Oberon, New Sussex Opera, 25 November 2014

Cadogan Hall

 

 

Oberon – Adam Tunnicliffe

Puck – Siân Griffiths

Sir Huon – Adrian Dwyer

Sherasmin – Damian Thantrey

Reiza – Sally Silver

Fatima – Carolyn Dobbin

Five Fairies – Nisha McIntyer-Burnei, Beatrice Monaco, Michael Diamini, Rachel Farago, Rachel Shouksmith

 

 

Harry Fehr (director)

Charlie Lucas (lighting)

Victoria Newlyn (choreography)

 

 

St Paul’s Sinfonia

New Sussex Opera Chorus

Nicholas Jenkins (conductor)

 

What on earth to do with Oberon, Weber’s last opera, written – are you listening, the Royal Opera? – for Covent Garden? Many consider it to contain his greatest music. I am not sure I should go so far; or, perhaps better, the genre with which Weber was lumbered, made it simply impossible for the music to tell as it should. If we think that Purcell had it bad with the dreadful mess of ‘semi-opera’, at least he had Dryden, although, as Sir Donald Tovey put it, ‘Our first and greatest man of genius in dramatic music was … condemned to inaugurate a tradition whereby English opera consisted of music that merely added a series of lyric and spectacular digressions to a play which, if good at all, would be better without the digressions.’ Weber, alas, had James Robinson Planché, whose libretto for Oberon for Tovey ‘represents an advance on [semi-opera] … inasmuch as the play would not be better without the digressions,’ thus leading up to what, regrettably, remains an unforgettable and largely unarguable claim: Weber ‘poured his last and finest music into this pig-trough.’ A sequel to A Midsummer Night’s Dream might seem ill-advised at the best of times; this, however, was certainly not the best of times.

 

 

And so, it was a brave and highly laudable decision for New Sussex Opera to stage Oberon. Nothing, I am afraid, can begin to redeem the libretto, whose lack of dramaturgical coherence is truly a thing of wonder. (One is almost left wishing that England had truly been a Land ohne Musik at the time.) Considering a roughly comparable – and far from un-problematical – work, Schubert’s Fierrabras, does not help; but then nothing can, save perhaps for the deconstructionist reimagining production of one’s dreams. Neuenfels or Herheim perhaps? That, of course, is not what we have, or could have have, here. Harry Fehr has limited resources and for the most part elects to play things straight, save, perhaps for some dubious – or dubiously executed? – choreography. Dress is more or less ‘modern’ but not really in the service of any particular ‘concept’. Chairs are perhaps over-used; waving them around to depict a storm seemed on the verge of exhausting some members of the chorus. A few sheets might have done the job better. But Fehr’s is clearly a thankless task and the contours of the drama, such as it is, register clearly enough.

It was a great pity that the orchestra could not have been augmented. (Might not some amateur string players have been found?) A string section of 4.2.2.2.1, even in a smallish hall, is bound, with the best will in the world, to sound undernourished at times for Weber’s score. That said, the players of St Paul’s Sinfonia for the most part responded admirably to Nicholas Jenkins’s sensitive, keenly dramatic traversal. Flexible and cultivated, with plenty of direction: his was a reading worthy both of Weber and of the gamble the company had made in mounting the enterprise. I should be keen to hear more of the conductor in such and indeed other repertoire.

The chorus had some shakier moments but for the most part acquitted itself well, summoning up a good, full sound for the close. Soloists did their best to bring to life the ‘characters’. Adrian Dwyer showed no sign of tiring from the difficult demands of the tenor hero, Sir Huon, offering creditable nobility of tone throughout. Sally Silver coped very well indeed with the loss of a monitor at the beginning of the second act, leaving her unable to see the conductor at all during ‘Ocean! Thou mighty monster!’ If her intonation was not always perfect, slips did not unduly distract, and she again invested the role with a dignity it perhaps does not entirely deserve. Carolyn Dobbin proved a lively Fatima, drawing one in as much as one could reasonably expect. Adam Tunnicliffe’s Oberon sounded destined – and I hope it will be – for a larger hall or theatre. Most importantly, then, we had a good opportunity to experience this opera ‘live’, for which thanks and congratulations should go to New Sussex Opera.

 

 

 

 

King Priam, English Touring Opera, 13 February 2014

Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House

King Priam – Roderick Earle

Hecuba – Laure Meloy
Hector – Grant Doyle
Andromache – Camilla Roberts
Paris – Nicholas Sharratt
Helen – Niamh Kelly
Hermes – Adrian Dwyer
Achilles – Charne Rochford
Patroclus – Piotr Lempa
Old Man – Andrew Slater
Nurse – Clarissa Meek
Young Guard – Adam Tunnicliffe
Paris (boy) – Thomas Delgado-Little
Hunters – Stuart Haycock, Johnny Herford, Henry Manning

James Conway (director)

Anna Fleischle (designs)
Guy Hoare (lighting)

Orchestra of English Touring Opera

Chorus of English Touring Opera

Michael Rosewell (conductor)

 

 

Sir Michael Tippett’s music has suffered a fate typical, though by no means always the case, for composers following their deaths. However, there are signs that a period of relative neglect, despite the continued advocacy of musicians such as the late Sir Colin Davis, might now be giving way to a reassessment. For instance, the Wigmore Hall has been putting on a Tippett retrospective, laudable for far more than its courage in breaking away from the annual anniversary grind. I speak from a position of considerable ignorance myself, the only other Tippett opera I have seen in the theatre being The Midsummer Marriage (Royal Opera, 2005); my concert and recorded music exposure has not been particularly great either. I am delighted to report, though, that the ever-valiant English Touring Opera’s new staging of King Priam proved a triumphant success, making me keen to hear more, despite having been somewhat nonplussed by what I experienced as the blandness of The Midsummer Marriage, not to mention its problematical dramaturgy. (It seems more often than not to be audiences’ favourite Tippett opera, but I doubt that it will ever be mine.)

 

King Priam is perhaps, above all, an opera of great ambition, often fulfilled. The interiority of much of the dramatic conflict in some senses recalls A Child of Our Time, but whereas it proves, for some of us, near fatal in that oratorio, here, at least for the most part, it offers an alternative standpoint from which to consider the workings of fate and politics. Interestingly, director, James Conway views the material very differently, remarking in his programme note, ‘It has been commented that Priam is not an opera about war, but about choice. I am not so sure that this says what is needful. … Choice, it seems to me right now, is not a theme, any more than Fate is a theme. War and beauty are themes.’ Beauty, yes, I thought – but less so war, even in Conway’s own production. Perhaps that simply goes to show that staging and work alike offer the possibility for different understandings, irrespective to an extent of ‘intention’.

 

Certainly Tippett’s score, in Iain Farrington’s excellent reduced orchestration, came across with visceral power and beauty alike, for which great credit must go both to ETO’s orchestra and Michael Rosewell’s wise direction. There were a few occasions when ensemble faltered, but they were quickly rectified and frankly of marginal importance. More than once, I was put in mind of some of Henze’s roughly contemporary writing, for instance in Der Prinz von Homburg, though I suspect the similarity in timbres may arise more from shared Stravinskian roots as ‘influence’ in either direction. And yet, whilst some music might occasionally put one in mind of other composers, the dramatic use to which it is put seemed to me very much Tippett’s own – and certainly did in what seemed to me an estimably idiomatic performance. I was heartened after the event to read David Clarke’s New Grove article upon the composer, which said much the same thing with specific reference to Priam’s encounter with his second son, Paris, whom he had ordered slain as a baby and does not yet recognise:

 

The instantaneous – almost cinematic – shift of subject from Priam to Paris in the first bar of the example is articulated by the division of orchestral forces and the abrupt switch of pitch collections. Yet while the vertical conflation of tonic, dominant and subdominant triads of E-flat in the initial, defining sonority of Paris’s music could be seen as a further Stravinskian touch, the disposition behind it – to intensify the expressive potential of tonal resources rather than interpose an ironizing distance – is entirely Tippett’s.

 

Moreover, the clearly Brechtian reworking – Oliver Soden’s valuable note makes reference to Tippett’s recent encounter with the work of the Berliner Ensemble – s of the Iliad is again unmistakeably personal, and, one senses, a definite inspiration to Conway’s staging. In that connection, it is worth mentioning the sense of kinship I noted with Alexander Goehr’s Promised End, given its premiere by ETO (again with Conway directing). Anna Fleischle’s designs and Guy Hoare’s lighting assisted greatly not only with the screwing up of dramatic tension but also the differentiation of place between Troy and the Greek camp. A real sense was conveyed of Tippett’s mediation between Homer and the present. And the final scene brought a splendid reminiscence of – and indeed, Brechtian distancing from – Boris Godunov, again whether ‘intentional’ or otherwise.

 

Roderick Earle’s portrayal of the title role played no mean part in accomplishing that, of course. Dignified, touching, and with considerable power, this drew one in further and further as time went on: Tippett vanquishing Brecht, as it were. Nicholas Sharratt was likewise splendid as ‘playboy’ (Priam’s own term) Paris, narcissistic vainglory and compelling attraction two sides of the same coin. Thomas Delgado-Little did a truly excellent job as Paris’s younger self: one of the most self-assured and dramatically convincing performances I have seen from a boy treble. Grant Doyle offered a properly masculine foil as Hector: here, at least, I could sense what Conway said about war. Charne Rochford’s Achilles seemed strained (miscast?) earlier on, intonation wavering considerably, but improved greatly, the scene between him and Priam moving and fatally – in more than one sense – menacing. Laure Meloy and Camilla Roberts both gave sterling performances, as Hecuba and Andromache respectively, whilst Niamh Kelly succeeded to an excellent degree in portraying the strange, chilling emptiness of Helen. (The kiss between her and Priam certainly unsettled in the best way.) All other members of the cast impressed in one way or another. Perhaps especially notable were Adrian Dwyer’s properly mercurial (sorry!) Hermes, Andrew Slater’s stentorian Old Guard, Clarissa Week’s knowingly wise Nurse, and Adam Tunnicliffe’s earnest, finely-sung Young Guard. As in all the best company performances, the whole was greater, considerably greater, than the sum of the parts.

 

I was delighted to see Kasper Holten in the audience and trust that this will have made him consider the possibilities on the main stage as well as in the Linbury for Tippett and other post-war composers, be they British or not. As I wrote a little while ago, when sharing clips from a BBC documentary about the Hamburg premiere of Alexander Goehr’s Arden Must Die, made in those dim-and-distant days, inconceivable to most of us, when BBC television cared about such things: ‘Rolf Liebermann's words are especially instructive. As Hamburg Intendant, he felt it artistically necessary to commision an opera from Goehr; the composer's nationality was supremely irrelevant to him. Covent Garden, kindly take note! Liebermann commissioned no fewer than twenty-six operas during his Hamburg tenure; others include Henze's Der Prinz von Homburg and Penderecki's The Devils. Opera and art in general must never consign themselves to the museum. That way they will succeed only in signing their death warrants.’ We need to hear Henze, Goehr, Birtwistle, Zimmermann, Stockhausen, Dallapiccola, Nono, Lachenmann, Peter Maxwell Davies, Messiaen, Sciarrino, Pascal Dusapin, et al., et al.: the list is almost endless, and it is endless before we even begin to consider the fates of Gluck, Rameau, Haydn, Weber, and so many other composers from earlier eras; what we certainly do not need are any more Verdi, Donizetti, or Massenet, to name but three current, bizarre obsessions of the Royal Opera and many other companies. Three cheers, then, to ETO for both its enterprise and achievement!

 

ETO’ s current season also includes Paul Bunyan and The Magic Flute. Not every work will be performed in every venue, but the company will perform between now and the end of May in London, Truro, Poole, Wolverhampton, Snape, Cheltenham, Leicester, Sheffield, York, Canterbury, Norwich Crawley, Coventry, Exeter, Durham, Perth, and Cambridge. To read more about ETO and forthcoming performances, please click here.

Fidelio, English National Opera, 25 September 2013

Coliseum

Florestan – Stuart Skelton

Leonore – Emma Bell
Rocco – James Creswell
Marzelline – Sarah Tynan
Jaquino – Adrian Dwyer
Don Pizarro – Philip Horst
Don Fernando – Roland Wood
First Prisoner – Anton Rich
Second Prisoner – Ronald Nairne

Calixto Bieito (director)

Rebecca Ringst (set designs)
Tim Mitchell (lighting)
Ingo Krügler (costumes)

Chorus and Additional Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Aidan Oliver)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Edward Gardner (conductor)

 

More than two centuries on, Fidelio may well remain the most misunderstood opera of all. Irrelevant and downright stupid criticisms continue to be made of it, those voicing them apparently blind to what one would have thought the blindingly obvious truth that it not only represents, but instantiates the bourgeois idea of freedom at its most inspiring, apparently deaf to the symphonism of this most symphonic of operas, that idea of freedom explicitly expressed through the structural dialectics of Beethoven’s score. What a relief, then, for ENO’s new Fidelio, a co-production with the Bavarian State Opera, where it has already been seen, to be staged both as an expression and a deconstruction of that idea. Such problem as there were lay with Edward Gardner’s Harnoncourt-lite conducting, but Calixto Bieito’s imaginative, probing production offered one of those rare evenings in which a staging could more or less redeem a disappointing conductor. For that, of course, an often excellent cast should also share the credit.

 

Recent performances of Fidelio have tended to make a point of messing around with the work: re-ordering, new dialogue, and so forth. I have never quite understood why; the libretto is no literary masterpiece, but that is hardly the point, for it serves Beethoven’s purpose. Bieito – I assume this to be his doing – also makes changes; this was probably the first occasion on which I found the choices worth making, not as a blueprint for other performances, but simply as a valid performing choice in this particular context. Alarm bells would normally ring were a performance to open with the third Leonore Overture; even Daniel Barenboim, in a magnificent Proms concert performance, failed to convince that such was a wise move, the overture tending to overshadow, almost to render the opera unnecessary. Yet, following a blinding light and our first reading from Borges, the appearance of the pitiless, intermittently neon-lit labyrinth, a fine piece of design by Rebecca Ringst, not only sets up our expectations – the hopelessness of blind alleys and imprisonment for all concerned – but, in tandem with the overture in which Beethoven essentially presents a symphonic poem, both heightens and deconstructs those expectations. As an audience, also imprisoned in our different ways, we will the prisoners to escape, we begin to ask ourselves how we too might escape, and, perhaps most importantly of all, we already begin to appreciate that this will be a far tougher battle than Beethoven might ever have conceived. That the drama has in a sense been played out before a note has been sung and we have progressed not an inch is, or ought to provoke sober reflection. (The ridiculous booing form small sections of the audience, doubtless fresh, as a Twitter friend suggested, from the UKIP party conference, suggested, sadly if all too predictably, as another Twitter friend commented, that those most in need of the production’s message would never trouble themselves to heed it. At least, however, we can take a small degree of comfort from their discomfort.)

 

As ever, with Bieito, the craft of stage direction is exemplary; what we see is what he intends us to see. (Yes, this ought to be a given, yet all too often it is anything but.) I could not help but wonder whether survival of dialogue, not necessary all of it, might have aided understanding of who the characters were, but of course, as stated previously, the characters, such as they are, are really not the point in this of all operas. Borges and, on one occasion, Cormac McCarthy (as I learned from the programme) do sterling work instead: allowing us to think for ourselves, to make correspondences, rather than necessarily have our vision restricted to Guantánamo Bay, or wherever it might be (perfectly valid though that realistic approach may be). It is a pity that David Pountney’s translation veers all over the place: sometimes offering attention-seeking rhymes, sometimes curiously Victorian formulations, sometimes more present-day demotic. Yet even though it sounds in serious need of editorial attention, or better still rejection in favour of the German Beethoven set, there are phrases that stick with one, phrases that interact with the staging, to have us think. ‘Crimes against humanity’, a sadly everyday phrase in many respects: how could a London audience not think of a war criminal still very much amongst us such as Tony Blair? Bieito’s relative abstraction – unusual for him, and highly telling – permits the space for reflection, whilst listening to the progress of Beethoven’s drama.

 

It is that sureness of musical touch that perhaps permits ‘liberties’, which, when recounted in the abstract, might for some sound too much. Leonore III already used, we hear – this a real coup de théâtre in visual and musical terms – at the once ‘traditional’ juncture, music from, or perhaps beckoning us to, heaven, a Heiliger Dankgesang whose numinous qualities, for which, many thanks to the excellent Heath Quartet, suspended in cages from the ceiling, transcend the drama, question it, and are in turn questioned by it. Bieito undercuts all-too-easy expectations by introducing a sense of distancing already between Leonore and Florestan. And the caged musicians: are they a Stockhausen-like flight of fancy? Are they angels of Beethovenian mercy? Are they too imprisoned, sheltered from ‘reality’, whatever that might be? Are they, as the minority audience reaction would suggest, fated to be ignored, whatever the truth – so Beethovenian a word – of what they might attempt to express? We must think for ourselves, and tragically, an administered world, to borrow Adorno’s formulation, wishes to block them out, as sure as its gaolers wish us to think of opera as nothing more than entertainment.

 

Entirely unprepared as I was for that challenge to the musical work, provocative in the best sense, it made as full as conceivable an impact upon me. Likewise Bieito’s trump card in the final scene. Don Fernando makes his appearance as a stereotypical eighteenth-century ‘operatic’ character in a box above the stage. His increasingly bizarre and unpredictable behaviour, not to mention outrageous feyness, have us realise, both there and when he comes down to the stage, that rescue is not all that it is cracked up to be. Indeed, though we are told that it has happened – many of the prisoners are handed placards, personally signed, to signal their alleged liberation – we wonder whether that is just a trick, perhaps an ‘operatic’ trick. There is no doubting Beethoven’s sincerity, his greatness; that endures. But we also know that the administered world endures. The labyrinth does not retreat; it is simply, as New Labour would have had it, ‘rebranded’. Political action, whether individual or en masse, is both absolutely necessary and quite hopeless. Fate, or rather the forces of late-capitalist production, will find another way to trick us, in the manner of Don Fernando; his apparently ‘arbitrary’ shooting of Florestan, not slain but wounded, a truly shocking moment. And the return of blinding light has us appreciate anew the perils both of the cyclical and of all-too-easy identification of forces such as ‘light’ with progress.

 

The contrast between Beethovenian optimism, the sheer goodness of the score, and its staged deconstruction would of course have been greater still, had it not been for Gardner’s listless conducting. Often simply too fast – the main body of the overture but a single, albeit extreme example – the problem went beyond that; like Harnoncourt, the conductor seemed to have little or no ear for harmonic rhythm. Numbers did not extend beyond themselves; nor did that seem in itself a deconstructive strategy, more a matter of reductive domestification by default. To a certain extent, a grander canvas revealed itself during the second act, but structural concerns still went for very little. There is no one ‘correct’ way to conduct Fidelio: consider the success of such entirely different approaches as those of Furtwängler and Klemperer, or latterly, Barenboim and Colin Davis; but that does not mean that anything goes. We had, as I said, to rely upon the staging to accomplish double the work; almost miraculously, it accomplished something not so very short of that.

 

The singers’ accomplishment was also not to be disregarded. Stuart Skelton offered the finest Florestan I have heard since Jonas Kaufmann: powerful yet vulnerable, clearly committed to the ideas of both Beethoven and Bieito. If only he had not been harried by Gardner’s seeming desire to catch an earlier train home. Emma Bell was an impressive Leonore, her ‘Abscheulicher’ almost beyond reproach, though certain coloratura later on was skated over. More importantly, though, her identification not only with the role but with that all-important idea of freedom, shone through. Sarah Tynan proved an uncommonly excellent Marzelline, cleanly sung, vivacious, and equally committed in dramatic terms. Though Jaquino is a smaller role, Adrian Dwyer offered similar virtues when called upon. James Creswell was a likeable yet properly tortured Rocco. The only vocal disappointment was Philip Horst’s often lightweight Pizarro.  Choral singing was of a high standard throughout: a credit both to the singers and to Aidan Oliver as chorus master.

 

Anyone, then, who cares about opera as drama, who believes that it is something more than expensive entertainment, needs to see – and to hear – Bieito’s Fidelio. Reactions will differ, but those willing to be challenged will find themselves properly inspired and unsettled.   

 

Wozzeck, English National Opera, 11 May 2013

The Coliseum

(sung in English)

Wozzeck – Leigh Melrose
Marie – Sara Jakubiak
Captain – Tom Randle
Doctor – James Morris
Drum Major – Bryan Register
Andres – Adrian Dwyer
Margret – Claire Presland
First Apprentice – Andrew Greenan
Second Apprentice – James Cleverton
Madman – Peter van Hulle
Marie’s Child – Harry Polden

Carrie Cracknell (director)
Ann Yee (choreography)
Tom Scutt (set designs)
Oliver Townsend, Naomi Wilkinson (costumes)
Jon Clarke (lighting)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Handley)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Edward Gardner (conductor)

 

If a production, and I include musical as well as staging elements here, has one more strongly confirmed in one’s judgement that Wozzeck is not only the greatest opera of the twentieth century but one of the greatest from any century, then it has accomplished its principal goal admirably. The first night of ENO’s new production unquestionably achieved that, reminding one yet again how paltry most operas, whenever they were written, seem when placed anywhere near Berg’s shattering drama. Tears certainly came to this reviewer’s eyes more than once during the third act, only to be superseded by a numb sense of utter horror at the child’s future prospects, or rather lack thereof, in the final scene as music and drama so chillingly came to their celebrated halt: no conclusion, simply the most abject desolation.

 

Carrie Cracknell’s contemporary – to us – production may not encompass everything suggested by Berg’s work, but most sensible people would agree that a single interpretation need not; it is perfectly possible to concentrate upon certain ideas, and to leave others for another time. There may be losses entailed in that course of action – for me, the Doctor’s experiments sat somewhat oddly, some might even say nonsensically, with the rest of the action – but there will be gains too. We are in a barracks town, suffering from disorder both social and, in Wozzeck’s own case, post-traumatic. The wretched vision – is it only his? Or is it real? – of a coffin draped in the Union flag, its pallbearers, and a soldier in action hammers home the point (some might say a little too heavily, but I was won over). The squalor of Marie’s council flat tells its own tale, as does the centrality, somehow greater than one generally senses, of the tavern to this town’s horrible, hopeless life. Though not a barracks town, and Aldershot or somewhere might have been a better example, something about the portrayal suggested a certain, perhaps rather dated, view of a northern city such as Hull.

 

The odd thing about Wozzeck, set against such a backdrop, is that he seems less ill, more philosopher. There is of course an element of that in the opera in any case, but it is brought out more strongly here. Madness gives way to ‘Hamlet in Hull’, who eventually resolves, with a greater degree of calculation than one might expect, to kill Marie and then himself; we seem more to be in the realm of EastEnders perhaps, as Marie’s flat floods – there is no lake as such – and turns partly red. One also senses more strongly than usual that this is one level the story of a crime, explicable yes, but still a murder, one that led, of course, to a celebrated trial. (The city museum in Leipzig to this day has a fascinating section of its permanent exhibition on the original case as well as Büchner and Berg.) Violence hits home too, whether that of Wozzeck’s crime, that of the Drum-Major’s vile abuse of him, or that simply endemic to society both particular and general.  

 

Designs are properly ghastly, enhancing claustrophobia and the town’s desolate tackiness. The former quality hits home all the more strongly given the excellent decision to have all locations present on stage at once, sometimes used and/or lit, sometimes not; there is no escape from what becomes very much a community drama in the most negative sense.  There is perhaps a sense that this was conceived more as a piece of spoken theatre, or at least closer to that tradition than might in principle be ideal, but on those terms, it works very well, Richard Stokes’s exemplary translation contributing powerfully to the drama, without drawing undue attention to itself.

 

I was fascinated by Edward Gardner’s conducting of the score. Gardner’s method is certainly not what I have become accustomed to, nor what I am ultimately likely to favour, but the well-nigh neo-Classical bent imparted to Berg’s closed forms brought revelations of its own. Rarely if ever can the inner workings, the ‘constructed’ quality, of Berg’s score have been lain so bare. The ENO Orchestra, a very few, quite forgivable, slips aside, followed his direction admirably indeed. There was certainly hyper-Romantic, expressionistic loss, especially earlier on, yet the final Interlude retained most of its horrifying impact; at last, it seemed, there was opportunity properly to cut loose. As an additional standpoint, quite distinct from those offered by great interpreters such as Abbado, Boulez, Böhm, and Barenboim, this musical narrative of mechanisation briefly wrenched into human subjectivity, if only in death, had me thinking in various ways not only about the score but about the drama as a whole.

 

Leigh Melrose made a wonderfully human hero, as starkly opposed to such mechanisation as to the barbarity of his social conditions. The aforementioned ‘Hamlet’ quality of philosophising and indecision was at least as much his accomplishment as the production’s, not quite so ‘intellectual’ as Fischer-Dieskau’s controversial portrayal, but complex in a different and not entirely unrelated fashon. Marie is a very difficult role to bring off convincingly; ideally, one needs to be Waltraud Meier, but what to do if one is not? Too much of the whore and not enough of the angel, or the other way around? Sara Jakubiak managed the tricky balance very well, soaring moments of radiance pitted against the grime of quotidian existence. Tom Randle was, as usual, excellent beyond the call of duty as the Captain, he and James Morris as the Doctor offering exemplary clarity of line and diction, as well as fully inhabiting their flawed characters. (We should, of course, remember that their flaws are in large part also to be attributed to the viciousness of society; Wozzeck and Marie are not the only victims.) Bryan Register’s thuggish Drum Major horrified in the best sense, whilst Adrian Dwyer and Clare Presland offered finely-etched portrayals of the ‘other’, surviving couple, Andres (perhaps his wheelchair proved a cliché too far?) and Margret. Presland’s crazed, dramatically truthful moment in the tavern limelight proved a powerful moment in its own right, presaging Wozzeck’s deeds yet also offering an alternative. Peter van Hulle offered another example of truth in madness, the hallowed tradition of the Fool cast in new light. Harry Polden – how one felt for him, cowed under Marie’s kitchen table as she entertained the Drum Major in her off-stage bedroom! – and the other children had us shiver, shudder, turn in righteous anger against the wickedness of a society, our society, which we know will perpetrate the same horrors upon them. Who cares? Certainly not our political class; yet do we? Truly? Wir arme Leut’...