Garsington Opera – now at the Getty family’s Wormsley estate near Oxford – goes from strength to strength. After opening with a triumphant Traviata, it serves up a fine revival of Bruno Ravella’s ingenious production of Rosenkavalier. It sounds great and looks even better. I have to give special plaudits to designer Gary McCann and lighting designer Malcolm Rippeth for providing a stunning visual setting that enhances the drama and offers the singers every opportunity to shine. And they do.
We are in Vienna before the Great War. The Marschallin has a young lover, Octavian. As the curtain rises, we find them in a playful mood after an erotic night together. Their morning idyll is interrupted by the arrival of the Marschallin’s aristocratic but uncouth country cousin, Baron Ochs and, to avoid scandal, Octavian disguises himself and is introduced as Mariandel, the Marschallin’s new maid. ‘She’ provokes Ochs’ lust. The Baron is in town to marry Sophie von Faninal, a rich young heiress from a merchant family. The Marschallin recommends Octavian to her cousin as the right man to present to Sophie the silver rose symbolising Ochs’ love. Octavian falls in love with her on the spot and, when Ochs arrives and behaves boorishly, the boy objects. In the final act, Octavian/Mariandel contrives to lure Ochs into an assignation with the pretend servant girl at a seedy inn. This leads to his humiliation and the end of his hopes of marrying money. As the opera ends, the Marschallin retires with exemplary grace to leave her young admirer alone with his new love.
The four key roles all get singers of the highest quality. Star billing has to go to Andreas Bauer Kanabas as Ochs, who produces a comic turn of seaside postcard proportions and backs it up with a resounding bass voice – it’s a Falstaff without redeeming features, but it is a real crowd-pleaser. Swedish soprano Matilda Sterby is a commanding presence as the Marschallin, lascivious in her boudoir and forceful when she appears in order to sort things out at the inn. Her delivery of the “stop the clocks” soliloquy was her best moment. Irish mezzo Niamh O’Sullivan looks disconcertingly like a member of a boy band in her ash-blond wig, and her turn as a drunken Mariandel at the inn is delightfully unexpected, but in the serious moments – especially as she struggles to reconcile her ‘old’ love for the Marschallin and her ‘new’ love for Sophie – she brings a real depth to the role. Soraya Mafi’s Sophie is, in keeping with the production, a bit more comic than one usually sees and consequently the delicate balance between old and new in the final scene was unclear, but her voice was better than ever and the promise shown in her English National Opera debut has been fully realised. Conductor Finnegan Downie Dear, who has amassed an impressive CV in a remarkably short time, brings out an assured performance from the Philharmonia Orchestra, and the Garsington choruses, adults and children alike, sound great and look to be having loads of fun.
The opera is, of course, a comedy – indeed a farce – and the audience members all around me were laughing loudly. But, as with all the best comedies, it has serious undercurrents. In Ravella’s production the comic greatly outweighs the serious and, for me, that is a weakness. For all the creative ideas that have gone into the revival – and the marvellous look of the piece – the blue-grey boudoir of Act 1, the parvenu palace of the Faninals in Act 2 (looking like a Giles cartoon at times) and the off-kilter green room at the seedy inn in Act 3 – the finale never quite caught emotional fire as it sometimes does. I am not sure if this was a result of the director’s concentration on the comedy or a mismatch between the three female voices in the sublime trio of Act 3. So this is a thoroughly enjoyable evening, but not a landmark version of this extraordinary masterpiece.
Music by Richard Strauss (1864–1949)
libretto: Hugo von Hofmannstahl
Conductor: Finnegan Downie Dear
Director: Bruno Ravella
Performers incl: Matilda Sterby, Niamh O’Sullivan, Andreas Bauer Kanabas, Soraya Mafi
Running time: 5 hours 15 minutes (including 90 minute interval)
Dates: until 29 June
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