This performance derives from a film made for Swedish Television in 1985. As is usual on these occasions liberties are taken with both the score and the scenario. Director Inger Aby conceives the piece as a dark, cynical tale filmed claustrophobically in a Bergmanesque style, with a ticking clock as a motif throughout signalling time passing as Tom’s fortunes decline. The evil episodes engineered by Shadow are often accompanied by flames at the bottom of the picture. The action is taken out into the Swedish countryside and into a town that looks more like Stockholm than London, but most scenes are filmed in the studio, often with distorting close-ups of the chorus – as in the brothel scene where Anne mysteriously puts in a fleeting appearance. The fantasy of a happy ending is one gloss too many.
Aby and the conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, choose to excise entirely the bread-machine scene (no great loss perhaps), large chunks of the Bedlam scene and the entire Epilogue, presumably in the cause of making a succinct – exactly two-hour – product suitable for a TV audience. These cuts may just be permissible in view of the convincing performances Aby extracts from his principals. Fedderly is splendid casting as Tom. He looks handsome, appropriately wide-eyed and ingenuous, moving through the early scenes with easy insouciance, then with affecting tragedy when Tom goes mad. His tenor hardens at the top, but his phrasing is consistently shapely.
Barbara Hendricks is a touching Anne, but her singing is compromised by thinnish tone and a tight vibrato. As Shadow, Hakan Hagegard dominates the scene with his baleful presence and insinuating manner. His singing, though his voice is a shade light for the role, benefits from his incisive diction and well-varied delivery. The casting of Baba with a countertenor creates a weird and uncomfortable result. The veteran Erik Saeden is a properly concerned Trulove: his all-important entry in the madhouse is excluded, an unacceptable cut. As the video of the Glyndebourne/Cox/Hockney staging on IMP is unavailable at present this is the sole choice and, in spite of my reservations, it is worth a try.'