Boris Godunov, Hamburg State Opera, 4 October 2023

Images: Brinkhoff/Mögenburg
Boris Godunov (Alexander Tsymbalyuk)

Boris Godunov – Alexander Tsymbalyuk
Andrey Schchelkalov – Alexey Bogdanchikov
Nikitch (Police Officer) – Hubert Kowalczyk
Mityukha – Julian Arsenault
Prince Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky – Matthias Klink
Pimen – Vitalij Kowaljow
Grigory Otrepiev – Dovlet Nurgeldiyev
Hostess of the Inn – Marta Swiderska
Varlaam – Ryan Speedo Green
Missail – Jürgen Sacher
Xenia – Olivia Boen
Xenia’s Nurse – Renate Spingler
Fyodor – Kady Evanyshyn
Boyar – Mateusz Lugowski
Holy Fool – Florian Panzieri

Frank Castorf (director)
Wolfgang Gruber (assistant director)
Aleksandar Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretzki (costumes)
Rainer Casper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Severin Renke (video, live camera)
Maryvonne Riedelsheimer (live editing)
Patric Seibert (dramaturgy)

  
Children’s and Youth Choir of the Hamburg State Opera (director: Luiz de Goday)

Chorus of the Hamburg State Opera (director: Eberhard Friedrich)

Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra

Kent Nagano (conductor)

It is, of course, the opera for our time; arguably, it is for many other times too. Boris Godunov, in whatever incarnation – a more complex question than it is even for a Bruckner symphony – has nonetheless come under attack from some frankly bizarre nationalists who consider it should not currently be performed. The Polish National Opera’s Waldemar Piotr Dąbrowski announced cancellation of a Warsaw staging with a string of non sequiturs he could not possibly have believed. Ukrainian protestors mobbed La Scala to demand cancellation there. The country’s Minister of Culture went further and, incredibly, demanded other countries boycott all Russian culture. What on earth do they think happens in the opera? Boris’s reign is hardly characterised by its success; whatever this opera is concerned with, it is certainly not a ‘how to’ guide. It is rather like those strange people who think Hitler might have been politically inspired by the Ring. We can be fairly certain he noticed what happened to Wotan, Siegfried, and any other hero. And if we are to take the claims made for Russian culture seriously, surely we should seek to understand it, as of course we should Polish, Ukrainian, and any other culture: all part of our world.

Frank Castorf’s new production for the Hamburg State Opera is arguably not so new. It was due to open in September 2020, but was thwarted by coronavirus. Three years later, it has its chance in a very changed Europe. (You will struggle to go far in Germany without seeing a Ukrainian flag.) Layers of resonance, like those in the work, make it more rather than less relevant, and show those who would cancel or ban artworks for the fools, as well as the knaves, that they are. All societies write and rewrite their history. All respond to myth as well as to evidence, to the present as well as to the past. This is what we see here, in a Russian Empire whose costumes (brilliantly designed by Adriana Braga Peretzki) may be of the twentieth century, but also look back all the way to the Time of Troubles and beyond, boyars from before Peter the Great had their beards shorn. (Is that not, after all, what Stalin did with his ‘Great Patriotic War’?) These pasts are, in many ways, now, whether in Pimen’s chronicle or the electronically changing and updating battle maps of Boris’s imperial quarters, whose billiard games afford little relaxation, yet provide plentiful metaphors for surrounding machinations.

The writing and the dramatising are the thing. Many of us have probably fallen into the trap of taking Pimen’s witness for the truth. He seems so plausible. Perhaps Grigory/Dmitri did too; that is left rather more to our imagination. And does not the tragedy make more sense if Boris was guilty? (Yet if he was, why not, as dramaturge Patric Seibert points out in an excellent programme essay, give the people what they want? Confess and crush his enemy, who is nowhere near victory, in any case?) Perhaps it would, if this were a ‘classical’ anything, yet the rough edges of Boris, its very problematical qualities, are itself the grit of its drama and, perhaps, of its truth. In this, the 1868-9 version (speaking of ‘original’ or otherwise only muddies the water further), we see and hear, to quote Richard Taruskin in typically trenchant yet not unpersuasive form: ‘a set of scenes very roughly hewn from Pushkin’s unwieldy block of poetic marble, selected according to diverse and unrelated criteria. … Far from showing how carefully Mussorgsky structured his dramatic conception, the first Boris boldly displays a quintessentially realist disdain for a well-made play.’ 

‘No Polish scene?’ I hear you lament. Well, yes or no. For Castorf, permitted a degree of leeway here in the opera house to draw on his theatrical practice of introduction of other texts, fills in some of the gaps on film between scenes. Avaricious, cynical, lustful, and a great deal more: it is difficult to imagine the Grigory and Marina we see there as offering much of a solution for the ever-suffering Russian people, whose manipulation by church and nobility is clearly signalled. So too is that of Poland and the Roman Catholic Church more generally, as we see in the presence, also on film, of John Paul II and dispersal of propaganda leaflets headed by iconic – for once, surely, the term holds – emblems of ‘Solidarność’. More traditional icons are to be seen amongst flags and other emblems too: here is nothing if not a contested sphere.

This is less a revisionist (or, if you prefer, historically informed) portrayal of Boris and his rule than one which, in Shakespearean style, declines to judge and leaves that to us, should we wish. We may, of course, learn more by similarly declining: a controversial message,’ if message it be, right now. We certainly learn more by being afforded the privilege. As the action progresses, framed by yet another superlative revolving set of contrasts and connections from Castorf’s longstanding collaborator Aleksandar Denić, we head towards more than one tragic denouement. There is that of Boris, and what we might read into him as representing: perhaps a more ideal form of Soviet rule? His concern for the people seems genuine enough and he feeds them: a point made clearly here. One thing, moreover, that differentiates Boris from today’s politicians – those in power, anyway – is, as Seibert notes, his a conscience. His personal tragedy, and that, it seems here, of Russia too, is that that conscience proves his undoing; it kills him. A Gorbachev, perhaps? For there is the greater political tragedy too. What comes of nefarious external interference, aided and abetted by the Shuiskys (and Romanovs) within?

Fool (Florian Panzieri)

Boris dead, the set revolves once more for Fyodor to see what the future holds: the swift substitution for socialist realism of Coca-Cola, in the form of a huge, again ‘iconic’ bottle centre stage, with a straw whose colours are that of Yeltsin’s (and Putin’s) Russia. ‘Flow, flow, bitter tears,’ as the Fool would have sung again in a different version; the words nonetheless ring in our ears and the curtain falls. What we have seen, whether on stage, on live video close-up, or on film, and what we have still not seen, that variety of sources notwithstanding, may have helped us make up our own minds. What does Pimen do when he retreats inside? Who is exploiting whom at the Polish court? To what extent, if you will forgive the school examination format, is Boris the victim of psychological manipulation? Or we may emerge all the more confused at the complications of art and reality. There are far worse lessons than that. 

Kent Nagano’s conducting of the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra intrigued me too. On the one hand, some of it sounded what I am tempted to call unidiomatic, though I should not exaggerate: closer to Tchaikovsky (though hardly Rimsky) than to Mussorgsky. Yet if we draw those lessons from the production, what of the musical performance? Should we not beware the idea that there is a correct or true path? If we cannot settle on a text for the work ‘itself’, should we not open that out in other ways? Nowadays, we pride ourselves on appreciating the radicalism of ‘pure’ Mussorgsky, even to the extent of preferring (to my mind, somewhat dubiously) the version heard here. What have we lost in the meantime? And can we seriously maintain that those before did not know what they were doing? For Nagano certainly knew where the music was going and, so it seemed, where it had more broadly come from. It was a reading that complemented and even complicated what we saw in stage, even if sometimes I longed for a little more starkness and bite.

 

Fyodor (Kady Evanyshyn)

In the title role, Alexander Tsymbalyuk offered a similarly thoughtful and complex portrayal: sympathetic yet never banally so. We might trust his witness no more than that of anyone else, but we could certainly trust the alchemy between music, words, and gesture. Matthias Klink’s wheedling Shuisky and Dovlet Nurgeldiyev’s sweet-toned faux-innocence as Grigory made their points in similarly thoughtful ways. Shuisky’s first-hand ‘happening’ to see Boris’s breakdown offered a duly chilling moment. Marta Swiderska presided in colourful, characterful fashion over a raucous hostelry close to the Lithuanian border, Ryan Speedo Green’s Varlaam a properly larger-than-life patron. Vitalij Kowaljow’s Pimen seemed very much the holy man we were given to believe, yet far from ruled out more sinister possibilities. All contributed to the greater whole, as of course did the chorus, whose disappointments, privations, and other sufferings were all too real. Not that they were not in some sense responsible too. Expertly trained by Eberhard Friedrich, with them we knew where we were—or rather, we thought we did.

Don Giovanni, Paris Opéra, 11 March 2022

Opéra Bastille

Don Giovanni – Christian van Horn
Commendatore – Alexander Tsymbalyuk
Donna Anna – Adela Zaharia
Don Ottavio – Pavel Petrov
Donna Elvira – Nicole Car
Leporello – Krzysztof Bączyk
Masetto- Mikhail Timoskenko
Zerlina – Anna El-Khashem

Ivo van Hove (director)
Jan Versweyveld (set designs, lighting)
An D’Huys (costumes)
Isabelle Horovitz (choreography)
Christopher Ash (video)
Jan Vandenhouwe (dramaturgy)

Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris, (chorus master: Ching-Lien Wiu)
Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris
Bertrand de Billy (conductor)

The problem with Don Giovanni, or rather with all too many contemporary approaches to it, whether by directors or audiences (perhaps less musicians), is secular liberals’ inability or refusal to acknowledge its nature as a deeply religious, indeed theological work. It does not tie one down to a single possibility, far from it, but simply to ignore that aspect, likewise its delicate, related balance on the cusp of mythology, serves at best to impoverish and delimit its horizons, and more often to render it and them downright incomprehensible. It is all there in the score, of course, at least as much as in the libretto, still more in the transcendent potentiality of bringing the work to our consciousness, into our bloodstream, in performance; yet liberals, as is their wont, think they know better, all too often lapsing into a skin-deep psychological realism with little to say beyond ‘we neither like nor understand this work, yet consider that to be its fault, not ours’.    

There were signs, I think, that Ivo van Hove and his production team had considered this problem, or at least some issues related to it, although at least during this first revival, they were intermittent and somewhat tentative. (It is always difficult to know what might have been there to start with, not only in staging, but in performance too, though by the same taken, I have seen revivals that have marked a distinct improvement on their first incarnations.) There is little sign of sympathy or admiration with Mozart and Da Ponte’s hero/antihero, which is fine; the work, in many respects disarmingly open, is far from demanding it. Likewise, for very obvious reasons, it is more difficult than once it may have been to accept a more Faustian, some might say nineteenth-century, reading. Was there nonetheless a sense of sin, even mortal sin, remaining? I think there was, perhaps most evidently in Christopher Ash’s arresting video projections onto Jan Versweyveld’s set (stylishly taking in a Classical inheritance with modern response). A vision of souls writhing in something akin to Hell did not seem out of place, but grew out of what had been there all along, neither necessitating nor ruling out divine intervention. Distance between Don Giovanni’s actions and the divine, even if it were only what he himself saw as an ideal version of himself, was clear throughout. He could not live up to his promise, instead tending towards sociopathy (although this could have been made clearer). 

Incipient deconstruction of libertinage—is it more of the ancien régime than of any revolutionary challenge to it?—was somewhat obscured, however, by a disinclination to use social (and political) distinction to bring it out. One need not return to an eighteenth-century society of orders, though one might, to do so, but to level most or all distinctions tends, if one is not careful, to present further difficulties of incomprehension, even incomprehensibility. If Giovanni is neither the ultimate product of a diseased system of privileged liberties, nor a Sadeian-Nietzschean herald of liberty who might lead revaluation of our values, then what is he? How does he manage to get away with it? With Leporello appearing more or less indistinguishable from his master—it can work, as for instance with Peter Sellars’s pair of Harlem twins—the assumption seems to be that the not-very-servant like accomplice stays because ultimately he wants to be like him. Fair enough, but why, given that he is little more than a dislikeable and, more to the point, unsuccessful operator? Moreover, Leporello seemed too close to Giovanni in the first place, not only in often identical costume, but also in his behaviour. I had the impression that the Stone Guest scene was intended to address this, but Leporello’s unwillingness to serve, instead throwing food around and acting more like his master might than his master did, failed ultimately (at least for me) to make much sense. It clashed with words and music, without offering anything in the way of meaningful dramatic counterpoint. Perhaps the arbitrariness was the point; if so, it seemed neither a strong nor coherent enough point to have been worth making. 

This is, of course, a musical drama, and it is perfectly reasonable to say that some at least of such matters might be dealt with by musical means. Alas, Bertrand de Billy is not a conductor likely to make any such, or even other, dramatic points. There were times when, to his credit, he acted as a facilitator for outstanding playing from the Paris Opéra orchestra. Its sweetness of tone in every section was greatly appreciated; likewise sterner passages with considerable backbone. The conductor’s direction, however, proved somewhat listless, individual numbers and even phrases often floating in the moment, then stopping rather than closing, leading nowhere in particular. 

The version of the score—whose decision this was, I do not know—was regrettable too. For once, we did not have an unholy mixture of Prague and Vienna (understandable from the standpoint of singers, yet from no one else’s) but rather what was more or less Vienna. Elvira thus had ‘Mi tradì’; ‘Il mio tesoro’ was replaced with the markedly inferior Leporello-Zerlina duet (its staging, which might have been the making of it, sadly half-hearted); worst, we had cuts in the finale, papered over by that jarring new setting of ‘Resti dunque quel birbon fra Proserpina e Pluton!’ You cannot have it both ways, it might be responded; if you dislike composite versions so much, then you cannot disallow Vienna. Perhaps, but my dislike of ‘traditional’ composite versions rests on their dramatic failure (the finest performance can suspend one’s disbelief, but it must be the finest) and not on their lack of ‘authenticity’. The solution is easy: Prague. Yet no one seems willing to take it. 

Christian van Horn gave an attractive performance of the title role, fully at home in its slippery shifts of style and character, though perhaps ultimately a little lacking in its darkness of soul. Was it a little too genial, especially given the production? There was nonetheless much musically to admire, as there was with Krzysztof Bączyk’s Leporello, though having a darker-toned Leporello compared with his master also posed dramatic problems that seemed to fuse with those of the production. Adela Zaharia and Pavel Petrov made for an outstanding seria pair, clean yet purposeful of line, with coloratura that unquestionably meant something, musically and dramatically. (I actually found myself regretting the loss of Don Ottavio’s second aria.) Much the same might be said of Nicole Car, her interpretation of the mezzo carettere role of Donna Elvira affording considerable erotic as well as more dignified pleasures. Mikhail Timoskenko and Anna El-Khashem were fully at home in the less ambiguously earthy pleasures of Masetto and Zerlina (also a strength of the production, if not fully mirrored in the higher social orders). They exuded immediate attraction—and attractiveness—and were all the better for it, as were we. The Ukrainian bass Alexander Tsymbalyuk received great cheers and applause when taking his curtain call with ‘NO WAR’ emblazoned on his shirt. Rightly so, but it was equally right for his excellent performance as the Commendatore, which offered a rich, dark nobility whose political and religious implications might fruitfully have been engaged with elsewhere.

Don Giovanni, Royal Opera, 14 February 2014

 

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Leporello – Alex Esposito

Donna Anna – Malin Byström
Don Giovanni – Mariusz Kwiecień
Commendatore – Alexander Tsyambalyuk
Don Ottavio – Antonio Poli
Donna Elvira – Véronique Gens
Zerlina – Elizabeth Watts
Masetto – Dawid Kimberg

Kasper Holten (director)

Es Devlin (set designs)
Luke Halls (video)
Anja Vang Kragh (costumes)
Bruon Poet (lighting)
Sine Fabricis (choreography)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Nicola Luisotti (conductor)

 

When, a fortnight ago, this production of Don Giovanni opened at the Royal Opera House, it seemed to have created uproar. Whilst I should have liked to go without hearing anything about it, that seemed well-nigh impossible in this case. From some of the comments, one would have thought that the love-child of Frank Castorf and Hans Neuenfels had been delivered – not that I should necessarily have minded that at all. I can only assume that half the audience must have been made up of a UKIP convention, having somehow found time to rest its collective eyes from perusing the latest pensées of Jan Moir and Melanie Phillips. What I saw was not only a thoughtful, intelligent, coherent staging, but actually if anything rather a ‘traditional’ one.

 

The premise of Kasper Holten’s production is interesting, yet hardly ‘difficult’. Don Giovanni is not merely imagining his story, but in a sense writing it. Though not identical, there is perhaps some kinship here with Holten’s Copenhagen Ring, in which Brünnhilde discovers ‘her’ story. In any case, the idea is not thrust in one’s face, and one could probably leave it to one side, should one wish. Was it, then, the projections which so offended? It is difficult to understand how or why. Aside from inscribing the names of some of Giovanni’s conquests upon the walls, they simply offer an elegant solution to the problem of shifting scenes. Doubtless this might have been accomplished through multiple scene changes, but the sense of an unchanging framework – Giovanni’s ego? – transformed according to circumstance, whim, and narrative would thereby have been lost. Perhaps most dramatically – in a true rather than sensationalist sense – this was accomplished through the creation of a labyrinth, not at all inappropriate to Mozart’s second-act music, straining as it is towards the Second Viennese School, Berg in particular. (Doubtless UKIP would not like that, but then it would probably be happier with the collected works of Eric Coates – or perhaps Dame Vera Lynn.) The great sextet works splendidly, characters compartmentalised, confused, attempting yet failing to make their ways out, agency of their own undermined by the central character’s control – but is it control? – of the narrative. The shift of the action to the nineteenth century might worry some, I suppose, but it is hardly Calixto Bieito – his still the best staging I have seen in the theatre of this work – and  added a layer of reminiscence to the conception of narrative, itself perhaps reminiscent of Holten’s Onegin as well as his Ring. These, I hesitate, are my readings; they may well not have been the director’s, but that openness to reading seems to me in itself a virtue of the staging.

 

I have one major reservation, concerning the ending. Not the Stone Guest Scene and its aftermath as such: they are well handled, leaving Giovanni on stage alone to cope with the existential devastation of his own creation, that issue of ‘creation’, be it of the self, of others, of narrative, an important point throughout. The ‘moral’ is sung from the pit, whilst he breaks down, Hell being the ‘written’ voices in his head. In this context, I can understand why Holten might have considered cutting the first part of the scena ultima; it indeed makes some sense in terms of his concept. It should probably, however, have been reconsidered. Contrary to the nonsense one spectacularly uninformed journalist – I wrote to him to point this out, but he did not dignify me with a response – was spouting, there is absolutely no precedent for this in Mozart’s own practice, such as we know it. For it was not the case that the scene was omitted entirely. (That may have happened in Vienna in 1788; we simply do not know.) Nor did the performance adopt the possibility of a cut within the scene, running from ‘Ah! certo è l’ombra che m’incontrò!’ to ‘Resti dunque quel birbon’, there being four ‘new’ bars, marked Andante, to facilitate that transition. Rather it sounded as if, in recorded music terms, we had simply skipped a track. In a production that often shows itself alert to the score as well as to the text, this was a pity – but a revival will offer occasion to reconsider. There is also the matter of the typical dreadful conflation of Vienna and Prague versions earlier on: regrettable, certainly, but sadly typical of most stagings. It really is time for directors and, still more conductors, to stand up to singers, audiences, whoever else might be longing for extra arias, however heart-rendingly beautiful, and say no; the drama must come first.

 

I had also been led by many to believe that something outlandish was to be offered by Nicola Luisotti. Now this was not Barenboim or Muti, let alone Klemperer or Furtwängler. But it was for the most part a well conducted, stylish performance. There were occasions when tension sagged, sadly more than a little during the oddly fire-less – and I do not mean to invoke the unlamented Francesca Zambello here! – Stone Guest Scene. But there was a sense of a greater whole, tempi were mostly sensible, and there was the most part a welcome degree of flexibility. Mozart’s music was certainly not harried. The strings played sweetly, the woodwind players often magically euphonious. Even when Luisotti took decisions from which I might have dissented, for instance, in reducing the strings for ‘Ah, fuggi, il traditor!’ there was discernible reason for his choice, likewise for his adding harpsichord to the mix here. It was clearly an attempt to highlight the kinship with Handel, even if some of us think that is better left to speak for itself.

 

As for the much-exaggerated continuo madness: well, I should prefer a modern piano to a fortepiano, but I can see no particular harm in offering fortepiano and harpsichord. They offered not only variety but also difference of response to situation, and if Luisotti’s fortepiano playing sometimes drew attention to itself a little too much, I have heard far worse. A strange switching between major and minor – yes, I suppose one could say that it is characteristic of the work as a whole – did little for the end of one recitative, and its deployment there seemed oddly arbitrary, but again, I have heard worse.

 

Mariusz Kwiecień shone in the title role: masculine, effortlessly seductive – it was, after all, his character’s imagination running riot – and unabashedly sexy. It would have been difficult, most likely impossible, for anyone to resist his call. Certainly his womenfolk did not, could not, and that was as much a matter of detailed attention to the libretto as to the musical line, operatic alchemy properly in evidence. Alex Esposito proved an alert, quicksilver Leporello. Malin Byström’s Donna Anna, clearly loving every minute of her seduction, could be somewhat wayward vocally; at its best, however, it was a powerful assumption, which placed the role and its emotional confusion firmly in the Romantic camp of ETA Hoffmann. Véronique Gens seemed to be having something of an off-day as Donna Elvira, one of her recitatives problematical in terms of intonation, though ‘Mi tradì’ itself recovered nicely. Elizabeth Watts was a perky, strong-minded Zerlina, full of her own seductive gifts, as was shown in her interaction with Dawid Kimberg’s contrastingly bluff Masetto. Antonio Poli displayed a sweet-toned tenor as Don Ottavio, though his intonation wandered a little at times. The Commendatore, as sung by Alexander Tsymbalyuk, made his mark well, whilst remaining integrated into the production’s dramatic framework. Choral singing was excellent throughout.

 

Sadly, the biggest problem lay with the audience. If UKIP moral outrage were less in evidence, boorish behaviour certainly remained. The bar is low, I admit, but this must have been one of the worst-behaved audiences I have yet encountered in the house. Coughing levels suggested a tuberculosis epidemic. Those I could see all around me made no effort to stifle their outbursts; I shall be fortunate indeed if I have not succumbed myself by this evening. Their chattering was, if anything, worse still, likewise the sweet-wrapper opening, and the strange, quite un-erotic groping I was compelled to witness in front of me. But the nadir came when the Catalogue Aria had to pause for a minute whist a gang of morons applauded in the middle.  Luisotti should, admittedly, have pressed ahead, but the fault was not really his. How difficult is it to understand that the first rule of attending a performance, and indeed of social interaction in general, should be to show consideration for others? This is not a matter of some mysterious ‘concert etiquette’, as contrarians would have it; it is what any decent human being would do, whether on a train, in a bus queue, or at the opera. Perhaps we need to move to a Stasi-like system in which behaviour is monitored and miscreants are barred from the premises…