Leave it to the musicians: Fidelio at the Southbank Centre
Fidelio, semi-staged concert performance
London Philharmonic Orchestra and Vladimir Jurowski
Royal Festival Hall
21 January 2017
Rear Stalls TT46, £10
Perfection rubbed shoulders with incompetence in LPO's performance of Fidelio last night. Leading the perfection brigade were Jurowski and the LPO. The orchestra played with absolute precision (allowing the odd horn fluff) and glorious ensemble – a faith-restoring balm to the ears after LSO's shambolic account of Mahler 6 under Rattle last Thursday. An all-modern band armed with some valveless trumpets (I'm not sure why but I'm not going to complain) gave a rich and sensitive account that never overwhelmed the singers.
They themselves were not far behind in this brigade of loveliness: truly a 'world-class cast' as the promotional copy had it and all did well, particularly Sofia Fomina as Marzelline, for whom I've had a softspot since her lovely Jemmy at the ROH's Guillaume Tell a few years ago. It was sad not to have Christopher Purves's Don Pizarro, but his stand-in Pavlo Hunka was not bad at all, if maybe a little quieter than the great Purves sound-making machine. Anja Kampe and Robert Dean Smith (another last-minute replacement, this time for Michael König) were at times very slightly stretched in the most fiendish passages of Beethoven's writing for his heroine and hero, but on the whole they sang wonderfully. Their Act II reconciliation duet moved me to tears, as it should, even despite a serious lapse of ensemble.
And that brings me to the incompetence of the evening. The concert was directed by Daniel Slater, who presumably also supplied the English text that replaced the opera's spoken German (although I couldn't find a specific credit for that anywhere). More on that anon, but my first beef with Slater is that as far as I could see there were no monitors of Jurowski in the auditorium. When the production is staged such that much of the action – including that crucial reconciliation – takes place behind the conductor's back, it seems a bit of an oversight not to provide the singers with a means of keeping an eye on him. Failures in ensemble inevitably ensued – surprisingly few given the circumstances, but occasionally disastrously.
My main problem, though, was the text itself, which reflected portentously on the meaning and themes of Fidelio – breaking the fourth wall, disrupting the story and turning the opera into something more resembling an oratorio. I'm fine with that in principle, I suppose, but need the text be so obvious and simplifying? Can't Fidelio speak perfectly well for itself, without having a dabbler to spell out what it's about? Add in an ill-judged reference to Saddam Hussein, a description of Leonore and Florestan as 'two ordinary people' (surely not) and two actors who, bless them, were clearly under-rehearsed and cringingly unable to remember their lines, and you have a big problem. Why disrespect the musicians and all their evident hard work with something that is essentially mediocre and often just bad?
The staging itself, sightlines aside, was reasonable enough, I thought, although it might have helped that I was a long way away. The first half was set up as a rehearsal and the second as a concert – I'm not sure why, but it did mean there was a nice contrast going into Florestan's dark-as-pitch prison cell after the interval. I could have done without the mugging the chorus was called upon to do – and given it was a professional ensemble I would have thought they could have been called upon to perform without copies – but on the whole blocking and movement seemed wise. Excepting those sightlines.
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