Britten : Gloriana
Royal Opera Chorus
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Paul Daniel
I've seen most of Britten's major operas (and most more than once), but there are two that have escaped me to date, because they're conspicuously less popular than the others. One is Owen Wingrave, which is understandable to a certain extent because it was conceived for television, and therefore surely poses certain problems of staging which have made it impractical. The other, however, is Britten's Coronation opera, Gloriana. I finally caught up on that one tonight, and while it's not perhaps Britten at his best - and it does suffer from a bit of a clunky libretto - there's much to admire and enjoy in it.
This new production, by Richard Jones, is the Royal Opera's way of marking both the Jubilee year, and Britten's centenary. Jones has come up with an intriguing idea of framing it as if it was an original performance of itself, only not at Covent Garden (as it was originally premiered), but in some large community hall in a small English town, in the coronation year of 1953, with the young Queen in attendance, duly flanked by the local Mayor, and both interpreters and crew are all townsfolk. So while you see the action of the opera in the centre stage, in Tudor dress, around the sides are constantly visible stage-hands, ambulance crew, chorus directors, chaperones for the children, musicians and numerous others, in their 1950s dress, assisting in the creation of the spectacle. It's only at the very end that you realise that one man in a dark suit, who seems up to that point to have been some sort of director, is actually meant to be Britten himself.
It was an interesting concept, and if stray thoughts of E.F. Benson's Lucia in Riseholme crossed my mind, they didn't stay for long. It was, however, also a distancing concept, and the first act in particular came across as peculiarly jocose, a little too light-hearted. The characters grew more involving as the evening progressed, fortunately.
What prevented the performance from being completely enthralling was, unfortunately, Susan Bullock's Queen Elizabeth I. Her singing had a tendency to be a little shrill; the vocal line does sometimes jump around a little, and Bullock had a tendency to shriek out the leaps to high notes in a somewhat jarring fashion. The character is ageing, I take the point that she's not necessarily meant to sound particularly beautiful, but I think there's probably a happier medium than the one found here. Secondly, she played Elizabeth as a petulant, grimacing virago, too stupidly kittenish at the start, too sullen at the end, never quite projecting genuinely regal authority, and without the charisma to weather the difficult, and mostly spoken final scene effectively. It also undermined much of the relationship between Elizabeth and Essex - despite Essex's naked ambition, you are required to believe that there is some genuine connection between them, and it was difficult to see that being possible under these circumstances. That said, Toby Spence did still manage to bring a good deal of charm to the otherwise spoilt and self-centred Essex.
The rest of the plateau was extremely good, with first-class cameos from Andrew Tortise (Spirit of the Masque) and Brindley Sherratt (the Blind Ballad-Singer), and strong, well-sung performances from Clive Bayley (Raleigh) and Jeremy Carpenter (Cecil), as well as a suddenly impassioned flowering from Kate Royal as Lady Rich in her last scene, demonstrating that ill-advised arrogance seemed to be a family trait with the Devereux. The Royal Opera Chorus sang superbly throughout, so well that the one place where they were less than pristine actually stood out rather a lot - the 's' of "Essex" at the start of the last scene of Act 3, when the Councillors pronounce his sentence, was surprisingly messy. However, it was a minor flaw in an otherwise truly impressive display of chorus-work, and there's a lot of it in this opera. I would have liked to hear a little more colour from the orchestra - they played well, but quite discreetly - but Paul Daniel kept a firm but subtle hand on the reins from start to finish, in a mostly enthralling evening's viewing.
[Next : 13th July]
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