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| Images: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM von Benjamin Britten, Regie: Ted Huffman, Premiere am 26.1.2020, Deutsche Oper Berlin, copyright: Bettina Stöß |
Oberon – James Hall
Tytania – Siobhan Stagg
Puck – Jami Reid-Quarrell
Theseus – Padraic Rowan
Hippolyta – Davia Bouley
Lysander – Gideon Poppe
Demetrius – Samuel Dale Johnson
Hermia – Karis Tucker
Helena – Jeanine De Bique
Bottom – James Platt
Quince – Timothy Newton
Flute – Michael Kim
Snug – Patrick Guetti
Snout – Matthew Peña
Starveling – Matthew Cossack
Cobweb – Markus Kinch
Peaseblossom – Lora Violetta
Haberstock
Mustardseed – Selina Isi
Moth – Chiara Annabelle
Feldmann
Ted Huffman (director)
Marsha Ginsberg (set designs)
Annemarie Woods (costumes)
DM Wood (lighting)
Sam Pinkleton (choreography)
Ran Arthur Braun (Puck’s
choreography)
Sebastian Hanusa (dramaturgy)
Neil Barry Moss (Spielleitung)
Children’s Choir of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus director: Christian Lindhorst)
Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin
Donald Runnicles (conductor)
For my final review – unless,
which seems unlikely, I manage to write up this evening’s concert before
midnight – written as a European citizen, it is perhaps fitting to be writing
of an English opera, performed by a German company, conducted by a Scotsman.
Given the circumstances, I hope I shall be forgiven if it does not find me at
my most inspired, should such a condition even exist. Hand on heart, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not an
opera I can bring myself to care for greatly, although – perhaps there is a
lesson, or at least an irony, here too – the Berlin audience reacted
enthusiastically.
Shakespeare is a dramatist whom
composers, at least opera composers, confront at their peril. However clichéd
it may be to say this, there is so much music in his verse that setting it can
seem superfluous. This is not a rule; there are no such rules. However, I
cannot see, or rather hear, what is gained in this case, other than an
undeniable creepiness to score and elements of the dramaturgy, which therefore
does not seem an unreasonable place for a performance to take as its point of
departure. In that, as in everything else, Donald Runnicles’s leadership of the
excellent Deutsche Oper Orchestra and Children’s Choir and a fine group of
soloists proved just the ticket. Rarely if ever have I heard those recurring
slithering glissandi and the weird
balances of instrumentation and of instrumentation-vis-à-vis-harmony sound
quite so ambiguous, even callous in their indifference to the affairs of mere
mortals. This was fairyland music properly unsentimentalised. Moreover, Runnicles
communicated the constructivist aspects of Britten’s writing more powerfully
than any conductor I can recall. Unsurprisingly, the closer it sounded to The Turn of the Screw, the more
interesting the score became. There is only so much anyone can do about the
general thinness of writing and a tendency, constructivism notwithstanding,
towards diffuse formlessness; insofar as anyone can, Runnicles certainly did. Colour,
however, came first and foremost. Those silvery slivers of orchestral moonlight
cast, in a fine dramatic paradox, as much shadow as anything else.
The children’s choir had evidently
been very well prepared by Christian Lindhorst. Indeed, I had to remind myself
afterwards that most of its members would have been singing in a foreign
language. A mixed cast included many Anglophone singers, but those who were
not, at least in terms of mother tongue, could again hardly be distinguished
from those who were. (Singing and musical performance more generally are, of
course, international businesses in which British artists have been enabled to
flourish by membership of the European Union; goodness knows what will happen
next year.) It seems invidious to single out particular performances when all
impressed and contributed to a whole that was unquestionably greater than the
sum of its parts. I shall limit myself to noting vocal portrayals that, for
whatever reason, particularly caught my ear. From James Hall came a warm yet,
in the best way, piercing Oberon, channelling Alfred Deller’s memory through
something more than imitation; he was well matched by Siobhan Stagg’s spirited,
knowing (at least until she was not!) Tytania. Gideon Poppe and Samuel Dale
Johnson offered an excellent rutting pair of impetuous youths, well matched and
contrasting with their lovers, Karis Tucker and Jeanine De Bique. James Platt’s
bluffly comic Bottom led a characterful troupe of rustics.
Ted Huffman’s production gave
the impression of good ideas that might fruitfully have been taken further,
while shining a clear path through the basic narrative. No
one would have stood in any doubt as to who was who, nor as to what was taking
place: more, after all, than can often be said in opera staging. I presume the
mid-twentieth-century setting – 1940s? – was intended to suggest the period of
writing or at least Britten’s life in some respect. It was not, however,
immediately clear why we should not then have been closer to 1960. Military
uniforms and a suggestion – or was that just me? – of a battlefield as all
slept in the forest may have alluded to wartime; if so, without something more,
I was rather at a loss as to why and with what consequences. In a programme
interview, Huffman referred to Oberon and Tytania fighting over the Indian boy
as being akin to the status of Britten and Peter Pears as a childless couple. Once
more, if so, nothing more was made of it – and I should hardly have thought of
that without reading. Lines delivered in somewhat exaggerated fashion by Jami
Reid-Quarrell, Puck was likewise intended, I learned, to represent an outsider.
Fair enough, although surely that comes with the territory. There was, however,
no doubting Reid-Quarrell’s agility, nor the skill of Ran Arthur Braun’s
choreography for him. Quite why Theseus, in a fine vocal and stage display by
Padraic Rowan, was drunk, I am afraid I have no idea, but the use of giant puppets for Pyramus and Thisby was charming.
What did I miss? Christopher Alden’s superlative ENO production, far and away the best I have seen, went
for the pederastic jugular. Would that more would grasp that thorny nettle with
such dramatic verve – be it in this or any other Britten opera. Perhaps, though, I was missing the point. With that, I should
probably sign off. See you on the other side, lost in a far darker wood than
this, with blue passports, yet nothing in the way of fairyland magic and no ‘break
of day’ for at least a couple of decades. If we are lucky.
