Julietta has been recorded
very seldom. There was a cut version
with Charles Bruck conducting in 1962
(on Chant du Monde but no longer available)
but only the Supraphon from 1964 has
stayed the course. One says "only"
but of course this Krombholc-led performance
is one of the greatest Martinů
recordings ever made.[review]
One is tempted to fly kites and proclaim
it simply the very greatest but let’s
not get sidetracked. Julietta is the
composer’s operatic masterpiece and
a work central to his canon. Listening
again to Krombholc one understands the
dilemma; it’s not an easy work
to stage and a good stage run would
be vital for a successful recording
– I had hopes that something might come
of the most recent British production
but apart from a BBC broadcast nothing
did. But Krombholc and his unrivalled
cast are incomparable. Every voice is
characterful and individualist and the
recording team gave the orchestra of
the National Theatre a vivid immediacy
that meant that their contribution was
as visceral as it must be. If you can’t
hear the band in Julietta you might
as well go home.
I won’t say you can’t
hear the band in this new recording
– it’s not true – but you might have
inferred from everything I’ve said so
far that this newcomer won’t detain
you for too long. And that’s a pity
because we need new Juliettas, new life
and new blood for this work. It’s not
simply an easily dusted down piece of
French surrealism refracted through
Martinů’s
romantic longings.
Let’s get the recording
into perspective. It’s a Bregenz production
– and full marks to them for putting
it on – and recorded complete in 2002.
The cast is international and they sing
in German, a perfectly sensible thing
to do, though on disc one loses first
syllabic stress and important hard consonants.
But if you can take Osud in English
you may well be able to take Julietta
(Germans and Austrians retain the French
form Juliette) in German.
I’m going to confine
my comments to the First Act, which
is something I never do normally but
which is justified here because Michel,
Julietta and the most important characters
are introduced here and there is so
much doubling of roles that almost all
of the voice types are heard. The strictures
I make regarding the production apply
equally throughout and would make for
repetitious, frankly tedious reading.
Firstly there is the recording, which
has not captured the orchestra with
any immediacy. A recessive pit may be
the problem but whatever the cause important
detail is smudged. Krombholc infuses
kaleidoscopic colour and almost hallucinatory
rhythmic momentum in his performance
but Dietfried Bernet is a much more
conventional, laissez-faire kind of
conductor; motor rhythms don’t kick,
dance patterns don’t course, string
weight is vapid.
The voices are all
perfectly serviceable, well trained
but uninteresting. There is a crucial
lack of differentiation between voice
types as well – The Fish Merchant and
the Bird Merchant should have distinctive
timbres but here they are generalised
squally mezzos. Johannes Chum is a decent
enough Michel but lacks ardour and tonal
variety and he gets the Toy Memory scene
all wrong, or his director and conductor
have – specifically it should be sung
reflectively with the anticipatory orchestral
duck quacks leading into Michel’s memories.
Here the band is plain soggy and there’s
no relation between the living entity
that is the orchestral detail and the
text. The Man with the Helmet (Matteo
de Monti – doubling the Blind Beggar)
lacks sonorous tone – he needs some
swagger about him as the Captain after
all. The Michel/Julietta meeting is
too hectoring. Her voice is too hard
and lacks allure. She can be – needs
to be – imposing but here she is a conventional
and stock character. The two long final
scenes lack tension and drama; too static,
too lacking in colour. And what is the
textual justification for Scene V’s
moment when the Man at the Window starts
playing his accordion but this time
with crazed Schoenbergian disintegration?
It should be played as it has been before,
surely. It’s an indication that someone
is not comfortable with the text and
has interpreted the previous lines ("Away
with the knife! Help! Help! Help!")
as an opportunity for quasi-realism.
Which, again, is all wrong.
If
you want Julietta you must have Krombholc.
You will then also have Maria Tauberová’s
Julietta, the unique Ivo Židek’s Michel,
Věra Soukupová, Jindřich Jindrák,
Karel Berman, Zdeněk Otava and
a whole host of magnificent voices –
twenty-four in all, whilst the
hard pressed Bregenz made do with twelve,
doubling.
It’s best to be objective
about this sort of thing, even at the
risk of seeming ungracious and dismissive.
Jonathan Woolf
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