- The Observer,
- Sunday November 11 2001
Fretwork Tour St Matthew's, Cheltenham
Roxanna Panufnik premiere Sheldonian, Oxford
Revolutionary in musical invention, radical in subject matter, The Marriage of Figaro is inexhaustible. Each performance shoots up sparks of revelation from the miraculous score or from Da Ponte's sophisticated text. There's always a bassoon response or a string figure, an elaboration of character or a dark joke unnoticed before. Musically there was much to discover in ENO's new staging. The production, directed by Steven Stead and designed by Matthew Deely, was challengingly opaque.
It was set in that cellar-cum-junkroom we've seen often of late at the Coliseum. The props cupboard had been raided for an array of familiar objects - a large gilded mirror, a pram chassis, an old mattress. Once again, Star Wars is a visual touchstone (the Count and his entourage with Qui-Gon Jinn haircuts and capes, Figaro a Ewan McGregor facsimile). The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Michael Jackson make an appearance in the shape of Cherubino, while Susanna, changing the tone and era somewhat, appears to be a Lyons Corner House 'Nippy'. No doubt we were to rethink outmoded class divisions and appreciate afresh the immediacy of the piece - which has surely never been in question.
Fortunately, the musical performance was on a different level. Jane Glover, making a welcome return to the Coliseum, showed her intimate expertise with Mozart - not only by conducting from memory, but with rigorous attack, beautifully nuanced and artfully shaped phrasing and attention to the inner workings of the score (those woodwind suspensions which spice the music were played with particular gusto). The ENO players excelled, with impressive, crisp string articulation in the overture and in the sustained unfolding of the Act 2 finale. The young cast, drawn largely from company members or from ENO's Young Singers Scheme and mostly new to their role, did well in the circumstances. Christopher Maltman, singing his first Figaro with customary finesse, will certainly grow into the part and bring more to the subtleties of character. The rest offered some engaging ensemble - an asset in any Mozart - but no voice as yet sounded quite at home in their solos. As the Countess, Orla Boylan, who had reportedly been unwell, lacked her usual richness of tone. Mary Nelson's Susanna was sprightly with Leigh Melrose a handsome, if somewhat stilted Count. Claire Ormshaw's Barbarina was charming and Victoria Simmonds a promising Cherubino. As for the production, I continue to ask myself what it was all about, but my search engine is drawing a blank. Though I must report that the audience cheered and guffawed enthusiastically.
An evening spent consorting with viols doesn't immediately sound promising. Could the silvery, diaphanous sound of these early bowed string instruments - indelibly associated with Tudor or Elizabethan composers, especially Orlando Gibbons - sustain variety and interest? Fretwork, founded in 1986, has worked indefatigably to keep this highly specialised form of chamber music alive by commissioning new works from almost anyone you could name. The ensemble's current series, the Hidden Face Cathedral Tour, includes works new and old. Two dancers, Maxine Braham and Sarah Fahie, provided aristocratic choreography (by Ian Spink) and the programme, taking place in near darkness with simple, effective lighting, has the feel of a stage event rather than a concert.
Orlando Gough's extensive Birds on Fire , inspired by Aharon Appelfeld's 1980 novel Badenheim 1939 , uses two klezmer tunes and gives the viols a haunting, drone-like energy, at once melancholic and driven. In From the Book of Disquiet, John Woolrich provides a punchy, pan-like oboe solo (Nicholas Daniel) to offset the sustained viol lines. His starting point for this vivid, fragmented work is the literary remains (from essays to scraps of paper) of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. Tavener's The Hidden Face, to a text by the composer, also uses oboe with soaring, muezzin-like countertenor and ghostly muted viols. Michael Chance, heroically overcoming the whooshing, banging fireworks outside, sang with the warm, almost dignified sound which singles him out. He may not have that piercing, skate-through-ice sound of some countertenors, but that's to his advantage. Michael Nyman's show-stopping Self-Laudatory Hymn of Ianna and her Omnipotence brought this compelling concert to a throbbing, strumming and audacious end.
Just as Fretwork has persuaded composers to push one instrument to its limits, so too has Roxanna Panufnik in her new concertino for harp, one of her strongest achievements yet, premiered by Catherine Beynon and the Britten Sinfonia, co-commissioned by Autumn in Malvern and Music at Oxford. Panufnik exploits both the familiar, ravishing flourishes and the strange, percussive side not normally heard in the concert hall except in error. In this two-part work, entitled Powers and Dominions , the instru ment is used to brutal effect: hitting, rattling and twanging strings, noisily jerking the pedals. These were only the more arresting features of an intricate musical landscape in which a second harp played a ghostly, shadowing role, creating an aural radiance with the soloist and vibraphone. Panufnik has angels in mind, but hers are more Miltonic than the limp Victorian familiars of the harp who would be surprised at their instrument's guts and power. Here's a piece for immediate assumption into the repertoire.
