Last Tues to the NIDA Playhouse for a performance of Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.
This was a joint production between the Conservatorium and NIDA. Performers (onstage and orchestra) were from the Con; NIDA provided the venue and everything else.
In my opera-going life, Opera Australia has had two excellent productions of MSND. First, the Moshinsky production first seen in 1978 with James Bowman as Oberon soaring in from the wings on a trapeze, and then the Baz Luhrmann “British India” production with the orchestra on a bandstand and the fairies creeping out from beneath it. I see I was a bit underwhelmed on its last return in 2010, but that did not diminish my love of the work.
Opera is a difficult art. With a student production you have to adjust your expectations and there will often be some necessary compromises.
The biggest compromise in this production was that instead of a chorus of children for the fairies (Britten wrote for boy trebles but it could well now be done with a “co-ed” group so long as there is an upper age/vocal maturity cutoff for the girls) this time we had five adult women as Mustardseed, Peaseblossom, Cobweb and Moth (as per the book) and a fifth, “Ariel” (on loan I suppose). They seem to have been re-thought as dryads and glided around the stage in a stately tree-like way.
Practically speaking the reasons for this are obvious. The Con opera and vocal tertiary program is in the business of providing parts for its (adult) students. But it did have musical and dramatic consequences.
Musically, an axis of comparison to the ethereal, other-worldly world of the chorus of fairies was weakened. (There was also a cut of the “tongs and bones” number where the children play recorders and percussion while Bottom demonstrates his reasonable good ear in music.) With five adult produced voices taking the chorus vocal lines it was also very difficult to make out the words for most of the songs. I also felt the tempo of the final chorus, maybe tempered to the different nature of the ensemble because of the fairy rethink, was too fast with a big loss of lilt.
Dramatically, there was also a mismatch: it was difficult to make sense of Titania’s directions to her fairies to “skip away.” Bottom summons the named fairies to various errands and tasks to which they each in turn respond “Ready!” (There is a running gag with Moth constantly being cut off.) You could imagine them waiting attentively and springing forth as bidden, but here they glided in at their own pace, more “When I’m ready.” When Titania sends the fairies away, they sing “One of us stand sentinel” but nobody did.
Basically the whole scherzando aspect of the fairies was lost.
The other compromise of a sort is that the NIDA theatre is fundamentally unsuited to classical music because it is CARPETED. This is hard on the singers and was especially hard on the counter-tenor singing Oberon.
I didn’t mind other compromises such as the substitution of an electric keyboard for the harpsichord and celeste – there probably wasn’t room in the pit for them. Sometimes the “harpsichord” was a bit implausibly loud but not overwhelmingly so.
Maddeningly, on Tuesday, after a delay of about 20 minutes (“unforeseen circumstances” we were told – putting me in mind of “accidental circumstances”), we were subjected to a school-concertish speech from Neal Peres da Costa before the beginning of the performance. He even duplicated the welcome to country and acknowledgement which we had already received over the PA. I said to my neighbour “Will there be a quiz on this?” I wish I’d had the nerve to call out more loudly “Is this going to be in the exam?”
The upshot of all of this is that although I was glad to have gone, I didn’t come away with the glow that I might have expected to take away from the first live performance I had been able to see since June.
All the same, when on Thursday my friend U offered me a spare and free ticket for the final performance on Saturday afternoon, I accepted.
A friend I ran into on Saturday expressed some incredulity that I would want to go twice. I am glad I did, though I doubt if I would have paid to go a second time. I enjoyed it more second time around. I expect the performance had improved over the run, but mainly I had adjusted my expectations. In the second half I also found a spot (in one of the boxes on the side) which gave Oberon more of an acoustical fighting chance. And, small mercy, we were not subjected to a speech at the start.
It looks as though the Con (they like to call themselves SCM) and NIDA are planning on continuing this collaboration. There are a lot of pluses for this theatrically. The carpet will continue to be a very big negative. I would prefer that NIDA in future conformed to operatic conventions in limiting admissions of latecomers to appropriate breaks in the performance.
In a program note by Kate Gaul and Stephen Mould (stage and musical director respectively) referring to musical treatments of MSND, Purcell’s Fairy Queen did not rate a mention even though Britten was described as “the first great composer for the opera stage [in England] since the age of Purcell (roughly contemporaneous with Shakespeare).” OK: 1659-1695 (Purcell) and 1564-1616 (Shakespeare). You could equally say Purcell is roughly contemporaneous with Mozart (1756-1792).
All of this seems a bit negative. Actually, and especially in the very trying circumstances of this year, it was a terrific achievement to have mounted this production, whatever its imperfections. There were some promising performances by the singers (the better ones were those with better diction) and the orchestra competently realised what must be a tricky score.
Stumbling on melons 