Vick's remedy works a treat

In her final piece for The Observer, our music critic listens to a remarkable Fidelio. She couldn't watch it - her head was in a black sack at the time

Fiona Maddocks
Observer

Sunday March 17, 2002

Fidelio Birmingham Opera Company, Aston Hall, Birmingham
Anderson premiere CBSO, Symphony Hall, Birmingham/ Radio 3

Last year we were jostled by security guards and exposed to bloodied limbs dangling from rafters and floating in chemical tanks. This year we put our heads in black felt sacks. We obeyed barked orders and, sheep-like, removed them only when told. Ten minutes spent in topical darkness is time enough to glimpse the trials of deprivation. The sense of vulnerability leaves its mark. The experience also forces you, robbed of sight at a key moment, to use your ears. The opening of Act II of Beethoven's only opera sounded alive as never before.

This was a typical Graham Vick masterstroke. A year ago I praised Birmingham Opera Company's staging of Berg's Wozzeck (renamed Votzek ), certain that though 2001 was young this would be a highlight. It was. Twelve months on, the same company has achieved a new, yet more ambitious triumph. Their promenade version of Fidelio occupies every spare inch of a big top next door to Aston Villa foot ball ground. Collective emotion seeps from the canvas and swirls round the yawning black space until it lodges in our very being.

As with Votzek, about 200 local people ('the broadest possible range', as the programme delicately puts it - and they palpably are) participate as singers, actors, backstage staff. A young Asian couple play reluctant newlyweds, locked in a bored clinch. A slender black boy rap-dances to Beethoven's score. An emaciated half-naked man, hair and beard flowing, writhes in solitary agony like a latter-day saint while a well-dressed, mature woman in large hat takes her place in the chorus. The audience, meanwhile, is obediently and curiously peripatetic, now seated, now stumbling over bumpy, mud-packed ground, negotiating bodies and scaffolding, mock graves and sunken (severally inhabited) prison cells. Paul Brown's designs, with skilfully coercive lighting by Robert A. Jones, told us where to go.

As with any community opera the vital question is who is it for: those performing or those paying to watch? Where Vick is involved, the resounding answer is both.

The superb orchestra, conducted by William Lacy, played a deft arrangement by Julian Grant. All 17 players become soloists yet Grant retains the dense colours of Beethoven's score. Repeatedly I tried, and failed, to work out his secret. The work almost becomes a wind concerto, clarinets, flute, bassoons and especially the ever-present oboe (winningly played by Philip Riordan) revealed with fresh prominence. The quartet of single strings, led by Clive Lander and with Lucy Wilding on cello, played with such authority and style that the notion of being underpowered never arose.

Grant and Vick have followed the disputed tradition of playing the Leonora No 3 overture before the finale, providing the prisoners with leisure to crawl, slowly, towards the light (after which, unexpectedly, they turn away, hands over their ears in disbelief at this hymn of praise to married love). The overture's new, lighter scoring suited the transparency of the entire work and removed any hesitation about this being too weighty an orchestral intrusion in the drama.

The outstanding cast was up to the standard of any national opera house, in voice as well as in quality of acting. Keel Watson's hulking Don Pizarro was pitted against the intense Florestan of Ronald Samm. Familiar from Votzek, this pair looked like brothers but were instead mortal enemies. Donna Bateman's touching, ardent Marzellina and Jane Leslie MacKenzie's sturdy, blistering Leonora were imaginatively cast. So too was Jonathan Best as the smarmy, nerdish, bullying Rocco. His slicked down hair, oily enough to grease a pie tin, and sex-maniac specs were especially beguiling. The production tours to Liverpool and Sheffield in the autumn (though not in a tent, alas). There's also a South Bank Show planned. Miss them at your peril.

The opera clashed with another important Birmingham musical event: the premiere of Imagin'd Corners by Julian Anderson (b 1967), conducted by Sakari Oramo. I heard the broadcast on Radio 3. Inevitably the important spatial characteristics of the piece - five horn players are positioned in different parts of Symphony Hall - were not wholly evident. But this high-energy work spiralled thrillingly in a weightless fanfare of wild hunting calls and Alpine echoes, sounding in volleys over a shimmering orchestra. The contrasting use of the untempered natural horn and the equal tempered (and to our Western ears more correct sounding) modern horn was both evocative and ingenious. At the impressive climax, horns screeched and yelped their sour blasts over a cacophony of orchestral sound and toneless cow-bells. The CBSO's new composer in association has made an exciting debut with this Donne-inspired work. It promises to be a fruitful collaboration.

Birmingham and its musical life have been a revelation in the years I have been writing this column. For me it was fitting to be able to devote my last week as Observer music critic to that city. Far from dwindling with the loss of Simon Rattle, Birmingham's concert life goes from strength to innovative strength. Other cities outside London are following suit, an exciting indication that British musical life is thriving.

Why stop doing something you love? In these times of equality I should pretend that a job like this - which is largely about going out at night - sits easily with being a mother of young children. It does not. It's no coincidence that nearly all my colleagues are single men. Nevertheless it seemed important to try to offer a different, perhaps more quotidian perspective; for most of us, however deeply committed, have to fit music and opera into and around ordinary life. Now the identity of that small figure who at first nights and premieres is seen scuttling out between the end of the last chord and the beginning of the applause can be revealed. Five years of hair-raising Russian roulette with the late-night road and rail system has been enough. If next year Graham Vick wants to capture, in a phrase, a sense of absolute despair he could try (as if on Didcot's featureless and windy platform) 'The last train to Oxford has been cancelled'.

I am taking on a different challenge with a well-known London evening paper. If it's half as much fun and I am half as fortunate with my readers, I shall be lucky indeed.