The Excursions of Mr Brouček, Grange Park Opera, 18 June 2022

The Theatre in the Woods

Mr Brouček – Peter Hoare
Málinka, Etherea, Kunka – Fflur Wyn
Mazal, Bounzincek, Petrik, Svatopluk – Mark Le Brocq
Würfl, Paycek, Councillor – Andrew Shore
Sacristan, Dudcek, Domšík – Clive Bayley
Kedruta – Anne-Marie Owens
Spotcek, Vojta, Raincek, Mirosla – Adrian Thompson
Postdatedcek – Jonathan Kennedy
Child Prodigy – Pasquale Orchard
Spotcek – Robin Horgan
Farty – Benjie del Rosario
Taborite I – Toki Hamano
Arty, Taborite I – Marcus Swietlicki
Dancers – Lauren Bridle, Bridget Lappin, Arianne Morgan, Luke Murphy, Jay Yule

David Pountney (director)
Leslie Travers (designs)
Marie-Jean Lecca (costumes)
Tim Mitchell (lighting)
Lynne Hockney (choreography)

BBC Concert Orchestra
George Jackson (conductor)

 

Bounzincek (Mark Le Brocq) and an artist on the moon
Images: Marc Brenner

Hats off to Grange Park Opera for unquestionably the best of the four ‘country house’ operas I have seen so far this season. First, and perhaps most important, with respect to the work itself: Janáček’s The Excursions of Mr Brouček. I suppose it might be theoretically possible to reach a state in which Janáček’s music was heard too often, though it might not. (Imagine saying such a thing of Bach or Mozart.) If it is, though, we are nowhere near that yet. Yet the Janáček operas we see staged are mostly, perhaps understandably, restricted to three: Jenůfa, Katya Kabanova, and The Cunning Little Vixen. We must go beyond The Makropulos Case and even From the House of the Dead to reach Mr Brouček. Doubtless some in the Grange Park Opera audience had seen it in the theatre before, but I had not, and was immensely grateful to have the opportunity to do so, let alone for it to be performed so well. 

Mr Brouček will doubtless always be a problematical work, in a way that the aforementioned popular (relatively speaking) trio will not. Its two-part structure will probably always require effort to bring together—if, indeed, such is the dramaturgical aim. But art is certainly not always about perfection, or approaches to it. Sometimes, it is about quite the opposite. The first part’s satire against pretentious avant-gardism, or perhaps better derrière-gardism, hits home more readily for a modern, or at least non-Czech, audience than the second, more preoccupied with Czech national mythology—although a little grounding helps us on our way. Nationalism, after all, remains sadly too universal. But the other part of the satire is against the antihero himself: the philistine who has little idea what he is doing in Prague, let alone on the Moon or in the fifteenth century. To that, we can and should all relate. No one likes a landlord, after all, especially one who boasts of having no mortgage, only a three-storey house. You can begin to see why the opera will never touch as Katya does. That is not its purpose.

 

Málinka (Fflur Wyn)

David Pountney’s production pulls out all the stops for a frankly zany trip from Prague to the moon, clarified and extended by Marie-Jean Lecca’s imaginative costuming. Leslie Travers’s brilliant set for the former captures an almost childlike delight in city models, as well as the, or at least an, idea of Prague. The empty pretentiousness of the moon artists—Pountney has fun, using his own, free English version of the text, creating names such as Spotcek, Raincek, and Postdatedcek—engenders an intoxication of its own. It is fun to watch, which guards us against too ready identification with Brouček. ‘We must each fight our inner Brouček,’ Janáček insisted. A similar, yet different mix of magical constructivism informs the still more bewildering—for many—and darker trip to the Prague of the Hussite rebellion.

 

Mr Brouček (Peter Hoare)

Whether one cares for the (literal) toilet (brush) humour of the interlude between the visits, will be a matter of taste. Monty Python is not my thing, but if it is yours, you will almost certainly love Pountney’s more outrageous excurses. Sometimes, though, I wondered where the heart was, especially during the Moon-trip. Is there not something more positive to say about artistic creation too? The answer, I suppose, would be that it lies in the score (and, indeed, in the artistic endeavour of performance and reception itself. It arguably suggested itself onstage at the end, when the innkeeper Würfl collected his drunken patron, laughed at his tall tales, but also walked him away in camaraderie. Perhaps that was enough. Again, that will probably be as much a matter of taste or inclination as anything else.

 

Peter Hoare’s Brouček captured well the contradictions not only of the character, but of our response(s) to him. This was a typically intelligent performance, which held the stage, amused, and touched without sentimentality. Fflur Wyn’s Málinka and other roles were lively, characterful, and rooted in, yet far from hidebound by, the text. Such is the magic of theatre, and such might be said of any number of the cast, including Mark Le Brocq’s handful of roles, Andrew Shore’s, and Clive Bayley’s, as well as Anne-Marie Owens's Kedruta. This was very much a company effort, which did Grange Park Opera proud, enthralling an audience that could all too readily have registered mere bemusement at the work’s oddity.

Domsik (Clive Bayley)

George Jackson’s traversal of the score elicited my unqualified admiration, as did the playing of the BBC Concert Orchestra. Incisive and expansive, earthy and soaring, above all attuned to those fabled speech rhythms and their unpredictable, magical combination into form and structure, this was as fine a Janáček performance as I have heard for some time, all the more so for its revelation of relatively unfamiliar territory. Time and time, presentiments of the Vixen’s world shone through, anchoring these ‘excursions’ in a common humanity and inspiring us to go forth and create it. The score emerged possessed of the musical, scherzando brilliance of the more or less contemporary Gianni Schicchi, if perhaps less single-minded, at any rate without the latter work’s dramaturgical precision, considered as a whole. We might say Janáček’s musical dramaturgy is more adventurous, though much depends what one means. Whatever our thoughts on that, this was a musical banquet beautifully and, at the last, movingly served.

The Passenger, English National Opera, 24 September 2011

Coliseum

Annaliese Franz – Michelle Breedt
Marta – Giselle Allen
Walter – Kim Begley
Tadeusz – Leigh Melrose
Katya – Julia Sporsén
Krystina – Pamela Helen Stephen
Vlasta – Wendy Dawn Thompson
Hannah – Carolyn Dobbin
Yvette – Rhian Lois
Old Woman – Helen Field
Bronka – Rebecca de Pont Davies
SS Officers – Adrian Dwyer, Charles Johnston, Gerard O’Connor
Steward/Elderly Passenger/Kommandant – Graeme Dandy
SS Officer/Kapo – Vanessa Leagh-Hicks

David Pountney (director)
Rob Kearley (associate director)
Johan Engels (set designs)
Marie-Jeanne Lecca (costumes)
Fabrice Kebour (lighting)
Ran Arthur Braun (director)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Merry)
Sir Richard Armstrong (conductor)

This is not to be taken in any real sense as a review but rather just as a few observations. ENO’s season, as so often, is a far more interesting prospect than that of its big brother across Covent Garden (three – or four, depending on how one counts – runs for La traviata!) Mieczysław Weinberg’s The Passenger, based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz, receives its British premiere, in a staging by David Pountney first seen at Bregenz. It is in excellent company, alongside works by Wolfgang Rihm, Detlev Glanert, and ENO’s first ever staging of a Rameau opera, Castor et Pollux (to be reviewed next month).

The problem, I am afraid, is that, on the basis of what I heard, Weinberg’s music is catastrophically inept. It is not merely that it adds nothing to the story; its aimlessness and weirdly arbitrary inappropriateness detract from what ought to be a harrowing tale of Holocaust remembrance. The Passenger is not offensive in the way that Terry Gilliam’s narcissistic Damnation of Faust was – an ignorant anti-German rant that also managed to posit genocide as entertainment – for it is clearly meant well, but the best, or at least most arresting, of Weinberg’s music seems to be heard in the couple of minutes or so before the voices enter, and it is still not very good. Some loud kettledrums at least have an effect. Whatever is one to make of the xylophone runs interpolated later on, though? It is difficult to imagine either musical or dramatic motivation for them: they just come and go. Influences or at least strong likenesses come thick and thin: perhaps most oddly, Shostakovich in jazz mode whilst Annaliese informs her diplomat husband of her wartime activities in the SS. Weill this is not, though it seems pretty clear that there is influence there. Most glaring is a passage – we are on a ship, so I suppose it is deliberate – that sounds lifted straight from Peter Grimes. Hindemith and Busoni might also be present, though the likeness may be coincidental rather than anything else. Otherwise, voices declaim, sometimes break into aria-like writing, whilst thin, irrelevant instrumental lines fill in the space below. Male SS officers veer dangerously close to the unintentionally comic: this does not appear to be an ironic commentary upon their repellent desire to burn human bodies more quickly, merely a product of the composer’s inability to compose appropriate music. A female officer unfortunately reminds one, both in appearance and delivery, of Helga from ‘Allo ‘Allo! What might work in depiction of Occupied France is not, to put it mildly, necessarily the best thing for an extermination camp.

Pountney’s production seems as good as the work is likely to get – and better than it deserves. There would have been a far greater sense of claustrophobia and naked terror, had they not been undermined by the music. Designs (Johan Engels’s sets and Marie-Jeanne Lecca’s costumes) and lighting (Fabrice Kebour) do everything one might have asked of them. Sir Richard Armstrong’s conducting is incisive, the ENO orchestra on excellent, truly responsive form, generating a volume that surprises in the vast expanses of the Coliseum. The singers again make the strongest possible case, Michelle Breedt’s Annaliese properly conflicted and vibrant, insofar as the music will permit that, Kim Begley’s delivery as heedful of text as one would expect, and so on. However, as I said, this is not really a review. For one thing, I left at the interval, unable to drag myself back into the theatre. Perhaps the second act would have proved a revelation. Perhaps not.

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Kommilitonen! Royal Academy Opera, 23 March 2011

Sir Jack Lyons Theatre

The Oxford Revolution

Voice of Pokayne – Jonathan McGovern
James Meredith – Marcus Farnsworth

Die Weisse Rose

Sophie Scholl – Aoife Miskelly
Willi Graf – Frederick Long
Hans Scholl – Johnny Herford
Christoph Probst/The Evangelist – Stephen Aviss
Alexander Schmorell/The Grand Inquisitor – John-Owen Miley-Read
First Clerk, Prison Guard – Irina Gheorghiu
Second Clerk, Gestapo Officer 1, Janitor – Jonathan McGovern
Gestapo Officer 2 – Maximilian Fuhrig

Soar to Heaven

Li Jingji (Mother) – Irina Gheorghiu
Wu Taianshi (Father) – Jonathan McGovern
Wu (Son) – Katie Bray
Li (Daughter) – Belinda Williams
Two Younger Children – Hannah Bradbury, Annie Rago
Zhou (Red Guard) – Ruth Jenkins
Red Army Officer 1 – Belinda Williams
Doctor, Red Army Officer 2 – Laura Kelly
Red Army Officer 3 – Irina Gheorghiu
Puppeteers – Helen Bailey, Nicholas Crawley, Kerri-Lynne Dietz, Thomas Elwin, Fiona Mackay, Sarah Shorter

David Pountney (director)
Robert Innes Hopkins (designs)
James Farncombe (lighting)
Carolyn Choa (choreography)
Mark Down (director of puppetry)
Nick Barnes (puppetry designer)

Royal Academy Opera
Royal Academy of Music Sinfonia
Jane Glover (conductor)


Never say never again: Sir Peter Maxwell Davies had declared that Mr Emmet Takes a Walk (first performance, 2000) would be his last music-theatre piece. However, upon appointment to a position at the Royal Academy of Music, Davies first declined and then, five minutes later, accepted: ‘OK, I’ll do it – but it must be about students and I want to do it with David Pountney … and we should try and do it somewhere else, as well as the Academy, and make it a joint commission.’ And so, it has come to pass: Pountney has acted as librettist and director; the Juilliard School has acted as co-commissioner; the new piece is indeed about students, as indeed was Royal Academy Opera’s recent production of Così fan tutte.

Kommilitonen! presents three stories of student activism, an idea suggested by Pountney to Davies on account of its alleged unfashionability. (It depends where one looks really.) In the meantime, however, the idea has become more topical than the creators might have expected. The three stories are those of the Mississippi Civil Rights pioneer, James Meredith (The Oxford Revolution) Munich students’ heroic wartime resistance (Die weisse Rose), and Chinese students turning upon their parents during the Cultural Revolution (Song to Heaven). Short scenes alternate between the three stories, not always ‘in turn’ – we do not visit China until the fifth scene – but nevertheless so as to provide a panorama of student political experience. The difficulty seems to be how to bring the stories together, and I was not entirely convinced by the synthesis attempted at the end, partly because the ‘message’ is unconvincingly optimistic – we win because we survive – and partly because the appearance of characters in each others’ worlds simply seems forced. Moreover, the superimposition, during the second of the two acts, of a choral voicing of the Passion narrative (in Latin) upon Die weisse Rose, itself somewhat confusingly sometimes in English and sometimes in German, seemed equally forced, though religious and theological concerns have for some time been of great importance to the composer. The introduction of a Grand Inquisitor was, I assume, a deliberate nod to Dallapiccolla’s magnificent one-act opera of political commitment, Il prigioniero, or perhaps it was to Schiller, but it seemed a little arbitrary in the face of what otherwise remained realistic, reportage even. When compared dramaturgically with a work such as Il prigioniero, let alone the daring marriage of agitprop and experimentalism in the operas of Luigi Nono, this did not always convince, enjoyable – perhaps curiously so – though it certainly was. Incidentally, I have no idea why Kommilitonen has been translated as ‘Young Blood’; it is neither a literal nor a contextual translation. ‘Fellow students’, or, if one wished to be more ‘political’, ‘(student) comrades’, would surely be preferable.

What of the music, though? Davies did a thoroughly professional job, as one would expect. The composer has long been associated with music for younger musicians, children included, and with other community projects. This, I can imagine, was a joy for the young musicians of Royal Academy Opera to work upon, nothing too ‘difficult’, grateful for the voices, an important choral part, and much to enjoy from the (chamber) orchestral standpoint too. Davies clearly did not want to present student performers with something unduly daunting, but at the same time, I could not help but wonder whether something a little less conservative in terms of musical language might have worked. Very little, if any, of the music would have been inconceivable to a composer working in the 1920s. Berg (a honky-tonk piano inevitably puts one in mind of Wozzeck, though there are of course precedents in Davies’s work too) and still more so Weill often come to mind in what was in general a frankly tonal score. Britten seemed a guiding presence too. Despite the division into twenty-eight scenes, the two acts are through-composed. There are, though, several memorable moments, not least the choral marching to glorify the Cultural Revolution, and a splendid trumpet solo (very well taken) during the confrontation of the Inquisitor with the Munich students. There is a good bit of parody, long, of course, a preoccupation of the composer; one could not help but smile at the incongruent jazz-band puppetry for the Maoist party scene (no.23). Nevertheless, I equally could not help but wish for the old bite of a work such as Eight Songs for a Mad King; it might have been an angry young man’s music, a line difficult to sustain forever, but its radicalism still takes one’s breath away.

Davies had collaborated with Pountney before; indeed, he was the librettist for Mr Emmet Takes a Walk. ‘I knew,’ Davies remarks, ‘that the stage direction would not be a travesty of text and music’. And the direction did seem to serve the work well – hardly surprising, I suppose, if director and librettist are one and the same person. The stories are generally told clearly and with wit; puppetry, in danger of becoming merely fashionable on the opera stage, does not fall into that trap here. Set designs and changes are skilfully conceived and executed. The intimacy of the Jack Lyons Theatre helps, but great credit is nevertheless due to all concerned.

Musically, this was very much a company performance rather than any sort of star vehicle, for which enabling credit is certainly due to composer and librettist. It seems in that context invidious to single out particular vocal performers, since all convinced, though I wish the unwelcome trend of having American characters sing in pseudo-American accent might be curtailed. No equivalent was attempted with the German and Chinese stories, so why do so when it comes to the United States? More importantly, however, one truly gained a sense of singers’ musical and dramatic interaction, having developed a work from scratch. There were no weak links whatsoever. Jane Glover directed the excellent Royal Academy Sinfonia with verve and formal clarity.