review: a requiem and a fairy

[calimac]

Manzoni was dead, to begin with. You must have no doubt about that. He was quite dead.

Nevertheless: "You must write my Requiem, Joseph!" his shade wailed. And Joe Green, or, as he was known in his own country, Giuseppe Verdi, hastened to comply.

And that famous Requiem was played by SSV on Saturday evening, under the baton of William Boughton, not the first work you'd associate with this conductor, but according to an interview he's always loved it. Very fine singing by the soloists, mostly local opera regulars, especially Kirk Eichelberger at bass, but somehow less, well, enormous of an interpretation than I'd heard before.

Something similar happened the next afternoon at Lyric Theatre's Iolanthe, my favorite of all the G&S operettas - it has the canon's most complex and outstanding musical structure, in the first act finale, and the most moving serious moment, when Iolanthe confronts her husband. The Fairy Queen, Kirsten Allegri, was tall, lean, and bore a cavernous expression: she acts especially well and would make a fine Katisha too. The Phyllis, Margaret Valeriano, short, stocky, and coquettish, also acted well and was a particularly fine singer.

What I look for in Iolanthe productions is imaginative staging ideas, many of which I'd be happy to see again but rarely do. This time I liked it when Strephon has to shoo off various fairies, unseen by Phyllis, during his first duet with her; and a clerk of the House of Lords (a member of the chorus) calling in the Lords who were rather late getting on to stage for their grand entrance. But the most unusual staging decision was having the Lord Chancellor appear in shirtsleeves and unwigged (first time I'd ever seen the character that way) for his Nightmare Song. (The clerk brings his robe and wig onstage after the song ends.)

Lyric Opera uses supertitling but they don't have to: their diction coaching is diligent. I was seated close to the stage and didn't have to try too hard to ignore it.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see Iolanthe. I'll have to locate it on DVD some day, I guess. I laughed out loud reading it at the line where she touches his leg and makes some comment and he says, "Don't do that."

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

The Nightmare is my favorite of the pattersongs.

...you're giving a treat,
penny ice and cold meat,
to a party of friends and relations;
they're a ravenous horde,
and they all came on board
'tween Sloane Square and Kensington stations...

just great stuff. The "good rap" of its day.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And no matter how often I visit London and ride the Underground, I cannot pass Sloane Square and South Kensington stations (they're adjacent) without that song coming richly and fully to mind.

[ookpik.livejournal.com]

Iolanthe is one of my favorites, too. (Maybe my favorite, but I can never pick just one; Ruddigore and Mikado and Patience are all in there.) The one thing I've never seen done, and really want to, is an Iolanthe who is not played by the traditional middle-aged woman: i.e. one for whom the "she is only seventeen and he is five-and-twenty" sequence is actually plausible!