Publihed in Oxford Magazine, Noughth Week, October 2009

Bohuslav Martinu: Mirandolina, Garsington Opera, 18 June 2009.

Arriving early at Garsington Manor for the twentieth and penultimate season there of Garsington Opera, we were able to secure a sheltered picnic table convenient for the lift to the auditorium to enjoy a thoroughly entertaining evening of opera in light-hearted vein. This was the Goldoni-based comic opera Mirandolina, completed in the year of its composer’s death in 1959. Celebrating its first performance in the UK, this choice proved a fitting way of marking the triple anniversary.

The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu was born in Bohemia in 1890, he was expelled from the Prague conservatory in 1910. After spending some years earning a precarious living as a musician he moved to Paris in 1923, where he studied with Roussel, and then to the United States in 1941; he spent his last few years in France and Switzerland. On the evidence of the small part of his great output known to us– including the violin sonata written for Albert Einstein (in part the inspiration for Oxford May Music) among his songs and chamber music and the rather lugubrious opera The Greek Passion – his music reflects his life and can be broadly characterised as French neo-romanticism with a residual Czech influence; his opera Julietta occupies a dream-world recalling that of Pellé­as et Mélisande but many of his stage works, as Mirandolina, reflect his interest in commedia dell’arte.

 

The opera has a typical Goldoni plot, a wry look at the battle of the sexes. The eponymous heroine, proprietress of an inn, is wooed with flattery and gifts by two of the residents, a Marquis and a Count. She, in turn, sets out to win and then break the heart of a mysogenist Cavaliere, another resident. Her servant Fabrizio and that of the Cavalliere are also in love with Mirandolina. Also involved, to give balance to the cast are two floozies posing as aristocrats who also go after the men. After a series of complications and misunderstandings, all the men are dismissed except Fabrizio whom Mirandolina has secretly loved all the time.

Between them Goldoni and Martinu make a tremendous romp of the whole thing, audience appreciation being enhanced by the witty translation into English of the text by Jeremy Sams delivered by all the cast with the utmost clarity, rendering the surtitles unnecessary. The costumes were of the period, though the brightly coloured sets (designed by Francis O’Connor), moved around to represent the rooms and spaces of the inn, were of the mid twentieth cantury. The music, too, was an eclectic mixture, opening with the jazz syncopation of nineteen-twenties’ Paris moving through a variety of styles aptly matched to the action on the stage. Rythmically, it sounded fiendishly difficult to play and to sing though the performance was immaculate.

More than one critic has likened the characters to those of the Carry on films but these are far more subtle and witty. The Columbian-born Juanita Lascarro plays the lead; in commanding voice, she subtly manipulates the various suitors. Her principal victim, the Cavaliere, played by Geoffrey Dolton, matches her performance with perfect timing, his downfall plotted through resistance, to flight, to defeat over her fainting body, followed by rejection. The Marquis (Andrew Slater) and the Count (Mark Wilde) give great characterisations while the ‘winner’ Fabrizio (Daniel Norman) expresses what he believes to be his well-merited good fortune. The ‘actresses’, played by Mary Hegarty and Jean Rigby contribute to the vocal balance.

This was a slight opera, not engaging the emotions but redeemed by the subtle complexity of the score and the perfection of the execution. The conductor was Martin André and the Director Martin Duncan.