It is easy to sympathise with those who want Walton's Troilus and Cressida to be a great opera. There were moments in Tuesday's concert performance when we got a brief taste of what Walton might have produced if he'd been firing on all four cylinders. The composer who created the gorgeous melodies of the Violin Concerto and the drama of the First Symphony could have produced something to rival Puccini. Troilus would then have appeared on the stage as a grand two-fingered salute to postwar modernism - an act of splendid defiance, like Strauss's roughly contemporary Four Last Songs.
Instead - well, I'm afraid the critic who called Troilus and Cressida "a hopeless old dodo" was not far of the mark. Things might have been better if Walton had not landed himself with such a poor libretto: limply flowery one moment, blandly prosaic the next. There are good operas with bad librettos, but in those cases you will usually find that the composer believed they were worth setting. Walton seems to have had his doubts about Christopher Hassall's text from the start, and his lack of faith shows in the musical results.
The characters are stolidly two-dimensional. Pandarus's antics - comic roulades and Brittenish arpeggios - can be quite effective, and tenor Nigel Robson put a lot of effort and skill into bringing the role to life. But neither words nor music give much of a clue of what he is really about - in particular, why he is so set on bringing Troilus and Cressida together in the midst of a devastating war.
All credit to conductor Richard Hickox, the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and the solo cast for trying to make it work. Soprano Janice Watson brought vocal beauty to the part of Cressida, and Bonaventura Bottone did sterling work as Troilus. But not even the LSO on form could make the earth move in the storm interlude from act two - supposedly symbolic of Troilus and Cressida giving in to their passion. There will be those who continue to hail Troilus and Cressida as an unjustly maligned masterpiece. But in the end perhaps they are doing Walton's cause more harm than good.
