I have walked out of performances several times, generally deciding
to cut my losses and put it down to experience. This is the first time
I feel I deserve at least a partial refund.
I showed faith in
ENO by booking my tickets in advance. Sure, I got a discount for bulk
buying but a mediocre seat still cost me over £40 and they are now
trying to offload decent seats for a tenner. At £40+ I am entitled to a
professional performance. Which is what I got from conductor Lawrence
Cummings and his band, and from talented young soprano Sophie Bevan.
Brindley
Sharratt demonstrated his strengths as a comprimario. Sadly, he was in
a major role and he just was not up to it. There was nothing really bad
about him but there was no substance either - and a decided lack of
trill. Particularly bad was his failed attempt to sing sh-a-a-a-a-a-ke (all nations). His The people that walked in darkness was as limp as a wet fish. I most certainly didn't wish to hear his Why Do the Nations?, the non plus ultra of bass arias, which I often sing in the shower!
You
only need a mediocre tenor for Messiah and that is exactly what we got
in John Mark Ainsley. One of the most over-rated singers I have
encountered, proof that being an 'ENO star' means very little on a
global scale. He strained, his voice had no core or ping, and his lack
of legato was woeful.
You do need a very good mezzo, or even better, a contralto for Messiah. Instead, we got Catherine Wyn-Rogers. Search the internet and it seems she is both: mezzo and contralto. She is the provincial librarian of mezzos, the playgroup co-ordinator of contraltos.
On the positive side, most of her notes were on pitch, and several of them sounded vaguely mellifluous. What overwhelmed was her singing by rote, her lack of understanding what she was singing, the phrasing that consisted of stressing every syllable that coincided with a downbeat.
She looked lost wandering
around the vast stage, and when she tried to imbue the words with
meaning, it was giving a shrug, a skip and a forced smile to reflect O thou that tellest glad tidings of Zion. (yeah, it really was that contrived)
My decision to leave at the end of Act 1 was in no small measure the realisation that if I stayed, I would have to endure her singing He was despiséd, which I was sure would be on the Treleaven-as-Siegfried scale of awfulness.
All of this would have been bearable in a concert venue and with a ticket costing considerably less than £42.50, but we also had to endure the "Community Chorus".
It was as if Gareth Malone had rounded up a random section of yokels, coached them for a few weeks and presented them on the stage of a leading opera company as if they were professional. And, that, in effect, is what it was, but minus Gareth Malone.
Oh, full marks all round for trying, blah de blah, I certainly wouldn't have got past the first audition yadda yadda, but pur-lease, they made Bryn's feeble backing choir from the other week seem like the Huddersfield Choral Society by comparison. I certainly wasn't going to hang around to hear them massacre Hallelujah, screechy sopranos, lugubrious basses and delayed cues.
They were insipid and disappointing; for example, the bit in They shall purify - 'that they may offer unto the Lord' should be soaring swelling wall of sound sending shivers down my spine. It simply didn't happen.
Even so, this would have been tolerable if it had been a performance by the (fictional) Clapham Park and Upper Tulse Hill Choral Society, at the Community Flat, with a raffle at the end. But it wasn't, it was English National Opera, at the Coliseum, with an Upper Circle ticket that cost forty and half pounds in sterling of my money.
And we had to endure 'the production'. I suppose I could have enjoyed the production if I had met up some hours beforehand with some female friends and an unspecified number of bottles of wine, and gone along in the 'so bad it's good' spirit of adventure. But solo and sober, it was utterly cringe-making. I mean, so bad it's just bad.
I overheard a conversation beforehand between two people. The first pointed out that there is no story, the second corrected her in that the 'story' is Christian doctrine, and then went on to accept the point in its broad accuracy.
I think we all agree that most of Handel's oratorios should be staged - Jephtha, Salome, Samson and so on were only presented as oratorios in order to circumvent the church-influenced ban on stage performances during Lent.
Messiah is singular, and not really because of its unique place in the affections of the nation, but because it has no story. No characters - the only character that matters is the title role, who does not appear once in the work, which is based upon Old Testaments prophets and Psalms, and the New Testament Epistles and Revelation, not the Gospels, a not insignificant point theologically or doctrinally.
So, instead we were given a succession of moving tableaux. The act opened with several rooms alongside each other, including the waiting area for a housing or benefit office, a hotel bedroom, a Japanese-style chain restaurant, an office where two people worked away on PCs, and a utility room where someone ironed.
I started off by thinking it was mainly banal and pointless, but by the close of the act I considered it a mostly irritating celebration of ADHD. There was a very annoying child who spent large portions of the act running around stage, jumping onto furniture, playing with the abandoned PCs, leaping into the bed, just after the mother had given birth.
In essence, he was one of those dreadful children you shudder at when they hove into view in public spaces, you curse their parents for their lack of supervision and discipline, and you know the child seeks only attention and calm, but in vain.
Oh, the mother giving birth. She didn't, like, give birth or anything on stage, but there was this 'baby' that appeared in a hospital style glass cot next to her bed in the hotel room, then, with the baby still in the cot, she got up and did a dance, like a proper ballerina, like most women do, pirouettes and the like, even before being given the once-over by the Community Midwife.
That wasn't the worst of the dancing, even though it cruelly distracted from Sophie Bevan's exquisite Rejoice Greatly. There was actually worse in the He Shall Feed His Flock, this couple doing pointless modern ballet shapes on the railway station waiting room chairs at the back of stage.
And at some point - the bit that starts with the off-key boy soprano (where's a counter-tenor when you really need him!) screeching There Were Shepherds Abiding in the Field where they did a pretend Primary School Nativity Play. I thought we were supposed to laugh at that point but no one else did, so I just buried my face in my hands out of sheer embarrassment.
It wasn't even like a proper Nursery School Nativity Play where one shepherd decides he is in fact a pirate and adjusts his head-dress accordingly, or where the shepherds and angels end up in a gang fight.
Just to make things even worse, some bat in a fur coat in front of me decided to conduct along to 'For Unto Us a Child is Born'. I only wish she had been in time with the music being played.
And and then there was the mime. There is never any justification for mimes anywhere, and especially not on the stage of a leading opera house. Even if one has to tolerate mimes, one should never had to endure a mime that minces along pushing their hands against an imaginary wall/window. No, please, make it stop, make it go away!
And to crown it all, there were no surtitles. I demand surtitles. What an arrogance to assume that everyone knows the words of Messiah. Actually, we don't. I do sort of, but it is my leading contender for misheard lyrics, and it wasn't as if the Community Chorus, in particular, were enunciating clearly. In any case, if the objective was to attract in the newbies, then, surely, surtitles is the least they could have offered.
I've spent a lot longer writing this blog post than I did attending the performance, and I've enjoyed the writing more. If you've got tickets, you might as well go and see how long you can endure it, but, much as I want to support ENO, I can't in all conscience advise you to buy some: even at £10 it's a bit steep.
This from the home of modern Handel operas was most disappointing.
