Romeo and Juliet
Press reviews
superb…
The
Independent, 20 September 2007
Thank heavens for little opera companies: never having heard a note of Georg Benda, I was curious to know how his Romeo and Juliet would come across, with its famously happy ending. Benda (1722-1795) was a member of "the Bach family of Bohemia ", musicians at the courts of Frederick the Great. Mozart admired his operas so much that he carried the scores about with him. Romeo and Juliet is an Italian-style "opera seria" cast in the German "singspiel" mode; and consisting of spoken text interspersed with arias and set pieces, it just scrapes by as an opera.
This production had a sweetly homespun feel from the start, with the announcement that the singer playing Friar Lorenzo was delayed in traffic and would have to be replaced for the first half – but since this half only involved speech, it wouldn't be too grievous a loss. The first three scenes, between Juliet and, respectively, her confidante, husband Romeo (in this version things move fast), and father Capulet, were appropriately stormy. The translation was stilted-contemporary – "Either my eyesight fails, or you look so pale", Juliet tells Romeo – but the acting was convincingly full-blooded.
But from the moment Juliet opened her mouth, we might have been listening to a blend of Handel and early Mozart. This may have been because the accompanying band for the final leg of this company's tour was the superb London Mozart Players, but it was principally the musical language: the textures and the interplay between voices and woodwind and strings were all instantly recognisable.
Who cared if the spoken bits were platitudinous, when the arias were so beautiful? Joana Seara as Juliet, and Ilona Domnich as Laura, dealt brilliantly with their coloratura arias; Mark Chaundy's Romeo acted stiffly but his voice was sweet, while Adrian Powter's Capulet was the epitome of mellifluously outraged paternity.
One only realised it wasn't Mozart as the drama was ratcheted up – Benda was a good composer, not a great one – but the denouement was delightful, with Juliet springing out of her tomb, Capulet slapping Romeo on the back, and hugs all round. Well, why not?
Michael Church
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evident relish…
The Oxford Times, 31
August 2007
We've dragged David off his combine, he didn't really want to come," a fellow member of the audience was explaining to her friend as they crossed the rolling lawns of Westonbirt House. David perhaps had a point: this was a glorious, warm, summer's evening, an evening almost unimaginable a month ago, when Bampton Classical Opera staged Georg Benda's Romeo and Juliet back home in Oxfordshire for the 30 patrons a night who somehow managed to make it through the floods.
Benda's work could be renamed R & J - the Sequel. As the curtain rises, Romeo and Juliet are already married. But their secret wedded bliss doesn't last long. Romeo must leave for Mantua , leaving Juliet with premonitions of death, and in no fit state to deal with her father, Capulet, who arrives to demand that she marry Count Paris. Strangely, Capulet does not seem to notice that she is nervously fingering her wedding ring as they quarrel.
This Romeo and Juliet, first performed in 1776, is a Singspiel featuring just six characters, and absolutely no crowds of warring Montagues and Capulets. Indeed there is little physical action of any kind, apart from a most effective funeral scene as Juliet is carried towards her grave. Even on a warm evening, the massive Victorian pile that is Westonbirt House provided a chilling backdrop to this scene.
As Juliet will shortly arise full of life from a drug-induced sleep, the irony hangs heavy. The clue that all is not lost comes from Benda's cheerfully lightweight score - dispatched with evident relish throughout by conductor Matthew Halls and the Bampton Orchestra. There was a delicious gurgling sound from the woodwind as Juliet downed the sleep-inducing magic potion.
The lack of action focuses attention on the voices. Joana Seara and Ilona Domnich both displayed a fine sense of line and style as Juliet and her confidante Laura, while adding as much characterisation as the writing allows. Meanwhile, Mark Chaundy (pictured with Ms Seara) was a suitably eager Romeo, and Adrian Powter's Capulet effortlessly jumped from fury to warmly shaking Romeo's hand as he finally blessed the marriage. "So Capulet was a good person after all?" a young audience member exclaimed indignantly afterwards, "I thought Romeo and Juliet was a tragedy!"
Giles Woodforde
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Love and death…
Manchester Evening
News, 25 July 2007
Love and death were common themes in two visiting opera productions at the Buxton Festival – only in one of them there was a good deal less dying than you might expect.
There were two UK premiere performances, by Bampton Classical Opera, of an 18th century version of Romeo and Juliet – with a happy ending.
The ‘singspiel’, by the appropriately named Georg Benda, begins with star-crossed couple already married and Tybalt already dead... and ends with Juliet sitting up on her casket in the crypt and assuring Romeo she’s quite all right, after which they sing a duet, and her dad and various others gather round for a final chorus.
Not the usual concept, then, but an example of the way tastes change. Benda’s version needs only four soloists, and in this new English translation got a few laughs from the very incongruity of its spoken dialogue, which, though not Shakespeare, is in a formal, archaic style which still fails to overcome the banality of the altered plot-line.
Bampton made it a little harder for themselves by casting the two female roles with non-native English speakers. Joana Seara was pretty close to idiomatic in the dialogue, though, and sang and acted with great skill, entering into character as much as the piece permitted. Ilona Domnich sang skilfully as her confidante, Laura, but I found her dialogue quite hard to follow.
Mark Chaundy was an upright, somewhat unemotional Romeo, but Adrian Powter managed to inject some realism into the role of Juliet’s father as well as singing with distinction.
It is a tribute to Jeremy Gray’s direction and Matthew Halls’ conducting (with the Northern Chamber Orchestra in the pit) that the first-night audience, although at first politely applauding each vocal number as the show progressed, gradually ceased to do so – because they were becoming engaged, to a degree, with the piece as musical drama. Bampton have not got such promising material here as they had with Paisiello’s The Barber Of Seville (brought to Buxton by them in 2005), but in the circumstances they could hardly have hoped for a better reaction.
Robert Beale
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Brilliantly engaging
Music and
Vision
In the fourteen years of its existence, Bampton Classical Opera (this sparkling company celebrates its 15th anniversary in 2008) has virtually set the standards for original, slick and polished UK stagings of 18th century opera. But it has also uniquely (apart from Peter Holman's Parley of Instruments, specialists in an earlier musical era) effected a revival of ignored and undervalued rare repertoire, thus inadvertently setting a trend that is, in its own way, as significant an achievement as the 1970s and '80s period instrument revival.
Stephen Storace (England's finest around the 1790s) may not yet be a household name, nor his terrific treatment of Shakespeare's Plautine farce The Comedy of Errors, which contains choral finales on a par with his mentor Mozart (Storace's sister was Mozart's first Susanna). Giovanni Gazzaniga's Don Giovanni hasn't exactly ousted Mozart's in popular affections, or Paisiello's The Barber of Seville quite notched up a place beside Rossini. Yet Bampton has got people talking about these composers for whom nobody else in Britain does anything.
Salieri's Falstaff -- as good as Verdi's? Well yes, just possibly! And The Philosopher's Stone, Schikaneder's Magic Flute curtain-raiser, pioneered by Bampton (who mounted the British stage première), was snapped up by Garsington -- which has also (in baritone Mark Saberton) benefited from the fruitful dramatic and vocal nursery that is Bampton.
Thanks in part to the spiritedness of their translations (Bampton performs in English and in producers Gilly French and Jeremy Gray has its own in-house Jeremy Sams and Amanda Holden), and to the clarity of its diction, the outrageous flippancy of its stagings and the impudent wit of its polished young performers, Bampton stagings are sheer unadulterated delight...with no cheating on or shortcutting the Geist (or spirit) appropriate to each opera, Bampton (like Emanuel Schikaneder before them), seem on the edge of creating a new genre.
Bampton is a take-off point for young talent, and those who move on from the Oxfordshire- (and now Gloucestershire- and Derbyshire-) based company are never quite the same again. Thomas Guthrie, whose daring, brilliantly imaginative stagings of Purcell (in particular) have led him to a place as a director on the Royal Opera House's Young Artists programme, has his own trademark talents, but there is always a bit of Bampton buried among them. Bampton clings to you. Likewise its conductors, who have included the gloriously maverick David Owen Norris, the King's Consort's Matthew Halls and -- no less -- the new music director of English National Opera, Edward Gardner, have caught the bug of these wayward, never flashy productions. Bampton is like a disease you catch and never quite recover from.
Invariably Bampton springs surprises in its idyllic garden setting (when it can: the first Oxfordshire performance fell on the day of the July monsoon, when most of the drenched audience never made it through flooded roads. It was given in the adjacent St Mary's, Bampton, devoid of the marooned orchestra, but with Halls bravely score-reading the score, partly by candlelight but mainly thanks to a lamp powered by a running car battery, kindly fixed up by a sympathetic, roll-up-your-sleeved audience member).
This year it was Romeo and Juliet [seen 27 August 2007], better known as an opera by Gounod or Bellini, but in this case by Georg Anton Benda, a Czech (Jirí Antonín Benda, 1722-95), but affiliated -- as one had to be after the Battle of White Mountain (1620), when Bohemia was overrun by the Austrian Empire -- to his Viennese masters and the Austro-German tradition. Two centuries later even Dvorák had to speak German at school, and Czech opera of the 18th century was deep-rooted in the German tradition (think of Mozart's Don Giovanni première at Prague's German Opera house), as was that of the late 19th century, headed by Dvorák, Foerster and Fibich.
Benda sealed his German affinities with the eight years he passed, in his twenties (from 1742) in the orchestra of Frederick the Great in Berlin and Potsdam . Paris and Naples aside, training didn't come much better than that. Like Myslivecek and perhaps Vorisek, Benda was one of those Bohemian composers Mozart not only admired, but devoured and respected. In 1778 young Wolfgang saw Benda's Medea in Mannheim -- the Palatinate alternating capital (with Heidelberg ) and the German world's musical Mecca ( Berlin and Vienna apart) during Haydn's and Benda's day. He obtained a score, and acquired that of Benda's Ariadne too.
Mozart admired the drama of the accompanied spoken passages (both works were not so much Singspiels, like The Magic Flute, but Melodramas, with long solo scenas of chilling poignancy and intensity. 'I carry' (he told his father) 'Benda's scores around with me.' Indeed you can feel the Czech's enduring influence in the spoken passages of The Magic Flute, in Il Seraglio, and (Gray points out) in scores such as Zaide. Benda influenced others too, including Beethoven not just in his Prometheus years, but the period of first Leonora and later Fidelio as well.
It is the great scenas that are at the heart of Benda's Romeo and Juliet, and which render it, in places, a very considerable drama. There are half a dozen, which embrace a striking rage of shifting moods and doubts, yet which also confirm this opera's affinities with the essential unities and dramatic simplicity passed on by Gluck to Salieri and Mozart. Conversely, it is not a very long opera, and, to be fair, in some ways an unsatisfactory one dramatically -- unbalanced, lacking a profound libretto (the unintended comedy that surfaced here, for Capulet, for instance, rested in its ineptness) and rather too influenced by the fads, exported from London, of David Garrick and actor-managers of that period. Happy ending predictable: at the end of the opera's tomb scene these lovers recover, are blessed by chastened (enlightened?) parents and, à la Dryden, happily married.
Curiously, the poignancy with which Juliet (the sensationally good young Portuguese-born soprano Joana Seara) cradles a white cushion, like a swaddled baby, in Act I of Jeremy Gray's serviceable production is all to do with the fact that we know (or thought we knew) that she and Romeo will never spawn one. In fact in this oddly Balfeian ending, we get the impression that a lusty, fond Romeo (tenor Mark Chaundy) will sire more than the statutory two and a half offspring upon her. The Montulets will soon be swelling in numbers.
Rather weakly moved on the very good set by Nigel Hook, which converted bedroom to family vault with skilful ease and provided a picture-frame like feel oddly akin to David McVicar's, Chaundy's Romeo cuts a rather feeble figure at the outset. But his biggest outpouring comes in a superbly varied and passionate aria Benda allocates him in the last Act (the well-managed tomb scene, led in by a sensational mourning chorus of Verdian intensity, terrifically acted and directed), in which soloists and orchestra under the King's Consort and Amsterdam Baroque's Matthew Halls -- not too practised in bringing out real liveliness in this charming but acoustically not unproblematic outdoor setting -- both excelled.
Even Capulet (Adrian Powter) gets a basso scena or two, part-comic in its sheer histrionics, in part extremely touching. There is no nurse, but a soubrette, a friend (Laura) who is a bit of a moralising pain, plus a mysterious aunt Camilla, from nowhere in Shakespeare, who seems to be the eminence not just grise but gruesome. Ilona Domnich sang Laura's set pieces with a very nice vocal character and fluency.
Jeremy Gray suggested in his very pertinent talk beforehand that the opera should really be Juliet and Romeo (a bit along the lines of Berlioz's Capulets and Montagues). Gray also hinted at some Benda influence on Berlioz -- and my goodness, you could hear it in the music: Cleopatra, Dido, Romeo and Juliet -- you name it. The two or three biggest scenas are for Juliet, all meaty ones. And what heaven they were, in Joana Seara's delicate and tender hands. This gorgeous young soprano has everything one could desire vocally. It's a more refined voice than, say Bottone's famously raunchy, sensual soprano -- more a Natalie Dessay than a bare-it-all Jessye Norman -- though both have brought fabulous coloratura gifts to make Bampton better and brighter than ever. The delicacy of each move of Juliet, each half-line uttered, was touching in the extreme: a mark, too, of the subtlety of Benda's dramatic vocal layout, with a feeling for word-setting that explains Mozart's profound admiration for him. As a result, the glories of this completely neglected music beamed out -- as so often with Bampton's boldly-imagined and resiliently-researched choice of repertoire.
There was indeed, as Gray told us there would be, a feel of not just the pathetic, abandoned Ariadne but the steely, unflinching Medea about this Juliet. Which is exactly what Shakespeare intended for this gutsy, older-than-her-young years girl, who seems in the original to epitomise the very end of a medieval era and parentally-imprisoned ethos in her eagerness to sealed the wedded knot, at not quite age fourteen. A thing of the past? No, a girl very much of our own era, and a tale of modern-day liberation. Brilliantly engaging: Benda emerged triumphant, Bohemia shone like a beacon, and Bampton blossomed yet again.
Roderic Dunnett
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a real gem
Musical Pointers
For some years Bampton Classical Opera Company have been prospecting in the vaults of neglected opera and this time they have unearthed a real gem.
Georg Anton Benda (1722– 1795) who is hardly a familiar name even in operatic circles, came from a large Bohemian family of musicians and produced more than a dozen singspiel operas in the course of his career. He enjoyed considerable success and the most popular of his operas continued to be performed regularly in Europe for the best part of a century, but Bampton’s production is believed to be the UK premiere of this one.
Julie und Romeo, as it is entitled on some copies of the score, was written for the court of Duke Frederick in the Thuringian town of Gotha. There was a culturally sophisticated audience but the theatre’s musical resources were on a modest scale. A drastic curtailment of the plot was called for, discarding the grand ball scene, the dramatic confrontation between the rival families and the duel. With no first class male singer available, even the famous balcony scene was axed!
The opera begins after the lovers are married, with Juliet sharing her fears with her confidante, Laura. These two characters dominate the first two acts – indeed Juliet is on stage for the entire opera. Benda did have two excellent sopranos at his command, his pupil Sophia Preysing (Juliet) and his young daughter Juster, who clearly boasted a fine coloratura (Laura), and Bampton were equally fortunate with their casting. Joana Seara combined radiant looks with dramatic intensity as Juliet, and Ilona Domnich had all the agility required for Laura’s high notes, though her accented speech proved something of an impediment in getting her words across in the tricky acoustics of St John’s.
Mark Chaundy, though relatively unchallenged by the singing demands of Romeo, looked every inch the part and delivered his spoken lines with greater clarity than anyone else. The roles of Capulet and (Friar) Lorenzo are much reduced from Shakespeare’s originals, and fortunately the latter is merely a speaking role until Act 3, as Ian Priestley’s arrival was delayed by a late-running flight.
Act 3 opens with a choral set piece. With Juliet lying unconscious on her tomb, a small body of mourners processed through the church and united in an impressive and moving funeral chant (which might easily have been the model for Britten’s Albert Herring threnody that I have heard so much of recently).
As always, the acoustics of St John’s favoured the orchestra, and Matthew Halls with the London Mozart Players took full advantage in a score that, despite the serious subject, is full of Bohemian joi de vivre. Nigel Hook’s touring set and Pauline Smith’s costumes conveyed an air of pre-Raphaelite sumptuousness, and I was pleased to see an excellent turn out for this rarity.
Oh, and I should mention that this is the “and they all lived happily after” version of the story with Juliet reviving just before Romeo swallows his poison, Capulet reconciled to the match, allowing the curtain to come down amidst general rejoicing.
Serena Fenwick
