Lohengrin (Royal Opera)

"Lohengrin" is never going to be the snappiest night at the opera but the Royal Opera's horrifically dated production stretches the work into sheer tedium. Vocal pleasures abounded and in Petra Lang you have a top grade villainess but this was otherwise a turgid event, long passages entirely static and designs that look nothing but tacky.

Things don't start well. Most of Act I is performed about thirty feet from the orchestra behind a white gauss with static singers offering stock gestures. When Lohengrin finally arrives, fifty minutes later, the gauss rises after a dismally pathetic "projection" (this isn't the seventies anymore). Whilst Boaz Daniel is fantastic casting as the Herald he's made to stand on a very amusing platform looking like an over-inflated Lord of the Rings' Elf for the entire first Act. The endless religious iconography is all well and good but it leaves much of the work unexplored and it certainly doesn't assist the dramatic elements. Johan Botha is not a man light on his feet but the combat was just embarrassing, he wouldn't be able to fight his way out of a paper bag. Things don't really ever pick up with a slow trudge towards the end. The crowd scenes were oddly messy, lots of banners and pillars scattered all over the stage to no particular rhyme or reason. Even the various processions were dull.

Luckily the casting mostly saved the day. Botha has a stage persona with about as much charisma as a wooden board but he's one of the most reliable singers around and his stamina was never in question even in the closing stages. His voice is more than robust though; it's also endlessly pleasant and carries some of the emotion that is lost in his stock operatic arm gestures. Falk Struckmann, a singer of even greater brilliance, takes a different tack tending towards hysterical overacting. In the context of the production it was probably the best he could do, his black costume with long, flared sleeves just plain funny, but it certainly wasn't a tour de force of three-dimensional acting. Lang seemed to have an awful lot of fun as Ortrud, spitting acid as she let forth volleys of auditorium filling notes. As with Struckmann, subtlety didn't get a look in but this was a terrific bit of singing. The only weak link in the four principals came from Edith Haller who had neither the volume nor the notes. Sung right off the stage by Lang, she didn't help herself by murdering a note at the climax of the first scene of Act III. Her voice had a certain radiance but just became threadbare in the higher reaches and intonation was never a strong point. The two smaller roles were well filled, Boaz Daniel is as robust as any singer and Kwangchul Youn made for a very dignified if largely unremarkable King.

The lack of refinement continued in the pit, Semyon Bychkov conjuring a vivid but rather imprecise reading from the Royal Opera House Orchestra. A new production is badly needed but the casting, with the exception of Haller, could scarcely be bettered and the chorus were on sterling form. Botha is one of the few singers whose stamina is never in doubt and with Struckmann and Lang firing on all cylinders, it was quite an evening vocally. A vapid drama but an excellent aural experience.