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.

 

Salzburg Festival (1) - Gawain, 2 August 2013

Felsenreitschule

Gawain – Christopher Maltman

Green Knight/Bertiak de Hautdesert – Sir John Tomlinson
Morgan le Fay – Laura Aikin
Lady de Hautdesert – Jennifer Johnston
King Arthur – Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Bishop Baldwin – Andrew Watts
A Fool – Brian Galliford
Guinevere – Gun-Brit Barkmin
Agravain – Ivan Ludlow
Ywain – Alexander Sprague

Alvis Hermanis (director, set designs)

Eva Dessecker (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Multimedia Design Studio ‘Raketamedia’, Moscow (video)
Ronny Dietrich (dramaturgy)

Salzburg Bach Choir (chorus master: Alois Glassner)

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Ingo Meztmacher (conductor) 

 

 

Images: © Ruth Walz

If it has taken Salzburg a while to produce an opera by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, then it has likewise taken an unconscionable while for Gawain to receive its second staging; the Salzburg Festival thus deserves a great vote of thanks for having done so, as a highly imaginative replacement for the postponed premiere of György Kurtág’s new Beckett opera. Kurtág’s Endgame, should that be the opera’s name, will, we are informed, be shown next year instead.

 

Which brings me to Alvis Hermanis’s rather puzzling production of Gawain. I could not help but wonder whether his post-apocalyptic vision, a few years in the ‘science fiction’ future, had started life as a response, if you can imagine this, to a version of Endgame with hordes of characters. Shifting the action from Arthurian times, and indeed from the thirteenth-century world in which Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written, does not trouble me, and one might argue for parallels between post-Roman Britain and a world following some unspecified future apocalypse, but it was unclear to me that the vagrant setting really works, or rather that it does anything much beyond providing an alternative ‘setting’. Hermanis makes a case for ecological issues: the ‘green’ of the ‘Green’ Knight, Nature taking its revenge in a scenario apparently inspired by Joseph Beuys, and a strangely glowing ‘magic’ green belt as the sash Lady Hautdesert gives to Gawain. But it is difficult either to understand such issues as central to the opera or to credit the director with an entirely plausible commentary or reinterpretation. Hermanis’s interest in Beuys, for instance, simply seems transplanted upon an existing work, to the benefit of neither.

 

That said, I was made to think – and the production deserves praise for that. It does not close down avenues of response, eccentric though its own chosen terms may be. It tantalises – and I do not think this is entirely my own reading, though it may be – with a dialectic between parallelism and difference; that is, we both appreciate that the new setting has things in common with the ‘original’ yet also how utterly different it is, thereby being compelled to place work, staging, and ourselves. The need for ritual, so much a preoccupation of both poem and opera, shines through, almost despite the dubious talk (in Hermanis’s programme note) of ‘science fiction’. And whatever one thinks of the ‘movement’, whether from a host of actors or, most astonishingly, from the best trained dog I have ever seen, it is accomplished with excellence. At a time when one often endures productions in which the director seems apparently unable to direct, there is succour to be gained from such professionalism.

Laura Aikin (Morgan le Fay), Christopher Maltman (Gawain)

 

 

Nor, most importantly, did the staging get in the way of what was an outstanding musical performance of a modern operatic masterpiece, scandalously neglected by houses that prefer endlessly to churn out the profundities of Donizetti. Ingo Metzmacher’s performance with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra perhaps placed Birtwistle in a more international, or better cosmopolitan, context than Elgar Howarth’s Covent Garden performances. Although I missed a sense of that ineffably ‘English’ quality that haunts Birtwistle’s music just as strongly as it does, say, that of Vaughan Williams, there were gains to be had too, especially for an ‘international’ audience in Salzburg. The performance was perhaps less primæval in its violence than Howarth’s – how vividly I still remember what was only my second evening at Covent Garden! – yet pacing, flow, and both the sheer array of colours and, where necessary, weight and incision of orchestral attack were second to none. It would certainly have been well-nigh impossible to over-praise the ORF orchestra. Birtwistle’s formal ritualistic preoccupations came to the fore through the medium that matters above all else, the music. It is, moreover, not entirely appropriate to the dramaturgical precepts of either the composer or his librettist, David Harsent, that there be some degree of disconnection between ‘dramatic’ and ‘orchestral’ action. Busoni’s influence perhaps extends further into the twentieth and even the twenty-first century than many of us appreciate.

 

So, of course, does Wagner’s. And with the Proms Ring so fresh in my memory, Birtwistle’s portrayal of flawed ‘heroism’, accomplished via different narrative standpoints, I was bound to think of Siegfried in Gawain. Christopher Maltman swaggered as a cowboy, his singing still more than his bathing offering ample reason for Gawain’s charismatic following. His journey towards ‘Why do you ask for someone who isn’t here? Who do you want me to be? I’m not a hero’ was not merely plausible, but immensely moving, and increasingly so. John Tomlinson is the Green Knight, of course, yet, despite a highly committed performance, it now takes an uncritical ‘fan’ not to be disturbed by the vocal problems at the top of his range. Laura Aikin and Jennifer Johnston were excellent Morgan le Fay and Lady Hautdesert. The eroticism of the former’s performance grew as she and Johnston’s character grew apart, indeed transformed themselves from commentators into participants. Hermanis’s direction assisted with that, but the depths of vocal characterisation upon which both singers drew were undeniably their own. Jeffery Lloyd-Roberts proved a steadfastly engaging King Arthur, the singer in infinitely superior vocal form to the last time I had heard him; I especially liked the directorial touch at the end of having him step up from his chair and make his first tentative steps towards an uncertain – heroic or non-heroic? – future. If Brian Galliford’s Fool sometimes lacked vocal lustre, his was a typically observant performance, using his words to highly dramatic advantage. Gun-Brit Barkmin, Andrew Watts, Ivan Ludlow, and Alexander Sprague all acquitted themselves very well indeed in their smaller roles. Special mention, however, must be accorded to the stunning offstage choral contribution, the Salzburg Bach Choir fully worthy of comparison with the illustrious orchestra in the pit. Alois Glassner clearly deserves great credit for his choral training.

 

‘Then with a single step your journey starts,’ sings Morgan le Fay – repeatedly. Let us hope that Gawain’s journey has (re-)started with this fascinating second step.

Philharmonia/Salonen - Beethoven and Dallapiccola, Il prigioniero, 26 January 2012

Royal Festival Hall

Beethoven – Symphony no.5 in C minor, op.67
Dallapiccola – Il prigioniero

The Prisoner – Lauri Vasar
The Mother – Paoletta Marrocu
Gaoler/Grand Inquisitor – Peter Hoare
First Priest – Brian Galliford
Second Priest, Fra Redemptor – Francisco Javier Borda

David Edwards (stage director)
David Holmes (lighting)

Philharmonia Voices (chorus master: Aidan Oliver)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)

Luigi Dallapiccola

There are Beethoven cycles and there are Beethoven cycles. Arguably eclipsed in recent years by Mahler, le grand sourd (Ravel) has never gone away, but he has been at least as unlucky in the quality as well as the quantity of the attention devoted to him. Many conductors – less so, it would seem, pianists and quartets – simply do not know what to do with Beethoven’s music. Daniel Barenboim does, and will bring the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra to the Proms this summer: it almost makes it worth enduring London’s Olympic Hell to hear that. A few years ago, Bernard Haitink conducted a memorable cycle – at least those concerts I heard were memorable – with the London Symphony Orchestra, though the results on disc perhaps shine less brightly. (Sometimes one has to be there.) Others I shall pass over in silence, except to suggest avoiding like the plague one recent, heavily-promoted CD set. Esa-Pekka Salonen, however, is offering something quite different, potentially more interesting: Beethoven’s symphonies in intelligent, provocative couplings. I do not know whether anyone before has presented the Fifth Symphony with Dallapiccola’s one-act masterpiece, Il prigioniero; someone certainly should have done and will, I hope, do so again. The archetypal Romantic journey of hope from darkness to light receives its tragic twentieth-century response.

And yet, despite a truly shattering performance of Dallapiccola’s opera, there was a problem. Salonen, at least on the basis of this performance, would seem to have no feeling for Beethoven. Even the change of orchestral clothes from evening tails to open-necked black shirts, doubtless intended for dramatic reasons, served only to underline the apparent, tragic remoteness of Beethoven to our concerns. We were not treated to the indignities of the perverse, alla Rattle or Norrington. Nevertheless, the Fifth Symphony was rendered dull; stripped of meaning, it emerged not in intriguing modernistic abstraction, but rather as if it were ballet. Beethoven as Delibes? It just about approaches the status of a point of view, I suppose, but it is not one I wish to hear voiced again. Perhaps surprisingly, the first movement exposition did not come off too badly, rhythmically and motivically insistent. Salonen’s reading showed musicianship at least, and Beethoven’s concision came through clearly. (There was some splendid kettledrum playing too, from Andrew Smith.) But of course, that was not enough. We had to wait until the coda for anything approaching vehemence, first from the cellos and then from the other strings, though even here, the final bars were on the light side. The slow movement emerged as an accomplished set of variations, which certainly did not dawdle and yet which nevertheless suffered at times from rhythmic slackness. There was no sense of striving: at best, this was an intermezzo. The scherzo was impressive enough in its own way, but one cannot start here; alas, the trio simply sounded too fast. Perhaps worst of all, the transition to the finale, one of the greatest passages in all music, entirely lacked mystery, even sounding dull. It pains me to say that the finale less evoked the opening of the portals of Heaven than the opening of a swish private health club. Enough: to hear the Philharmonia in this symphony, turn to Thielemann, to Boulez, or best of all, to Klemperer.

If our world, with a few heroic exceptions, simply does not know what to do with symphonic Beethoven, it desperately needs to hear from Dallapiccola, just as much as his own world of fascism and apparent liberation did. Were there any justice, Il prigioniero would long have been a staple of every opera house. There is no such justice, of course, whether in the operatic or the wider world; instead, we discover that L’enfer, c’est les autres opéras, more often than not the latest rerun of La traviata. However, a performance such as this can still offer us that hope so utterly denied in the story enacted (though not, perhaps, in the musical form?)

The bite and conviction absent from Salonen’s Beethoven could scarcely have registered more powerfully; the Philharmonia sounded reinvigorated, the prologue’s opening chords screaming less as twelve-note Puccini than in startlingly Stravinskian fashion. They were matched, moreover, even surpassed, by the anguished Mother of Paoletta Marrocu. Her delivery was unabashedly emotional, and all the better for it, those terrible final cries of ‘Figlio’ (son) haunting us, angering us, inciting us. Lauri Vasar’s Prisoner was equally fine. The occasional sob in his voice early on could readily be forgiven, for this proved not only a scrupulous but a searing portrayal, all-engrossing with a truly hallucinatory power when it came to the poor soul’s own hallucinations. For that, of course, Salonen and the Philharmonia must also be credited. A wealth of orchestral detail was revealed, not with cold, clinical clarity, but with dramatic direction founded upon evident understanding and communication of Dallapiccola’s motivic and serial working. This was most certainly a post-Bergian labyrinth – at times, I even fancied that I heard foreshadowing of Boulez in the woodwind – but for a purpose. We, like the Prisoner, were tempted by the possibility of escape, only to have it all the more cruelly denied by the sweetness of orchestral phantasmagoria. (Zsolt-Tihámer’s first violin solos were especially noteworthy in that respect.)

The Gaoler and Inquisitor of Peter Hoare and the First Priest of Brian Galliford were more ‘character’ portrayals than anything else, but in context that mattered not at all. Any verdict upon the former’s use of head voice would be largely a matter of taste: there was certainly an apt sense of wheedling casuistry. The invitation ‘Fratello …. andiamo…’ sickened as it must. Francisco Javier Borda’s Second Priest impressed vocally as well as dramatically. No one, though, not even the orchestra, could overshadow the stunning contribution of the Philharmonia Voices. Absolute vocal security combined with surprising weight for a choir of under fifty, to assault both conscience and consciousness. Quasi-liturgical repetition of responsorial words our modern predicament would deny straightforwardly terrified, the precedent for a work such as Nono’s Intolleranza 1960 starkly apparent. In such a context, the Prisoner’s standing seemed ambiguously to evoke celebrant and crucifixion; however, Fate – such as we ought to have heard in the Fifth Symphony – was to be the sole victor. Hope was indeed the final torture: ‘La speranza … l’ultima tortura’. We all knew the answer to that final, faltering, ironic question: ‘La libertà?’ In a world of prisons such as Guantánamo and Gaza, we know it all too well.