BBC
PHILHARMONIC: BEETHOVEN’S FIDELIO
Bridgewater Hall
IT’S
puzzling that people seem to like opera in the concert hall so much, rather
than seeing the real thing in the theatre. Part of the reason may be the cost
of opera tickets, in many cases, and in this part of the country the fact that
we get so little fully professional opera offered at all.
But there’s
a positive reason, too – you hear the purely musical splendour of the great
opera scores to much better effect in a concert setting, especially in an
acoustic like the Bridgewater Hall’s. The BBC Philharmonic have made it almost
a tradition to end their main concert season here with opera, and, in a year of
Beethoven focus, the one and only operatic masterpiece the composer wrote was
the obvious choice.
It loses
through the transplant, of course. It’s a ‘Singspiel’ – a play with music, with
much of the story advanced in spoken dialogue, and its opening is in a cheerful
style rather like parts of The Magic Flute (Jaquino, the prison guard, has
designs on Marzelline, the head jailer’s daughter, which she forcefully
spurns). The compensation is that the orchestral score and the splendour of the
vocal writing are revealed in high-def glory, as they were under Juanjo Mena’s
baton.
But you
miss the visual aspect when the characters are lined up in concert dress and
not doing much acting. Benjamin Hulett sang Jaquino accurately and strongly,
and Lucy Hall brought moments of genuine emotion to Marzelline. Stephen
Richardson has the experience of performing Rocco the jailer on stage, and he
was soon a living, breathing character as well as a warm and admirable singer.
But the
story changes, once we meet the real goodies and the (very) baddie. Detlef Roth
sang the evil Don Pizarro with force and malice; Manchester-trained Rebecca von
Lipinski was the star of the show as Leonore (the wife who disguises herself as
a man to free her prisoner husband), and Stuart Skelton was outstanding in the testing
tenor role of Florestan, the incarcerated hero.
In the
early stages the voices were in danger of drowning in the orchestral volume (at
least from where I was sitting), but things took off musically in the Mir Ist
So Wunderbar quartet and rarely looked back.
Rebecca von
Lipinski was magnificent in her first showpiece aria (Abscheulicher! and Komm,
Hoffnung) – passionate and in lovely voice – and earned the first spontaneous
applause of the evening. Her dialogue with Rocco, following the prisoners’
release, was the first scene to live in any dramatic sense, with the first of
many a ringing top note.
Stuart
Skelton began his act two soliloquy with an ambitious soft-to-loud crescendo on
the opening word, and his expressiveness and tone were everything demanded by the
hero-tenor writing.
The London
Symphony Chorus began their parts tentatively (perhaps deliberately so?) but
warmed to their task, and from the prisoners’ ranks soloist Edward Price made a
real impact. Andrew Greenan completed the cast nobly as Don Fernando, the man
who finally sorts things out after Leonore has shown her willingness to die to
save her man.
By the end
Juanjo Mena was whipping the faster speeds along with all the breakneck
enthusiasm worthy of a modern Beethoven expert, and the performance ended with
him bouncing on the rostrum and excitement reaching dizzy heights. It was quite
a night.
****
Robert
Beale
No comments:
Post a Comment