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The good, the bard and the chubby London
Barbican
11/24/2001 -
Henry Purcell: The fairy queen
Carys Lane (soprano), Mhairi Lawson (soprano), Julia Gooding (soprano), Susan Hemington Jones (soprano), Rodrigo del Pozo (tenor), Charles Daniels (tenor), Andrew Mackenzie-Wicks (tenor), Peter Harvey (baritone), Stephan Loges (baritone), Patrick Craig (counter-tenor), Andew Ollesson (counter-tenor)
Gabrieli Consort
Philip Pickett (conductor)
St John's, Smith Square
11/25/01
Gordon Getty: Plump Jack
Alan Opie (Falstaff), Robert Breault (Shallow/Snare), Zheng Cao (Hostess), Lisa Delan (Boy/Clarence), David Gustafson (Hal), Henry Waddington (Davy/Fang/Warwick), Les Young (Henry IV), Jonathan Veira (Chief Justice/Bardolf), Dean Ely (Pistol)
Philharmonia Orchestra, London Voices
Charles Ketcham (conductor)
Philip Pickett's Gabrieli Consort is named after a Venetian master composer, while William Christie's Les Art Florissants is named after a bit of fluff by the French courtier Charpentier. Both bands, though, have produced stellar versions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English music, with LAF excelling in bravura and sprezzatura, often in exquisitely costumed semi-staged performances, and the Gabrielis in musical depth and drama. There is a hint of parody of their distinguished competition in the Gabrieli Consort's semi-staged "production" of Purcell's music from the Fairy queen: the singers are working stiffs wearing tatty corporate T-shirts ("The future's grey....The future's Monotone*"), heading into the woods for a mickey-mouse team-building exercise and overtaken by nature and a couple of naughty orange imps with a dressing up box. The plot is non-existent (the summary in the programme gives putative characters the names of the singers), but the setting gets the main point: conventional people have time out in the woods and discover some truths about themselves as well as the joys of altered states.
The frame is so silly and flimsy it doesn't really help to engage a modern audience more with Purcell's music. In this performance it even seemed to highlight the set-piece quality of masques: people who you might expect to act realistically spent all their time striking poses. But Purcell's music doesn't need any help -- there is rude good humour, dreamy eroticism and wonder approaching the sublime in it that it no performance could entirely miss. These performers, singers and instrumentalists, knew exactly what they were doing and joined in the conceit amiably enough as well as giving the music its due.
The singers were a comfortable ensemble. Carys Lane and the more assertive Mhairi Lawson were an amusing, attractive pair of imps, or possibly nymphs. Julia Gooding was sympathetically authoritative in more or less the Titania slot, while Susan Hemington Jones was a bit fragile in the girl-discovering-love music. The three tenors Rodrigo del Pozo, Charles Daniels and Andrew Mackenzie-Wicks particularly well matched in their ensembles, although Daniels' solo numbers would be hard to beat. Mackenzie-Wicks was surprisingly moving as Phoebus in the seasons masque, but also in great panto-Dame form as Mopsa, and Stephan Loges was entertainingly (and superbly theatrically) drunk and confused as his Coridon. Loges sounded like a baritone a couple of years ago, but his voice has a lot of substance lower down, and he's probably headed for Fischer-Diskau land. Peter Harvey, who has an intensely focussed voice, also of great quality, was an amusingly grumpy Hymen.
The instrumental ensemble was as good as the singers, never confusing dreaminess with sogginess, and always pin point accurate. The usual kudos to the solo trumpet, one of David Hendry and Robert Vanryne, who came downstage to duet with the singers, and about as much to the other one, as they were both positively good (not just squawk-free). Altogether an unbeatable evening, and probably soon to be a wonderful recording.
There was a much more faithful rendition of Shakespeare at St John's the following night in Gordon Getty's Plump Jack, an opera based on the Falstaff scenes in Henry IV parts 1 and 2, plus the death of Falstaff and his followers' departure for Agincourt in Henry V. This is more or less the same ground as Orson Welles' Chimes at midnight, and it is unbeatable stuff: Henry IV's lament for England, his death and Hal's rejection of Falstaff are all gut-wrenching. Getty included rather too much of the wit and dense comic knockabout, and his choices in his libretto had the slightly unfortunate effect of highlighting the substantial material that Shakespeare recycled in more trivial vein in The merry wives of Windsor, and so setting up resonances with Verdi and Boioto, in spite of the completely different mood -- national epic, male bonding, humour in the face of despair -- and musical approach. The music had echoes of Walton's score for the Olivier movie in pageant scenes, but a recurring tendency to stick in the baritone range in both instruments and voices, and to rely on stage directions for expressiveness rather than melody, rhetoric or colour.
Alan Opie, a great Verdi Falstaff, showed signs of being a pretty good Shakespearean one as well, and the rest of the cast delivered the drama splendidly.
H.E. Elsom
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