Ivor Bolton’s brief spell as the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s principal conductor was one that left no lasting impressions. The players, if I remember rightly, thought of him as one of those conductors who are referred to as visually distracting. He for his part failed to draw from them performances that sounded as interesting as they looked. Interviewing him once in Edinburgh, I found him alert and direct, a conductor with distinct, attractive enthusiasms which for some reason he was perhaps not yet wholly transmitting.
But now, on the international scene, he is certainly doing so - and with a vengeance, especially if the composer happens to be Handel. His Salzburg Festival Theodora with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, directed by Christof Loy, was more gripping than Peter Sellars’s famous but fussy Glyndebourne production, presented with relentlessly semaphoric gestures from the singers though coolly conducted by William Christie; and last year Bolton himself was at Glyndebourne, conducting, with high intensity, Barry Kosky’s no less irksome staging of Saul, another great Handel oratorio ingeniously, or not wholly persuasively, transformed into an opera.
One of the signals that Glyndebourne’s annual summer season has begun is when one or two of the previous year’s highlights begin appearing on DVD. Saul has now done so, but is it really worth buying? Musically the answer is yes. Bolton’s unfolding of the rich score, filled with glorious choruses and moments of drama, is a triumph. But Kosky’s sumptuous production, much of it eye-challengingly dark and quite meldramatic, is diminshed by being viewed on a domestic screen. Much of it simply looks too crowded. Whatever it was like in the theatre - and it did earn some admiring reviews - is largely lost at home.
But not the music. It’s true that Bolton, seen in close-up in the Glyndebourne pit, looks as jerky, if not more so, than in his Scottish days, but the sounds he draws from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, not least the exquisite oboe tone, are ravishing.
Here is high Hendelian emotion. Even when the stage is over-stuffed with candles, as it is in Part Two, the music shines through. But too many of the singers, particularly Christopher Purves madly articulating the title role, veer frequently into grotesquerie. Saul, after all, is a grand oratorio, which I would like to hear from Bolton on the concert platform, and not a Handelian version precursor Ligeti’s Grand Macabre.
Despite the performance’s many beauties - and Iestyn Davies’s counter-tenor voice is of the sweetest tenderness in the role of David - the production on screen can only be called disconcertingly over the top. A bit more of Bolton at Glyndebourne, however, will not go amiss.
7 June 2016
But now, on the international scene, he is certainly doing so - and with a vengeance, especially if the composer happens to be Handel. His Salzburg Festival Theodora with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, directed by Christof Loy, was more gripping than Peter Sellars’s famous but fussy Glyndebourne production, presented with relentlessly semaphoric gestures from the singers though coolly conducted by William Christie; and last year Bolton himself was at Glyndebourne, conducting, with high intensity, Barry Kosky’s no less irksome staging of Saul, another great Handel oratorio ingeniously, or not wholly persuasively, transformed into an opera.
One of the signals that Glyndebourne’s annual summer season has begun is when one or two of the previous year’s highlights begin appearing on DVD. Saul has now done so, but is it really worth buying? Musically the answer is yes. Bolton’s unfolding of the rich score, filled with glorious choruses and moments of drama, is a triumph. But Kosky’s sumptuous production, much of it eye-challengingly dark and quite meldramatic, is diminshed by being viewed on a domestic screen. Much of it simply looks too crowded. Whatever it was like in the theatre - and it did earn some admiring reviews - is largely lost at home.
But not the music. It’s true that Bolton, seen in close-up in the Glyndebourne pit, looks as jerky, if not more so, than in his Scottish days, but the sounds he draws from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, not least the exquisite oboe tone, are ravishing.
Here is high Hendelian emotion. Even when the stage is over-stuffed with candles, as it is in Part Two, the music shines through. But too many of the singers, particularly Christopher Purves madly articulating the title role, veer frequently into grotesquerie. Saul, after all, is a grand oratorio, which I would like to hear from Bolton on the concert platform, and not a Handelian version precursor Ligeti’s Grand Macabre.
Despite the performance’s many beauties - and Iestyn Davies’s counter-tenor voice is of the sweetest tenderness in the role of David - the production on screen can only be called disconcertingly over the top. A bit more of Bolton at Glyndebourne, however, will not go amiss.
7 June 2016
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