Semele, Royal Academy, 14 November 2018

Susie Sainsbury Theatre, Royal Academy of Music



Semele (Lina Dambrauskaitė), Jupiter (Ryan Williams), Chorus
Images: Robert Workman

Semele – Lina Dambrauskaitė

Ino – Olivia Warburton
Cadmus, Somnus – Thomas Bennett
Athamas – Alexander Simpson
Jupiter – Ryan Williams
Juno – Frances Gregory
Iris – Emilie Cavallo
Cupid – Aimée Fisk
Apollo – Joseph Buckmaster
Pasithea – Maya Colwell

Olivia Fuchs (director)

Takis (designs)

Jake Wiltshire (lighting)

Chorus

Royal Academy Sinfonia

Laurence Cummings (conductor)



Semele

Handel’s Semele was born of and into a celebrity-obsessed society of conspicuous consumption. Here, in Olivia Fuchs’s new staging for Royal Academy Opera, it unfolds in one still more so obsessed, still more conspicuously consuming: our own. We can sentimentalise the former, view it through a sepia lens, consider it more ‘beautiful’, but we should be foolish to do so. Fashion ruled there as here. An endless supply of minor portraits – ‘endless pleasure[s]’ – of minor aristocrats might appeal to the ‘heritage’ crowd. Is it, though, anything more than snobbery, snobbery directed from the Brexit generation toward the young, to consider Instagram and its visual network of ‘celebrity’ so very differently?

Semele and Chorus

Consequent constructions of the individual and the social come across strongly here. The chorus’s individual and corporate wielding of mobile telephones in the first scene, awaiting the (never-to-happen) wedding of Semele to Athamas, ‘society’ anxious not to miss the opportunity to record every single image of the forthcoming nuptials, might seem a now tedious cliché of contemporary operatic staging. If I am honest, it did so to me too. I came to realise, though, that that was surely the point. It is on the back of such behaviour, such vapid, glitzy, priorities that Semele achieves her moment in the celebrity – divine – firmament. She goes too far, of course, urged on by Juno. Such people tend to: here today, gone tomorrow. In a nice touch, moreover, Jupiter, come to her as ‘himself’, as thunderbolt, not only destroys her, but does so in the flash of a photo shoot.

Juno (Frances Gregory), Chorus, and Semele

Within that framework of suitably slick designs (Takis) and telling lighting (Jake Wiltshire) the story unfolds with clarity and confidence. The Royal Academy’s young singers perform their roles admirably. A few minor opening night slips notwithstanding, no one could reasonably have failed to be impressed, not least since the cast could act too – and did: testament to talent, application, and of course, the RAM’s schooling. For me, pick of the bunch, perhaps unsurprisingly, was Lina Dambrauskaitė in the title role. She had presence, vocal and stage, and used it to great musical and dramatic effect. Her coloratura was outstanding, as it needs to be, but so was her quicksilver adoption of different guises (celebrities need that) within the same convincingly crafted personality. (They need that too.)

Cadmus (Thomas Bennett), Athamas (Alexander Simpson), Ino (Olivia Warburton), Semele, Chorus

Ryan Williams’s versatile tenor took a well-judged Jovian journey from unheeding divine masculinity to genuine tender care, albeit too late. Frances Gregory offered a Juno not to be trifled with, who yet certainly maintained and projected feelings of her own. Olivia Warburton and Alexander Simpson impressed as Ino and Athamas, the latter especially in his final aria, ‘Despair no more shall wound me’. Both judged well the tricky tightrope between earlier seria tendencies and a new world of sentimentalism (in an eighteenth-century sense). Thomas Bennett’s Cadmus and Somnus revealed a more than promisingly sonorous bass. All soloists and the chorus impressed, their musical and dramatic contributions unquestionably greater than the sum of their parts. The Purcellian ‘Oh, terror and astonishment!’ sounded wondrously grave; frippery and not a little splendour fared equally well.

Athamas

My sole disappointment came with certain aspects of Laurence Cummings’s direction of the orchestra. Playing on period instruments, the musicians often sounded as if they would have been happier not. (I certainly should have.) Cummings’s determination not only to eradicate vibrato but, seemingly, phrasing too, led to some deeply unsatisfactory closes to sections and numbers, as well as a good deal of choppiness in between. At times, moreover, he was unable to coordinate pit and stage. A little more modernity, to match what we saw and heard on stage, would not have gone amiss; nor would a tad more charm.

The Indian Queen, English National Opera, 26 February 2015

Coliseum

Hunahpú – Vince Yi

Teculihuatzin – Julia Bullock
Doña Isabel – Lucy Crowe
Don Pedrarias Dávila – Thomas Walker
Don Pedro de Alvarado – Noah Stewart
Ixbalanqué – Anthony Roth Costanzo
Mayan Shaman, Zapatista – Luthando Qave
Leonor – Maritxell Carrero
Mayan Deities (dancers) – Sonya Cullingford, Alistair Goldsmith, Lucy Starkey, Jack Thomson
Tecum Umán – Jack Thomson
Leonor as child – Rosanna Beacock

Peter Sellars (director)

Gronk (set designs)
Dunya Ramicova (costumes)
James F. Ingalls (lighting)
Christopher Williams (choreography)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Christopher Bucknall)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Laurence Cummings (conductor)

As Peter Sellars might enjoin us, ‘Hey, let’s accentuate the positive!’ Or, as his relentlessly hyper-ventilating character, Leonor, might loquaciously, nonsensically have put it, ‘Throbbing through the long, hot, dangerous night, he, o he, that wondrous mixture of virility and divinity, ah, how the thrusting of his white, masculine loins and my ever-flowing beauteous womanhood must maximise and conjoin all that is awesomely towering and breathtakingly divine in river-creating accentuation of the, o, how ecstatic, the majestically positive.’

I had better start again: let us attend to the virtues of this performance. They were entirely musical, and in many cases, estimable indeed. Much to my surprise, after his dry, charmless Messiah for ENO, Laurence Cummings conducted an often richly expressive account of Purcell’s music. There was even, wonder of wonders in this puritanical age, vibrato – more, admittedly would have been welcome – to be heard from the violins. A decent-sized orchestra and well-endowed – sorry, Leonor – continuo group gave as fine a ‘live’ account as I can recall of much of the composer’s greatest music, its chromaticism beguiling and disconcerting in equal measure. The occasional ill-chosen tempo aside – an absurdly rushed Trumpet Tune, if I remember correctly – the music took its time, its melancholy and, on occasion, languor permitted to tell. I am not sure, moreover, that I have heard more committed choral singing of Purcell’s sacred music – what it was doing there is of course another matter – than that from the ENO Chorus, its expressive range pleasingly unconstrained by ‘early musicke’ dogma.

Much of the solo singing was very good indeed too. Lucy Crowe’s soprano brought welcome lyricism, elegance of line, and emotional depth, contrasting with the lighter, yet not slighter contributions of Julia Bullock. The two counter-tenors were more variable.  Vince Yi was accurate, and rather more than that on some occasions, but his voice, especially in its higher reaches, was somewhat thin of tone. Anthony Roth Costanzo struggled with intonation and register earlier on – almost as if he were expecting the music to be sung at a different pitch – but revealed himself later to be the more expressively-voiced of the two. Noah Stewart’s virile yet sensitive – yes, Leonor – tenor had one wishing for more. (We heard nothing at all from him in the first half, although we saw plenty.) I hope that ENO will invite him back for a more musically substantial role. Likewise Thomas Walker, whose stylish contributions were not the least of the evening’s virtues. Luthando Qave was a little woolly of tone.

Had we been treated to a concert of Purcell’s music, that would have been all well and good. Alas, we had Peter Sellars’s intervention to contend with. The programme description ‘unfinished semi-opera in five acts with a prologue by Henry Purcell, completed by Peter Sellars’ was, at least in one way, uncharacteristically modest; for what we had was, the ‘soundtrack’ notwithstanding, entirely the baleful creation of Sellars’s half-baked ‘ideas’. Doubtless they would have been thought daringly post-colonial, and will be praised as such by fashion victims; yet, in truth, there was little of the ‘post-’ to them. There are problems, to put it mildly, with the twenty-first century presentation of Purcellian semi-opera, but I cannot imagine that we could have been worse off with something approximating to the original play, described by Sellars as a ‘bizarre fantasy’. It takes one to know one, I suppose. I can only assume that the spoken texts from Rosario Aguilar’s The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma became more thoroughly lost in translation. What we hear seems in its banality to cater to the lower end of the Woman’s Own market, an irredeemable mixture of very mild soft pornography and tedious 'right-on' platitudes.

Sellars seems to present, although I may have misunderstood, an unthinking mixture of Aztec and Mayan civilisation conquered by the Spanish. The patronising presentation of the ‘Other’ as primitive victims strains toward, never quite reaching, the intellectual coherence and emotional depth of a gap-year student’s attempts to find him- or herself. Of what might interest us about other civilisations there is little, unless one counts a risibly choreographed parody of Mayan mysticism at the beginning, replete, I am sorry to say, with recorded generic ‘jungle’ sounds. There is still less to credit in the gaudy, jumble-sale-style costumes. ‘Foreign’ people are so colourful, and unspoilt, you see. Designs, attractive enough in a one-dimensional, touristic sort of way, are by ‘Gronk’, who ‘since the early 1970s has been using guerrilla street performance, video, film, photography and conceptual art to upstage the mainstream art world and proclaim the outside existentialism of Chicana/or artists.’ At least we are spared the participation of Bill Viola, although we are certainly not spared the ardours of a preposterously long evening: three hours and forty minutes, with one interval. It seems much longer, especially during the second of the two acts, despite its slightly greater dramatic coherence.

Then there is Leonor – who, for the most part, confusingly appears to speak as her mother, Teculihuatzin, lover to Don Pedro (Leonor’s father). It would, I hope, be difficult to find anyone in polite society who would not be utterly horrified by the genocidal acts of the Spanish conquerors. So banal and excitable are Leonor’s interventions, though, that one almost begins to sympathise. Were the squaddies to put her out of our misery, it would unquestionably be a merciful release. I do not know whether the actress, Maritxell Carrero, was simply following orders. However, even if one could overlook the aggravating mispronunciation of words such as ‘lieutenant’, she came across as something close to an ‘amusing’ 1970s caricature of an ‘exotic foreigner’. Perhaps, however, such caricatured North American presentation is creditably true to this Indian Queen, for ultimately, so self-indulgent a show seems concerned with little beyond a director’s self-imposition upon self-righteously adopted ‘causes’. If ‘self’ appears too many times in the preceding sentence, that sorry deed, at least, has not been carried out entirely unknowingly.  

 

 

Radamisto, English National Opera, 7 October 2010

The Coliseum

(sung in English)

Images: Clive Barda


Radamisto – Lawrence Zazzo
Zenobia – Christine Rice
Tiridate – Ryan McKinny
Polissena – Sophie Bevan
Farasmane – Henry Waddington
Tigrane – Ailish Tynan

David Alden (director)
Gideon Davey (designs)
Rick Fisher (lighting)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Laurence Cummings (conductor)

The English National Opera is to be congratulated for its enterprise, this time in mounting its first production of Handel’s Radamisto, written for the Royal Academy of Music in 1720. ENO performed it more or less in the revised version Handel prepared for the King’s Theatre in December that year for the castrato, Senesino. This was doubtless a good call, not least given that the revised version boasts a vocal quartet: dramatically impressive in itself but also providing welcome respite from the stream of recitatives and da capo arias. Radamisto’s three acts were transformed by ENO into two – no harm done there – and cuts were made. I thought it a pity to lose the ballet music, but everyone will have his own ideas about what should remain and what should be lost, and a ‘complete’ version, even if we could agree on what that might be, is not always the best way into opera seria. (A further, 1728 revision is generally held to have weakened the work.)

David Alden has directed Handel at the Coliseum and elsewhere before. His is not an imitative vision of the Baroque; however, it clearly finds inspiration in some of its conventions, whilst disregarding others. Stylisation is part of the game, with nods, arguably more than nods, to Japanese theatre: a feature of the Göttingen and Edinburgh Festivals’ recent Admeto too. Such, for instance, was the waving of a black, silken sheet, which would have appeared stylish, mannered, or a little close to the world of am-dram, according to taste. Much the same might be said of Gideon Davey’s set designs, whose patterns veered between Central Asia, tilting towards the Mogul khanate, the Sainte-Chapelle, and a certain form of wrapping paper. Rick Fisher’s lighting was generally revealing. Opinions will be divided as to whether the combination of stylisation with more ‘modern’ scurrying about and sexual teasing is provocative or misguided. It can work, but there were occasions when it seemed more concerned to bring attention to itself than to illuminate the drama, such as it is. I was definitely unconvinced, however, by the general tenor of the production’s Orientalism. Yet again, I was left wondering whether those concerned had read Edward Said: his work may not be the last word on the subject, but it is a useful first few. Presentation of oriental despotism is part of the work, of course, though as usual, it is matters of family and love that are truly to the fore. Is it really necessary, though, to add a cast of ‘sinister’-looking actors, faces and bodies covered, in a manner that has uncomfortable contemporary resonances for a modern audience? It would doubtless be possible to make something of this, but it seemed more a matter of evoking an exotic atmosphere than anything else.

Laurence Cummings generally paced the action appositely. The overture did not bode well, its quick section taken at a breakneck speed, but thereafter there was considerable variation, some recitatives as well as arias taken surprisingly slowly. I could not help longing for a larger string section and one that was permitted a broader expressive palette, but we stood some distance from the wilder shores of astringency. Woodwind and brass were on especially good form. Handel often has a good line in bassoon colouring – a favourite instance of mine is the Witch of Endor’s music in Saul – and this shone through more than once. The military music was well done, harking back to Purcell: never a bad thing. It was a treat also to hear the horns in Tiridate’s ‘Alzo il volo di mia fima,’ the first occasion, Jonathan Keates’s notes informed us, in which they were employed for a London theatre orchestra. There were a few strange sound ‘effects’. I did not mind at all, though I can imagine that Sir Thomas Beecham’s ‘drowsy armchair purists’ might have objected – and there can be no doubt that they are very much in the ascendant today.

Singing was generally of a high standard. Lawrence Zazzo shone in the title role, a worthy successor to Senesino. His dazzling coloratura was second to none – and he can act too: all that, without the old-fashioned ‘hoot’ of yesteryear’s countertenors. Christine Rice brought her customary warm tone and musical intelligence to the role of his consort, and Sophie Bevan was at least as impressive as his unlucky sister, Polissena: expressive, but never inappropriately so. Ryan McKinny made a malevolent Tiridate, virile up to a point, but tellingly weak where and when it mattered. He has stage presence and used it wisely. Henry Waddington had to deal with a costume and general appearance that made his Farassane a visual cross between Mussorgskian mendicant and Beckettian tramp; nevertheless, he made something of the character as well as proving firm and deep of voice. The only fly in the ointment was Ailish Tynan’s Tigrane, unfortunately cast visually and vocally. Intonation was not always perfect elsewhere – though I do not recall hearing a single slip from Zazzo – but in her case, tuning was often wildly awry. Even when leaving upon one side the bizarre Tommy Cooper get-up selected for the character – I assume this was intended, though goodness knows why, to be amusing – it was difficult to imagine that this was a Prince of Pontus. There is no reason whatsoever why a woman should not sing the role, as happened on the premiere of the original though not this revised version. However, on this occasion, one was led to think that a countertenor would have been more appropriate. Handel cut the role of Fraarte, Tiridate’s brother, for this version.

This being the sort of opera it is, we knew, even without forewarning, how everything was going to turn out. All’s well that ends well. The reversal of fortune and the tyrant’s change of heart are not the most convincing, but there is little we can do about that. Handel has some fine music indeed here, though dramatically, like all his operas, it falls short of his great oratorios. Once more, however, it is a matter of congratulation for ENO that it should have decided to stage the work. It was also a good thing yet again to note the presence of the company's Music Director in the audience: he is clearly more than a principal conductor.

Messiah, English National Opera, 27 November 2009

The Coliseum, London

Sophie Bevan (soprano)
Catherine Wyn-Rogers (contralto)
John Mark Ainsley (tenor)
Brindley Sherratt (bass)
Harry Bradford (treble)

Deborah Warner (director)
Tom Pye (set designs)
Moritz Junge (costumes)
Jean Kalman (lighting)
Leo Warner, Lysander Ashton, and Tom Pye (video)
Kim Brandstrup (choreographer)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Merry)
Laurence Cummings (conductor)

Just when I had begun to wonder whether ENO had gained a certain edge over its Covent Garden neighbour, along came this. Deborah Warner’s staging of Handel’s Messiah does not, as she admits in the programme, entail ‘turning it into an opera’. Apparently, she has introduced ‘a visual element which is a quite different process to dramatising it’. I am not sure what she means by this; more importantly, I am not at all sure what it was that we saw on stage. The ‘narrative thread ... woven clearly through the three parts of the evening’ – does Handel’s work not already possess a narrative thread of some import? – eluded me, though, goodness knows, I tried. What I saw was an extraordinary mixture of pretentious irrelevance and bizarre literalism, united only by their common thread of banality. Much to my astonishment, what remained of the audience seemed to love it.

The first part I found straightforwardly incomprehensible. Opening with some metropolitan video footage – all of the filming was very well presented, though its end remained dubious, to say the least – the first ‘scene’, as I suppose we should call it, appears to show John Mark Ainsley leaving orders of service on some makeshift pews, whilst other people in everyday dress go about their daily business. Somehow having a woman do the ironing and someone else look at a computer screen is held to illuminate ‘Comfort ye ... Ev’ry valley shall be exalted’. Lots of other people in everyday dress – all different, attesting to considerable effort on Moritz Junge’s part, however dubious the end... – come on to mill around for the first chorus. And I must not forget the hyperactive child who runs around for a great deal of the proceedings. Whether he is doing Warner’s bidding or his own thing, I neither know nor care. Doubtless some people, sentimental at the very mention of children and animals, found this winning; I wished I had a revolver to reach for. For some reason, the child collects in the pieces of paper almost as soon as Ainsley has handed them out. Perhaps this signals that we are not going to proceed along the usual track; perhaps it signifies nothing at all. We see a photographed scene from a school nativity play for the nativity itself. From time to time, depictions of Christ and other ‘ordinary’ faces appear on screen. Nothing seems to bear any relation to anything else. I can only assume that these are various facets of the ‘community’ to which the programme makes repeated reference: good for New Labour-style ‘inclusivity’, ‘access’, and other such buzzwords, I suppose.

The second part is worse still. Banal dance routines become more common. (Again, they seem very well delivered by the dancers; it is certainly not their fault.) The opening numbers feature a strangely literalistic, albeit bloodless, representation of scourging and so forth, whilst members of the ‘community’ look on. ‘All we, like sheep,’ displays lots of people scurrying up and down escalators at what appears to be Liverpool Street station. ‘Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron’ appears to show a camp display of conjuring: more ‘community entertainment’ perhaps? After that, the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus simply has people walk around and hug each other, as if it were a particularly lame Home Counties celebration of New Year’s Eve, before all coming together – ‘community’? – at the front of the stage, to face the audience. To have ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ sung from a life-support machine is risible enough, but then slowly to have the sun rise and other people get up from their hospital beds, as we hear of the Resurrection of the dead, is downright offensive in the banality of its ‘response’ to the text: a bizarre form of secular, content-free televangelism. People I had not seen before venture on stage towards the end of the final ‘Amen’ chorus. One resembles the late Bea Arthur; another, I was unsure whether this ‘character’ were male or female, is a Clare Short lookalike.

Is there any good news (let alone Good News)? The singing was better than the staging. Catherine Wyn-Rogers was excellent, even if I missed a deeper contralto sound, such as one used to hear. Sophie Bevan was very good too: singing ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ lying in a hospital bed was, in its way, impressive. Ainsley, however, was underpowered – try Jon Vickers for size here – and his feyness in the aforementioned ‘Thou shalt break them’ was merely embarrassing. Brindley Sherratt made a reasonable job of the bass part, though he could sometimes sound constricted, and struggled with ‘The trumpet shall sound’. (Unfortunately, its middle section was included, as were many of the traditionally ‘optional’ numbers.) Treble Harry Bradford was a most welcome addition, taking on the ‘Nativity’ numbers with musical intelligence and winning purity of voice. All soloists displayed excellent diction. The choral singing was often surprisingly ragged, especially amongst the female voices. Thus what should be the real location of ‘community’ amounted to very little.

Last and, in a way, least was the lamentable conducting of Laurence Cumming. Never have I heard the slow introduction to the Overture sound so lacking in import and, indeed, rhythmically slack. Tempi were either rushed or drawn out almost beyond endurance, with no apparent justification in either sense. The ‘Pastoral Symphony’ sounded unrecognisable, over in less than the twinkling of an eye. To make the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus so underwhelming requires a perverse skill, I suppose, but not one deserving of wider dissemination. Perhaps most infuriating of all was the reduction of what has so often proved to be a fine orchestra to the sound of an especially malnourished ‘period’ band. I could not see how many musicians were in the pit, but they sounded few; what managed to emerge was thin gruel indeed. Devotees of ‘period style on modern instruments’ will doubtless hail this achievement; I cannot understand what the point of using modern instruments would be, if one is intent upon ignoring or suppressing their manifold advantages. Weird kettledrums and short-breathed, out-of-tune brass sounded as if they actually were period instruments. The difficulties experienced by the trumpeter in ‘The trumpet shall sound’ seemed to confirm that beyond reasonable doubt.

Recently, Warner seemed entirely to miss the point of Brecht in her National Theatre production of Mother Courage. The weird rock-star presentation of the anti-heroine was embarrassing enough, but the attempt, magnificently realised by Fiona Shaw, to render her sympathetic was at best misguided. Again, a largely middle-aged, middle- class audience lapped it up. Now Warner seems entirely to have missed the point of Messiah, the clue perhaps lying in the work’s title. Strangely enough, the opening curtain displayed dictionary definitions of the word and a brief etymology; perhaps the director might have taken the trouble to read them, or even, perish the thought, the text and the score. Warner says that she is ‘not someone who would be queuing for the choral society’s annual performance in the local church’. Perhaps if she had shown a little respect for what used to be, and perhaps still is, a true sense of ‘community’, she might not have gone so wildly astray. I know which queue I shall join next time.