Like looking at a shop window
Michael White on the ENO's Merry Widow and a breathtaking performance from The Sixteen
9 May 2008

Amanda Roocroft, above, does little with her big numbers and left you pining for a soprano with more class and charisma

When the curtain rose on ENO's new Merry Widow, half the audience clapped the frocks. Which told you something. It was that sort of audience, those sort of frocks and, indeed, that sort of show - directed by the veteran John Copley (back from the grave, as some of us thought) in the most decorous conventionality, awash with white ties, tails, and lots of staircases for people to sweep up and down.

As ENO's boss John Berry wrote with wry truth in the programme book, it was "a production of The Merry Widow you will recognise": in other words, no swastikas, stormtroopers or any of the other things a fashionable (younger) stage director might be tempted to throw into Adolf Hitler's favourite operetta. And what a relief, you might say. A chance to see a tuneful piece as the composer wanted it: in an "innocent" production for a change.

The problem is that innocence comes at a price in opera these days, and the price tends to be energy. For sure, this Widow was a competently staged show, nice to look at (in a Selfridge's shop-window way), fairly well sung, but empty as a charter flight to Basra: half asleep until the interval and only intermittently alive thereafter - thanks largely to the re-insertion of a usually dropped solo for the comic role of Njegus, done here as a guest turn by Roy Hudd. That he could neither sing nor remember his lines scarcely mattered: he could hold the stage. And that, alas, is what the rest of this cast didn't do.

The spoken dialogue was excruciating. The sung diction was poor (something ENO must seriously address if it carries on bothering to sing in English). And there was nobody apart from Hudd and Richard Suart (happily hamming up the other barely singing character-role of the ambassador) with presence. Still less, glamour.

Amanda Roocroft made a knowingly attractive widow, but did nothing with her big numbers and left you pining for a soprano with the class and charisma of Felicity Lott (which is what the role needs). John Graham-Hall's Danilo stole the acting honours, so things perked up when he was around, but he didn't convince as a matinee idol. And Alfie Boe - Classic FM's favourite tenor, but cast here only in the supporting role of Camille - had the notes but little style. The chief vocal pleasure came from Fiona Murphy, whose Valencienne had some style but not enough spunk.

And in the pit, Oliver von Dohnanyi conducted with the cultural authority of a true Mittel-European, but also with a heavy hand. When you're dealing with froth, better to keep it light.

For total contrast - something heavy, rich and done so stylishly it leaves you on your knees with admiration - this year's annual, so-called Choral Pilgrimage by that fine professional choir The Sixteen has been touring a programme of English Tudor polyphony around various churches and cathedrals. I caught it at Greenwich Naval College Chapel. And I can say without hesitation that it was the best concert I've heard in a very long while. Literally breathtaking.

The music was by three composers - Christopher Tye, Robert Parsons, Robert White - whose names don't mean much to the average listener but who were active through the mid-1500s when art, religion and politics were dangerously interconnected and musicians who survived the turbulence had to be flexible. In their works, if not their hearts.

As Rowan Williams writes in a booklet to accompany the pilgrimage, it was a period whose initial musical exuberance reflects the chapel architecture at King's Cambridge - long lines of grand perspective filled with decorative detail - but then, under pressure of the Reformation, retreats into "inner dramas of faith". It's also a period whose music is largely lost, thanks to the outer consequences of those dramas.

What remains, though, is amazing. And to hear White's spectacular five-part Lamentations - sung here with a thrilling synthesis of polish and power under The Sixteen's founder/conductor Harry Christophers - is to marvel (a) that there could be such perfection this side of heaven and (b) why no one knows it.

For this one piece alone the name of Robert White should be set among the stars.

And to anyone in striking distance of Southwell Minster, Blackburn Cathedral, Greyfriars Edinburgh or the other venues on what remains of this "pilgrimage" (see www.thesixteen.com), I'd say do yourself the favour of a lifetime. Go and hear it, and be devastated.