October 28.
Michael Tumelty's article about Scottish Opera's production of Julius
Caesar serves to highlight the considerable gap between the perceptions
of the professional musicologist and those of the non-professional music
lover (October 28).
The professional seems to regard an opera as a technical problem best
solved by some avant-garde producer with outrageous ideas. The music
lover hopes to find his enjoyable entertainment by great music will be
enlarged and enhanced by the stage presentation.
At the performance of Julius Caesar I quickly concluded that the
on-stage cavorting of some hairless clowns of indeterminate gender (by
sight or sound) was unlikely to produce such enhancement of Handel's
great music, and the competing attraction on BBC2 of Verdi's Otello
performed by an apparently normal, healthy, and attractive cast
(wickedness and all) in beautiful surroundings proved irresistible.
I made for the theatre exit at the point when King Ptolemy was kissing
his army general, and it may therefore be contended that half an hour is
scarcely enough time to assess a three-hour production.
Scottish Opera, however, might do well to take into account the
possibility that present subscribers may in future prefer to spend no
time at all in assessing their productions and an audience restricted to
musicologists will not do much to solve their financial problems.
Robert E. Macdonald,
Southdown,
Dunvegan Drive,
Newton Mearns.
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