Lohengrin, Royal Opera, 24 April 2022

Royal Opera House

Henry the Fowler – Gábor Bretz
Lohengrin – Brandon Jovanovich
Elsa – Jennifer Davis
Friedrich von Telramund – Craig Colclough
Ortrud – Anna Smirnova
King’s Herald – Derek Welton
Brabantian Nobles (‘Four Followers of Telramund’) – Elgan Llŷr Thomas, Thando Mjandana, Matthew Durkan, Thomas D. Hopkinson
Pages (‘Four Women at the Wedding’) – Katy Batho, Deborah Peake-Jones, Renata Skarelyte, Louise Armit
Gottfried – Alfie Davis

David Alden (director)
Peter Relton (revival director)
Paul Steinberg (set designs)
Gideon Davey (costumes)
Adam Silverman (lighting)
Tal Rosner (video)
Maxine Braham (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Jakub Hrůša (conductor)

Considering the first night of David Alden’s (then) new production of Lohengrin in 2018, I found ‘a conceptual weakness at ... [its] heart. I suspect it can be remedied: if a shell, it is a fine shell. It will not, however, remedy itself.’ Rather to my surprise, I found this first revival, notably under a new director, Peter Relton, much stronger. It is not always easy to be sure what has actually changed, and what one is viewing differently for oneself. I shall not try; the earlier review remains for anyone who wishes to read it. In at least partial recantation, then, I am happy to say this made for a far more satisfying evening, dramatically and musically, than that experienced four years ago. Moreover, for Wagner to have returned so emphatically to one of the city’s main houses marked a step-change in London’s operatic recovery. However much one wished it to succeed, ENO’s autumn Walküre proved a bitter disappointment. If Lohengrin did not quite match the success of Covent Garden’s astonishing recent Peter Grimes, it stood closer to that than to November’s dispiriting evening at the Coliseum. 

An interwar fascist regime, on the verge at least of further war, is the setting (albeit with certain irritating Alden anachronisms of the sort that conceive postmodernism as style rather than philosophy). The aftermath of war, presumably the Great War, that haunts the first act in particular, every character seemingly damaged, mentally and often physically too. The charge of war and of preparations for another has obvious resonances to spring 2022; they could hardly fail to speak. If King Henry cowers like a question mark—in his throne, with crown, he seems an all-too-obvious rip off from Hans Neuenfels at Bayreuth—and the Herald wears his injuries anything but lightly, others struggle to stand too. Telramund and Elsa act and react in caricatured expressionist style. Even Lohengrin adopts a foetal position of comfort with Elsa, presumably seeking a mother figure lacking in the Grail brotherhood. (As Nietzsche did not say, let us not go there.) 

Only Ortrud, doubtless significantly, operates as normal. Perhaps it is her ‘magic’, or perhaps that magic is a metaphor for something broader; that is really up to us. A fine touch, at the close of the second act, is her apparition in a box, toasting (cursing) with champagne the unhappy couple. Hemmed in by Paul Steinberg’s sets, their crossings and their disjunctures a striking visualisation of catastrophe, the action is never likely to end happily. This, after all, is a tragedy, probably the purest in Wagner; a signal strength here is that we do not forget that. That is not, of course, to say that it always need be played exclusively as such, but there is an ultimate trajectory here less in evidence than last time, which certainly strengthens the drama in this context. 

So too did Jakub Hrůša’s conducting of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House—and the golden orchestral playing itself. Hrůša is not afraid to take his time, the first act feeling especially broad, though never merely slow. Careful attention to detail and to its place in the whole had Wagner’s score veritably glow with inner life. The old operatic forms on which much of Wagner’s conception is ultimately based were clear. In Mein Leben, Wagner recalls Schumann’s puzzlement at a Dresden reading of the poem; he ‘liked it, yet couldn’t figure out the musical form I had in mind for it, as he couldn’t find any passages suitable for traditional musical numbers. I then had some fun reading him different parts of my poem just as if they were in aria and cavatina form, so that in the end he smilingly conceded the point.’ Full performance can heighten that sense further—yet also more dialectically. For equally clear were the development of those forms and the forces energising that development: harmony (especially that of Ortrud), of course, but also an energised conception of Gluckian accompagnato arising from Wagner’s work as conductor, editor, and director. 

At any rate, not only did Hrůša show a fine Wagnerian’s ability to hear vast structures—acts, at least—in a single breath, but he inspired the finest playing from all sections of the orchestra throughout. Each act had its own way of unfolding; no one-size-fits-all approach, but rather a patient, powerful strategic ear and mind. Moreover, he often favoured—unfashionably—long, quasi-vocal orchestral lines: not so much Straussian as with kinship to the Wagner of a conductor such as Karajan. The vertical was not ignored, but experience suggested ultimately a more horizontal conception of Wagner’s—‘endless melody’, perhaps—and convincingly so. 

Brandon Jovanovich offered a finely judged portrayal of Lohengrin, as acute in verbal as musical terms, its clarion heroism shielding—and sometimes not—a vulnerable and decidedly ambiguous inner core. Craig Colclough’s Telramund, tragically in thrall to Anna Smirnova’s sensational Ortrud, presented similar ambiguities, those similarities engaging sympathy and our appreciation of dramatic complexity. If there was something winningly ‘old-school’ to Smirnova’s vocal delivery and sheer star presence, that was not at the cost of more ‘modern’ engagement with directorial concept, far from it. Jennifer Davis’s movingly human Elsa grew in stature throughout a committed performance. Gábor Bretz vividly captured the King’s instability. Derek Welton made for an uncommonly vivid Herald, hinting intriguingly at psychological complications from a wartime past. 

Last but far from least, William Spaulding’s Royal Opera Chorus sounded on as fine form as I can recall for some time. How welcome, moreover, it was to have a large chorus seemingly unrestricted—reality may have been different—by pandemic restrictions in what it could do and, above all, how it could sing. Ultimately, then, it was that crucial, yet often elusive, sense of a dramatic whole that served to distinguish revival from first incarnation.

Les Huguenots, Deutsche Oper, 2 February 2020

DIE HUGENOTTEN von Giacomo Meyerbeer, Regie: David Alden, Premiere am 13.11.2016, Deutsche Oper Berlin, copyright: Bettina Stöss

Marguerite de Valois – Liv Redpath

Comte de Saint-Bris – Seth Carico

Comte de Nevers – Dimitris Tiliakos

Valentine – Olesya Golovneva

Urbain – Irene Roberts

Tavannes – Paul Kaufmann

Cossé – Jörg Schörner

Méru – Padraic Rowan

Thoré, Maurevert – Alexei Botnarciuc

De Retz – Stephen Bronk

Raoul de Nangis – Anton Rositskiy

Marcel – Andrew Harris

Bois-Rosé – Andrei Danilov

Archer du guet – Timothy Newton

Two courtiers, Two Catholic girls – Jacquelyn Stucker, Karis Tucker

David Alden (director)

Giles Cadle (set designs)

Constance Hoffman (costumes)

Adam Silverman (lighting)

Marcel Leemann (choreograpy)

Teresa Reiber, Gerlinde Pelkowski (Spielleitung)

Jörg Königsdorf, Curt A Roesler (dramaturgy)

Chorus of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus master: Jeremy Bines) 

Opera-Ballet of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin 

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Alexander Vedernikov (conductor)

The Meyerbeer enigma – or enigmas: will they ever be solved? Shall we ever even agree what they might be? There remains, at least for me, an object of fascination in the phenomenon itself, not that I could be sure of telling you what it is. A certain variety of cynic will doubtless lay into Wagner at this point. People always do, of course. (It makes a change from Jeremy Corbyn.) However, on returning to Wagner’s description in Oper und Drama, I suspect that he came closer than most: ‘a monstrously coloured, historico-romantic, devilish-religious, sanctimonious-lascivious, risqué-sacred, saucy-mysterious, sentimental-swindling, dramatic farrago’. (It sounds better/worse in German: ‘ein ungeheuer buntscheckiges, historisch-romantisches, teuflisch-religiöses, bigot-wollüstiges, frivol-heiliges, geheimnisvoll-freches, sentimental-gaunerisches, dramatisches Allerlei’.) Either that, or Wagner transformed our understanding of musical drama so much as to render it well-nigh impossible for us to hear this bizarre, often incomprehensible music otherwise.

There is, I suspect many will agree, a particular problem concerning how to stage a work such as Les Huguenots for a modern audience. I was inclined to give David Alden the benefit of the doubt for quite some time. Not only have I admired several other Alden productions, but this also shows some sign of recognising that there was a problem and of attempting to address it. Or does it? Part of the way through, I was as bewildered by what was going on visually as I was by what was happening – I think that is the word – aurally. The opera seems somewhat carelessly updated to the nineteenth century, to no particular end, though perhaps with no particular loss either. The period comes across as too late to coincide with the time of composition: more Second Empire than July Monarchy, though perhaps I am misunderstanding. Indeed, it comes across as having been chosen more for its ‘look’ and for the strange interpolation of big-house Offenbach dance numbers, ultimately more vulgar than ironic, than anything else. Little or no attempt is made to accommodate the action to its new setting. One gains no sense of a framing, nineteenth-century glance back towards the sixteenth century, let alone of equivalents being found. As to who these people are, what they are doing, how one might react to them: who knows?

The third act offers a case in point. Confusingly, everything here appears to take place in whatever it is the Pré-aux-clercs has become: more suggestive of a Calvinist church to start with, although ecclesiology, let alone theology, seems even less on Alden’s mind than Meyerbeer’s. Characters are regularly pushed onstage astride large horse statues, the frequency of such arrivals presumably reflecting a desire to attain better value for whatever they must have cost. The idea of spectacle is certainly worth playing with, but here there is not enough spectacle, let alone idea. If you like seeing fire onstage, then the denouement will be for you, but only if you have never seen it accomplished with greater spectacle. Throughout a dance, a blow job, a round of champagne, some other such staple, or a combination of the above will occur when nothing else immediately suggests itself. Why the archer du guet, a sort of royal nightwatchman, appears as a wraith I simply have no idea. Having wondered what Alden might make of his claim in the programme booklet that, to a twenty-first-century audience Meyerbeer’s operas can seem ‘with their collage technique ironic, cool, and postmodern’, I can only really say nice try; or rather, more of an actual attempt would have been welcome. If the idea were to reflect the messy dramaturgy, if one can even call it that, of Meyerbeer’s opera, then it needed framing better than this. Any unhappy coincidence, however, was more likely to have been just that.

I can imagine a conductor bringing more to the material, making more of it, than Alexander Vedernikov. Perhaps there is no ‘whole’ to give a sense of here; if so, discontinuity would be better off coming across as an aesthetic choice – difficult, yet far from impossible – rather than a mere default option. Orchestra and chorus alike sounded less than inspired, at times ragged and uncertain. There is doubtless little that can be done about the interminable quality of certain arias; nor about the composer’s seeming inability to bring them to a close when he finally makes the attempt; nor about the weirdly unfinished nature of many of them, as if Meyerbeer had sketched a vocal line and obbligato instrumental solo and been in too much of a rush to add the rest. Perhaps he was. If so, though, why has anyone ever taken this music to heart, as many would genuinely seem to have done? Cutting would probably not have helped. A viola d’amore staying more or less in tune throughout its ‘star’ moment – here taken onstage – surely would.

As for solo singing, it was a mixed bag. French pronunciation, let alone style, was rarely a strength. No one should argue for casting on nationalistic or even national grounds; I could nevertheless not help but wonder whether the presence of a French singer or two would have helped. As it was, female singers tended to fare better than their male counterparts. Liv Redpath’s light, clear soprano, often somewhat instrumental in tone, was granted ample opportunity to shine, opportunity well grasped. If her melodies and those of others remained obstinately unmemorable, when indeed they cohered at all, fault for that lies elsewhere. Irene Roberts, as the page Urbain, offered finely honed complement and contrast. If Anton Rositskiy’s Raoul proved somewhat rough-hewn, the tenor offered staying power and a winning ardency. Olesya Golovneva’s heartfelt Valentine sounded more genuine than any of the writing itself, and was all the more welcome for it. Dimitris Tiliakos impressed too, as a suave, clean-toned Comte de Nevers.

This remained, however, a baffling evening, in which little of the interest of the composer's own Robert le Diable, let alone of another, immeasurably superior composer's Rienzi, was to be discerned. Why Meyerbeer? I have considerably less idea than I did before.

Lohengrin, Royal Opera, 7 June 2018

Royal Opera House

Images: Clive Barda

King Henry the Fowler – Georg Zeppenfeld

Lohengrin – Klaus Florian Vogt

Elsa – Jennifer Davis

Friedrich von Telramund – Thomas Johannes Mayer

Ortrud – Christine Goerke

King’s Herald – Kostas Smoriginas

Brabantian Nobles – Konu Kim, Thomas Atkins, Gyula Nagy, Simon Shibambu

Pages – Katy Batho, Deborah Peake-Jones, Dervla Ramsay, Louise Armit

Gottfried – Michael Curtis

                                        

David Alden (director)

Paul Steinberg (set designs)

Gideon Davey (costumes)

Adam Silverman (lighting)

Tal Rosner (video)

Maxine Braham (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus and Extra Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Andris Nelsons (conductor)

Elsa (Jennifer Davis) at her wedding

Since returning to London in January, I have been heartened by much of what I have seen – and indeed heard – from the Royal Opera. If Barrie Kosky’s Carmen proved something of a flop, there has been much to ponder and indeed to inspire from Krzysztof Warlikowski’s From the House of the Dead, superlatively conducted by Mark Wigglesworth, and most recently, George Benjamin’s new operatic masterpiece, Lessons in Love and Violence. David Alden is perhaps not the most obvious directorial choice for Wagner, though his ENO Tristan – the first I saw – certainly had its merits. He pretty much had the field to himself, though, given that Covent Garden’s previous staging was the lamentable fancy-dress pageant served up by Elijah Moshinsky, its final reheating coming as late as 2009. On the face of it, Alden’s move to the 1930s must have come to a shock to the more reactionary elements always present in a Wagner audience. That it does not seem to have done so suggests either a welcome opening of minds or something – at least, according to one reading, like Lohengrin – rather less substantial than one might have initially presumed.

I wish it had been the former but Alden’s production ultimately proved conventional, all too conventional: more a potential shell for something more interesting than a remotely finished – even ready – production in itself. Designs and some stage direction, notably that of the chorus, are suggestive, but where is the dramatic grit? To offer a Lohengrin come as redeemer to a society broken by war is of course to follow Wagner precisely; to shift the actual war to something closer to our modern concerns is no bad thing at all. He unifies a people in disarray through his charismatic authority, yet ultimately cannot fulfil his duty and rejects his people.

Lohengrin (Klaus Florian Vogt) and Telramund (Thomas Johannes Mayer)

Ortrud (Christine Goerke) and Telramund

Nazi parallels, or rather premonitions – like Marx, Wagner is often at his very strongest in pointing to where the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would go wrong – are obvious, yet none the worse for that. Even that level of critique will, after all, stand as a rebuke to those who follow that disingenuous old Nazi, Curt von Westernhagen, railing against the fresh theatrical wind of the 1970s: ‘Directors who deem themselves progressive when they transform the Ring back into a drama with a “message” have no idea how regressive this approach is in relation to the genesis of the work itself.’ Westernhagen’s scholarly methods are now as discredited as his ideology. Disciples remain, though, and few things get them so hot under the collar as Nazis on stage. Clue: they like it, really.

That said, simply to update is never enough. Indeed, it is to adopt the Westernhagen fraternity’s strange delusion that a production more or less is its designs (here, handsome indeed, for which great credit should be accorded to Paul Steinberg in particular). In many ways, when and where something is set, or is not, is the least interesting thing of all; at best, it is a starting-point. Save for that arresting, almost cinematic (Riefenstahl at a push) direction of crowd movement, its dramatic import obvious yet undeniably powerful, there is not much to get one’s teeth into. If the setting remains largely undeveloped, too much also seems awkwardly reminiscent of other productions. Had you never seen a German Lohengrin, you might remain, often literally, in the dark; Wagner and indeed many in his audiences surely deserve greater credit than that.

Henry the Fowler (Georg Zeppenfeld)

A King Henry whose hunched body language was a little too close to comfort to that of Hans Neuenfels’s Bayreuth production is one thing, but a falling of banners for war that aped the close of the second act of Stefan Herheim’s Parsifal is another again. If some point had been made about Wagner, the Nazis, and Bayreuth, it might have worked, I suppose; here, it seemed gratuitous and frankly derivative. What the point of describing the pages as ‘four women at the wedding’ may have been I do not know: if you like that sort of thing, then that will doubtless be the sort of thing you like. A sudden design apparition from Neuschwanstein seems merely a change of scene. Again, one can see why such an image might have a point in a fascist, even Nazi, setting, but it needs at some level to be made, not merely assumed. Dramatic motivation, then, largely eluded me. Such irritations pointed to a greater problem: a conceptual weakness at the heart. I suspect it can be remedied: if a shell, it is a fine shell. It will not, however, remedy itself.

Perhaps the same once had been true of Moshinsky. At any rate, this evening shared something else important with that final outing of 2009: musical excellence. Andris Nelsons, who conducted Neuenfels’s production at Bayreuth, was not at his strongest here, especially in the first act. Indeed, there both Nelsons and Alden seemed intent, consciously or otherwise, to underline what can often seem to be its rather static nature rather than to enliven the drama. However, Nelsons drew increasingly lovely playing from the orchestra, lower strings and woodwind in particular, and made often quite extreme second-act rubato – not to be confused with tempo variation – work, rather than seem merely mannered. His command of the architecture in the second and third acts impressed. Still more so did the outstanding singing from the chorus and extra chorus. William Spaulding’s work here is clearly reaping rewards, just as it did at Berlin’s Deutsche Oper.

Klaus Florian Vogt’s Lohengrin is a known quantity: known also, of course, to Nelsons from Bayreuth. I am less enthusiastic than once I was: the purity is less consistently apparent, the blandness more so. (Or maybe I am just tired of it.) However, it remains impressive on its own terms; one’s response to his singing will perhaps be more than usually personal. Replacing the originally advertised Kristine Opolais, Jennifer Davis impressed greatly as Elsa. This was by any standards a high-profile debut. Vocal and dramatic sincerity were matched by a security one had little right to expect. Thomas Johannes Mayer, also of recent Bayreuth fame, more than hinted at a properly complex Telramund, even if his artistry received little help from the staging. Christine Goerke’s Ortrud climaxed in properly blood curdling cries at the close, although again I had the impression a deeper production would have brought out something – well, deeper. Georg Zeppenfeld did what he could with the Neuenfels King-redux; that again was impressive indeed. Only Kostas Smoriginas, as his Herald, disappointed: often uncertain of verbal and musical line alike.

 

Ortrud waiting

The audience, part of one’s experience whether we like it or not – unless one happens to be Ludwig II, and even then… – proved something of a trial. Someone’s telephone vibrated throughout the first minute or so of the first-act Prelude, the culprit eventually shouting ‘Yes! I’m going to turn it off’. A friend heard someone else announce upon Lohengrin’s arrival: ‘I prefer it when he wears golden armour.’ Coughing, electronic terrorism, and inanity aside, they seemed to like the production: rarely a good sign. Given what they will boo… Still, there is, I am sure, room for something more to take shape within its framework; perhaps they will do so then. Moreover, there is, I assure you, a genuinely exciting prospect for the new Lohengrin at Bayreuth this year. At least on this occasion, my lips must remain better sealed than Elsa’s. The world, however, is likely to see a worthy successor to Neuenfels from Yuval Sharon, in a production that penetrates more deeply to the work’s essence and grapples with its implications.

Jenůfa, English National Opera, 23 June 2016

Images: Donald Cooper
Karolka (Soraya Mafi), Mayor's Wife (Natalie Herman), Jenůfa (Laura Wilde), Laca (Peter Hoare)

 

Coliseum

Grandmother Buryja – Valerie Reid

Kostelnička Buryja – Michaela Martens
Jenůfa – Laura Wilde
Laca Klemen – Peter Hoare
Števa Buryja – Nicky Spence
Foreman, Mayor – Graeme Danby
Jano – Sarah Labiner
Barena – Claire Mitcher
Mayor’s Wife – Natalie Herman
Karolka – Soraya Mafi
Neighbour – Morag Boyle
Villager – Claire Pendleton

David Alden (director)

Charles Edwards (set designer)
Jon Morrell (costumes)
Adam Silverman (lighting)
Claire Gaskin (choreography, revived by Maxine Braham)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Stephen Harris)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Mark Wigglesworth (conductor)

 

 

 

Jenůfa

This now seems as though it took place in another world – because it did. I nearly did not make it, waiting more than half an hour to change trains at Tower Hill, before desperately trying to find a cab to take me to the Coliseum. Yes, that monsoon rainfall that hit London – and, well, you know the rest… In some ways, it was fitting, if heartbreaking, that this outstanding demonstration of European internationalism should have opened on the night it did: the night when the forces of bigotry, those who would have stoned Jenůfa, took us where they did. I might have preferred to hear Jenůfa in Czech, but who cares? Although the words – excellently translated, insofar as I am competent to judge, a considerable ‘insofar’, although compared to my countrymen and, to a lesser extent, countrywomen… - sometimes sound in themselves a little odd in English, they and their meaning were powerfully, indeed viscerally conveyed. (I know that ‘visceral’ is a much overused word in such contexts, but here it certainly was the mot juste, or whatever ‘decent’ English phrase that fascist Farage would have us use.) Moreover, hearing the words in English certainly had the advantage for a non-Czech speaker – my fault, I know – of underlining when words, especially but not only when repeated, took on not only vocal but orchestral life of their own as speech rhythms (even if the speech rhythms were thus a bit peculiar!) That cavil-which-is-not-a-cavil will be really my only attempt at finding one, for this was magnificent, a reproach not only to xenophobes but to all those who have wished ENO ill, and who, in certain case, continue to do so.

ENO Chorus

 

The (relatively few) reservations I had about David Alden’s production last time around in 2009 have either evaporated or, seemingly, been dealt with in revision. Perhaps it was as much a matter of the outstanding performances we saw on stage – although they were pretty good too in 2009. I am not entirely sure which, since it is always difficult, no impossible, to remember precisely what happened when, so shall not offer detailed comparisons. At any rate, the shift from Czech Hardy-land – I was put in mind of Boulez’s less-than-favourable description of earlier Janáček as ‘Dvořák in the country’, thereby exalting the late works to which he came to, well, late – to a more overtly, at least to us rootless cosmopolitans, vicious urban-ish setting, perhaps holding something in common with Christoph Marthaler’s Paris Katya Kabanova. The people are poor and they live in a small, ‘tight-knit’ community, with all the problems that brings: that is what is important, not whether we see lots of wheat sheaves or whatever. Indeed, a sense of the bucolic might be argued to distract from the tragedy at hand; that is certainly given no chance of happening here.

Grandmother Buryja (Valerie Reid), Jano (Sarah Labiner), Jenůfa

 

Charles Edwards’s brilliant designs, Jon Morrell’s costumes, Adam Silverman’s costumes, the choreography of Claire Gaskin, here revived by Maxine Braham: all these combine with Alden’s razor-sharp focus upon human tragedy to present something out of the normal (and that is before we even come to the music). Walls close in, the storm intervenes, worlds (visual) collide, often with the greatest physical menace. The Mayor’s Wife outfit and make-up are just as much part of the drama, as the terrifying rattling on the shutters of the Kostelnička’s house and the eventual smashing of the glass. Gesamtkunstwerk is a word so divested of meaning, historical or contemporary, that it is perhaps beyond salvation, but if salvation there might be – and there is precious little chance of that dramatically – this would offer unimpeachable witness. If I find some of the deviations from the naturalistic a little peculiar in themselves, they serve that greater purpose; indeed, when considering that, I recalled Alden’s brilliant ENO Peter Grimes. I was less troubled there by such matters, perhaps because I like the work ‘itself’ less; that, though, should not be the point, and the greater dramatic point of small-community, small-minded bigotry punches one in the gut just as it did in Britten’s opera. The advance of the chorus, the villagefolk gunning for their primitive, punitive, perverted ‘morality’ will long remain in the mind; so will the cowardly attempt at rescue of a broken Števa. Here, wall-hugging, often rightly derided, had justification, the desire both to escape and to self-incarcerate inescapably drawn to the fore.

Kostelnička (Michaela Martens)

I cannot recall hearing a finer performance from the ENO Orchestra. Mark Wigglesworth’s conducting – he must be brought back as Music Director, with a settlement for the company to match – was the most intense I can recall in this work, perhaps in any Janáček opera. It grabbed one by the throat, just like the work of a great conductor in Wozzeck, and never relinquished its grip. It was not all fierceness, though; the open, sympathetic, European humanity of Janáček’s score shone through all the more warmly in the context of such an agón. The pounding repeated chords at the second half registered all the more strongly for the turmoil both onstage and in the world outside; but they were the orchestra’s and Wigglesworth’s too. Biting, ferocious, generative: they were everything a musico-dramatic prelude should and must be. As the lights flickered in duet with the xylophone, a world internal and external shook. Wagner has no monopoly in operatic renewal of Attic tragedy: this was a communal and, yes, a political rite.

Jenůfa and Laca

That warm sympathy was equally apparent in Laura Wilde’s lovely account of the title role. This was no stock object of sympathy, of circumstance; we experienced her agonies, but as an agent too, albeit, like us, an agent constrained, (near-)destroyed by her ‘community’. Michaela Martens, almost the only returning member of the 2009 cast, again presented a woman of strength as well as goodness, that strength smashed to pieces – how broken she looked and behaved in the third act! – by what she had done. Vocally, she soared; dramatically, in the very best sense, she plummeted. Valerie Reid was similarly broken by that stage as Grandmother Buryja. She intrigued, as the finest performances of this curious role will: we knew that she and whatever mistakes she had made were fundamental to the tragedy unfolding, without ever quite knowing what they had been. We guessed, though, thus making us complicit with the chorus of terror. Its magnificent contribution throughout, beyond ‘visceral', if something can be so, was yet another standing rebuke to the encircling vultures: ironically so, given its members roles as just that.

Jenůfa and Števa (Nicky Spence)

Peter Hoare’s Laca took us on as moving a ‘journey’, with apologies for the cliché, as that of Jenůfa; youthful (in knowing excess?) silliness was transformed into diffident, difficult maturity. I was quite unprepared for the violence of Nicky Spence’s first-act Števa. Again, being rid of the bucolic doubtless helped, but what generally comes across as winning charm was here a brazen display of power from the start, somewhat tempered, eventually, by Jenůfa’s intervention towards the end of the act, but only somewhat. That rendered his ghost-like appearance and disappearance all the more terrifying in the final act. Sarah Labiner’s splendidly boyish Jano, Soraya Mafi’s spirited Karolka, Graeme Danby’s skilfully differentiated roles Natalie Herman’s nasty-piece-of-work Mayor’s Wife: they and all the rest contributed to a true company performance. Even in, particularly in, the direst of tragedy, we find our catharsis somehow.

 

The Queen of Spades, English National Opera, 9 June 2015

Coliseum

(sung in English)

Hermann – Peter Hoare

Count Tomsky – Gregory Dahl
Prince Yeletsky – Nicholas Pallesen
The Countess – Dame Felicity Palmer
Lisa – Giselle Allen
Pauline – Catherine Young
Chekalinsky – Colin Judson
Surin – Wyn Pencarreg
Chaplitsky – Peter van Hulle
Narumov – Charles Johnston
Governess – Katie Bird

David Alden (director)

Gideon Davey (designs)

Wolfgang Goebbel (lighting)

Lorena Randi (choreography)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Stephen Harris)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Edward Gardner (conductor)

 

Oh dear! What a maddeningly inconsistent director David Alden is. Or is he maddeningly consistent, his productions suiting some works, or perhaps better, some swathes of the repertoire, better than others? His ENO Peter Grimes was a brilliant reassessment of a work that is weaker than partisans allow; it engaged with Britten’s opera at a level deeper than most have dared. This Queen of Spades barely engages with Tchaikovsky’s opera at all. I cannot help but conclude that high Romanticism – call it what one will – is really not Alden’s thing. He exhibits no sympathy for any of the characters, nor for their predicament. He seems to have no interest in the plot, not even to deconstruct it. All we have is a tiresome parade of clichés, as if designed to rouse the ire of operatic ‘conservatives’ and nothing more. Dark glasses, piles of chairs, flippantly unmotivated cross-dressing, a ragbag assemblage of costumes from different periods (the Kruschchev era (?) meets something older, though not of course Tchaikovsky’s brand of Mozartiana, and with no real sense of interplay), a hospital ward, extras who are not extras but are treated as such until they are not, party guests with animal masks: all these and more put in their mandatory appearances. Contemptuously tossed bank notes might make a point, but it is all but drowned under the frenetic, meaningless goings on. Is there a hint that the Countess is a gay icon, even a drag queen? Perhaps, but it is taken no further. And why does the clock never reach twelve, even when we are told that it does? This audience member was long past caring. My fear was that everything lay in Hermann’s – or rather Alden’s – tortured, or careless, mind. What a novel idea! If you despise the opera and everything surrounding it quite so much, if you really think it so clichéd that you have nothing to add beyond further cliché, might there not be a degree of integrity in leaving it to the care of another director?

The orchestra, however, sounded terrific, as it generally does now, especially under Edward Gardner. Precision, weight, delicacy: all were present. If only Gardner’s prowess as an orchestral trainer were matched by insight into the score. His conducting was often stiff, save when he accelerated too quickly. There were moments of repose, not least in the realm of Mozartian parody (which Gardner clearly esteems more highly than Alden), but there was little to indicate a longer line. Continuity was fractured less than on stage, but Tchaikovsky needs more than that. The chorus was on fine form too, its virtues – and its acting, however misplaced – every inch the equal of the orchestral performance.

ENO also offered a splendid cast. Peter Hoare proved an unusually thoughtful Hermann, his detailed attention to the text (that is, to words and music) exemplary throughout. Giselle Allen’s Lisa provided a near-ideal mixture of, or perhaps better confrontation between, coldness and warmth; her confidante, Pauline (Catherine Young) mirroring and to an extent extending such qualities on her smaller scale. What on earth Alden was thinking of in her case, I hardly dare consider. Felicity Palmer retains the most formidable star quality; her Grétry aria was as moving as anything we heard. For once, a degree of stillness! The richness of Nicolas Pallessen’s baritone proved a welcome luxury in the role of Prince Yeletsky. Despite the absurdities of the production at large, there was always a proper sense of interaction between all on stage; almost all excelled. What a pity, then, that the director seemed determined to undermine, even to negate, such manifest virtues.

Peter Grimes, English National Opera, 29 January 2014

Coliseum

Peter Grimes – Stuart Skelton

Ellen Oford – Elza van den Heever
Captain Balstrode – Iain Paterson
Auntie – Rebecca de Pont Davies
First Niece – Rhian Lois
Second Niece – Mary Bevan
Bob Boles – Michael Colvin
Swallow – Matthew Best
Mrs Sedley – Felicity Palmer
Revd Horace Adams – Timothy Robinson
Ned Keene – Leigh Melrose
Hobson – Matthew Treviño
John – Timothy Kirrage
Dr Crabbe – Ben Craze

David Alden (director)

Ian Rutherford (assistant director)
Paul Steinberg (set designs)
Brigitte Reiffenstuel (costumes)
Maxine Braham (movement)
Adam Silverman (lighting)

Chorus, and additional chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Edward Gardner (conductor).

I am no uncritical Britten fan; last year, we heard far too much not only of his music but of ludicrous overrating – not his fault, more that of the English musical parochialism Britten himself often struggled against. As so often, the sterner test comes when an anniversary year has been and gone. In the present case, in a work more prone to overrating than most, largely on account of the dearth of noteworthy English opera during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It was, however, not only that test which was passed with flying colours; so too ENO triumphantly dismissed malevolent – as opposed to constructive – criticism from philistine, right-wing newspaper critics with no understanding of opera as drama (nor, for that matter, as music).

 

This, in short, was far and away the best staging of Peter Grimes I have seen. If even these forces could not entirely conceal the weaknesses of some sections of the score, then the dramatic fervour with which every aspect of the performance was presented made them count for little. (Even I have to admit that not every opera can be Wozzeck, though I still find Britten’s third-act homage to the tavern scene a little too close for comfort.) It was certainly the best conducting I have yet heard from Edward Gardner. If he struggles in much of the central Austro-German repertoire, he was clearly born to conduct Britten. If there were occasional moments of imprecision, they were so few as to seem touchingly human. For not only was the broad sweep of the musical drama searingly present; the constructivism of Britten’s compositional method was lain bare too, not didactically, but with a keen sense of its dramatically generative method. This held both throughout the three acts as a whole, but also between them. Perhaps especially impressive was the sense of material emerging in the first act, blossoming and withering as it developed. Moreover, the ENO Orchestra and Choruses were on magnificent form throughout. Weight and clarity were equally present, but so was a lighter touch where necessary; so too was a plethora of dynamic shadings. Chorus master (and assistant conductor) clearly merits plaudits of his own.

 

David Alden’s staging is, quite simply, brilliant, just as much so as his brother Christopher’s more controversial Midsummer Night’sDream. (Please, ENO, may we see that again?) Post-modernism does not, as often in Alden’s work, become overt and distracting; rather the tension between a joyless, ‘austerity’ 1940s setting and moments and episodes of heightened expressionism almost miraculously coheres. More than once I thought of Brecht: not in the sense of ‘similarity’, but in the sense that his dramaturgy seemed both extended and called into question. The hypocrisy of the Borough almost presents itself, but the spiv-like portrayal of Ned Keene seemed almost to evoke the world of Mahagonny, reminding us that this is at least partly an essay in socialism as well as an exploration of sexual repression. Presentation of Auntie as a Weimar lesbian Master/Mistress of Ceremonies sounds out of context quite out of place; and yet, it works, especially in a performance as committed as that offered by Rebecca de Pont Davies. It also sheds interesting light on her relationship with her Nieces, both disturbed and disturbing. (Abusive behaviour never lies far beneath the surface of this vile community, yet it is often as much hinted at as spelled out.) What leaves perhaps the longest and deepest impression, though, is the handling of the crowd. When choreographed as expertly as here (Maxine Braham), its madness as well as its viciousness, its sinister Daily-Mail provincial conformism and its ready manipulation by those with hidden motives, play with frightening realism – and surrealism.

 

Stuart Skelton’s portrayal of the anti-hero was again, without qualification, the best I have seen and heard. Skelton suggested that it is no luxury, but even a necessity, to have a Heldentenor in the role. There is no doubting the strength of his voice – his excellent Seattle Siegmund last summer offering further testimony to that – but just as impressive were the moments of hushed arioso (‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’) and all manner of colours and shades in between. The final scene showed just how movingly Skelton can act too (even if Britten, alas, is no Mussorgsky here). It did no harm, of course to have a Balstrode as sincere (and yet with quiet toughness) as that of Iain Paterson, nor an Ellen Orford as compassionate and as silvery-toned (yet again, though, with steel beneath the surface) as in Elza van Heever’s revelatory portrayal. Felicity Palmer’s Mrs Sedley was quite beyond compare: Miss Marple meeting Mary Whitehouse, with a generous dose of laudanum, a portrayal as intelligently sung as it was acted. Leigh Melrose proved utterly convincing as this especially sleazy Ned Keene, and Matthew Treviño revealed a dark, focused, highly attractive bass as Hobson, the carrier. There was not a weak link in the cast, nor in the performance as a whole. This is a production that absolutely demands to be seen – and heard.