UFO Info Week-End

New works and performances come few and far between these days

New works, and performances, come few and far between these days. But last weekend Morley College staged a semi-pro production of English Eccentrics, the chamber opera Williamson adapted from Edith Sitwell’s famous book for the 1964 Aldeburgh Festival, and it was fascinating. He was talented, prolific, turning out scores in every operatic genre – full scale, chamber, for the church, for children – until suddenly the momentum stopped and he settled into the existence of a conspicuously quiet Master of the Queen’s Music. Altogether it’s a fine show, and well-served by a director, Yannis Kokkos, who leads it gently and with dignity (as opposed to kicking and screaming) into the 20th century. The Greek peasants seem to be in Paul Smith suits, but unobtrusively – proving that people in Paul Smith suits actually look like Greek peasants.Back in the 1960s, Malcolm Williamson must have looked like a very plausible successor to Benjamin Britten.

As is Nicholas McGeegan, conducting, who peps up the pace and rhythmic energy but never to the point where Gluck’s noble intentions are distorted. It supplied Janet Baker’s farewell to Covent Garden, and Kirsten Flagstad’s to the Met.
At Glasgow, though, it marks the opposite: the UK opera debut of Isabelle Vernet, a much talked-of French soprano who fulfils some of the potential of the role but not all. The voice is very nearly very good – dramatic, full, affecting, individual – but it’s also overblown, pushing the top unevenly and losing pitch at phrase-ends. In many ways I preferred the Admetus, Mark Padmore, who is less demonstrative and slightly reedy but controlled, intelligent, extremely musical, and sensitive to the stylistic ground-rules of the genre. At its heart – and especially at the heart of Gluck’s revised, French-language version which Scottish Opera use – is a profoundly human testament of love put to the ultimate test.

Offering her own life for her husband’s, Alceste becomes one of the great self-sacrificing heroines of the lyric stage; and with so much magnificent valediction on offer in the process, you can appreciate why the role is a favourite for star singers on the way out. But Alceste is actually more than ceremonial and static choruses. Alceste is undeniably austere: a ceremony of mourning for the deaths of its two principal characters, which haven’t happened yet but can be anticipated as such things only can in the classical world of oracles and ascertainable destiny The story is adapted from Euripides. In a sense he was the man who scrubs the lavatories before royalty arrives. And you could argue that his zeal was self-denying: that his mature work comes nobly sanitised, a model of artistic hygiene, but so preoccupied with stripping away the dirt of the past that not much remains beyond severe, slow-moving tableaux set to music of extreme solemnity More liturgy than theatre.

Certainly he is more studied than staged: of the 20 or so major stage-works in his catalogue, only Orfeo ed Euridice has survived in standard repertory But 1996 has the makings of a Year of Gluck in Scotland. He dominates the opera schedule of this summer’s Edinburgh Festival and, in Glasgow, Scottish Opera has just opened a new production of Alceste, the piece that first itemised Gluck’s reforms in a published preface to its score. As the forbidding Mrs Leavis, Maggie Steed wanders in and out of the tutorial, with a washing basket under her arm. Here it is then: The Great Tradition meets The Common Pursuit.Theatre details: see Going Out, page 14.. CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD GLUCK is remembered as the reformer who cleaned up the voice-indulging excesses of early 18th-century opera, just in time for Mozart to materialise and reap the benefits. Mark Kingston looks the part as Leavis; his benign presence round the house will surprise anyone who thinks of Leavis (from his prose style) as a challengingly dogmatic figure. A Glaswegian student (Tony Curran) turns up for tutorial with the literary critic F R Leavis.

He witnesses the Leavises’ marriage at close quarters, and precipitates an exploration of their unhappy relationship with Sir Arthur Quiller- Couch (Robert Langdon Lloyd) in the Twenties and Thirties. The Last Romantics is set in Cambridge between the wars and in 1968. This is a terrific play – humane, alarming and true.If Pam Gems’s biographical drama Stanley, about the life of Stanley Spencer, was a stage play that ought to have been a BBC2 drama, Nigel Williams’s latest play (his second in two weeks) is a BBC2 film that ought not to have become a stage play. She has a quick, fraught, bony nervousness, as she struggles to justify herself. You always know what she is thinking, even when she hasn’t got a clue. Eventually, she realises: “It turned nasty because it was a silly, naive, half-baked idea.” Her final gift to Strong – who is very good at registering his disbelief at how different she is – turns out to be a present to herself. On designer Anabel Temple’s steeply raked stage, a ladder leads to an attic, and a narrow staircase leads downwards.