OPERA: Coenraad Visser
PACT OPERA first staged this astounding production of Wagner’s Der Fliegende Hollander in 1991. The Teatro Colon team, Roberto Oswald and Anibal Lapiz, created a visual spectacle the envy of any major opera house. The cast too, led by South Africans Wicus Slabbert and Marieta Napier, would have done any major artistic management proud.
The current production is visually as arresting as before, the lighting sometimes even more so. Unfortunately, with two exceptions, the musical aspect veers between misdirected and mediocre.
The problem starts in the pit where Gert Meditz, already poor when he conducted La Boheme, has no idea what the inventive score demands. With the Transvaal Philharmonic Orchestra uncharacteristically directionless, he gives a lightweight reading completely at odds with Wagnerian tradition.
On stage, too, singers like Andrea Catzel and Rouel Beukes seem to believe they are in comic opera, perhaps even operetta. Beukes’s Daland is a buffoon, exactly what the programmes notes tell us he should not be. Catzel cannot cope vocally, so that at times she simply resorts to raw shrieking. Worse still, Senta’s ballad is delivered in a style more suited to the cheery widow Hannah Glawari entertaining her folks with a ghost story.
Hans van Heerden used to be an imposing Dutchman. He still looks imposing, but his amply demonstrated inability to maintain any vocal line robs the great love duet of all pathos. This Dutchman is simply cardboard, and so unable to elicit sympathy for his dreadful plight.
Late replacement Michael Pabst is vocally a suitably ardent Erik even in a production unintentionally resembling a Mel Brooks comedy. Jannie Moolman is a convincing steersman, perhaps at last on the right track with his considerable vocal abilities.