Vanessa        Meryl Richardson
Erika          Louise Mott/Victoria Simmons (?)
Old Baronness  Susan Flannery
Anatol         Evan Bowers
Doctor         Richard Angas

Piano          Anthony Kraus

Music director Guy Hopkins
Director       Loveday Ingram

This production, with piano, is the first British production of Vanessa.
The Lyric Studio is a high square space, with a full-height door in one
corner  and seating for about seventy on the opposite two sides. It looks
like part of the original theatre.

Vanessa is Gothic nonsense, with a cynical twist. The original publicity
for this production said it was based on Chekhov's The cherry orchard, but
I believe its source is an Isak Dinesen story. It begins with a discussion
of what to have for dinner in menu French which recalls Babette's feast,
though the food is here an emblem of discord. (Dinesen's authorship perhaps
absolves Barber and Menotti of charges of misogyny sometimes raised against
the plot and the characterization of Vanessa.) Some of the decor and themes
are certainly borrowed from Chekhov -- a remote estate in winter,
mouldering inhabitants pining for the city, and a doctor who realises he
doesn't understand the human heart. But the main plot is something like
Rosekavalier/Arabella turned inside out, with more than a touch of Miss
Havesham and Stella. A corrupt urban outsider disrupts a miserable rural
existence, and the young woman who sees the truth surrenders her happiness
and lover to the totally deluded older woman, becoming her to start the
cycle over again.

Vanessa, expecting her lost lover Anatol, finds his son has come instead.
Anatol junior, hedging his bets, sleeps with Vanessa's young niece Erika,
but gets engaged to Vanessa, who is passionately in love with him, to get
hold of the estate. Erika, finding herself pregnant as Anatol and Vanessa
celebrate their engagement, tries to kill herself but instead suffers a
miscarriage. Anatol and Vanessa go off to Paris, but Anatol does not know
that Vanessa has left the estate to Erika. Vanessa's mother, the old
countess, looks on, refusing to speak to Vanessa, and later to Erika, as
they fail to realise that they cannot be happy. The worldly doctor, a
surrogate father to Vanessa, fails to understand everything, but keeps
going on sentiment and pragmatism.

There may be advantages to doing this as a chamber work. The piano version
avoids any excess in the music. In a note in the handout, Michael Kennedy
describes Barber's orchestration as "perfumed", and it's easy to imagine
that this music, evoking decadence and turmoil in the middle of a chilly
landscape, could be too lush for comfort. And the single-set production,
with a couple of chairs and a table, focusses on the interactions between
the people, the triangle and the two older observers, in a way which brings
out similarities with Bergman or A little night music. Loveday Ingram's
production delivered the action with impressive clarity, in spite of the
apparent need for multiple sets.

But the music isn't really chamber music. It's an early example of
contemporary American opera, a heightened setting of speech with lyrical
fragments and some ariosio fragments to support the drama, plus
intermittent dances. The words don't express enough without the music to
work as initimate music theatre. (Example: "but when they find her -- she
will not be alive". ) Vanessa gets a couple of soprano set-pieces, Anatol
has a Howard-Keelish aria in the first act, and the two of them have
several big duets which in this performance had the singers shouting to
express passion. Perhaps singers with more expertise in this genre could
have got more out of the music, and the small space certainly didn't help
either. But I felt there wasn't very much there either.

Meryl Richardson looked pale and loitering as Vanessa, all nerves and
spikes, though her singing was also too spiky for comfort at times. I was
disappointed that Louise Mott had the flu, as she's one of the most
impressive young mezzos in London at the moment. She acted well, and
Victoria Simmons (whose name I forgot to check, sorry) sang Erika's music
very competently from the piano. Simmons obviously also has a good voice.
Evan Bowers somehow lacked even lounge-lizard appeal as Anatol, and his
singing was energetic but monotone, except when he shouted. Richard Angas
was outstanding as the doctor, getting some melancholy comedy out of a
stereotype character.

This definitely isn't my kind of opera, though there are tantalizing
elements in both the libretto and the music.  (The good stuff in the
libretto is mainly due to Dinesen, I'd guess, like the Oedipus subtext
signalled by Erika's reading of a poem called Oedipus, and then a reference
to her as a sphinx, the impediment to the "returning" Anatol marrying a
woman old enough to be his mother.) But it's well within the mainstream of
"traditional" opera, and has the advantage of being both well made and new
to London. Let's have a full-scale production.

All performances are sold out, except for the gala on Thursday 21 January,
where tickets prices GBP30 are still available from The Other Theatre
Company.