By showing only the morning after the night before, it remains unclear exactly what's going on, right up to the end. It was, in fact, shot in Bristol, reveals Hallmark's advertising agency, Leo Burnett. Yet this couple are at once everyone and no one, thanks to a jumble of cultural references designed to give it a universal feel - and, of course, to allow it to be used in any number of international TV markets.Then there's its lack of specifics. The ad is obviously designed to illustrate how a Hallmark card can help people express their most innermost feelings, yet the attempt has a distinctly hollow ring.Perhaps it's got something to do with the commercial's lack of place.
The card so carefully protected from the rain by her lover's coat now becomes very soggy indeed - with her tears. Aaah.And yet, despite the glossy, feature-film look of the ad, the end result is distinctly lacking in emotion. Yet somehow she manages to find the strength to open the envelope, take out the card and read the printed message inside, which is accompanied by a single hand-written word: "Sorry". There was the time when he protected Gay News from the wrath of Mary Whitehouse. Those were the days in 1974 and '75 when the cases against the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, and Judith Ward were prepared for evidence and tried. Her strength is the impassioned delivery and, when her eyes light up in recollection of the voice that told her to go on living after the death of her mother (cue divine intervention of the opera's most fragrant tune), you had better believe that it's going to take more than the guillotine to cut this woman down.Gerard had seen her potential, of course, and his potential was fully realised here in the figure of Anthony Michaels-Moore This excellent singer goes from strength to strength. The voice, as yet, does not support, yield to, the finer shadings.Maria Guleghina (the Maddalena) works hard on hers, sometimes too hard, striving always to sing on the interest as well as the capital. But this is a big, ripe voice that does not naturally succumb to those quiet levitations (nothing virginal about this Maddalena).
The quiet lyricism of his Act 4 "nocturne" cruelly exposed his shortcomings. The dark, grainy voice was wielded with determination, the big high notes arrived at by way of that curious glottal spring-board effect which effectively adds an appoggiatura to them. There's an athleticism, an air of sport about his singing which is, of course, in the great tradition of tenor stylists, but whilst his musicianship is apparent in long phrases such as those that grace his second-act aria, "Credo a una possanza arcana", there aren't too many vocal endearments to cherish The voice loses interest and colour and resonance in piano. Riding on the crest of his new-found reputation as the latest "fourth tenor" (isn't it time we did a recount on this?), his poet/patriot stood tall and swarthy, a tenorial colossus who knows he's made it. And they're expressly designed to incite passion and enflame desire The audience's, that is Love and idealism writ large - does it every time. You could see that Jose Cura was already well-primed for his task before he rose to it. Still, any opera that can so shamelessly soup up the "Marseillaise" can't be all bad.And Chenier is not all bad.
Tenors love it, of course, because they get four arias - one in each act. So swiftly in Chenier that the composer sounds like he's writing the final scene in every act. But she'll soon be wacking out ecstatic unisons with the man of her dreams, the idealistic poet Chenier, whose fate is sealed before even the first of his applause-baiting arias has bounced from the back wall of the gallery Events move swiftly, loudly, unsubtly in verismo opera. No sooner has the curtain risen, no sooner has the servant Gerard (a born revolutionary if ever you saw one) thunderously proclaimed his allegiance to "Her Highness, the Princess of Poverty" than (wouldn't you know it?) Maddalena - the princess of everything he despises - is once more stealing his heart. But a theatre (or concert hall) at the height of the Italian verismo. Opera: Andrea Chenier Royal Opera at the RFH, London You know exactly where you are with Umberto Giordano's Andrea Chenier Not revolutionary France, that's for sure.
That should be something else again (and will be broadcast live on Radio 3), while the lavish series booklet (a mere pounds 2.50, thanks to support from the Pamela & Jack Maxwell Foundation and The Foundation for Sport & the Arts) will tell you all you need to know, and much more.Barbican booking: 0171-638 8891. If you missed it, fret not: but do try not to miss tomorrow night's presentation of the magnificent Fourth Symphony, together with an unknown Adagio fragment that was probably part of its original plan. And in case you think I'm snobbishly snubbing the "lighter" Shostakovich in favour of the heavyweight symphonist, I should also say that the May Day symphony (No 3) is decidedly inferior to the October. Keystone-Cops-style ostinatos set up a clangorous din and the banner-waving finale is forgettable in all respects save for its sheer volume. True, one or two lyrical moments offered the odd spot of respite, but with no screened images to justify the musical action, The New Babylon squandered expert playing skills and valuable time.Having the stylistically similar Age of Gold suite follow in its wake tested audience tolerance levels to the full - so much so that the hilarious "Polka" didn't raise as much as a titter Plainly, the jokes were beginning to wear thin.