Phaedra, Royal Opera, 16 May 2019

Linbury Theatre

Artemis (Patrick Terry), Hippolyt (Filipe Manu), Phaedra (Hongni Wu), Aphrodite (Jacquelyn Stucker)
Images (C) ROH 2019, by Bill Cooper

Phaedra – Hongni Wu

Hippolyt – Filipe Manu

Aphrodite – Jacquelyn Stucker

Artemis – Patrick Terry

Minotaurus – Michael Mofidian

Noa Naamat (director)

Southbank Sinfonia

Edmund Whitehead (conductor)

Hans Werner Henze’s penultimate opera, Phaedra has been fortunate indeed in London since its 2007 Berlin premiere. Astonishingly, this was the third time I had seen the work in London: first a Barbican concert performance; then the Guildhall’s excellent double-bill, coupled with the early radio opera, Ein Landarzt; now a staging at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre, from members and one soon-to-be-member of its Jette Parker Young Artists Programme and the Southbank Sinfonia.

Hippolyt and Phaedra

I continue to find it an elusive, even enigmatic work, difficult to pin down – as often with Henze. There is nothing wrong with that, quite the contrary. Immediately obvious works that have little to reveal on subsequent encounters – Tosca, for instance, whatever its qualities – are not the most interesting. Layering of its libretto, by Christian Lehnert, is, for me at least, a little too self-conscious, indeed in that sense itself obvious; that of the score, however, continues to fascinate, both in itself and with respect to Henze’s lengthy career and well-nigh unmanageable œuvre. Conductor Edward Whitehead and the Southbank Sinfonia proved strong in their communication of the score’s textural layering, Schoenberg, Berg, Mahler, and Wagner lying behind or, perhaps better, beneath it, the orchestra’s lines seemingly summoned up like a refined Götterdämmerung oracle. I was put in mind of a remark by Henze from four decades earlier, from an interview with Die Welt given to coincide with the premiere of The Bassarids: ‘The road from Tristan to Mahler and Schoenberg is far from finished, and … I have tried to go further along it.’

Henze’s way was always, or usually, though, then to take up another path thereafter, perhaps resuming that earlier path some time later. We perhaps view his way with greater clarity now, or kid ourselves that we do. At any rate, other tendencies shone through too: Weill-like (Hindemith too?) wind and percussion; mesmerising saxophone lines that lured one seemingly to nowhere (a remimaging of Natascha Ungeheuer?); magical forest colours (König Hirsch); and, perhaps most tellingly, towards the close, when Hippolyt surprisingly, disconcertingly returns as Virbius, the transformational magic of Ariadne auf Naxos, Straussian reference clear, but kinship to Hofmannsthal’s ideas (perhaps via Elegy for Young Lovers) ultimately more meaningful. At its best, Noa Naamat’s staging seemed to take its leave from these circles, lines, interactions of musical and aesthetic meaning, a sense of eastern ritual (perhaps a little Robert Wilson, but less formulaic than his work has come) coming into contact and conflict with turning of the wheel. Comparison and contrast with the work of Birtwistle came to mind, as they had on my previous encounters with the work.

Artemis

The singers all proved excellent. Though the work is called Phaedra, I do wonder whether Henze would have been better lending Hippolyt(us)’s name to it. (But then, arguably, Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie is similarly misnamed.) Filipe Manu, due to join the JPYAP next year, proved compelling indeed in the would-be title role, as vulnerable an object of contemplation and, later, as equivocal a vehicle of reinvention as Henze’s earlier Prince of Homburg. Was Hongni Wu’s Phaedra presented too vampishly in this production (not necessarily in performance)? Perhaps, but the deepening of her range of vocal colour throughout the evening offered compensation. Jacquelyn Stucker and Patrick Terry (the programme’s first countertenor) offered strong, detailed performances as Aphrodite and Artemis, whilst Michael Mofidian’s Minotaurus, richly sonorous yet equally careful of detail, left one wishing greedily that he had had more to sing, his persistent stage presence notwithstanding.

Why, then, did I emerge feeling slightly dissatisfied – or perhaps wondering whether I should have done? It may just have been a matter of how I was feeling on the day: it happens to us all. I do not think, though, that it was just that. Did the decision to introduce an interval get in the way? I think it did, making the work seem longer, more drawn out, more sectional than it is. I am not sure that the parameters within which Naamat’s staging had to operate helped in that respect. Though necessarily simple in scenic terms, it paradoxically seemed to dart around somewhat from scene to scene, perhaps through no fault of its own somewhat blunting the underlying ritual power of the score. Perhaps, alternatively, that was actually a reflection of the fragmentary qualities of the opera, of Hippolyt’s partial, flawed regaining of consciousness under his new identity. If I continue to find Phaedra enigmatic, Henze’s genre designation of ‘concert opera’ included, then that will doubtless say something about it, me, the performance, the production, or about any combination of the above. Such, after all, is opera.

Minotaurus (Michael Mofidian), Hippolyt

Così fan tutte, Guildhall, 5 November 2018

Silk Street Theatre

Guglielmo (Benson Wilson), Ferrando (Filipe Manu), Don Alfonso (Christian Valle),
Fiordiligi (Alexandra Lowe), Despina (Zoe Drummond), Dorabella (Carmen Artaza)
Images: Clive Barda

Fiordiligi – Alexandra Lowe

Dorabella – Carmen Artaza

Despina – Zoe Drummond

Ferrando – Filipe Manu

Guglielmo – Benson Wilson

Don Alfonso – Christian Valle

Oliver Platt (director)

Neil Irish (designs)

Rory Beaton (lighting)
Caitlin Fretwell Walsh (movement)

Orchestra and Chorus of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Dominic Wheeler (conductor)

Despina and Ferrando

Precisely where and when Così fan tutte takes place should be a matter of sublime indifference – or at least of individual taste. It is ‘about’ many things, but eighteenth-century Naples – should that actually be the less exotic yet still ‘othered’ neāpolis of Wiener Neustadt? – is not among them. Not intrinsically, anyway. These things can happen anywhere, at any time; these emotions, these physical and metaphysical truths are for many of us as close to universal as makes no matter. Nevertheless, the idea of a southern port city as a venue for touristic licence may well prove an apt setting for what is at dramatic stake. It helped Mozart and Da Ponte tread the fine line between realism and artifice that is surely fundamental to this, (one of) the very greatest of all operas; it also did to outstanding effect in Opera Holland Park’s new production this summer.  

Guglielmo and Dorabella

In a different way, or at least in a different southern port setting, so too does it in the Guildhall’s new staging. I only realised after the event – indeed upon starting to write this paragraph – that the director had been one and the same: Oliver Platt, albeit with a different design team. Perhaps, then, there was something after all to my hitherto innocent thesis of a common theme, notwithstanding the move forward a couple of centuries to the 19-80s to Alfonso’s Bar. Close to an American (West Coast? San Diego?) naval base, with all the potential for conflict between transience and long-term ‘home life’ that might imply, mood was superficially very different, likewise the consequences for particular directorial choices. Rarely, if ever, for instance, have I seen quite so raucous an opening scene, as the licentious ways of the naval boys (and at least one girl), their partners, and their would-be partners got under way, our quartet of lovers to be schooled taken from their number. That sense of a social context, however – a meaningful social context rather than a mere setting, ‘pretty’ or otherwise – remained common to both productions.

Don Alfonso and Despina

So too, again in different ways according to the different requirements of this particular production and performance, were the spatial, eminently musical visualisations of Mozart’s extraordinary and extraordinarily telling musical symmetries and oppositions. Così fan tutte is a labyrinth and a laboratory like no other, as worthy a successor to the experimental Bach of the cantatas as a precursor – a successor too – to Tristan und Isolde. Indeed, though Don Giovanni was the Mozart opera Pierre Boulez said he had long wished to conduct, yet never did; it is surely Così he should ultimately have come to, not least in light of his revelatory late recording of the Gran Partita, KV 361/370a. Whatever the ‘incidental’ detail of tequila shots, of entertainment in sombreros, of Despina the notary as Judge Judy, the fundamentals – related, not necessarily identical – were present both in Holland Park and at the Guildhall. So too was the existential devastation, the clear-eyed, merciless refusal to transcend, of the close.

Despina

For that to be the case, of course, one needs musical drama too – indeed, musical drama above all. This one took a little while to get going: perhaps more a matter of opening night nerves than anything. The Silk Street Theatre acoustic did not help, I suspect, not least when married to a certain, rather surprising heaviness of hand – tending, in the Overture, even to the brutal – from Dominic Wheeler in the pit. Throughout the first act, some of his tempo choices were distinctly odd: not so much in themselves – as a listener, one should always be willing to adapt, to rethink in that respect – as in relation to one another. (Once again, doubtless idiosyncratically, I thought of Boulez and his admiration for Wagner’s Essay on Conducting, not least the claims for proportionality rather than ‘absolute’ tempo therein.) The second act worked much better, though, blessed by some gorgeous woodwind playing, even if the strings were a little too often thin of tone.

Dorabella

There was much both to enjoy and to admire in the singing – as there must be, if a performance and production are to have the slightest chance of working their dramatic effect. Carmen Artaza’s dignified, often exquisitely spun line, trickily married – that tightrope I mentioned above between realism and articificality – to sparky, well-defined personality proved a particular joy as Dorabella. So too did the patent sincerity of Filipe Manu’s Ferrando, his second-act aria truly moving, Benson Wilson’s Guglielmo a swaggering yet not insensitive contrast. Fiordiligi will always prove a great challenge: one to which Alexandra Lowe rose with considerable success in a performance finely differentiated from Artaza’s, her soprano coloratura meaningful as well as accurate. Christian Valle’s Don Alfonso ruled the roost as he must, Zoe Drummond’s excellent Despina intriguingly disillusioned at the close. Called upon to do far more in the way of acting and movement than would usually be the case, members of the chorus impressed too, individually and corporately. This, as the cliché has it, was considerably more than the sum of its parts. After all, if ever there were an opera to demonstrate both the truth and depth of what might first appear to be, and indeed what might actually, be buffo cliché, it is Così fan tutte.