Martin Duncan’s chic and swanky new production of The Gondoliers, which opened last weekend, may not recapture the tongue-in-cheek irony and subtlety of Miller’s ever-magical Mikado, but that is partly the fault of Gilbert and Sullivan. It was the last of their collaborations before the celebrated “carpet quarrel”, which saw the librettist and composer at loggerheads over D’Oyly Carte’s attempt to charge them for carpeting his theatre.
(Sullivan sided with Carte and G&S appeared in court as opponents.) First seen at the Savoy Theatre in 1889, it was their last joint success, but, despite some of Sullivan’s most deliriously joyous musical numbers, The Gondoliers has always suffered from a sense of déjà vu, if not entendu. The cutting edge of Gilbert’s satire was evidently blunted by his admission to the ranks of the fêted musical-theatre establishment.
In the much earlier HMS Pinafore, he aims his salvos at the snobbery of a self-perpetuating elite. Here, he seems to be siding with the toffs, lampooning a more egalitarian society. The words of the royalist Grand Inquisitor, Don Alhambra del Bolero, chorused by the would-be republican gondoliers, Marco and Giuseppe Palmieri, have a reactionary ring: “When everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody.”
Duncan plays safe, not delving too deeply beneath the surface of a formulaic and contrived text, and allowing the audience to savour the cash-for-honours topicality of the Duke and Duchess of Plazatoro’s duet without new-Labouring the joke.
Bereft of a first-class word-book, Duncan and his brilliant designer, Ashley Martin-Davis, have gone for spectacle: a giant pop-up book, showing a map of Venice emblazoned with 3-D mini Rialto Bridges and gaudy gondolas, is the backdrop to a model-village representation of the city in Act I. In Act II, the kingdom of Barataria is depicted as a health resort, with a swimming pool and sun loungers adorning the book’s huge pages. The gondoliers’ would-be “country” girlfriends wear dazzling Dior New Look frocks in yummy shades of Italian ice cream. Sarah Tynan’s Gianetta and Stephanie Marshall’s Tessa look good enough to eat, although the best- before dates of some of their chorus companions appear to have long passed.
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If the comic momentum drags in the dialogue, that’s because opera singers almost invariably project the spoken word too emphatically, especially in a theatre the size of the Coliseum. It’s a bit shaming, too, that in such lightly and deftly scored music, and with a sympathetic conductor in Richard Balcombe, so few of the sung words are audible, and that they need to be projected on the dreaded surtitle screen — the veterans Donald Maxwell, Geoffrey Dolton and Ann Murray, as the Inquisitor, Duke and Duchess, and the youthful Rebecca Bottone’s enchanting Casilda are exceptions.
ENO fields an attractive cast, vocally on the thin side for an opera company in this repertoire. Tynan and Bottone are bright, soubrettish sopranos, and both have good looks and oodles of personality; their gondolier husbands, David Curry and Toby Stafford- Allen, look the part, but lack the sort of vocal glamour one craves. Curry’s Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes is stylish, but a long way short of show-stopping. Maxwell and Dolton rattle out their patter songs with energy and verve, but Murray’s voice now sounds a bit worn, even for an old-bag role. The chorus has its moment of glory in Dance a Cachucha, Fandango, Bolero, even if only vocally. Jonathan Lunn’s choreography is lacklustre and formulaic, executed without much athleticism by a company that looks a tad under-rehearsed.
Most of the fun comes from the pit, where Balcombe’s baton really sparkles in the overture.
Better known as a West End musical MD, he clearly knows and loves his Sullivan, and gets sprightly playing from the ENO orchestra. If this isn’t the last word on The Gondoliers, it’s still the best operetta production ENO has staged since the Miller Mikado.
During the renovation of the Festival Hall, the big choirs and orchestras have had to look for alternative spaces to mount blockbuster choral works. The Bach Choir and Philharmonia Orchestra joined forces at Westminster Cathedral for a moving, sometimes shattering performance of Britten’s War Requiem, the most enduring and beloved of his large-scale non-operatic works.
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Britten initially wanted his choral masterpiece performed only in holy places, but after a performance in Westminster Abbey, he thought better of it. The echoey acoustic of the cathedral may not be ideal, but it is an appropriately dramatic setting, with the painted crucifix that looms over the choir achieving a symbolic synergy with the music when the tenor, the excellent James Gilchrist, sang the words of Wilfred Owen’s At a Calvary Near the Ancre — “One ever hangs where shelled roads part” — in Britten’s Agnus Dei. This was just the most poignant moment of a thrillingly sung performance, with the glorious baritone of Simon Keenlyside joining Gilchrist as “the enemy you killed” in Strange Meeting, and Susan Bullock intoning the hieratic solos of the Latin text with dramatic soprano bravura. David Hill, the Bach Choir’s music director, conducted with masterly control. An uplifting concert.