I spent twelve years
as a member of the music staff at the
Glyndebourne Festival, first in 1971
and 1972, then again from 1977 to 1986.
This was before reclaiming my summers
to watch my oldest son play cricket
and add a career as a music historian
to that of a conductor. When I first
joined it was the heyday of the Pritchard
era, before Haitink took over in 1978.
If this Dutchman was a phlegmatic rehearser,
very modest and particularly humble
in his approach to the operas of Mozart
with which he began (Die Entführung
aus dem Serail), he was on the other
hand an intense performer. The following
year he tackled Fidelio in a
new production by Peter Hall, with designs
by John Bury, a strong team that went
on to hold its own for a number of productions.
A friend of Liszt once said, ‘Every
theatre is a lunatic asylum, but opera
is the ward for incurables’, a sentiment
with which I wholly sympathise.
At some point towards
the end of the overture in Hall’s Festival
production the curtains opened on to
a courtyard scene in which chickens
were eating corn placed strategically
over the stage. In fact it was an accurately
calculated series of lines of corn beginning
at the centre and radiating out into
the wings where a stage-hand was waiting
to grab them as they got to the end
of their meal coinciding with the last
chord of the overture. The amount of
corn was astutely judged and timed,
but when it wasn’t, the silence following
the last chord would be filled by a
loud squawk as they were grabbed and
taken into the wings. The television
director (the late and much lamented
Dave Heather) took the safe option for
this recording - for many years made
by Southern TV, always at the end of
August and before an invited audience,
rather than a traditional Glyndebourne
one - and avoided any catastrophe by
screening the cast-list whilst the audience
continued to look at closed curtains.
One animal did survive from stage to
TV screening, and that was the white
horse on which Don Pizarro arrives upstage,
stopping centre-stage for his master
to dismount on to a raised raked platform
thus mercifully concealing from the
audience’s eyes all rear-end accidents
which inevitably occurred.
There is another memory
indelibly associated with this production,
which persists with me to this day.
Some days after the premiere, a soprano
in the chorus invited many of her colleagues
and members of the music staff, including
myself, to a lunch-party at the house
she had rented for the season in Lewes.
She cooked us all chilli con carne
but unfortunately forgot to soak the
beans overnight. Midway through the
afternoon the effects began to tell.
I cannot possibly describe the details
here but suffice to say that the Prisoners’
Chorus in that evening’s performance
as they emerged very slowly from their
cells and shuffled painfully into the
courtyard was the most convincing one
of the run. The word ‘run’ takes on
a particularly sensitive meaning in
the context of this story.
But to more serious
matters. Seeing this recording again
after more than a quarter of a century
reminds me of Haitink’s muscular Beethoven
and his unerring feel for shaping a
phrase. The cast was a mixed bag of
nationalities. The Swedish Söderström
- affectionately known to us all as
‘La Sodastream’ - is the lynchpin of
the ensemble, a supreme artist of the
highest calibre with whom one readily
sympathises in the role of Leonore/Fidelio.
Her performance of the first act aria
‘Abscheulicher’ is nothing short of
a consummate triumph, inspiring the
LPO horns to great playing in the pit
of the old ‘village hall’ Glyndebourne.
The other soprano, Elizabeth Gale was
also in superb voice and a fine actress.
She went on to a highly successful career,
and now enjoys an enviable reputation
as a teacher. Söderström’s
compatriot Curt Appelgren was a fine
musician - not long before he had been
a violinist in a Stockholm orchestra
- and cut a jolly rustic figure as Rocco
the jailer blessed with a conscience
and a rich voice. On the other hand
tenor Ian Caley (as the put-upon Jaquino)
always had a rather prominently quick
vibrato, but manages to blend satisfactorily
with his fellow artists in the sublime
quartet ‘Mir ist so wunderbar’. The
Australian Robert Allman arrives slightly
unsteadily on his white charger looking
for all the world like a cross between
Napoleon and Marty Feldman. He has a
rich bass-baritone despite some dubious
antipodean German. The English-speaking
members of Glyndebourne casts were invariably
put to shame by their European colleagues
when it came to sounding convincing
in the pronunciation of foreign languages.
The male chorus (then under Nicholas
Cleobury) sing a heart-rending Prisoners’
Chorus at the start of the first act
finale. Florestan is discovered at the
start of the second act. The tenor Anton
de Ridder was not a familiar name, despite
a career in Karlsruhe stretching back
thirty years - and that after starting
life as a diamond cutter in his native
Amsterdam - but the voice is both lyrical
and heroic, and strikes sparks when
he is reunited with his Leonore.
The LPO are in great
fettle, and this is a fine performance
among those Haitink went on to record
during his tenure. Apart from some lapses
in synchronisation in the second act
and one or two spelling error in the
subtitles, the transition from TV film
to DVD is satisfactory.
Christopher Fifield
Glyndebourne
Chorus 
ARTHAUS
MUSIK DVD101099 [120.00] 
