Scottish Opera - Menotti: The Telephone - The Telegraph

During the immediate post-war era, the Italian-American composer Gian Carlo Menotti (1911- 2007) seemed like a great white hope for opera, an authentic and prolific successor to Puccini whose ‘accessible’ music could generate mass appeal. Amahl and the Night Visitors is his hugely successful pseudo-biblical parable aimed at children and designed for television; The Medium and The Consul are tautly effective melodramas on strong contemporary themes; the tear-jerking The Saint of Bleecker Street won a Pulitzer Prize.

These works enjoyed considerable popular success through the 1950s, since when their reputation has plummeted. Will they ever bounce back? Occasional recent revivals don’t suggest an imminent return to favour: Menotti wrote fluently and expressively for the voice and had a strong sense of theatre, but he broke no barriers and took no risks – for ears now accustomed to a wide variety of sonorities and harmonies, his style emerges as too safely tuneful, tonal and sentimental to have much lasting kick or arresting originality.

The Telephone exemplifies his lighter side. A whimsical 20-minute sketch, intended as a curtain-raiser to the darker The Medium – alongside which it enjoyed a run of over 200 performances on Broadway after it was first performed in 1947 – its premise is simple. In her Manhattan apartment, a flighty young woman named Lucy is so absorbed in calls to her friends on her old-world dring-dring landline that she fails to allow her exasperated suitor Ben the space to make his romantic proposal in person. In the end, he has to walk out and ring her up in order to pop the marriage question.

The subject-matter has a pendant in Poulenc’s marvellous 1958 setting of Cocteau’s tragic monologue La Voix Humaine, in which a desperate woman tries to keep her faithless lover on the line to stave off suicide, but Menotti’s perspective is only mildly satirical of our obsession with pointless chatter. The score, appropriately, is a dainty Mozartian pastiche, with some busily cheerful orchestral writing and passages of skittering coloratura for Lucy: it has no pretension to do anything but amuse.

For this diverting online film made by Scottish Opera in collaboration with this year’s ‘virtual’ Edinburgh International Festival, the director Daisy Evans has taken the fairly obvious path of updating the setting to the present day and focusing on the phenomenon of smartphones. She treats it with a nice light touch: this Lucy meets Ben not in her apartment, but the bar of Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre and her telephoning habit involves a lot of fidgety texting and Face Timing. 

Two of our finest younger singers give engaging performances in this romcom territory: soprano Soraya Mafi sings with crystalline clarity as Lucy and baritone Jonathan McGovern is warmly sympathetic as the patiently impatient Ben. From a studio, Stuart Stratford conducts Scottish Opera’s orchestra with verve, and the camerawork is fluent. The case for or against Menotti remains unproven and no withers are wrung, but The Telephone is hard to dislike.