A weekend of Les Arts Florissants at the Barbican. (A bit late, and already reviewed fairly extensively.) Charpentier double bill 18Sept97 Les plaisirs de Versailles Sophie Daneman La Musique Katalin Karolyi La Conversation Matthieu Lecroart Comus Steve Dugardin Le Jeu Francois Pioliono Un Plaisir La Descente d'Orphee aux Enfers Sophie Daneman Euridice Gaelle Mechaly Daphne/Enone Mhairi Lawson Prosperine Katalin Karolyi Arethuze Paul Agnew Orphee Matthieu Lecroart Apollon/Tityre Steve Dugardin Ixion Francois Pioliono Tantale Nathan Berg Pluton Choreographer/dancer Ana Ypes Dancer Georges Keraghel William Christie Conductor Les Arts Florissants Charpentier (ahem, Louis-Phillipe, not Gustave) composed as part of the lifestyle decor of the court of Louis XIV. Les plaisirs de Versailles is pure fluff, with chocolate: Music and Conversation have a staged row about which of them contributes more to the pleasures of the court. But it's done as a bitchfest between sopranos, with imaginative musical colour -- you can just about imagine it with Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. And some of it is quite funny. Well, mildly amusing. For example, Comus, the major domo, offers Conversation some chocolate to shut up for a bit, and she starts yattering on about chocolate. Regretably, there wasn't any chocolate during the interval, only the usual mildly nasty coffee. The young singers were completely on top of the style, and kept it all nice and light, and the semi-staged performance worked well. A small token of the (non-musical) difference between this production and the Royal Opera's Guilio Cesare was that while Amanda Roocroft had to wear an extremely ill-conceived fake Chanel outfit (as part of an amorphous art deco/orientalizing style), the women singers here wore real Nina Ricci gowns. Ricci's frocks are the ultimate fluffy confections, and she is also a direct though distant descendent of the couturiers of the court of Louis XIV. Le Descent d'Orphee was almost as insubstantial, and equally enjoyable. Charpentier's libretto concentrates on the power of music rather than on love and death, and ends (perhaps deliberately) with the departure of Orphee and Euridice from the underworld. The music is beautiful though not deeply emotional, and Paul Agnew's singing especially is exactly right for it. The staging was still definitely semi, but a bit more dramatic. This could be great fun with a full staging, with Ixion boogieing on his wheel, as in the original Ovid (or was it Propertius?). Purcell: King Arthur 21Sept97 Singers and dancers as for Orphee (no roles assigned in the programme) Philip Franks and Rebecca Saire, actors King Arthur is a much more complicated work that the Charpentier pieces. Dryden's libretto is pretty dense (though we didn't get it all) and poetic. Purcell's music is gorgeous and diverse. But it's still got elements of the court masque -- aristocratic patriotic nonsense of the sort that Erasmus sent up at the start of the previous century, and stagey set pieces, including aesthetic shepherds and a frozen kingdom with no narrative purpose at all -- though in a commercial context. LAF have done a fully staged version and a recording, and they performed the music energetically and in style. The spoken dialogue was edited by Jeremy Sams as a narrative performed by two actors. It emphasized the camp aspects of the plot, which includes evil spirits, Vikings (who get a fair crack of the musical whip at the beginning with a semi-Wagnerian sacrifice and call to Woden's hall), the blind Emmeline, miraculously cured with the help of Merlin, and King Arthur, without Camelot or any of the other usual trappings. Plus shepherds and frost people. The narrative was a bit tedious in spite of the jokes (I suspect that Dryden did better, but would have gone on too long). Sams did a similar job for Der Silbersee at the Proms last year, with results that I found similarly unsatisfactory. But the music was superb -- you could just lie back and enjoy it completely, as directed by the show-stopping numbers, How blest are shepherds, and Fairest isle. A jolly, mildly subversive, harvest home ended in praise of old England, with the English members of the orchestra and some of the audience joining in. My only concern is that they might have meant it, though it took a multi-national cast, predominantly French, to deliver such a splendid performance. Fiction: I've just given up on Anne Rice's Cry to heaven about fifty pages in, mainly because the writing is diabolical. I suppose it's a bit like opera, with a little affective, slightly kinky scene every few minutes, but it doesn't work without music. Instead, my book to read on the bus is Roberto Calasso's The marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a poetic survey of Greek myths and a matrix for generating opera plots (among much else). I'm not sure what it is, but it's an excellent read. Also, I noticed in Books etc. a novel with lots of blue on the cover (probably embossed) called The counter-tenor's daughter. I took a quick look, expecting it to be a Joanna Trollope rip-off, but it was even worse: set in the glamorous and meticulously researched (ie probably lifted straight out of Anne Rice) world of eighteenth century Italian opera, our heroine is the daughter of a glamorous soprano and ditto counter-tenor. My guess is that it was conceived as The castrato's daughter until someone realised. Or are counter-tenors so sexy these days that the author made an honest mistake rather than trying to exploit the Farinelli movie?