Gilbert & Sullivan: The Mikado – Lytton

There used to be an argument, back when I first started writing about this repertory, about whether anyone under sixty had any business preferring acoustic-era or early-electric D’Oyly Carte recordings of Gilbert and Sullivan to the polished, modern, digitally sourced alternatives. I confess I was on the wrong side of that argument for longer than I care to admit. Then I actually sat with this 1926 Mikado — several times, headphones on — and the case closed itself.

Henry Lytton is the reason. There have been plenty of good Ko-Kos on record — Martyn Green with his rubber-faced comic timing, Peter Pratt, John Reed later for Sargent and then for himself — but Lytton has something none of them quite manage. A lived-in, faintly melancholic authority, which comes, I suspect, from having actually created the role’s originating tradition under Gilbert’s own beady supervision decades earlier. Listen to “Tit-Willow.” It should be a throwaway novelty number, a bit of shtick with a ukulele-plucked accompaniment. Lytton makes it ache, just slightly, under the patter. That’s the whole trick of great G&S performance: you play it absolutely straight and let the absurdity do its own work.

Around him the cast ranges from superb to merely serviceable, which is more or less what you’d expect from a working repertory company caught on records rather than assembled for the occasion.

Darrell Fancourt’s Mikado has exactly the cavernous, faintly terrifying bass authority the role wants. “My object all sublime” lands with real menace under the jollity, not just bluster. Bertha Lewis, similarly, is a real contralto in the Katisha music, not a mezzo straining downward for effect; the chest voice has actual weight to it, and she can still spin a legato line in “Alone, and yet alive” that most later interpreters simply bark through. Leo Sheffield’s Pooh-Bah is another matter. All character, precious little actual singing voice left by 1926, and you hear the strain whenever Sullivan asks for more than parlando. Derek Oldham’s Nanki-Poo divides opinion and always will; that plummy, covered tenor tone and those hiccupping little scoops into phrases were apparently catnip to 1920s audiences. To my ear they wear thin well before the Act One finale. Elsie Griffin’s Yum-Yum, by contrast, is a genuine pleasure — creamy, unforced, girlish without being twee in “The sun whose rays.”

Here’s the real news, though, and it isn’t really about the singing at all. This was recorded shockingly early in the electrical era, the microphones essentially brand new technology, everyone including the engineers feeling their way blind, and for decades the transfers we had access to reflected that uncertainty: boxy, congested, dynamics collapsing whenever the chorus and orchestra hit full cry together. Mark Obert-Thorn’s restoration changes the calculus entirely. Orchestral detail I’d genuinely never registered in earlier LP and early-CD transfers — a bassoon line here, a triangle ping there, the woodwind chattering under “Three little maids” — suddenly emerges from what I’d always assumed was an irretrievable sonic murk. It doesn’t sound modern. Nobody should pretend it does. But the veil has lifted enough that the reading can finally be heard on something closer to its own terms, rather than through a fog we’d all simply learned to tolerate.

Should this be your only Mikado? No. Get Sargent or Mackerras too, for the fuller orchestra, the modern sopranos, the stereo spread that lets Sullivan’s scoring actually breathe. But if you want to hear why this operetta held the English-speaking stage in a grip for the better part of a century, why audiences who’d seen it thirty times still queued for the thirty-first, this is the version that explains it. Get this one anyway. Get it first, probably.