LES CLOCHES DE CORNEVILLE, John Lewis Partnership Music Society, in their private theatre, Friday 21 April 1978.

Planquette, said the programme note, is the fourth most important French operetta composer, after Offenbach, Lecocq and Messager. If that is so, on this showing, I would not like to have to suffer the lesser lights. In point of fact I have, and some of them write more attractive music than this. Les Cloches has not been performed in England for some time, and this was, I think, the premiere of a new version by Geoffrey Wilson and Max Morris. An older translation(s) used to be regularly performed by amateurs up to 20-30 years ago (Avalon L. O. S. performed it in 1957.) The operetta is a rather cumbrous over-written piece, whose two main obstacles are that there is much too much music for the action, and it has the misfortune to suffer from a theme song ("Ding-a-ding-a-ding, dong") with words and music of exceptional banality. It has some pretty tunes, and a plot and score which waver awkwardly between Victorian melodrama and Mummerset farce. Not being familiar with the original score I cannot say how much Max Morris has tinkered and/or improved it; I confess though, to being less than happy with Geoffrey Wilson's translation. It is obviously churlish to criticize but there were numerous occasions when the singers seemed unhappy, and where the English words seemed to sit uneasily on the French notes. One particular instance I noticed was in the second act where the Bailie has to sing a comic song which has a rhyming phrase, the halves of which are separated by an orchestral interlude so that the singer has to pause in the middle of a sentence. I found it hard to believe that the singer in French would have been required to do that. Certainly it struck me as a thoroughly bad song. Subsequently I checked with a copy of the score of the H. B. Farnie translation, and could not help feeling that the words there would have been a lot easier to sing. The chorus diction was so bad that large sections of the score were quite unintelligible, and as I have attended the last two John Lewis opera productions, and not had trouble understanding I don't think it was purely chorus incompetence. James Robertson conducted the orchestra with unusual vigour, producing an almost painful over-enthusiasm in the brass. The production was good, and the sets excellent. Of the soloists, Nicholas Folwell was outstanding as the Marquis, though betraying a great deal of nervousness and an uncertainty in his upper register. Also good were Claire Powell and Marie McLaughlin and the two female protagonists, David Flint as the idiot tenor Grenicheux had a fine voice, but peculiar facial contortions and a humorous (for quite the wrong reasons) tendency to overact. Brian Kevis had a pantomime dame approach to the Bailie, and Alan Patient almost succeeded as Gaspard the almost-villain, but his ashen make-up was a trifle disconcerting. MICHAEL WALTERS

• To Previous Page
• To Next Page
• To No. 10 Home Page
• To Gilbertian Gossip Home Page