Martyn Brabbins, conductor; Ruth Knight, director; Ian Jackson-French, lighting designer. Cast – Christine Rice, Queen Elizabeth I; Robert Murray, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex; Paula Murrihy, Frances, Countess of Essex; Duncan Rock, Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy; Eleanor Dennis, Penelope (Lady Rich); Charles Rice, Sir Robert Cecil; David Soar, Sir Walter Raleigh; Claire Barnett-Jones, a housewife; Innocent Masuku, The Spirit of the Masque; Willard White, a blind ballad singer / The Recorder of Norwich
This work has seen remarkably few performances. There was a concert performance in 1963, which was the opera’s first performance in any form since its inaugural production in 1953; the second re-staging of Gloriana was undertaken by Sadler’s Wells Opera in 1966, with a concert version at the Proms under conductor Charles Mackerras performed and recorded in 1973. There was a revival of the 1966 SW/ENO production in 1984 under Mark Elder and other performances in productions by Welsh National Opera in 1992 and by Opera North in 1994. Apart from a production in Colorado, and a one off production by Richard Jones at ROHCG for the Britten centenary, that’s it!! So it’s a rare work to get to see and I am not at all sure I will see it again in my lifetime. I was fascinated in advance to see how I would react to this work, the music of which I knew nothing about except for the Courtly Dances compilation. It’s not often you hear a known major work by a major composer for the first time.
Although billed as a ‘concert performance’, and despite being a one-off, this was a staged performance with costumes – who knows from where and what production the three ladies’ splendid Elizabethan costumes came from – as well as movement, a tiered stage for the chorus (who however were in modern dress with their scores) and strongly directed interactions between the characters. There were also some effective video projections, sometimes suggesting a commentary on the characters’ words – leaves falling from a tree, for example. and sometimes illustrative, such as a picture of Ireland. The staging overall was much more than i was expecting and felt like a real labour of love. The auditorium was gratifying full, though not completely sold out, with a strong sense of empathy for the Company in their current predicament.
These then were my thoughts on the work:
1. As in some other Britten operas the language of the libretto often jarred and sounded clunky. Sometimes it sounded twee; sometimes there was an odd mix of modern and vaguely 16th century cod-Shakespeare, with no consistency on the use of the two. Odd words cropped up that sounded misspelled or misunderstood – kern (kerl?), ‘ obstrude’ etc.
2. Much of the music was wonderful – full of invention, memorable melodies, and carefully crafted. Very little sounded routine and all felt as though shaped for voices to enable them to be at their best. The choral masques I’ve sometimes seen flagged as a low point – and maybe, had there been dancers, this might have been the case. Somehow though the stage focus on the chorus alone left me impressed by the beauty and skill of the choral writing. The Elizabethan musical pastiches were very cleverly woven into the texture of the work.
3. The problem for me in the first half was that, unlike most of the other Britten operas, which have a passionate core to them about the outsider, the destruction of innocence, and the workings of evil, which grip you in seeing the works on stage, in Gloriana we somehow never engage with the characters before us – they are remote figures from a well known historical past. Only the Queen is treated in a way that gives her character depth and the rest seem one dimensional. Perhaps the second half is slightly better handled – two more female figures are introduced that make the plot and what’s happening more complex, and the Queen’s undecidedness about what to do with Essex is something that I sympathised with. But at the end of the day this is about a man who’s a bit of an idiot and a queen who has, as rulers do, to make tough decisions. It doesn’t make for compelling drama.
4. Whatever Britten’s and Plomer’s thinking, I found the spoken words at the end disruptive – somehow in their bare intensity they made speech more dramatically profound than the music, and that can’t be right; Britten’s score became akin to film music.
Christine Rice was very fine as Queen Elizabeth though without really moving me with her voice. Robert Murray didn’t have a particularly sympathetic presence but that goes with the role, I suppose (and had a voice that sounded extraordinarily like Pears). It was great to hear Willard White in fine voice in two small roles.
I did wonder on the tube back to my hotel why this was ever conceived to be an appropriate work for the Coronation in 1953 or why in the final analysis Britten felt compelled to write it. Somehow there is something about it that’s dutiful rather than blazingly inventive, even if there’s much that’s enjoyable musically. It’s essentially about the familiar, in operatic terms, clash of love and duty, keeping up appearances and suffering as individuals, which is the making of some of Verdi’s great operas but here there doesn’t seem to be a subtle sense of characterisation that would really bring the major characters to life, I’m afraid.
John's musical journey 