HENRY PURCELL didn’t complete his music for The Indian Queen, John Dryden and Robert Howard’s “semi-opera” — his brother Daniel, a lesser musician, filled the gaps — and little is known about the hybrid work’s premiere, which took place some time after the 36-year-old composer’s death in 1695. In its original form, this play with music, almost an hour’s worth by the great man, is clearly not viable in the theatre today. But I am not sure Peter Sellars’s cannibalisation of the score for his very free English National Opera version is much of a dramatic event, either.
Padding out the evening with a couple of famous Purcell songs — Sweeter Than Roses, Music for a While, for which a partially new text has been supplied — and, more questionably, with his church anthems, Sellars yet again plies his familiar tropes of the repression of indigenous peoples, racism, the subjugation of women and so on, in a would-be piece of agitprop of Wagnerian length. As in his recent ENO world premiere of John Adams’s The Gospel According to the Other Mary and his “semi-stagings” of the Bach Passions, this “happening” feels like a happy-clappy prayer meeting with music and dancing, rather than a night at the theatre. There were quite a few coat-gatherers at half-time. Paying patrons have all the luck.
Sellars has acquired a cult following that has included the music director elect of the London Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle. Already, a Rattle-Sellars semi-staging of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande has been announced for the next LSO season at the Barbican. They collaborated on this masterpiece at Netherlands Opera 20 years ago — one of only two Sellars opera productions I have found at all dramatically compelling.
Since his “signature” world premiere staging of Adams’s classic Nixon in China in 1987, I’ve come to realise that Sellars does only one production, fitting the music to his now familiar shtick of formation choral semaphore — the only “direction” the chorus get in The Indian Queen is to come on, go off and sign while they sing — along with lots of inner pain from the principals, and cathartic hugging. See one Sellars show and you really have seen them all, but that’s what the cult followers have come to expect.
This time, at least, there are pretty “Mayan”-patterned painted flats and backdrops by the Los Angeles street artist Gronk, but they don’t create an environment for drama. It’s “community theatre” at some of the highest prices in the West End.
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Laurence Cummings, a baroque specialist, does what he can with the non-specialist ENO orchestra and chorus, but he’s slowed down by the leaden pace of Sellars’s dramaturgy. Lucy Crowe is the pick of ENO’s Purcellians, ravishing in Doña Isabel’s solos, but dramatically Sellars does nothing with her: she comes on, sings, hugs someone and goes off. Julia Bullock, as the titular Indian Queen who marries — unhappily — the conquistador Don Pedro de Alvarado, is an affecting actress and singer, though small-voiced for the Coliseum. The men are less remarkable.
The Indian Queen has a few musical high spots, tricked out into an evening of penitential length by a man who apparently never tires of gazing at his own navel. The emperor’s clothes have never looked more moth-eaten.
Concert performances can have more visceral thrill than your average Sellars staging. Two I attended last weekend were edge-of-the-seat stuff. Opera-going of this kind is like exotic time-travelling, as Antonio Pappano’s Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia and a starry cast transported a lucky few from Rome to ancient Egypt with an incandescent Aida, studio-recorded for release by Warner Classics this autumn. Two days later, Pappano’s Royal Opera chorus master, Renato Balsadonna, conducted a hardly less thrilling account of Massenet’s first Parisian hit, Le Roi de Lahore (1877), for Chelsea Opera Group. It hasn’t been heard in London since 1880, apart from instrumental numbers included in the score of Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon ballet.
For the Warner Aida, Pappano had assembled a mouth-watering but mostly non-Italian cast, who, on the whole, did not disappoint. Anja Harteros bravely tackled the title role for the first time in front of an Italian audience — possibly unwise, as she was barracked by a small but vocal group at her solo bow — with her Munich “dream partner”, Jonas Kaufmann, making his debut as Radamès. Neither is strictly Italianate in timbre, but both are supreme musicians, and I doubt whether any current Italian Verdians would be so scrupulous with the composer’s dynamic and expressions.
Harteros had an effortful ascent to a pianissimo high C — hence, presumably, the boos — but it was the sole blot on an otherwise commanding performance. Her gleaming soprano rides the big ensembles thrillingly — she all but drowned out Kaufmann and Ekatarina Semenchuk’s Amneris — and shaped long legato lines exquisitely. Kaufmann’s gritty tenor won universal approval. He, unlike the ladies, was showered with bouquets at the end, above all for his dark, heroic sound and for his morendo (dying) pp B flat at the climax of Celeste Aida. It’s a spellbinding effect, often simply ignored by fearful tenors. Semenchuk, initially soft-grained, opened all the stops for a barnstorming Judgment Scene and duly brought the house down.
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Pappano was incandescent, inspiring his orchestra and chorus to marvels of drama in the big scenes, yet also wondrously detailed, revealing textures in this masterly score of breathtaking transparency and delicacy. Aida in the theatre is rarely, if ever, like this.
The plot of Le Roi de Lahore is a sort of cross between Aida and Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, with a dash of the supernatural: the titular king, Alim, dies in battle, but is granted an Eurydice-like reprieve by the god Indra so he can prevent his beloved, Sita, from marrying her villainous uncle, Scindia. As in Aida, the lovers choose death together. Balsadonna galvanised his amateur orchestra and chorus, and a terrific team of professional soloists, for a thrilling performance that had most of the audience on their feet at the end. Michael Spyres’s heady, stylish tenor could hardly be bettered in Alim’s high-lying music, while as Sita, Anush Hovhannisyan’s already glamorous soprano proved excitingly temperamental as the evening progressed. William Dazeley has rarely sung better than as the usurping Scindia. Lovers of opera arcana can’t be too grateful to the Chelsea Opera Group, performing at their absolute peak for Balsadonna.