Irish National Opera
Alice’s Adventures Under Ground
★★★☆☆
Les Arts Florissants
Platée
★★★★☆
What do you do with opera productions whose runs are cancelled by Covid? This week’s releases provide an answer: you stage them before a very select audience of microphones and cameras. Antony McDonald’s larksome staging of Gerald Barry’s madcap Lewis Carroll opera, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, captured at Wexford last May, goes online for a month via ROH Stream and onjam.tv. It features Irish National Opera’s cast fearlessly conquering the pugnacious extremities typically demanded by the eccentric composer, such as Alice’s 98 heaven-scraping top Cs.
An audio album, recorded separately, is also released today. It contains Barry’s feverish libretto, a heavily squeezed amalgam of both Alice books spiced with the composer’s own word games, including Jabberwocky in Russian and French. All that’s a plus. The sanitised studio recording, clear of footsteps but also of atmosphere, is more of a problem, although we can easily feast on the high-speed virtuosity of the amazing Claudia Boyle (she’s Alice) and the six other singers, and the vim of the Irish Chamber Orchestra, gleefully conducted by André de Ridder, a reliable specialist in the bizarre.
The main drawback is the absence of visuals, needlessly emphasised by damaging pauses that replace missing stage action with the charms of dead silence. Also, without McDonald’s colourful trappings, the violence embedded in Carroll and Barry’s imaginings becomes oppressive over time, even if that is a trim 53 minutes. The old-style solution would have been to issue this singular entertainment on a DVD. Well, I still buy them.
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The week’s second resuscitation is Theater an der Wien’s December 2020 revival of Rameau’s comic opera Platée. Its brief streaming has long gone, but from available images of Robert Carsen’s production, set in the modern fashion world, I wouldn’t shed many tears about that. Recorded live, footsteps and all, the album is a splendid showcase for Rameau’s imaginative and effervescent music, crisply performed by Marcel Beekman, who heads the excellent cast, and William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants. One big warning: the opera’s plot hinges on the cruel ribbing of an ugly nymph by numerous celebrities from the world of Greek myth. Funny? I don’t think so. (Signum Classics; Harmonia Mundi)