6 hours ago
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Pirates! Princesses! Mermaids! Fairies! A magic horn! You name it and Carl Maria von Weber chucked it at Oberon – his fantastical, nonsensical, often farcical romp of a final opera, which sees a French knight and his Arabian beloved subjected to magical trials and hardships so that fairy king Oberon can win an argument with queen Titania.
You can see how it happened. The opera’s English libretto (the work was premiered at Covent Garden in 1826) is based on a German poem, itself adapting a French chivalric romance, is a patchwork whose lumpen dialogue (and, latterly, unpalatable attitudes) have rendered it all but unstageable in living memory. Enter Mark Elder, the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique and Monteverdi Choir to give Oberon a Proms premiere 200 years in the making.
Tackling the problem head-on, this semi-staging binned the dialogue, replacing it with author Timothy Knapman’s new narration, which wrestles an impossible plot (a “franchise spin-off” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as he puts it) into arch rhyming couplets and knowing pop-culture references. It’s often funny, but there’s an awful lot of it, even when delivered by the ever-watchable Tamsin Greig.
This is a passion project for Elder. You could hear it in the crisp attack and deliberate shading he demanded of the orchestra – by turns Mozartian or Mendelssohnian in their silver-footed fairy-music, Wagner-broad in brass sallies and pageantry. It’s unfashionable to suggest it, but in a venue of this size (and fluctuating temperature), with anachronism already in the drama, might a contemporary symphony orchestra have given us greater punch and brilliance than a period band? For all the score’s charm and vivacity it’s also dangerously close to Gilbert and Sullivan at times, even before tuning sours in the heat. No wandering minstrels in the Monteverdi Choir however, who dispatched their choruses with subtlety and style, all while acting up a storm under Emma Doherty’s light-touch direction.
John Findon’s indefatigable Sir Huon was a musical chameleon in a role that demands a Mozart tenor, a Bellini tenor and occasionally even a Wagner tenor, with soprano Jennifer Davis, a luxurious, expansive Reiza. Listen out for young American mezzo Rachael Wilson, a knockout as maid Fatima, all gilded legato and smooth-polished tone, handsomely matched by Yannick Debus’s Sherasmin. Presiding over all was Nicky Spence, hamming it up deliciously (in a foretaste of the Last Night of the Proms) as Oberon.
Weber died just months after Oberon’s premiere – from tuberculosis, rather than complications from the libretto. It’s a peculiar epitaph: part panto, partgrandopera. Will Oberon’s Proms premiere also be its final festival outing? Even with the help of a whole section of magic horns, it’s hard to imagine otherwise.
