Sarlatan - Haas
Czech composer Pavel Haas (1899-1944), a pupil of Janacek, was among the group of composers interned by the Nazis in the Terezin concentration camp before extermination in Auschwitz. His opera Sarlatan (Charlatan) was written in happier times, in the mid-1930s, when circumstances had at last enabled him to devote himself fully to composition.
The charlatan of the title is one Dr Pustrlpalk, a travelling doctor at the end of the 17th century whose skills are as much those of the fairground as of any medical school. His success at the height of his powers is depicted in bustling scenes with busy music, the members of his travelling troupe cavorting as characters out of the commedia dell'arte.
The love of his life is not his shrewish wife Rozina but the altogether more appealing Amaranta, who abandons her family to go on the road with the seriously-smitten medicine man. She leaves him through the intervention of the monk, Jochimus. Years later a failed operation on Jochimus proves the doctor's undoing. He is branded "charlatan", and later again, when, a dejected and neglected figure, he dies, he has a vision of Jochimus as the agent of his demise.
Purstlpalk, who won the approbation of the King, may sound a larger than life figure. But in the clean, clear and focused singing of baritone Luca Grassi, he is more businesslike than inspirational, more impresario than star. Mezzo soprano Viktoria Vizin has both the vivacity and vocal allure to picture a convincing love interest, and the host of other characters are all drawn with consistent vividness.
Haas's music, heavily dependent on motivic repetition, ostinatos and pedal points, generates great energy, but, in conductor Israel Yinon's hands, no great sense of forward propulsion. The feeling is more of vertical agitation than linear momentum. There's a lack of focus, too, in the playing he secures from the NSO. Outside of the moments of direct recourse to folk idiom, this makes Haas's harmonic language sound a lot denser than it need.
Director John Abulafia and designer Fotini Dimou strike just the right note with crowds and colour (the singers in the chorus are, in fact, mostly Czech), and create a picturesque liveliness of movement to counterpart the often frenetic-sounding activity in the pit.
Strong claims have been made on behalf of Haas's magnum opus. On the evidence of this production, the signs of promise are clear, but the composer seems to have worked his motivic material for rather more than it had to yield.
