The Long Christmas Dinner and A Dinner Engagement, Guildhall, 4 June 2018

Silk Street Theatre

Lucia – Alexandra Lowe

Mother Bayard, Ermengarde – Carmen Artaza

Roderick, Sam – Michael Vickers

Brandon – Bertie Watson

Charles – Frederick Jones

Geneviève – Emily Kyte

Leonora – Madison Nonoa

Nurse – Meriel Cunningham

Lucia II – Lucy Anderson

Roderick II – Eduard Mas Bacardit

Earl of Dunmow – Samuel Carl

Errand Boy – Filipe Manu

Mrs Kneebone – Emily Kyte

Countess of Dunmow – Lucy Andreson

Susan – Zoe Drummond

Prince Philippe – Eduard Mas Bacardit

Grand Duchess – Lucy McAuley

Ashley Dean (director)

Cordelia Chisholm (set designs)

Kevin Treacy (lighting)

Laura Jane Stanfield (costumes)

Victoria Newlyn (movement)

Orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London

Dominic Wheeler (conductor)

Stuck record time again: much of the best London opera comes from our conservatoires. That is not to belittle what I have heard at Covent Garden since returning to London; much has been of a very high standard. ENO: let us hope the benighted rule of Cressida Pollock has now been put behind it. Opera Holland Park continues to go from strength to strength, most recently with perhaps the finest all round Così fan tutte I have seen and heard for well over a decade. These things are not competitive, whatever capital might tell you. Moreover, our conservatoires tend to offer rather different, complementary fare. A particular strength of the Guildhall has been its repertoire choices – and so it continued to be here. If, in this double bill of two operas I had neither seen nor indeed heard, one proved far superior to the other, I was immensely grateful to be afforded the opportunity to acquaint myself with both, especially in such fine performances as these.

Hindemith and Thornton Wilder might not seem the most obvious of collaborators. The Long Christmas Dinner, however, works very well. Wilder, it seems, worked hard to convert his 1931 play into a libretto. (I say ‘it seems’, since I am relying on secondary literature; I shall certainly try to read the play before long.) The concision is striking, but so is its suitability for Hindemith in particular. That may, of course, also be a matter of Hindemith’s adaptability too. At any rate, what came across strongly, in work, performances, and indeed staging was the somewhat tedious repetition of Christmas in a bourgeois New England family, the Bayards, over ninety years – without in any sense proving tedious itself. The cyclical aspect may be seen in a revolving set, centred on the dinner table, to which characters in slight decline – far less dramatically so, and surely this is deliberate, than in Buddenbrooks – come and from which they go. Behaviour varies and repeats; one feels a certain sympathy, and yet a certain ennui, or rather feels their ennui. Hindemith’s forms mirror and/or incite this: softened Kammermusik, in a sense, the post-Bachian motor rhythms still present, albeit without noticeable aggression, drawing one in to action and atmosphere alike, in a harmonic language that is, doubtless unsurprisingly, closer to Die Harmonie der Welt. Time passes: their time and the world’s. Until, that is, Ermengarde, the final member of the family resident, learns that another branch – by now, with children Roderick III and Lucia III – are building another house, another story. Whilst reading the letter informing her, she dies. It is a very difficult task to bring off, to portray such people in such a situation whilst retaining one’s interest, but the company – and this seemed to me a true company achievement – did just that. For that reason, I shall single no one out in particular, other than to say Dominic Wheeler’s conducted framework proved just what the team required.

Hindemith’s opera was first performed in Mannheim, in 1961; its first performance in English came two years later, at the Juilliard, in 1963. Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement had its premiere a few years earlier, in 1954, at Aldeburgh’s Jubilee Hall. It seems, frankly, to be very much an opera written for the insular, xenophobic world to which those trying to force us out of the EU would have us return. Not out of intent, I am sure, whether from Berkeley or his librettist Paul Dehn. But its fluent, pleasant, vaguely Gallic boutique musical style palls after a while, not least on account of the absence of any dramatic grit. A diplomat and his wife plan to marry off their daughter to the son of the Grand Duchess of Monteblanco. (Don’t ‘foreign’ places have funny names?) That son, Prince Philippe, thinks the daughter is a maid; they get on, and they decide to marry, the lack of a handsome dowry notwithstanding. His mother does not even object. If ‘heartwarming romantic comedies’ are your thing, even you might look for a little more in the way of a plot twist. The only ‘joke’ is that the ‘foreigners’ are – well, foreign, so speak or rather sing with ‘silly’ accents. Some food burns too. Performances were again very fine, Eduard Mas Bacardit and Zoe Drummond skilfully teasing out what level of lyrical excitement the score permitted as the two lovers. Once again, moreover, there was an excellent sense of company. But there are limits to what might be achieved, even with a resourceful kitchen set design, when the material is sub-Carry On – without the jokes.

Ein Landarzt/Phaedra - Guildhall School, 8 June 2015

Silk Street Theatre, Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Landarzt – Martin Hässler

Aphrodite – Laura Ruhi-Vidal

Phaedra – Ailsa Mainwaring
Artemis – Meili Li
Hippolytus – Lawrence Thackeray
Minotaur – Rick Zwart

Ashley Dean (director)

Cordelia Chisholm (set designs)
Mark Doubleday (lighting)
Victoria Newlyn (movement)
Dan Shorter (video)

Orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Timothy Redmond (conductor)

Once again, many thanks are owed to the Guildhall School for courageous programming, fully vindicated. A double-bill of Henze operas, neither of them straightforwardly designated as such by the composer, surely offered one of the most enticing offerings in London for quite some time. Henze’s early, short radio opera, Ein Landarzt, presents a number of problems, not least of which might be: how should one, or simply should one, stage a ‘radio opera’ at all? Premiered in 1951, it is, as Henze recounts in his autobiography, Bohemian Fifths, ‘a word-for-word setting of Kafka’s short story of the same title’. Martin Hässler’s performance proved deeply impressive, in attention to words, text, gesture, and their marriage. It doubtless helps to be German, but that is only the beginning. Indeed, as conservatoire presentations go, this must have been one of the most challenging (for the artist) I have heard. Yet there was no gainsaying Hässler’s achievement, in what might consider almost a whimsical (or not) male-voiced Erwartung, with more than the odd backward nod to Schubert.

 

Whether it really benefits from staging, I am not sure. Henze certainly had no problem with it being presented in that way; one such performance was staged by Madeleine Milhaud. However, the production here did not really seem to me to add up to much beyond the scenery; perhaps concert (or indeed radio) performance remains preferable. There were a few tentative moments from the orchestra – hardly surprising in such a score – but for the most part, the young players offered a committed performance, firmly directed towards its denouement by Timothy Redmond. In any case, Hässler’s marriage of language, musicality, and stage presence offered ample rewards. At the end, we remained properly unsure whether anything had ‘happened’ at all, or whether the doctor’s difficulties were of his own imagining.

The 'concert opera', Phaedra was first heard in London at the Barbican in 2010. It is a measure of this Guildhall performance that, not only did I find it not wanting by comparison with a British premiere from the Ensemble Modern and Michael Boder, I actually found myself considerably more involved. Perhaps that was at least in part a matter of better acquaintance. (I have certainly heard a great deal more Henze since then too, partly on account of my academic work.) But in 2010, I had wondered whether a slightly irritating cleverness in Christian Lehnert’s libretto might actually be offset by full staging. Probably, would be the answer, because now the question never presented itself. Nor did my suspicion of a little note-spinning on Henze’s part. I am, then, more than happy to offer a mea culpa.

Reenactment and ritual proved generative: not quite as in Birtwistle, for the composers are very different, but presenting interesting parallels, for all the title might (misleadingly?) edge us towards Britten or the French Baroque. Ashley Dean seemed very much to have saved his best for this opera. The ruined labyrinth of the first act (‘Morning’) asks more questions than it answers: less, as so often, proves more, even when dealing with complexity. A surprising transformation into a modern operating theatre proves just the thing for the ‘Evening’ of the second act. Hippolytus eventually arises from the efforts of the divine medical team, though no one will ever be quite sure what happened, the drama finally broken down – not unlike the images we have earlier seen on screen – into dance.

Just occasionally, there were a few slips and imprecisions on the orchestra’s part, although this was a fine performance by any – not just youthful – standards. Henze’s love of flickering colours and their transformation – again I thought, whatever he himself might have made of this comparison, of Strauss’s Daphne – shone through, as full of dramatic propulsion as harmony and rhythm. Redmond’s direction again proved sure, indeed more than that: vital. Lawrence Thackeray’s tenor led the way, navigating Henze’s often difficult lines and tessitura with greater ease than one perhaps has any right to expect. Meili Li’s countertenor Artemis brought due strangeness to the endeavour, blurring boundaries as that final dance blurs events and motives. Laura Ruhi-Vidal and Ailsa Mainwaring offered proper contrast, considerable range and differentiation of colour employed to sometimes searing dramatic effect. The sonorous bass of Rick Zwart’s Minotaur signalled that he would also have made a compelling Landarzt. (He and Hässler were alternating roles on different evenings.) My immediate reaction was that I really needed to see everything again, to piece more of the work together. I suspect that that is part of the point: we think we can, yet it remains fragmentary. A performance, however, needs to remain purposeful, compelling: this unquestionably did.