Samuel ARNOLD (1740-1802)
Polly (1777)
Polly – Laura Albino (soprano)
Mrs. Ducat – Eve Rachel McLeod (soprano)
Damaris – Gillian Grossman (soprano)
Jenny Diver – Marion Newman (mezzo)
Trapes – Loralie Kirkpatrick (mezzo)
Cawwawkee – Bud Rocach (tenor)
Vanderbluff – Andrew Mahon (baritone)
Morano – Matthew Grosfeld (bass)
Jason Nedecky (baritone)
Aradia Ensemble/Kevin Mallon
rec. St. Anne’s Church, Toronto, 14-16 July 2008
Synopsis provided. Libretto available online at www.naxos.com/libretti/660241.htm.
NAXOS 8.660241 [78:37]
The Polly we can hear – and enjoy – on this disc had quite a complex
genesis, bound up with the politics of eighteenth century England. Polly
was originally written in 1729, by John Gay and Johann Christian Pepusch,
as a sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, the great success of the previous
year at Lincoln Inn Fields Theatre. The satire on Sir Robert Walpole in The
Beggar’s Opera had been so well-directed, and so sharply felt, that Polly
was kept from performance by the government, although the text was printed
and was widely bought and read. Much later in the century Samuel Arnold, house-composer
at the Haymarket Little Theatre, reworked Pepusch’s music - with a great many
substitutions, additions and abridgements. The text was revised - with fair
freedom - by the dramatist George Colman (1732-1794), a long-term collaborator
of Arnold’s and manager of the Haymarket Little Theatre. By the time they
had finished, the result contained at least as much of Arnold-Colman as it
did of Pepusch-Gay. Indeed it also included some borrowings from Jeremiah
Clarke and Thomas Arne. Surviving printed and manuscript texts have been edited
by Robert Hoskins, a leading authority on Arnold, who provides a very useful
and perceptive note on the music in the accompanying booklet. The result of
all this ‘collaboration’ is thoroughly enjoyable!
Essentially the sequel transports - in several senses of the word - the survivors
of The Beggar’s Opera to the West Indies, which allows for a
kind of mild exoticism not possible in the taverns and prisons of that earlier
work. But the connection with the preceding work is neatly established by
Arnold’s overture, a charming melange of melodies from The Beggar’s Opera.
The essential message of the later work remains much the same:
Observe the Statesman’s ways,
The Pimp’s are just the same;
And both their own conditions raise
On others guilt, and shame
– although it is presented with rather less force than in the earlier work.
The details of the plot needn’t trouble us here – it is enough to know
that Macheath becomes a pirate and dies, while Polly rescues an Indian prince
and marries him. Ideally, one needs to follow the libretto (available online)
while listening – since the spoken dialogue is omitted from this recording
and a good deal of the humour and the coherence of the plot is lost without
knowledge of it.
Arnold’s music is everywhere engaging; naturally enough, no great profundity
or complexity is aimed at, but the entertainment and charm are consistent
throughout. What sounds like a predominantly young, and almost wholly Canadian
cast, acquits itself very decently, and the playing of the Aradia Ensemble
is wholly idiomatic.
This is hardly any sort of towering masterpiece, but this attractive recording
fills out very nicely the picture of popular English theatre music in the
last quarter of the eighteenth century and is readily recommendable. Maybe
the same forces would like to tackle another Colman-Arnold collaboration performed
in the very same year as Polly (1777), The Spanish Barber, based
on Beaumarchais’ Le Barbier de Séville, foundation of some rather more
famous operatic adaptations?
This is a world premiere recording.
See also review by Jonathan
Woolf
Glyn Pursglove
Slight but charming music which entertains and is of genuine historical interest.