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And how can they, when McVicar (who designs as well as directs) gives the Marschallin's palace and Faninal's town house the same set? It works perfectly for Act I, where the spot of damp and peripheral decay in the palace bedroom sets the right tone for an ancien regime on its way out. Pressed into service for the glittering, new, self-made world of Faninal, it doesn't work at all.Nor does the handling of Baron Ochs - a character so critical to the piece that, as originally planned, it carried his name. McVicar has encouraged Peter Rose, the Ochs here, to play cool and subtle with what are otherwise the pantomime gestures of the role.But at the end of the day, Ochs is a comic character, defined by laughter. Here, the laughs come rationed, elegantly sung but underplayed to the point of extinction. Accompanied by scruffy playing from the Scottish Opera orchestra under Richard Armstrong (who lets them get away with it) this Rosenkavalier is not the triumph it purports to be.For a long while now, Daniel Barenboim has not been the pianist he originally purported to be either.
Seduced by the stick, his career these days centres on conducting, with keyboard appearances largely confined to self-directed concertos. Recitals come at a premium; and he hadn't given one in London for years until last Sunday, when he filled the Royal Festival Hall with a full and - thanks to Hilary and Jackie - curious audience for a programme of Beethoven and Debussy.There was a strong sense of the event about this concert - a sense, almost, of recovering something lost to the past. But if Barenboim himself shared those feelings, he didn't yield to them in his playing, which came stripped clean of nostalgia and sentiment. His Beethoven - the sonatas Opus 13 and 109 - was more classical than romantic: sharp in attack, precise, intelligent, and with a crystalline transparency that I'd guess has something to do with the causal relationship between posture and tone.Barenboim is a small man with a high piano-stool that he sits against rather than on, like a monk in a misericord.
That leaves his legs at 45 degrees, his arms outstretched, and with no obvious sign of bodily support to whatever weight he gives his playing. It all seems to come from the hands alone, with a stabbing muscularity that defines the detail in his finger-work.In his Debussy Preludes, Book 1, it was much the same story: "classically" told, and resistant to the idea of these miniatures as fleeting moments of pure atmosphere and colour. For Barenboim they were skin in need of bone, which he inserted, for the most part, cleanly and incisively into extremely fine, if not especially idiomatic, readings. I enjoyed them.But it was revealing to watch, later that night on Channel 4, Christopher Nupen's TV film about Jacqueline du Pre, with its archive footage of Barenboim playing chamber music in the early 1970s Then, there was a heady and exhilarating vigour. Now, it's hardened into something far more calculated.Britain has no seriously ancient orchestras like the Gewandhaus or the Dresden Staatskapelle, so the 50th anniversary of the London Mozart Players this year makes it the oldest chamber ensemble we have The event was marked on Thursday with a gala at the RFH. It was a night of memories and, no doubt, nostalgia for the days when the LMP enjoyed a higher profile than it does now, resident in Croydon. And the Mozart it programmed for the gala was, I think, indicative of its current standards: crafted, competent but unexciting.