Verdi’s Falstaff is an opera which I have usually found it easier to admire than to love, but English Touring Opera’s production, which has been going round the country since October, is exceptionally endearing. I hope that they might keep it in their repertoire — so many of the best things this company has done have disappeared, while I’m sure that many people who have seen them once would be happy to go to a repeat performance a few years later — what happened to their wonderful Fidelio, for instance? Falstaff is probably the biggest challenge to date, demanding the utmost in precision from the performers, while needing never to lack spontaneity and tireless zest.
ETO has risen to the occasion, and a considerable part of its success is the brilliant reduction of the scoring done by Jonathan Dove (I believe, though I can’t find him credited in the programme). The orchestra is very small, though Verdi wrote for a large one, and went in for an uncharacteristic intensity of colour. There are moments in this production where one misses the full orchestra, for instance in the passage in Act III where the frozen and embittered Falstaff drinks his sack and one instrument after another begins to trill, until the effect is of cosmic vibration; here that went for little. On the other hand, one of the most brilliantly original features of the score, the way in which melodies are passed from voice to orchestra and back again, which gives a paradoxical impression both of seamlessness and utter diversity, registered more clearly in Dove’s version, with everyone very much on the qui vive.
The title role was taken by Andrew Slater, a baritone in bass’s clothing (and actually slimmer, padded, than the Bardolph was naturally), but he sang beautifully, expressively, even if the poignancy and pain in the role mainly escaped him.
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