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| Images: Matthias Baus |
Dalila
– Elina Garanča
Samson
– Brandon Jovanovich
High
Priest of Dagon – Michael Volle
Abimelech
– Kwangchul Youn
Old
Hebrew – Wolfgang Schöne
First
Philistine – Andrés Moreno Garcia
Second
Philistine – Jaka Mihelač
Philistine
Messenger – Javier Bernando
Samson Double (Dancer) – Nikos Fragkou
Dalila Double (Dancer) - Lisa Schramm
Damián
Szifron (director)
Étienne
Pluss (set designs)
Gesine
Völlm (costumes)
Olaf
Freese (lighting)
Tomasz
Kajdański (choreography)
Romain
Gilbert, Heide Stock (assistant directors)
Jana
Beckmann (dramaturgy)
Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Martin Wright)
Staatskapelle Berlin
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
Hand
on heart, I have never seen anything quite like this. From curtain rise to reveal a
dog running across stage—accompanied by palpable audience bewilderment and
highly audible laughter—to a bizarrely offensive final act seemingly
co-directed by David
McVicar and ‘Mad’ Melanie
Phillips, film director Damián Szifron’s first foray into opera afforded
the very definition of a car-crash. Much as one may have wished to avert one’s
eyes, such was alas never an option. There was, to be fair, unwitting entertainment
along the way. Yet seeing—and hearing—outstanding artists such as Elina Garanča,
Brandon Jovanovich, and Michael Volle wading and occasionally, Dagon help us, dancing
through the non-ironic polystyrene debris of a scenic cross between Cecil B De
Mille, Franco Zeffirelli, mid-budget 70s science fiction, and the day’s nth Spectator columnist endorsement of Boris Johnson, was ultimately
the stuff of nightmares—or at least of end-of-term revues.
Let
us start with the good, musical news. All three of those soloists were on fine
musical form. I have never heard anything other than an excellent performance
from Jovanovich; this was to be no exception. Tireless, committed to words and
music, heroism and humanity, in equal measure, his Samson could hardly be
bettered. That neither he nor Garanča could be visually recognised beneath
their extraordinary costumes was doubtless no bad thing for either. Garanča
brought all the virtues one might have expected to her Dalila: similar precision
and professionalism, with a mezzo as rich as it was even of tone. Volle, to
whom my heart especially went out when in a ‘religious’ bathrobe, proved
vocally intelligent and inviting as ever. Save for unfortunate appearances from
Kwangchul Youn and Wolfgang Schöne, the rest of the cast, chorus included also impressed.
The latter’s slightly rocky start did not preclude performances of welcome heft
and dramatic direction.
At
least as impressive as the central trio were Daniel Barenboim and the
Staatskapelle Berlin. The promise held out by their all-Saint
Saëns subscription concert a couple of weeks earlier was fulfilled in a
performance suggesting, however great the illusion, this to be music they
played almost as regularly as Wagner. (To be fair, Barenboim has a recording of
the opera to his name, but even so.) As ever with Barenboim’s performances, it
was founded upon harmony, making fine sense of Saint-Saëns’s medium- and
longer-term tonal plans, yet without sacrifice to detail. Not for the first
time, his handling of neo-Bachian elements had one long for him to conduct more
of the real thing one day. If the opera’s conclusion remains strangely
perfunctory and the preceding Bacchanale problematic in its orientalism, there
is little that can be done about that. An array of gorgeous orchestral playing,
transparent and weighty as required—not infrequently, both—offered more than
ample compensation for shortcomings in the score. At least, it would have done,
had it not been for the unfolding catastrophe on stage.
Dear
reader, it is to the tale—or tail—initiated by that mysterious,
never-to-be-seen live stage hound, lodged indelibly in the visual memory, that
we must return. Poor Rover, we knew him all too little, yet he deserved our
gratitude for running across the stage—not unlike the equally mysterious ENO
nude lady of yore, presumably awarded a block booking—and thus briefly
distracting us from Étienne Pluss’s still more risible ‘Biblical’ landscape. It
matched, I suppose, Gesine Völlm’s ‘Biblical’ costumeswere one in the market for
a Life of Brian sequel without the (intentional)
jokes. And it provided a space—someone had to—for breathtakingly amateurish
blocking and choreography. Such was leavened-or, according to that rarest of
commodities here, taste, further depressed—by hapless acts such as having
Samson appear on stage dragging, with mixed success, a slaughtered bull, from
which he would extract a horn to gorge a few passing Philistines.
A
ballet scene, in which Samson and Dalila doubles danced their inexplicable
desires, Dalila at one point wandering offstage to emerge with child—cue, yes,
much rubbing of her ovular miracle—was bewilderingly accompanied by a sun/moon
that moved ever so fitfully in various directions. A technical hitch, perhaps? More
likely trying to escape this cosmos from embarrassment. And so it went on, not
so much as an idea, let alone a Konzept,
in sight. Dalilla’s cave, seemingly located on a stage simplification of a set
for a spin-off from Peter Davison-era Dr
Who, offered a location for what, in this ‘aesthetic’, we should probably
call ‘lovemaking’. That was certainly, in the pejorative sense, what it looked
like; thank goodness it was cut short; one could sympathise with Philistine
desire to arrest at least one of its participant.
Following
a visit to Samson’s Gaza dungeon, its abattoir ‘look’ weirdly out of kilter
with what we had seen previously, we moved to a Temple of Dagon in whose
representation Szifron appeared to be trying to outdo Uwe
Eric Laufenberg’s execrable Bayreuth Parsifal
for Offensively Orientalist Staging of the Year (bonus points for implied
Islamophobia). I say ‘appeared’ because I suspect much of it was not even
intended and instead the product—as with so much that had preceded of it—of having
enlisted a director without knowledge or experience of opera, or even a cursory
interest in the genre. Toe-curlingly un-erotic orgies are in keeping with actually
existing opera’s history on stage: not for nothing did Schoenberg touchingly
prescribe the events around his Golden Calf as an explicitly ‘erotic’ orgy. However,
youthful executioners’ bewilderment at ongoing proceedings, as witnessed by
their vacantly staring at female breasts, came across as anything but knowing. Bloodsoaked
assassins – Assassins with a capital ‘a’, I fear—did what ‘exotic’, ‘Eastern’
people would. Could not Barenboim have introduced Szifron to the work of Edward
Said? All the while, Volle as High Priest wandered around quizzically in bath
robe and staff topped with not un-crescent-like 'symbol'. If Jehovah were unwilling to draw such proceedings
to a close, He would have been a crueller, more vengeful God than even Voltaire
would have charged. As it was, the Great Director in the Sky took His time:
understandable on musical grounds, yet otherwise…
