Music: Singers dealt a losing hand The Queen of Spades Royal Opera House, London
Independent on Sunday - United Kingdom; May 20, 2001
BY NICK KIMBERLEY
Herman, a soldier and the central character in Tchaikovsky's opera The Queen of Spades, pursues two mutually exclusive obsessions. The first is Liza, a woman he has only observed from afar; the second and finally more powerful is the secret, possessed by Liza's guardian the Countess, of how to gamble and win with just three cards.
To modern sensibilities, the first obsession is rather implausible, at least if we're to call it love, as Herman does. But we can all believe in a compulsive gambler. Even Tchaikovsky, the music seems to say, has more faith in the cards than in his love for Liza, and in the end, the three-card trick does for Herman, the Countess and Liza too.
Conducting Covent Garden's new production, Bernard Haitink plunges us deep into Herman's nightmare, but by contrast, Francesca Zambello's staging doesn't always give the impression of believing in either obsession. Of course, a director is under no obligation to endorse the opera's point of view, and Peter J Davison's imposing set clearly intends a bit of deconstruction. He gives us St Petersburg's Winter Palace in a state of crumbly decay, half-filled with a great white mound, apparently of snow. The chill that it radiates infects the whole production.
Here, Herman is an outsider, observing everything, including his own fate, with bespectacled detachment. That is not Tchaikovsky's view; he based his opera on Pushkin, and perhaps Zambello gives us Pushkin's Herman rather than Tchaikovsky's. At any rate, in Vladimir Galouzine's portrayal he prowls the stage with an intensity that is sometimes abstracted, sometimes feral. When lust gets the better of him in Liza's bedroom, he tries to possess her doggy fashion; and when he comes literally face to face with the Countess, his kiss sucks the life from her body. It is an extraordinary moment, if not quite what Tchaikovsky intended. Josephine Barstow's Countess is old and frail, but memories of sex still course through her sclerotic veins. Year by year, Barstow's voice becomes more idiosyncratic, the tone squeezed tight as if the notes are being forced through a tiny aperture. It is mesmerising, if not exactly bel canto.
As Liza, Karita Mattila sounded at less than her radiant best on opening night. I think I heard several coughs, so perhaps she was poorly, but she rode on top of the music rather than inside it. The same could be said of Dmitri Hvorostovsky who, as Yeletsky, Herman's rival for Liza's love, for once invested his admittedly impressive legato with a mechanical feel.
No such problems with Vladimir Galouzine. His Herman may be dramatically distant but in vocal terms, he attacks the role like a man possessed. The tone is sometimes raw, but with a dark ferocity that takes his tenor to the baritonal depths. There is a relentless quality to his singing that might get wearing, but as a vocal embodiment of Herman's obsession it is quite overwhelming. A pity the production can't match it.
'The Queen of Spades': Royal Opera House, WC2 (020 7304 4000), to 28 May
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