Cadogan Hall
David – Harun Ellis Tekin
Jonathas – Tom Liburn
Saül – Massimo Modoni
Achis, Shade of Samuel – Daniel Chmiak
Pythoness – Nadila Chalchenko
Joabel – Ambrose Chiu
Director – Paul Higgins
Designs – Mollie Cheek
Lighting – Daisy Hardwick
Choreography – Namiko Gahler-Ogawa
Dramaturgy – Benjamin Poore
New Sussex Opera Chorus (director: Ruth Kerr)
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| Image: Colin Chapman David (Harun Ellis Tekin), Jonathan (John Lilburn) |
French Baroque opera – as we somewhat
anachronistically call it – remains a rare specimen outre-Manche. Even
Rameau, for whose Hippolyte et Aricie the first artistic usage ‘du
barocque’ was employed, is heard here less than he ought to be and seen far
less often. Charpentier probably come a poor second, more faute de mieux
than anything else, but the opportunity is rare enough that one might have
expected more people to come to Cadogan Hall for this visit from New Sussex
Opera. (Travel chaos doubtless did not help, the District Line suspended and
Sloane Square station thus temporarily closed.) Maybe they did or will in Hove,
Eastbourne, and Winchester; I hope so.
The first and perhaps the most important thing therefore to acknowledge is
gratitude for this staging of Charpentier’s David et Jonathas, sung in
English as David and Jonathan, in a translation by Christopher Cowell;
swiftly followed by a reminder of the important role companies such as this
play in regional and, indeed, national ecologies of the arts. I doubt anyone,
even the woman two rows in front of me doing her best to disrupt proceedings
with light from her mobile telephone, would have regretted attending. That
said, the performance and production were a bit of a curate’s egg, as the cliché
has it. If my preference would have been for modern instruments, that is
considered pretty much impermissible nowadays, and the Bellot Ensemble offered
excellent, stylish playing throughout, whether in moments of intimacy or
grander choral numbers. They certainly held their own in the latter, despite
being considerably outnumbered, and were only obscured, most unfortunately, by over-enthusiastic
wind and thunder effects at the start. Toby Purser’s conducting of instrumentalists
and singers alike was well conceived and executed, highly sympathetic to the
needs of individual artists and groups, whilst nonetheless ensuring overall
coherence and direction throughout the five acts of this tragédie en musique.
If the music often sounded closer than one would expect to Purcell, that was a
matter of English translation rather than a stylistic lapse. Indeed, a virtue
of that decision was a reminder, should any need it, of how European Purcell’s musical
and dramatic languages, as well as general frame of reference, were.
Whether the Jesuit preacher François de Paule Bretonneau’s libretto was intrinsically better served in English is dubious. There are, notoriously, all manner of difficulties in such endeavours of translation, as there are in sung French. It was a pity to lose the more declamatory and stylised elements, but one can argue these things either way. It was nonetheless a surprise – and this, to be fair, is probably more a production than a translation decision – to find a paraphrase of Walt Whitman’s ‘Beat! Beat! Drums’ as the final number, in place of what Cowell dismissively, anachronistically referred to in the programme as the ‘jingoistic colour of this finale’s text’. The idea of ‘the seventeenth century’s unquestioning acceptance of the human cost of war’ is so far from the truth that it is difficult to know where to begin. Let us say that it seems odd to insist on period instruments and then to make such changes from a standpoint of alleged ethical superiority. Undercut the text if you wish, preferably by staging, or even interpolate other texts as here, but it might be better to be clear to the audience what you are doing, especially in a work that will hardly have been familiar to all. I do not think that makes me a ‘purist’, but if so, so be it.
Paul Higgins’s production oscillated similarly—and presumably that was the point. For the most part, it seemed set in the mid-twentieth century, certainly an age familiar with war and its devastation, but Saul emerged as a caricatured Louis XIV (I think, or at least someone from his court). Tensions between love and duty, war and peace, came through with relative clarity, as did the fabled homoeroticism of the relationship between David and Jonathan. A stronger dramatic line, however, often proved elusive, in part, I think, because the admittedly resourceful production was trying to do too many things, but also because quality of diction (without titles) was highly variable. If the argument for English relies, as surely it must, on intelligibility, then the former seems lost without the latter.
Otherwise, vocal performances generally did the company credit, and there was little verbal obscurity from the central pair, Harun Ellis Tekin’s David and Tom Lilburn’s Jonathan. Both offered considerable psychological breadth and depth, the challenges of the former haute-contre role relished and met, countertenor voice offering an ironically contemporary replacement for boy soprano in the latter. There was a compelling danger to the relatively few moments in which they came close, as there was to Jonathan’s scene with his father, here played by a dark-hued Massimo Modoni. The pick of the rest for me was probably Ambrose Chiu’s Joabel; I could not help but wish the work offered him more to do and a more sharply defined role. Many smaller characters were performed by members of the chorus stepping forward. If, inevitably, some proved stronger than others, there was likewise much to admire here, as there was in the general enthusiasm of the chorus, often also called upon to dance.
