(sung in English)
Milton Keynes Theatre
Armand des Grieux – Jason Bridges
Manon Lescaut – Sarah Tynan
Lescaut – Benjamin Bevan
Lilaque père – Adrian Thompson
Francis – Alastair Moore
Lilaque fils – Laurence Cole
Mr Man – Tomasz Wygoda
Mariusz Treliński (director)
Boris Kudlicka (set designs)
Marek Adamski (costumes)
Felice Ross (lighting)
Bartek Macias (video)
Tomasz Wygoda (choreography)
Welsh National Opera Chorus
(chorus master: Stephen Harris)
Welsh National Opera
Orchestra
Lothar Koenigs (conductor)
As I took the unlovely walk
towards the theatre from the railway station, up Midsummer Boulevard, I began
to wonder whether I was the victim of a hoax. Was the claim that the Welsh
National Opera would be staging Boulevard
Solitude in Milton Keynes simply a way of sending up the absurd pretension
of the street-naming in this most notorious of England’s ‘new towns’? Whatever
would I find when my long march came to an end? The answer proved to be: a
first-rate performance of Henze’s first full-scale opera, in a rather
impressive, small but not too small, municipal theatre, boasting friendlier
staff than I can recall encountering in any opera house, large or small.
Indeed, though I have not seen
so very many of WNO’s productions, this was undoubtedly the finest in my
experience. A few frayed moments aside, the orchestra showed itself well
matched to Henze’s protean, eclectic idiom(s), Lothar Koenigs’s direction
equally adept. Each scene was well characterised, whilst a sense of onward
progression was maintained throughout. Whether the echoes of Lulu – near-plagiarism or tribute,
according to inclination? – or the strains of Stan Kenton-like jazz, each style
had its due in a performance that winningly conveyed the sheer exuberance of
Henze’s youthful explorations. After the
Hanover premiere in 1952, a journalist compared Henze with Judas Iscariot; 500
marks had allegedly been the price for betrayal of German art. Here one heard
renewal, not afraid, Stravinsky-like, to use rather than venerate tradition,
yet in that use nevertheless manifesting a truer respect than the pieties of
misplaced nationalism. Already, moreover, one hears –and in performance, heard –
the unwillingness of the composer to settle for serialist orthodoxies,
twelve-note writing not only interspersed with frank diatonicism, whether
parodic or relatively unmediated, but also, Berg-like, dramatising its own
working out. The dramatic contrast between Schoenberg and Stravinsky expressed
in, say, Der Prinz von Homburg
sounds, if anything, more adventurously, certainly more freshly here.
Mariusz Treliński’s
production works impressively in tandem with score and performance. The chic
emptiness of Boris Kudlicka’s sets, occasionally visited by cinematic
flashes and clashes, not least thanks to
Felice Ross’s skilful lighting, convincingly evokes the mood of background and
foreground and the dubious ‘modern’ atmospheres of railway station and hotel
bar comings and goings, permitting the central tragedy to speak for itself,
growing out of that setting. One can perhaps make too much of the filmic
quality, whether of work or staging, since this remains very much a theatre
piece, but it was certainly present. Indeed, as Henze would write in his
autobiography, Bohemian Fifths, this ‘was
a subject that had suggested itself to me … [partly] as a result of
Henri-Georges-Clouzot’s recent film, which was set at the time of the French
Resistance and starred Cécile Aubry’. I wondered to start with whether
Treliński was focusing too much on Manon and not enough on Armand, but then
reconsidered: to an extent, that is what Henze does himself, allowing Armand to
emerge from the depths of the story’s pre-history as anti-hero rather than
being imposed upon it from the outset.
The cast was excellent. Jason
Bridges portrayed movingly and sensitively the descent of Armand into seasonal
and metaphorical winter. Well supported by Koenigs and Treliński, the sudden
rush as Armand did his first line of cocaine packed quite a punch; so too did
the plaintive moments in which Bridges had him rise above mere self-pity. Sarah
Tynan made for an excellent Manon, those Lulu echoes ever-present and yet not
overpowering; this was not simply a tribute act, but a woman with at least a
degree of agency of her own, even vis-à-vis Benjamin Bevan’s suitably thuggish
Lescaut. The rest of the cast did far more than make up the numbers, the
Lilaques (Adrian Thompson and Laurence Cole) nicely contrasted yet sharing the
benefits of financial and social privilege, both spoken and unspoken. Alastair
Moore offered an intelligently sung and acted Francis.
The British premiere took
place at Sadler’s Wells, in 1962; I therefore assume that would have been given
in English too. After a minute or two, I more or less forgot that I ‘should’
have been hearing the work in Grete Weil’s original German, such was the
conviction of the performance. Three cheers, then, for WNO!
