This week’s Alastair Macaulay Review is a triple-header of current operas. Two should have been bigger and better. The third was embarrasingly ludicrous. Read on:
1: Mary Queen of Scots – English National Opera, February 15-17
The composer Thea Musgrave, aged ninety-six, was present at the London Coliseum on Saturday February 15 for the first night of English National Opera’s new production of her “Mary Queen of Scots”. When invited to take applause, she did so, with such warmth and grace from the front row of the stalls, receiving the evening’s greatest ovation, that you wanted the occasion to have been bigger and – let’s face it – better.
The event was the first of only two performances of a partly inept semi-staging by Stewart Laing. Was this a not-good-enough account of an opera that deserved better delivery? Or was this opera just unworthy of revival? Musgrave, still active, has been a good and prolific composer; “Mary” was new in 1977, when she was half her current age. Its points of interest include its perennially fascinating protagonist, controversial in her lifetime and ever since: a queen who claimed the thrones of Scotland, France, and England, a Catholic who fought for her Scottish throne when Protestantism was winning the war for her country, a woman who survived three successive husbands. Musgrave’s opera,
in particular, attends to the few years when Mary was in Scotland as active monarch of the Scots – but its ending leaves us dissatisfied: Mary leaves Scotland for exile under English protection, and leaves us asking “And – ?”
Today, we’re eager to rediscover (or, more often, just discover) both this Scottish queen and women composers who may well have been underrated back in the day. I applauded Musgrave for her sheer longevity, her warmth, and the intensity of her opera. But her music writing seldom allows words to register.
Mary’s a big role, yet we have to read the words above the stage even to find what mood she’s in; it’s hard to believe that other sopranos would make be able to make more of the role than did Heidi Stober at the Coliseum. Musgrave’s libretto – written by herself – often makes areas of her own plot unclear. (In a period of Scottish history when too many people bore the names James and Stewart anyway, it was especially unclear how one James Stewart was Mary’s half-brother. There were crucial scenes in which it was vague whether the male
chorus was composed of Scottish courtiers or parliamentarians.)
Did English National truly believe in this “Mary”? If so, why didn’t it make a better case for it? Stewart Laing presented a modern-dress semi-staging that was at once too much and not enough. Who needs a “Mary Queen of Scots” opera whose main visual concern is the distracting slow assemblage onstage of a marquee?
2: Il Trovatore – Royal Opera. This cast until March 22.
Although Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” is one of the most gloriously vivid warhorses of the operatic repertory, it’s unusually hard to stage effectively. The score has not a weak number – most are irresistible – and remarkably little of it requires any stage action. Most of the five leading characters are haunted by the past, with the strongest arias being primarily narrative. If you understand the words (brush up your Italian) and if they’re communicatively sung, then “Trovatore” can still thrill. And if you don’t, then let the singers stand and deliver – “park and bark” – as if it mattered to the listener.
But in the Royal Opera’s 2023 production, directed by Adele Thomas and stranded on a single vast staircase designed by Annemarie Woods, is often embarrassingly ludicrous. Franck Evin’s lighting keeps the leading characters’ faces in shadow. (When characters are telling stories, it helps if we can see their eyes and mouths.)
Despite the singer-hostile lighting, the American tenor Michael Fabiano, playing the troubadour of the opera’s title, utters every word with diction of rare lucidity. He’s a constant source of connective energy onstage. Agniezka Rehlis (Polish), as his adoptive mother Azucena, Aleksei Isaev (Russian), as his brother-in-wolf’s-clothing the Count de Luna, and Riccardo Fassi (Italian), as Luna’s officer Ferrando are more conventional performers, but their singing, like Fabiano’s, enriches the evening. As the heroine Leonora, Rachel Willis-Sørensen (American) is uneven in terms of diction, top notes, and stage deportment. She rises to her best in her Act Four cabaletta “Tu vedrai che amore in terra.” (This is the one item that always used to be omitted until the Karajan-Callas 1956 recording. Willis-Sørensen makes an effectively urgent case for it.)
You can argue that “Trovatore,” with its larger choral numbers and epic sense of medieval history, is about much more than its few leading characters. But why not take the ensembles seriously? Why does choreographer Rebecca Woods organise one group to swing their bodies left-right-left-right to the oompah beat of the Anvil Chorus, facing the audience, as if telling us how hackneyed it is? And then why make another group do the same left-right oompah to the Soldiers’ Chorus?
3: Mansfield Park – Guildhall School of Music, until March 8.
Amid such clumsy accounts of repertory unfamiliar and familiar, how heartening to encounter the Guildhall School’s production of Jonathan Dove’s 2011 opera of Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park”. Devotees of the novel (I’m one) will be bothered that Dove and his librettist Alasdair Middleton have omitted its superb Portsmouth section (though they do take the action, deftly, to Sotherton) and that the passive (subtly passive-aggressive) Fanny Price is not more clearly the story’s heroine. Yet this opera turns these uncomfortable choices into virtues: Mansfield Park itself becomes an idyllic haven, and its residents become an intricate community.
Devotees of Stephen Sondheim (I’m not one) may admire how Dove follows his lead in taking short verbal phrases into tightly rhythmic vocal patterns. But Dove’s varied manner also owes debts to composers from Rossini to Britten, so that his opera doesn’t slot into any one stylistic category. Dove knows how to lodge words and vocal lines into listeners’ memories, how to make each of his characters vocally distinctive, and how to make Austen’s English-country-house story an eloquent study of moral decisions and striking individuals keenly interacting. At the Guildhall School, Thomas McGovern (as Edmund Bertram) and Joshua Saunders (as Thomas Crawford) make the most distinctive impressions, but most of the cast – directed by Martin Lloyd-Evans, conducted by Dominic Wheeler – does more than adequately.
“Mansfield Park” – originally commissioned for the English touring opera company Heritage Opera and subsequently revived by a number of companies and academies from Vancouver to Sydney – deserves to be presented by one of London’s leading companies. It’s touching, funny, entirely engrossing.
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