Bach – Christ lag in Todesbanden, BWV 4 (arr. Iain Farrington)
Ullmann – Der Kaiser von Atlantis
Emperor Überall – Richard
Mosley-Evans
Death – Robert Winslade
AndersonLoudspeaker – Callum Thorpe
Maiden – Paula Sides
Harlequin – Jeffrey Stewart
Drummer – Katie Bray
Soldier – Rupert Charlesworth
James Conway (director)
Neil Irish (designs)
Guy Hoare (lighting)
Aurora Orchestra
Peter Selwyn (conductor)
Not for the first time, the
heroic efforts of English Touring Opera have put to shame the larger, wealthier
opera companies. Whereas ENO has elected to garner minor headlines by launching
a silly campaign to encourage audience members to wear jeans and trainers, and from
the 2012 productions I have seen on the main stage at Covent Garden, but one, Rusalka,
has proved artistically first-rate, not only is ETO offering an autumn season composed
of three twentieth-century operas – Albert
Herring, The Emperor of Atlantis,
and The Lighthouse – in the present
production, it has risen impressively to the challenge.
To preface Viktor Ullmann’s
opera with Bach’s Christ lag in
Todesbanden was a brilliant idea. (There was also a pre-performance
rendition of a newly commissioned song-cycle by Helen Chadwick, Towards an Unkown Port, which I was
unable to attend.) Bach’s cantata was arranged for the same chamber forces as
the Ullmann, Iain Farrington’s arrangement showing both sensitivity to the
score and an imagination that at times seemed to pay occasional homage to the
Bach arrangements of Webern and Berio. (Was that a touch of flutter-tonguing I
heard early on?) Harlequin and Death observe the performance, presented
chillingly by four soloists – Katie Bray, Rupert Charlesworth, Paula Sides, and
Callum Thorpe – with suitcases ready for the journey ahead. Though sung in
German, Harlequin offers a rough and ready flash card translation, which at
times he uses to incite Death, waiting with his scythe. This may be an Easter
Day cantata, based of course upon Luther’s chorale, itself based upon eleventh-century
plainsong, but it is hardly Bach at his most jubilant. Christ lies in bonds of
death and though we progress towards a final ‘Alleluia’ – this from 1724, Bach’s
first version for the final stanza having been lost – via, amongst other
wondrous writing, it is sin, the wait for judgement and, above all, especially
in a contest such as this, the stretto contest between life and death, that
linger longest and most profoundly in the mind. Each of the soloists was
excellent, as indeed was the Aurora Orchestra, the plangent beauty of Charlesworth’s
tenor perhaps particularly worthy of praise.
Der
Kaiser von Atlantis, or to give it its full title, Der Kaiser von Atlantis, oder Die
Tod-Verweigerung (‘The Emperor of Atlantis, or Death’s Denial’), followed
on immediately. How does one listen ‘objectively’ even upon hearing the
subtitle, given that one knows this was a Theresienstadt opera? One does not,
of course, and it would be unreasonable to expect anyone to do so. A Schoenberg pupil, on his teacher’s
recommendation, Ullmann was made a founder member of the committee for the
Society of Private Musical Performances. Having been taken to Theresientadt in
1942, he wrote this opera with librettist Peter Kien the following year, though
it only went so far as dress rehearsal, before being realised for the thinly
disguised satire that it was. Ullmann, Kien, and many of their colleagues would
be transported to Auschwitz in October 1944, to be murdered there.
Yet Ullmann’s opera is not of
mere historical interest; he was an established composer for quite some time
before the Second World War, and it shows. ‘Eclectic’ would perhaps give the
wrong impression of the score, since it does not dart around willy-nilly;
however, it certainly draws upon elements of tonal Schoenbergian writing and
more popular idioms, often bringing Weill to mind. Death’s withdrawal of his
labour disturbs the Emperor Überall – here, in spite of the opera being sung in
English, the name was wisely not translated, adding definite national resonance
– in his campaign of total war. (Yes, that very phrase is uttered.) The non-death
of the soldier and girl in the third scene echoes, questions, subverts the
struggle between life and death in the Bach cantata. Eventually, the Emperor
accedes to Death’s demand that he be the first to die in return for the freedom
for others to die again. It is perhaps only in this fourth scene that the music
lingers a little too long, but even that arguably has its dramatic point, given
the Emperor’s reluctance to die. The final ‘rejoicing’ is set to a lightly
modernist elaboration of, irony of ironies, Ein’
feste Burg ist unser Gott.
Once again, the orchestra,
expertly directed by Peter Selwyn, was on excellent form. James Conway’s
direction was typically impressive throughout, each character well prepared for
his or her actions within this almost surreally terrifying setting, the sets of
Neil Irish and Guy Hoare’s lighting playing their part here too. One had a
sense if not of the conditions of Theresienstadt – how could one? – then of how
modest means can create something far and beyond what one might expect, of the
defiance and, clichéd though it may sound, hope that artistic solidarity may
confer in the darkest of circumstances. Especially noteworthy amongst the cast
were, once again, Charlesworth as the Soldier, also Callum Thorpe’s intelligently
presented Loudspeaker, informing the Emperor of the war’s progress, and Paula
Sides’s attractively voiced Maiden. Richard Mosley-Evans wavered somewhat as
the Emperor, but the whole performance remained far more than the sum of its
parts.
The production will also be
seen in Cambridge, Exeter, Tunbridge Wells, Harrogate, Aldeburgh, Malvern, and
Buxton. Click here for further
details from the ETO website.
