<<  -- 4 --  Roderic Dunnett    DANCE OF DEATH

The Queen of Spades - like Nielsen's Maskarade, or Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu - is a prolonged Dance of Death, and Jones and Macfarlane are not short of grim, skeletal coups-de-théatre. Wide open stages and boxed in rooms descending from the fly-tower are familiar enough : what is original is Jones's use of them. Figures constantly criss-cross the stage : the variants of these, plus the odd interjected surprise, create a music, and a choreography, of their own. The number three - a death symbol integral to the opera - is pounded out visually, as well as in the score. Jones interlinks scenes by a kind of visual punctuation, though always to a purpose. There is light relief, but no let up. The decay eats away - possibly too soon - at the Regency wallpaper, as if the graphic virtual rape (captured, as if in a pathologist's snapshot, at the close) is already hovering in the air.

The children's chorus, including a chirpy in-step but delightfully out-of-phase leader, is sheer joy - evidence again, surely, of Orfaneva's and Susan Dingle's linguistic coaching excellence. The all-but Beethovenian party chorus which opens the Act II ball is magnificent, even though it also produced the only split-second stage-pit uncoordination I sensed in the whole evening.

Yeletsky's wonderful acquiescence aria - shades of Onegin's Prince Gremin - was beautifully done by the Guildhall-trained, Kathleen Ferrier award-winning baritone Garry Magee, replacing the indisposed Vladimir Glushchak. Numerous orchestral touches seared to the quick - the frenetic clarinet as Herman interrupts the fluttering strings and harp of Lina's 2nd aria; simpering Brittenesque bassoon and thrilling brass bubbling up for their Act I closing exchange; the oboe obbligato to Herman's Act II soliloquy; the nervy viola pattern that permeates Act II scene ii like a murderous Leitmotif ; the glorious renaissance polyphony that follows in the strings; or the mesmerising low clarinet-writing - a sneak preview of Tchaikovsky's Pathetique - which ushers the old 'witch' to her sudden shivering death.

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