La vera costanza (High Fidelity)
Press reviews
Melting moments that are the best of Haydn
The Times, 19 July 2004
Always an insane venture, Bampton Classical Opera eschews such fripperies as shelter and performs in the garden of a Cotswold deanery. Last year outraged nature forced the operation into the local church, so this time the company faced down the elements by staging a work that opens in a tempest. It worked, too, despite showers in isolated arias which the game singers steamed gently through.
Haydn’s 1778 work is not as unknown as many of those the company unearths, but it is still, like all the composer’s operas, unjustly ignored. Like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, composed ten years later, it is a mixture of opera seria and buffa full of social nuance and cross-class relationships. It also prefigures Mozart to a degree, not only in its extended finales but in musical characterisation: there are adumbrations of Leporello, Masetto and Zerlina that go beyond idiomatic cliché.
With its bad-ass aristos and traduced domestics it is a high-point of the regrettable phenomenon known as Sentimentalism which Jane Austen dealt with so briskly in Sense and Sensibility. It even features a child, the kiss of death to an art form which tends to a laudable separation of the erotic and reproductive functions.
Fish-girl Rosina, loved, fer-tilised and left by toff Errico, is subject to the attentions of the local Countess (aunt of Errico), who wants her to marry the rich booby Villotto for no apparent reason, before she herself will agree to pair off with an etiolated marquis. In the end errant Errico returns to Rosina, despite her commonness: more stark realism.
The story is not brilliantly told, and wasn’t helped by an iffy translation and a standard production by Alexander Clifton. Bampton’s calling-card has been founder Jeremy Gray’s spacey, faux-naïve stagings; this was a bit of a let-down, particularly since the opera is loaded with absurdist opportunities, notably in the proto-Rossinian finales and the character of Villotto, a Woosterish oaf engagingly played by Nicholas Merryweather.
Serena Kay’s droopy Rosina was quite affecting but unkindly unsexed by the director. The rest of the cast provided good ensemble, and Murray Hipkin paced the extended finales neatly and coaxed beautifully idiomatic woodwind playing from the orchestra: this score has melting moments that are the best of Haydn, a luminosity and variety of scoring quite different from Mozart’s that make you despair of the man’s neglect.
Robert Thicknesse
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The subtle kinship linking Bampton Opera so warmly to its audience
Oxford Times, 23 July 2004
Bampton Opera duly parted the Red Seas of this summer’s gloomy weather last Saturday to entertain a picknicking audience with Alexander Clifton’s version of Haydn’s La vera costanza. The Deanery garden seemed even more crowded this year. Word gets round of course. Traditionally, Bampton punches kilograms above apparent weight and this time Haydn’s far from milksop music helped to catch our expectations of the opera buffa style repeatedly off-guard. The purr of Murray Hipkin’s players never over-manicured the edge of Haydn’s veering moods; and the sparks that flew merged with the pleasing crackle of events on stage.
Murray Hipkin, with Gilly French, was also author of the English rendering. At one level the Bampton translations, using terms like ‘barking mad’, ‘bang goes the wedding!’ or ‘I’ve never heard such baloney’, cause mirth as elements outlandish to the museum-piece patina coating baroque recitative. At another, they peel away this dignity (never meant to be there anyway) and for all the period dress, re-jig the cast as hip purveyors of a slangy idiom. That contrast may be part of the joke; it’s also a way of signalling that, underneath the flummery, these on-stage folk are just like us. The subtle kinship linking Bampton Opera so warmly to its audience is the result.
The production paraded a well-matched and balanced ensemble, seven in all, and all hinting at a range and depth beyond instant need. Here was Serena Kay, as the fishergirl, steering the mood from tongue-in-cheek to rococo sentiment with effortless finesse; elsewhere, Nicholas Merryweather, his vocal style so natural it seemed like speech, looking artfully dishevelled and awkward as the fop. Ilona Domnich, in the meaty part of Lisetta, the maid, was as usual admirable; and a newcomer, Nicholas Sharratt, emerging on the outside stretch – as Irene’s suitor – proved richly impressive.
A bare dais, no backdrop but the tailored hedges of the Deanery, occasioned cheeky devices in the staging. A shipwreck? Sure, just jog some placards up and down, depicting a vessel in a jam. Entrances? Well, anywhere you like: including arranging for the whole cast, after dusk, to pop up from behind the hedges, lit up like spooks. The world, you soon felt, seemed not a bad place after all. Bampton, bless ‘em, had done it again.
Derek Jole
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superb in all departments
Opera, September 2004
Bampton’s ‘A’ team - including formidable new recruits - was reserved for La Vera Costanza, staged outdoors in Oxfordshire a month later. For it they engaged a new director (a shrewd choice again) : the patently gifted Alexander Clifton, an ENO staffer whose fine-detail tweaking of comedy – aptly enough, Bampton is sponsored by the Joyce Grenfell Trust - dovetailed seamlessly with the effervescent, quirky style Gray has established. I didn’t see a bad wheeze all evening : every idea, move and entry seemed polished, finished, thought through; relevant, deuced clever and McVicar-like. Clifton’s cast responded gamely to sophisticated comedy : everything gelled admirably.
‘Ah well, of course it’s not Mozart’ is a perception Haydn himself – whether mischievously or self-protectingly – apparently promoted. And when you strain ears for the beguiling obbligati (pirouetting horns and a patch of fabulous flute writing furnish obvious exceptions), indeed it’s not. Rather, this notably wise piece acquires Figaro-like definition by its arias, constantly shifting ensembles, and the clever clotting of characters and moods in Puttini and Travaglia’s libretto (here in a delightfully cheeky rhymed translation by conductor Murray Hipkin and Gilly French.)
Brian Parsons stood out as the loyal fisher-brother, Masino; Nicholas Merryweather epitomised Bampton’s gift for playing comedy to the gills without ever quite overstepping. Amanda Pitt made an amusing Baroness; Nicholas Sharratt beguiled as her vexed admirer. Ilona Domnich revealed Haydn’s maid Lisetta as almost a Susanna model. A substantial aria for Errico by Anfossi – seemingly borrowed by Haydn himself for Esterhazy - was charmingly retained.
Best of all, Huw Rhys-Jones – delightful as Flute in ETO’s recent Britten Dream - delivering Errico’s mock militaristic love-lesson (shades of Cherubino hover too); and Serena Kay as Haydn’s enchanting Rosina : it’s her constancy that flies in the face of inter-class (and here cross-generation) affections to win her ineptly jealous spouse back. As for Hipkin’s finales : superb, in all departments.
Roderic Dunnett
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the real joy of the English summer opera season...
Opera Now, November 2004
When I see an opera being described as 'seldom performed' or 'neglected' in a programme, I start to shift nervously in my seat preparing myself for a work that was ripped up and thrown away by the composer for a very good reason. One explanation for the unpopularity of Haydn's operas is that when it came to writing for the stage, his skills as a dramatist simply didn't match his genius in other areas - neither did he have the good fortune and judgement of Mozart when it came to the quality of the librettists he selected.
Despite there being something charming about La vera costanza - a quasi-serious comedy of love overcoming the social divide, where the heroine remians faithful to the father of her child in the face of hostility from him and his ghastly family - it is full of flaws, not least the entire final act where dozens of loose ends are tied together in a laughingly unconvincing few minutes.
Director Alex Clifton, the cast and orchestra did a good job despite the material they were given and brought out the comedy well. Clifton's tasteful slapstick, fine use of open spaces of the formal garden of the Deanery in Bampton, and an excellent staging of the overture made the trip worthwhile in themselves.
Serena Kay was excellent vocally and dramatically as the patient, wronged heroine, Rosina. Her lover, Huw Rhys-Evans, was suitably weak-willed, visibly wilting under the watchful eye of his aunt Baroness Irene, played by a confident Amanda Pitt. Putt's maid Lisetta (Ilona Domnich), suitor Ernesto (Nicholas Sharratt) and Masino, Rosina's brother (Brian Parsons) kept the humour bubbling along and produced some very fine singing. But it was the hapless Nicholas Merryweather as Villotto Villano who stole the show - time and time again he is rebuffed in his courtship of Rosina but he comes back like a faithful, optimistic puppy. There weren't many sustained vocal passages that he could sink his teeth into, but we heard enough to establish that he has a very fine, weighty baritone.
But for me, the real joy of the English summer opera season is the people-watching one can enjoy at places like Bampton - as much drama occurs on the lawn as on stage; the jealous glances at superior picnics, the polite jostling for the best pitch, the husband who has drunk too much champagne before the end of the overture. Who, I wonder, will write the first opera about opera audiences?
Matthew Peacock
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a cast of bold dramatic range and beguiling musical gifts
Opera News
Haydn’s La Vera Costanza, like Mozart’s Don Giovanni, is dubbed a ‘dramma giocoso’; and very jocund it is. Its score, composed for Esterhazy in 1778/9, was destroyed by fire, but revamped for further staging in 1785. Its quality ensembles and dramatic characterisation even invite comparison with Mozart’s Figaro, first staged a year later (1786); and it shares with Piccinni’s La Cecchina, Paisiello’s Nina (and even Mozart’s La Finta Giardiniera) a saintly dramatic heroine surmounting all ills – a fresh genre paving the way for Medea, Lucia, Amina (in La Sonnambula) and Norma.
This was arguably Bampton’s best staging yet. Co-producers Jeremy Gray and Gilly French engaged English National Opera’s gifted young staff director Alexander Clifton, whose acute sense of relevant detail already rivals David McVicar’s; and his ingenious production was much helped by the capable conducting and vivacious continuo of Murray Hipkin – another ENO regular – and a cast of bold dramatic range and beguiling musical gifts.
Despite a predictably Plautine, sub-Commedia dell’Arte story, La Vera Costanza, sung in Hipkin and French’s vivid, raunchily rhyming translation, hinged on real emotions and intense, tangible feelings. Central to this outwardly amiable tale of shipwrecked aristocrats rescued by humble fisherfolk – Haydn had already alighted here with the skimpier Le Pescatrici (1770) - are an attractive couple endowed with strong, passionate emotions : Rosina, the heroine, has bridged the social gap to have an affair with, and a child by, a wayward errant aristocrat, Errico - who is gradually drawn to embrace responsible domesticity, whatever the social consequences.
Serena Kay’s Rosina revealed both enchanting tone and a vital musical personality; while in the gun-toting Errico’s famous scena, graphically likening the pursuits of love to those of the chase, Huw Rhys-Evans, with equally gorgeous tone and engaging personality, brought the house down – although this being a garden event (the topiaried Deanery Garden at Bampton is one of Britain’s most idyllic opera settings) - the sky was our roof. Errico’s unwitting encounter with his tiny son (Joseph Allinson), and a path of flute obbligato as he yields to Rosina, were moving beyond words.
At one moment Clifton had six separate comic vignettes playing in subtle counterpoint : controlling these was the mark of a master. Costumes (from London’s National Theatre), were superbly apt; cast make-up was far superior to previous stagings; the placard-waving storm was hilarious; and Gray’s homespun designs - as ever - a delight. Haydn’s ensembles and finales emerged beautifully polished. Amanda Pitt confirmed her top register talents as the aristocratic patron; Nicholas Sharratt excelled in Ernesto’s Act II aria; Nicholas Merryweather, a memorable Bardolph in Bampton’s recent production of Salieri’s Falstaff, brought an astonishing range of gesture to his attractively toned fop, Villotto. Russian-born Ilona Domnich sings in clearer English than many a native speaker. The special bonus was tenor Brian Parsons in the role of Masino, the fisherman – an object lesson in how to pitch, project and moderate vibrato; rising young singers could learn much from this seasoned teacher about how to conserve their voices intelligently.
Roderic Dunnett
