it's been a good TV Christmas for UK opera lovers. We had three operas over
the two days of the holiday, two of them not exactly seasonal.

The proper holiday opera, broadcast on 26 December, was Cerentola from the
Houston State Opera with Cecilia Bartoli. US listers are probably familiar
with this recording already. Bartoli is, well, chunky as Cinders (she's not
very tall) but she's full of brio and it's impossible to dislike her in the
role. The production is traditional  -- for Rossini, anyway. A male
Dandini, female ugly sisters and not a fairy in sight are not quite natural
for British audiences, who expect a bit of subversion. I know it's not a
pantomime really, but somehow I was hoping they'd do something a bit camp
with it. I mean, it's not as if it's a great drama or anything. But jolly
all the same.

On Christmas day, we had a choice of Aldens: Gounod's Faust from the Welsh
National Opera, director by Christopher, and Ariodante from the English
National Opera, directed by David. Both of these were visually (as well as
thematically) dark productions, and my less-than-cutting-edge VCR and TV
might have affected my impressions.

I suppose I'm basically prejudiced against Faust. My main response to the
music is that it is Gilbert and Sullivan without the wit, though full of
familiar music that works better in context. And extracting the Margarita
story from the rest of Goethe's play makes it pointless -- why does Faust
need to sell his soul just go seduce a village virgin? The jewels help, but
he could have done it any number of other ways.

But to me Christopher Alden's production makes sense by invoking the view
of women at the time Gounod composed the work. An interval presentation
outlined the premise that any woman who wasn't married or otherwise owned
by a man was assumed to be for sale. So Margarita becomes available simply
because her brother is away, and Mephisto's role is to give Faust the power
to buy her. On this view, the opera represents a combination of
conventional morality (girls who sell themselves come to a bad end) and
prurience (we see Margarita coming to a bad end at length).

The opening titles included pseudo-newsreel of Paris in 1859, and the
chorus were dressed in black clothes of the same date. Mephisto had a pair
of purple wings that recalled the famous Dore print, also roughly
contemporary. (The set consisted as far as I could work out of a raked
stage, black drapes, and a ladder.) Janice Watson's Margarita was dressed
and characterized in the "traditional" German way, as a gormless blonde who
doesn't know what's hit her until the pain is overwhelming. The chorus were
truly sinister, embodying sanctimonious public opinion and prurience as
required.

Alasdair Miles as Mephisto had an enjoyable comic edge that would have been
at home in a more Goethe-like work, though his pained reactions to the
events he caused seemed rather odd. I suppose Mephisto in this production
represents the paradox that while men assume that women are there for the
taking, they also claim to want to protect them from other men and to be
shocked at rape and abuse.  Paul Charles Clarke as Faust was a fairly
conventional romantic Faust, permanently pained and confused, and needing
to be driven on by Mephisto. There was no hint in his performance as to
whether he would go up or down at the end.

This production, in the end, although quite interesting thematically, was
really justified by the singing. Clarke, Miles and Watson all sounded
superb to my (basically unsympathetic) ear. Joanne Edworthy was charming as
Siebel, Maragarita's loyal but poor admirer, and Jason Howard was good and
butch (and a fair match for Mephisto) as Valentine. Overall, not cheerful,
but good to listen to, and a hint of something that was probably much more
engaging live.

The ENO Ariodante was the only one of these productions that I'd seen live,
and I was generally impressed how well it transferred. This was such a
superb performance of superb music that it was worth recording in any case.
The main advantage of the video is to show in close up Ann Murray's vocally
beautiful and dramatically overwhelming performance in the title role.
Christopher Robson's Polinesso is also even more repellant and quite
vampire-like in close up (and I don't think Michael Chance would use his
tongue like that).

OTOH, the baroque dome which forms an integral part of the set is almost
never visible, which is a major thematic loss. Although this production has
been called post-modern and deconstructionist, its achievement is to
present the opera as a baroque work in every sense. The themes of artifice,
darkness and deceptive light pervade the libretto, and the fake sky in the
court in Acts 1 and 3 emblematically becomes the foundation of the
night-time action in Act 2 -- literally, as it is lowered, and the singers
perform rather hazardously on top of it. The top of the dome is visible in
the video, but it's not clear what it is.

I'm less sure that it was deliberate, but I found the reflection of the
conductor on the reflective scrim quite effective in emphasising the
artificiality of it all in the live performance (sort of a la Las Meninas),
but this was completely edited out. In fact, there was no sense of the
performance being in a theatre at all, even though the production used a
stage within a stage.

However, much of the detail becomes even effective on video. Perhaps the
key idea of this production is that claiming innocence always implies a
knowledge of sin. So the pastoral setting is an artificial denial of the
realities of the court -- lust, ambition and the rest. The focus of this
problem of innocence is Ginevra, the princess and heir to the throne of
Scotland: if she is truly innocent, why is she so horribly tormented when
accused of inchastity?

The emotional impact of this paradox on all the characters involves some
fascinating characterization, as well as giving an overwhelming force to
many of the arias, including of course,  "Take your pleasure" (Scherza
infida). Ariodante's despair here isn't just romantic immaturity, it's a
justified response to an intolerable situation.

Dalinda, Ginevra's lady in waiting who throws herself at Polinesso and
becomes his accomplice in framing Ginevra, is here a repressed nymphomaniac
whose passion suddenly erupts in the worse possible direction. One reviewer
described Lesley Garrett in the role as a younger, sexier Mrs Danvers, and
I found her performance impressive, and much more interesting than her
usual mugging bimbos and divas.

The king also becomes a repressed monster, though Gwynne Howell achieves
this mainly by his physical presence and appearance.

The character who doesn't really compute in this production is Lurcanio,
Ariodante's brother. Paul Nilon sings the role beautifully. But Lurcanio is
there purely for the purposes of the unproblematized plot--to save
Ariondante from suicide, to tell the King that he's seen Ginevra (as he
thinks, actually Dalinda) letting in a lover, and to kill Polinesso. He
represents only the conventional view of things, unless you want to make
something of his residual jealously of the dead Polinesso (Nilon doesn't
seem to).

One of the achievements of this production is to use the ballets in Acts 1
and 2 as nightmare visions that evoke the threats to innocence of which
Ginevra is conscious. The degeneracy of the court is enacted by superbly
gothic courtiers (whose costumes could have been sourced within a few
hundred yards of the Coliseum). In the Act 1 ballet, supposed to celebrate
the engagement of Ariodante and Ginevra, they abuse a shepherdess who tries
to perform a pastoral on the stage within the stage. The particular threat
to Ginevra is her intense relationship with her father. This is revealed by
his choice of Ariodante as his heir and her husband -- a foreigner who
turns out to become suicidal rather easily, and not much of a threat to her
father's possession of her -- and in the heavy emotion in Act 3 when
Ginevra asks the king to let her touch his hand. In the Act 2 ballet, the
relationship become explicitly incestuous, and we also see Ginevra
attracted to Polinesso and sharing Ariodante's presumed death by drowning,
again (in the ballet) at the hands of the sinister courtiers.

When, at the end of Act 3, the courtiers appear in pastoral garb and dress
the rescued Ginevra as a Marie Antionette shepherdess, it's easy to see why
she and Ariodante look miserable as hell. None of the problems has gone
away, and their happy ending is simply a return to denial and repression.
The end of the video production is quite disturbing, because it leaves you
with the image of Ariodante and Ginevra trapped in hell, whereas in the
theatre you can release some of your anxiety by applause, or simply getting
out of there.

The ultimate paradox, of course, is that it's truly beautiful music
gloriously sung. You can't help enjoying it, just as you can't help
enjoying the drama of the enacted pain of the characters (or Polinesso's
villainy). This production forces you to examine the innocence of your own
response to beauty.