Re: "Il tabarro" RAH, 11.viii.08

I had hoped to hear this on the BBC transmission and then missed it,
but it doesn't sound like I missed too much.

How was Varady, if you recall at this point, when you saw her in this?
I think she's one of the great stage creatures that we've largely
missed here.

How was Banks, to the extent his little roll matters, so to speak? I
used to think he was the cat's meow, but the last few times I've heard
him, I've really felt some of the bloom is off the vocal rose....the
colortura is now more labored (certainly it was for the completely
uncut and restored Baber up at Caramoor about a month ago), the
extension was more effortful, and I thought the sound was also a bit
problematic,so I wonder how the basic presentation was in the
Trittico.

Thanks, and yes, a joy to read

Richard, who'd suggest you might want to be careful about suggesting
that 90 years is better late than never.




On Aug 12, 8:54 pm, "Stephen Jay-Taylor" <sjaytay...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
"First performance at the Proms", it said in the programme. Well, I suppose
90 years is better late than never. And the better news is that Covent
Garden, having never given "Il trittico" intact since its poorly-received
1920 local premiere, is due to make amends season after next. Let's just
hope they have a better cast planned....

Concert performances can often generate a greater head of dramatic steam
than fully staged specimens, but this, alas, was not one of those occasions.
Strung out across the front of the entire width of the Albert Hall's
amphitheatre platform, the soloists had to fight to make themselves heard
much of the time ( though friends who were sitting over the other side of
the yawning expanse, opposite me, apparently heard rather more of Frittoli
than I did, who instead got the orchestra - the BBC Philharmonic - loud and
cloudy, but not much else ). Then there is the small problem of Lado
Ataneli, sporting a boot-black mullet and fanned-out pony-tail which made
him look like an East-end spiv circa Camelot, and whose Michele sounded
about as impassioned as a parking notice.

Apparently, Miroslav Dvorsky has a career. I wonder what as ? Certainly not
a Puccini tenor - and tenoring comes no easier than Puccini's version of
it - since he missed one note and cracked hopelessly on another, whilst
managing to look twenty years older as the youthful Luigi than the bizarrely
blacked-locked Ataneli as the supposedly much older Michele. Between the
plain vocal inadequacy of the one, and the utterly undifferentiated,
laundry-list, bellowings of the other, I thought the performance just about
died on its feet. Nor does it help that the work is so unfamiliar here -
though I did see Varady as Giorgetta at the ROH in the early 80s - the
audience were completely thrown by the musique-concrète elements of the
score - the car horn, the foghorn, the Petrushka-esque barrel-organ music -
and either started laughing embarrassedly, or looked around angrily for the
cause of the disturbance.

Some relatively starry names were drafted in to fill the minor roles,
including Alastair Miles as Talpa, Barry Banks - looking more than ever like
opera's own Truman Capote - as Tinca, and Jane Henschel as Frugola, going on
and on about her ***. Even the offstage music-vendor busy peddling
"l'istoria di Mimi" was Allan Clayton, who's just finished singing a long
run of Albert Herring at Glyndebourne to tremendous acclaim, whilst the
offstage lovers - here brought unprofitably onstage - were sung by Katherine
Broderick,  busy winning first the Kathleen Ferrier Prize, then the Maggie
Teyte Prize, and Edgaras Montvidas, who's about to sing the tenor part in
"Das Lied von der Erde", good luck to him. Much of this was pure gain,
though I've never rated Henshcel's voice, and it's plainly in decline,  if
indeed she would ever have been able to negotiate Frugola's rythmically
tricky, fast-moving parlando patter about ***.

But Barbara Frittoli, insofar as I could hear her, seemed very much in her
role, and though a purely lyrical lightweight for Giorgetta, gave a most
affecting performance, her purely acting skills, which are prodigious,
fleshing out some less than overwhelming vocalism. Best of all was the
conducting of Gianandrea Noseda, the BBC Phil's principal, who paced it
expertly, and generally gave his band their impressive head. Quite why the
first half was given over to Rachmaninov's 1st symphony, rather than, say,
his "Francesca da Rimini", making the singers involved earn their fee, I've
no idea, but it seemed to me an opportunity wasted. As it is, in the absence
of any strong guiding hand to repostion the singers upstage, behind and
above the band ( from where they would have been uniformly audible ) or to
encourage them - scoreless as they all were - to move around and act out the
drama more effectively, it all seemed fairly soggy to me.

Janacek's "Osud" next week, and Messiaen's "Saint François d'Assise" with
Rodney Gilfry the week after, and Rimsky's "Kastchey the Immortal" somewhere
along the line. I may drop a line or two.....

SJT, who's just heard tonight's BBC Radio 3 announcer say, live on air, "And
we do hope that the music tonight didn't spoil your enjoyment of the sound
of the rain hammering on the Albert Hall's roof throughout the concert".

.

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