Bell be my belle: Vanessa at Glyndebourne
Vanessa
Glyndebourne Festival
Blue Upper Circle Standing 5, £10
26 August 2018
Glyndebourne page
It’s not often you get to see a production of an extant work that is a complete unknown and so I preserved my near-total ignorance in the run-up to tonight like a badge of honour. There are of course dangers in seeing and hearing a piece only once, and I’ve surely measured out some unintended disrespect to Barber by not doing my homework; but on the other hand it is fun to feel a piece unfurl in front of you, especially one that carries the era of its creation so markedly, and to catch in quick hindsight how the director’s interpretation sits outside the original intended narrative.
Keith Warner’s smart and elegant production (the half I could see from my budget viewpoint) I feel can’t help but belittle Vanessa, as much as it wants to revere it. I was very much enamoured of the first half, Emma Bell got up like a Douglas Sirk heroine, Edgaras Montvidas a very passable Anton Wallbrook lookalike, all chiming deliciously with this definitely 50s, definitely American, definitely melodramatic opera-cum-musical.
But that’s not really what Barber is about, and the first half’s troublesome references to baronesses and peasantry pares apart fully from Sirk-land in the second half, where Barber strives to place this story firmly in the old world, emulating R Strauss emulating the expired world order in a musically derivative party scene that is unhappily the opera’s apex. Warner is aware of the tension, which he manifests with a chorus of boogywoogying Viennese grande dames. But the intensity of that tension is in part his responsibility, ratcheted up by his decision to pin the work to Barber’s time, and it ends up doing a disservice to the music. Whether justly or not, Barber’s soundworld is squarely inhabited in my mind by Herrmann and Bernstein, and to have those connections magnified in a work that already seems to want to be by a different composer leaves it high and dry.
If Vanessa’s success could have rested on singing alone then no better case could have been made for it than by Bell. Her performance is ravishing. Her voice fills all the space without and within you and made my inner core tremble like a struck tubular bell; she looks wonderful, completely capturing the character of the hungry, woeful obsessive in body and tone. She is perfect for the role, and the closest I came to being moved in the opera was in sheer wonder at the gloriousness of her singing.
The only problem with Bell is that she is way louder than anyone else on stage, and while to start with I thought that was the point, like Warner’s staging it makes less and less sense as the opera goes on. She has sterling support from Montvidas, singing beautifully and in completely control as ever; from Donnie Ray Albert as the doctor, another beautiful voice and a performer who makes complete sense of the expanded role Warner has suggested; and from Rosalind Plowright, who cuts a figure of such concise anguish that she almost makes sense of the opera’s laboured point of generational circularity.
Virginie Verrez as Erika has the harder job. In a way she’s very sensible casting again – like Bell a wide, powerful voice, yet younger, more cautious, more constrained, a musical match for Erika’s quiet seriousness. But as the opera wore on I found myself increasingly not buying it; surely the point of Vanessa is that we all know who the real heroine is and how she is stifled, but it cuts the heart out of the story when the disparity between singers is as great as it is here, when all I want is to wallow some more in Bell’s voice or get out and go home.
For all my kvetching, it was wonderful to see Bell, entertaining to hear the LPO and conductor Jakub Hrůša wring this overwrought score, and good to see a Warner production that was only a bit too interpretative instead of the usual much-too-much. And of course, it being the last night of the festival, I got to remind myself how shamefully little of God Save the Queen I can remember.
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