King Priam, English Touring Opera, 13 February 2014

Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House

King Priam – Roderick Earle

Hecuba – Laure Meloy
Hector – Grant Doyle
Andromache – Camilla Roberts
Paris – Nicholas Sharratt
Helen – Niamh Kelly
Hermes – Adrian Dwyer
Achilles – Charne Rochford
Patroclus – Piotr Lempa
Old Man – Andrew Slater
Nurse – Clarissa Meek
Young Guard – Adam Tunnicliffe
Paris (boy) – Thomas Delgado-Little
Hunters – Stuart Haycock, Johnny Herford, Henry Manning

James Conway (director)

Anna Fleischle (designs)
Guy Hoare (lighting)

Orchestra of English Touring Opera

Chorus of English Touring Opera

Michael Rosewell (conductor)

 

 

Sir Michael Tippett’s music has suffered a fate typical, though by no means always the case, for composers following their deaths. However, there are signs that a period of relative neglect, despite the continued advocacy of musicians such as the late Sir Colin Davis, might now be giving way to a reassessment. For instance, the Wigmore Hall has been putting on a Tippett retrospective, laudable for far more than its courage in breaking away from the annual anniversary grind. I speak from a position of considerable ignorance myself, the only other Tippett opera I have seen in the theatre being The Midsummer Marriage (Royal Opera, 2005); my concert and recorded music exposure has not been particularly great either. I am delighted to report, though, that the ever-valiant English Touring Opera’s new staging of King Priam proved a triumphant success, making me keen to hear more, despite having been somewhat nonplussed by what I experienced as the blandness of The Midsummer Marriage, not to mention its problematical dramaturgy. (It seems more often than not to be audiences’ favourite Tippett opera, but I doubt that it will ever be mine.)

 

King Priam is perhaps, above all, an opera of great ambition, often fulfilled. The interiority of much of the dramatic conflict in some senses recalls A Child of Our Time, but whereas it proves, for some of us, near fatal in that oratorio, here, at least for the most part, it offers an alternative standpoint from which to consider the workings of fate and politics. Interestingly, director, James Conway views the material very differently, remarking in his programme note, ‘It has been commented that Priam is not an opera about war, but about choice. I am not so sure that this says what is needful. … Choice, it seems to me right now, is not a theme, any more than Fate is a theme. War and beauty are themes.’ Beauty, yes, I thought – but less so war, even in Conway’s own production. Perhaps that simply goes to show that staging and work alike offer the possibility for different understandings, irrespective to an extent of ‘intention’.

 

Certainly Tippett’s score, in Iain Farrington’s excellent reduced orchestration, came across with visceral power and beauty alike, for which great credit must go both to ETO’s orchestra and Michael Rosewell’s wise direction. There were a few occasions when ensemble faltered, but they were quickly rectified and frankly of marginal importance. More than once, I was put in mind of some of Henze’s roughly contemporary writing, for instance in Der Prinz von Homburg, though I suspect the similarity in timbres may arise more from shared Stravinskian roots as ‘influence’ in either direction. And yet, whilst some music might occasionally put one in mind of other composers, the dramatic use to which it is put seemed to me very much Tippett’s own – and certainly did in what seemed to me an estimably idiomatic performance. I was heartened after the event to read David Clarke’s New Grove article upon the composer, which said much the same thing with specific reference to Priam’s encounter with his second son, Paris, whom he had ordered slain as a baby and does not yet recognise:

 

The instantaneous – almost cinematic – shift of subject from Priam to Paris in the first bar of the example is articulated by the division of orchestral forces and the abrupt switch of pitch collections. Yet while the vertical conflation of tonic, dominant and subdominant triads of E-flat in the initial, defining sonority of Paris’s music could be seen as a further Stravinskian touch, the disposition behind it – to intensify the expressive potential of tonal resources rather than interpose an ironizing distance – is entirely Tippett’s.

 

Moreover, the clearly Brechtian reworking – Oliver Soden’s valuable note makes reference to Tippett’s recent encounter with the work of the Berliner Ensemble – s of the Iliad is again unmistakeably personal, and, one senses, a definite inspiration to Conway’s staging. In that connection, it is worth mentioning the sense of kinship I noted with Alexander Goehr’s Promised End, given its premiere by ETO (again with Conway directing). Anna Fleischle’s designs and Guy Hoare’s lighting assisted greatly not only with the screwing up of dramatic tension but also the differentiation of place between Troy and the Greek camp. A real sense was conveyed of Tippett’s mediation between Homer and the present. And the final scene brought a splendid reminiscence of – and indeed, Brechtian distancing from – Boris Godunov, again whether ‘intentional’ or otherwise.

 

Roderick Earle’s portrayal of the title role played no mean part in accomplishing that, of course. Dignified, touching, and with considerable power, this drew one in further and further as time went on: Tippett vanquishing Brecht, as it were. Nicholas Sharratt was likewise splendid as ‘playboy’ (Priam’s own term) Paris, narcissistic vainglory and compelling attraction two sides of the same coin. Thomas Delgado-Little did a truly excellent job as Paris’s younger self: one of the most self-assured and dramatically convincing performances I have seen from a boy treble. Grant Doyle offered a properly masculine foil as Hector: here, at least, I could sense what Conway said about war. Charne Rochford’s Achilles seemed strained (miscast?) earlier on, intonation wavering considerably, but improved greatly, the scene between him and Priam moving and fatally – in more than one sense – menacing. Laure Meloy and Camilla Roberts both gave sterling performances, as Hecuba and Andromache respectively, whilst Niamh Kelly succeeded to an excellent degree in portraying the strange, chilling emptiness of Helen. (The kiss between her and Priam certainly unsettled in the best way.) All other members of the cast impressed in one way or another. Perhaps especially notable were Adrian Dwyer’s properly mercurial (sorry!) Hermes, Andrew Slater’s stentorian Old Guard, Clarissa Week’s knowingly wise Nurse, and Adam Tunnicliffe’s earnest, finely-sung Young Guard. As in all the best company performances, the whole was greater, considerably greater, than the sum of the parts.

 

I was delighted to see Kasper Holten in the audience and trust that this will have made him consider the possibilities on the main stage as well as in the Linbury for Tippett and other post-war composers, be they British or not. As I wrote a little while ago, when sharing clips from a BBC documentary about the Hamburg premiere of Alexander Goehr’s Arden Must Die, made in those dim-and-distant days, inconceivable to most of us, when BBC television cared about such things: ‘Rolf Liebermann's words are especially instructive. As Hamburg Intendant, he felt it artistically necessary to commision an opera from Goehr; the composer's nationality was supremely irrelevant to him. Covent Garden, kindly take note! Liebermann commissioned no fewer than twenty-six operas during his Hamburg tenure; others include Henze's Der Prinz von Homburg and Penderecki's The Devils. Opera and art in general must never consign themselves to the museum. That way they will succeed only in signing their death warrants.’ We need to hear Henze, Goehr, Birtwistle, Zimmermann, Stockhausen, Dallapiccola, Nono, Lachenmann, Peter Maxwell Davies, Messiaen, Sciarrino, Pascal Dusapin, et al., et al.: the list is almost endless, and it is endless before we even begin to consider the fates of Gluck, Rameau, Haydn, Weber, and so many other composers from earlier eras; what we certainly do not need are any more Verdi, Donizetti, or Massenet, to name but three current, bizarre obsessions of the Royal Opera and many other companies. Three cheers, then, to ETO for both its enterprise and achievement!

 

ETO’ s current season also includes Paul Bunyan and The Magic Flute. Not every work will be performed in every venue, but the company will perform between now and the end of May in London, Truro, Poole, Wolverhampton, Snape, Cheltenham, Leicester, Sheffield, York, Canterbury, Norwich Crawley, Coventry, Exeter, Durham, Perth, and Cambridge. To read more about ETO and forthcoming performances, please click here.

Euryanthe, Chelsea Opera Group, 23 November 2013

Cadogan Hall

 

King Louis VI - Richard Wiegold
Adolar - Jonathan Stoughton
Euryanthe - Kirstin Sharpin
Lysiart - Stephen Gadd
Eglantine - Camilla Roberts
Bertha - Melinda Hughes

Chorus of the Chelsea Opera Group (chorus master: Deborah Miles-Johnson)
Orchestra of the Chelsea Opera Group
Cameron Burns (conductor)

 

Poor Weber: opera companies, especially in England, do him anything but proud. And then, at least in the case of Euryanthe and Oberon, there is the matter of the dreadful libretti he had to set – presumably part of the reason why companies are unwilling to perform them. (Oddly, dreadful music seems to be less of a problem, given the lashings endured of Donizetti, Verdi, et al.) The best one can say for Helmina von Chezy’s efforts in Euryanthe is that they are merely awful, as opposed to the execrable text for Oberon.  Lucky Weber, then, to receive such a fine performance as this from the valiant forces of the Chelsea Opera Group.

Conductor Cameron Burns and his excellent cast should receive equal credit for what I have no hesitation in describing as the best COG performance I have heard – by some distance. Burns’s reading ought to have been welcomed with open arms in any opera house; indeed, it would have signalled a marked improvement in most of what we hear.  A refreshingly elegant, unexaggerated style – no frenetic waving around of arms to no evident end – did not in any sense preclude engagement with libretto, whatever its shortcomings, and score alike. It was surely testimony to sound training that soloists and chorus not only enunciated clearly, but for the most part seemed really to mean their words – even when the chorus was compelled to comment, without a trace of irony, that Euryanthe’s alleged betrayal of Adolar was the most grievous deed the world had ever witnessed: ‘ O Unthat, grässlichste von allen,
Die jemals auf der Welt erhört!’ Burns’s handling of Weber’s score was perhaps all the more revelatory, not least since it is about the music that, perforce, we truly care. Line was maintained throughout. Not a single passage sounded unduly hurried or remotely meandering.

The Overture was an interesting case in point. It offered quite a contrast with, say, Karajan’s account, firmly melded into an almost granitic Wagnerian whole as it is – and mightily, even wondrously, impressive. Here, however, we heard a greater variety of moods, textures, and tempi, arguably more faithful to the movement’s role as a potpourri introduction to Weber’s opera (as opposed to Karajan’s concert overture) and to the composer’s conception, without danger of lapsing into the merely sectional. Presentiments – one has to remind oneself that they are not echoes! – of Mendelssohn characterised the very opening, but a darker form of the supernatural made its voice eerily heard in the ghost music. Weber’s musico-dramatic experiments were communicated with apparent ease, boundaries blurred but not obliterated between more old-fashioned set pieces and the ‘forward-looking’ – at least to any self-respecting Wagnerian – treatment of recitative and arioso. Above all, dramatic tension remained tight and proportions simply sounded ‘right’, a far more difficult task to accomplish than many might appreciate.

The chorus sometimes lacked a little in youthful vitality, especially earlier on, yet became more animated as the opera progressed, later sounding impressive indeed in the great close to the second act. Not unfittingly, it was at that point that the orchestra perhaps gained its greatest dramatic heights too, though throughout there was a great deal of impressive solo playing, especially from the woodwind. If only Weber’s clarinet writing were as meaningful in his concertos as it is here; he clearly needed a dramatic impetus to reach the heights of which he was capable. Moreover, the strings, if at times a little reticent earlier on, subsequently showed themselves adept at providing just the right sort of musical cushion for vocal recitatives. I could not help but wish that we had heard Burns at the helm for the COG Die Feen earlier this year, not least since the amount the two works have in common – not solely influence, though there is a good deal of that – became increasingly clear, as indeed did the influences, perceptible yet again not exaggerated, upon Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. (If only, I thought, Weber had had a dramatist such as Wagner to shape the relationship between Lysiart and Eglantine, we might have had a more telling taste still of Ortrud and Telramund. Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, appallingly misunderstood by many critics at Covent Garden last year, also came to mind more than once.)

Kirstin Sharpin’s star shone brightly in the tight role, words and music honoured to equal extent and indeed in fine alchemy. Hers was a portrayal both impassioned and noble, clearly longing to be properly ‘on stage’, yet offering considerable dramatic compensation even in concert. Sharpin’s cleanness of vocal line and dramatic commitment were shared by Camilla Roberts’s Eglantine. Tricky coloratura apparently evoked no fears; more importantly, such ambiguity as the libretto permitted was exploited to its dramatic fullest. Stephen Gadd likewise offered a finely honed portrayal of her accomplice, Lysiart, malevolent and sophisticated – again, insofar as the libretto permitted, but considerably more so than one would have likely have expected. Jonathan Stoughton revealed an often pleasing tenor as Adolar, drawing upon lyric and heroic reserves as required. This is clearly a voice which, if sensibly marshalled, will be in great demand for heroic roles; however, more careful phrasing was sometimes called for on this occasion. Richard Wiegold projected a benevolent voice of experience as the king, and Melinda Hughes’s brief appearance as the country girl, Bertha proved full of charm. All contributed to a performance that was very much more than the sum of its parts. Now will one of our opera companies – ideally, the Royal Opera – kindly take its cue and do its duty by Weber?