Don Giovanni, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 7 June 2014

Don Giovanni (Elliot Madore) and Donna Anna (Layla Claire)
Images: Robert Workman

Glyndebourne Festival Theatre

Leporello – Edwin Crossley-Mercer

Donna Anna – Layla Claire

Don Giovanni – Elliot Madore

Commendatore – Taras Shtonda

Don Ottavio – Ben Johnson

Donna Elvira – Serena Farnocchia

Zerlina – Lenka Máčiková

Masetto – Brandon Cedel

 

Jonathan Kent (director)

Lloyd Wood (revival director)

Paul Brown (designs)

Denni Sayers (movement)

Mark Henderson (lighting)

The Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus master: Jeremy Bines)

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Andrés Orozco-Estrada

 

Having become so jaded with indifferent – or, sadly, far worse than merely indifferent – stagings of an opera I love more than words can tell, it proved a relief and indeed a joy for me to attend this first revival of Jonathan Kent’s 2010 Glyndebourne production, especially its first act. It was not perfect; perfection we leave for Mozart. But Kent’s staging, as revived by Lloyd Wood – I am afraid I am in no position to say how much is Kent and how is Wood – treats this masterpiece seriously and joins a select group of productions I should happily see again, not least because I suspect there would be intriguing points revealed to me that I had missed upon a first viewing. (Incidentally, its Glyndebourne predecessor, from Graham Vick, forms part of that small band.)

 

Kent’s staging may lack the cocaine-fuelled kinetic energy of Calixto Bieito’s unforgettable ENO production, or the (apparently) all-encompassing, Calderón-like Salzburg World Theatre of Herbert Graf’s production for Furtwängler (the most precious opera DVD this side of the Boulez-Chéreau Ring?), but even such magnificent achievements as those can only begin to hint at the possibilities Mozart and Da Ponte offer us. Most stagings come nowhere near accomplishing even that. Social tensions are either absent or underplayed – an all too common shortcoming – but a seriousness and sensibility it is perhaps not unduly exaggerated to call theological nevertheless comes to the fore. Giovanni’s unflinching, libertine atheism is of course the true heroism of the opera. The dark force of what to him may be reaction is symbolised by the darkness of Paul Brown’s excellent set designs, from out of which the action seems to emerge and into which it retreats. But some in the audience – and some of the characters too – might equally decide that it is the temporal stability of the revolving cube (the Mother Church, perhaps?) which protects and which ultimately proves the villain’s downfall.

 

 

Such openness to interpretation is quite different from a lack of direction. There is room for the burning conviction of strong directorial lines – Bieito is surely one of the greatest and unquestionably one of the most celebrate examples – and for more reticent yet nevertheless intelligent productions, permitting of various understandings. In that respect, Kent’s likening, in his brief director’s note, of Brown’s spinning cube to ‘a kind of Cabinet of Curiosities or, perhaps, a great sarcophagus,’ proves fruitful both in itself and for the further consideration it might suggest. Moreover, such properly Baroque references, in a more broadly cultural sense rather than the narrow conceptions of ‘style’ prevalent today, prove equally stimulating to the imagination – just as they do in Mozart’s score and Da Ponte’s libretto. The 1950s updating registers if one wishes: Kent suggests a ‘time of transition, in which a sexual, social and moral revolution, a dolce vita world, coexisted with the remnants of a devout society. However, at least to my eyes, it does not force itself unduly upon one’s consciousness. The staging is again, then, suggestive; it does not make the mistake of trying to shoehorn the drama into a pointlessly narrow conception, let alone somehow attempt to make Don Giovanni ‘about’ the era in question.

 

There remains, however, one significant reservation. I do not know whose decision it was to serve up what seemed pretty much to be the Vienna version of the score, but I wish he or she had thought again; it made a change, though, from the unholy conflation of Vienna and Prague generally foisted upon us. To anyone who cares to think about it, Prague wins every time, although I have yet to attend a single performance in which Mozart’s dramatic sensibility is thus honoured. At any rate, we heard both of Donna Elvira’s arias, just the one of Don Ottavio’s (‘Dalla sua pace’), and the very rare Vienna duet for Zerlina and Leporello, ‘Per queste tue manine’. It was not, of course, uninteresting to hear the latter, for once, but it is almost unworthy of late Mozart, and holds up the action just as much as if we were to hear both of Ottavio’s arias (and/or, for that matter, both of Elvira’s: just as much a problem with Vienna). There was, at least, no messing about with the scena ultima – a relief, given the recent butchery perpetrated by the Royal Opera. It was a great pity, though, about the surtitles, whose translation was unworthy of Da Ponte’s matchless marriage of wit and profundity.

 

Andrés Orozco-Estrada’s Mahler I greatly admired in Vienna a year-and-a-half ago. At first, that is, in the Overture, I found him somewhat wanting in Mozart. I have learned to live with the opening being taken at an allegedly alla breve tempo far too fast to my ears; off the top of my head, only Barenboim and Muti, amongst living conductors, come close to what I hear in my head. More concerning were a general thinness of tone and apparent lack of concern with harmonic rhythm.  If those were not actually natural trumpets – I could not see the pit – they certainly sounded like them; others, of course, respond better to that rasping sound than I do. However, once past that disappointing opening, there was much to admire, though such tendencies were far from entirely banished. There will always be tempi with which one can quibble, but this was a variegated performance which did not harry the music, and which permitted both the on-stage drama to develop and the excellent London Philharmonic Orchestra to have its say. The Stone Guest Scene, however, was strangely un-climactic: partly, I think, a matter of the failure to use the Prague score, but it was more than that, for that failing is common to many other performances. Though beautifully played by the LPO and – for the most part – well sung, the final scene therefore did not jolt quite as it should.

 



Leporello (Edwin Crossley-Mercer) and Don Giovanni

Indeed, the main factor was probably the underpowered singing of  Taras Shtonda’s Commendatore. The other disappointment amongst the cast was Layla Claire’s vibrato-laden Donna Anna, whose musical line really needed to be clearer throughout.  Otherwise, a cast almost entirely unknown to me acquitted itself well, with a fine sense of company. Ben Johnson, whom I had heard before as Ottavio, albeit in English, sang exquisitely, almost to the extent of having one regret the lack of ‘Il mio tesoro’. Serena Farnocchia was a stylish Elvira, whilst Lenka Máčiková and Brandon Cedel offered vocally lively assumptions of the roles of Zerlina and Masetto. If Elliot Madore lacked the charisma of the great Giovannis, then he nevertheless delighted in the musico-dramatic quicksilver of the role, sufficiently differentiated from the equally lively Leporello of Edwin Crossley-Mercer. There was genuine chemistry between them. Perhaps ironically, given the ‘loss’ of his aria, it was only Johnson’s Ottavio which continued to ring in my ears; but this, like the production and performance as a whole, was a cast that proved considerably greater than the sum of its parts.

Die Zauberflöte, English National Opera,7 November 2013

(sung in English, as The Magic Flute)

The Coliseum

Tamino – Ben Johnson

First Lady – Eleanor Dennis
Second Lady – Clare Presland
Third Lady – Rosie Aldridge
Papageno – Roland Wood
Queen of the Night – Cornelia Götz
Monostatos – Brian Galliford
Pamina – Devon Guthrie
Three Boys – Alessio D’Andrea, Finlay A’Court, Alex Karlsson
Speaker – Steven Page
Sarastro – James Creswell
First Priest, First Armoured Man – Anthony Gregory
Second Priest, Second Armoured Man – Robert Winslade Anderson
Papagena – Mary Bevan

Simon McBurney (director)

Michael Levine (set designs)
Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)
Josie Daxter (movement)
Jean Kalman (lighting)
Finn Ross (video)
Gareth Fry (sound designs)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Gergely Madaras (conductor)

I seem to be in a minority in not remotely regretting the passing of Nicholas Hytner’s ENO production of The Magic Flute. Though others loved it, when first, rather late in the day, I saw it, I found it ‘more West End than Masonic’, and was still less thrilled upon a second viewing. For ENO, in a co-production with the Dutch Opera, the International Festival of Lyric Art, Aix-en-Provence, and in collaboration with Complicité, to present something new from Simon McBurney was therefore most welcome. At first, things seemed quite promising. The emphasis upon theatricality and showing its workings is certainly not out of place in such a work, even if the use of video – for instance, in writing ‘The Magic Flute’ on a screen during the Overture – often seems unnecessary. The presence on either side of the stage of sound booths, in which one witnesses the making – or in some cases, I think, not actually the making – of various sound ‘effects’, some more welcome than others, offers the prospect of an interrogation of Complicité’s brand of theatricality. Unfortunately, little more issues from such intriguing possibilities. We seem more often than not to be in the world of Wagner’s celebrated accusation against Meyerbeer: effect without cause. What initially, and indeed for a good part of the first act, seems refreshing, for instance the presence of actors with paper birds sometimes to surround Papageno, soon palls.

 

More fundamentally, despite the undoubted technical ingenuity on display, theatricality seems to serve as a substitute for, rather than a means to express, any idea of what the work might actually be about, or be held to be about. With such a host of possibilities, which might be presented, questioned, even rejected, not even to ask the question in the first place leaves behind a sense of lack of fulfilment, rather as if one had eaten an initially striking yet ultimately un-nutritious meal.  I am not entirely convinced that Furtwängler was right to argue against viewing the work as a brother to Parsifal, although I can understand why he did; it is a point of view worth taking seriously in any case. However, I should rather a production and performance that took The Magic Flute too seriously, should that even be possible, than one that did not take it seriously enough. That need not, should not, preclude magic, humour, wonder; however, as the Leipzig Gewandhaus has reminded us since 1781, ‘Res severa verum gaudium’. Instead we have yet again the tedious and at the very least borderline offensive depiction of a ‘Northern’ accent for Papageno as intrinsically amusing.   

 

Gergely Madaras, making his operatic debut, often took the music too fast, yet at least he did not fall into many ‘authenticke’ traps, bar that annoying, increasingly prevalent, trait of double-dotting in the Overture. The effect of excessive speed tended to be a little inconsequential rather than hard-driven, such as we have had to endure from ENO’s Music Director in his ill-advised forays into Classical repertoire. There were also peculiar instances of scaling back the number of strings – already meagre, with nine first violins down to just two double basses. Perhaps most serious of all, gravity was lacking; surely the practice of any number of great conductors, such as Furtwängler, Böhm, Klemperer, and Colin Davis, ought to have been suggestive here. That said, there was a sense, when it was not rushed, of delight in the music. Perhaps a greater sense of what is at stake will come with greater experience.

 

Ben Johnson made a very good impression as Tamino: his acting committed and his singing generally stylish. As his beloved, Devon Guthrie was competent, but little more than that. Alas, Cornelia Götz, as her mother, was rather less than that, boasting neither ferocity nor sparkle. (Quite why she was in a wheelchair, I have no idea.) James Creswell lacked sonorous dignity as Sarastro, though he was certainly not helped by the staging. Brian Galliford’s Monostatos was more a theatrical than a musical assumption, but on those terms made its mark. (I assume, given McBurney’s remarks concerning The Tempest, that the strange visual portrayal must have been intended as a Caliban equivalent. It was not perhaps, a bad idea to replace the problematical Moorish associations with Shakespeare’s ‘salvage and deformed slave’, though that again is hardly without its problems for a modern audience; yet again, it was difficult to discern any fundamental dramatic point being made.) Roland Wood’s Papageno was sadly lacking in charm, though again that may have been partly to be ascribed to the production; for some unfathomable reason, his appearance bore at least a hint of the post-Jimmy Savile. The Three Ladies were a good bunch, musically and theatrically. Otherwise, it was left to Mary Bevan to offer with her veritably sparkling Papagena, however briefly, the only real vocal complement to Johnson.

 

The increasingly common usage, ‘Three Spirits’, was used for what used to be the standard English, ‘Three Boys’: odd, given that girls’ voices were used. In any case, the boys, despite their weird portrayal as skeletal old men – again, for no reason I could discern – sang well. More seriously, the programme described the Two Armoured Men as ‘Armed Men’: a common mistake, though the German is perfectly clear, and the meaning is quite different. A strange piece on ‘Mozart and Maths’ by Marcus du Sautoy seemingly labours under the delusion that Mozart wrote his own libretti. (Yes, of course he would suggest sometimes considerable revisions, but that is another matter.) On the positive side, there is much to provoke one to thought, far more than in the production, in a splendid short essay by Anna Picard on the role of women.

 

Don Giovanni, English National Opera, 17 October 2012

The Coliseum

Don Giovanni – Iain Paterson
Leporello – Darren Jeffery
Donna Anna – Katherine Broderick
Don Ottavio – Ben Johnson
Donna Elvira – Sarah Redgwick
Commendatore – Matthew Best
Zerlina – Sarah Tynan
Masetto – John Molloy

Rufus Norris (director)
Ian MacNeil (set designs)
Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)
Paul Andreson (lighting)
Jonathan Lunn (movement)
Finn Ross (projections)

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

Zerlina (Sarah Tynan), Don Giovanni (Iain Paterson), Donna Elvira (Sarah Redgwick)
Images: Richard Hubert Smith

 

Some especially puerile, needlessly irritating, marketing, involving pictures of condom packets – oddly chosen in so many ways, since few people find contraceptives especially erotic, and Don Giovanni would seem an unlikely candidate to have employed  them – had attended the run-up to this revival of Rufus Norris’s production of Don Giovanni. In 2010, it registered as the worst staging I had ever seen: a fiercely contested category, when one considers that it includes Francesca Zambello’s mindless farrago across Covent Garden at the Royal Opera – now, may the Commendatore be thanked, consigned to the flames of Hell. (Kasper Holten, Director of Opera, is said to have insisted, having viewed it in horror, that the sets be destroyed, lest it never return.) There were grounds for the odd glimmer of hope; Norris was said to have revised the production in the face of its well-nigh universal mauling from critics and other audience members alike. Yet the marketing did little to allay one’s fears, especially when reading the bizarre description on ENO’s website of a ‘riveting romp [that] follows the last twenty-four hours in the life of the legendary Lothario’. Something really ought to be done about whomever is involved in publicising productions; for, irrespective of the quality of what we see on stage, they  more often than not end up sounding merely ludicrous: in this case, more Carry On Seville than one of the greatest musical dramas in the repertory. Even if one were willing thus to disparage Da Ponte – and I am certainly not – does Mozart’s re-telling of the Fall in any sense characterised by the phrase ‘riveting romp’?

How, then, had Norris’s revisions turned out? Early on, I felt there was a degree of improvement. The weird obsession with electricity – certainly not of the musical variety – had gone, but not to be replaced by anything else. Certain but only certain of the most bizarre impositions had gone, or been weeded out, yet not always thoroughly enough. For instance, there was a strange remnant of the already strange moment when, towards the end of the Act Two sextet, people began to strip off, when Don Ottavio – an ‘uptight fiancé’, according to the company website – carefully removed his shoes and socks. No one reacted, and a few minutes later – I think, during Donna Anna’a ‘Non mi dir’ – he put them back on again. Otherwise, the hideous sets and other designs remain as they were, though one might claim a degree of contemporary ‘relevance’ in that Don Giovanni’s dated ‘leisure wear’ now brings with it unfortunate resonances of the late Jimmy Savile. Alas, nothing is made of the similarity. The flat designed as if by a teenage girl, full of hearts and pink balloons, remains; as does the building that resembles a community centre. Leporello still appears to be a tramp. There are no discernible attempts to reflect Da Ponte’s, let alone Mozart’s, careful societal distinctions and there is no sign whatsoever that anyone has understood that Don Giovanni is a religious drama or it is nothing. Norris has clearly opted for ‘nothing’.

 

There is, believe it or not, a villain perhaps more pernicious still. Jeremy Sams’s dreadful, attention-seeking English translation does its best to live up to the ‘riveting romp’ description. A few, very loud, members of the audience did their best to disrupt what little ‘action’ there was by laughing uproariously after every single line: the very instance of a rhyme is intrinsically hilarious to some, it would seem. A catalogue of Sams’s sins – sin has gone by the board in the drama itself – would take far longer than Leporello’s aria. But I no more understand why the countries in that aria should be transformed into months – ‘ma in Ispagna’ becomes ‘March and April’ – than I do why Zerlina was singing about owning a pharmacy in ‘Vedrai carino,’ or whatever it became in this ‘version’. It is barely a translation, but nor is it any sense a reimagination along the brilliant lines of the recent gay Don Giovanni at Heaven; it merely caters towards those with no more elevated thoughts than Zerlina going down on her knees, about which we are informed time and time again, lest anyone should have missed such ‘humour’. The lack of respect accorded to Da Ponte borders upon the sickening.

Edward Gardner led a watered-down Harnoncourt-style performance. At first it might even have seemed exciting, but it soon became wearing, mistaking the aggressively loud for the dramatically potent. Where was the repose, let alone the well-nigh unbearable beauty, in Mozart’s score? A peculiar ‘version’ was employed, in that Elvira retained both her arias, whereas Ottavio only had his in the first act. On stage, Prague remains preferable every time, despite the painful musical losses its adoption entails; sadly, few conductors seem to bother.

Donna Anna (Katherine Broderick), Zerlina, Leporello (Darren Jeffery),
Masetto (John Molloy), Don Ottavio (Ben Johnson)

Iain Paterson remains bizarrely miscast in the title role, entirely bereft of charisma. Darren Jeffery’s Leporello was bluff and dull in tone. (How one longed for Erwin Schrott – in either role, or both!) Katherine Broderick was too often shrill and squally as Donna Anna, and her stage presence was less then convincing, shuffling on and off, without so much as a hint of seria imperiousness. Her ‘uptight fiancé’ was sung well enough, by Ben Johnson, though to my ears, his instrument is too much of an ‘English tenor’ to sound at home in Mozart.  Sarah Redgwick’s Elvira was probably the best of the bunch, perhaps alongside Matthew Best’s Commendatore, but anyone would have struggled in this production, with these words. Elvira more or less managed to seem a credible character, thanks to Redgwick’s impressive acting skills, quite an achievement in the circumstances. Sarah Tynan made little impression either way as Zerlina, though she had far more of a voice than the dry-, even feeble-toned Masetto of John Molloy: surely another instance of miscasting.

ENO had a viscerally exciting production, genuinely daring, almost worthy of Giovanni’s kinetic energy. It seems quite incomprehensible why anyone should have elected to ditch the coke-fuelled orgiastic extravagance of Calixto Bieito – now there is a properly Catholic sensibility – for Rufus Norris. whose lukewarm response at the curtain calls was more genuinely amusing than anything we had seen or heard on stage. Maybe the contraceptive imagery was judicious after all.

Billy Budd, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 22 June 2010

Glyndebourne Opera House

Captain Vere – John Mark Ainsley
Billy Budd – Jacques Imbrailo
Claggart – Paul Whelan
Mr Redburn – Iain Paterson
Mr Flint – Matthew Rose
Lieutenant Ratcliffe – Darren Jeffery
Red Whiskers – Alasdair Elliott
Donald – John Moore
Dansker – Jeremy White
The Novice – Ben Johnson
Squeak – Colin Judson
Bosun – Richard Mosley-Evans

Michael Grandage (director)
Christopher Oram (designs)
Paule Constable (lighting)
Tom Roden (movement)

Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus master: Jeremy Bines)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Sir Mark Elder (conductor)

Glyndebourne’s first Billy Budd must be accounted a resounding success. (I have one principal reservation, which I shall leave to the end, but it is hardly the fault of Glyndebourne.) First and foremost are the extraordinary contributions of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Sir Mark Elder. I have heard the LPO on good form many times, but never more so than here. The Glyndebourne acoustic doubtless helped, but even so, richness and roundness of tone from the pit were first class. Woodwind solos, chattering or plangent, were superbly taken, whilst the deeply expressive cellos would have fitted right in to a top Continental string section. Elder’s command of the score never faltered, guiding light through the fog and chief dramatist at the climaxes. The broad sweep never eclipsed smaller detail, that ‘conflict of thirds’ (Arnold Whittall) from which the ‘Rights o’Man’ motif evolves properly at the centre of so much of the action, properly haunting, and properly generative. Echoes of Berg were stronger than I recall hearing previously too: not just Wozzeck but Lulu too. The Glyndebourne Chorus was on equally exceptional form; it is some time since I have heard such accomplished singing, full of body yet never fuzzy, in the opera house. The two principal London companies should look to their laurels.

Solo singing was of a high standard too. Paul Whelan, understudy to Phillip Ens, had nothing to fear from any comparisons he might have courted, for his Claggart was a more subtle interpretation than the part might have had right to expect. Musically and dramatically detailed, his interpretation truly made the words tell.  There was no stronger portrayal on stage. Jacques Imbrailo’s Billy was less bright-eyed than that of Simon Keenlyside for ENO, and certainly less acrobatic. There was, though, at least some of the time, a strong sense that this might be a plausible character: not an easy thing to accomplish. He can act – and he did; he can also sing handsomely – and he did. John Mark Ainsley probed the ambivalence of Vere, properly Pilate-like, for better or worse. There were moments in the second act when his tuning wandered, but he regained focus. Standing out amongst the other men were Jeremy White’s loyal, generous-hearted Dansker and Ben Johnson’s credibly-led Novice, once spirited, now broken.

Michael Grandage’s production takes the work pretty much at face value. It takes place on a ship at the appointed time. One can tell what is happening and why, without the distraction of production ‘features’ that fail to cohere. Christopher Oram’s set is mightily impressive, again doing just what is supposed to do and perhaps a little more besides. Paule Constable’s lighting was evocative indeed. I cannot say that any especial insight struck me from the production, but nor did anything irritate. The lack of eroticism, however, was surprising, to say the least. One has only to follow the words, let alone the music, to discern it, but little was on visual display. Had this been subordinated to another angle, I could have understood; as it was, I was left wondering: why so coy? We are not in the 1950s now, thank God.

So most, if not quite all, was well and good. And yet… There remains the problem of the work itself. Even when granted so strong a performance as this, the dramatic cracks cannot quite be papered over. Motivation remains abrupt, even at times obscure, unless it is all really about something else. And if it is, can we not bring that out at least a little more strongly? We need to know more about Claggart if he is to become interesting, or at least plausible. Do men really hero-worship their captain as these men do? If so, why? What I really cannot stomach is the heavy-handedness of the Christian symbolism, quite incompatible in form and content with what otherwise seem to be the libretto’s concerns. Vere’s Pilate act is bad enough, but the Christ of Billy Budd? It borders uninterestingly upon the blasphemous. As for the reference to the peace that passes understanding, the reference perhaps surpasses anything in The Rape of Lucretia.The constant references to goodness and beauty are little more than creepy. Ultimately, Britten’s music is stronger than Forster’s libretto deserves, yet does not emerge untainted.