Tales of the Tales

My first encounter with The Tales of Hoffmann was the gloriously flashy film directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, with Sir Thomas Beecham as conductor.  I had left school and was on my first trip to London. The film had just opened in Leicester Square and I was among the first to see it. The reviews had dismissed it as ridiculously ostentatious but I loved every moment of it. It ran for a while in its original version  before box-ofice failure prompted savage cuts. When it finally reached Edinburgh I saw it again and still loved it, despite the mutilations, paticularly as it retained the closing shot of Sir Thomas conducting in the pit, which was the moment I had been waiting for. 

The next time I saw the film was in Paris, a few years later. For local audiences the singing  had been dubbed into French, with different, less impressive singers. The closing shot of Beecham was missing, because it had another conductor, the routinely efficient Andre Cluytens, who was not seen on screen. This time round,  I enjoyed it much less. Then, quite recently, the old Beecham version was reissued on DVD.  It was not uncut, but Beecham, at least, remained in view. 

I found that I still loved it for its glitter, for Moira Shearer dancing the role of the doll that sprang to life, and for Robert Helpmann and Leonid Massine for appearing in other dancing roles.  Singers’ voices had been dubbed from the start of the film’s history. Today, people are still buying it and, thanks to Beecham, it  remains the best version of Offenbach’s romantic opera you are likely to come upon.

But this weekend I saw another, filmed at the great Liceu Theatre in Barcelona, which in some respects was almost as good. It was conducted, extremely well, by Stephane Deneve, formerly of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra - surely the most exceptional conductor it has had in years. Natalie Dessai (whom Deneve had conducted in Pelleas and Melisande in a concert performance of Debussy’s opera when he first came to Scotland) was the touching Antonia. Kathleen Kim was superb as the doll. Laurent Naouri sang all four of the sinister villains, as Offenbach intended. 

The Hoffmann, Michael Spyres, seemed nondescript in comparison with Beecham’s polished Robert Rounseville. The decor and lighting were grey and dull, making Laurent Pelly’s production look as if it was set in a factory. But like a few other recent versions of Hoffmann - one of them at  the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland -  it restored quite a lot of little-known music, particularly for Nicklause and for Hoffmann’s Muse, which is traditionally omitted. 

The Venetian scene, placed at the end, was substantially rejigged, not entirely to its advantage. For all its good features, then, this was not a Hoffmann to surpass the Beecham/Powell/Pressburger version, which I shall be watching again this week. But it raised an interesting question. Why was Stephane Deneve, clearly an opera conductor of great ability, never invited to conduct Scottish Opera while he was in Scotland?  Was it for contractual reasons? If so, what a pity.

22 June 2014