Homeless Royal Opera Orchestra a Long Way From Covent Garden

The Royal Opera was once a great company and will undoubtedly become one again. But for the moment it is in a sorry state. Anyone who has spent time in its cramped but elegant opera house in London’s fashionable Covent Garden will surely have valuable memories. One of mine is a performance of Strauss’ “Elektra,” about 25 years ago, that Carlos Kleiber conducted. The singing was great (Birgit Nilsson was Elektra), and the orchestral playing was phenomenal--every voice on stage and every instrument in the pit seemed to be joined agents of shocking drama. I couldn’t sleep that night.

Today, the Royal Opera House, in the midst of a two-year renovation, is a giant construction site. The company--unloved by the press, the current Labor government’s Arts Council and maybe even itself--seems in shambles. Its scheme to perform ad hoc opera around London during the renovation unraveled. The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is reduced to drumming up business wherever it can. Wednesday night, that was at the Orange County Performing Arts Center for the first of two performances.

The company, we are told, is on the mend, what with an American, Michael Kaiser, come to the rescue. A few projects are back on the board, like an evening of zarzuela--Spanish operetta--with Placido Domingo at the Barbican in April. Music Director Bernard Haitink has rescinded his resignation. And there actually is an orchestra to tour, which was no certainty three months ago.

But still, Wednesday night’s program of excerpts from some of the most common operas in the repertory, sung by acceptable but second-tier British singers (at least one of whom has never before performed with the company) and led by a venerable British conductor (but not its music director), hardly bespoke a once-proud institution.

Edward Downes, who has conducted at the Royal Opera for nearly half a century, noted in the program booklet that the excerpts from “La Traviata,” “La Boheme” and “Tannhauser” and the Suite from “Der Rosenkavalier,” were chosen because of the association of great performances of those works at Covent Garden. None of this, of course, distinguishes the Royal Opera, since all major companies can make the same claim.

What does distinguish the Royal Opera, however, is its creation of a great tradition of British opera--with its fostering of work by Britten, Tippett and now Birtwistle--as well as the development of a school of outstanding British singing actors (for instance, Janet Baker). Downes made important contributions in bringing Russian opera, especially Prokofiev, to international attention.

There were no hints of any of this at Segerstrom Hall. The orchestra performed on a fairly high level, although much of what it performed was accompaniment. And while Downes displayed a sure feel for sweeping, weighty, properly rounded phrase, the effect after a while proved a bit dramatically leaden.

There was little added drama from the singers. Judith Howarth indicated a forceful Wagnerian soprano in “Dich, theure Halle,” from “Tannhauser.” Rita Cullis demonstrated impressive high notes and flexibility in the “Traviata” and “Boheme” excerpts, but was wooden. Gwyn Hughes Jones was her stalwart tenor in both the Verdi and Puccini operas. A young baritone, William Dazeley, made the strongest impression in his visionary account of the “Song of the Evening Star” from “Tannhauser.”

The last time the Royal Opera appeared in Southern California was 15 years ago for three productions at the Olympic Arts Festival. Los Angeles had no major resident opera. Orange County didn’t even have a proper theater for opera. San Diego Opera was in its insecure infancy. The Royal Opera’s productions excited us and helped spur on our own companies. Everything has now changed. This time its appearance felt sadly irrelevant, an echo of things better heard on our own stages. With luck, that will all change Dec. 1, when Covent Garden is scheduled to reopen.