<<  -- 5 --  Roderic Dunnett    AN UNUSUAL OPERA

It was the rather well-managed night-scene (Act II), but above all the water-sprites' appeals, complete with some rather good blocking and gestures (most of the attempts at stylised gesture in this production were hopeless, or at least pathetically executed; a director's 'good idea' is only a good wheeze when it is actually carried off), which finally won me -- and I suspect, the audience, over. The later scenes, quite regardless of the fact that patrons had wined and dined pleasantly in Garsington's fabulous garden in the meanwhile, seemed to acquire a cogency that Act I frankly, after (by all accounts) a superb overture that rivalled the subtle instrumentation of Rimsky's gorgeous Act II prelude) seemed to lack.

Even at the close, I couldn't make out if they got and pitched into the watery deep the right wicked stepmother-figure (the obvious candidate survived intact; what looked like an innocent was hauled off for immolation, or rather inundation). Nor could I really make out what the amiable Kalenik (his name means charcoal burner or coal-burner, and if you think about it, it's almost the same word) was up to. Oh yes, a jolly drunk. But surely, this being Gogol, (a kind of proto-Chekhov) his was not so much a Simeonov-Pishchik comic loon, but some kind of cynical observer of life, à la Trofimov, Astrov or Lopakhin? Geoffrey Dolton is one of the British operatic stage's nattier, cannier singing actors. Someone must have forgotten to tell him what it was all about. A directorial mishap perhaps? (Come to think of it, Dolton would have been rather a good choice to direct this opera: it's an art he has espoused, not unsuccessfully: ask those at Leeds' Opera North).

And while I've got my 'northern' hat on, I only wish someone would reemploy surely the doyen of British opera directors, Joseph Ward, (the original Starveling in Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream), who founded the Royal Northern College of Music's opera school and reasserted Manchester as one of the finest venues for opera stagings in the country -- at times even upstaging London's brightest and best. There is someone who knows how to gee up a vast chorus. What this May Night needed was more of a chorus line. How I'd love to have laughed a belly-laugh. The way they do in Minsk or Tomsk, in Semipalatinsk and Akpolinsk.