La bohème, English National Opera, 29 October 2014

(sung in English)

 

Coliseum

 

Marcello – George van Bergen

Rodolfo – David Butt Philip

Colline – Barnaby Rea

Schaunard – George Humphreys

Benoît, Alcindoro – Andrew Shore

Mimì – Angel Blue

Parpignol – Philip Daggett

Musetta – Jennifer Holloway

Policeman – Paul Sheehan

Foreman – Andrew Tinkler

Jonathan Miller (director)

Natascha Metherell (revival director)

Isabella Bywater (designs)

Jean Kalman, Kevin Sleep (lighting)

Chorus of the English National Opera

Orchestra of the English National Opera (chorus master: Genevieve Ellis)

Gianluca Marcianò (conductor)

 

Jonathan Miller’s production of La bohème for ENO, shared with Cincinnati Opera, sits uneasily, at least as revived by Natascha Metherell, between comedy and tragedy. Perhaps, you might say, that is as it should be; there is certainly an element of taste in such matters. However, it seems to me that a highly creditable desire to explore the darker elements – and they are hardly difficult to find! – in Puccini’s opera is somewhat undone by moments closer to farce. The greyness of an imagined Paris inspired by Cartier-Bresson works very well, Isabella Bywater’s designs in themselves a great visual strength, waiting to be relieved by brief, or at least relatively brief, moments of colour. Café Momus makes a particular impression in that respect. However, I could not help but wonder whether some of the things – entrances, concealment, and so on – one sees going on around the sets would be better left unseen. Elements of ‘surprise’ – yes, many of us know the opera all too well, but that is a different matter – are lost, without the ‘workings’ adding anything genuinely new. Still, it is a relief not to have anything too sugary; the last thing Puccini of all composers needs is sentimentalising. Doubtless I have been spoilt by seeing Stefan Herheim’s urgently compelling version on DVD: the only staging of this work that has really revealed anything at all to me. Recommended to Puccini-lovers and –sceptics alike, indeed to anyone who believes that opera can and should be something more than a tired museum piece.

 

A few more serious drawbacks prevented the evening from having had the impact it might have done. Amanda Holden’s translation started off poorly and, if anything, got worse. It managed both to be vaguely ‘after’ the libretto and dreadfully anti-musical. Italian suffers worse than most languages by translation into English, but the task can be accomplished much better than this. This was a version only for those who might think there is something ‘edgy’ about people randomly singing the word ‘bastards’. But then, perhaps a selfish – or hard-of-hearing? – audience happy to applaud throughout, and indeed before the orchestra had stopped playing at the ends of acts was genuinely enthralled or even shocked by such banalities. Moreover, Gianluca Marcianò’s charmless conducting helped nothing or no one. The first act in particular seemed devoid of life. I struggled in vain to hear anything throughout the evening that would vindicate Puccini’s symphonic ambition. Instead, phrases followed one after another, quite unconnected. The ENO Orchestra, on generally excellent form, both pointed and luscious where permitted, deserved far better.

 

So too did the cast: probably the principal reason to catch this revival. There was a good sense of ensemble between the singers, which will doubtless only increase as the run progresses. Individually, there is much to admire too. David Butt Philip really presented Rodolfo as a credible character, not a mere opportunity to sing. The conflicts within his soul, cowardice and self-absorption vying with a genuine if ‘poetic’ aspiration towards something nobler, came across with considerable subtlety. Angel Blue seemed slightly stilted to start with, but quickly grew into the role of Mimì. Her vocal allure is by now reasonably well known; it did not disappoint. However, a little more attention at times to words and their implications would have deepened the impression. If George von Bergen was somewhat stiff as Marcello, the other students impressed; Barnaby Rea’s Colline and the Schaunard of George Humphreys helped to create a proper sense of milieu and preoccupation from which Rodolfo could emerge. Jennifer Holloway’s Musetta very much looked the part, but the top of her range proved uncomfortably strident, even squally. Andrew Shore, however, proved luxury casting as Benoît and Alcindoro, vivid portrayals them both.


 

American Lulu, The Opera Group, 14 September 2013

Young Vic Theatre

Lulu – Angel Blue

Clarence – Robert Winslade Anderson
Dr Bloom – Donald Maxwell
Jimmy – Jonathan Stoughton
Eleanor – Jacqui Dankworth
Photographer, Young Man – Paul Curievici
Athlete – Simon Wilding
Professor, Banker, Police Commissioner – Paul Reeves

John Fulljames (director)

Magda Willi (designs)
Guy Hoare (lighting)
Finn Ross (video)
Carolyn Downing (sound)

London Sinfonietta

Gerry Cornelius (conductor)

Images: Bregenzer Festspiele/Anja Köhler and Bregenzer Festspiele/Karl Forster
In the foreground: Jacqui Dankworth (Eleanor) and Angel Blue (Lulu); Simon Wilding (athlete) in background

 

I was a little taken aback by the reaction I received upon mentioning that I was looking forward to seeing American Lulu. One friend, perfectly reasonably, said that he had not taken to it when he had seen it in Berlin; I wish I had had the chance to press him more on why. However, he did suggest that the staging – presumably at the Komische Oper premiere – may have been a considerable part of the problem. Others, though, seemed to recoil at the very idea. Who did Olga Neuwirth think she was, adapting Berg’s opera into her own? For once, I almost felt myself the voice of reason, then stopped short when I recalled that to have been the title of an especially nasty right-wing newspaper column. At any rate, I had no a priori objection to what sounded as though it were simply the continuation of practices that dated back as long as any conception of the musical work, and indeed beyond. I have always preferred the Second Viennese School arrangements of Johann Strauss to the ‘originals’; Mozart’s Handel reworkings, whether in terms of arrangement or more thoroughgoing recomposition have long fascinated me; and as for Bach, whether his rewriting of other music, sometimes his own, sometimes that of others, or the multitude of rewritings, in whatever form, offered by composers from Mozart to George Benjamin... They vary wildly in quality, of course, and that seemed to me the only point; the question was not whether Neuwirth had any ‘right’ to adapt Berg’s opera, but whether it worked.

 

I think it did, or at least much of it did. I cede to no one in my love for Lulu – save, perhaps to one of Neuwirth’s teachers, Luigi Nono, who described  it as one of the two greatest operas of the twentieth century, the other being Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand. I know Berg’s score – and Friedrich Cerha’s completion – pretty well, and found myself not annoyed, but fascinated by the interplay between Berg and Neuwirth. In a work that lasts about half the time of the original, Neuwirth adapts, including reorchestration, the first two acts, and writes her own third act, both text and music. (English translations, concerning which, I found some more convincing than others, were provided by Richard Stokes and Catherine Kerkhoff-Saxon in the first two acts, and Kerkhoff-Saxon alone in the third.) One might miss the gorgeous post-Romantic labyrinthine depth of Berg, but to hear his music refracted as it was, pointed in a different direction by a new(-ish) story held its own interest – just as, say, Berio’s work on composers as different as Boccherini, Purcell, and Schubert has. (If only he had lived to complete his realisation of L’incoronazione di Poppea...) And so, with Berg’s – admittedly, selectively employed – jazz-influenced scoring in mind, Neuwirth’s reorchestration and composition alike make their move to New Orleans via a wind-dominated ensemble, Berg’s voluptuous strings put in their place and perhaps now heard through Brecht-Weill. (No one, I hasten to add, is saying that Berg is ‘improved upon’; that is not the point.) I was less sure about the introduction of more popular music ‘proper’, especially Eleanor’s blues music, into the score; its inclusion, presumably intentionally so, seemed oddly uncritical, as if, in a curious inversion or at least evasion of Adorno, Berg’s opera requires subjection to criticism but that of an allegedly purer popular culture does not. And yet, as I shall come to describe, there is a dialectical twist that would at least partially assist in that regard. The new version of the film music – what a relief it was actually to see a film, practically the only moment in present-day staging of opera where film seems to be eschewed – is brought to us, like the ‘jazz band’ music  via a recording of a Wonder Morton organ: evocative, contemporaneous, and yet also, rightly for a new work, somewhat oblique in its relationship to the ‘original’.

 

The third act of Lulu, which Neuwirth, wrongly to my mind yet perhaps nevertheless fruitfully, regards as ‘unsatisfactory’ – ‘after great trials and tribulations, two women are simply slaughtered by a serial killer; and that is that’ – becomes instead ‘an unresolved murder case’, but more to the point here, offers her own music, clearly flowing from that of Berg, still more from that of Berg-Neuwirth, and yet which quite properly takes on a life of its own: a twenty-first-century reimagination of post-expresssionist music. There are vocal leaps; there is vocal seduction; there is a hard-edged, yet sinuous quality, in line with Berg’s own. I should need to hear it again to say much more; yet, to answer the earlier question, for the most part, and bearing in mind my cavil concerning the blues music in particular, I think it worked.

 

I deliberately started with the music but ought to say something briefly about the new setting.  Instead of the Prologue, we start at the end, in 1970s New York, when Clarence (Schigolch) asks Lulu why, when she is now so wealthy, she is no more satisfied, prompting her to look back at her life, beginning in 1950s New Orleans. A photographer with whom she is living is soon supplanted by Dr Bloom, purchaser of the pictures; Lulu dances in Bloom’s club, music written for her by his son, Jimmy. (I do not need in laboured fashion to point out who is who with respect to Berg; it is perfectly clear, though some of Berg’s intricate parallelism falls by the wayside as Neuwirth’s drama takes on a different trajectory.) Initially I found the substitution of Eleanor, a singer, for Geschwitz, something of a disappointment. The ‘otherness’ – if I am honest, banality – of her music, however well sung by Jacqui Dankworth, seemed too obvious, too lacking in integrative or indeed disintegrative power. However, and I hope this was not merely a product of my fevered imagination, there is criticism, if not so much of her music, then of the hippyish psycho-babble in which her reproaches – she is by the third act a successful singer, though still hurt by Lulu’s prior rejection – are couched. She too, it seems, is capable of exploitative behaviour. As indeed are we all, and some of it, like Neuwirth’s, may even be construed positively. We should not fall for bogus notions of the ‘jargon of authenticity’. Meanwhile, all the while, the drama is punctuated by reminders of the Civil Rights Movement: words from Dr King, and sounds, in Eleanor’s final song, of ‘We shall overcome’.  It is certainly not subtle, and it is perhaps all too easy to say ‘that is the point,’ but its contribution was nevertheless greater than to make us appreciate more fully the balancing-act between existential and social – far too often tilted in favour of the former – in Berg’s opera. (Should we consider American Lulu in reference to Berg’s work, or as a work in itself? That depends, of course, on who ‘we’ are. Either we know the original or we do not, but a question that permits neither of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as a ‘straight’ answer is a good question for Neuwirth to be asking audiences, steeped in the self-righteous delusions of Werktreue.)

 

This was a co-production by The Opera Group, the Young Vic, Scottish Opera, and the Bregenz Festival, in association with the London Sinfonietta. The latter was on excellent form throughout, splendidly guided, insofar as one could tell from an initial hearing, by Gerry Cornelius. I was certainly as gripped by the orchestral performance as by the puzzles and challenges of Neuwirth’s work itself. John Fulljames makes a great deal from relatively little on the small stage of the Young Vic. Video was used sparingly but to great effect, Finn Ross’s work employing characters from the stage greatly appreciated, as mentioned above. The uncomfortable voyeurism of having Lulu change on stage, taking her clothes from a wardrobe and almost defying us not to watch, has one’s mind working, as it should, in different directions: self-interrogation, heightened by the (Brechtian?) presence onstage behind a see-through curtain of the orchestra. Construction of reality, perception of what may or may not be epic, is not simply our own task, but it is so at least in part, as in Lulu’s mind.

 

Angel Blue offered a charismatic assumption of the title role. It is of course far shorter than Berg’s, but has different challenges, the slipping between speech, parlando, and glorious, if all-too-brief (deliberately so?), passages in which the voice may truly soar a case of ongoing reinvention. Her stage presence, just as in ENO’s recent Bohème, was scintillating. In this opera, more than Berg’s, the other cast members are lesser beings, but there was much to enjoy from their various contributions. Paul Curievici, for instance, furthered the strong impression he recently made in The Importance of Being Earnest, and Donald Maxwell continued to hold the stage even at what must be approaching the twilight of his career.

 

Emma Woodvine, credited as ‘dialect coach’ seemed to have done a good job. I still wonder about the practice, though, of having assumed accents, be they from the South or elsewhere. It seems curiously selective; for instance, when we have a performance of Carmen, whether in French or in translation, we do not usually hear the dialogue – or, for that matter, the vocal lines – delivered in the tones of Seville. Better, I think, to let actors, including singing actors, act than to have them turn impressionists. (That runs both ways, of course; those complaining, as sometimes they do, about American or other accents in English dialogue should probably find better things to do with their time.) No matter; it is a minor point, indeed more of a question. And a great strength of this evening was the questioning that it provoked.

La bohème, English National Opera, 29 April 2013

The Coliseum

Marcello – Richard Burkhard

Rodlofo – Gwyn Hughes Jones
Colline – Andrew Craig Brown
Schaunard – Duncan Rock
Benoit, Alcindoro – Simon Butteriss
Mimì – Kate Valentine
Parpignol – Philip Daggett
Musetta – Angel Blue
Policeman – Paul Sheehan
Foreman – Andrew Tinkler

Jonathan Miller (director)

Natascha Metherell (revival director)
Isabella Bywater (designs)
Jean Kalman, Kevin Sleep (lighting). Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Genevieve Ellis)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Oleg Caetani (conductor)

 

This second revival of Jonathan Miller’s La bohème was the first time I had caught the production. Miller has often been over-praised, particularly by those ‘of a certain age’, apparently unaware or unwilling to accept that the world has moved on from the 1960s of their youth; indeed, Miller’s Royal Opera Così fan tutte is not simply bad, but one of the most objectionable stagings I have seen of anything. This Bohème, whilst hardly groundbreaking, does its job reasonably enough. For some reason, the action is updated to the Paris of the 1930s. Beyond imparting a certain cinematic quality – though not necessarily nearly so much as Miller and his designer, Isabella Bywater seem to think it does – it is not clear what is gained, but nor for that matter is a great deal lost. An individual’s fondness for the photography of George Brassaï does not in itself seem to me justification for a production, but anyway... The characters are for well directed on stage, for which revival director, Natascha Metherell should doubtless receive much of the credit. (Both Metherell and Miller appeared on stage to take a bow.) Occasionally, I wondered whether the action were a little too prey to domestification of the wrong way; the meeting between Rodolfo and Mimì is decidedly low-key, more akin to a neighbourhood watch meeting than an ignition of passion. However, the selfishness of ‘Bohemian’ youth comes across at least as strongly as I can recall upon other occasions: are not these boys to some extent playing at poverty, whilst Mimì’s suffering is the real thing?

 

Described in the publicity blurb as a ‘cast of young British talent’, that is for the most part what it is. I have little patience with those who castigate ENO – or Covent Garden, for that matter – for ‘failing to promote British artists’. The arts world has, let us be grateful, yet to capitulate to the insidious yet hysterical nationalism pervading much of our political class and media. What we want are singers, artists in general, who are good, and preferably more than that. With the exception of Gwyn Hughes Jones, we did pretty well. Though his Rodolfo improved somewhat during the third and fourth acts, and was not without sensitivity, there was too much that was simply crude, almost an allegedly ‘Italianate’ parody, or strangely faceless. The vacuum extended to stage presence too; it would have been well-nigh impossible to believe in him as a Romantic lead. Kate Valentine’s Mimì, on the other hand, was a credit to her and to ENO. Nobility of spirit was allied to sterling, necessary musical values of phrasing and tonal variegation. It was a delight to make the acquaintance of the charismatic American singer, the splendidly named Angel Blue (an exception in terms of nationality, but certainly not quality). She sang as well as she acted, holding the stage without effort, imparting both ‘artistic’ superiority to Musetta as singer and, increasingly, warm humanity to her as woman. Richard Burkhard’s Marcello impressed too, as did the excellently sung – and acted – Colline of Andrew Craig Brown and Schaunard of Duncan Rock. It was a pity that Simon Butteriss over-acted – ‘silly voice’ rather than expression of the text through singing – in the role of Benoit; maybe he was doing so under orders. A greater pity was the banality of Amanda Holden’s translation; making Puccini sound satisfactory in English is not the easiest of tasks, but too often, a tin ear revealed itself in the straightforward incompatibility of words and vocal line.

 

Oleg Caetani made a very welcome return to the Coliseum. His direction of the ENO Orchestra was splendid, rich in tone – sometimes, a little more, alla Daniele Gatti, would have been appreciated there, but then Gatti, last summer, had the Vienna Philharmonic – but above all, dramatically alert. Temptations to linger, to sentimentalise, were eschewed, without draining the drama of its lifeblood. Wagnerisms – I noticed some especially Tristan-esque progressions – and modernisms were not necessarily underlined, yet, given Caetani’s ear for balance and line, caught one’s ear nevertheless. I should love one day to hear a properly modernistic Bohème – or Tosca. This was not it, but refusal to play to the gallery, and underlining of solid, yet certainly not stolid, musical virtues proved a great relief for a work in which superficial gloss can all too readily hold sway. Choral singing and direction of the chorus also proved estimable throughout.