Opolais/Gewandhaus/Nelsons - Dzenītis, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler, 9 October 2018

Royal Festival Hall

Andris Dzenītis: Māra (United Kingdom premiere)

Tchaikovsky: The Queen of Spades, op.68: ‘I am worn out with grief’

Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin, op.24: Polonaise and Letter Scene

Mahler: Symphony no.1 in D major

Kristine Opolais (soprano)

Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra

Andris Nelsons (conductor)

After the relative disappointment of the first of these two Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts, that disappointment relating to Andris Nelsons’s conducting rather than the orchestra itself, there came a second chance. I wish I could say that I had responded more warmly. There were, as before, sections of the concert to which I could – and did. However, Nelsons’s Mahler ultimately proved no more convincing than it had before, the final movement of the First Symphony as vulgar and uncomprehending a display as I have heard for a long time. An audience that once again seemed to value excellence of orchestral execution and sheer volume of sound rather than formal, interpretative coherence clearly felt otherwise. Again I thought of Beecham: ‘the English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes’. Perhaps Nelsons qualifies as an Englishman too, at least when it comes to Mahler.

His taste in new music seems odd too. Try as I might, I could not make anything much of Andris Dzenītis’s Māra – although, as ever, with a new work, that may well just have been my fault. Its first performance had been given by the same forces in Leipzig five days earlier; this performance certainly sounded committed and incisive. The title apparently refers to a notion of divine omnipotence: according to the programme note, ‘the entire physical, visible, audible and tangible world, the materialisation of all spiritual power’. Dzenītis can certainly write for an orchestra in a ‘traditional’, more or less Franco-Russian way: the quarter of an hour or so piece proved ‘colourful’, ‘ritualistic’, ‘pictorial’, ‘dramatic’, and so on, in predictable, generic fashion. Certain passages grabbed the attention: repeated pitches redolent of Morse Code, repeated figures that briefly offered something intriguingly hypnotic. What it all added up to, though, I could not say. ‘Eclectic’ would be one way of putting it, so too ‘at least twice as long as it need have been’. A solo bass clarinet solo at the close may or may not have held some programmatic meaning. According to the note, the piece allowed ‘runes to become visible in the score’. Perhaps they were audible too; I am afraid I have no idea.

Tchaikovsky made much more sense to me, Kristine Opolais on superlative form. In Liza’s third-act arioso from The Queen of Spades and the Letter Scene from Eugene Onegin, she truly brought to life her characters, without context, scenery, or titles. One knew and felt what Liza and Tatiana meant, what their plight was – and could have taken dictation, verbal or musical, from her. Hers were fully gestural performances too, very much those of a classic singing actress. The Gewandhaus Orchestra ‘spoke’ splendidly too: this, after all, is an orchestra that plays for the Leipzig Opera as well as the concert hall (and the Thomaskirche). If only Nelsons and/or Opolais had not indulged in quite so extreme gear changes towards the end of the Letter Scene, and if only he had not driven the Polonaise so hard, these would have been ideal performances. No one, however, would have been seriously disappointed.

The first movement of the Mahler symphony opened with great promise: opening string harmonics (and their later repetition) spot on, without sounding clinical, woodwind full of colour and character, offstage brass as well balanced as I can recall. There was first-rate audience bronchial interjection too, for which many thanks. Later on, an overall freshness of spirit was apt, winning, invigorating. Antiphonally placed first and second violins worked a magic that was little short of revelatory, whilst the tender tone of the Leipzig horn consort was simply to die for. Soon, however, Nelsons began to mould the music excessively, leaving one longing for the ideal of a Kubelík. (Few are the occasions when that conductor proves anything but ideal!) Climaxes grew more and more brash, in quite un-Mahlerian fashion, once again suggestive of a conductor more at home with Shostakovich. Formal coherence had soon gone quite out of the window too.

The Ländler likewise opened well: as vigorous, as earthy as I have heard, the Leipzig strings digging deep indeed. As it progressed, however, it seemed too determined by rhythm, too little by harmony: this should not be a zero-sum game. There was alienation in the Trio, if not quite enough, the material often sounding oddly close to Bruckner. Irony does not seem Nelsons’s strong suit. Nor was it so in the third movement, its weird echoes of Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream apparently in spite of the conductor rather than on his account. There was no gainsaying, however, the excellence of the Gewandhaus Orchestra’s soloists here. It was a pity that Nelsons pulled around the Klezmer and other contrasting material so wildly; soon it made no sense at all, a mere succession of moments. One could hardly have wanted a louder, more emphatic opening to the finale; many of us indeed might have wished for something less ear-splitting. Such, however, was to be the order of the day, with extreme contrast that had the audience ‘excited’ in its seats. I felt merely bludgeoned. Had there been something in the way of formal coherence, it would not have been quite so bad; in its absence, this glorious movement felt interminable. Bizarre tempo changes added further frustration. What a waste of a great orchestra.

Munich Opera Festival (2) - La clemenza di Tito, 19 July 2014

Images: © Wilfried Hösl
Sesto (Tara Erraught) and
Vitellia (Kristine Opolais)

Nationaltheater, Munich

Tito – Toby Spence

Vitellia – Kristïne Opolais
Sesto – Tara Erraught
Servilia – Hanna-Elisabeth Müller
Annio – Anna Stéphany
Publio – Tareq Nazmi

Jan Bosse (director)

Victoria Behr (costumes)
Ingo Bracke (lighting)
Bibi Abel (video)
Miron Hakenbeck (dramaturgy)

Chorus of the Bavarian State Opera (chorus master: Sören Eckhoff)

Bavarian State Orchestra
Ádám Fischer (conductor)

 

 

 

It had been a while since I had seen La clemenza di Tito in the theatre, though I spend a good deal of time on it when teaching. Alas, there was little to cheer about here, save for some of the singing. Ádám Fischer’s listless conducting only had me long for Sir Colin Davis, in the pit for the sole convincing musical performance I have heard ‘live’; Jan Bosse’s stage direction had me longing for just about anything else.

Fischer, first: his role was puzzling. If anything, I’d have expected someone from at least the quasi-authenticist wing to harry the score. And that is what the Overture sounded like: grand neo-Classicism reduced to something impatiently knocking on the door of small-scale Rossini (without the gloss or the bubbles). Thereafter, however, Fischer tended to maul the score, rarely letting it settle at one tempo or another. Not that there is anything wrong with tempo variations; far from it. But Fischer seemed unable to find a general pulse for an aria, let alone for any greater structural unit. The great public scenes were scaled down: surely this calls for a reasonable-size chorus.  Perhaps worst of all was the lugubrious pacing of many of the secco recitatives: in this of all Mozart’s works, we really do not need to dwell on them, since they are many, they are not his work, and they are sometimes frankly unsatisfactory in terms of where they tonally lead us. For some reason I could never establish, they were mostly given with harpsichord, but a few with fortepiano. The Bavarian State Orchestra played well enough, considering, but as with Dan Ettinger’s dreadful Figaro two nights earlier, it was difficult to shy away from the conclusion that the orchestra would have been better off without a conductor. Certainly in this case, it would have been better off without the more interventionist aspects of Fischer’s decidedly peculiar interpretation.

Tito (Toby Spence) and chorus members

Bosse’s staging? Ultimately, as a friend wearily remarked to me during the interval, it reflects the seeming inability of a large number of opera directors to take opera seria seriously, as it were, let alone to take this extraordinary late example of the form for what it is. Caterina Mazzolà’s often drastic revision of Metastasio was acknowledged neither for what it had become, nor for what it had been, and certainly not for what Mozart transformed it into. It is difficult to discern any understanding of the classical conception of opera seria as spoken theatre with additional music having come into conflict, whether in work and reception, with later-eighteenth-century æsthetics, which had ascribed greater importance to music – unless, that is, it be nodded to by having the excellent solo clarinettist sit on the edge of the pit to be looked at by Sesto and then later by Vitellia. It is equally difficult to discern any sense of the political, of this coronation opera as, in words I have used for an article elsewhere, ‘a compulsory class in a school for ruler and ruled’.  It is just all a bit silly, with various people wandering around in ludicrously exaggerated visions of eighteenth-century dress, the size of Vitellia’s dress especially ridiculous. Wigs look as though I have been taken from an LSD-user’s vision of Amadeus. The trouser roles offer a bit of gender confusion, in that the characters’ dress seems as much female as male. And that is it: none of those ‘ideas’ is really developed, let alone related to the work. The only other feature I can recall worthy of comment is the general change from black to white between acts and the banal apparent conclusion that the characters find themselves through the burning of the Capitol. Of revolution, of counter-revolution, of Enlightened absolutism, of aristocratic revanchism: there is nothing. What on earth the dramaturge was offering for his fee I cannot imagine. And of Mozart: well, there is, if anything, still less.

Toby Spence had his good moments, more in the second act than the first, but had some strikingly unsteady moments too. He certainly was not helped by the direction, which seemed limited to having him wander around uncertainly in a sheet. I felt rather conflicted about Kristïne Opolais. There was no doubting the committed nature of her performance as Vitellia, but the nature of the application was not always necessarily appropriate. In the first act, she sometimes sounded as though she would have been happier singing Puccini, forsaking Mozart’s line for generalised ‘operatic’ sounds and gestures that have little or no place in his world. The second act was much better, though, ‘Non più di fiori’ an undoubted highlight, in which even Fischer got his act together to lead a strikingly successful transition into the finale. (It was a rare, much appreciated example of an ill-behaved audience not being permitted indiscriminately to applaud.) Tara Erraught and Anna Stéphany were more or less beyond reproach as Sesto and Annio, clean of line and clear of dramatic purpose – at least insofar as the production permitted. Both would grace the Mozart ensembles of any house. Hanna-Elisabeth Müller, the Susanna in that earlier Figaro, impressed once again as Servilia; if anything, the role – and form – seemed to suit her better still. Tareq Nazmi’s Publio, again not helped by a production which seemed to have the character down as simply a bit of a weirdo, could have been more cleanly sung. And there we have it: an opera seria performance as if from the bad old days, when the drama was seen as secondary to the singers, when the music was barely understood for what it is. Not for the first time, I longed for Gérard Mortier and the Herrmanns.

Manon Lescaut, Royal Opera, 17 June 2014

Royal Opera House

Manon Lescaut – Kristïne Opolais

Lescaut – Christopher Maltman

Chevalier des Grieux – Jonas Kaufmann

Geronte de Revoir – Maurizio Muraro

Edmondo – Benjamin Hulett

Innkeeper –Nigel Cliffe

Singer – Nadezhda Karyazina

Dancing Master – Robert Burt

Lamplighter – Luis Gomes

Sergeant of the Royal Archers – Jihoon Kim

Naval Captain – Jeremy White

Jonathan Kent (director)

Paul Brown (designs)

Mark Henderson (lighting)

Denni Sayers (choreographer)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Stephen Westrop)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Sir Antonio Pappano (conductor)

 

A moronic audience and obscenely high ticket prices were not designed to have one in the best of moods. The Royal Opera House should be ashamed of itself for its cynical pricing: I had to pay £51, more than I could really afford, for the most distant reaches of the Upper Amphitheatre, from which it is impossible to see the singers’ fasces, whilst Stalls tickets far exceeded £200. So more should those who, having previously been laughing, shuffling, talking, opening sweets, coughing, sneezing, etc., booed the production team. Jonathan Kent’s staging has all sorts of problems, yes, but such boorish, threatening behaviour has nothing to do with art and suggests the perpetrators would be better off at a football match, of which there seems to be no shortage at the moment.

 

Indeed, it was tempting to conclude that such people received what they deserved. Having tittered at the surtitles – is it not side-splittingly hilarious that someone should be interested in preserving an emerald or too? – they, needless to say, failed to notice what might have been the virtue of Kent’s production, had it been coherently thought through and presented. Turning the tables on spectators of different varieties, most notably during the filmed ‘show’ of Manon’s antics in the second act, set to a backdrop of sickly pink vulgarity, might have worked in a Katie Mitchell-like manner; it might even have succeeded in indicting those who had turned up for an evening of conspicuous consumption and sentimental refusal to hear something other than ‘lovely tunes’. One might be able to set aside jarring details, such as this modern(-ish) woman having had parents decide to send her to a convent. The problem is that a not uninteresting idea – and I appreciate that this is a generous reading of what we see – utterly collapses following the interval. Suddenly, without warning, and more to the point without discernible agency, we appear to be in a different production altogether. The point – and again I am trying to be generous – may well be that now the audience, having been rendered aware (a fine chance with most of that lot!) of its complicity, should now be more or less conventionally harrowed, but that is not how it comes across. What registers instead are incoherence and ineptitude, increased by designs which seem to have been ‘borrowed’ from Kent’s less than successful Flying Dutchman.

 

By the time one reaches the fourth act, the production team seems to have given up completely. Not only is it well-nigh impossible, even for the most sympathetic viewer, to consider the cartoon-like presentation with a hint of irony; it is far from clear whether Des Grieux’s failure to bother to find some water, instead just sitting down a few yards away, is deliberate or just an unknowing commentary on what we have been watching. If Kent had had the strength of his (apparent) convictions, had continued to undermine an ‘easy’ reading, perhaps by having Manon fake her death and return to a life of luxury, this would have been worthier of respect; as it stands, one can neither sympathise with the characters nor with the botched attempt at critique of the ‘drama’, such as it is.

 

With a cast such as this, there are compensations of course, but again, bearing in mind the cynical pricing, that is hardly enough. Jonas Kaufmann sounded at times a little strained in the first act – he would surely be more home as Siegmund, the sort of role in which the ROH never permits us to hear him – but, even from the very back of the house, one could see as well as hear his dramatic presence. The Italianate sobs are not overdone, thank goodness, and one could take dictation from his words and vocal line alike, however softly sung. Much the same, bar the Siegmund observation, could be said of Kristïne Opolais, whose shaping of her lines was every bit as impressive as Kaufmann’s. The voices may not always quite have blended, but they certainly came together powerfully in the fourth act – which would have been far better off in a concert performance. Christopher Maltman’s Italian sometimes seemed a little deliberate, but his was an alert reading of the role of Lescaut, both on stage and in voice. Maurizio Muraro probably had the best of the production in terms of the presentation of Geronte; his was a powerful presence throughout. ‘Supporting’ roles were pretty much all well taken; especial mention might be made of Benjamin Hulett’s finely observed Edmondo. Choral singing was of an equally high standard.

 

As for Antonio Pappano’s conducting: well, at least it was not his Wagner. Many extol him in Puccini; he certainly seems more at home here than in a great deal of other repertoire. There remains, though, more than a little stiffness, and that same desire to ‘accompany’ rather than to lead. The Wagnerisms of Puccini’s score came through, perhaps ironically, far more strongly than when I had heard the work in Leipzig in April, but, like much of the rest, they seemed isolated rather than properly placed within a greater scheme. Delicacy was more to the fore than passion, let alone a dialectic between them. The orchestra, bar some surprisingly thin string tone at times, played very well, considered in itself, though it was too rarely given its head; I could not help but wonder what a symphonic conductor such as Daniele Gatti, Semyon Bychkov, or Riccardo Muti would have brought to the performance. That said, the most glaring shortcomings were those of the half-baked staging.  This really is not, or at least should not be, the place to present work-in-progress.