Benvenuto Cellini, English National Opera, 5 June 2014

Coliseum

(sung in English)

Benvenuto Cellini – Michael Spyres

Giacomo Balducci – Pavlo Hunka
Teresa – Corinne Winters
Fieramosca – Nicholas Pallesen
Pope Clement VII – Sir Willard White
Ascanio – Paula Murrihy
Francesco – Nicky Spence
Bernardino – David Soar
Pompeo – Morgan Pearse
Innkeeper – Anton Rich

Terry Gilliam (director, set designs)

Leah Hausmann (co-director, movement)
Aaron Marsden (set designs)
Katrina Lindsay (costumes)
Finn Ross (video)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Nicholas Jenkins)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Edward Gardner (conductor)

 

First, a sigh of relief: in almost every respect, this new ENO staging of Benvenuto Cellini marks a significant improvement upon Terry Gilliam’s ‘Springtime for Hitler’ Damnation of Faust. If that sounds like faint praise, for beating a ‘Holocaust as entertainment’ travesty is perhaps setting the bar unreasonably low, then such is not entirely the intention. Gilliam’s Cellini has its virtues, though for me they are considerably fewer than they seemed to be for the audience at large. It is far from unreasonable to depict anarchy and ribaldry in the Carnival, and indeed during the ‘carnival’ overture – though Gilliam’s reported remark that ten minutes of music are ‘too long for the audience to sit through waiting for the show to begin’ are unworthy of anyone working in opera. There is nothing wrong in principle with ‘staging’ an overture, but the reason should be better than that; if the results are a little over the top, they are certainly superior to the justification.

 

And yet… here and in the Carnival itself we also experience the main problem: Gilliam’s seeming inability to trust Berlioz’s opera, an infinitely more successful work than ignorant ‘criticism’ will suggest. Yes, there is excess, even at times an excess of excess, in Berlioz’s work, but what I suspect Gilliam’s fans will applaud as ‘wackiness’, be it the director’s or the composer’s, is far from the only or indeed the most important facet of the opera. Despite the handsome, splendidly adaptable Piranesi-inspired designs, the plentiful coups de théâtre, the impressive collaboration of set design and video for the forging, etc., etc., what matters most of all – Berlioz’s score and, more broadly, his musical drama – often seems forgotten. Perhaps that also explains the unaccountable cuts, which serve to exacerbate alleged ‘weaknesses’ – many of which turn out to be deviations from the operatic norm – instead of mitigating them.

 

Matters improve considerably after the interval, and there is a genuine sense of dark, nocturnal desperation to the foundry and surroundings at dawn on Ash Wednesday (though there was, admittedly, little sense of the significance or even the coming of that day of mortification). Much of the first act, by contrast, is overbearing and in serious need of clarification. Yes, by all means harness spectacle as a tool of drama, but too often it runs riot in an unhelpful sense; it also encourages a large section of the audience to guffaw, applaud, chatter, make other, apparently unclassifiable, noises, often to the extent that one cannot hear the music. I could not help but think that a smaller budget would have removed a good number of excessive temptations and resulted in something less perilously close to a West End musical. There are the germs, and sometimes rather more than that, of something much better here, but those ‘editing’ Berlioz perhaps themselves stand in need of an editor. The updating to what would appear to be more or less the time of composition, perhaps a little later, does no harm; indeed, it proves generally convincing.

 

Edward Gardner’s conducting of the first act was disappointing, the Overture, insofar as it could be heard, setting out the conductor’s stall unfortunately: excessive drive followed by excessive relaxation. Wild contrasts are part of what Berlioz’s music demands, of course, but there still needs to be something that connects. Throughout, there were many occasions once again to mourn the loss of Sir Colin Davis, whose 2007 LSO concert performance of this work was simply outstanding. The orchestra proved impressively responsive, though, and, once both Gardner and Gilliam had somewhat calmed down, truly came into its own, sounding as the fine ensemble that it undoubtedly is. Gardner is rarely a conductor to probe beneath the surface, but as musical execution, there was a good deal to savour following the (protracted) interval. Choral singing – and blocking – were more or less beyond reproach, a credit to chorus master Nicholas Jenkins and Gilliam’s team alike, as well of course as to the singers themselves.

 

Michael Spyres performed impressively in the sadistically difficult title role, there being but a single example, quickly enough corrected, of coming vocally unstuck. His stage swagger seemed true to Gilliam’s conception, and his vocal style – insofar as one can tell, in English translation – was keenly attuned to that of Berlioz. A few ‘veiled’ moments notwithstanding, especially later on in the first act, Corinne Winters impressed equally as Teresa. ‘Entre l’amour et le devoir’ could hardly have been more cleanly sung in the most exacting of aural imaginations. Nicholas Pallesen revealed himself to be a thoughtful and at times impassioned baritone as Fieramosca, though Pavlo Hunka’s Balducci sounded thin and generally out of sorts. Despite Willard White’s undeniable stage presence, his appearance as the Pope did little to dispel suspicions that, sadly, his voice is now increasingly fallible. Paula Murrihy, however, proved an excellent Ascanio: characterful and attractive of tone in equal measure. There were few grounds for complaint from the ‘smaller’ roles either.

 

ENO’s description of this opéra semi-seria as a ‘romantic comedy’ is puzzling. It is, to be fair fair to Gilliam and all those involved, a description that stands at some distance from their vision too. An opéra comique was originally Berlioz’s conception, but that is a matter of form rather than of sentimentality. We should doubtless be grateful that we were spared a ‘heart-warming’ Richard Curtis version. Nor does it help, of course, that we are subjected to an English translation, which inevitably sounds ‘wrong’ for Berlioz, especially when so apparently deaf to musical line and cadence as this present version. If only ENO would reconsider its stance on a once vexed question, now resolved by the use of surtitles, it could truly transform its fortunes.

 

Sir Colin Davis: some personal highlights

A touching documentary (click here) will be available until Friday. Thoughtful, profound, without intellectualising, this is the Sir Colin Davis we knew and loved, above all through his music-making. Haunted by death but not afraid of it, it is the Davis we heard in so many of his later performances. It also has some wonderful footage of Sir Colin's earlier career, including a performance of Mozart's Clarinet Quintet.


It is a difficult, indeed impossible, task, but I thought I should select five great live performances, not necessarily 'the greatest', if such a thing should exist, but which nevertheless touched me greatly and whose memory continues to do so. I have restricted myself to those about which I have written here, so we are dealing only with the period 2007-12. You may click on the titles to read the full reviews. (Numerical position in the list indicates nothing.)


Berlioz Requiem

Not quite his final performance, but one of the last, and the last time I heard him. The orchestra and chorus who adored him, the London Symphony Orchestra and London Symphony Chorus, could not have done more. It was fitting, no doubt, that it should be with the composer for whom he had done far more than anyone else, Berlioz, that I should bid Davis farewell. At the time, I concluded (and as I sad, the full review may be read by clicking on the title): 'Cyclic completion, which if not exactly symphonic is not entirely un-symphonic, brought a satisfaction which, if not of the nature of a peace that passes all understanding, nevertheless passed beyond mere understanding. We heard the wisdom and cogency of a performance that seemed to sum up the devotion of a career – except that, nowadays, whenever one thinks that Sir Colin has crowned that extraordinary career, one is likely to experience a subsequent coronation a month or so later.' Though it was to prove a final coronation, what a coronation!


Beethoven Missa Solemnis

With the same forces, but at the Proms rather than in St Paul's Cathedral for the City of London Festival, this was a performance of the previous year every bit as profound, as granitic, as ready to wrestle with the angels, whoever they were. Again, this was a conductor of wisdom looking death - and Beethoven - squarely in the face and communicating the consequences. I know of no performance since Klemperer - certainly not the vaunted Bernstein, or indeed Karajan - who came so close to unlocking the secrets of this most enigmatic and perhaps greatest of all Beethoven's works. If anything, and if only on account of the work itself, it was a still more astounding performance than that of the Berlioz. Sir Colin had a point when, in the aforementioned documentary, he described this as the last great Mass (Requiem Masses being another matter). Whatever one thinks of that claim, he conducted it as if it were, and with all the consequences to which such a final reckoning with the Almighty might lay claim.


Haydn, The Creation

This oratorio will always have a very special place in my heart, not only because it - along with The Seasons - was the subject of what I count as my first piece of academic work, my third-year undergraduate dissertation. Its combination of joy, sublimity, and profound humanity would have seemed made for Davis, and so it was, though this seems - rather surprisingly - to have been the first time he had conducted the work. Once again, the LSO and LSC did him proud, even if the solo singing were patchier. Indeed, I thought then, and continue to do so, that even the legendary Karajan Berlin recording had almost met its match here. If Karajan's soloists will surely always have the edge, orchestra, chorus, and perhaps even conductor may well have excelled further at the Barbican. At any rate, it was a model performance, seemingly effortlessly variegated and yet unquestionably sure of divine - and human - purpose.


Così fan tutte

Mozart's music was of course Davis's greatest love, as it is mine. This was quite simply a performance such as I could never have dared think I should hear. In an age tormented by absurd ideas of 'authenticity', about which he would from time to time most trenchantly express his views, it had become almost unheard of to hear Mozart treated as music, let alone both to resound so profoundly and to ravish the senses so beautifully and yet so cruelly. In Mozart's most perfect opera, so ludicrously misunderstood by many from at least Beethoven onwards, one should experience, yet rarely does, a reckoning with the world's darkness that is both tragic and anything but. The experience became all the more painful given the contrast with Jonathan Miller's tawdry, anti-Mozartian production; Sir Colin's and Mozart's victory somehow became all the more sweetly, deliciously, and yes, tragically ambivalent.


Benvenuto Cellini

Not quite his Berlioz operatic swansong, for I should later hear a wonderful Royal Academy Beatrice and Benedict, this was a performance that almost vied with the stunning 2000 Proms account of The Trojans. (That would certainly have been included, had I been writing at the time.) Again on the home soil of the Barbican with the LSO and LSC, Sir Colin communicated, relished Berlioz's mercurial vision as scintillatingly as anyone can ever have done - the contrast with a hard-driven, largely uncomprehending performance I should hear soon after from Valery Gergiev was telling - but form was of equal importance. As I wrote at the time, 'The authority with which he approached the score was evident from the first to the last bar, and the Overture set the scene for both work and performance. Orchestral weight and lightness of touch stood in perfect equilibrium. There was never any question, given the conductor's long experience with this work and with Berlioz's œuvre as a whole, that he knew precisely where he was going and that every episode would fall precisely into its allotted place.' If that makes the performance sound dull, then I have failed, and I fear that I have. For there was here, as in the performances above, an apparently straightforward 'rightness' to the performance, which opened up vistas not for a physical stage, but for a concert-performance theatre of the imagination. And for Berlioz, imagination is everything.

Salzburg Festival: Benvenuto Cellini, 15 August 2007

Benvenuto Cellini - Burkhard Fritz
Fieramosca - Laurent Nouari
Giacomo Balducci - Brindley Sherratt
Pope Clemens VII - Mikhail Petrenko
Teresa - Mija Kovalvska
Ascanio - Kate Aldrich
Francesco - Xavier Mas
Bernardino - Roberto Tagliavini
Pompeo - Adam Plachetka
Innkeeper - Sung-Keun Park

Phillip Stölzl (director)

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Valery Gergiev (conductor)

We cannot say that we were not warned. The Festival's publicity trumpeted director Phillip Stölzl's background in pop music videos, advertising, and cinema. Stölzl trumpeted his belief in a programme interview that 'the cultural perception of my generation is very strongly related to film no matter what'. And this is what we got: a panoply of projection and special effects, introduced by a cinematic title screen. Some of this worked well enough; the carnival and forging scenes were undeniably thrilling.

Yet the whole 'show' - the word seems unusually appropriate in this case - sometimes degenerated into what Wagner accused Meyerbeer of creating: 'effect without cause'. (Nietzsche turned the accusation round onto Wagner, utterly unjustly, but therein lies a different tale.) Now it might be claimed that Benvenuto Cellini is not an inappropriate case for such treatment, that it was written for Paris after all, and may even qualify as grand opera. And is not grand opera a forerunner of the movies? Well, the latter may be the case - Adorno once said as much - but as for the rest: the most charitable answer must be 'not really'. Cellini is an extraordinary work, drawing inspiration from a range of sources one might have thought incompatible, but Les Huguenots it is not, still less Aida (thank God!) Even at this stage of his career, long before the neo-Gluckian Les Troyens, the Romanticism in Berlioz thrives on the dialectic with his Classicism.

Moreover, some aspects of the stage action were simply bizarre, detracting from whatever coherence the basic approach might have yielded. Why on earth was there a walking vacuum cleaner during Teresa's Act I romance? Why did Stölzl's 'post-futuristic Rome' - whatever that might mean - look more like New York? (We do have cinema in Europe, I think.) Perhaps most bafflingly of all, why was Ascanio a robot? As for the Pope, he resembled Willy Wonka, from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, regaled by some very odd male dancers. To say that the Pope's presentation jarred with the dignity of Berlioz's music, so very different from that written for other characters, would be the understatement of the year. It was very 'all-singing, all-dancing', and doubtless entertained many in the audience, but to what dramatic end? I have no idea. If this were a way of demonstrating the empty banality of modern popular culture, there were surely better and certainly cheaper ways of doing this. However, I think it may actually have been a celebration of such trash: in which case, might we not leave Berlioz out of it?

It is not usually my practice to concentrate so heavily upon the production, but this hardly gave one a choice. One was treated like an infant with an attention span of a few seconds, since so much had to be 'going on' all of the time. This may be how one produces a pop video, but in the theatre less is usually more. The music was almost relegated to the status of a soundtrack. It was brilliantly, if breathlessly, performed by the Vienna Philharmonic under Gergiev. He could do with learning some lessons from his predecessor at the LSO, Sir Colin Davis. But maybe he was swayed by the production: there was certainly a virtuosic fit. The chorus was outstanding throughout, albeit in a similar fashion. It was splendid to have a Heldentenor of Burkhard Fritz's stature in the obscenely demanding title role. He rarely sounded totally at ease with the French, but it remained a virile, almost overpowering portrayal. Mija Kovalvska made a few slips as Teresa early on, but grew into the role, another challenge of extreme proportions. I must mention Kate Aldrich's feat of singing with great beauty and dramatic credibility Ascanio's aria, 'Mais qu'ai-je donc?', whilst having her head ludicrously severed from her robotic 'body'. I can only assume that this referred to the apprentice's fear that his master would soon lose his head. But whilst undeniably 'spectacle' of considerable order, it really added nothing other than confusion to the drama.

This work is intimately concerned with the artist and his relationship towards uncomprehending society. Here the relationship was in danger of being inverted. The fine cast and orchestra were not well served by this reversal.

Benvenuto Cellini, 26 June 2007

Hector Berlioz: Benvenuto Cellini

Barbican, London, 26 June 2007

Gregory Kunde (Benvenuto Cellini)
Laura Claycomb (Teresa)
Darren Jeffery (Balducci)
Peter Coleman-Wright (Fieramosca)
Andrew Kennedy (Francesco)
Isabelle Cals (Ascanio)
Jacques Imbrailo (Pompeo)
John Relyea (Pope Clement VII)
Andrew Foster-Williams (Bernadino)
Alasdair Elliot (Cabaratier)
London Symphony Chorus
London Symphony Orchestra
Sir Colin Davis

It was about time Sir Colin Davis and the LSO returned to Benvenuto Cellini. Their last performances were too early to be included on the LSO-Live label. One assumes that a 'live' recording will now follow, to join the astounding Troyens, the hardly less remarkable Béatrice et Bénédict, and a host of other Berlioz semi- and non-operatic works. With the exception of Les francs-juges – now largely destroyed – Cellini is Berlioz's first opera, and as such a wider public will doubtless want to hear how have Sir Colin's thoughts have developed since his groundbreaking first recording (1972) and indeed since the recent appearance of John Nelson's worthy competitor, which, in the light of Hugh Macdonald's Bärenreiter edition of the score, added about half an hour's additional music to that previously available. Nelson's recording is a fine achievement indeed, but what works for a studio recording is not necessarily best for a performance, and Davis acknowledged this, if only implicitly. Moreover, choices must always be made between competing versions (both for Paris and for Weimar). Whilst I do not propose to conduct this review as a comparison with these earlier recorded performances, they are important to bear in mind as an important context for how subsequent performances of the work will now be received.

Davis's Berlioz has always been of a somewhat Classical bent – hardly surprisingly, given his stature as a condutor of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. The colouristic wildness of a Bernstein or a Munch has never been his way; yet for a composer who has often been criticised for alleged formal deficiencies, it is no bad thing to entrust the score to a conductor for whom structure and its delineation are so crucial. The authority with which he approached the score was evident from the first to the last bar, and the Overture set the scene for both work and performance. Orchestral weight and lightness of touch stood in perfect equilibrium. There was never any question, given the conductor's long experience with this work and with Berlioz's œuvre as a whole, that he knew precisely where he was going and that every episode would fall precisely into its allotted place. Delicate woodwing colouring brought to mind the Wagner of Die Meistersinger. (If only Davis and the LSO would perform a Wagner opera or two in concert...) The recollection, or more properly presentiment, of Wagner and of Meistersinger in particular was not at all inappropriate, I reflected: both works are comedies, both involve elopements and communal celebrations (Carnival or Midsummer's Day), and most crucially, both are concerned with the figure of the artist and the nature and purpose of art itself. Wagner was far from an uncritical admirer of Berlioz, but he acknowledged the Frenchman's mastery of the orchestra (his 'mechanical means', as Wagner wrote in Opera and Drama). One could very well understand why, as the trombones displayed an awesome combination of absolute precision and luxurious richness of sonority. Davis and his orchestra showed beyond doubt that command of structure and detail does not in any sense imply a slight dullness of interpretation.

Indeed, the orchestra was faultless throughout its navigation of the vast score. It would be impossible to mention every instance of brilliance, but that should not prevent citation of a few instances. The virtuosic tuba solo was played not only with great technical aplomb, but also with true tenderness of feeling. Another world was sounded, as the trombones solemnly intoned the arrival of the Pope. Rarely, if ever, have I heard such a beautiful yet portentous sound from these instruments. Even in apparently small accompanying figures, David Pyatt's horn sang more sweetly than one had any right to expect. Guitars and percussion made the street scenes credible without scenery. The crucial rhythmic and harmonic pointing of the strings, the nervous energy they imparted, underpinned the whole as if Berlioz's idiosyncratic writing were the most natural thing in the world (which it is emphatically not). They provided a rhythmic beat and a heartbeat to the progression of the score.

The chorus was every bit as good. Indeed, one of the most remarkable aspects of its performance was the unanimity of attack in conjunction with the orchestra. Orchestra, chorus, and conductor must have performed more Berlioz together than any other such combination; yet whilst this quality of performance should not necessarily surprise, it nevertheless does. The great perorations were as thrilling as anything in Les Troyens. Moreover, choral diction was beyond reproach.

Whilst in many ways, orchestra and chorus stand at the very heart of the opera, there are also of course singers to consider. Let it first be said that no one was any less than good, but the picture was somewhat more mixed here, at least considered by the stratospheric standards invoked above. I felt the absence, with but one exception, of any Francophone singers. Other singers are perfectly capable of singing the roles, of course, and many have done with great success. Yet it does seem, perhaps especially with Romance languages, that inclusion of at least one or two native speakers, lifts the general level of communication. Such has often been my experience, for instance, with Italians in Don Giovanni. Much of the French sounded a bit too much like hard work, as was unfortunately highlighted in the painfully slow delivery of the spoken dialogue. Rather oddly, Isabelle Cals, the only French singer, produced some very odd vowel sounds during her second act aria, 'Mais, qu'ai-je donc?' So maybe nationality was not the problem after all...

Gregory Kunde, also the Cellini on Nelson's recording, brought authority to his role. He could sometimes sound a little strained, though, and in some instances just a little too old for so youthful and virile a role. His approach perhaps erred on the Italianate side, but this is something very difficult to get right in so international an age of vocalism. Laura Claycomb certainly had the technique for Teresa, as she displayed in the excessive cadenza to her first-act cavatina. (Any excess is Berlioz's fault, not hers, I should add.) I felt that her voice lacked a certain warmth and colour, but one can rarely have everything. Darren Jeffery's Balducci was a bit too much of a generalised buffo figure, although it should in fairness be mentioned that he was a late replacement (as indeed was Kunde). For a buffo villain par excellence – at least until his conversion in the final scene to the cause of art – we should turn to Peter Coleman-Wright's Fieramosca. There was nothing generalised and everything particular to this characterisation, which brought a real sense of the theatre to proceedings. We were not so far yet still far enough from the world of Rossini (albeit with far superior orchestration!) Coleman-Wright's aria, 'Ah! Qui pourrait me résister,' was very fine indeed. Alasdair Elliott made the most of Berlioz's delicious little cameo portrait of the innkeeper who refuses to serve Cellini and his friends more wine until they pay their bill. And Jacques Imbrailo made a striking impression in the small yet dramatically crucial role of Pompeo. There was no finer singing than that of John Relyea, as the Pope. His deep, sonorous tones perfectly complemented those of the trombones I mentioned above. Such were his vocal and dramatic authority, one wondered whether he might be a future Boris.

In many ways, a concert performance is a sterner test than a staged performance for singers. All of their acting must be done vocally, rather as in a studio recording, and yet they must also be seen. Taken as a whole, the ensemble worked well, and there were, in the cases of Coleman-Wright and Relyea, two outstanding performances. If the general level of the soloists did not quite reach that of conductor, orchestra, and chorus, that is as much testament to the greatness of the latter as to any great shortcomings from the former. For the rapturous reception accorded to the performance was richly deserved; Berlioz was fortunate indeed at the Barbican.