Independent Opera at the Wigmore Hall
21st June 2008
Finally my exams are over and I’m back on the opera circuit! Yay! I’d better have passed them because there’s no way I’m sitting through that lot again but I reckon I’ll do okay.
Independent Opera did the complete Orlando at Sadler’s Wells last year I think but I didn’t go. They only did extracts at Wigmore Hall, I don’t know why. Maybe because it takes like 3 and a half hours to perform the whole thing and Wigmore Hall concerts are usually quite short unless they’re big galas.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing to cut down long operas, they should definately try doing it with Wagner, have you ever tried sitting through like the whole of Das Rheingold without an interval when you’ve had a drink or two? Forget the world coming to an end, do you know what that could have done to my reputation? Handel doesn’t need cutting down as much because at least he doesn’t go through the same stuff over and over again but then if you have a time limit I reckon you should still do Handel operas. First because he’s a really great composer and every company needs to do him but also because companies with time limits are usually companies with young singers who are often going to be really good at Handel because their voices are still quite light. So if doing Handel means you have to cut stuff out then you cut stuff out. Like when English Touring Opera did Alcina they had to miss out a whole storyline but they still ended up with a really good production.
Orlando would be harder to cut storylines out of because it’s all like a big love square. Medoro and Angelica are a couple but Orlando fancies Angelica and Dorinda’s after Medoro. You could cut out Dorinda I suppose and just have the two blokes fighting over Angelica, you can’t do the trio at the end of Act 1 without Dorinda but if you’ve cut bits out you probably want to do a 2 act version anyway and then you can have the interval after Orlando’s big mad aria like Independent Opera did – that worked really well dramatically actually.
So what Independent Opera did to cut it down was they just did the tunes, the accompanied recitative and a few plotty bits of recitative. I thought it was a good idea at first because you’d probably still have the whole story and the recitative is the least interesting bit of the music. But you know like at the start of Act 4 of The Marriage of Figaro when you’ve got Barbarina, Marcellina, Don Basilio, Figaro and Susanna all singing arias one after the other? They’re all good arias and everything but you kind of wish a couple of them would start doing a duet or something.
That’s kind of how it was in Orlando, it was like aria aria aria aria aria all the way through and even the recitative they had didn’t break it up much because there mostly wasn’t any and the bits they did have were all like leading into the arias most of the time. There’s like 2 duets, 1 trio and the Finale and all the rest is arias and ariosos. Orlando is such a cool opera and it does have some brilliant arias in but what they did just didn’t work for me. I reckon it would have been better if the conductor Gary Cooper or maybe the singers had introduced each aria and kind of moved the story along in the introduction, kind of like how Classical Music Company did that Die Entfuhrung/Zaide thing Barry reviewed. The programme had a synopsis with the words but the words were quite small and you’d probably have to read quite fast if you wanted to follow that and read the libretto and watch the singers too.
William Towers was Orlando which was really cool because the first time I saw him was in Orlando when he sang Medoro at the ROH, Bejun Mehta who was supposed to be singing Medoro ended up singing Orlando because the mezzo was off sick so William sang Medoro. He’s a brilliant Orlando too. I wasn’t quite so sure in his first aria, it took him a bit of time to get warmed up but once he was he sang really well and I reckon it must be really hard to sing all the arias with just one interval, it’s not like they’re easy arias anyway although William didn’t seem to be having any trouble with them. It wasn’t staged or anything but William did lots of acting, he looked so insane.
Rebecca Ryan was Angelica, she looked really sexy and powerful so I could understand why the blokes were literally going mad over her. She seemed a bit cold sometimes but that made it extra funny when she and Medoro were comforting Dorinda because he was acting all concerned and Angelica looked really pissed off with him for being nice to her rival. They were singing the same lines but he sounded like he meant it and she sounded like she was singing through her teeth. I liked it like that, it makes her a bit more interesting.
Christopher Ainslie was Medoro, he seemed really cool. Poor guy though, he’s got Dorinda stalking him and Angelica possibly about to run off with this madman and Medoro’s only just recovering from nearly dying, seriously he’s not having a good time but you don’t see him going mad do you? He’s got a really interesting voice, he almost didn’t sound like he was singing falsetto. It’s cool the way countertenor voices can vary so much. The only ones I don’t like are the honky ones but there weren’t any at this performance which was good.
Dorinda was Martene Grimson, she was the only singer who wasn’t in the staged production. I know my girlfriend won’t like me saying this but Martene is HOT! Maybe Medoro is mad. Dorinda is a bit pathetic really but she’s got some great arias and she is quite sweet in a clingy sort of way. It’s quite cool the way Dorinda asks them all back to her house even though she’s just a shepherdess and the others are all upper class probably. Lots of operas have people from different classes hanging out together, I know lots of the characters keep killing each other but seriously these librettists and composers aren’t classist or sexist or anything stupid like that. They even have gay relationships like Don Carlo and Rodrigo.
There’s hardly anything for Zoroastro to sing but he’s someone you remember. Nicholas Warden is still quite young but he’s got all the low notes and he can sing them in tune most of the time. He’s a real proper light bass and his stage presence is good, you could tell Zoroastro was the authority figure.
So even though it probably wasn’t performed in the best way possible you just had to enjoy it because the performers were all so good. The orchestra had a theorbo and a harpsichord which was played by the conductor (so he had enough to do really without doing little intro pieces about the arias as well) and I reckon all the other instruments were old too because they didn’t sound like the modern ones. There was this one bit with a violin solo, I can’t remember which piece it was in but it was but it sounded really good.
FitCrit
primi-divi at hotmail.co.uk