Oberon, New Sussex Opera, 25 November 2014

Cadogan Hall

 

 

Oberon – Adam Tunnicliffe

Puck – Siân Griffiths

Sir Huon – Adrian Dwyer

Sherasmin – Damian Thantrey

Reiza – Sally Silver

Fatima – Carolyn Dobbin

Five Fairies – Nisha McIntyer-Burnei, Beatrice Monaco, Michael Diamini, Rachel Farago, Rachel Shouksmith

 

 

Harry Fehr (director)

Charlie Lucas (lighting)

Victoria Newlyn (choreography)

 

 

St Paul’s Sinfonia

New Sussex Opera Chorus

Nicholas Jenkins (conductor)

 

What on earth to do with Oberon, Weber’s last opera, written – are you listening, the Royal Opera? – for Covent Garden? Many consider it to contain his greatest music. I am not sure I should go so far; or, perhaps better, the genre with which Weber was lumbered, made it simply impossible for the music to tell as it should. If we think that Purcell had it bad with the dreadful mess of ‘semi-opera’, at least he had Dryden, although, as Sir Donald Tovey put it, ‘Our first and greatest man of genius in dramatic music was … condemned to inaugurate a tradition whereby English opera consisted of music that merely added a series of lyric and spectacular digressions to a play which, if good at all, would be better without the digressions.’ Weber, alas, had James Robinson Planché, whose libretto for Oberon for Tovey ‘represents an advance on [semi-opera] … inasmuch as the play would not be better without the digressions,’ thus leading up to what, regrettably, remains an unforgettable and largely unarguable claim: Weber ‘poured his last and finest music into this pig-trough.’ A sequel to A Midsummer Night’s Dream might seem ill-advised at the best of times; this, however, was certainly not the best of times.

 

 

And so, it was a brave and highly laudable decision for New Sussex Opera to stage Oberon. Nothing, I am afraid, can begin to redeem the libretto, whose lack of dramaturgical coherence is truly a thing of wonder. (One is almost left wishing that England had truly been a Land ohne Musik at the time.) Considering a roughly comparable – and far from un-problematical – work, Schubert’s Fierrabras, does not help; but then nothing can, save perhaps for the deconstructionist reimagining production of one’s dreams. Neuenfels or Herheim perhaps? That, of course, is not what we have, or could have have, here. Harry Fehr has limited resources and for the most part elects to play things straight, save, perhaps for some dubious – or dubiously executed? – choreography. Dress is more or less ‘modern’ but not really in the service of any particular ‘concept’. Chairs are perhaps over-used; waving them around to depict a storm seemed on the verge of exhausting some members of the chorus. A few sheets might have done the job better. But Fehr’s is clearly a thankless task and the contours of the drama, such as it is, register clearly enough.

It was a great pity that the orchestra could not have been augmented. (Might not some amateur string players have been found?) A string section of 4.2.2.2.1, even in a smallish hall, is bound, with the best will in the world, to sound undernourished at times for Weber’s score. That said, the players of St Paul’s Sinfonia for the most part responded admirably to Nicholas Jenkins’s sensitive, keenly dramatic traversal. Flexible and cultivated, with plenty of direction: his was a reading worthy both of Weber and of the gamble the company had made in mounting the enterprise. I should be keen to hear more of the conductor in such and indeed other repertoire.

The chorus had some shakier moments but for the most part acquitted itself well, summoning up a good, full sound for the close. Soloists did their best to bring to life the ‘characters’. Adrian Dwyer showed no sign of tiring from the difficult demands of the tenor hero, Sir Huon, offering creditable nobility of tone throughout. Sally Silver coped very well indeed with the loss of a monitor at the beginning of the second act, leaving her unable to see the conductor at all during ‘Ocean! Thou mighty monster!’ If her intonation was not always perfect, slips did not unduly distract, and she again invested the role with a dignity it perhaps does not entirely deserve. Carolyn Dobbin proved a lively Fatima, drawing one in as much as one could reasonably expect. Adam Tunnicliffe’s Oberon sounded destined – and I hope it will be – for a larger hall or theatre. Most importantly, then, we had a good opportunity to experience this opera ‘live’, for which thanks and congratulations should go to New Sussex Opera.

 

 

 

 

Caligula, English National Opera, 25 May 2012

The Coliseum 

Caligula – Peter Coleman-Wright
Caesonia – Yvonne Howard
Helicon – Christopher Ainslie
Cherea – Pavlo Hunka
Scipio – Carolyn Dobbin
Mucius – Brian Galliford
Mereia, Lepidus – Eddie Wade
Livia – Julia Sporsén
Four Poets – Greg Winter, Philip Daggett, Gary Coward, and Geraint Hylton

Benedict Andrews (director)

Ralph Myers (set designs)

Alice Babidge (costume designs)

Jon Clark (lighting)

Dennis Sayers (choreography)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Francine Merry)

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

Images: Johan Persson

Whatever qualifications I might go on to voice – not, I admit a promising start to a review – I am in no doubt that ENO deserves applause for its commitment to staging contemporary, or at least recent, Continental European opera. The idea that any house, even one styling itself ‘English National’, should restrict its repertoire on a basis anything other than quality, should be anathema to anyone who cares about the art form, and it is heartening to note that the present management agrees. For a German house to stage both Wolfgang Rihm’s Jakob Lenz and Detlev Glanert’s Caligula in the same season would be noteworthy; for an English company, it is cause for rejoicing. It was good, moreover, to see both present and past music directors, Edward Gardner and Sir Mark Elder, in the audience.

And yet… If only I could feel greater enthusiasm for the work itself. I suspect that Amanda Holden’s translation does not help, its flatness often evoking the language of the cereal packet as opposed to French existentialism. (The source is the play by Albert Camus.) There are a couple of amusing incidental moments, such as the line ‘crap nail varnish’ – presumably an operatic first – and, more tellingly, the line ‘We’re all in this together.’ Non-British readers may need enlightening, if that be the word, that the phrase is associated with the Chancellor of Exchequer, George Osborne, as a fig-leaf of social solidarity in the face of Government policies involving massive redistribution of wealth towards the rich, in the name of ‘austerity’.

But even putting language aside, and even if one can take an existentialist as opposed to a more seriously political take upon dictatorship - it seems fundamentally to be about bad or troubled personality, brought on by bereavement, with social and economic structures languishing unexplored – Glanert’s score is not up to much. There is a certain skill with respect to orchestration, but the harmony signals little more than threadbare neo-Romanticism, apparently without irony. If one might plot a scale running from knowingly allusive through derivative to, well, what my myriad of lawyer-friends would doubtless counsel me against writing, I doubt that one would put very much of the score on the allusive side of derivative. The most compelling music was that which sounded as if it had been lifted almost wholesale from Wozzeck. There was some catchy enough dance music after the interval, but Henze did that sort of thing far more powerfully in The Bassarids. (Now there is a work we need to see on a London stage!) Britten and Wagner – a reference seemed to be made to Tristan, though I could not for the life of me understand why – were other ‘closely related’ composers; it does not seem worth the effort to trace such relationships further. Perhaps worst, the opera goes on far too long, seemingly in need of a good editor. It sounds more like a piece presented at a first workshop session than a finished article.

Helicon (Christopher Ainslie)

All of which is a pity, given that the performers and production team approached it with evident enthusiasm and skill. Perhaps the drama might have been stronger had Caligula been awarded a more prepossessing voice than that of Peter Coleman-Wright – a Matthias Goerne, for instance – but Coleman-Wright acted well, and seemed to relish his drag turn after the interval. Christopher Ainslie was perhaps the star of the show, his counter-tenor Helicon, Caligula’s slave, making one keen to hear him in Britten and other florid roles, ancient and modern. He also, not unreasonably, seemed to enjoy the opportunity to look good in a toga. Carolyn Dobbin presented an undoubtedly sincere Scipio, who might genuinely have moved, had the work permitted. The rest of the cast all impressed, both musically and in terms of acting. So did Ryan Wigglesworth’s incisive, indeed passionate, conducting, the ENO Orchestra once again on excellent form. I wish I could have shared the performers’ belief, though I am glad for their sake that they possessed it.

I have seen better work from Benedict Andrews, not least his unforgettable Return of Ulysses for ENO last season, but there of course he was dealing with a towering masterpiece, and there is certainly much to applaud in his stadium-based staging. The socio-political dimension missing from the work itself has greater prominence here. Caligula’s madness may indeed start off partly a game of capitalism, its tawdry wares of entertainment gathering a momentum of their own. Livia’s Rebekah Brooks hair-do raised a smile on my part, though that may have been coincidence rather than intent. The emptiness of fascism, the emergency strategy of monopoly capitalism as some of us are still old-fashioned enough to believe, shone through in a more meaningful way than a merely empty score. Some members of the audience clearly relished the return of the once statutory ENO nude – I recall her running onstage like a streaker in the middle of the Wolf’s Glen Scene from Der Freischütz and running back off again – since applause for her seemed more vociferous than for many who had actually sung.