The Consul review – Menotti's clunky opera resists Guildhall's best efforts

It’s hard to believe now that in the 1950s and 60s Gian Carlo Menotti was perhaps the most widely performed of all living opera composers, especially in the US, where his works seemed to bridge the divide between the opera house and musical theatre. But if it was his Christmas piece for television, Amahl and the Night Visitors, that turned the Italian American composer into a household name, it had been the score composed immediately before it, The Consul, his first full-length opera, that had confirmed his stature. First performed in 1950, it ran on Broadway for eight months, was performed at La Scala Milan the following year, and secured Menotti the first of his two Pulitzer prizes.

But even before his death 10 years ago at the age of 95, Menotti’s operas had almost vanished from this side of the Atlantic. The Guildhall School’s revival of The Consul was therefore a rare chance to discover – almost 70 years after it was composed – what this music offers. The answer – on this evidence anyway – is not very much at all.

That’s not to say that the plot has become dated or irrelevant. A woman, Magda, whose husband is on the run from the secret police, finds her attempts to leave an unnamed European country repeatedly frustrated by the bureaucracy of the consulate she petitions for a visa; she never gets to see the consul of the title, and after her baby and her mother die, and her husband is arrested, she takes her own life.

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It’s a bleak, unforgiving tale which needs tactful, understated musical treatment. But Menotti’s score does the opposite, with its clunky dramaturgy, flagrant rip-offs of Puccini, Strauss, Britten and Richard Rodgers, and B-movie orchestral effects. There wasn’t much that conductor Timothy Redmond could do with the portentous orchestral writing, but I suspect it would have all seemed much worse had Stephen Medcalf’s production not presented the drama as tautly as possible, keeping it firmly in the period in which it was written, and had his Guildhall cast not put absolutely everything into bringing their cardboard characters to life.

As Magda, Michelle Alexander got the best chances, and made the most of the opera’s big set-piece aria; Emily Kyte as the consul’s none-shall-pass secretary, and Eduard Mas Bacardit as the magician who runs through his routine in the consul’s waiting room to prove that he is who he says he is, also stood out. But, really, everyone did a valiant job, and now deserves to get back to singing some decent opera.