Rost is the complete modern florid singer: all notes are strongly focused and unremittingly beautiful
Posted in General on 15. Aug, 2010
Rost is the complete modern florid singer: all notes are strongly focused and unremittingly beautiful, and roulades are taken in a smooth legato. Ryland Davies was a fluent and warm Normanno, Alastair Miles darkly benign as Raimondo (a baritone with a good trill, forsooth); there was a heroic Arturo (Paul Charles Clarke) and a full- toned, abundant Alisa (Louise Winter).Rost, as Lucia, did not second Sir Charles’s intention to return to the old methods of singing, which he declared in the programme. The original Lucia would have taken high notes in a thin half-voice, and florid runs would have been slightly detached, like raindrops on a window. Bruce Ford, as Edgardo, was a bel canto singer whose Italianate voice was not favoured by the big hall (the Festival Theatre would have been better for him), but he conveyed adolescent ardour and pathos, revealing that the tragedy was finally his, with a moving “Fra poco a me ricovero”.There were no weak links. Everything was pace, dash and excitement, the Hanover Band adding brisk virtuosity and the rich spice of their authentic instruments – a moody clarinet, barking horns and clattery old drums that lent a fairground excitement to the storm scene Above all, Mackerras was clearly in charge.
He dominated not only the plain-sailing parts but even the soloists’ great moments of sentiment, and you saw them deferring to his kindly authority, sacrificing pauses and tenuti for the sake of the general momentum.And what soloists! Michaels-Moore made a virtue of the slight huskiness in his tone, plunging headlong into “Cruda, funesta smania” with reckless ferocity. And where Sir Edward Downes returned to the original 1847 score of the Verdi, Sir Charles Mackerras re-created Donizetti’s music as it would have been heard, with original keys restored, no surrender to vocal display, embellishments in the reprises and all the composer’s scenes in their proper order.
Suddenly, Donizetti seemed like a truly major figure. It was another concert performance, this time at the Usher Hall on Sunday; and there were other similarities. Anthony Michaels-Moore, fresh from singing the Thane of Cawdor, was Enrico, and in place of Georgina Lukacs (the Lady Macbeth) there was another Hungarian soprano, Andrea Rost. Macbeth was a great event, but Lucia di Lammermoor was greater.
Nottingham Playhouse will stage ‘Le Bourgeois gentilhomme’, possibly with Strauss’s incidental music, in November. People who saw the Royal Opera’s concert performance of Verdi’s Macbeth in Edinburgh last week vowed that it would be the great event of the 1997 festival. It had everything, except stage production: firm direction, great singers, high drama
They were wrong, however. It seems to have worked – they’re both finding out how to spark off each other.”"I think it will be a work for a slightly specialist audience,” concedes Armstrong. But it’s quite possible.”Martin Duncan, artistic director of the Nottingharn Playhouse and stage director of this new Ariadne, also emphasises the extreme demands that the 1912 score places on the singer (Lisa Saffer) playing Zerbinetta “In this version, it’s a considerable acting role as well So are some of the others. Perhaps the whole thing got rather out of hand when Strauss and Hofmannsthal were putting it together.