SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Although defined in musicology as semi-opera, Purcell's The Fairy Queen, in this production at least, is anything but semi. I had wondered how the announced time of the performance, four hours and fifteen minutes, was going to be filled, considering that the music by itself only runs about two hours. William Christie certainly is no slouch when it comes to the unspoken “I can play this piece faster than you” competition that seems these days to exist among Baroque “historically informed performance'' groups. The opening First Musick -Prelude, taken at breakneck speed before the audience was completely seated, seemed to bode a shorter evening. If I had done my homework, I would have known that Christie was giving us not just what we would now call incidental music, but the whole Fairy Queen, which, it so happens, includes pretty much all of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Hence we have, in the credits above, the singers' names followed by the actors. Only the inimitable Desmond Barrit as Bottom both acted and sang.

This production was as close to Gesamtkuntswerk as you could get short of Wagner. Music, dancing, comedy (high and low), drama, fantasy, elaborate machinery—the list goes on. If you want to know in which period this performance takes place, it's the 18th century, powdered wigs and all. No, wait: the comic house cleaners have a vacuum cleaner; the women in one scene are wearing outfits from the 1950s. In another scene, there's Adam and Eve, Eve tossing an apple to a character in modern dress, Eve herself then morphing into a Valley girl. All lines and times are crossed, and as for the copulating rabbits, well, I can't even begin to broach that particular scene.

It would be very easy for a production of this sort to fall apart, having in it too many pieces that would not normally fit together. Some of the cruder types of humor could have become just silly. This production avoided that possibility. The music is late Purcell (if being written at the age of 32 can be considered late), and it is ravishing. I've always found Purcell's vocal music to be of the purest kind, so that even some of the more challenging arias, if performed by a good singer, sound as if they were not really sung but rather spoken in a manner both unstrained and perfectly natural. This purity isn't just a result of the period in which Purcell lived. Not to disparage either the composers of the previous generation (Lully, Charpentier, Lawes, Locke) or his own generation (A. Scarlatti, Marais, F. Couperin), but being so steeped in tradition they lack Purcell's spontaneity. Their music, which I love, just does not flow as naturally as Purcell's. Even though his compositions clearly reflect the infuence of thr French and Italian schools of music, they at the same time, seem unsullied by any national musical style. The beauty of his vocal music shines through even the most insipid texts. This is partcularly true of several of the odes written specifically to flatter their recipients. The most beautiful music accompanies texts filled with words that are both unctious and cloying. Purcell's clean harmonic lines and catchy tunes, certainly Baroque in style, seem to transcend the period in which they were written. The way the chorus often picks up the soloist's melody at the ritornello always seems just right. Even at first hearing, you feel you've heard this music before, as if it's always been here, before your time, even before Purcell's time.