Hänsel und Gretel, Royal College of Music, 4 and 5 July 2016

Hänsel (Kamilla Dunstan), Peter (Timothy Connor), Gertrud (Elspeth Marrow), Gretel (Gemma Lois Summerfield)
Images: Chris Christodoulou

 

Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music

Peter – Timothy Connor/Nicholas Morton

Gertrud – Elspeth Marrow/Amy Lyddon
Hänsel – Kamilla Dunstan/Katie Coventry
Gretel – Gemma Lois Summerfield/Sofia Larsson
Witch – Richard Pinkstone/Joel Williams
Sandman – Maria Stasiak
Dew Fairy – Louise Fuller

Liam Steel (director)

Myriddin Wannel (designs)
Andy Purves (lighting)

Chorus of Echoes, Angels, and Gingerbread Children

Royal College of Music Opera Orchestra

Michael Rosewell (conductor)

Gertrud (Elspeth Marrow) and
Peter (Timothy Connor)

 

At the risk of sounding like a stuck record, albeit with less varied tunes, I shall say again that much of the best opera in London is to be found at our conservatoires. Moreover, they seem to get better and better. I am not sure why, but it had been a little while since I had gone to a Royal College of Music production; this made me realise just what I had been missing. Indeed, I think it was probably not only the best production I had seen there, but perhaps, all things considered – and there are always many things to consider when it comes to opera! – the best production of Hänsel und Gretel I had seen anywhere.

 

Liam Steel’s staging is the one I and many others have been waiting for, light-years away from the evasive, glossy, yet reassuringly völkisch  - reassuring to the völkisch, that is – School of Cameron Mackintosh production Adrian Noble recently inflicted upon the Vienna State Opera. I can hear a self-styled operatic ‘conservative’ seething already: ‘Oh for goodness sake. Leave it alone; it’s just a fairy tale.’ Indeed, the bizarre Bernd Weikl has recently called for criminal prosecutions (!) of directors whose work he does not like, has done just that, pointing to the New York Met (yes, you read that correctly) as a model of sensible staging and funding. Just a fairy tale? Fairy tales, as we all, save for a bewildering number of opera directors and managers, know, are full of all manner of violence. So, of course, are adult constructions of something called ‘childhood’. Children do not think about ‘childhood’, claim to wish to ‘protect’ it, whilst at every twist and turn undermining it; children, simply, or rather not so simply, live their lives under the increasingly oppressive shadow of this construction. They – and we – learn a great deal from ‘fairy tales’. We certainly do on this occasion, in which abuse takes centre stage. That abuse is not so much the abuse of childhood’s construction, although we are likely also to be led to reflect upon that, as that violence against children which, more often than not, takes place within the ‘home’, within the hallowed sanctuary-cum-torture-chamber of the family.

 

Gretel (Gemma Lois Summerfield)

I nearly added ‘bourgeois’ to ‘family’, then decided against it, since one of the many disturbing aspects of Steel’s production is the poverty – very much part of the ‘fairy tale’ and of the ‘original’ artwork from Engelbert Humperdinck and his sister, Adelheid Wette – in which the family lives. We begin with a cartoon, a projection of what two children, plonked in front of the television whilst their parents are out (perhaps working), are watching: David Ochs’s Who’s Hungry? Ending with the old test card – now that is something to divide us according to age – we can then focus properly, in every sense, upon the revealed stage. When we first properly see Peter and Gertrud, they are dirt – literally, so – poor, their unwashed, unkempt existence mirrored in, intensified by the miserable kitchen in which they play. Myriddin Wannell’s designs, here and elsewhere, are as crucial to the development of the Konzept as Steel’s detailed, yet never too-detailed Personenregie. The awkwardness of the children’s dancing is as important, in its way, as the stunted dance of Elektra in Patrice Chéreau’s shattering staging (ironically, recently taken to the Met). They are certainly damaged, then, by the abject poverty that reduces them to the all-too-convenient category of what many, too many, in this country would dismiss as ‘chavs’, and, as soon becomes clear, by something else, as yet intangible. And yet, at the same time, they are not quite broken; they can play, even if, especially in Hänsel’s case, it takes a bit of sisterly encouragement for him to break his inhibitions. (And what, we might well ask, lies behind or beneath those inhibitions? It seems a little more than mere insistence that he is a boy, not a girl, although that is clearly the starting point, in work and production.)

Peter (Nicholas Morton)

The milk having been spilt, the children expelled, we witness a tattooed, swaggering, Peter’s return to Gertrud, her hairstyle (‘Croydon’, is I believe, the snobbish description), condition (heavily pregnant, ‘once again’, one assumes, de haut en bas), and clothes almost the very image of what our construction of a ‘neglectful parent’ would be. Theirs is an evidently sexual relationship. (Freud would, of course, tell us of the anxiety resultant from children imagining their parents having sex, and the consequences of such anxiety.) Indeed, Peter cannot keep his hands off Gertrud; and once she realises he has, literally, brought home the bacon, and much else, she is duly, seemingly genuinely, appreciative. It is Peter, though, who asks about the children and who worries when he hears from Gertrud where they have gone. At the time, we think – or at least I thought – that that is just a matter of being interrupted in the act, and, once she has attended to her cane (which we may or may not notice at the time), her handbag and its contents, she happily accompanies her husband to look for the children.

 



Sandman (Maria Stasiak)

Lest that all sound too un-Grimm-like (but what do the ‘protectors’ of the Brothers actually know of their collections?), the woods are wonderfully so. Are they in some sense a projection, a fantasy? Perhaps. Certainly some of the darkness appears to have resulted from the cartoon projections. (The second act is introduced by Jan Švankmajer’s Jabberwocky, the third by Katy Towell’s Never Wake Up; their relevance will be clear from the titles alone, but their portrayals of childhood within a general framework entertainment, not least portrayals of dolls and their dismemberment, tell us more still.) That this is a nightmare is clear, certain objects, not least the stove, the fridge, and the kitchen door, remaining constant, or near-constant, throughout all three acts. That is not, of course, to say that the nightmare is not also ‘reality’. Gnarled trees, made up sometimes, or so it seems, of strange woodland figures, enhance the sense not only of danger but of necessary enchantment (whether good, evil, or something else). The Sandman’s emergence fascinates: is he ‘just’ a vagrant with carrier bags or something more primæval, as his pleasing, traditional countenance and, indeed, Andy Purves’s lighting might suggest? We are not sure, and indeed our dreams and nightmares play a role in our interpretation.

 

Hansel (Katie Coventry), Peter (Nicholas Morton), Gertrud (Amy Lyddon), and Gretel (Sofia Larsson)

The Evening Prayer underlines how close, through necessity, Hänsel and Gretel have become: now he does not mock her prayer, as he had at the beginning of the first act; they protect each other. And the Dream Pantomime is, quite simply heartbreaking. Here, we see the ‘perfect’ family, the ‘perfect’ Christmas they – we – desperately want. Not only are the children the objects of that unconditional parental love society has children, rightly or wrongly, believe is the norm; not only do they receive gifts which are worth more, emotionally as much as financially, than they have likely ever received in their lives; not only are their parents bedecked in good, respectable middle-class clothes (slightly different, according to which cast) which they could never afford and would most likely shun even if they could; not only is a veritable feast of food and wine prepared; there is hope, and there is fulfilment of that hope. It is, in short, Christmas – or rather, our construction of ‘Christmas’, which necessarily involves, co-opts, arguably abuses children. The appearance of the Dew Fairy, at the beginning of the next act, offers deconstructive humour; where that ideal might have granted us forlorn hope, here we have someone much the worse for wear, spilling her wine from the bottle – not so much the morning after the night before as her revels not yet having ended.
 

Witch (Joel Williams) and Hänsel (Katie Coventry)

An abiding childhood fear at my school, and I am sure not just at my school, was of the loner who would attract one back to his – it always seemed to be ‘his’ – car with a bag of sweets. We heard about that all the time, although no one ever seemed to have heard of it actually happening. The Witch attracts the children then, with conventional methods – just as (s)he always has. We see the gingerbread house as we should. And we see a ‘respectable’ if somewhat grotesque old lady (en travestie), her house boasting comfortable furnishings as well as edible treats, and, crucially, photographic portraits of young children, just as we would when they were reported missing – and indeed, just as we have at the beginning of the show. The children are wary, perhaps warier than usual in productions of this work; do they know something already, perhaps have some experience of what might happen? At any rate, the conservative’s ‘harmless’ fairy tale progresses as it should, the Witch capturing Hänsel in her cage, force-feeding him like a dog, ready for his baking, until the children turn the tables. There is a break in which we are blinded – well, not quite, but we certainly cannot see what happens behind. A few words of dialogue – the first act also began with some – lead us into the children’s tentative healing of the rescued other children. There is joy, but there is clearly also trauma; how could there not be? And when, full of the (apparently, at least) purest joy, their father finally discovers them, ‘true’ familial love seems to be the order of the day. Given the horrors of what have happened, this reunion is rendered all the more moving – perhaps more so on the first evening than the second, which seemed a little less dark (although that might have been more a matter of my own mood, or that of a section of the audience, which seemed determined, bizarrely, to laugh a little too often on the second evening).

 

Witch (Richard Pinkstone)

And yet… Steel has a chilling twist to the tale. Gretel scowls at the children; they look at her, terrified. There is no heartfelt reunion, indeed no physical contact, there. The inebriated, genuinely beloved Peter, oblivious to all but the general rejoicing, fails to notice as she collects her (the Witch’s) wig and stick. There may be no use crying over spilt milk; how, however, could the children – and we – fail to do so in this case? And ‘case’ perhaps should have more than one meaning, for who is the narrator, reliable or unreliable, here? What actually was or is the ‘abuse’? Is it ‘real’ or the fantasy of Hänsel and Gretel, as a result of neglect and ill-temper on their mother’s part? When Gertrud collects the stick, is there just a chance she might actually be the long-suffering mother (perhaps another of our longstanding constructions: the ‘wicked stepmother’) having yet again to clean up the mess? But surely that fear on the children’s faces was all-too-real, was it not? Difficult questions indeed.



Dew Fairy (Louise Fuller)

None of that would have amounted to anything very much without such excellent performances. So enthused was I by the first performance I attended that I arranged to return the following evening to hear the second cast. Our Hänsels and Gretels were not dissimilar. Both Kamilla Dunstan and Katie Coventry were excellent at portraying their character’s boyishness, without loss to genuinely lovely mezzo-soprano tone quality. (It goes with the mezzo territory, I suppose.) As Gretel, Gemma Lois Summerfield and Sofia Larsson both proved warmly sympathetic, both in vocal and stage terms. Elspeth Marrow and Amy Lyddon both carried off the difficult task of portraying, indeed exploring a more complex Gertrud than we genuinely encounter. Not only did they disturb, though; they both sang beautifully. (I am once again proud to say how lovely it is to encounter former Royal Holloway students, in this case Marrow and Coventry, making their way in musical careers.) There was greater contrast between the two Peters. Timothy Connor was fuller of swagger, disarmingly sexy; Gertrud’s mother would doubtless have thought him a bad lot, yet been charmed in person. Nicholas Morton offered a sadder, more forlorn figure, not least in vocal tone, very much emerging from the German Romantic past. Both worked splendidly; indeed, they complemented each other strikingly, offering different perspectives, even within the same production. Our two witches, Richard Pinkstone and Joel Williams, both trod with great skill the fine line between comedy and tragedy, with stagecraft second to none, stagecraft that yet did not eclipse their estimable vocal attributes. Maria Stasiak and Louise Fuller offered lovely singing and plenty of stage presence as the Sandman and Dew Fairy respectively. The RCM Chorus of Echoes and the younger Angels and Gingerbread Children rounded off a thoroughly excellent cast; their contribution may be mentioned last here, but it should certainly not be considered as least.

 



Gretel (Sofia Larsson) and
Hänsel (Katie Coventry)

Michael Rosewell’s conducting and the playing of the RCM Opera Orchestra were similarly first-class. It might seem absurd to compare them to Thielemann at the Vienna State Opera last November, in the Noble production I mentioned above, and I do not really intend to do so, but hand on heart, I can say that they would have nothing to fear from such a comparison. The theatre is smaller, of course, but what we heard was plenty to fill the RCM’s Britten Theatre, and not just to fill it, to sound as gloriously Romantic, and if anything, more variegated, both in terms of texture and articulation, than that Viennese performance. A relatively small string section (7.6.4.4.2) certainly did not sound small – perhaps occasionally on the thin side on the second night, but only occasionally (and that may have been more a matter of sitting in a different part of the theatre). There were some truly ravishing solos to be enjoyed. The wind sounded vernal, autumnal, and all manner of seasonal shades in between. Rosewell’s handling of Humperdinck’s post-Wagnerian melos was impeccable, indeed often enthralling. Transitions were handled without the slightest hint of awkwardness. Humperdinck’s Wagnerisms and, I think, his anticipations of Strauss (Rosenkavalier, for instance, in both the second and third acts) too shone through in all their irresistible loveliness. Not for nothing did Strauss conduct the premiere. Equally apparent and immediate, however, was the dramatic menace necessary to convey the story and its undertones, often founded in a secure yet wandering bass line; this was no tale of opposition between pit and stage. All concerned had, quite clearly, learned from the collaboration – and, I suspect, enjoyed it very much too. I certainly did, and, as you will have gathered, it really had me think too. These, then, were performances for which I should gladly have travelled some way to see and to hear. Outstanding!

 

 

ECO/Vermunt - Handel and Adrian Thomas, 4 July 2013

St Paul’s Cathedral

Handel – Te Deum for the Peace of Utrecht, HWV 278

Adrian Thomas – The Idea of Peace (world premiere)
Handel – Jubilate for the Peace of Utrecht, HWV 279

Gillian Keith (soprano)

Lucy Hall (soprano)
Kamilla Dunstan (mezzo-soprano)
Emily Kyte (mezzo-soprano)
Mark Wilde (tenor)
Martin Hässler (baritone)

Choristers of Utrecht Cathedral Chior School

Toonkunstkoor Utrecht

Canon Michale Hampel (narrator)

English Chamber Orchestra

Jos Vermunt (conductor)

 

The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which established the Peace of Utrecht, concluded the long-running War of the Spanish Succession and signalled the final nail in the coffin for Louis XIV’s aspirations to universal monarchy. Accompanying commercial treaties – the Treaty itself actually a series of treaties – laid the way for economic expansion, so the ‘peace’ seems an especially appropriate settlement for the City of London Festival to be celebrating its tercentenary. Given the death toll, variously estimated at somewhere between 400,000 and 1.251 million, I could not also but help think of Voltaire’s Candide, in which the tradition of the military Te Deum joins the list of items for excoriation:

There was never anything so gallant, so spruce, so brilliant, and so well disposed as the two armies. Trumpets, fifes, hautboys, drums, and cannon made music such as Hell itself had never heard. The cannons first of all laid flat about six thousand men on each side; the muskets swept away from this best of worlds nine or ten thousand ruffians who infested its surface. The bayonet was also a sufficient reason for the death of several thousands. The whole might amount to thirty thousand souls. Candide, who trembled like a philosopher, hid himself as well as he could during this heroic butchery.

At length, while the two kings were causing Te Deum to be sung each in his own camp, Candide resolved to go and reason elsewhere on effects and causes. He passed over heaps of dead and dying, and first reached a neighbouring village; it was in cinders, it was an Abare village which the Bulgarians had burnt according to the laws of war. Here, old men covered with wounds, beheld their wives, hugging their children to their bloody breasts, massacred before their faces; there, their daughters, disembowelled and breathing their last after having satisfied the natural wants of Bulgarian heroes; while others, half burnt in the flames, begged to be despatched. The earth was strewed with brains, arms, and legs.

It is no coincidence that the eighteenth century was especially ripe with schemes for ‘perpetual peace’, from writers such as the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, and Kant. Not that any of them had the slightest chance of being considered as anything but wild utopianism, as the European states system continued to dictate foreign policy. (We might bitterly recall New Labour’s claim to have been adopting something called an ‘ethical foreign policy’ whilst launching a series of murderous invasions.)

 

Returning to 1713, Handel, newly settled in London, in today’s unlovely parlance an ‘economic migrant’, wrote his Te Deum and Jubilate for the Chapel Royal, and had them formally premiered in St Paul’s Cathedral in July, as here, though a public dress rehearsal had actually taken place in March of that year. It took my ears a while to adjust to the notorious St Paul’s acoustic, the dome swallowing up so much of the sound, and the reverberation continuing longer than anywhere else I can think of. Jos Vermunt wisely did not push the music of the Jubilate; trying to do battle with the echo would only result in victory for the latter. There were even times when that echo helped, or at least added a notable additional quality to the performance, for instance in the halo surrounding the words ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’. In this relatively early Handel, there are already borrowings from some of his Italian music, but also kinship conscious or otherwise, with French ceremonial music – Lully and Charpentier – also made its mark, albeit with a welcome lack of bombast. There is plangency too, here conveyed with skill both by the ECO, oboes especially, and the soloists. ‘When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man’ was taken wonderfully slowly, and successfully sustained, for which particular credit should go to mezzo-soprano, Kamilla Dunstan. The following a cappella quartet, ‘When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death’ seemed to look forward to the unaccompanied chorus, ‘Since by man came death,’ from the Messiah, benefiting from excellent balancing between the soloists; it likewise is followed by concerted rejoicing. Echt-Handelian trumpets made a fine appearance upon ‘O Lord, save thy people,’ though curiously accompanied by a lengthy ad lib from an audience noseblower; his command of rhythm was more commendable than his timing. All of the soloists acquitted themselves well. Having already mentioned Dunstan, I should also single out the baritone, Martin Hässler, who combined beauty of tone with verbal clarity and understanding; I hope to hear more of him.

 

Choral singing, somewhat hampered by the acoustic, seemed to gain a degree of focus in the premiere of Adrian Thomas’s The Idea of Peace, the Toonkunstkoor Utrecht now joined by choristers from Utrecht Cathedral Choir School. The City of Utrecht had commissioned the work, which here received its first performance. Alas, whilst performances, not least from the two soloists, Gillian Keith and Mark Wilde, seemed excellent, the work itself disappointed. Hampered by an over-enthusiastic gathering of texts from disparate sources by Arjen Eijenraam, Thomas had little success in transforming lines such as ‘People are infinitely precious/Take them as they are,’ or ‘Bring dialogue, benefit, and joy into the world’, into something idiomatically vocal. He was certainly fortunate, however, in having Keith to despatch words of Queen Anne, ‘We have this business of Peace so much at heart’, with pinpoint melismatic skill. (The accompanying chimes sounded an uncomfortably ‘New Age’ note, however.) Vague orientalism, for instance in a prominent cello solo, put me in mind of another occasional piece, from one Francis Grier, my first Cambridge college, Jesus, endured for its quincentenary; the sole comfort from this work’s protracted progress was that none of us would be likely to hear it ever again. If soft-centred, anodyne harmonies, allied to excessive reliance upon the harp and weirdly jaunty settings of words such as ‘Non Violence, Truthfulness, Tolerance/Respect and Partnership not only be/renewed though Kingdoms, States/Dominions and Provinces...,’ be your thing, then you might have looked more kindly upon it. Or, as a tedious refrain had it, ‘Listen, talk, and learn and flourish together,’ might have been a little more the order of the day; to my ears, it sounded more akin to the soundtrack for a primary school ‘learning activity’, run hopelessly out of control. How one longed, amongst this paradoxically glib worthiness, for a true message of the horrors of war: A Survivor from Warsaw perhaps, or Il canto sospeso.

 

What one longed for still more was the return of Handel, whose Jubilate therefore proved all the more welcome. Dunstan’s duetting with trumpet proved a delight, as indeed did all the expressive instrumental and vocal solos (Handel limits himself to three here). The darkly chromatic setting of ‘For the Lord is gracious, His mercy is everlasting,’ peered forward towards Mozart, who would surely have loved Handel’s setting, had he known it. A resplendent final doxology brought together the ECO and choir in harmony infinitely more convincing than that attempted during the previous piece, enthusiastically presented though it might have been. Handel nevertheless emerged unscathed, ready for another three hundred years.