Financial Times; May 15, 2001
By ANDREW CLARK
|
|
|
|
| THE ARTS: Haitink's Queen is a West End girl at heart OPERA: Financial Times; May 15, 2001 By ANDREW CLARK |
|||
| Thanks to an outstanding quintet of principals, the Royal Opera has a popular success on its hands in The Queen of Spades. But the stage is draped in so much air-headed flimmery and flummery, masquerading as a "modern" production, that the success is seriously compromised. It's the kind of show that a lot of money buys, but it skirts all the main themes of Tchaikovsky's penultimate opera, and tells us next to nothing about its characters. | |||
| What this performance lacks is intellectual respectability, of the kind money can't buy. Strip it of the fancy set, the space-filling choreography and all the unnecessary extras, and you have an arch-traditional staging that would have served Covent Garden long into the future. | |||
| The Royal Opera hadn't performed The Queen of Spades for 40 years. In the last 10 of those, operatic taste has finally caught up with a work which summarises Tchaikovsky's mastery of dramatic form and looks daringly into the future, without carrying the emotional punch of Onegin or Mazeppa. It's as if, despite the fervour with which he wrote it, Tchaikovsky had honed his skills just a shade too fine. Part of the problem is the fictional 18th century world in which he encased Pushkin's story - in the words of John Warrack's programme essay, a "balanced, structured monde . . . that invokes the spirit though not the techniques of Mozart". | |||
| Recreating the past in the style of the present is even more the rage today than it was in Tchaikovsky's time. Francesca Zambello's staging, designed by Peter Davison and Nicky Gillibrand, goes for it with the sort of exaggeration that reminds you of those phoney American villages where everyone supposedly dresses and behaves like they did 200 years ago. The permanent set - a winter palace flanked by a lopsided double-row of theatre boxes - creates a deliberately false sense of period. Every chorus is laden with heavily choreographed mock-18th century manners, attracting undue attention without offering a whiff of illumination or authenticity. This is Tchaikovsky recreated in the style of a West End musical. | |||
| None of this "dressing" masks the incongruity of the stage's central feature, a silly lump of snow whose sole purpose is to reveal the Countess's ghost and receive Lisa's dead body - but we have to wait three acts for that. Nor does it hide the fact that Zambello has little interest in Tchaikovsky's characters. This turns out to be a blessing in disguise, for the five principals use their set-piece scenes as the vehicle for strong vocal acting, with minimum directorial interference. | |||
| As Herman, Vladimir Galuzin is that rare commodity - atenor in the big- voiced Russian mould who can hold the stage convincingly: it's a real pleasure to listen to a voice that carries so well, but is used so lyrically and musically. Nikolai Putilin, Galuzin's St Petersburg colleague, gives Tomsky a much more distinctive profile than we're used to, while Dmitri Hvorostovsky shows us how far his artistry has matured, and how much less self-regarding he is. | |||
| As the Countess, Josephine Barstow - sounding in stronger voice than for a long time - presents a more imperiously steely force than the "walking mummy" of tradition. And Karita Mattila's Lisa is rightly the evening's heart and soul. Some of the arm-waving comes close to mannerism, but she looks drop-dead gorgeous, knows how to appear vulnerable, and has a voice that, above the stave, touches the nerve- ends of emotional desperation. Among today's leading sopranos, she has no rival. Bernard Haitink conducts a symphony in three acts: the orchestral playing is unfailingly fine, the choral entries less so, and Saturday's performance left me wondering whether Haitink really has any theatrical instinct. | |||
| Andrew Clark Back to May 2001 index Back to reviews index Back to site index | |||