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| MONDAY MAY 14 2001 | |||||||||||||||||
| Opera | |||||||||||||||||
| Ahead of the pack | |||||||||||||||||
| BY RODNEY MILNES | |||||||||||||||||
| A starrily cast Queen of Spades at Covent Garden is outstanding | |||||||||||||||||
| In many respects this is the Royal Opera’s return to form: Tchaikovsky’s opera is as starrily cast as is possible today, and on the whole quite wonderfully sung and played under Bernard Haitink. As so often with its music director in romantic opera, the orchestra, especially the strings, plays right through the phrases, giving them maximum emotional weight, and the absolute unanimity in even the most scarily elaborate passages is extremely impressive. | |||||||||||||||||
| Haitink and his players are especially successful in catching the overwhelming melancholy of the score, its moments of unbridled passion and operatic grandeur; maybe those sections where the woodwind depicts the protagonist’s mental collapse are underplayed, and there’s a vein of grotesquerie that could be more profitably mined. | |||||||||||||||||
| The singing was of an excellence that those there on Saturday will bore their grandchildren about. Take Dmitri Hvorostovsky in the short role of Prince Yeletsky: for musical line and beauty of tone I have heard nothing to touch him in either the aria or his little eight-bar outpouring of love for Liza in the first scene. | |||||||||||||||||
| Vladimir Galouzine sings Gherman: his voice is astounding, basically a warm baritone that just goes up and up into the tenor register without any loss of body. He sang at an unremitting forte in the early scenes, hammering out the commas and full-stops, as it were, at the same unsparing level, but he calmed down a little in the scene where he frightens the old Countess to death. He played Gherman as a sad sack, not remotely Satanic. But what a voice! Similarly with Karita Mattila: glorious sound and perfectly poised, long-breathed accounts of her big numbers, but I’m not sure what opera this Liza was singing in, maybe a setting of Miss Julie that we know not of. | |||||||||||||||||
| And so on: Victoria Vizin’s Paulina, with a heart-achingly beautiful account of her song; Josephine Barstow in her element as the Countess; Nikolai Putilin vocally resplendent as Tomsky, though what drove this man remained unclear. | |||||||||||||||||
| By now it may be apparent that I have doubts about Francesca Zambello’s production, “generously sponsored”, as we are told five times in the programme, by the ubiquitous Alberto Vilar. Obviously this had to be a big “show”, as unlike the Welsh National’s prize-winning “poor” staging as possible. But the generosity was insufficient: you can’t do this piece “grandly” in a permanent set. The libretto specifies seven different settings, and however cleverly Mark McCullough’s lighting sought to vary it, Peter J. Davison’s arrangement of snow-mountain, wonky theatre boxes and fragmented salon had long outstayed its welcome by the fourth scene. | |||||||||||||||||
| What money there was had gone on Nicky Gillibrand’s handsome costumes, and 20 dancers in a piece that doesnt need any dancers at all, and their continual eyes-and-teeth caperings were deeply embarrassing. What ideas Zambello may have had about the work were submerged in needless, shallow spectacle. | |||||||||||||||||
| Back to May 2001 reviews | |||||||||||||||||