{TABLE} La boheme .............. Puccini {/TABLE} MUSICAL arrangements come in all sorts of guises, and you could categorise most of them into up arrangements and down arrangements. The former would include Ravel's treatment of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition", Stokowski's orchestral Bach; the latter would embrace Liszt's two handed renderings of the Beethoven Symphonies, Busoni's organ to piano Bach and Ravel's keyboard versions of "La valse" and "Bolero".
Most of these were created with the intention of broadening access to the music though the shift of musical perspectives involved (not to mention the virtuoso demands which may he made on players) sometimes invested the results with an altogether broader interest. And modern audiences are listening to arrangements in concerts from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Rimsk Korsakov's Sliehemzade by four handed piano teams to Schoenberg's chamber re scorings of Strauss Waltzes as never before.
It's about 10 years since the Arts Council chose to close the curtain on another form of arrangement, opera with piano by withdrawing funding from Irish National Opera. Yet piano accompanied opera has remained with us, both in tours by Opera Theatre Company and, since last year, in compacted presentations as part of the Wexford Festival.
Unlike true chamber opera whether composed as such or creatively re worked, piano accompanied opera seems to me largely an area of deprivation and impoverishment, not least because the scaling of the enterprise is so precarious. The singers rarely accommodate downwards to the size of, venue or nature of the accompaniment. And the piano as orchestra tends to be a failure both musical (by being insensitively literal) and technical (by being unnegotiably awkward for the player).
These problems were well evidenced in the Wexford Festival Opera Scenes presentation of Puccini's La boheme.
The director, Dimitri Bertman, and his designer, Tamsin Tillier, accommodated the lively antics of the impoverished quartet and handled well the intimacy of the setting. The singers, though, were less gracious, with, for instance, Leonid Bomstein's Rodolfo straining after effects he couldn't fully deliver, and Mark Evans's Schaunard rarely seeming to drop below full throttle.
The rewarding exceptions were the rounded Mimi of Giuseppina Piunti (attractive of presence as well as of voice, and happily showing no compulsion to press things to extremes) and the compassionate (when not too blustering) Marcello of David Kempster. La boheme, however, is not a piece that yields well to piano accompaniment, and, on this occasion, Fiona MacSherry was burdened with an instrument with notes as sour in tuning as ever I've heard in public performance. Roll on the delivery day of artistic director Luigi Ferrari's aspiration to opera scenes with chamber ensemble!
