Idomeneo, English Touring Opera, 8 March 2019

Hackney Empire Theatre

Images: © Richard Hubert Smith

Ilia – Galina Averina

Idamante – Catherine Carby

Idomeneo – Christopher Turner

Arbace, High Priest of Neptune – John-Colyn Gyeantey

Elettra – Paula Sides

Voice of the Oracle of Neptune – Ed Hawkins

James Conway (director)

Frankie Bradshaw (designs)
Rory Beaton (lighting)

Chorus and Orchestra of English Touring Opera

Jonathan Peter Kenny (conductor)

The greatest miracle in operatic history? On balance, I tend to think so. The distinction of Idomeneo’s forebears, be they operas of Mozart, Gluck, or anyone else, ‘reformist’ or otherwise, is too readily overlooked. Nevertheless, the leap from La finta giardiniera to Idomeneo remains a challenge to explain – or, better, a mystery at which to marvel, in which to rejoice. I remember, as an undergraduate, once noting an examination question with a quotation something along the lines of ‘It is impossible to explain the quantum leap Wagner took from Rienzi to Der fliegende Holländer,’ followed by the injunction, ‘Nevertheless, make the attempt.’ Something similar might be said here, and Wagner is surely the only comparable case; I wonder, though whether Idomeneo might not offer a miracle still greater.

Idamante (Catherine Carby), Chorus, Ilia (Galina Averiana)

Speaking of miracles, English Touring Opera does not come so very far off with a production and performance that, considered as a whole, mark the finest I have seen. We do not live in a golden age of Mozart stagings, nor do we live in a golden age of Mozart conducting; most likely, such golden ages never existed in the first place. There are exceptions, though, just as there most likely always have been. Idomeneo nonetheless seems to have proved particularly unlucky – or perhaps I have been particularly unlucky with it. If Jonathan Peter Kenny’s direction of the keen ETO Chorus and Orchestra occasionally seemed to err a little on the bright and bubbly side – this is, after all, a work as much in the tradition of tragédie lyrique as anything else, and one Mozart wished, in the case of subsequent revision to take further in that direction – then there remained, once past the strangely perfunctory opening bars, much to admire. Admirably flexible, there was enough in Kenny’s conducting to convey the dramatic power and dazzling originality of Mozart’s intimations of so much nineteenth-century practice: orchestral colour (yes, with roots in Gluck, even Rameau, yet peering forward to Weber, Berlioz, and beyond), and both a shorter- and longer-term harmonic strategy, the latter married to Wagnerian dissolution of formal boundaries and consequent alternative, often sonata-led constructivism, that at the very least rival Don Giovanni. Slight roughness around the edges was a price well worth paying for such musico-dramatic commitment.

Elettra (Paula Sides)

Much of that came, of course, from the singers, more than a match for any other cast I have heard in the theatre. Christopher Turner’s Idomeneo was certainly the best I have heard: vulnerable, thoughtful, utterly secure of line, and possessed of all the necessary vocal firepower, wisely deployed. Galina Averina and Catherine Carby made for a beautifully matched, yet also contrasted, Ilia and Idamante, moral examples through struggle, without a hint of didacticism. Paula Saides’s Elettra proved little short of sensational, an object lesson in the combination of line, colour, and dramatic involvement to create in time something so much greater than the sum of its parts. John Colyn-Gyeantey combined the thankless role of Arbace with the slight role of the High Priest. A little confusingly, the roles were elided rather than simply sung by the same artist, but that was not his fault. Coloratura was, throughout the cast, deployed not only with accuracy but with meaning; much the same might be said of ornamentation.

Idomeneo (Christopher Turner)

James Conway offered a typically resourceful production: not only, of course, for the Hackney Empire, but for a host of theatres up and down the country, many of them in towns that will otherwise see and hear no opera all year. He proceeded from trusting the work, from seemingly – however much of a theatrical illusion this may be – permitting it to speak for itself. Costumes, lighting, facial expressions, especially from the chorus of Trojans and Greeks, hinted at the political backdrop, without reducing the work to the all-too-easy, if understandably appealing conception of a ‘wartime drama’. A Mediterranean, even Cretan setting was likewise apparent, without dominating or overwhelming. This was above all a drama of sacrifice, in the line of Antoine Danchet’s original Idomenée at least as much as the Abbé Varesco’s revision (much transformed by an often frustrated Mozart). Lest that all sound a touch too werktreu, an excellent twist, drawn out of the drama rather than imposed upon it, was brought to us in Elettra’s final attempt to hold Ilia hostage, perhaps even to slaughter her.

The only real disappointment one might have entertained lay in the considerable cuts visited upon the score. If I could live with them, I suspect anyone of good will would also have been able to do so. Richard Strauss, after all, conducted far more drastic surgery, especially to the recitative, eliminating the harpsichord entirely – alongside, of course, acts of wholesale recomposition. Might I have preferred to hear a more ‘complete’ version, leaving aside for the moment the lack of what we – or Mozart – might consider a definitive text? (Many would consider the Munich ‘original’ preferable to the single Vienna performance; I should broadly, not without qualification, agree.) Of course. That, however, is quite beside the point. Within all manner of unavoidable constraints, not least the needs of touring, it would have to have been this, something like it, or nothing at all.

Idamante and Idomeneo

That ‘this’ emerged superior to any other Idomeneo I have experienced in the theatre thus says all the more, given its regrettable – in a utopian sense – constraints. Magnificent, musically and dramatically, though the ballet music may be, we could hardly expect the company to stage that too. Martin Kušej’s 2014 Covent Garden production, sadly let down by atrocious conducting and a still more atrocious Idamante, offered a one-off solution of no dance whatsoever, a provocative frieze of shell-shocked regime change; such, however, is hardly a negative coup de théâtre gladly to suffer repetition. There is often much to be said for straightforwardness; there is pretty much everything to be said for conviction. This production and these performances offered both – and more.

Iphigénie en Tauride, English Touring Opera, 5 March 2016

 

Images: Richard Hubert Smith

Hackney Empire Theatre

Iphigénie – Catherine Carby

Oreste – Grant Doyle
Pylade – John-Colyn Gyeantey
Thoas – Craig Smith
Scythian Guard – Simon Gfeller
Ministers of the Sanctuary – Ashley Mercer, Bradley Travis
Priestesses of Diana – Susanna Fairbairn, Samantha Hay

James Conway (director)

Anna Fleischle (designs)
Guy Hoare (lighting)
Bernadette Iglich (choreography)

Orchestra and Chorus of English Touring Opera
Martin André (conductor)

At last, an opera company bothering, in London, to perform an opera by one of the most important composers in the history of the genre! (When the Royal Opera performed Orphée et Eurydice, it condescended to Gluck by hiving him off to an external orchestra, as if he somehow were not good enough for its own players.) One grows weary of lamenting, year after year, Gluck’s absence from our programmes. This performance at the Hackney Empire sold out, showing that there is a keen audience, both of devotees and newcomers; if Gluck is not programmed, just as when Schoenberg, say, is not programmed, it is because companies have decided not to do so, not because no one will go. It is all the better, then, that English Touring Opera will take the production to many theatres around the country that would otherwise receive no opera at all, let alone any Gluck operas.

What most, me included, would consider the crowning masterpiece of Gluck’s career will win converts from any willing to treat opera as a serious art form; those who are not might as well remain in front of the television. For Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the great German art historian and archaeologist, ‘the only way for us to be great, and if at all possible, immortal,’ was ‘by imitating the ancients’. Such was the context for Gluck’s crystallisation of plans for operatic reform, opera, which should have been the inheritor of Attic tragedy, being seen instead to have degenerated into an undramatic farrago of vocal and scenic exhibitionism. (It is hard not to sympathise in the case of, say, Vivaldi’s operas, and many others.) Gluck’s (well, Ranieri de’ Calzabigi’s) 1769 Preface to Alceste remains a landmark document in operatic history, the archetypal declaration of operatic reform. It was very much what we heard here:

I have striven to restrict music to its true office of serving poetry by means of expression and by following the situations of the story, without interrupting the action or stifling it with a useless superfluity of ornaments; and I believe that it should do this in the same way as telling colours affect a correct and well-ordered drawing, by a well-assorted contrast of light and shade which serves to animate the figures without altering the contours. Thus I did not wish to arrest an actor in the greatest heat of dialogue in order to wait for a tiresome ritornello … nor to wait while the orchestra gives him time to recover his breath for a cadenza. … I have sought to abolish all the abuses against which good sense and reason have long cried out in vain. ... Furthermore, I believed that my greatest labour should be devoted to seeking a beautiful simplicity.

Moreover, it was what we saw too. James Conway’s production, focused on Anna Fleischle’s resourceful single set will doubtless transfer well to other, smaller theatres. It proves eminently adaptable, focusing our attention, like Gluck’s music, on the drama, not upon extraneous ‘effects’. That is not to say that there is anything bloodless to it. Quite the contrary, in fact, the blood-drenching of the opening scene, Iphigénie and her priestesses compelled to perform their appalling task, hits home powerfully, the well-nigh psychoanalytical quality of Gluck’s writing – storm external and internal – powerfully conveyed. Conway concentrates on the characters and their plight, permitting the drama to do its own work, or so it seems. One especially welcome aspect is his willingness to follow the homoeroticism of the relationship between Oreste and Pylade. (Quite why many other directors decline to do so remains a mystery to me.) Their second-act kiss is a splendidly handled moment. Have they (physically) been lovers all along? Perhaps, but I had the impression that, at this moment, facing death and the prospect of never seeing each other again, they could finally act as their romantic friendship had all along urged them. However difficult Oreste had become, perhaps even tried to be, they now found themselves helpless, compelled by Fate to snatch the moment. The openness of Conway’s staging allows one to read that moment as one will; there is no doubt, however, that this is the truest of love. Nothing, however, detracts from the playing out of the tragedy, Guy Hoare’s lighting clearly focusing our expectation and concentration.

An unfortunate exception came with the decision to present the deus ex machina in the guise of a little girl Diana, splashing around in the puddles. It makes for an undeniably arresting moment of theatre. Alas, its vocal effectiveness stood in inverse proportion to the element of visual surprise. Another aspect of vocal weakness came with Craig Smith’s stiff Thoas, king of Tauris. It is not the most grateful of roles, perhaps, but he sounded elderly rather than barbarous. Otherwise, there was much to admire in the cast. Catherine Carby’s gave a heartfelt performance as Iphigénie; how could one not deeply sympathise with her plight? Grant Doyle’s Oreste came across as properly conflicted, properly stunted by his appalling experiences, growing in humanity and self-knowledge. If John-Colyn Gyeantey’s Pylade was not always vocally secure, sometimes possessed of an unduly distracting vibrato, he had one believe in his character and his motivations, which is of greater importance; moreover, ‘Divinité des grandes âmes’ proved a proper climax to the third act. An excellent small chorus made its mark in various guises, as did those taking the smaller roles.

What a joy, moreover, to hear Gluck performed on modern instruments! If Martin André’s direction sometimes veered a little towards the frenetic for my taste, one hears far more extreme examples. Rarely did the instruments sound circumscribed, even if a little warmer string tone would not have gone amiss at times. More importantly, though, the bubbling of this well-nigh proto-Wagnerian (and proto-Berliozian) wordless Chorus told us so much of what we needed to know, explained so much of what we saw on stage and heard in the vocal line. Continuity and variety were impressive, André ensuring that both emerged as sides of the same dramatic coin. This was not a performance on the grand scale of, say, Riccardo Muti’s legendary recording from La Scala, but one would not have expected it to be. ETO does in many respects a far more important job, for which we should all offer thanks. There could be no doubt that it gave us the opportunity to hear just what Louis Petit de Bachaumont wrote of, in the account he gave in his Mémoires secrets of the 1779 premiere:

It is a new genre. It is truly a tragedy, … a tragedy in the Greek style. There is no Overture, … no arias [an exaggeration, but one knows what he means!]; but many indications of passion expressed with the greatest energy; they arouse an interest hitherto unknown on the lyric stage. One can only congratulate Chevalier Gluck for having discovered the secret of the ancients, and he will raise it to a pitch of undoubted perfection.

Now, more Gluck, please!

 

 

L'incoronazione di Poppea, English Touring Opera, 9 October 2013

Images: Richard Hubert Smith
Poppea (Paula Sides), Nerone (Helen Sherman)

Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music

Nerone – Helen Sherman

Seneca – Piotr Lempa
Ottavia, La Fortuna – Hannah Pedley
Nutrice – Russell Harcourt
Lucano – Stuart Haycock
Liberto – Nicholas Merryweather
Poppea – Paula Sides
Arnalta – John-Colyn Gyeantey
Ottone – Michal Czerniawski
Drusilla, La Virtù – Hannah Sandison
Amor – Jake Arditti

James Conway (director)

Oliver Platt (revival director)
Samal Blak (designs)
Ace McCarron (lighting)

Old Street Band

Michael Rosewell (conductor)

(sung in English, as The Coronation of Poppea)

 

James Conway’s production of Monteverdi’s final masterpiece, L’incoronazione di Poppea was first performed last November by students from the Royal College of Music. Now it is revived, at the same Britten Theatre, but by English Touring Opera, as part of its Venetian season. It made a still greater impression upon me than last year; whilst the earlier cast had sung well and deserved great credit, the professional singers of ETO seemed more inside their roles, as much in stage as purely musical terms.

 

Conway’s production holds up very well. Its perhaps surprising relocation of the action to a parallel universe in which a Stalinist Russia existed without the prude Stalin – ‘just the breath of his world,’ as Conway’s programme note puts it – provides a highly convincing reimagination of the already reimagined world of Nero. ‘Stalin’s bruising reign convinced me,’ Conway writes, ‘that this was a place in which Nerone might flourish, from which Ottone, Drusilla, Ottavia, and Seneca might suddenly disappear, and in which all might live cheek by jowl in a sort of family nightmare, persisting in belief in family (or some related ideal) even as it devours them.’  And so it comes to pass, from the Prologue in which La Fortuna, La Virtù, and Amore unfurl their respective red banners, setting out their respective stalls, until Poppea’s (and Amore’s) final triumph. Claustrophobia reigns supreme, save for the caprice of Amore himself, here dressed as a young pioneer, ready to knock upon the window at the crucial moment, so as to prevent Ottone from the murder that would have changed everything. Samal Black’s set design is both handsome and versatile, permitting readily of rearrangement, and also providing for two levels of action: Ottavia can plot, or lament, whilst Poppea sleeps. Conway’s idea of Poppea as an almost Lulu-like projection of fantasies in an opera whose game is power continues to exert fascination, and in a strongly acted performance, proves perhaps more convincing still than last time. Where then, the blonde wig had seemed more odd than anything else, here the idea of a constructed identity, designed to please and to further all manner of other interests, registers with considerable dramatic power. The seeping of blood as the tragedy – but is it that? – ensues makes an equally powerful point, albeit with relative restraint; this is not, we should be thankful, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk or some other instance of Grand Guignol. Above all, the Shakespearean quality of Monteverdi’s imagination, unparalleled in opera before Mozart, registers as it must. One regretted the cuts, but one could live with them in as taut a rendition as this.

 

Michael Rosewell’s conducting had gained considerably in fluency from last time. I feared the worst from the opening sinfonia, in which ornamentation became unduly exhibitionistic – I could have sworn that I heard an interpolated phrase from the 1610 Vespers at one point – and the violins were somewhat painfully out of tune, my fears were largely confounded. It is a great pity that we still live in a climate of musical Stalinism, in which modern instruments are considered enemies of the people than the kulaks were, but continuo playing largely convinced and string tone, even if emaciated, at least improved in terms of intonation. For something more, we must return, alas, to Leppard or to Karajan.

 

Moreover, it was possible – indeed, almost impossible not – to concentrate upon the musico-dramatic performances on stage. Helen Sherman’s Nerone displayed laudable ability to act ‘masculine’, at least to the dubious extent that the character deserves it, and great facility with Monteverdi’s lines, even when sung in English. Paula Sides proved fully the equal both of Monteverdi’s role and Conway’s conception. Hers was a performance compelling in beauty and eroticism; indeed, the entwining of the two was impressive indeed. The nobility but also the vengefulness of Ottavia came through powerfully in Hannah Pedley’s assumption, her claret-like tintà a rare pleasure. Michal Czerniawski again displayed a fine countertenor voice as Ottone, engaging the audience’s sympathy but also its interest; this was no mere cipher, but a real human being. Much the same could be said of Hannah Sandison’s Drusilla, save of course for the countertenor part. Piotr Lempa has the low notes for Seneca, though production can be somewhat uneven, perhaps simply a reflection of a voice that is still changing. John-Colyn Gyeantey’s Arnalta was more ‘characterful’ than beautifully sung, but perhaps that was the point. Pick of the rest was undeniably Jake Arditti’s protean Amor, as stylishly sung as it was wickedly acted. The cast, though, is more than the sum of its parts, testament to a well-rehearsed, well-c0nceived, well-sung production of a truly towering masterpiece.