, smoky below and effortless in alt. A lovely piece of singing of real distinction, in fact. Unfortunately, Ännchen is a soubrette role (Marzelline in Fidelio the obvious inspiration). As with Brewer, one salutes a technique that can negotiate such miscasting – in Matthews’ case, the usual-for-the-repertoire coloratura – but still wonders why she should be having to do so at all. This is not the first time Sir Colin has shown a, shall we say, highly individual sense of vocal suitability: it used to happen often enough at Covent Garden; and only recently he chose Schwanewilms – who would have been perfect here as Agathe – to sing a very discommoded Desdemona instead. As the Americans say with deadpan despair: go figure. And then there was her Otello, Simon O’Neill, as tonight’s Max. As casting goes this is somewhat less peculiar: whenever I heard the opera at the ROH, it was with either René Kollo or Peter Hofmann in the role, Lohengrins and Parsifals both. But then, they were under Sir Colin as well. It is surely possible to perform a role written in 1818 as if it had been written for a Tamino or Florestan – known points of reference available to Weber as models – than to somehow credit him with more than just musical prescience and to imagine that he really had a Siegmund or Tristan-type voice in mind. Still, O’Neill slots in to Sir Colin’s Wagnerian conception admirably, and was in far more pleasing voice than last year’s Walthers found him at Covent Garden. It’s still a notably nasal, reedy business: but the focus is tight, the tone secure, and the scale and stamina unstinting. Poor love, he’s no kind of actor, even of the vocal variety: but his commitment to the matter in hand is absolute, and not a note emerged tonight either ill-tuned or ill-turned. Ideally, more lyric juice is what’s wanted, and a bit less steely clarion ping: but given the almost universal miscasting elsewhere, this specimen went relatively well.

In sharp contrast to this veritable orgy of overcasting, Stephan Loges made thin beer of his dual assignment as Samiel and the Prince: my first Ottakar was Donald McIntyre, then the ROH and Bayreuth’s resident Wotan (and surprisingly funny as a bewigged and knee-breeched prince, socially aghast at being surrounded by butch hunters). Undercasting this role when you’ve overcast virtually all the others is plain weird, but there it is. Happily, however, there were a few people involved tonight doing what they ought. One was Marcus Farnsworth, a perfectly-rendered Kilian, warm and of exactly the right size and weight. Another was Martin Snell as Agathe’s father Kuno, a most distinguished sounding bass with more than a passing touch of Kurt Moll’s richness, solidity and depth of timbre. Why does he not sing here regularly? At a time when the ROH fields a voiceless Italian as Monterone in Rigoletto, why are they importing at all when a voice of this quality is (presumably) going begging? And then there’s Gidon Saks – another one whose absence in Bow St. is an ongoing scandal – not, as last year, singing Kaspar (quite wonderfully), but this time the Hermit. Wandering on at the end looking like a giant version of Robert Downey Jnr. with a discreetly slashed-open-to-the-sternum evening shirt, he brought a touch of real distinction, both of voice and carriage, to his small-but-crucial part.

In stark sartorial contrast, Lars Woldt – subbing at the last minute for an indisposed Falk Struckmann as Kaspar – turned up in ill-fitting day-wear, which left me wondering if it was some subtle statement about Kaspar’s status within the drama (yeah, right). He’s a bit of a blusterer: and he’s the sort of neither/nor bass-baritone who gets caught out occasionally both up top and down below. But he also fielded much the best German of anybody involved, with crystal-clear diction, and any amount of role-identification (one I imagine he’s done often on stage back home in Vienna). He single-handedly salvaged the Wolfsschluchtszene from its otherwise pretty inadequate realisation. The hundred-strong LSO chorus enjoyed themselves – as well they might – as snotty peasants (Davis gets the lumpen Breughelesque stamp of their music off to perfection) and otherworldly spirits, singing with tremendous verve and gusto (too much so as ghosts, alas). And Sir Colin’s old band ever-so-slightly raised their already-high game for their old chief, playing with brio and great technical address (if surely on too large a scale, with too much saturated fat in the strings). Watching him at work at close quarters, musically he belies his 84 years, though a few passages did receive his latter-day marmoreal Mozart treatment (principally Brewer’s music, thereby leaving the poor woman doubly handicapped). But for the most part, though increasingly frail (and I can’t tell you how seeing the idols of my youth like Mackerras and Haitink and Previn and Davis physically decline in their eighties has started to really upset me: it must be like seeing your parents get old, for those whose did) he retains a firm grip on the musical architecture of the work and inspires his forces to give of their best, at least insofar as this particularly unnecessary, half-arsed compromise of a “text” permits.

I ended up last year’s Proms review of the John Eliot Gardiner performance by regretting that so small-scale and mimsy – orchestrally and much more so vocally – an approach to the opera had been put on in London’s biggest and least tractable hall: so there is, I suppose, a quaint – if unwelcome – irony in this time bemoaning that the work is instead now so overinflated both cast- and band-wise that it rather overwhelms the available acoustic. Plainly they should have been performed the other way round. Ah well. Obviously, there’s no pleasing some people (e.g. me). But if any of the above appeals, and you can bear the performance practices employed, you should still turn out for the repeat on Saturday. In its own odd way, it’s quite the collector’s item. I bet I end up going…

Stephen Jay-Taylor

Verdi: Requiem / Mariinsky at the Barbican 4th April 2012

There’s an art, clearly much-perfected in St. Petersburg, of making a little go a long way. When Verdi’s grand commemorative musical machine is mounted in London– which it is, with great regularity – you’ll usually find an orchestra of around 90-odd, plus a chorus of anything ranging from 120 to 240. But Valery Gergiev runs a tight ship back home and even more necessarily on tour; and so, both tonight and even more strikingly in last night’s infrastructurally remarkable Parsifal, the Mariinsky’s orchestra numbered no more than 70-odd (with just 46, as opposed to the standard 60, strings) and a chorus of less than 60, tout court. Closely grouped together on the Barbican platform as if huddling together for warmth, you could be forgiven for anticipating that the thinly-assembled forces would produce only a certain amount of sound and no more, at best hopefully gaining in inner-part clarity what they would inevitably lose in volume. But this is to reckon without the Russians’ musical commitment to the matter in hand: they might very well be standing out in Silk Street en masse, half-frozen, producing more smoke than a steelworks with bare minutes to go before curtain up; but come the hour (somewhat delayed, par for the Gergiev course as LSO regulars know well), their concentration is a thing of wonder. The sheer, staggering weight of sonority unleashed in the Parsifal I shan’t forget as long as I live: and the engulfing torrent of fatly upholstered, richly dramatic sound they produced tonight was such as to beggar belief. Less, with them, is plainly more. Much, much more. I have no idea how they do it: I’m just glad they do.

Given that the Mariinsky chorus is a professional, paid opera group, I’m a little surprised at their relatively indistinct diction in what must be a deeply familiar Latin text (though it is possible that the conventions of Russified Latin – like that of the German equivalent with which I am, unlike the Russian, familiar – entails phonetic differences from the modified Harrovian form still practised here). But their musical response is beyond reproach, embracing effortlessly all levels of dynamic from the all-but inaudible at the start to the almost deafening in the Dies Irae. Their tireless energy and precision, buoyed along by Gergiev’s ideally-paced direction – once, and once only, in the Lacrimosa, I thought the tempo too slow – gave the performance its overall distinction: that, and the fabulous playing of the band, whose blinding brass need to defect here immediately to replace the sorry, crack-prone crew atCovent Garden.

Three of the four soloists I was familiar with, though I’ve only heard Ildar Abrdazakov live as Basilio in Il barbiere (shamefully, the only role he’s performed at Covent Garden, and that only last year). Mrs. Abdrazakov, aka Olga Borodina, I first heard all of twenty years ago, as Dalila. Utterly impassive and slightly disdainful, like a Piero della Francesca Madonna, she commands the mezzo line in the Requiem as only very few have managed before her, and even fewer today. In the best parts of her voice, the incomparable declamatory power remains, like some Old Testament prophetess reading the riot act to a race of sinners, stentorian and stern. I do slightly wonder if this is what Verdi had in mind for the part: Maria Waldmann, for whom he wrote it, and whose potential absence elsewhere nearly brought about a cancellation, was the first Amneris at La Scala, in 1872. The Liber Scriptus in the Sequence was even rewritten after the original 1874 performance of the Requiem the better to highlight her chest notes. These, it goes without saying, Borodina has in abundance. But the diminuendo jump to the last pianissimo note of “proferetur” and “continetur” in the opening lines now rather catches her out: and generally high(er) notes are negotiated and placed with some caution, as her always low-set voice settles ever-lower with age and use. I can’t help thinking that the lighter, more flamboyantly mezzo-y tones of a Garanca might be a bit more what’s required. Still, in her marmoreal, matronly way, Borodina nails it. As does hubby, the best I’ve heard live since Ruggero Raimondi in his prime (rather more years ago now than it is wise for me to admit to) with a fine, deaths’ head Mors stupebit and a most magisterial Oro supplex.

    

About the tenor soloist, Sergey Semishkur, whom I last heard battling bravely (but unsuccessfully) against the acoustic in St. Paul’s in Mahler 8 under Gergiev (a performance still washing up and down the nave there as I write), I’m just a tad less enthused. The tone is bright, forward, rather clarion in a slightly reedy, Slavic sort of way: not at all unsuited to the task at hand, in fact. And the voice is both well-schooled and evenly produced (more than could be said of several of last night’s soloists, the Parsifal included, for whom Semishkur would have been much better casting). But he’s one of those nervous tenors, (unnecessarily) worried about his upcoming top notes – all present and correct, in fact – who then visibly belabours his breathing for what’s ahead, in the process alas throwing his timing out either by anticipation, or, twice in the Ingemisco, by coming in fractionally late. Somebody needs to sit him down and have a quiet word about this before it gets worse, and begins to afflict his performance more noticeably than it already does.

Hand on heart I do not know why a conductor of such supreme skill and operatic experience as Valery Gergiev would so completely miscast his soprano soloist in this work. Viktoria Yastrebova is an appreciable singer: but she looks (and sounds) about twenty, with a slightly raw-toned, somehow unfinished edge to the voice, which is big enough, but girlish and glassy. Last night in Parsifal she sang the First Flower Maiden, surely more the sort of weight both of role and responsibility she should be undertaking at this early stage of her career, rather than the crucifying obstacle course Verdi wrote specifically for his absolute artistic (and other) innamorata, Teresa Stolz, who was the first Aida at La Scala (and Forza Leonora: and Elisabeth de Valois). Given who it was written for, and in what manner – think of the appalling all-guns-blazing orchestral and choral racket against which Verdi evidently expected Stolz to be able to crank out audible high Bs and Cs – I would say that NO soprano who hasn’t already sung Aida – and sung it magnificently – should go anywhere near the Verdi Requiem, which for the soprano is every bit as demanding (and yes, that includes Schwarzkopf. O boy, does it include Schwarzkopf!).

Last time I heard Gergiev conduct it live – in the same hall, with LSO forces, for the Verdi centenary in 2001 – he had Renée Fleming on the top line. Far from ideal as she was – insufficient weight, weak middle register, ill-defined chest, and with an unexpected catastrophe on the high B-flat in the Libera Me – she still had more of what the role requires than poor Yastrebova has or, I’m pretty sure, ever will. The girl should be singing Gilda, and maybe eyeing Luisa Miller, not thrown in at the deep end trying to keep her head above water in this killer of a piece. As for the Recordare and Agnus Dei – the duets with the mezzo – it was like the vocal equivalent of seeing a Cessna parked next to a 747. That she emerged relatively unscathed, and even managed a reasonable, if somewhat rusty, B-flat in the Libera Me (a regular graveyard for all sopranos) is credit to Yastrebova’s technique. And she must be profoundly musical: in the self-defeatingly difficult unaccompanied pieces – the Pie Jesu in the Sequence and the Lux Aeterna: why ever did Verdi write them? – she alone kept the quartet in tune when either the mezzo or the tenor took the usual tonal wrong-turning. But more quiet words are needed if such silly miscasting is not to be repeated (as I fervently hope for her sake it isn’t). For a company that nurtured Netrebko – who actually could sing deep-end Verdi if she weren’t so preoccupied by ill-suiting bel canto excursions – it’s bizarre that anyone could have thought this advisable.

So: a bit of a mixed bag on the soloist front, with the marrieds emerging clear winners (one of the very, very few times I have ever heard a perfectly evenly cast quartet of them was at the Proms four years ago, with Urmana, deYoung, Calleja and d’Arcangelo, under Belohlavek, pretty much perfection all round). But the impassioned playing and singing of the Mariinsky forces, and the no less fine conducting by Gergiev – all done and dusted in 80 minutes – was a wonderful thing to have encountered all the same, and I’m very glad to have heard it.

3.5 stars

Stephen Jay-Taylor