L'Etoile, Royal Opera, 1 February 2016

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Images: ROH/Bill Cooper

 

 

Dupont – Jean-Luc Vincent

Smith – Chris Addison
Patacha – Samuel Sakker
Zalzal – Samuel Dale Johnson
King Ouf I – Christophe Mortagne
Siroco – Simon Bailey
Laoula – Hélène Guilmette
Hérisson de Porc-Epic – François Piolino
Aloès – Julie Boulianne
Tapioca – Aimery Lefèvre
Lazuli – Kate Lindsey
Maids of Honour – Lauren Fagen, Katy Batho, Kiera Lyness, Emily Edmonds, Louise Armit, Bernadette Lord 

Mariame Clément (director)

Julia Hansen (designs)
Jon Clark (lighting)
Mathieu Guilhamon (choreography)
Mariame Clément, Jean-Luc Vincent, Chris Addison (new dialogue)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Mark Elder (conductor)

 

Before saying anything else, I must commend the Royal Opera on broadening its repertoire. Anything that leavens a diets of endless Traviatas can only be a good, or at least a better, thing. Moreover, to perform a work that had not previously been given at Covent Garden is a better thing still. Alas, Chabrier’s opéra bouffe did not, on the whole, have a good night, and, although I know it has its admirers – the ‘lighter’ the music, the more militant the admiration tends to be – I really cannot claim to have been won over, at least insofar as I could tell from Mariame Clément’s confused production.

 

Clément never seems to be clear – or at least I was not – whether what we see might be intended ironically or not. Is the cod-mediævalism of the set designs intended to be amusing? I really have not the faintest idea, likewise with respect, more disturbingly, to its orientalism. A post-modern hotchpotch, is, as usual with such presentations, very much the thing, almost daring one to seem too serious, too intellectual, by requesting some degree of coherence. Ambiguity is not necessarily a bad thing, yet few of the metatheatrical possibilities go for anything very much; the creation of new characters and dialogue might be said to be frame the work, but ultimately to little purpose. (I was left with the impression that the purpose was really to create a role, in English, for Chris Addison.) Clément tries too hard, perhaps: there are too many silly things at which to gawp, and which do not cohere. (One might say that of the opera itself, I suppose, but let us at least try to give it the benefit of the doubt, without initially resorting to the disingenuous, ‘well, it’s supposed to be incoherent’.) Spectacle, especially in the French tradition, can be an important tool of drama, but here Wagner’s accusation – yes, I am doubtless too Teutonic by half – of ‘effect without cause’ seems far more just here than it was for Meyerbeer. Only people who think the appearance of a hot air balloon or a large elephant is intrinsically amusing – and there seem to have been many such people, I grant you – will have escaped the feeling of tedium during the lengthy progress of the evening.

 

For the real problem is, of course, that Meyerbeer could – and should – work very well at the Royal Opera House; the great pity of the Royal Opera’s Robert le diable was the director, Laurent Pelly’s inability to take it seriously. (That and, of course, the deadly conducting of the dread Daniel Oren.) A work such as L’Etoile would surely be far better off in a smaller, indeed a much smaller, theatre. Not only would one see the artists on stage, better to respond to their facial expressions, their shrugs, their other gestures; there would be no need to inflate the scenic representation beyond something this slight work can bear. As I said, there is nothing to bring out the protective impulse in certain music-lovers than to dare to express scepticism concerning something that is ‘light’. One immediately becomes humourless, joyless, all the rest of it. It certainly would not help one’s cause with them to point to the Leipzig Gewandhaus and its motto, ‘Res severa est verum gaudium’. But surely it is as ridiculous to claim that all ‘light music’ is good as to claim that all ‘serious music’ is. Palestrina is not Parsifal; I am not sure that L’Etoile deserves to be cherished as, say, the best of Offenbach, or even middling Offenbach. Silliness becomes wearing rather quickly; excellent satire does not.

 

Matters might have been helped, had Mark Elder, however, been a little less ‘serious’. The evening’s progress was fitful, one first-act duet in particular plodding rather than sparkling. Taken on its own terms, the playing of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House was impressive, yet I could not help but think that zippier direction would have helped it along. It was not actually an especially long evening, but it felt like it, the first act less than an hour felt to me considerably longer than its equivalent in Parsifal. And it was difficult, to put it mildly, to feel that as much was at stake.

 

 

The singing was generally good, though, as indeed was the acting. Christophe Mortagne’s King Ouf tilted more towards the latter, but perhaps that is as it should be. Kate Lindsey offered a spirit and, at times, almost touching performance in the role of the pedlar, Lazuli, however tiresome the antics surrounding him/her. Addison and his companion, Jean-Luc Vincent proved good company members, in no sense jealous of the limelight, although I could certainly have done without the former's Sherlock Holmes set-piece. If Simon Bailey’s astrologist Siroco veered somewhat uneasily between French and English, that was really the director’s responsibility. The four visitors, Julie Boulianne, François Piolino, Hélène Guilmette, and Aimery Lefèvre performed well throughout. Alas, neither work nor performance approached the sum of its parts. One may or may not have been supposed to care about the characters, but should one have felt such utter indifference to the action, such as it was?

 

Stephen Hough, Wigmore Hall, 17 January 2008

Wigmore Hall

Mendelssohn – Variations sérieuses in D minor, Op.54
Webern – Variations, Op.27
Beethoven – Piano Sonata in C minor, Op.111

Weber – Invitation to the Dance, Op.65
Chopin – Waltz in C sharp minor, Op.64 no.2
Chopin – Waltz in A flat major, Op.34 no.1
Saint-Saëns – Valse nonchalante, Op.110
Chabrier – Feuillet d’album
Debussy – La plus que lente
Liszt – Valse oubliée no.1
Liszt – Mephisto Waltz no.1

Stephen Hough (piano)

This recital fell clearly into two halves. The first focused upon variation form, the second upon the waltz. A packed Wigmore Hall was understandably eager to hear Stephen Hough, as was I. However, I came away feeling a little disappointed. Flashes of brilliance – sometimes, especially in the second half, rather more than that – were accompanied by some perfectly respectable yet surprisingly workmanlike pianism.

The Mendelssohn Variations sérieuses have had a number of advocates over the years, but I do not find an especially strong work here. The theme is a little dull, which need not betoken dull development; yet, despite some interesting moments, Mendelssohn does not seem particularly inspired for many of the variations. That said, the Variations found an able advocate in Hough. His touch was beautiful and there was a real sense of cumulative development as the variations gathered pace. The syncopations of the fifth variation were tellingly presented and the part-writing of the tenth variation’s fugato was projected with an admirable balance between contrapuntal clarity and harmonic progression. Hough hastened towards a dazzling peroration in the coda.

Webern fared less well. Hough’s was very much a horizontal rather than vertical reading, whereas the music requires an equilibrium and a dialectic between the two. The notes were very clear, crystal-clear even, but without the crystalline perfection – let alone the meaning – that, for example, Maurizio Pollini brings to this miraculous score. The second movement, marked Sehr schnell, sounded relentlessly loud, despite the acknowledged dynamic contrasts. Its notes sounded stabbed at, rather than sculpted. Usually this work is over in the twinkling of an eye; here, it threatened to overstay its welcome.

Beethoven’s final piano sonata received a reading somewhere in between. There was little about which one could justifiably complain, although, on the other hand, this was not a performance one will be likely to recall several years hence. An unusual aspect was the forthrightness of the opening Maestoso. One lost something in terms of harmonic ambiguity, but one sensed a kinship with Beethoven’s earlier masterpieces in C minor. Indeed, much of the first movement sounded closer to ‘middle-period’ Beethoven than to the more typically rarefied sublimity of ‘late’ Beethoven. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that: holy ground does not always necessitate removal of one’s shoes. Yet something of this noble work’s secondary simplicity was lacking. Initial presentations of the first subject, in both the development and the recapitulation, sounded a little matter of fact and hard-driven, but there were also passages of considerable beauty, more in tune with the extraordinary metaphysical vistas Beethoven reveals. With the second-movement Arietta, we returned, of course, to variation form. There were once again some beautiful things here, not least those all-important trills, preparing their breathtaking modulatory way (all the more breathtaking for the movement’s general lack of modulation). Hough remained utterly secure in his technical command. He exhibited a clear understanding of the music’s structure, without ever quite appearing to be breathing its air of another planet.

It seemed a little cruel to position Weber’s rather trivial Invitation to the Dance – which sounds better in Berlioz’s orchestration – next to two of Chopin’s Waltzes. Despite a little haziness at one point in the passagework, Hough proved an able advocate for the Weber, but he could not entirely obscure its sectional writing and sometimes rather threadbare invention. To think that this was the work of the composer of Der Freischütz! The Chopin waltzes received generally fine readings, especially the C sharp minor work. Hough exhibited a sound command of idiom and style: not the most overtly ‘Polish’ of readings, but there are many ways to perform Chopin. Inner voices, of which there are fewer in the waltzes than in many other Chopin works, were made to tell where they did appear, but never at the expense of the longer line, nor indeed of a dancing grace. I retained a nagging doubt, however, that there remained unplumbed emotional depths.

Saint-Saëns’s Valse nonchalante did what it said on the tin. It was mildly interesting to make its acquaintance, but I doubt I should rush to hear it again. Chabrier’s Feuillet d’album, whilst hardly a profound work, exhibited more charm, both in itself and in Hough’s account. The pianist also had the measure of Debussy’s slyly ironic, yet far from un-affectionate La plus que lente. Debussy’s accomplishment, however, rather forcefully consigned his compatriots into the shade.

The one serious disappointment in terms of performance from the second half was the first Liszt Valse oubliée. Its technical challenges posed no problem to Hough, but he rather glided over the musical content. Liszt of all composers needs to be treated as more than an opportunity for pianistic display. Perhaps Hough was holding something in reserve for the first Mephisto Waltz, for this received an outstanding performance. The astonishing opening accretions of fifths underlined that we are but a stone’s throw, if that, from Bartók. Mephistopheles’s music was dangerous and enticing, though never in a flashy sense. Faust was dangerous, exciting – and beguiling. Hough played like a man – indeed a Faustian figure – possessed, and received a deservedly rapturous innovation at the end. It was worth having attended the performance simply for this final piece. The recital was being recorded for release by Hyperion.