WAR AND PEACE, THEATRE ROYAL, GLASGOW
By Andrew Clark
Financial Times
January 25 2010 22:46
It is a popular misconception that masterpieces arrive in fixed
form, like a gift from heaven. Some of the most successful operas
– Carmen, Don Carlos, Boris Godunov , to name but three – have
extremely messy histories, and until recently no one bothered
if the edition was bowdlerised. What great composers have always
wanted is to communicate. If the performance breathes style and
conviction, it doesn’t matter which version you use. It’s only modern
musicologists who believe in the possibility of an "original" text and
its superiority over established versions. Bizet, Verdi and Mussorgsky
never heard the so-called original versions of the operas cited above:
practical considerations came first.
This is the context in which we must judge War and Peace, a
collaboration between Scottish Opera and music academies in Glasgow,
Russia and Armenia. It is billed as "the world premiere of the original
version". But Prokofiev’s opera went through so many versions –
none of which he heard complete – that it’s hard to credit this one
with greater authenticity than the others. It is "edited" by Rita
McAllister: she has pieced it together from manuscripts, orchestrating
parts of the war scenes that Prokofiev wrote in piano score and axed
at the behest of his Soviet minders. This version omits the ball scene
and the Fili scene in which Field Marshal Kutuzov sings his paean to
Moscow. It also knocks an opera of four hours down to two and a half.
Does it work? It has greater consistency than the established
version, which hardly justifies its length. But it misses some
wonderfully rousing moments in the second half. What validates it
is the all-round quality of performance, staged by Irina Brown,
designed by Chloe Lamford and conducted by Timothy Dean. With a cast
of students and young professionals, the opera’s contrast of young
and old personalities must be taken as read, and some voices are
underprojected, but the overall effect is fluent and atmospheric.
Aleksey Gusev’s virile Napoleon steals the show; Maria Kozlova’s
Natasha and Aram Ohanian’s Kutuzov also show promise.