Synchronised songbirds too saccharine to be sweet
Flirting individually with 2,000 people would seem to be a tall order, but cheeky opera divas Barbara Bonney and Angelika Kirchschlager did just that in a concert of duets at London's Barbican to promote their new CD, First Encounter.
Think of the most famous opera divas in the world and London-based US soprano Bonney and Austrian mezzo Kirchschlager would come close to the top of the list. So, to have both on stage together, along with pianist Malcolm Martineau, was an occasion not to be missed.
They looked sensational together, one blonde the other brunette and both in little strapless black dresses. All evening they smiled and pouted at us, tilting their pretty heads to one side and occasionally stealing sisterly sideward glances at each other before swirling their ingenuous faces back to their real love: their adoring audience, banked up in packed rows before them.
But even an audience with the sweetest tooth can eventually reach satiety.
Each song of the opening six Mendelssohn duets piled on another heaped teaspoon of the most refined sugar, and when the pair did a synchronised girly twirl in the Saint-Saens Pastorale Ici les tendres oiseaux it was a teaspoon too far.
The frothy, flowery lyrics didn't help much. The glossy programmes obligingly provided translations for all the songs, with a discrete reminder at the bottom of each page: 'Please turn the page quietly.'
For those who could bear to take their eyes off the playful songbirds on stage, a world of saccharine lyrics was there for the taking. 'In my garden I find many flowers pretty and nice' went the second song in the Mendelssohn sextet - although this sounded less trite in the original German. 'Little flowers blue, yellow and white, they all gather round' went the lines of the last of the songs.
The Circe-like power of these charming musical enchantresses to reduce a hard-bitten, cynical, streetwise London audience to a pile of pulp was firmly demonstrated in the guffaws they elicited for their naughty pranks during Rossini's very camp La Regatta Veneziana: Vogo, o Tonio, which translates as Venetian Regatta: Row, oh Tony. The song casts the singers as the girlfriends of two of the gondoliers in the boat race, Tony and Beppo. The girls vie with each other, urging on their boyfriend rowers, with poor Malcolm Martineau being forced to role-play the gondoliers and receiving many an encouraging smile and raised fist from either Angelika or Barbara, to which he returned a magnificently artificial Liberace-like smile.
The best part of the evening was in the second half when the pair sang Dvorak's Moravian Duets. Their voices were well suited to these adaptations of Czech folk songs and, although we were again bombarded with flowers - 'Smelling as sweet as a violet you are my lovely little bride' - the context was more authentically rustic, less drawing room, less thrillingly aspidistra and high tea.
