Playing to his unofficial appointment as the social conscience of any corporate-friendly metropolitan arts event, Peter Sellars' contribution to the Barbican's Mostly Mozart festival was a valiant but misfiring attempt to present the composer as an anti-slavery activist and his unfinished opera Zaide as anti-slavery polemic.
The opera does indeed deal with the freeing of slaves and the enlightenment of their captors, but it couldn't support the weight of good intentions lumped on to its performance here. It was preceded by a talk introducing the work of two human rights charities; and yes, these messages from Anti-Slavery International and the Poppy Project needed to be heard. But an audience warm-up they were not. The musical performance began in a sombre, flat atmosphere; even Louis Langrée's charged conducting couldn't lift things immediately, and the fact that the Concerto Köln's tuning took a while to settle didn't help.
The production, too, looked like work in progress, despite the fact that it has already been seen in Vienna. Sellars has a black and Asian cast playing workers and enforcers in a sweatshop, with the slaves bedding down in army-surplus sleeping bags among the sewing machines. The setting works well enough, but the acting in this semi-staging was only semi-effective.
The spirited slave Zaide was sung by Hyunah Yu. She is soon to release a solo disc, on which her poised, often expressive soprano will presumably sound more substantial than it did here. Ruhe Sanft is one of Mozart's most beautiful arias and the opera's main selling point, and she sang it prettily, but in her angry third aria she could barely be heard above the orchestra, now playing with a thrilling, raw-edged sound for Langrée. Two reasonably promising US tenors, Norman Shankle and Russell Thomas, sang Gomatz and Soliman; but it wasn't until the bass Alfred Walker stopped looking bemused as Allazim and started singing that any number was received with anything other than polite silence. Walker, rather than Yu, is the singer to listen out for.
