Everybody loves Candide, you’d think, yet the show struggles to find its place in the repertory. Is the comedy too dark and the narrative too jumbled? Is it an operetta that thinks it’s a musical, or vice versa? What voice types work best in it?
Richard Wilbur’s lyrics fizz with Broadway pizzazz and laugh-out-loud wit but they need a musical theatre sensibility to put them across. The problem with Leonard Bernstein’s 1989 recording with the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, and to a lesser extent with this concert by the same forces, is the usual one of opera singers slumming it and thinking they’re funny. Alas, alack. For out-and-out fun nothing beats John Caird’s National Theatre production of 1999, in which Daniel Evans’s ingénu Candide and Simon Russell Beale’s drily hilarious Pangloss showed that acting chops matter way more than trained voices. For the present concert Leonardo Capalbo did well in the title role but his tenor sound is too rock-hard for a role than demands lyricism and vulnerability; as for Sir Thomas Allen, magnificent artist though he is, sardonic narration is not his thing and his jokes fell as flat as an MP’s stand-up act.
In a rendition such as this, concert forces make Candide feels more like The Rake’s Progress than a comic operetta; yet there is at least one character who demands a serious voice and Jane Archibald gave possibly the most dazzling account of her music that I’ve heard. Cunegonde, Voltaire’s much-murdered heroine, needs a uvula of steel and stellar coloratura in her showpiece aria “Glitter and be Gay”, and the Canadian soprano delivered in spectacular style. Anne Sofie von Otter was ramrod-stiff as the Old Lady and couldn’t quite project the exotic gleam in her eye, but the great mezzo did enter into the swing and even hoofed a little light choreography at one point.