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Jose
Carreras Sings in the Park
(With the Kind Permission of The Royal Crescent
Society Newsletter No.20
Summer 1992)
Pity about the Packaging - Dr Malcolm
Hill, Professor of Composition at the Royal
Academy of Music, gives an expert opinion on
National Music Day's star event
The audience to sit in the open air Gardens,
listening to singers accompanied by a hand
picked orchestra of generous proportions for
Bath, the whole enriched by the brief effect of
fireworks overhead. . .'
Ever since 1787 when Benjamin Milgrove, the
local toyman of 4 Bond Street, produced his
pastoral Acastro, Bath has irregularly hosted
many such outdoor events. At this year's
concert, Carreras in the Royal Crescent, the
soloists were so superb that all that remained
to criticize was the packaging. The demonstrable
integrity of soloists and conductor only
heightened the artistic problems that they
encountered with the chorus, orchestra and
lighting effects.
From the very opening of Rossini's Silken
Ladder overture, Elio Boncompagni carved the
clearest of beats. Yet despite his best efforts,
the orchestra was generally unable to coordinate
its wind section, offering instead some very
suspect intonation, especially from piccolo,
first clarinet, first desk of horns, and also
the outer strings.
In opera houses, the relationship between the
vocal technique of soloists and chorus is
heeded: was it then wise to dissociate these
even more by placing top ranking soloists
alongside an under rehearsed local choir? The
conductor was musically forced to drown the
amateurish chorus who did not bear comparison
with the soloists' clear diction and near
perfect intonation.
15,000 people crowded into the specially
built arena to hear the renowned Spanish tenor
sing favourite arias on a balmy summer's evening
in The Royal Crescent.
The running order of the programme
unfortunately made Carreras appear to be the
traditional warm up the audience subsidiary
character heralding the entrance of the diva.
After Stefania Towyska's somewhat cautious
opening in Donizetti's La Favorita, she was soon
communicating fluently in a voice not typical of
Slavonic vocal production. Demonstrating
perfectly controlled long phrases, especially in
the sweetly mellifluous Printemps qui commence
by Saint Saens, Miss Toczyska generally
refrained from offering her loudest thirty per
cent. Even when she approached this volume, as
in the Cavalleria Rusticana duo, the
amplification was drastically cut within a
single beat, killing both line and climactic
structure. Her Carmen solo, while spirited,
lacked eroticism, but with Carreras in the
ensuing duo the music's sexual chemistry was
ignited. 'Miss Toczyska was, perhaps, not the
perfect foil for Carreras: their vocal qualities
are so very different her voice dramatically
robust, his darkly lyrical; hers fiery, his
subtly restrained.
Despite some evident degree of strain (at the
beginning and end of the concert), Carreras's
occasional examples of lighter tones vanished
into the whoosh of the amplifier, while his
loudest notes nearly caused peaking: his working
dynamic range was wider than the engineers had
predicted. No faults were to be detected in
Carreras's effortless dark tone, even when the
highest tessitura was over amplified during the
octaves in Mascagni's duo. The richness of his
nasal tones when amplified created a pseudo
Pavarotti effect, losing much of its essential
range of emotion.
But who could not like his gentleness,
generosity and openness? The Granada encore,
despite being a lightweight work, was one of the
highlights of the evening. Only a master can
give such a lesser piece eminence; or was the
success conditioned by the suggestive deep
purple light which bathed soloist, scaffolding
and dome? Fortunately, Cardillo's Core 'ngrato
was performed without Caruso's sob but the
Placing of microphones on every desk of the
orchestra gave the impression that pre war
'authenticity' was being attempted, with all the
instruments accorded equal dynamic status.
Throughout the evening the sound system
emulated a two dimensional effect with no depth
of sound and, with the exception of Tosti's
Marechiare, the system's bass range was
consistently set at too puny a level. At the
opening of Donizetti's Una furtiva lagrima
brutal electrical amplification of the bassoon
evoked the wrong mood. The system was at its
most amusing when projecting the pit a pat of
Verdi's anvil and when creating the aural
illusion that Carreras's dynamic power equalled
that of single harp notes. During Part One,
loudspeakers noisily hissed even when not
driven, after the interval sudden deathly hushes
between phrases suggested electronic editing all
one could hear then was the attempted slaying of
maraudingmosquitoes, spoilt for choice.
Frequent light changes in the dome during a
single number only led to distraction (but when
the conductor was bathed in green the orchestra
seemed to take more notice), Carreras' superb
communication with the audience was slightly
impaired by his chameleon green to pink face, A
lack of feed back from the audience to the stage
hindered the best efforts of all the performers,
who were not assisted by insecure stage
management during the second half. Needless
diversion came with the sky pointing
searchlights, flashing in time with the
percussion; their overuse diluted the impact of
the brief fireworks displayed in the gathering
dusk.
Those unwilling to spend £5 on the official
and glossy programme (which included a picture
entitled 'Putney (sic) Bridge and River Avon'
and named members of the chorus but not of the
orchestra) had probably been subjected to the
media's hype that 'nine encores will be
performed'. The qualified applause at the end of
Part Two (after the fifth and last encore)
certainly suggested that much more was still
expected.
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