Royal occasion

People still write about Gloriana in a defensive tone, though surely the absurd reactions of some of its first spectators can now be forgotten. In a production as nearly faultless as Opera North's - they have been receiving so much critical flak lately that it must be nice to have a winner that can be revived regularly to the renewed or (in my case) fresh delight of all who see it - it comes across as all told the finest of Britten's operas. In all the others which one might make that claim for there seems to me to be a fatal flaw, often the result of Britten's obsessions entering in a sidelong fashion. Gloriana is blessedly devoid of his usual concerns, though Opera North's leading programme commentator, in a tryingly trendy piece, writes that `The tale of Elizabeth and Essex is the stuff of homoerotic play', giving the strange grounds that `here is a young man in a position of submission, pursued for his good looks. She is old enough to be his mother.' If that constitutes the stuff of homoerotic play we shall have to do a good deal of conceptual reorganisation. The author goes on to specify four ways in which Elizabeth `invented a kind of transcendental sexuality', but I think they are better left unpursued.

The production, unlike the notes, is direct, sensible, clear-headed and unaffected by contemporary fads. At its centre, still, is the performance of Josephine Barstow. I am clearly in a tiny minority in finding her all too much of an intense thing. I don't object to intensity, and plenty is called for in this role, but I find Barstow's is unvarying. She puts so much into everything that whether she is celebrating, cajoling or threatening, the words come out with a ferocity which I find wearying. Now that her vocal resources are undeniably shrinking, she has to resort to something like shouting to get some of her intended effects across. At the end, and once or twice before, she tries whispering, and becomes inaudible. Her presence continues to be magnetic, but then Britten has ensured that. By contrast with his Queen, the Essex of Thomas Randle, also a well-- rehearsed assumption, is wonderfully vibrant and various. In the opening scene, enraged at the account of Mountjoy's success, he is dangerous, sexy, restless, worldly and tinged with idealism. The confident building up of the characters from the very start must owe a lot to Britten's veneration for Verdi, though the Italian rarely managed so many characters with such mastery. It seems to me that the one scene which is clearly unsatisfactory, the penultimate one in which we learn from a ballad singer about the progress of Essex's exploits, shows Britten swapping allegiances to Mussorgsky. He and Verdi are by far the two greatest operatic historians, but their ways of doing it don't mix. That apart, the work seems to have inspired in its performers its conviction in itself, and to be well beyond the range of carping.

It would take more columns than I have words at my disposal to do justice to Welsh National Opera's Tristan und Isolde, at least as it was performed to rows of empty seats at Oxford's Apollo Theatre last Saturday. I had avoided it, feeling that the two principals were past their prime, and might be painful. In the event they were in fine voice, and dramatically committed to an extent that was indeed painful, but in the right way.

During Act I Mary Lloyd-Davies was smouldering, her suffering more inward than Isoldes normally make it. At the start of Act II it was clear that she was a changed woman, her movements free, her voice ecstatic, and together with her Brangane, Anne Marie-Owens, and the incandescent conducting of Carlo Rizzi, here as throughout the score showing himself to be a truly great Wagnerian, the scene leading up to the extinguishing of the light was as thrilling as I have ever known it. Yet things went from wonderful to amazing, with a love duet perfectly shaped and climaxing with nearly intolerable intensity. No false husbandry, either: big climaxes led to far bigger ones. Even so, and incredibly, Act III was the most moving, thanks to Jeffrey Lawton's identification with the role of Tristan. It isn't hard to see why he makes no recordings: his voice is of no distinctive quality, and has a restricted dynamic range. He uses it now with so much humanity, is so well versed in a role which he goes on exploring, that he made a more effective performer of this ultimately taxing part than many of its famous exponents; only Jon Vickers, in my experience, has plumbed it still more deeply.

All told, the performances that I was reminded of throughout were those that Goodall conducted with the same company in 1979, and which I rank among the richest, most disturbing artistic experiences of my life. There are two more performances, in Bristol and Llandudno. It is worth going a very long way to catch one of them.

Copyright Spectator Jul 10, 1999
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