The Bard Music Festival concluded its two-week exploration of Ralph Vaughan Williams with a semi-staged concert of Sir John in Love, his gentle, folksy spin on The Merry Wives of Windsor. Although the opera lacks the complexity of Falstaff and the uproarious wit of Shakespeare’s source text, it shows off the composer’s gift for weaving traditional songs into a work of symphonic heft on a maximalist level, a skill that conductor Leon Botstein realized in the performance’s most successful moments.
Acting as his own librettist, Vaughan Williams conveyed the basic plot of Shakespeare’s source text, with Alice Ford and Meg Page teaming up to bamboozle the lascivious Sir John Falstaff, while Anne Page and Fenton secretly conspire to marry. He also expanded many of the smaller roles in the play, creating a village of distinct, memorable characters that often seems like a precursor to the dramatic works of Benjamin Britten. These ancillary figures – a sanctimonious parson, a bawdy but wise tavern host – certainly charm the audience, but the outsize focus on their high jinks can sometimes make the strands of plot hard to follow. It’s a problem only intermittently solved by Alison Moritz’s stage direction here.
Perhaps due to attenuated rehearsal time, the performers rarely had the chance to fully develop their characters in relation to the central story, and as the opera wore on, one could be forgiven for confusing the smaller roles and their functions. In terms of delineating personage and place, Neil Fortin’s stylish costumes did the best work, situating the period as somewhere around the opera’s composition in the mid-1930s. The gentry were decked out in elegant evening wear, while the comic characters had outfits that hewed closely to their roles within the societal structure. Sir John looked, appropriately, like a nobleman gone to seed. The moony Fenton and Master Slender, one of his rivals for Anne’s affection, were appareled like proper English schoolboys.
Leading the American Symphony Orchestra, Botstein hit his stride in the score’s many lush interludes, with a particularly warm and spacious reading of the Greensleeves section that opens Act 4 (and would later inspire Vaughan Williams’ famous fantasia). He also forcefully underlined developments in the composer’s soundscape, like an agitated passage in the Act 1 scene at the Garter Inn that could almost pass as a discarded sketch from the Fourth Symphony. Elsewhere, though, Botstein favored thick, heavy textures rather than a more pastoral sound, and his driving rhythms occasionally covered the singers, especially in ensembles. With the orchestra placed onstage for this concert, balances were not always ideal.
Craig Colclough delivered a humorously self-aware Sir John – more the butt of his own joke than a tragic fool – that compensated for a somewhat weathered voice. Recent Metropolitan Opera National Council winner Sarah Saturnino made for a ravishing Mistress Ford, her darkly colored mezzo-soprano enveloping the seductive setting of Greensleeves in Act 3. The winsome soprano Ann Toomey matched her marvelously as Mistress Page, and veteran mezzo Lucy Schaufer stole scenes left and right as Mistress Quickly, despite Vaughan Williams’ diminution of the character.
William Socolof and Troy Cook served as a proper pair of henpecked husbands as Ford and Page, and Lucia Lucas was luxuriously cast as a rich-voiced Host of the Garter Inn. Tenor Joshua Blue struggled with Fenton’s punishingly high tessitura, and Brandie Sutton was a linguistically indistinct Anne Page. Small roles were taken with distinction by Martin Luther Clark (Master Slender), Theo Hoffman (Sir Hugh Evans), William Ferguson (Robert Shallow) and Julius Ahn (Bardolph). The Bard Festival Chorale, prepared by James Bagwell, dispatched their duties with panache.
As always, Bard deserves credit for foregrounding works that otherwise regularly go unprogrammed, especially in the United States. I don’t expect Vaughan Williams’ idiosyncratic adaptation to supplant Verdi, but as a portrait of an artist rendering the sound and style of his home country, Sir John in Love holds much to value.
