On paper, at least, the prospects looked encouraging: Glyndebourne’s dynamic young music director, the Russo-German Vladimir Jurowski, has made known his belief that Fledermaus is a masterpiece that deserves serious treatment. Glyndebourne’s cast, if a shade veteran for a work about men and women very nearly getting caught with their underwear down in Vienna circa 1875, includes such festival favourites as Sir Thomas Allen, singing his first Gabriel von Eisenstein; the Swedish baritone Hakan Hagegard as his friend Dr “Fledermaus” Falke; and the latter’s compatriot Ragnar Ulfung making a cameo appearance as the Eisensteins’ lawyer, Dr Blind. There are a lot of Swedes in this cast, including the Alfred of Pär Lindskog and the Orlofsky of Malena Ernman. Stockholm may lie 1,000 miles north of the City of Dreams, but this only partly explains why this Fledermaus misses the spirit of Viennese boulevard comedy by a few million light years.
Two fatal errors have beencommitted in this production: first, the dotty decision to perform the work in German; and second, allowing the director, Stephen Lawless, to “adapt”, or rather rewrite wholesale, the spoken dialogue with Daniel Dooner, then have it translated back into the original language. This text is hid-eously unfunny: Eisenstein saying at the ball that he is “hungry for a Hungarian” is about as witty as it gets, at least as long as you read the surtitles. Translated, it’s a joke no native German-speaker would fathom. The new book is so desperate that Orlofsky has to suggest that the audience should be offered free champagne so that they might laugh more in the second act. Perhaps this was intended as irony, but under the circumstances, I wonder. For me, they could have filtered laughing gas into the air-conditioning system and still failed to provoke so much as a titter.
Ah, yes, champagne. This is the idée fixe of Lawless’s production, which at least has the hint of a justification in the text — the bubbly beverage is blamed at the end for the sordid antics of the principal characters — but it is just about the only idea. The front cloth is a mock-up champagne label featuring the title of the opera and the composer’s name, and after the second half — the Act II ball is divided in two for the supper interval, which gives Jurowski’s claim to be taking Die Fledermaus seriously a hollow ring — the stage is littered with Moët & Chandon empties. Glyndebourne has a long history of stage directors sucking up to the audience, but I can’t remember such abject grovelling as this before. In the spoken monologue of the jailer, Frosch, Udo Samel delivers a buttock-achingly boring lecture on champagne in heavily accented English, and, pointing at the chairman’s box, says: “This is a marvellous institution” (meaning Glyndebourne).
Yes, Glyndebourne is — or can be — a marvellous institution, but it is capable of delivering absolute stinkers like this one, and the tragedy is that so much talent and expense have been lavished on it. Jurowski’s conducting and the London Philharmonic’s playing are truly world-class, and they raise the spirits, only for them to sink into the abyss when the music stops.
Benoît Dugardyn’s Jugendstil gasometer set looks wonderful for Acts I and II, but is impossibly lavish for the prison of Act III: even Lord Archer might blush at being incarcerated here. And the singing is only so-so. Eisenstein is a good role for Allen at this stage of his career, as it lies high, in the best part of his voice these days. Pamela Armstrong is a serviceable Rosalinde, the Russian Lyubov Petrova an accurate but strident Adele, but the Swedish contingent sounds effortful: Ernman’s Orlofsky is a ghastly caricature of a countertenor singing this mezzo-soprano trousers role.
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Holland Park Opera continues to pack in audiences, even in unseasonably wet and cold weather. For the last offerings of the season, Martin Lloyd-Evans directed a stolid production of Verdi’s Stiffelio, and it was only passably sung, except by the Serbian soprano Katarina Jovanovic as the hero’s adulterous wife, Lina. She started tentatively, but grew in confidence and vocal lustre.
HPO’s Lucia di Lammermoor was sensibly directed by Nik Ashton, handsomely costumed — Victorian Scottish baronial — by Jessica Curtis, conducted with style and elan by Jeremy Silver, who made the RPO’s Holland Park division sound something like the real thing, and pretty well sung, especially by the French soprano Anne-Sophie Duprels as an unusually convincing, vocally fearless Lucia. Mark Stone, as her bullying brother, was also very good. Our “national” companies would be hard-pressed to put on as enjoyable a performance of Donizetti’s masterpiece as this.