Le nozze di Figaro, Komische Oper, 27 April 2024

Schillertheater

Count Almaviva – Hubert Zapiór
Countess Almaviva – Nadja Mchantaf
Susanna – Penny Sofroniadou
Figaro – Tommaso Barea
Cherubina – Susan Zarrabi
Marcellina – Karolina Gumos
Bartolo – Tijl Faveyts
Basilio – Johannes Dunz
Antonio – Peter Lombert
Cherubino – Georgy Kudrenko
Count’s henchman – Nikita Kukushkin
Young man – Nikita Elenev

Director, designs – Kirill Serebrennikov
Co-set designer – Olga Pavlyuk
Co-costume designer – Tatyana Dolmatovskaya
Choreography – Evgeny Kulagin
Dramaturgy – Julia Jordà Stoppelhaar, Daniil Orlov
Lighting – Olaf Freese
Video – Ilya Shgalov

Orchestra of the Komische Oper

James Gaffigan (conductor)

Images: Monika Rittershaus

It is currently fashionable to treat the three operas Mozart wrote with Lorenzo Da Ponte as a ‘trilogy’. There is nothing wrong with that in principle: that is, in commissioning a director (perhaps a conductor too and some of the cast) to stage all three. Nor is there anything wrong with attempting to draw out dramatic themes hold in common. What is sauce for the musicological goose should also be sauce for the performing gander, and vice versa. Results, however, seem more mixed: more, it seems to me, because the gander will not necessarily pay as much attention as he might, if not to the goose, then at least to the intrinsic qualities of the works themselves. Sadly, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden’s decision to entreat all three works to Vincent Huguet resulted in three productions that ranged from the merely vacuous to the catastrophic. Neither (relatively) recent experiments in this respect from the Salzburg Festival has resulted, to my mind in great success, though at least Claus Guth came up with a memorable, in the best sense provocative Marriage of Figaro. The jury must remain partially out on Kirill Serebrennikov for Berlin’s Komische Oper, with a Don Giovanni to come; yet, whilst this new Figaro has a number of things to commend it, it also proves considerably more problematical than his excellent Così fan tutte (premiered in Zurich). 

The set offers a literal upstairs-downstairs setting: eminently suitable, one might think, for a drama involving relations between masters and servants. In many ways, it is, though the sheer grubbiness of the ‘downstairs’, rows of washing machines to excite disgraced ex-MP Keith Vaz, seems in a not especially productive way to be a little too much. An old woman gets a great deal of ironing done, though, and cast members, especially male ones, freely change their clothes in an uninviting environment, which also plays host to a torture-interrogation scene for Figaro’s trial (again, perhaps a little too much, not least in its disregard for the words and music being sung and played). Above seems to be an art gallery, though it may just be that expensive works of art and, latterly, an exhibition are to be seen in the Almavivas’ private residence. An older painting is damaged and sent for repair, though I do not think we see it again; it is replaced by a shallow, kitschy installation-world with neon slogans, which, as video commentary and a spoken intervention by Dr Bartolo inform us, poses questions about contemporary relationships between hyperreality and simulation. ‘Capitalism kills love’; reads one; I presume the banal truism to be deliberate, although my wager would be small. One of the neon signs reads ‘FESTA FOLLIA’, ‘party madness’, which at least has relevance to what is going on and perhaps even to the folle journée of Beaumarchais’s title. We are, I presume, invited to read this into what else is unfolding dramatically, and that seemed to me at least a fruitful way to proceed, but connections both with what we saw and with the work might have been made clearer. 

I realise talk about ‘not trusting’ the work and its creators runs the risk of sounding, indeed perhaps being, unduly reactionary. It and they will survive to fight another day, and there is plenty of room, or should be, for productions that take their leave from a work to say something different, as well as those more evidently at its ‘service’. That said, I could not help find some of what we saw unduly provisional, as if the director had either run out of time, or simply could not be bothered. Serebrennikov certainly has ideas; this is not a Huguet-style disaster, far from it. Whether they are pursued with sufficient rigour to be comprehensible to an audience, let alone to form a coherent argument, is sometimes less clear. 

For there is much messing about with the text, without much in the way of gain from it. Characters are eliminated, redeployed, invented with scant justification, and the old(ish) trick of using titles to say something else begins to look a little threadbare. Why Bartolo’s first-act aria is cut, only to reappear in the third act I have no idea. The character’s sudden appearance in the second act finale is surprising, since no one will have any idea who he is, save for a text-message exchange (video again) between him and Marcellina earlier on. Text messages also feature heavily in the splitting of the role of Cherubino between a silent, highly physical male actor and a frumpily dressed ‘Cherubina’, who relays his messages to others. We read in the programme the extraordinary claim that Serebrennikov ‘gets round the operatic convention of casting a soprano in the role … (rather overstretching the imagination of the audience) and he makes Cherubino into a credible rival’. If high Victorianism could readily manage such gender fluidity and the ‘convention’ dates back not only to the premiere but to the entire conception of the work, it does not seem too much of an ‘overstretch’ to ‘imagine’ that Berlin in 2024 could cope. Perish the thought that disguise might also be crucial to the role and drama. The more fundamental idea, though, is that ‘a personification of eros’, who ‘cannot hear or speak’ uses as ‘his only weapon … passion, utilising his whole body’. Perhaps, though, presenting a hearing actor imitating deaf speech might have been rethought, so as to offer representation to a deaf actor. It is surely only a coincidence, though, that this gave Serebrennikov another opportunity to depict male undress and nudity. 

Barbarina is nowhere to be seen; I had thought her part might be united with that of ‘Cherubina’; that might have made some sense. It seemed to be in the third act, but then for some reason or none, the Countess sang her cavatina in the fourth act. A further odd claim, moreover, is that made by dramaturge Julia Jordà Stoppelhaar in the programme that Serebrennikov ‘becomes even more of a Kammerspiel [chamber play]’ by eliminating the chorus and allegedly ‘supporting roles’ (Nebenrollen). Since he adds a good few of his own, such as the bizarre, pet-playing ‘Count’s henchman’ – nothing necessarily wrong with bizarre, but even so – and another ‘Young man’, as well as other extras drawn from the Komparserie, the claim seems at best tenuous even on its own terms. The greater problem lies in what has been lost, musically too, nowhere more so than in the near nonsense of hearing much of the chorus music with orchestra alone (or, in the first act, shared between soloists and harpsichord). 

Interpolation of music from Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet to suggest (I presume) the neurotic, white-glove-wearing Count’s fragile state of mind, might have made greater impact had it been better played; it actually took me some time to realise what it had actually been (however obvious the selection). The debt owed to – no, let us be scrupulously fair, coincidence with – the better thought-through Calixto Bieito Fidelio incorporating Beethoven’s Heiliger Dankgesang was too obvious and not at all flattering. A pause would probably have been a better idea, if something must be done at all. I have little idea why the third act began with ‘Soave sia il vento’. The staging seemed to suggest the end of a threesome between the Count, Countess, and Susanna, though nothing that happened afterwards seemed to take that into account. At least, if so, it was a rare acknowledgement that women might have sexuality, or at least sexually attractive qualities, too. Moving Marcellina’s aria to the third act works well, precisely because there is dramatic motivation for the shift, observations on gender becoming part of her curatorial address. It also, to be fair, ensures that we hear a number all too rarely heard. Retention of Basilio’s aria, where it should be, is also greatly appreciated, not least given such an excellent performance, although Serebrennikov’s casual handling of action elsewhere in the fourth act often suggests a little more attention to what is ‘supposed’ to happen might have worked wonders for coherence. Moreover, the aria, sadly for something so rarely encountered in performance, made questionable sense in a portrayal that suggested the character to be far from elderly. 

Otherwise, tonal coherence seemed to be the least thing on anyone’s mind: a pity, given James Gaffigan led a bold, variegated account of Mozart’s music, the level of orchestral playing in general far higher than the unfortunate quartet sounds. Well paced and intelligently supportive both of singers and broader dramatic goals, too often it played second fiddle to Serebrennikov’s ideas, yet remained impressive. So too did much of the singing—and all of the acting. My criticism of the conception of ‘deaf Cherubino’ should not in any sense detract from Georgy Kudrenko’s performance in itself, though it did tend unfortunately to overshadow Susan Zarrabi’s performance. Hubert Zapiór’s made much of his difficult (though, I suspect, rewarding) task as Almaviva, in many ways a fascinating study in the fragility of masculinity. Tommaso Barea was an alert, agile Figaro; it is not his fault that his character seemed somewhat elbowed out by the production. Nadja Mchantaf, a fine singing actress as well as actress, seemed somewhat miscast as the Countess, especially in her first aria; recitatives fared better. Karolina Gumos, Tijl Faveyts,  and Johannes Dunz all shone in their roles. In many ways, it was the remarkably able Penny Sofroniadou who, as Susanna, held things together—which is probably as it ought to be. A little more of ‘what ought to be’, though, might more generally have assisted ‘what might be’.

Œdipe, Komische Oper, 29 August 2021

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Œdipe (Leigh Melrose), Jocaste (Karolina Gumos), Laïos (Christoph Späth)

Œdipe – Leigh Melrose
Tirésias – Jens Larsen
Créon – Joachum Goltz
High Priest – Vazgen Gazaryan
Night Watchman – Shavleg Armasi
Shepherd – Johannes Dunz
Laïos – Christoph Späth
Jocaste – Karolina Gumos
Sphinx – Katarina Bradić
Antigone – Mirka Wagner
Mérope – Susan Zarrabi

Evgeny Titov (director)
Rufus Didwiszus, Charlotte Spichalsky (set designs)
Eva Dessecker (costumes)
Ulrich Lenz (dramaturgy)

Choir of the Komische Oper Berlin (chorus director: David Cavelius)

Vocalconsort Berlin 

Children’s Choir of the Komische Oper Berlin (chorus director: Dagmar Fiebach)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper Berlin

Ainārs Rubikis (conductor)

Tirésias (Jens Larsen), Œdipe, Jocaste

Art returns in various ways. There is, nor should there be, no one-size-fits-all. In London, the Royal Opera, largely silent during the days of endless lockdown and occasional reprieve, lightened our darkness with a production of La clemenza di Tito about which, if we were brutally honest, we should have been less enthusiastic had it not appeared on the very first day of limited reopening for theatres; it followed that, however, with an outstanding Don Giovanni, showing that nothing, good, bad, or mediocre, should be taken for granted. The Komische Oper took a different path, as indeed have Berlin and Germany. This path, or better this first step, came later but needed no qualification, none whatsoever. Audience numbers are still limited, with a plan for increasing them as the season progresses, but otherwise this was absolutely the real thing. This new production of George Enescu’s Œdipe would have been a fine achievement at any time. Coming as the first full performance and staging, the first time a full orchestra had played in the pit, since the end of February 2020, it was little short of astounding. 

Œdipe 

A strong sense of company, of music and theatre working together, has always been a hallmark of the Komische Oper and its mission; it dates back to Walter Felsenstein. In the circumstances, one might have expected that to suffer a little, but not at all. Ainārs Rubikis’s musical direction seemed entirely of a piece with Evgeny Titus’s direction of the stage action, as of course did the vocal and dramatic contributions of a fine cast. There were moments of great power—what it was to hear an orchestra of this size once more in the pit, in the theatre!—but also passages of unease, of solace, of somewhere liminal betwixt and between. These were balanced by a keen sense of where the drama was heading and, equally important, ability to communicate that sense in the dynamism that transforms musical structure into form. That would be nothing, of course, without excellence of playing from the Orchestra of the Komische Oper. Together again at last, the players sounded inspired, woodwind modal lyricism (Le tombeau de Couperin came to mind) as crucial to our interpretation of the tragic labyrinth as dread moments of expressionist cataclysm. A cut version of the work, given without an interval, will have had some lamenting what had been lost. As with the performance and staging more broadly, expressionism was favoured, though never exclusively, over classicism. There was, however, much to be gained by seeing and hearing this opera much as it might have been given in the spoken theatre, albeit with a searing intensity that could only come from music, revealing a greater kinship to works such as Salome or Elektra than I had hitherto imagined. Instead of a single day, though, this was a life taken to extremity.

Laïos, Jocaste, Mérope (Susan Zarrabi), Night Watchman (Shavleg Armasi)

Indeed, the spare, oppressive, in a word fateful set design (Rufus Didwiszus and Charlotte Spichalsky) might almost have been from a staging of Elektra. (Elektra productions, for whatever reason, tend to look strikingly similar.) That frames the action, but so does memory; indeed, inability to escape memory—fate itself, in at least one sense—is depicted and experienced both as frame and framed. Titov has Œdipe visit, witness his birth. Huddled, helpless in foetal position, Œdipe is granted the hopeless gift of understanding and consciously experiencing his fate, incapable of altering it, fully capable of sharing once more in its agony. That fate is not only his, but also the fate of a sick, traumatised society. Theban citizens act as a crowd, a sick crowd at that, from the outset, the plague to come as much an expression of something more fundamental. Titov wisely resists COVID-19 references. We know the day is coming when every third-rate director presents masks, respirators, video conferencing, and so on, but that is not here, not now. That will be a plague of its own. Instead, there is a suggestion that the plague proceeds from Œdipe’s own understanding that there is something wrong with the state of Thebes, appearances of health notwithstanding. That is not to say that it is imagined, but rather that it expresses something wrong, whether that something be social, political, psychological, or all of the above and more. No wonder, ultimately, that Œdipe elects no longer to see. The bloody state of his blindness in wilderness wandering is depicted with tragic horror. It leads to something akin to catharsis; perhaps that is what it is, for the single-mindedness of the dramatic trajectory at play is unquestionable. Blood and water are present at birth and throughout, culminating in cleansing and catharsis. In life and in death, this is elemental drama.

Œdipe

For that single-mindedness permitting of such duality we must also credit Leigh Melrose’s mesmerising performance in the title role. One felt, rather than merely observed, every twist and turn of the fatal screw, words, music, and gesture conceived and delivered in post-Wagnerian whole. Karolina Gumos’s Jocaste was finely sung and possessed of great stage presence; likewise Susan Zarrabi’s Mérope, Œdipe’s disturbing prior model for incestuous attraction. Company stalwart Jens Larsen offered a typically individual, world-weary performance of Tirésias. Shavleg Armasi’s Night Watchman and Katarina Bradić as the Sphinx gave noteworthy portrayals of their characters, words crystal clear and possessed of considerable dramatic import. All the cast worked together to provide something greater than the sum of its parts. So too considerable choral forces heard from above, to hear a combined chorus of that size in itself a treat. This was Berlin’s first new production of Œdipe since 1996, that Deutsche Oper staging last seen in 2004. Let us hope not only that this has a longer life, but that it offers a precedent for other such explorations. Szymanowski’s King Roger for instance, or some Henze. In the meantime, we should be grateful indeed for this.

Semele, Komische Oper, 18 December 2019

Jupiter – Stuart Jackson

Juno – Ezgi Kutlu

Cadmus – Philipp Meierhöfer

Semele – Sydney Mancasola

Ino – Karolina Gumos

Athamas – Terry Wey

Iris – Georgina Melville

Somnus, Priest – Evan Hughes

Barrie Kosky (director)

David Merz (Spielleitung)

Natacha Le Guen de Kerneizon (set designs)

Carla Teti (costumes)

Johanna Wall (dramaturgy)

Alessandro Carletti (lighting)

Chorus of the Komische Oper Berlin (chorus director: David Cavelius)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper Berlin

Konrad Junghänel (conductor)

Oh, terror and astonishment!
Nature to each allots his proper sphere,
But that forsaken we like meteors err:
Toss'd through the void, by some rude shock we're broke,
And all our boasted fire is lost in smoke.

William Congreve’s libretto—to my mind, perhaps the finest Handel set—makes clear what is at stake in Semele. So too, working along strikingly similar lines, does Barrie Kosky’s production. That one comes to appreciate the achievement of both, in collaboration, of course, with one of Handel’s finest dramatic scores and a highly talented cast, when all has drawn or is drawing to a close is surely just as it should be. The owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk; here, though, it is a dusk and, possibly, a dawn formed by Semele’s ashes, more of a prequel than one might initially have expected—certainly than I expected—to Henze’s The Bassarids, also staged here at the Komische Oper Berlin in an excellent production by Kosky. Kosky had taken over the production when the originally scheduled director, Laura Scozzi, had fallen ill. Presumably many of the designs were already in place, but they are put to good use. Speculating over who did what is fruitless; either one knows or one does not, and ultimately, even if one knows, so what? What I saw certainly sense to me, minus the occasional irritant that is more concerned with style than anything substantial.

To return to the cited chorus text, however, also returns us to the beginning—and thus to the overall set design that frames the action as a whole. We are invited into an eighteenth-century building, some of the room’s detail clearly apparent, other aspects left for us and for the drama to fill in. An ash heap, reminiscent perhaps of a mound in Kosky’s Castor et Pollux signals, at least in retrospect, where the action is heading, yet also, more importantly, represents the traumatic intrusion of the gods into the world of men and women. That tragedy of a genuine love between Jupiter and Semele, as opposed to the comedy of Semele’s vanity and comeuppance, of a love that is essentially fated never to be, lies at the heart of the production. Adopting the time-honoured procedure—somewhat Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe—of entering, in this case, being dragged through a fireplace portal to an alternative world, Semele briefly attains happiness, as notably does Jupiter, albeit in something destined not to last. The cosmic Toryism—think of Pope’s Essay on Man—that decrees all shall now their place in a well-ordered universe will not permit such a transgression for long.

Nor, of course, will its guardian Juno, here less a wronged woman, though at some level remaining that, but a woman with agency, desires, and power, all of which she will use in self-defence and attack. So do she and Iris, in a highly erotic scene, bring Somnus into play. Sacerdotal purple for her dress nonetheless makes clear her status, as does the same colour for Jupiter’s socks, which betray his true nature even when he has otherwise taken human form. And so, when tricked into demanding Jupiter assume his true, thunderbolt nature, Semele seals her fate, becoming ash, as we see had all along been foretold. She sits above the fireplace, her status reassumed, a ghost—as too, ironically, are Jupiter and Juno—at the wedding of Ino and Athamas, with the proviso, signalled by Congreve and the priestly chorus, that Bacchus will ultimately ‘crown the joys of love’. Or will he? As we know, things never turn out quite as they should—and the tragedy of The Bassarids awaits.

Sydney Mancasola shone in the title role, the whole performance building up to a bravura performance of her final air, ‘No, no, I’ll take no less/Than all in full excess!’ That full excess, alas, was to be truly hers, but was also seen and heard to characterise an exuberant performance from beginning to end. Stuart Jackson, whom I heard only seven years ago at the Royal Academy of Music in Haydn’s La vera constanza, is now rightly treading larger stages. Here he treated to us a finely, often poignantly sung and acted performance of Jupiter, who truly met his match in Ezgi Kutlu’s fiery Juno. What a joy it was to hear a mezzo here in the line of Marilyn Horne. Karolina Gumos and Terry Wey offered a well matched, nicely contrasted Ino and Athamas, while Evan Hughes’s darkly alluring Somnus justly threatened to steal the show in his scene with Juno and Georgina Melville’s spirited, stylish Iris. Choral singing—and acting—was first-rate throughout, Kosky and his singers fully rising to the task of Handel’s ‘objective’ commentary that yet involves itself, in the line of ancient predecessors. Though I could not help but wish that Konrad Junghänel had permitted greater warmth from the strings, his tempi and general direction proved well variegated, supportive of singers without being reduced to mere accompaniment; and, just as important, strongly suggestive of the panoply of character, emotion, and action on display here. It was clear that all had collaborated to render this, once again, a company achievement from the Komische Oper that was significantly greater than the sum of its considerable parts.

Eugene Onegin, Komische Oper, 20 September 2019

Images copyright: Iko Freese / drama-berlin.de

Eugene Onegin – Günter Papendell

Tatiana – Natalya Pavlova

Olga – Karolina Gumos

Lensky – Aleš Briscein

Mme Larina – Stefanie Schaefer

Prince Gremin – Tijl Faveyts

Filipievna – Margarita Nekrasova

Zareski – Changdai Park

M. Triquet – Alexander Fedorov

Zaretsky – Changdai Park

Captain – Carsten Lau

Guillot – Yuhei Sato

Barrie Kosky (director)
Rebecca Ringst (set designs)

Klaus Bruns (costumes)
Simon Berger (dramaturgy)
Franck Evin (lighting)

Orchestra and Chorus (chorus director: David Cavelius) of the Komische Oper

Ainārs Rubikis (conductor)

What’s in a name? Should Tchaikovsky’s opera – which, as Barrie Kosky states in the programme booklet, should be considered alongside Pushkin, not as its musical translation – really be called Eugene Onegin at all? Or would Tatiana Larina be the more fitting title? Eugene and Tatiana, perhaps? It is a silly question, really; for one thing, no one is going to rename the work, although someone, I suppose, might write another. But names aside, there will probably always be something of a tension between the centrality ascribed by a production to the opera’s two principal characters; and also something, moreover, of a tension between Tatiana and Onegin on one hand and Lensky, if more rarely Olga, on the other. It is difficult to imagine a successful or indeed pretty much any unsuccessful production that did not involve such tensions, although Achim Freyer, in his bizarre staging for the Staatsoper Unter den Berlin, a few hundred metres away, may be said to have accomplished that in his very typical way.

Kosky’s 2016 staging for Berlin’s Komische Oper, in co-production with Zurich, offers an intriguing, convincing blend of the broadly yet never lazily conventional; the slightly symbolic; and the point of detail, even the incidental, made more than that. The latter first: as the opera opens, Mme Larina and the nurse, Filipievna are making jam. I am not sure that I even recalled that point of detail, though I am sure that I will now. The jam jar, however, returns at a crucial point – in Kosky’s staging, that is – as container for Tatiana’s letter to Onegin. Her nurse, affecting not to understand for whom it is intended, keeps dropping it, casting it aside, until she relents and sets that train of events in motion. ‘So what?’ you may ask. So nothing, perhaps; but I think not. For the jar and its contents take us back to the opening, an apparently carefree summer afternoon, save of course for beneath the surface. Things have changed – and have stayed the same; such tends to be the way with life. And the chorus of local girls, more than usually an emanation of Tatiana’s unconscious – replication and contrast in Klaus Bruns’s costumes lightly make the point – has all along been framing, voicing, goading.

So too will the chorus, male and female, later on, as part of a more general pattern of contrasts and connections between public and private, indoor and outdoor, country and town; and the criss-crossing connections between those pairs of opposites. The fundamental setting, common to all scenes, is that of the meadow on which it all began: designer Rebecca Ringst’s simple, adaptable focus for development and memory. Franck Evin’s lighting works wonders in its partial transformations, highlighting (false or alienating?) community and Romantic loneliness, whilst never having us lose sight of where we are. So too, of course, do Kosky’s blocking and, more broadly, his story-telling. It does no harm for the ball to take place with torches outside for once; its stifling, tragic qualities are not lost. Only in the first St Petersburg scene is there an additional set design, but even then, the facade of Prince Gremin’s palace can, like all facades, readily be dismantled, so that we can turn to the inversion of our central pair’s fortunes and their resolution.

Like many directors, Kosky ignores the opera’s strong, at times overwhelming, homosexual subtexts: the ‘Romantic friendship’ between Onegin and Lensky and, of course, the figure of Tatiana herself as alter ego for Tchaikovsky, his fantasy of how a woman might feel and act. That, however, is simply not the concern of this particular production. For, in the programme booklet, Kosky expresses a preference for operas with ‘very simple stories and incredibly multifaceted themes and emotions – precisely as in Greek theatre,’ and also criticises composers who, over the past fifty years, have, allegedly, ‘simply set literature to music’. I am not quite so sure that it is as simple as that, nor that the comparison with ancient Greece is objectively meaningful in this case, as it certainly would be to Wagner; however, if it is to him, all the better. There is unquestionably a directness to Kosky’s telling of the story here, far from opposed to interpretation, but rather open to it, which works very well: as, say, in his Rusalka and his Pelléas, or indeed, harking back to Attic tragedy, in his Iphigénie en Tauride, all for the Komische Oper, yet sadly lacking in his Bayreuth Meistersinger. Whose opera is this anyway? Here, it conventionally, yet never stereotypically, moves from being Tatiana’s to Onegin’s; the latter character emerges in the reflection, the memories of the latter’s acts and emotions. That trajectory is delineated with a power only rarely achieved, at least in my experience.

Instrumental – or better, vocal – to that was Günter Papendell’s Onegin, thus perhaps rebalancing the scales slightly in that direction. To begin with, I felt somewhat nonplussed at the apparent woodenness of his portrayal, until I appreciated that it was a portrayal of woodenness, of coldness, to be humanly defrosted, as it certainly was during the course of the opera. This was a fine, memorable, and sophisticated conception of the role. It would be an exaggeration, indeed a vulgarisation, to say that Natalya Pavlova’s Tatiana moved straightforwardly in the opposite direction, but tension was present in that respect: the crossing of lines and lives that ultimately turns, we think, to tragedy. Her opening fragility, her heartfelt and beautifully sung Letter Scene, and her final struggle, seemingly achieved, for self-possession proved similarly memorable and sophisticated. Aleš Briscein’s Lensky was surprisingly coarse of tone to begin with, though it was an ardent performance; I could not help but wonder whether he were unwell. A spirited Olga in Karolina Gumos, a stylish and lively M. Triquet in Alexander Fedorov, a splendidly deep-voiced Gremin in Tijl Faveyts, and above all a richly expressive, compassionate Filipievna in Margarita Nekrasova had much to offer, in a typically strong company performance that had no weak links.

The chorus sang and acted well too, its stage direction always a Kosky strength. My sole, relative disappointment lay in aspects of Ainārs Rubikis’s conducting of the orchestra. At its best, especially in the middle scenes, there was a telling striving towards symphonism. Elsewhere, however, much was oddly hard-driven. There were striking disjunctures, moreover, between orchestra and chorus in the first scene. This was not, then, an Onegin to think of in the way of Semyon Bychkov’s (probably the best conducted I have heard in the theatre) or Daniel Barenboim’s (for Freyer, as mentioned above). This was Kosky’s Onegin rather than the conductor’s, yet it belonged as much to the singers and of course to their characters. That, I think, was a good part of its point: a point served well.

Rusalka, Komische Oper, 30 October 2016

Komische Oper, Berlin

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Rusalka (Nadja Mchantaf), Ježibaba (Nadine Weissmann), and her son (Marcus Wagner)

(sung in German)

Rusalka – Nadja Mchantaf

Prince – Timothy Richards

Ježibaba – Nadine Weissmann
Vodník – Jens-Erik Aasbø
Foreign Princess – Karolina Gumos
Gamekeeper – Ivan Turšić
Kitchen Boy – Christiane Oertel
First Wood Nymph – Annika Gerhards
Second Wood Nymph – Maria Fiselier
Third Wood Nymph – Katarzyna Włodarczyk
Huntsman –Johannes Dunz
Ježibaba’s Son – Marcus Wagner

Barrie Kosky (director)

Anisha Bondy (revival director)
Klaus Grünberg (set designs, lighting)
Klaus Bruns (costumes)
Bettina Auer (dramaturgy)

Chorus of the Komische Oper, Berlin (chorus master: David Cavelius)

Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin

Henrik Nánási (conductor)

Prince (Timothy Richards), Rusalka, and Foreign Princess (Karolina Gumos)

 

I shall not beat about the bush: this was just what opera should be. It convinced this sceptic that a repertoire system can not only work, but work uncommonly well. Barrie Kosky’s intelligent, thoughtful production, Henrik Nánási’s similarly intelligent conducting of the excellent Komische Oper orchestra, and a splendid cast (with a true star, in the best rather than the ‘celebrity’ sense, in the title role) combined to enchant, to challenge, and to move. There is an openness to the production and performance typical of so much of the best opera at the moment

It is only a certain class of reactionary adults who will refer to something as ‘just’ being a fairy tale. Children and thoughtful adults know that the world of the fairy tale is dark indeed. (And yet, the number of anodyne productions of Hänsel und Gretel the world must suffer continues to grow! Thank goodness for bold exceptions, such as that of Liam Steel earlier this year, for the Royal College of Music.) Look closely, or even just permit yourself to be receptive, and you will find that it is all there: sex, violence, sorrow, tragedy. The Grimm Brothers and other collectors were not interested in an adult’s sentimental creation of ‘childhood’. Nor, however, were they out to shock. They did their collecting, their editing; they certainly were not passive. But they wanted to let the tales speak in some sense – however illusory this idea may be as an ‘absolute’ – ‘for themselves’. So, I think, does Kosky here, mediated, as it most likely must be, via the nineteenth century, in which the opera was (just!) written, and of course by what has happened since. Indeed, an interview with Kosky and Patrick Lange – the conductor, I presume, when the production was new, in 2012 – opens with Kosky declaring: ‘Rusalka muss ein Märchen sein!’ (‘Rusalka must be a fairy tale.’)

 

And so, without danger of prettification or ‘mere’ folklore or folklorism, the story is, with great strength, quite without varnish, placed centre stage, literally and figuratively. Klaus Grünberg’s set design unfussily suggests the Komische Oper’s interior itself; we are all staging, after all, not least those of us in the audience. The cold elegance, moreover, of the late Victorian wall and, crucially, door – that is where, even how, things change, the action moves on – is all the framing we really need. We concentrate on the wood nymph herself and her plight. Above all, her mermaid’s tail, with which she struggles in such heart-rending fashion, leaving her desperate to become ‘human’, only for matters to become worse when she does, sears itself into the memory, as does the fish skeleton that emerges from within following the shocking butchery of the witch, Ježibaba. A (Danse) macabre convention of skeletons, spirits of death, and so on we see in the third act (of the opera ‘itself’, for here, we have only one interval) chills without undue grotesquerie; all is very much in the spirit of a fairy tale that is anything but ‘mere’. (There is no literalist river by the meadow here, but there is water, which, when we see, even feel, it, thereby makes its point all the more clearly.) The subconscious is clearly at work, but never in laboured, didactic fashion. That, after all, is not the way of the subconscious. And we make what we will of it; that, after all, is its way.

 

At the heart, in more ways than one, of the performance was Nadja Mchantaf’s superlative performance as Rusalka. She captured, in gorgeous, never self-regarding, vocal tone, the longing, the dreaming, the sadness, the heartbreak. Her stage presence, again entirely at the service of the drama, was second to none. One could read into her frustration as much – or as little – more as one wished, or rather as one’s subconscious wished. Mchantaf’s ability to capture ‘girlish’ sweetness, not necessarily unalloyed, and desire, indeed desperation, for something more will linger long in my memory. Rusalka’s unknowing imitation of the Foreign Princess’s knowing sexual advances upon the Prince were perhaps saddest of all. Karolina Gumos herself brought old-style glamour to a stage-stopping performance as the Princess, seductive in voice as well as in her shameless yet never inelegant display. Timothy Richards’s honestly perplexed performance as the Prince occasionally edged towards vocal strain, but never excessively so. Jens-Erik Aasbø brought a sense of the deeply, sternly primæval to Vodník, the Water Goblin, lamenting Rusalka’s fate, refusing to grant her false hope. Nadine Weissmann, Frank Castorf’s Erda, was perhaps always going to court that comparison, especially when singing this opera in German, but I was just as interested to hear how the role differed; her malevolence and yet also her personal, hinted-at tragedy shone through with what was, I think, the blackest of humour. Kosky’s conception of both goblin and witch as mediators between two irreconcilable (dream?) worlds was in excellent hands – and voices. There were no weak links, and a true sense of old-fashioned – in the best sense – company lifted every contribution. One final mention should go to the splendid trio of Wood Nymphs, Rhinemaidens in the making – or is it the other way around?

 

Nánási’s conducting traced the ebb and flow of Dvořak’s score very well. Opening in perhaps more formalistic fashion – not at all inappropriately so – this reading acquired impetus, even aqueous dissolution, of its own, rather as if the composer were ‘progressing’ from something more Schumannesque to the world of Tristan. In a sense he is, and one can certainly here proximity in some of the later harmonies. The orchestra and chorus glistened and glowered, equal partners – at least – in a drama more compelling still than most of Dvořak’s symphonies. Lange, in that interview, actually drew comparisons with Mahler, and compared the opera to ‘eine gensungene Sinfonie’. Nánási seemed very much to follow in his footsteps, St Anthony’s preaching to the Mahlerian fishes as ever going (tragically) unheeded.