In Days of Old When Knights were Bold. . . .Prom 6: Der Rosenkavalier

. . .And the teenagers were randy;
They went first for girls that were a bit old
Then dumped them for eye-candy.

At least last night, it being a 'semi-staged' performance, we were spared the bilious and clashing colours of the actual stage set. Seeing those on the BBC4 Glyndebourne documentary a little while ago, reminded me of student 'decorating parties' in the Seventies.

That was when the party-goers, enthusiastically fuelled with alcohol and moderately hallucinogenic (or merely self-deluding) drugs, all even more enthusiastically grabbed a random pot of paint and started painting equally randomly as to walls and colours.

Once sober and partially sane again, the denizens of those rooms usually realized very quickly they couldn't sleep with those colours around them without worse nightmares than a tab or two set going; and certaiinly not eat without feeling even queasier at every meal than they had the morning after the party, and rushed out to buy quantities of white paint to expunge the horror of it all.

I think this was the most disappointing Glyndebourne performance I've ever seen (and heard: though to hear much from the stage intelligibly last night, even with the libretto in front of you would have needed the average hearing aid to be turned up to eleven.)

As it happens, I finally saved up enough to actually go to Glyndebourne this summer; and I am really, really glad that I didn't choose this Rosenkavalier . . .Much of the stage business—and I'm allowing for the narrower confines of the platform at the Albert Hall, not that that has ever seemed to confine the company before—was puzzling, pointless, mystifying, or just plain silly

It didn't look quite so bad close-up in a TV documentary with someone offering some kind of explanation of why they were doing it—which I've forgotten—but from a greater distance, when Sophie and Octavian start their audition for the Synchronised Swaying Doubles Team, from the Circle at the Albert Hall, it looked like two lemmings meeting each other face to face each stubbornly convinced the other was heading the wrong way to the cliff they were overdue to throw themselves over.

It could be that those who stayed at home and listened to the sixth Prom (and for free! Prommer mutters darkly) had the best of it. I'll have a quick listen to my recording later. . .

But in the hall it was all rather flat. (As flat as the flats in the set. A technical theatrical pun, there, in case you didn't notice. I knows about these fings, innit?) The singing emotionally flat—no-one seemed in fact to have any emotions; which is very odd considering what this opera is about.

And worse, musically flat. Professional, competent, all the notes in the right order, sort of thing, but changes of dynamics or swoops into mezzoforte are not really emotionally satisfying substitutes for a psychological score that needs more insight than Robin Ticciati appeeared to be able to provide.

"There will be tears, there will be laughter," said Ticciati, very softly, on Radio 3.  There were very few of the former and very little of the latter.

Enough for the moment, since it's late, and I need a decent night's sleep so as to prepare for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Opera Companies kicking the door in and confiscating my Kobbe's Opera Guide or making me write 5000 words on "Mid Twentieth Century Butch Feminism in Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage".

Sorry about the limerick. But it's not as vulgar as some that begin that way. But it's not boorish, is it? Baron Ochs, you see, is a boor. A smug, arrogant, stupidly self-confident and assured one for most of the opera. It's questionable, doubtful really, that he even notices, let alone is affected by, what gives us in the audience—or should—just a short twinge of satisfying schadenfreude after the police have finished with him. But in this production he's only vulgar, and we don't get even a little twitch of that most satisfying of emotions: to the Viennese, reputedly, anyway. Almost, but not quite, as vulgar as Octavian/Mariamdel's horrendous squawking combo Strine-Estuary Essex accent in the same  inn scene of the Third Act.

Perhaps that was supposed to be comic, but  it just came across as amateur end-of-the-pier music hall, and like many missed opportunities in this production garnered merely a handful of slightly embarrassed titters . . .a handful in an audience of a handful of thousands? I ask you. . .I haven't often seen an audience so disengaged. And that wasn't because half of them were concentrating on trying to follow the libretto.

While we're on about vulgarity, listeners at least missed the Marschallin's adolescent 'black boy' hunting around the stage at the end for her underwear and having a good sniff at it. Oh, no: it was supposed to be a hanky, wasn't it? Maybe it was a scarf. Difficult to tell from the Circle. Some people laughed.

I see I shall have to come back to this, given other reviews, varying from the near-adulatory to the lukewarm. It won't have been the first time—or will be the last, probably—that I'll be wondering if I was at the same performance as some critics.

I can't say I care for Ticciati as a conductor. While his Rosenkavalier was competent, it would be hard to honestly say much more than that. (The waltzes were popular with the audience, but surely there should have been more Richard and less Johann about them?) I saw Eugen Onegin at Covent Garden; and felt then he was almost out of his depth. He made the Covent Garden orchestra sound almost third-rate; which is not how I've heard them for a very long time.
Note: Baron Ochs was sung by Franz Hawlata, not Lars Woldt as advertised; and Sophie by Louise Adler, not Teodora Gheprghiu. No explanation that I saw. Hope thieir arms  are OK?

Live: RAH 

iPlayer Acts 1 and 2; don't know where Act 1's gone . . .

Act 1 has surfaced