The Independent - United Kingdom; May 16, 2001
BY STEPHEN WALSH
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| Opera: The production that doesn't miss a trick QUEEN OF SPADES; ROYAL OPERA HOUSE, LONDON The Independent - United Kingdom; May 16, 2001 BY STEPHEN WALSH |
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| NO QUESTION that the production here of Russian opera has been transformed in the last decade by the availability of leading Russian singers, nor that Tchaikovsky's great but problematic Queen of Spades has been a major beneficiary. | |||
| Only last autumn we had a superb Welsh National staging, galvanised by an unknown Hermann (Vitali Taraschenko) from Moscow. Now his performance is capped by Vladimir Galouzine in Francesca Zambello's new production for the Royal Opera. Galouzine's brilliant singing of the final scene, where Hermann disintegrates as the cards turn against him, is alone worth the ticket price. But from the start his brooding, hysterical melancholy - a kind of cross between Werther and Pierre Bezhukov (Zambello has him bespectacled) - exactly catches Pushkin's idea of an abstract theoretician caught on the horns of a mad obsession. And he sings marvellously throughout, with fearless commitment, con forza but with no hint of coarseness or ham. | |||
| For the director, though, the work's problems remain. On the small Cardiff stage, Richard Jones emphasised its sense of emotional imprisonment. But here Zambello can't ignore the Imperial elements, though she treats them with postmodern irony, setting the entire action within a ghostly Winter Palace (designed by Peter Davison), filling the stage with dancers while the chorus sing - somewhat distantly - from bleached, tumbledown stage boxes, and even giving us a real Catherine the Great (Tchaikovsky, by law, kept her off stage). | |||
| But in the end, postmodernism triumphs. The countess's ghost pops up from a heap of snow (still unmelted from a chillier-than-usual first scene), then Lisa suicides into the same heap; Hermann's iron bedstead remains as a designer canal-side bench without the canal, and so on. One would credit such ideas more if one didn't half-suspect they are the unwanted consequences of other decisions - such as the blurring of Tchaikovsky's act structure or the rejection of a front curtain. | |||
| But Zambello does much that is beautiful. Her funeral procession for the countess is a stunning image that exactly fits the ghost-scene prelude. And the production moves well, recognising the balletic aspects of late Tchaikovsky, as well as its repressed sensuality - not only Hermann-Lisa but, quite plauusibly, Hermann-countess, who seems to come back not at all, as she claims, "against her will". | |||
| Saturday's first night had its disappointments, though. Bernard Haitink, an exemplary musician, is no blood-and-guts Tchaikovskian, and the great moments seldom hit one between the ears. Karita Mattila's Lisa is mellifluous but wan - a shade too much like Pushkin's put-upon orphan. Nikolai Putilin's Tomsky is strong on idiom but stolid, especially in his delicious song about the birds in the branches.Dmitri Hvorostovsky is a model Yeletsky, but then, Yeletsky is a dullard. Josephine Barstow creaks impressively as the old countess and comes to life in what Zambello interestingly turns into a requited obsession. But in the end, it's Galouzine's show. | |||
| Stephen Walsh | |||
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