When it was first seen, at the Met in 1958, Samuel Barber's Vanessa was hailed by some as a masterpiece, and it is not hard to understand why. The fluent, lushly orchestrated score must have appealed greatly to a certain generation (and type) of opera-goer, for whom the memory of new operas by Richard Strauss was relatively fresh.
Yet it is equally easy to understand why the work never caught on. Gian Carlo Menotti's libretto proposes a preposterously alien world in which a rich woman - Vanessa - has shut herself, her sternly taciturn mother, the Baroness, and her niece Erika away in their country house because she was let down decades earlier by a man called Anatol.
His arrogant young son, also Anatol, visits. Since Anatol the elder is dead, Vanessa falls in love with Anatol the younger instead. The trouble is, so does Erika.
Barber's and Menotti's intent seems to be to evoke the flavour of findesiecle expressionism, of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande, of Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle. Yet the intense psychology of those works is missing, and the characters are unconvincing caricatures. Only in the farewell quintet near the end do emotions run deep. Maybe the entire opera was contrived backwards, from the final goodbyes.
This was, however, an extremely well sung and played, if awkwardly semi-acted, performance. The cast was from the A-list, headed by soprano Christine Brewer as Vanessa and mezzo Susan Graham as Erika, both in stupendous voice, both able to combine beauty and stunning power as few can.
Tenor William Burden brought the right shallow, swaggering ardour to the character of Anatol, while ripe-toned mezzo Catherine Wyn-Rogers lent an apt haughtiness to her Baroness.
The bass Neal Davies, also sounding very well, did his best to illuminate the rather odd character of the Old Doctor, among whose functions is the provision of a measure of comic relief. And Leonard Slatkin and the BBC Symphony Orchestra rightly indulged the piece to the full, telling us loud and clear that even if it isn't a masterpiece it is at least lovely to play.
