A Midsummer Night's Dream, Deutsche Oper, 29 January 2020

Images: A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM von Benjamin Britten, Regie: Ted Huffman, Premiere am 26.1.2020, Deutsche Oper Berlin, copyright: Bettina Stöß

Oberon – James Hall

Tytania – Siobhan Stagg

Puck – Jami Reid-Quarrell

Theseus – Padraic Rowan

Hippolyta – Davia Bouley

Lysander – Gideon Poppe

Demetrius – Samuel Dale Johnson

Hermia – Karis Tucker

Helena – Jeanine De Bique

Bottom – James Platt

Quince – Timothy Newton

Flute – Michael Kim

Snug – Patrick Guetti

Snout – Matthew Peña

Starveling – Matthew Cossack

Cobweb – Markus Kinch

Peaseblossom – Lora Violetta Haberstock

Mustardseed – Selina Isi

Moth – Chiara Annabelle Feldmann

Ted Huffman (director)

Marsha Ginsberg (set designs)

Annemarie Woods (costumes)

DM Wood (lighting)

Sam Pinkleton (choreography)

Ran Arthur Braun (Puck’s choreography)

Sebastian Hanusa (dramaturgy)

Neil Barry Moss (Spielleitung)

Children’s Choir of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus director: Christian Lindhorst)

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Donald Runnicles (conductor)

For my final review – unless, which seems unlikely, I manage to write up this evening’s concert before midnight – written as a European citizen, it is perhaps fitting to be writing of an English opera, performed by a German company, conducted by a Scotsman. Given the circumstances, I hope I shall be forgiven if it does not find me at my most inspired, should such a condition even exist. Hand on heart, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not an opera I can bring myself to care for greatly, although – perhaps there is a lesson, or at least an irony, here too – the Berlin audience reacted enthusiastically.

Shakespeare is a dramatist whom composers, at least opera composers, confront at their peril. However clichéd it may be to say this, there is so much music in his verse that setting it can seem superfluous. This is not a rule; there are no such rules. However, I cannot see, or rather hear, what is gained in this case, other than an undeniable creepiness to score and elements of the dramaturgy, which therefore does not seem an unreasonable place for a performance to take as its point of departure. In that, as in everything else, Donald Runnicles’s leadership of the excellent Deutsche Oper Orchestra and Children’s Choir and a fine group of soloists proved just the ticket. Rarely if ever have I heard those recurring slithering glissandi and the weird balances of instrumentation and of instrumentation-vis-à-vis-harmony sound quite so ambiguous, even callous in their indifference to the affairs of mere mortals. This was fairyland music properly unsentimentalised. Moreover, Runnicles communicated the constructivist aspects of Britten’s writing more powerfully than any conductor I can recall. Unsurprisingly, the closer it sounded to The Turn of the Screw, the more interesting the score became. There is only so much anyone can do about the general thinness of writing and a tendency, constructivism notwithstanding, towards diffuse formlessness; insofar as anyone can, Runnicles certainly did. Colour, however, came first and foremost. Those silvery slivers of orchestral moonlight cast, in a fine dramatic paradox, as much shadow as anything else.

The children’s choir had evidently been very well prepared by Christian Lindhorst. Indeed, I had to remind myself afterwards that most of its members would have been singing in a foreign language. A mixed cast included many Anglophone singers, but those who were not, at least in terms of mother tongue, could again hardly be distinguished from those who were. (Singing and musical performance more generally are, of course, international businesses in which British artists have been enabled to flourish by membership of the European Union; goodness knows what will happen next year.) It seems invidious to single out particular performances when all impressed and contributed to a whole that was unquestionably greater than the sum of its parts. I shall limit myself to noting vocal portrayals that, for whatever reason, particularly caught my ear. From James Hall came a warm yet, in the best way, piercing Oberon, channelling Alfred Deller’s memory through something more than imitation; he was well matched by Siobhan Stagg’s spirited, knowing (at least until she was not!) Tytania. Gideon Poppe and Samuel Dale Johnson offered an excellent rutting pair of impetuous youths, well matched and contrasting with their lovers, Karis Tucker and Jeanine De Bique. James Platt’s bluffly comic Bottom led a characterful troupe of rustics.

Ted Huffman’s production gave the impression of good ideas that might fruitfully have been taken further, while shining a clear path through the basic narrative. No one would have stood in any doubt as to who was who, nor as to what was taking place: more, after all, than can often be said in opera staging. I presume the mid-twentieth-century setting – 1940s? – was intended to suggest the period of writing or at least Britten’s life in some respect. It was not, however, immediately clear why we should not then have been closer to 1960. Military uniforms and a suggestion – or was that just me? – of a battlefield as all slept in the forest may have alluded to wartime; if so, without something more, I was rather at a loss as to why and with what consequences. In a programme interview, Huffman referred to Oberon and Tytania fighting over the Indian boy as being akin to the status of Britten and Peter Pears as a childless couple. Once more, if so, nothing more was made of it – and I should hardly have thought of that without reading. Lines delivered in somewhat exaggerated fashion by Jami Reid-Quarrell, Puck was likewise intended, I learned, to represent an outsider. Fair enough, although surely that comes with the territory. There was, however, no doubting Reid-Quarrell’s agility, nor the skill of Ran Arthur Braun’s choreography for him. Quite why Theseus, in a fine vocal and stage display by Padraic Rowan, was drunk, I am afraid I have no idea, but the use of giant puppets for Pyramus and Thisby was charming.

What did I miss? Christopher Alden’s superlative ENO production, far and away the best I have seen, went for the pederastic jugular. Would that more would grasp that thorny nettle with such dramatic verve – be it in this or any other Britten opera. Perhaps, though, I was missing the point. With that, I should probably sign off. See you on the other side, lost in a far darker wood than this, with blue passports, yet nothing in the way of fairyland magic and no ‘break of day’ for at least a couple of decades. If we are lucky.

Aleko (concert performance), Melos Sinfonia/Zeffman, 7 July 2014

 

St John’s Smith Square

Aleko – James Platt

Zemfira – Sara-Lian Owen

Young Gypsy – Luperci de Souza

Old Gypsy – Arshak Kuzikyan

Old Gypsy Woman – Nelli Orlova

Chorus (chorus master: William Cole)

Melos Sinfonia

Oliver Zeffman (conductor)

 

Aleko, the libretto by Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, after Pushkin, was assigned in 1892 to three members of Anton Arensky’s composition class at the Moscow Conservatoire. Rachmaninov’s setting, made at the tender age of nineteen, was the only one to be published (though not in full score until 1953) or performed, winning the young composer the ultimate prize of a gold medal. In truth, it needs all the dramatic help it can get, more a reflection upon the libretto, which amounts to little more than a succession of numbers rather than a real dramatic development, than upon the score itself. Nevertheless, even a concert performance is of interest. One hears the influences, as one always does in immature works. Tchaikovsky looms largest; he was so impressed that he suggested Aleko form a double bill with his own Iolanta. The choral writing echoes Eugene Onegin; the orchestral writing often echoes the symphonic as well as operatic Tchaikovsky. There are hints of the Mighty Handful too, certainly of the Liszt of the symphonic poems, and perhaps also of Wagner.

 

If there is little that suggests Rachmaninov’s mature voice, the writing is remarkably assured, and so it sounded in this generally excellent performance from the Melos Sinfonia and its artistic director, Oliver Zeffman. If there were a few rougher moments, the string sheen and the sheer power of the orchestra as a whole, brass and all, proved mightily impressive, with a splendid sense of idiom. Zeffman guided the score’s progress wisely: flexible, without a hint of stiffness. The chorus, trained by William Cole, sang very well too, as did most of the soloists. If James Platt as Aleko and Sara-Lian Owen as Zemfira took a little time properly to settle, it was only a little time. Their diction, dramatic commitment, and musical line were excellent, Owen had one believe more in the gypsy girl who transfers her affections – shades of Carmen, though it was Pushkin’s narrative poem that would have influenced Merimée – more than one might have thought possible, in a performance which increasingly yearned for the stage. Arshak Kuzikyan revealed a passionate, dark-hued bass voice as the Old Gypsy, his lines shaped intelligently throughout: his was a compelling performance indeed, having one wish that there was more to hear from him. Nelli Orlova’s brief appearance as the Old Gypsy Woman had one wish for more too. Only Luperci de Souza’s performance as the Young Gypsy for whom Zemfira falls fell flat, audibly strained, at times seriously struggling. Perhaps it was just an off-night; everyone has them.

 

At any rate, this marked a wonderful opportunity to hear a fascinating early work. The Melos Sinfonia will next be heard in September at the Grimeborn Opera Festival and the Rose Theatre, Kingston, in a coupling of Walton’s Façade and Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King, whose Russian premiere they well give in St Petersburg in November.