David et Jonathas, New Sussex Opera, 20 October 2026

Cadogan Hall

David – Harun Ellis Tekin
Jonathas – Tom Liburn
Saül – Massimo Modoni
Achis, Shade of Samuel – Daniel Chmiak
Pythoness – Nadila Chalchenko
Joabel – Ambrose Chiu

Director – Paul Higgins
Designs – Mollie Cheek
Lighting – Daisy Hardwick
Choreography – Namiko Gahler-Ogawa
Dramaturgy – Benjamin Poore

New Sussex Opera Chorus (director: Ruth Kerr)

Bellot Ensemble

Toby Purser (conductor)

Image: Colin Chapman
David (Harun Ellis Tekin), Jonathan (John Lilburn)

French Baroque opera – as we somewhat anachronistically call it – remains a rare specimen outre-Manche. Even Rameau, for whose Hippolyte et Aricie the first artistic usage ‘du barocque’ was employed, is heard here less than he ought to be and seen far less often. Charpentier probably come a poor second, more faute de mieux than anything else, but the opportunity is rare enough that one might have expected more people to come to Cadogan Hall for this visit from New Sussex Opera. (Travel chaos doubtless did not help, the District Line suspended and Sloane Square station thus temporarily closed.) Maybe they did or will in Hove, Eastbourne, and Winchester; I hope so.

The first and perhaps the most important thing therefore to acknowledge is gratitude for this staging of Charpentier’s David et Jonathas, sung in English as David and Jonathan, in a translation by Christopher Cowell; swiftly followed by a reminder of the important role companies such as this play in regional and, indeed, national ecologies of the arts. I doubt anyone, even the woman two rows in front of me doing her best to disrupt proceedings with light from her mobile telephone, would have regretted attending. That said, the performance and production were a bit of a curate’s egg, as the cliché has it. If my preference would have been for modern instruments, that is considered pretty much impermissible nowadays, and the Bellot Ensemble offered excellent, stylish playing throughout, whether in moments of intimacy or grander choral numbers. They certainly held their own in the latter, despite being considerably outnumbered, and were only obscured, most unfortunately, by over-enthusiastic wind and thunder effects at the start. Toby Purser’s conducting of instrumentalists and singers alike was well conceived and executed, highly sympathetic to the needs of individual artists and groups, whilst nonetheless ensuring overall coherence and direction throughout the five acts of this tragédie en musique. If the music often sounded closer than one would expect to Purcell, that was a matter of English translation rather than a stylistic lapse. Indeed, a virtue of that decision was a reminder, should any need it, of how European Purcell’s musical and dramatic languages, as well as general frame of reference, were.  

Whether the Jesuit preacher François de Paule Bretonneau’s libretto was intrinsically better served in English is dubious. There are, notoriously, all manner of difficulties in such endeavours of translation, as there are in sung French. It was a pity to lose the more declamatory and stylised elements, but one can argue these things either way. It was nonetheless a surprise – and this, to be fair, is probably more a production than a translation decision – to find a paraphrase of Walt Whitman’s ‘Beat! Beat! Drums’ as the final number, in place of what Cowell dismissively, anachronistically referred to in the programme as the ‘jingoistic colour of this finale’s text’. The idea of ‘the seventeenth century’s unquestioning acceptance of the human cost of war’ is so far from the truth that it is difficult to know where to begin. Let us say that it seems odd to insist on period instruments and then to make such changes from a standpoint of alleged ethical superiority. Undercut the text if you wish, preferably by staging, or even interpolate other texts as here, but it might be better to be clear to the audience what you are doing, especially in a work that will hardly have been familiar to all. I do not think that makes me a ‘purist’, but if so, so be it.

Paul Higgins’s production oscillated similarly—and presumably that was the point. For the most part, it seemed set in the mid-twentieth century, certainly an age familiar with war and its devastation, but Saul emerged as a caricatured Louis XIV (I think, or at least someone from his court). Tensions between love and duty, war and peace, came through with relative clarity, as did the fabled homoeroticism of the relationship between David and Jonathan. A stronger dramatic line, however, often proved elusive, in part, I think, because the admittedly resourceful production was trying to do too many things, but also because quality of diction (without titles) was highly variable. If the argument for English relies, as surely it must, on intelligibility, then the former seems lost without the latter. 

Otherwise, vocal performances generally did the company credit, and there was little verbal obscurity from the central pair, Harun Ellis Tekin’s David and Tom Lilburn’s Jonathan. Both offered considerable psychological breadth and depth, the challenges of the former haute-contre role relished and met, countertenor voice offering an ironically contemporary replacement for boy soprano in the latter. There was a compelling danger to the relatively few moments in which they came close, as there was to Jonathan’s scene with his father, here played by a dark-hued Massimo Modoni. The pick of the rest for me was probably Ambrose Chiu’s Joabel; I could not help but wish the work offered him more to do and a more sharply defined role. Many smaller characters were performed by members of the chorus stepping forward. If, inevitably, some proved stronger than others, there was likewise much to admire here, as there was in the general enthusiasm of the chorus, often also called upon to dance.

Munich Opera Festival (4) - Lefilliâtre/Heumann/Jacobs, Music from the Court of Louis XIV, 25 July 2016

Klosterkirche St Anna im Lehel, Munich

Etienne Moulinié – Si mes soupirs sont indiscrets; Bien que l’Amour; O che gioia

Charles Hurel – Prélude
Nicolas Hotman – Allemande
Pierre Corneille – Psyché: ‘A peine je vous vois’
Michel Lambert – Ombre de mon amant; Vos mépris chaque jour
Sieur de Sainte-Colombe – Les Couplets
Sébastien le Camus – Laissez durer la nuit; Ah! Fuyons ce dangereux séjour; Amour, cruel Amour
Michel Lambert – Rochers, vous êtes sourds
Robert de Visée – Prélude; La Mascarade: Rondeau; Chaconne
Jean de La Fontaine – Fables, Livre XII, 14: ‘L’Amour et la Folie’
Charpentier – Profitez du printemps; Celle qui fait tout mon tourment; Au bord d’une fontaine; Sans frayeur dans de bois
Marin Marais – Pièces de viole, 3^ème livre: Prélude and Grand ballet
Couperin – Zéphire, modère en ces lieux

Claire Lefilliâtre (soprano)

Friederike Heumann (viola da gamba)

Fred Jacobs (theorbo)

Klosterkirche St Anna, 1727-33

In many respects, this second ‘Festspiel-Barockkonzert’  made for an intriguing pendant to the previous night’s premiere of Les Indes galantes. All of the music was earlier than Rameau’s opéra-ballet, some of that in the first half – the programme was broadly but not pedantically chronological – considerably earlier. Music from the court of Louis XIV covers, after all, a good number of years, the king having reigned between 1643 and 1715. The works by Marais and Couperin at the close were probably the latest, both dated 1711, four years before Louis's death. Rather to my surprise, although not without exception, it was the first half that proved more compelling as a performance to me. Perhaps that was partly a matter of having tired a little; although this repertory certainly interests me, I can lay no claim to great expertise. One has to listen intently to appreciate its subtleties and its variety, just as one does with, say, the music of Luigi Nono. Maybe, then, I am – perhaps unusually - more accustomed to listening to Nono.

For there was certainly variety in the programming, within its chronological and courtly framework. Its French title – ‘Au bord d’une fontaine – Airs et Brunettes’ – alluded nicely not only to one of the Charpentier works and implicitly to Versailles itself, but also to the celebrated 1721 collection of songs arranged for flute by Jacques Hotteterre, ‘Airs et brunettes a deux et trois dessus pour les flutes traversieres tirez des meilleurs autheurs, anciens et modernes, ensembles les airs de Mrs. Lambert, Lully, De Bousset, &c les plus convenables a la flute traversiere seule, ornez d'agremens par Mr. Hotteterre Ie Romain et recueillis par M. ++++.’ And so, rather than arrangements, we heard ‘originals’, mostly vocal, with Claire Lefilliâtre as soprano, but with instrumental interludes, from viola de gamba (Friederike Heumann), theorbo (Fred Jacobs), and the two instruments in concert. We also heard a couple of recitations, Lefilliâtre reading from Corneille and La Fontaine. 

What I think I missed most of all, especially during the second half, was something more outgoing in Lefilliâtre’s vocal performances. Now there is much to be gained from intimacy, which I valued greatly in the vocal music of Etienne Moulinié and Michel Lambert in particular, and not all of this music, indeed not much of it, is ‘operatic’, whether in a seventeenth- or a more modern sense. By the same token, however, there were times when, despite trying to listen as I could, I missed a greater sense of variation both within and between pieces.

The Italianate style of some of the first-half performances – more than once, I thought of Cavalli – initially surprised me, until I reflected on Cavalli’s own Ercole armante, commissioned by Mazarin for the 1662 wedding of Louis to Marie-Thérèse. As the harpsichordist Luke Green reminded me afterwards, the roots go back further, however: to the influence of Marie de Medici. Such tendencies are not absent, of course, even in Charpentier and Couperin; not only did I miss them being brought to the vocal foreground more strongly, however; I missed much of what made those composers different, more modern. Their music looks forward to Rameau as well as back to the earlier years of Louis’s reign. A further oddity was the inconsistency in Lefilliâtre’s ‘historical’ pronunciation, whether in the declamatory Corneille or the vocal items. I have no particularly strong feelings either way about the practice as such, whether in my own language or another, but it was unclear to me why some word endings should be pronounced and others not. Details matter in most music, but they certainly do here. Diction and intonation could sometimes be a little wayward too.

                                                                                                            

There was, though, a moving sincerity to Lefilliâtre’s performances at their best – enhanced for me by the warmth of the church acoustic, although others . Tales of love and death – are they not often one and the same? – drew one in. So too, very much, did not only the ‘accompaniments’ but the instrumental items. Heumann’s gamba playing proved her not only mistress of her instrument but above all a deeply sensitive musician, responding to it just as a fine pianist would to Chopin. The pieces from Marais’s Pièces de viole sounded not only as justly acclaimed summits of this still little-known (at least beyond certain circles) repertory, but as instrumental music fully fit to hold its own with more celebrated successors. Likewise Jacobs’s theorbo playing, pulse always clear, and for that reason capable of meaningful rather than arbitrary modification. I do not think I had heard the music of Robert de Visée before; it emerged in Jacobs’s hands as something clearly worthy of further exploration. And that, whatever certain reservations regarding vocal performances, is surely the point.  

Merry Christmas!

Some favourite Christmas music:

Médée, English National Opera, 15 February 2013

The Coliseum

(sung in English, as Medea)

Médée – Sarah Connolly

Jason – Jeffrey Francis
Créon – Brindley Sherratt
Créuse – Katherine Manley
Oronte – Roderick Williams
Nérine – Rhian Lois
Cléone – Aolfe O’Sullivan
Arcas – Oliver Dunn
Corinthian/Jealousy – John McMunn
Italian Woman/Phantom II – Sophie Junker
Corinthian/Argive – Jeremy Budd
Cupid’s captives – Aolfe O’Sullivan, Sophie Junker, John McMunn
Sons of Médée and Jason – Ewan Guthrie, Harry Collins

Sir David McVicar (director)

Bunny Christie (designs)
Paule Constable (lighting)
Lynne Page (choreography)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Jörn Andresen)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Christian Curnyn (conductor)

 

Médée was Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s sole work written for the Académie Royale de Musique, the legacy of Lully’s operatic monopoly having died hard. Though not a popular hit, unlike, say, Alcide and Didon, the theme of Thomas Corneille’s libretto and Charpentier’s response thereto almost certainly proving too much, too ‘immoral’ for many Parisian sensibilities, the opera certainly proved a critical success upon its first performances in December 1693. Sébastien de Brossard, priest, music theorist, and composer, went so far as to describe it as ‘the one opera without exception in which one can learn those things most essential to good composition.’ Louis XIV, erstwhile avid Lulliste, was impressed, complimenting Charpentier personally upon the opera, whilst the king’s brother, Philippe, Duke of Orléans, ‘Monsieur’, and eldest son, Louis, the Grand Dauphin, both attended several performances. Though hailed by the critics on its first outing, Médée seems to have received no further performances at the Paris Opéra after 1694.

 

Does it deserve better this time? Yes, I have no doubt that, even if Rameau were unaware of it – the evidence seems tantalisingly unclear – that it is nevertheless not only a fine tragedy in its own right but, in retrospect, a crucial stepping stone on the teleological path that takes us not only to Rameau but to Gluck, and thence of course to Mozart, Berlioz, and Wagner. Alas, the cast was left to shoulder the burden on its own on this occasions, receiving scant support from either the pit or the staging. So whilst some excellent singing will doubtless have won a few welcome converts to the cause of tragédie lyrique, much of what was seen and a typically perverse conception of so-called ‘period style’ from the conductor – do conductor and director ever stop to consider how irreconcilable their stances are with each other? – will also have had many wonder what the fuss was about. My enthusiasm for the work was certainly not shared by a couple of friends to whom I later spoke; given the circumstances, I cannot say that I blame them.

 

The lion’s share of the responsibility should be lain at the door of Sir David McVicar. Taking up the recent tendencies in his stagings and extending them, at times to the point of absurdity, what we witnessed was a camp monstrosity, relocated to the 1940s for no apparent reason, save to permit an endless display of military uniforms, secretarial staff, and the dancing boys and girls within them. A point might well have been made about war and wartime exigency, but it was not; the updating seemed merely a matter of arbitrary ‘colour’. The nadir was perhaps reached with the arrival on stage of a large pink aeroplane at the end of the second act, whilst Cupid darted around as a nightclub singer, an unfortunate reminiscence, even if unintentional, of the recent ENO Giulio Cesare.

 

Spectacle could perfectly well have been harnessed to dramatic effect, just as it might have been in late seventeenth-century France; however, it was not. I was put in mind of Wagner’s furious accusation in Opera and Drama against Meyerbeer; opera had degenerated into an ‘outrageously coloured, historico-romantic, devilish-religious, sanctimonious-lascivious, risqué-sacred, saucy-mysterious, sentimental-swindling, dramatic farrago’. The only moments of real drama emerged as if by default, the endless comings and goings on stage thinning out for a while, and Charpentier’s music just about emerging on its own terms. When that happened, however, it did not last for long, the brief moment of concentration upon Médée in the third act giving way to the bizarre appearance of hellish creatures who, in a non-mythological context, seemed more like writhing refugees from a second-rate episode of Dr Who than tragic figures of dread. The dance routines, however well executed, seemed tone-deaf to Charpentier’s music and quite unaware of the dramatic role that dance should play in this repertoire. Some time immersed in a seventeenth-century manual, if only to reject its prescriptions, might have been well spent.

 

If opera is held to be mere ‘entertainment’ – and not very entertaining entertainment at that – then there seems little case for public subsidy at all; if treated more seriously, more daringly, more provocatively, more shockingly, then it justifies itself handsomely as public discourse. German houses tend to understand that. Our London houses show some understanding of that from time to time; if only McVicar, undoubtedly a master of his craft in terms of having singers and actors do what he would, might shed the disturbing anti-intellectualism that has pervaded so much of his recent work and go beyond mere crowd-pleasing spectacle. Rightly or wrongly, the Prologue was omitted entirely.

 

Christian Curnyn’s conducting will doubtless be lauded in certain quarters. There was a far from unimpressive ebb and flow to it, the boundaries between air, chorus, and recitative properly brought into question, even dissolved. That undoubted achievement could readily have formed the basis of a fine performance. The great pity, however, just as in Giulio Cesare last autumn, was ‘period’ obsession: puritanical elimination of vibrato, refusal to allow the strings to sing, indeed to sound like orchestral sings as opposed to members of a village folk band, and what sounded very much to me – I could not see the pit – like employment of different, so-called ‘Baroque’ bows. There were moments, especially solo moments, when the ENO strings seemed to regain control, but they really should not have to play with both hands metaphorically tied behind their backs. If we are to have the rare, priceless advantage of modern strings, then for goodness sake let them be used. The blend with recorders was often problematic, as it always tends to be; modern flutes would have been a far better choice. Trumpets and a variety of drums alleviated the worst of the vibrato-less tyranny.

 

What of the singers? The Mercure galant enthused of Marie Le Rochois, a veteran of Lully’s 1686 Armide, to which score and libretto make reference and allusion on numerous occasions:
 

The passions are so vivid, particularly in Médée, that when this role was but declaimed it did not fail to make a great impression on the listeners. Mlle Rochois, one of the best singers in the world and who performs with warmth, finesse and intelligence, shone in this role and made the most of its beauties. All of Paris is enchanted...

How would Sarah Connolly match up? Very well indeed. There were moments earlier on when I wondered whether the role was quite suited to her voice, some of its richness lost on account of the range. However, from the point of her summoning the spirits onwards, such doubts were triumphantly banished. The part became Connolly’s, in dramatic and musical terms equally; there was no doubt about where one’s sympathies lay, however horrific her crime. Katherine Manley’s Créuse offered an excellent foil, necessarily a poor second to Médée, yet beautifully sung and acted, and capable of eliciting a degree or two of sympathy herself. Likewise Roderick Williams’s typically subtle, intelligent portrayal of Oronte, though as in every case, one could not help but wonder what he might have sounded like in French, Christopher Cowell’s English translation making a good stab at an impossible task. Brindley Sherratt’s Créon offered a well-judged blend of hubris and haplessness. Many of the singers in smaller roles shone too, for instance Rhian Lois and Aoife O’Sullivan as the confidantes of Médee and Créuse. Choral singing was excellent too. The sole fly in the ointment was Jeffrey Francis’s quite unheroic Jason. There may be a good case for deconstruction of heroism in this case, but there needs to be a degree of construction in the first place. The role sat unhelpfully for his voice, but stage presence was lacking too.

 

Three cheers are certainly due to ENO for this foray into pre-Ramellian tragédie lyrique. Would it not be a wonderful thing to hear some Lully next? Or indeed, to move forward to Gluck? Let such further explorations, however, be the province of a director who would take form and drama with but a modicum of greater seriousness.