La Gazzetta, Royal College of Music, 24 June 2014

Chorus
Images: Chris Christodoulou

Britten Theatre

Lisetta – Filipa van Eck

Doralice – Hannah Sandison

Madama la Rose – Angela Simkin

Filippo – Luke D Williams

Alberto – Gyula Rab

Don Pomponio – Timothy Nelson

Anselmo – Matus Tomko

Monsù Traversen – Julien van Mellaerts

Donald Maxwell, Linda Ormiston (directors)

Nigel Hook (designs)

John Bishop (lighting)

Louisa McAlpine (choreography)

 

Chorus
Royal College of Music Opera Orchestra
Michael Rosewell (conductor)

Don Pomponio (Timothy Nelson)

With but one exception, I am delighted to report with great enthusiasm on the Royal College of Music International Opera School’s summer show, Rossini’s La Gazzetta, performances and staging alike at least the equal of last year’s sparkling Offenbach production, La Vie parisienne. Donald Maxwell and Linda Ormiston update the action, such as it is, to the 1990s, though I cannot help but think that their synopsis overplays the idea of ‘the power and reach of newspapers’, in the opera at least, if not necessarily in Goldoni’s original play. At any rate, we have an array of madcap antics, colourfully designed by Nigel Hook, brilliantly lit and choreographed by John Bishop and Louisa McAlpine choreographed. The Neapolitan figure of fun, Don Pomponio, has his erstwhile assistant turn glamorous female (and thus now Tomassina); vividly portrayed by Kelly Mathieson, despite her total lack of words and music, this is intended as a ‘tribute to Italy’s most famous care home assistant’, the attitude and words of other characters reflecting that Berlusonci-like turn. And so, from the opening hotel lobby sequence, in which hotel guests (a Welsh male-voice choir!) sing something inconsequential, until the ‘Turkish’ disguises and inevitable, unsurprising ‘revelations’ of the finale, in which again something inconsequential is sung, visual spectacle is impeccable.

 

Lisetta (Filipa van Eck)

Vocal performances were splendid too. This is not easy music to sing, but bar the odd intonational slip here and there, every member of the cast offered something promising indeed. Timothy Nelson’s Don Pomponio succeeded – a tricky task, with an English audience – in conveying the ‘peculiarity’ of the character’s Neapolitan dialogue. Filipa van Eck stole the show more than once as his daughter, Lisetta; there is quite a range here, and estimable accuracy to boot. She clearly also relished the stage opportunities –wonderfully tasteless costumes included – her nouveau riche character offered. Gyula Rab had an excellent line in the imploring, lovelorn tenor, generally singing as handsomely as his unmistakeably Italianate costuming suggested. Hannah Sandison’s tone hardened at times, but was for the most part focused, strong and yet, when required, touchingly vulnerable. Luke D Williams proved himself once again an excellent baritone with real stage presence. Angela Simkin’s Madama la Rose proved far more than the mere foil to which the plot more or less reduces her, possessing genuinely ear-catching moments of her own. The roles of Anselmo and Monsù Traversen are smaller, yet there could be no complaints concerning the contributions of Matus Tomo and Julien van Mellaerts, likewise from the chorus of soloists who completed the action. Though small in size, the orchestra conjured up a truly Rossini-like sound under Michael Rosewell. If Rosewell had the overture stop and start a bit too often – largely Rossini’s fault, but such faults can be mitigated – then precision, colour, and vivacity were very much to the fore later on. Wind solos in particular were highly distinguished.

 

Alberto (Gyula Rab)

That sole reservation? The opera itself, I am afraid. I shall not dwell on the matter, especially since such performances are intended at least as much as a showcase for highly talented young singers as anything else. (In that respect, I should not be surprised to hear more from all of them over the coming years.) It is difficult, ultimately, to imagine, however, why anyone should care about these characters, and the ‘fizz’ soon wears off. La Gazzetta is not a short work, and such slight material – someone placing an advertisement in a newspaper for a potential husband for his daughter and the all-too-typical disguiges, misunderstandings, etc. – can hardly support the considerable length of such a work. As so often with Rossini, the music is curiously interchangeable; would it really matter if any of it were moved anywhere else, or indeed to a different opera? Such ‘æsthetics’ have their apologists, of course; tedium sets in quickly for the rest of us. Parsifal seems far shorter by comparison.

 

Nevertheless, many congratulations to the cast and production team for displaying such commitment to an opera whose merits remain dubious. If you are a Rossini enthusiast, you certainly should not hesitate; likewise if you simply wish to hear some fine singing.

American Lulu, The Opera Group, 14 September 2013

Young Vic Theatre

Lulu – Angel Blue

Clarence – Robert Winslade Anderson
Dr Bloom – Donald Maxwell
Jimmy – Jonathan Stoughton
Eleanor – Jacqui Dankworth
Photographer, Young Man – Paul Curievici
Athlete – Simon Wilding
Professor, Banker, Police Commissioner – Paul Reeves

John Fulljames (director)

Magda Willi (designs)
Guy Hoare (lighting)
Finn Ross (video)
Carolyn Downing (sound)

London Sinfonietta

Gerry Cornelius (conductor)

Images: Bregenzer Festspiele/Anja Köhler and Bregenzer Festspiele/Karl Forster
In the foreground: Jacqui Dankworth (Eleanor) and Angel Blue (Lulu); Simon Wilding (athlete) in background

 

I was a little taken aback by the reaction I received upon mentioning that I was looking forward to seeing American Lulu. One friend, perfectly reasonably, said that he had not taken to it when he had seen it in Berlin; I wish I had had the chance to press him more on why. However, he did suggest that the staging – presumably at the Komische Oper premiere – may have been a considerable part of the problem. Others, though, seemed to recoil at the very idea. Who did Olga Neuwirth think she was, adapting Berg’s opera into her own? For once, I almost felt myself the voice of reason, then stopped short when I recalled that to have been the title of an especially nasty right-wing newspaper column. At any rate, I had no a priori objection to what sounded as though it were simply the continuation of practices that dated back as long as any conception of the musical work, and indeed beyond. I have always preferred the Second Viennese School arrangements of Johann Strauss to the ‘originals’; Mozart’s Handel reworkings, whether in terms of arrangement or more thoroughgoing recomposition have long fascinated me; and as for Bach, whether his rewriting of other music, sometimes his own, sometimes that of others, or the multitude of rewritings, in whatever form, offered by composers from Mozart to George Benjamin... They vary wildly in quality, of course, and that seemed to me the only point; the question was not whether Neuwirth had any ‘right’ to adapt Berg’s opera, but whether it worked.

 

I think it did, or at least much of it did. I cede to no one in my love for Lulu – save, perhaps to one of Neuwirth’s teachers, Luigi Nono, who described  it as one of the two greatest operas of the twentieth century, the other being Schoenberg’s Die glückliche Hand. I know Berg’s score – and Friedrich Cerha’s completion – pretty well, and found myself not annoyed, but fascinated by the interplay between Berg and Neuwirth. In a work that lasts about half the time of the original, Neuwirth adapts, including reorchestration, the first two acts, and writes her own third act, both text and music. (English translations, concerning which, I found some more convincing than others, were provided by Richard Stokes and Catherine Kerkhoff-Saxon in the first two acts, and Kerkhoff-Saxon alone in the third.) One might miss the gorgeous post-Romantic labyrinthine depth of Berg, but to hear his music refracted as it was, pointed in a different direction by a new(-ish) story held its own interest – just as, say, Berio’s work on composers as different as Boccherini, Purcell, and Schubert has. (If only he had lived to complete his realisation of L’incoronazione di Poppea...) And so, with Berg’s – admittedly, selectively employed – jazz-influenced scoring in mind, Neuwirth’s reorchestration and composition alike make their move to New Orleans via a wind-dominated ensemble, Berg’s voluptuous strings put in their place and perhaps now heard through Brecht-Weill. (No one, I hasten to add, is saying that Berg is ‘improved upon’; that is not the point.) I was less sure about the introduction of more popular music ‘proper’, especially Eleanor’s blues music, into the score; its inclusion, presumably intentionally so, seemed oddly uncritical, as if, in a curious inversion or at least evasion of Adorno, Berg’s opera requires subjection to criticism but that of an allegedly purer popular culture does not. And yet, as I shall come to describe, there is a dialectical twist that would at least partially assist in that regard. The new version of the film music – what a relief it was actually to see a film, practically the only moment in present-day staging of opera where film seems to be eschewed – is brought to us, like the ‘jazz band’ music  via a recording of a Wonder Morton organ: evocative, contemporaneous, and yet also, rightly for a new work, somewhat oblique in its relationship to the ‘original’.

 

The third act of Lulu, which Neuwirth, wrongly to my mind yet perhaps nevertheless fruitfully, regards as ‘unsatisfactory’ – ‘after great trials and tribulations, two women are simply slaughtered by a serial killer; and that is that’ – becomes instead ‘an unresolved murder case’, but more to the point here, offers her own music, clearly flowing from that of Berg, still more from that of Berg-Neuwirth, and yet which quite properly takes on a life of its own: a twenty-first-century reimagination of post-expresssionist music. There are vocal leaps; there is vocal seduction; there is a hard-edged, yet sinuous quality, in line with Berg’s own. I should need to hear it again to say much more; yet, to answer the earlier question, for the most part, and bearing in mind my cavil concerning the blues music in particular, I think it worked.

 

I deliberately started with the music but ought to say something briefly about the new setting.  Instead of the Prologue, we start at the end, in 1970s New York, when Clarence (Schigolch) asks Lulu why, when she is now so wealthy, she is no more satisfied, prompting her to look back at her life, beginning in 1950s New Orleans. A photographer with whom she is living is soon supplanted by Dr Bloom, purchaser of the pictures; Lulu dances in Bloom’s club, music written for her by his son, Jimmy. (I do not need in laboured fashion to point out who is who with respect to Berg; it is perfectly clear, though some of Berg’s intricate parallelism falls by the wayside as Neuwirth’s drama takes on a different trajectory.) Initially I found the substitution of Eleanor, a singer, for Geschwitz, something of a disappointment. The ‘otherness’ – if I am honest, banality – of her music, however well sung by Jacqui Dankworth, seemed too obvious, too lacking in integrative or indeed disintegrative power. However, and I hope this was not merely a product of my fevered imagination, there is criticism, if not so much of her music, then of the hippyish psycho-babble in which her reproaches – she is by the third act a successful singer, though still hurt by Lulu’s prior rejection – are couched. She too, it seems, is capable of exploitative behaviour. As indeed are we all, and some of it, like Neuwirth’s, may even be construed positively. We should not fall for bogus notions of the ‘jargon of authenticity’. Meanwhile, all the while, the drama is punctuated by reminders of the Civil Rights Movement: words from Dr King, and sounds, in Eleanor’s final song, of ‘We shall overcome’.  It is certainly not subtle, and it is perhaps all too easy to say ‘that is the point,’ but its contribution was nevertheless greater than to make us appreciate more fully the balancing-act between existential and social – far too often tilted in favour of the former – in Berg’s opera. (Should we consider American Lulu in reference to Berg’s work, or as a work in itself? That depends, of course, on who ‘we’ are. Either we know the original or we do not, but a question that permits neither of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as a ‘straight’ answer is a good question for Neuwirth to be asking audiences, steeped in the self-righteous delusions of Werktreue.)

 

This was a co-production by The Opera Group, the Young Vic, Scottish Opera, and the Bregenz Festival, in association with the London Sinfonietta. The latter was on excellent form throughout, splendidly guided, insofar as one could tell from an initial hearing, by Gerry Cornelius. I was certainly as gripped by the orchestral performance as by the puzzles and challenges of Neuwirth’s work itself. John Fulljames makes a great deal from relatively little on the small stage of the Young Vic. Video was used sparingly but to great effect, Finn Ross’s work employing characters from the stage greatly appreciated, as mentioned above. The uncomfortable voyeurism of having Lulu change on stage, taking her clothes from a wardrobe and almost defying us not to watch, has one’s mind working, as it should, in different directions: self-interrogation, heightened by the (Brechtian?) presence onstage behind a see-through curtain of the orchestra. Construction of reality, perception of what may or may not be epic, is not simply our own task, but it is so at least in part, as in Lulu’s mind.

 

Angel Blue offered a charismatic assumption of the title role. It is of course far shorter than Berg’s, but has different challenges, the slipping between speech, parlando, and glorious, if all-too-brief (deliberately so?), passages in which the voice may truly soar a case of ongoing reinvention. Her stage presence, just as in ENO’s recent Bohème, was scintillating. In this opera, more than Berg’s, the other cast members are lesser beings, but there was much to enjoy from their various contributions. Paul Curievici, for instance, furthered the strong impression he recently made in The Importance of Being Earnest, and Donald Maxwell continued to hold the stage even at what must be approaching the twilight of his career.

 

Emma Woodvine, credited as ‘dialect coach’ seemed to have done a good job. I still wonder about the practice, though, of having assumed accents, be they from the South or elsewhere. It seems curiously selective; for instance, when we have a performance of Carmen, whether in French or in translation, we do not usually hear the dialogue – or, for that matter, the vocal lines – delivered in the tones of Seville. Better, I think, to let actors, including singing actors, act than to have them turn impressionists. (That runs both ways, of course; those complaining, as sometimes they do, about American or other accents in English dialogue should probably find better things to do with their time.) No matter; it is a minor point, indeed more of a question. And a great strength of this evening was the questioning that it provoked.

World premiere: Tarik O'Regan, Heart of Darkness, Opera East Productions/ROH2, 1 November 2011

Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House

Marlow – Alan Oke
The Thames Captain – Njabulo Madlala
The Company Secretary, The Manager – Sipho Fubesi
The Doctor, The Boilermaker – Donald Maxwell
The Accountant – Paul Hopwood
The Helmsman – Paul Hopwood
Kurtz – Morten Lassenius Kramp
The Harlequin – Jaewoo Kim
The River Woman, The Fiancée – Gweneth-Ann Jeffers

Edward Dick (director)
Robert Innes Fisher (designs)
Rick Fisher (lighting)

CHROMA
Oliver Gooch (conductor).

By my reckoning, this is the fourth new opera I shall have seen in 2011; so far as I am aware, it will also be the last. The balance sheet, to employ an unlovely metaphor, has not been unremittingly positive, yet it seems to me crucial that arts organisations should be permitted to make mistakes; the alternative is the stultifying conservatism of a dead museum culture. Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole claimed to be about trashiness but was merely trashy, whilst Nico Muhly’s equally-hyped Two Boys proved so grossly inept that it did not even afford the odd moment of unwitting amusement. Fine performances were wasted on both. Tarik O’Regan’s Heart of Darkness, however, joins Bruno Mantovani’s Akhmatova as a well-crafted, well-executed work, which, whatever the future may hold, permits of not only a satisfying but at times moving evening in the theatre. Neither work, moreover, outstays its welcome, suggesting in the present case that preliminary development work with American Opera Projects and ROH 2’s OperaGenesis, reaped dividends for the finished article as jointly presented by Opera East Productions and ROH2.

Unlike those other three works, Heart of Darkness is a chamber opera: for obvious reasons a more typical course for a new opera to take, though there was no sense of compromise in that respect, nor indeed of anything other than enthusiasm at the smaller scale involved. Not everything needs or even wants to be grand. O’Regan and librettist, Tom Phillips, have distilled Joseph Conrad’s novella, using Conrad’s own words, aiming to present, and to my mind succeeding in doing so, a psychodrama: the old sea captain, Marlow’s exorcism of the trauma of his visit to Africa as a young man. The action flits between the Thames and the Congo, yet cleverly, we are made to wonder how much of the latter is a creation of the former, not least on account of the visible doubling of roles: how reliable a narrator is Marlow? O’Regan’s use of resonances – rather than direct quotation or re-creation – from Hugh Tracey’s ethnological recordings of the 1950s present in their instrumentation of harp, celesta, guitar, and percussion, a necessarily European attempt both to adopt and to stave off the strangeness of the world penetrated, or not, by the young steamboat captain. The ‘compromise’ is anything but: in its employment not for the ‘African’ drama but for the London quasi-recitatives, we become increasingly aware of the layered nature of orientalist experience. Variation in musical style is associated with, but perhaps confounds our initial expectations of, time and location. Both librettist and composer focus at one point upon the word ‘rivets’. It has a sound and potential of its own, clearly relished by both; it also has association with the imperialist world of commerce in polite terms and murderous rape and exploitation in franker, more realistic language. And so, the motor rhythms generated from this verbally and musically generative cell take over the ensuing scene: not only a metaphor, but direct experience of the unspeakable barbarism of the Congo Free State. Yet the journey as a whole is not straightforwardly towards truth, far from it, for just before the end, Marlow flinches and tells Kurtz’s Belgian fiancée that Kurtz’s last words had been her name, whereas famously, they had been ‘The horror! The horror!’ The world and Marlow’s experience of it remain a ‘vast grave of unspeakable secrets’. Should we trust his divulgence of this particular example?

Opera East Productions were both wise and fortunate to engage the services of the new music ensemble, CHROMA, as well as a fine cast, incisively conducted by OEP’s artistic director, Oliver Gooch. Scoring is for flute/alto flute/piccolo, two clarinets/bass clarinets, horn, percussion, keyboards, guitar/bass guitar, two violins, viola, two cellos, double bass, and harp. The musicians seemed unfailingly alert to the twists and turns of the score, Stravinsky-like in the inhuman rhythms of modern imperialism, more flexible, indeed close to Britten, in the freer, recitative passages. The vocal lines often stand very much in a post-Britten line too, certainly as interpreted here. Alan Oke makes a predictably excellent impression as Marlow, young and old: one could imagine that he had been singing the role all his life rather than creating it here and now. Another splendid voice of experience was provided by Donald Maxwell. Gweneth-Ann Jeffers provided both an air of mystery and of emotional honesty in the doubling up of Kurtz’s African love and European fiancée. The dark, questing spirit of Kurtz himself was powerfully evoked by Morten Lassenius Kramp: his deep, virile bass a true discovery of the evening. (We can gloss over the contradiction between the synopsis description of ‘gaunt, thin, and ill’ and the impressively gym-honed body on display, since there was an undoubted fever to appearance and portrayal.) Jaewoo Kim’s Harlequin left something to be desired in terms of diction and the character somewhat irritated: but the latter at least is doubtless part of the intention.

Edward Dick’s staging and Robert Innes Hopkins’s designs proved more resourcefully ingenious than many a production viewed on the main stage at Covent Garden Rick Fisher’s lighting a crucial agent in the transformations of time and location. The framing device of a ship’s ropes and the dual purpose function of items such as desk and crates a real virtue in terms of imagination and the work’s interrogation of Marlow’s narrative. All the while, the water lapped around: threateningly evocative of both Thames and (imagined?) Congo. How refreshing it was, then, to experience a work and production that spoke of true collaboration.