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.
