Glorious sunny day at Glyndebourne, where we were lucky enough to take in the dress rehearsal of Verdi’s Falstaff.
He wrote this brilliant, taut, energetic, funny piece at the
age of eighty, his last opera. Hope for us all. (By the way, the opera is a
serious improvement on The Merry Wives of Windsor.)
The singing was first-rate, but it was the orchestral
playing that was so intriguing. For the first time, Falstaff was given with an
orchestra dedicated to the kind of instruments and performing practices that
the composer would have expected. This seems to have been at the initiative of
the conductor, a famous Verdian, Sir Mark Elder, the band in question being the
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.
While they started life focused on baroque and classical
music, in recent years the OAE has been exploring the Romantic repertoire,
right up to the early twentieth century, with revelatory consequences.
In this case, using gut strings instead of metal, and with
narrow-bore trombones and valveless horns, the orchestra produced sounds of
startling clarity. But for me the major change was the shift in balance of
sound between orchestra and stage. Often the singers have to strain to be heard
over a modern symphony orchestra playing fortissimo, but here they could really
shine through.
A memorable evening.
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