OPERETTA AND CLASSICAL MUSIC: Coenraad Visser
NOT even intelligent direction and two sterling individual performances can elevate Pact Opera’s production of Lehar’s The Merry Widow above the barely ordinary.
Johan Spies directs the central characters with a sure hand to make their actions motivated and believable, a tall order in this often silly work. In the crowd scenes, too, he intuitively transforms the chorus members into more than a human backdrop: another accomplished effort from this young director.
Hanli Stapela (Hannah Glawari) and John Fletcher (Danilo) made a fetching pair of lovers, at ease vocally and dramatically at the centre of the production. Stapela, with equal measures of dignity and charm, made a marvelously sweet-toned widow, quietly rapturous in the Vilja-lied. Fletcher is handsome and swaggering, vocally totally at home in this idiom.The same cannot be said of the second pair of lovers. Sally Gain (Valencienne) and Jannie Moolman (Camille) were often gritty and overbearing, completely unfamiliar with the gentle Viennese style.
In smaller roles, Rouel Beukes (Count Zeta) battled with his English pronunciation, Barbara Veenemans (Praskowia) seemingly couldn’t remember why she is on stage, and David Sherwood decided on his own pronunciation of the widow’s
Sandy Dyer’s choreography has nothing to do with the period within which the production is set. Also, the wayward dancers constantly appeared likely to injure some onlooker on the cramped stage.
The booming amplified stage voices completely drowned out the unamplified orchestra. Not that the end result was altogether undesirable, given the out-of-tune playing by the Roodepoort Pro Musica Orchestra, conducted by Weiss
In Uri Mayer’s first two concerts with the National Symphony Orchestra, the highlights were Leslie Sheills’ bewitching flute solo in Debussy’s Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune and a purposeful performance of Lutoslawski’s showpiece Concerto for Orchestra. Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 1 (Winter Dreams) was only marginally less successful, full of excitement and sharply characterised, but let down by some uneven string playing in pianissimo passages.
The playing of the first violins deteriorates with each successive concert, if this is possible. Their playing in the Strauss Horn Concerto was pitiful, with only some of them attempting all the notes in the score.
Both soloists were disappointing. Tigran Alikhanov could not make any sense of the rhythmic complexities of Ravel’s Piano Concerto, and so resorted to pounding away at the keyboard. Shamil Lutfrachmanov, surprisingly after his acclaimed performance of the same composer’s first concerto, was at sea in Strauss’ Second Horn Concerto. Too many notes cracked, and the soloist was constantly unsure of the basic rhythmic structure of the work. Best playing came in the slow movement from Peter Jaspan (oboe) and Robert Pickup (clarinet) in their dialogues with the