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Adele (the splendid Natasha Agarwal) dances to centre stage at the ball. Pictures: Peter Marsh Die Fledermaus
Opera Warwick
Warwick Arts Centre
**** One
has huge admiration for Opera Warwick. This student company, relying on
a first-rate organisation, inspired and energised musical leadership -
whether from undergraduates or their seniors - a sequence of imaginative
stagings and a series of gifted technicians overseeing costumes,
lighting, sound and set building, yet with no university music faculty,
it has without doubt the ability, at best, to match the efforts of the
music colleges in London, Glasgow and Manchester. I have relished its productions of Rossini (La Cenerentola), Mozart (Don Giovanni, Figaro), and most impressively Monteverdi (a staggeringly sensitively done L’Incoronazione di Poppea), all of which have impressed by the quality of their production values - in every department - and a wily, canny good sense that constantly and pretty much consistently hit the jackpot.
Now Warwick have turned their prodigious
skills, gift of eloquent delivery and wicked sense of humour to
Strauss’s most famous operetta
Die
Fledermaus (1874), which – as the
Director’s note observes – drew its humour not just from the stage play
or vaudeville
Le Réveillon
by Meilhac and Halévy,
staged in Vienna two years earlier, but via them to the 1850s play
Das Gefängnis
(The Prison) by the still performed playwright Julius Benedix.
(1811-73).
The fast-moving wit and humour of its libretto
and the sheer quality and flair of the score made
Die
Fledermaus the very apogee of
Viennese operetta, as it still is to that day, despite the massive
contributions of Lehár
(whose
Merry Widow
Opera Warwick staged a couple of winter seasons ago), and obvious
talents of Kálmán,
Fall and numerous others.
Fledermaus
requires a slickness, a rhythmic vitality and alacrity of pace, and an
overall brilliance and sparkle to carry off its often bruisingly
challenging, rip-roaring music. And this Josh Dixon’s p
At times one looked for some more specific detail and precise touches – for instance, he set it in the ‘Thatcher era’ but there was precious little, just the odd quip, to define and capture anything of that specific period. Some of the acting seemed left to the performers’ own devices, other passages were really nicely mapped out. Fledermaus turned out perhaps a curate’s egg, but the good points outdid any drawbacks as much as an ostrich’s egg outweighs a domestic hen’s. There was a lot worth praising. One of the
crucial things was the superb coordination between stage and pit. Paul
McGrath, who conducted (usually hitherto undergraduates have taken the
helm, something which should be retained), is the university’s Director
of Music, and has a significant CV working with the national companies
in London and also abroad. To say he was a vast asset would be an
understatement. His ability to command singer and orchestra, each in
impeccable detail, and at the same time, would have served a production
well at Opera North or indeed at ENO, where he previously worked. His
rapport with his players – from where I was one saw it especially with
the violins, but you could see that it energised the (magnificent)
woodwind and brought fine effects from brass (including an important
tuba), tuned percussion and everybody else clustered around him. The
playing, to my mind, was of the very first order, fizzing and whizzing,
and that applied from the first note of the wondrously played overture
to the end of the show. Quite some achievement.
My spirits rose when I saw that final year
student Natasha Agarwal had been cast as Adele. Her Susanna in
Figaro
had been a triumph, vocally as much as dramatically (just as her
colleague in Warwick’s
Carmen,
Ellie Popham – the pair sang Frasquita and Mercédè
Meanwhile
Ellie Popham showed a nice, wry wit that helped enliven an already
bizarrely funny Act I (bizarre exchanges with Adele who is claiming an
ill aunt), and when it came to her set piece as the ‘Hungarian countess’
who discredits errant husband Eisenstein at the palace ball, she really
turned it on. The tone of her sound in Strauss’ parody of
a csárdás
gained a spectacular warmth, that beamed out amid the almost surreal
spotlighting (James Fitzpatrick) which picked her out so movingly as she
held the ball guests spellbound. Popham, always abetted by conductor
McGrath, also lent character to the set piece ensembles – her lulling
Act 1 duet with Alfred, for instance, and the extended Act 3 trio with
Eisenstein and Alfred; plus between those, the combative duet with
Eisenstein at the ball.
Indeed it
was Florian Panzieri’s Alfred who proved perhaps the vocal highlight of
this endlessly cheeky and cheerful evening. Panzieri has made the
transition, literally just now, from baritone to tenor. What a great
decision. His tenor is a scrumptious sound, winningly secure in higher
tessitura (what a singing teacher he would really make) and profoundly
warm in quality. Alfred’s role is a somewhat curtailed one – one would
have relished more of him from Strauss and his librettists Haffner and
Genée
– but both in his cavorting with Rosalinda (cue sundry well-known arias)
and in his insistent singing from his prison cell (cue more ‘classical
pops’), he showed what a truly fulfilling voice he has developed. His
stage character, like certain others’, lacked something in invention and
definition, but his humorous tolerance of his unlikely plight rendered
the character all the more attractive and entertaining.
Ross Kelly is a first year Business and French
student, and Eisenstein is quite a tall order for a newcomer to
undertake. That he carried it off with such panache was a huge credit to
him. The negative element was that one felt many of his solo moves were
more or less self-directed. The deportment – well, s Frank (Michael Green) engages with his prisoner Alfred (Florian Panzieri)
There was just occasionally a tangible
shortage of detail. But Kelly is an attractive performer: his Eisenstein
was pleasantly and tangibly full of
joie-de-vivre, and a lot of the
paciness and raciness of the evening was occasioned by him, right from
the very opening, in the extremely funny stage business he and Falke
contributed to the overture. The voice is a pleasing one, not there yet
but hopefully well on the way; he hurls himself around the stage like a
hyperactive frisbee, and if this was occasionally just overdone it was
equally often well devised and ably rehearsed.
Cole McLaren-Bailey’s Falke was a
sophisticated cove, very ready to join in or initiate the mischief,
tolerant of Eisenstein’s antics (here) like an amiable Latin teacher,
and at his best, very funny, and moreover – even in a joint invasion of
the audience - subtly so. His star turn comes at the end when he appears
in a pretty spectacular, bearish bat costume, thus reviving the joke
that his friend played on him some time earlier. But there is an
appealing and nicely supported voice there, which bodes well. It’s he
who introduces the sequence of comments about material wealth (‘My
friend, you’re forgetting one thing – we’re rich’) which will resurface
in the ball scene (‘those people over there – they’re
poor’),
and which perhaps classes as one of the libretto’s ‘Thatcher era’ jests.
Falke’s
famous aria, ‘Friends of mine’, a sort of slow waltz beautifully and
sensitively paced by McGrath and his players, was enchanting. The new
translation, which director Josh Dixon made abetted, presumably, by an
initial version from the German by Eve Miller, served the opera well at
every stage: and you could
Another of
the super characters in this production was the Prince Orlofsky, Ellie
Sterland, a splendidly august and stylish performer: Orlovsky’s arias
are, like Rosalinda’s Hungarian countess, the real highlights of the
central Act, and one was not left wanting. They were sung with
tremendous spirit, as well as authority and wit, and paired with
McGrath’s orchestra emerged highly polished. Her moves, with or without
a hefty sword (one of the nicer props; the costumes – Emma Ann Hall,
Anne Peo shone best in this Act), were splendid calculated, very much
Viennese (or Berlin or Budapest) hussar, and all one wanted – in one of
the set pieces – was perhaps a little more volume; yet they had plenty
of punch, a super tone with a tangible depth to it, and recalled (in two
cases) the impudent piece of yodelling that Johann Strauss has, tongue
in cheek, imported.
For the ball scene,
Die
Fledermaus depends on a vital and
energetic chorus, displaying a fair amount of imagination. Despite the
odd deliberately static moment, for the most part this choir showed
itself imaginative in moves - and the very opposite of the humdrum
choruses one sometimes encounters. Some of the toing and froing was, one
would guess, mapped out as part of the direction, but the finer detail
will have depended on the performers themselves, including the
supportive Ida, Adele’s sister (third year biomedic Charlotte Senior,
Opera Warwick’s active President). The use of lateral moves – one or two
players shifting laterally from one side of the stage to the other – was
especially effective. The choir sang well as a whole, and as unified
whole too, which heightened the quality and impact. There were no ragged
ends. An attempt was made by the set designer (Tomm Act 3 got off
with as much of a bang as Act 1: this was thanks to Mike Lyle’s Frosch.
A senior member of the company, featuring a broad and very funnily
deployed Scottish accent, his Frosch – as drunk or hung over as his
boss, Frank – was a delicious loose cannon, bumbling haphazardly into
the audience, pouring scorn on orchestra and conductor, and the audience
too; and without deploying any kind of flood of expletives, generally
taking the piss out of everyone, including the haplessly warbling
Alfred, locked in his cell (a particularly good bit of set design).
Sense and order is brought to Act 3 by his boss, Frank, the prison
governor who has mistaken and misarrested Alfred for Eisenstein. As well
as possessing an agreeable voice, Michael Green gave, I suggest, one of
the star performances of the evening as the longsuffering Frank, who is
left to cope with one interloper after another in the early stages of
Act 3, before all is revealed. A delightful, well-deployed collection of
affable greetings, perplexity, charm, shrugs and grimaces were just part
of his very ample repertoire: his exchange with Adele was rather nicely
backed by shadows, thanks to James Fitzpatrick’s lighting. What does
this all amount to? With a few reservations and the odd cavil, another
success for Opera Warwick, one which went down patently well with the
considerable student contingent, as well as the outsider members, of the
audience. One is prepared to make certain allowances for student
productions, even at the London music colleges. But here there was no
need to patronise. Opera Warwick continues to show that flair, quality
and ability that makes it one of the most stylish and impressive
companies that England currently deploys. Stage fun, quality organising,
strength in depth and a quite magnificent orchestra invariably take this
company right to the top of the tree.
Roderic Dunnett 01-17 |
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