Birtwistle at 80 (1) - Gawain, 16 May 2014, BBC SO/Brabbins

Barbican

Gawain – Leigh Melrose

The Green Knight, Sir Bertiak de Hautdesert – Sir John Tomlinson

Morgan Le Fay – Laura Aikin

Lady de Hautdesert – Jennifer Johnston

King Arthur – Jeffrey Lloyd Roberts

A Fool – John Graham Hall

Guinevere – Rachel Nicholls

Bishop Baldwin – William Towers

Agravain – Ivan Ludlow

Ywain – Robert Anthony Gardiner

Sound Intermedia (sound design)

Aqamera (projections)
John Lloyd Davies (direct0r)

BBC Singers (conductor: Andrew Griffiths)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

 

 

 

This was a truly outstanding performance, thoroughly worthy of its standing ovation. The only problem now will be of upholding such standards throughout the Barbican’s Birtwistle at 80 series. This was something no one present is likely to forget: a masterpiece, whose absence from opera houses, not just in this country but across the world, stands as a devastating indictment to all concerned, was given a ‘concert staging’ to match the finest efforts of any established house.  Last year’s Salzburg staging – incredibly, the only one since Covent Garden’s premiere and revivals – performed a signal service in bringing Birtwistle’s opera to an international audience, but a questionable production detracted somewhat from the impact of an excellent musical performance. Here, John Lloyd Davies’s unfussy direction did all that was necessary – or at least seemed to be necessary – with the support of excellent lighting. Quite whether the projections were necessary, I have my doubts, but they did no especial harm either.

 

A happy surprise was the reinstatement of the full version of the Turning of the Seasons, which I had never heard before. What utterly magnificent music this is – and, equally to the point, musical drama which strongly reinforces the power of ritual in this opera. Gawain’s year-long journey reminds us of the crucial importance of the passing of time; actions are not here merely repeated, revisited, viewed from different standpoints. There is surely a strong comparison to be drawn here with Siegfried’s going out into the world, ‘zu neuen Taten’, and of course both Wagner and Birtwistle question, indeed deconstruct the notion of heroism. As the disillusioned Gawain insists, he is not, almost certainly never was, that hero the court, the world had imagined him to be. That unnerving experience of returning to a place, to people, and it, they having carried on without one registered all the more powerfully, even chillingly. A stronger sense of the passing of time was gained, then, but so was a stronger sense of the sheer power of ritual, in this case of the calendar and of man’s relationship to it, ambivalently positioned as it is in this case between Church and something closer to paganism. Speaking to other audience members during the interval, some, though by no means all, seemed to have struggled with the consequent greater length of the first act. I did not feel that at the time, but admit to noting thereafter a certain imbalance with respect to the first and second. That need not necessarily be a bad thing, but I could not help but wonder whether a second revision might be in order. Perhaps the Turning of the Seasons could become a second act tableau in itself; perhaps it might be split between the two acts, for, as Birtwistle has noted, many of his works have a tendency to ‘stop’ rather than to ‘end’. (I am not sure that that is really the case with this work, which is in many ways more conventionally operatic than many give it credit for, but the point may still stand in general.) At any rate, experiencing this additional music for the first time was an overwhelming experience in itself; moreover, it permits more to be heard from Guinevere, Bishop Baldwin, and the chorus. I understand – I think – the case for the revised version, but I should now never wish the cuts to be reinstated. In practice, though, I shall have to take what, if anything, I am given.

 

Martyn Brabbins led a superlative performance from the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the splendid BBC Singers (conducted offstage with equal excellence by Andrew Griffiths) and what I suspect may be the finest cast the work has yet received. The BBC SO’s contribution was almost beyond praise, every inch the equal of its Vienna counterpart last summer. It is perhaps all too tempting to resort to ‘national’ stereotypes, and maybe this was as much a matter of staging and venue, but I think I perceived a more generally internationally modernist Klang from the ORF Vienna Radio SO, and a more deeply English – but certainly not remotely nationalist – melancholy from the BBC orchestra. That is not to say that the violence of Birtwistle’s score did not register; it most certainly did, to searing effect. Nor that the powerful Stravinskian antecedents did not register. One may hear a fascinating struggle between a world born of Symphonies of Wind Instruments and one born of The Rite of Spring: doubtless an over-simplification, but perhaps not entirely gratuitous. The welding together of primitivism, mediævalism, and (Northern) English landscape was perhaps achieved still more idiomatically by Brabbins than by Ingo Metzmacher, matching the distinguished contribution by Elgar Howarth on the CD recording from the Royal Opera House. (Alas, that was made at a revival, so has the revised version of the score, but it remains an absolute ‘must’ for anyone who remotely cares about twentieth-century opera.) The brass – including three tubas and a euphonium – proved as powerful as any more celebrated section, but with none of the brashness one sometimes encounters from American orchestras in particular. A battery of percussion unleashed its fire at times, yet also offered true delicacy, not least in the guise of that unforgettable cimbalom part. Uneasy magic was conjured up – the observed and observing malevolence of Morgan le Fay? – from the woodwind, whilst the strings worked over-over-time throughout: incisive and, yes, at times beguiling. Courtly love and eroticism were given their due; one cannot deconstruct without in some sense having constructed.

 

Such was also the tale of the vocal performances. Leigh Melrose summoned up memories of his fine ENO Wozzeck as Gawain, and yet went further still. Very human choices, fears, and disappointments made the descent – or should that actually be ascent? – from his initial swagger all the more affecting. Sir John Tomlinson was his inimitable self, a true force of nature, if the more or less unforgivable cliché may be forgiven, as the Green Knight. An ‘objective’ review would have to mention the indulgence that needs to be offered to his higher range, here not so often employed, but frankly such cavils seem irrelevant in the face of so all-encompassing a dramatic assumption. The day will come – at least, we hope it will, if our opera houses will listen – when another bass will have to take on the role, but for the moment, the archetypal, apparent timelessness of this performance makes it impossible to imagine. For Tomlinson, moreover, there was no need for a score. Jennifer Johnston made a glorious impression as Lady de Hautdesert the wife of his alter ego: rich, even voluptuous, of tone, nicely ambiguous of purpose, and yet imparting something very important concerning the human and perhaps especially the female condition as constructed here. Laura Aikin was equally magnificent as Morgan le Fay. The cruel demands of the role clearly hold no fears for her; far more than ever before, I had the sense of her as a real character, as the moving force of events. Perhaps the longer version played a role in that; her manipulative appearance onstage – unseen to the hero – when Gawain arrived at the Hautdeserts certainly did. It was, however, an interpretative consequence too, born of vocal strength and palpable musical intelligence.

 

Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts and Rachel Nicholls made for an excellent royal couple, as attentive to words as to vocal line. William Towers made more of the role of Bishop Baldwin – again, doubtless partly a matter of the version, but not only that – than I had previously heard. His is a virile counter-tenor, put to piercing, perhaps sanctimonious use here. I certainly found myself asking more about the character, his role, his motivations, than I had done so before. John Graham-Hall fully inhabited the role of the Fool; there was an entirely appropriate correspondence with King Lear to be made in this case. Ivan Ludlow and Robert Anthony Gardiner offered finely sung portrayals of Agravain and Ywain. There was not a weak link in the cast, just as there was not in the evening as a whole. A resounding triumph! Now which company will do its duty and give us a properly thought-through new staging?

 

 

Salzburg Festival (1) - Gawain, 2 August 2013

Felsenreitschule

Gawain – Christopher Maltman

Green Knight/Bertiak de Hautdesert – Sir John Tomlinson
Morgan le Fay – Laura Aikin
Lady de Hautdesert – Jennifer Johnston
King Arthur – Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Bishop Baldwin – Andrew Watts
A Fool – Brian Galliford
Guinevere – Gun-Brit Barkmin
Agravain – Ivan Ludlow
Ywain – Alexander Sprague

Alvis Hermanis (director, set designs)

Eva Dessecker (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Multimedia Design Studio ‘Raketamedia’, Moscow (video)
Ronny Dietrich (dramaturgy)

Salzburg Bach Choir (chorus master: Alois Glassner)

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Ingo Meztmacher (conductor) 

 

 

Images: © Ruth Walz

If it has taken Salzburg a while to produce an opera by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, then it has likewise taken an unconscionable while for Gawain to receive its second staging; the Salzburg Festival thus deserves a great vote of thanks for having done so, as a highly imaginative replacement for the postponed premiere of György Kurtág’s new Beckett opera. Kurtág’s Endgame, should that be the opera’s name, will, we are informed, be shown next year instead.

 

Which brings me to Alvis Hermanis’s rather puzzling production of Gawain. I could not help but wonder whether his post-apocalyptic vision, a few years in the ‘science fiction’ future, had started life as a response, if you can imagine this, to a version of Endgame with hordes of characters. Shifting the action from Arthurian times, and indeed from the thirteenth-century world in which Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was written, does not trouble me, and one might argue for parallels between post-Roman Britain and a world following some unspecified future apocalypse, but it was unclear to me that the vagrant setting really works, or rather that it does anything much beyond providing an alternative ‘setting’. Hermanis makes a case for ecological issues: the ‘green’ of the ‘Green’ Knight, Nature taking its revenge in a scenario apparently inspired by Joseph Beuys, and a strangely glowing ‘magic’ green belt as the sash Lady Hautdesert gives to Gawain. But it is difficult either to understand such issues as central to the opera or to credit the director with an entirely plausible commentary or reinterpretation. Hermanis’s interest in Beuys, for instance, simply seems transplanted upon an existing work, to the benefit of neither.

 

That said, I was made to think – and the production deserves praise for that. It does not close down avenues of response, eccentric though its own chosen terms may be. It tantalises – and I do not think this is entirely my own reading, though it may be – with a dialectic between parallelism and difference; that is, we both appreciate that the new setting has things in common with the ‘original’ yet also how utterly different it is, thereby being compelled to place work, staging, and ourselves. The need for ritual, so much a preoccupation of both poem and opera, shines through, almost despite the dubious talk (in Hermanis’s programme note) of ‘science fiction’. And whatever one thinks of the ‘movement’, whether from a host of actors or, most astonishingly, from the best trained dog I have ever seen, it is accomplished with excellence. At a time when one often endures productions in which the director seems apparently unable to direct, there is succour to be gained from such professionalism.

Laura Aikin (Morgan le Fay), Christopher Maltman (Gawain)

 

 

Nor, most importantly, did the staging get in the way of what was an outstanding musical performance of a modern operatic masterpiece, scandalously neglected by houses that prefer endlessly to churn out the profundities of Donizetti. Ingo Metzmacher’s performance with the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra perhaps placed Birtwistle in a more international, or better cosmopolitan, context than Elgar Howarth’s Covent Garden performances. Although I missed a sense of that ineffably ‘English’ quality that haunts Birtwistle’s music just as strongly as it does, say, that of Vaughan Williams, there were gains to be had too, especially for an ‘international’ audience in Salzburg. The performance was perhaps less primæval in its violence than Howarth’s – how vividly I still remember what was only my second evening at Covent Garden! – yet pacing, flow, and both the sheer array of colours and, where necessary, weight and incision of orchestral attack were second to none. It would certainly have been well-nigh impossible to over-praise the ORF orchestra. Birtwistle’s formal ritualistic preoccupations came to the fore through the medium that matters above all else, the music. It is, moreover, not entirely appropriate to the dramaturgical precepts of either the composer or his librettist, David Harsent, that there be some degree of disconnection between ‘dramatic’ and ‘orchestral’ action. Busoni’s influence perhaps extends further into the twentieth and even the twenty-first century than many of us appreciate.

 

So, of course, does Wagner’s. And with the Proms Ring so fresh in my memory, Birtwistle’s portrayal of flawed ‘heroism’, accomplished via different narrative standpoints, I was bound to think of Siegfried in Gawain. Christopher Maltman swaggered as a cowboy, his singing still more than his bathing offering ample reason for Gawain’s charismatic following. His journey towards ‘Why do you ask for someone who isn’t here? Who do you want me to be? I’m not a hero’ was not merely plausible, but immensely moving, and increasingly so. John Tomlinson is the Green Knight, of course, yet, despite a highly committed performance, it now takes an uncritical ‘fan’ not to be disturbed by the vocal problems at the top of his range. Laura Aikin and Jennifer Johnston were excellent Morgan le Fay and Lady Hautdesert. The eroticism of the former’s performance grew as she and Johnston’s character grew apart, indeed transformed themselves from commentators into participants. Hermanis’s direction assisted with that, but the depths of vocal characterisation upon which both singers drew were undeniably their own. Jeffery Lloyd-Roberts proved a steadfastly engaging King Arthur, the singer in infinitely superior vocal form to the last time I had heard him; I especially liked the directorial touch at the end of having him step up from his chair and make his first tentative steps towards an uncertain – heroic or non-heroic? – future. If Brian Galliford’s Fool sometimes lacked vocal lustre, his was a typically observant performance, using his words to highly dramatic advantage. Gun-Brit Barkmin, Andrew Watts, Ivan Ludlow, and Alexander Sprague all acquitted themselves very well indeed in their smaller roles. Special mention, however, must be accorded to the stunning offstage choral contribution, the Salzburg Bach Choir fully worthy of comparison with the illustrious orchestra in the pit. Alois Glassner clearly deserves great credit for his choral training.

 

‘Then with a single step your journey starts,’ sings Morgan le Fay – repeatedly. Let us hope that Gawain’s journey has (re-)started with this fascinating second step.

The Queen of Spades, Opera North, 22 November 2011

(sung in English)

Barbican Theatre

Lisa – Orla Boylan
Countess – Dame Josephine Barstow
Hermann – Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Count Tomsky, Pluto – Jonathan Summers
Prince Yeletsky – William Dazeley
Pauline, Daphnis – Alexandra Sherman
Governess – Fiona Kimm
Chekalinsky – Daniel Norman
Sourin – Julian Tovey
Masha – Gillene Herbert
Chaplitsky – David Llewellyn
Narumov – Dean Robinson
Master of Ceremonies – Paul Rendall
Chloë – Miranda Bevin

Neil Bartlett (director)
Kandis Cook (designs)
Chris Davey (lighting)
Leah Hausman (choreography)

Chorus of Opera North (chorus master: Timothy Burke)
Orchestra of Opera North
Richard Farnes (conductor)

Opera North holds a special place in my affections: my first full opera in the theatre was the company’s Wozzeck, which I saw as a schoolboy at the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield. The experience marked me for life. I have never doubted since that Wozzeck is one of the greatest operas ever written, nor have I doubted that opera, whatever the disappointments one may experience in practice, can at its best prove at least as potent a form of drama as any other. It is many years now since I heard a performance from the company, though I have received very good reports from those who have, often comparing its offerings favourably with those on offer from the two principal London houses. I was therefore delighted to have opportunity to see and to hear for myself in Opera North’s first visit to the Barbican Theatre. (More are planned.) The timing was interesting too, affording comparison with Eugene Onegin across town at the Coliseum.
First impressions of Neil Bartlett’s production were preferable to those of Deborah Warner’s Met-bound anodyne crowd-pleaser. There is, at least to begin with, no evident point of view expressed; straightforward storytelling seems the order of the day. By the same token, however, that does not come across as a deliberate policy to play safe, even to condescend. The setting is where it ‘should’ be; costumes are of the period; there is neither jarring nor particular elucidation. It would have been bizarre and not just unwelcome if the audience had followed the practice of a segment of that for Onegin and had drowned out the music by applauding Kandis Cook’s serviceable sets; they simply did their job without ostentation and without sentimental emphasis upon petit bourgeois conceptions of the ‘beautiful’. However, I said ‘first impressions’ above, because there is one aspect of Bartlett’s staging that might distress the literal-minded. It seemed interesting to me, yet arguably out of place in a production that offered nothing more of the same, rather as if the concept had wandered in from elsewhere. I speak of Bartlett’s treatment of the Countess, who emerges a sex-crazed vamp: she certainly would have captured attention in her scarlet gown even if she had not been played by Dame Josephine Barstow. Fitting or not, it was at least an idea, which was more than could be said for anything Warner mustered. The Personenregie, however, was considerably less skilled, or at least its execution was. And If Catherine the Great made her appearance, I am afraid I missed it.

The real problems, though, lay in the musical performances, and above all with Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts’s Hermann. It did not sound as though this were an off-day, more a matter of having taken on a task that lay far beyond what the voice was incapable of delivering. It would be a matter of taste rather than judgement whether the shouting or tuning proved more painful. This, I am sad to say, constituted some of the most troubling professional singing I have heard; indeed, most student or other amateur performances are executed at a much higher level. He improved slightly during the third act, though he continued to croon in a manner that might have been thought excessive for a West End musical. Some smaller roles were no less approximate and crude, though, by the same token, some proved much better. William Dazeley’s Yeletsky impressed, as did the Tomsky of Jonathan Summers. Perhaps best of all was Alexandra Sherman’s Pauline. Hers was that rare thing: a true contralto. Moreover, she could use it to properly dramatic ends, the song, ‘Podrugi milïye,’ musically shaped and genuinely moving. Orla Boylan’s Lisa had its moments, but sometimes found herself all over the place in terms both of (melo-)drama and of intonation.

The chorus had clearly been well trained by Timothy Burke, and generally acquitted itself well, most of all in the third act, when, despite the translation, choral sound came across as more plausibly Russian than elsewhere. (The translation itself veered between embarrassing couplets and the merely prosaic; in that respect, Martin Pickard’s work recalled what we heard from him for Onegin.) Barstow, as the reader may have guessed, stole the show. Though her tuning was a little awry upon her entrance, and some might have queried the preponderance of quasi-spoken, parlando style, she can still hold a stage. One longed for more, wishing that her palpable commitment had rubbed off on others.

Richard Farnes proved intermittently impressive. There was certainly dramatic drive, sensitivity too, to his conducting. Yet, whilst there were moments in which the orchestra sounded to have just the right Tchaikovsky sound – the opening of the third act, for instance – there were other passages in which the score veered awkwardly between dark, would-be Wagnerism and soft-centred Puccini. A greater body of strings would have assisted: though what was mustered played well, the lack of heft was apparent throughout. Characterful woodwind was offset by variable brass, sometimes blaring, sometimes surprisingly tentative. (Placing outside the pit, at the edge of the stage, doubtless did not help.)

It was just about worth it for the Countess, then, but Opera North’s outing to London proved for the most part a damp squib. And it is surely a little too easy to say that the problem may have lain in staging so ambitious a work. After all, it was Wozzeck, no less, that made such an impression upon me in Sheffield. The stage director of that searing, life-changing Wozzeck? Ironically, one Deborah Warner…