La Vestale, The Coliseum, London

Nice opera, shame about the singing

External links

ENO online

Forgive me if I come over all Alanis Morissette-ish today but the ironies are getting to me. No, it's nothing to do with flies in my Chardonnay. Nothing to do with flying. Or dying. Or lottery tickets (not directly, that is). It's to do with style, talent, money and the waste thereof. It's to do with good intentions gone wrong.

Let's suppose that you want to go to an opera this week. (For the purpose of this argument, let's also suppose that your destination is London.) At the Royal Opera House we have the revival of Tristan und Isolde; a superb musical account of a justly famous work, dressed up in one of the most ugly and irrational productions that you could see. At the Coliseum, a beautiful and rational new production – from the excellent director/designer team of Francesca Zambello and Alison Chitty – of a Napoleonic rarity; Spontini's La Vestale, last performed in London in 1842. No contest, you might think, I'll go for the Spontini. Sadly, this beautiful, rational production clothes one of the most miserably unstylish musical performances you could hear.

Irony number one. Unless you're extremely adept at listening between the lines – or staves – you might come away with the feeling that La Vestale's 160 years of silence were well deserved. The plot (which rests on whether Julia the Vestal Virgin will put out for Licinius and thereby put out Vesta's sacred flame) is certainly thin, yet the music has a loveliness that exceeds its curiosity value. Spontini's writing is unique – arias, duets, trios and recitatives that encapsulate the post-Revolutionary tension between nature and ideology, orchestral detail of extraordinary colour, harmony that hints at Beethoven and choruses that have the gravitas and simplicity of Pergolesi's church music – and far more persuasive than that other operatic favourite of the Bonapartes, Méhul. But would you get this from ENO's performance? If you clamped your hands over your ears and observed the elegant movements around Chitty's colour-washed orrery, you might at least imagine it. If you listened, however, you'd get early Verdi thrashed out at top speed by a frantic conductor, an ill-defined, homogeneous orchestra and an unidiomatic chorus.

Of ENO's current cast only two are suited to their roles, neither of which is the lead. Irony number two? La Vestale is a star vehicle. Were I casting this piece, I'd look at Sandrine Piau, Véronique Gens. Emma Bell or Mireille Delunsch. But Jane Eaglen? She of the Wagnerian voice and stature? As Julia? Eaglen may be big box-office but this match of singer to role brings little glory to either. Instead of approaching Julia's crisis of conscience with subtlety she treats it as an endurance test. Instead of poignancy, we have power (the kind of power that works through force rather than persuasion). Instead of loveliness, unloveliness. Alas, the supporting roles are cast to match. Suffice to say that Paul Nilon (a sensitive Cinna) and Gerard O'Connor (an impressive High Priest) are by far the best of the bunch.

So to irony number three. In a city that boasts some of the finest professional choirs and consorts in the world – The Tallis Scholars, The Monteverdi Choir and Polyphony, to name but a handful – how can a work that needs supreme choral lucidity be so badly sung? The standard argument is that "academic" singers are less dramatic but I'm sure that Zambello could bring out the vamp or vestal in even the coolest choral scholar. ENO's chorus act undeniably well, but their blend is dismal. On the one hand there is a group of fresh, flexible voices. On the other there's a phalanx of near-pensionable old-hands. Unlike the Royal Opera House, they have few voices who can bridge this stylistic and tonal gap. In melodic blockbusters like Nabucco, they get away with it. In the more exposed neo-classical, classical and baroque repertoire the cracks – literal and metaphorical – are all too evident.

Were a new production of La Vestale to be mounted in Paris (the city of its creation), at somewhere like Le Châtelet, it's a certainty that the orchestra would be composed of period instruments: Minkowski's Les Musiciens du Louvre, Christie's Les Arts Florissants, Herreweghe's Orchestre des Champs Elysées, John Eliot Gardiner's Orchestre Romantique et Révolutionnaire or the self-governing Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. My point? It's not that I think only period instruments should touch this repertoire – anyone who heard Emmanuelle Haïm's stylish Glyndebourne Touring Opera Rodelinda will know what can be achieved with a modern band – but I cannot think of another city so rich in home-grown period instrument talent that consistently turns its back on historically-informed performance practice in opera. And so while Spontini was subjected to his first, dire performance in WC2, Cimarosa (Spontini's greatest musical influence) got the deluxe treatment in EC2, courtesy of Christophe Rousset in Les Talens Lyriques' one-off Barbican performance of Il matrimonio segreto. Isn't that ironic?

There you have it: a brave gesture gone badly wrong. Poor Spontini. ENO may have tried, but if you want to hear early(ish) opera performed in London in the original language, with instruments and voices appropriate to the period, with stylistic élan and with an eye to the conventions of the composer's era, it seems that you must go to a concert hall or a fringe venue. And until ENO and the other companies adopt Glyndebourne's admittedly expensive approach of running two different orchestras, that is the way things will stay. OK, it's a money thing. ENO would be hard-pressed to stand up to the unions if they decided to break with tradition. But if we're going to import fully-staged opera at all then isn't it time we imported the specialists too? I hear there's some lovely sets for La Vestale at the Coliseum.

a.picard@independent.co.uk

'La Vestale', English National Opera, London WC2 (020 7632 8300) to 26 April