The Queen of Spades, Deutsche Oper, 20 March 2024

PIQUE DAME von Pjotr I. Tschaikowskij, Premiere am 9. März 2024 in der Deutschen Oper Berlin,
copyright: Marcus Lieberenz
Countess (Doris Soffel) and Hermann (Martin Muehle)

Hermann – Martin Muehle
Tomsky – Lucio Gallo
Prince Yeletsky – Thomas Lehman
Chekalinsky – Chance Jonas-O’Toole
Surin – Kyle Miller
Chaplitsky – Andrew Dickinson
Narumov – Artur Garbas
Master of Ceremonies – Jörg Schörner
The Countess – Doris Soffel
Lisa – Maria Motolygina
Pauline – Karia Tucker
Governess – Nicole Piccolomini
Masha – Arianna Manganello
Children’s commander – Sofia Kaspruk
Little Hermann – Aleksandr Sher
Little Lisa – Alma Kraushaar
Stage piano – Jisu Park
Old servant – Wolfgang Siebner

Director – Sam Brown
Designer – Stuart Nunn
Choreography – Ron Howell
Video – Martin Eidenberger
Lighting – Linus Fellborn
Assistant directors – Constanze Weidknecht, Silke Sense
Dramaturgy – Konstantin Parnian

Children’s Chorus of the Deutsche Oper (director: Christian Lindhorst)

Chorus of the Deutsche Oper (director: Jeremy Bines)

Statisterie, and Opernballet of the Deutsche Oper

Sebastian Weigle (conductor)  

The late Graham Vick was to have directed this new production of The Queen of Spades for the Deutsche Oper. According to the cast list, Vick laid down the principles for the production, but his successor Sam Brown, charged with bringing the project to completion, alongside designer Stuart Nunn and choreographer (and Vick’s widower) Ron Howell, will necessarily have brought much that his own to the piece. As he says in an interview, ‘I knew that the framework that he’d created provides a lot of room for conceptual freedom. … It may sound dramatic, but Graham’s ideas for PIQUE DAME outside of the equipment died with him. As a director, I have to walk my own path.’ Tempting though it may be to speculate what comes from whom, that is hardly the point. Having noted the situation, it is better to move on to discuss what it is we see and hear.

Chekalinsky (Chance Jonas-O'Toole), Tomsky (Lucio Gallo), Surin (Kyle Miller)

Layering of memory is a particular strength. Tchaikovsky – and his brother and librettist, Modest, as well of course as Pushkin – play with memories of the eighteenth century. That is doubled by the Countess’s memories of her ‘own’, earlier eighteenth century, Mme de Pompadour and all. The Grétry air is another case in point. In this production, without being merely indeterminate or arbitrary, which would defeat the point, further nesting occurs, for instance in the silent film excerpts (from a Russian adaptation of 1916), but also in the dressing and undressing of particular characters at different points, as well as in broader designs. Spanning three centuries – the nineteenth may not be overtly depicted on stage, but it is always present – is not an easy trick to bring off, but it is meaningfully accomplished here. Moreover, it is with us from the start, the opening scene with children’s chorus pointing to much of what is to come. A maltreated child, a social outsider even then, is abused by children and adults alike, only to have a little girl briefly come to him and show a little kindness. It prefigures what is to come, but perhaps it is also a memory. In this opera, though, it is always too late. The cards dealt by fate can never be changed, despite – or because of – their entirely random nature in what is no game of skill. 

Hermann, Countess

The cast acts out this game and propels it with great skill, heightening and extending its outlines in much the same way the production does. Martin Muehle’s Hermann is tireless, anguish-ridden, obsessive, perhaps a little on the Verdian side of Tchaikovsky, but I am not sure it behoves me, as one who speaks no Russian, to be too fussy here. It was above all his journey of catastrophe, and no one could doubt that Muehle grasped his fate and followed it. But it is not only his journey; part of the problem is surely that the characters are heading in different, mutually opposed and uncomprehending directions. Maria Motolygina’s Lisa, unable to escape from her childhood and clearly presented as such, was by the same token beautifully, often heartrendingly sung, her final scene powerful indeed. As expected, Doris Soffel’s Countess stole the show: not only a sterling performance, that ‘ancient’ air included, but one showing her sexual drives to be as strong as ever, perhaps even more so. Perhaps if she too had questioned her obsessions, she might have been happier—but is there any meaning in that ‘perhaps’? Thomas Lehman’s Yeletsky was finely sung indeed, as, in smaller roles, were Karia Tucker’s Pauline, Andrew Dickinson’s Chaplitsky, Chance Jonas-O’Toole’s Chekalinsky, Kyle Miller’s Surin, and many more, up to and including the chorus. Lucio Gallo’s virile, contemptuously masculine Tomsky showed how this singer can still absolutely hold the stage. Raunchy masked-ball choreography from Howell and excellent performances from the dancers not only returned to several questions already posed, but also asked a good number of their own.

Sebastian Weigle’s conducting had its moments, especially during the third act. (The opera was essentially given in scenes rather than acts, the interval given, as is often the case, following the arrival of Catherine the Great in the middle of the second act.) Then it became more idiomatic, conjuring up from the excellent Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper more of a Tchaikovskian sound than had previously been the case. We should not be too essentialist about such matters, but much previously had sounded rather on the Germanic side, albeit with distinctly odd balances, strings in particular notably subdued. A lack of dramatic sweep, without anything obvious put in its place, proved frustrating. 

Catherine the Great (Doris Soffel)

Singing and production continued, though, to offer considerable compensation. Soffel’s reappearance as Catherine the Great suggested she and the Countess were one and the same, her mocking laughter at the end of that third scene echoing the Countess’s ghostly reappearance (dressed as Lisa) to name the three cards. Was this all, then, just Hermann’s fevered imagination? And if so, to put it bluntly, what is the point? What we saw was not so cut and dried as that. Indeed, one of the projector quotations between scenes, from Dostoevsky, considering the nature of fantasy, how it must come close to reality, made that clear. 

If the scales here are tilted towards fantasy rather than reality, more so than any other production I can recall and than I have tended to think of it, then this remains a single production, concentrating fruitfully on a particular standpoint; another will be free to do something else. And it is only limited by it to the extent that almost any standpoint will limit: it enabled and heighted a strong sense of fate, from which not only Hermann, but also Lisa and indeed the Countess wish to escape, yet ultimately knew they cannot—and do not. 

There is, I think, something psychoanalytical to the approach. Certainly everything appears to be built on misunderstandings or downright lies: untruths, at any rate. What Hermann wants does not really exists; what Lisa wants does not really exist; what the Countess has wanted all her life has probably never existed at all. That holds for others too, not least Yeletsky. For all his apparent good fortune, he loses Lisa, and there is no sense of triumph in his final victory over Hermann. That it ends with a third and final death, all three ultimate protagonists departed, seems fitting in a sense that goes beyond Romantic death wish. Perhaps it is here, then, that the fantastic twist properly resumes, bidding us continue to question what we have seen and heard.

Carmen, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 7 March 2020

  

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Micaëla (Christiana Karg) and chorus members

Carmen – Anita Rachvelishvili

Don José – Michael Fabiano

Escamillo – Lucio Gallo

Dancaïro – Jaka Mihelač

Remendado – Ziad Nehme

Moralès – Adam Kutny

Zuniga – Jan Martiník

Micaëla – Christiane Karg

Frasquita – Alyona Abramova

Mercédès – Serena Sáenz

Lillas Pastia – Klaus Christian Schreiber

Martin Kušej (director)

Herbert Stöger (revival director)

Jens Kilian (set designs)

Heidi Hackl (costumes)

Reinhard Traub (lighting)

Children's Choir of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden (chorus director: Vincenz Weissenburger)

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Like stagings of any opera – Elektra almost an exception – Carmens vary, though perhaps not so much as they ought. I have seen a few: from those that do not even to try (Francesca Zambello and her donkey, Aletta Collins for the embarrassing nadir of vapidity) to brilliant, interrogative reimagination (Dmitri Tcherniakov), via a valiant yet strangely tedious attempt to recreate (Barrie Kosky) and a relatively straightforward updating that yet remained on a dramatic knife-edge (Calixto Bieito). Not until now, however, had I seen Martin Kušej’s 2004 Staatsoper Unter den Linden production.

Situated omewhere between Bieito and Tcherniakov, albeit closer to the former, it holds up very well, especially when conducted by Daniel Barenboim, who knows it of old and offers, so it seems, a reading of this rather than a generic Carmen. There is little, thank God, of the picturesque here. In a production that put me in mind somewhat of his 2003 Don Giovanni (Salzburg), Kušej, like Barenboim, presents a dark, large-scale tragedy, in which even moments of interiority, emerging painful in their loneliness, seem defined by a grander canvas of the implacable. It stands a world away from the work’s opéra comique origins, which may concern some. All the worse for them; so, after all, are we. The question is whether it works, and it does. In that respect, I recalled another Salzburg Mozart production, Claus Guth’s 2006 Figaro. It sounds, disregarding as it does so much of what we might consider ‘essential’, as though it should not work, at least on paper, yet it does, having one reassess both the work internally and its place in a broader scheme of theatrical drama.

That fatal relationship between internal and external may indeed be understood to lie at the heart of this staging. A soldier faces a firing squad as the curtain rises: a daily occurrence or a foretelling of something unique? There is no need to choose, any more than there will be later when Carmen reads her cards, ostensibly with other the gypsies, yet actually alone, physically and psychologically, at the front of the stage. Jens Kilian’s elemental designs and the harsh environment – more Lorca than Mérimée? – in which they appear to be situated sometimes revolve to reveal something beneath or beyond, albeit through eyes we may wish or claim were not ours, yet unquestionably are. There is something pornographically joyless, recalling the director’s Don Giovanni, to the couplings that ensue when soldiers – and we – penetrate the hitherto mysterious factory. There will be along, whether at Lillas Pastia’s, in the mountains, or at the final bullfight. That is not to deny, but rather to heighten, the extent of violence at work, whether implicit or explicit, externalised or sublimated. Much of what unfolds may be ‘just’ something to do. Better than doing nothing? Perhaps: it is difficult to say; this does not seem to be a world given to reflection. We ask what Wagner means by love all the time; why not, at least on occasion, what Bizet does too?

Don José (Michael Fabiano), Carmen (Anita Rachvelshvili)

Nietzsche’s clarion call, ‘il faut méditerraniser la musique’, to exalt the sunny physicality of Carmen over the northern, décadent idealism of Wagner and worse, his disciples, comes ironically to seem the height of sentimentality, a typically German exaltation of ‘the south’ and evasion of the much-vaunted truth. Myth, instead, returns, a cold, hostile chorus, at least in external terms, not only participating in the action but holding it to scrutiny. Masks at the last invite the full, Attic horror we deluded ourselves was not really involved. Perhaps Wagner was right after all; at the very least, his tragic forebears seem to have been. The circle ultimately is closed, Carmen closing as it had begun; Don José faces a firing squad. The curtain falls, catharsis denied.

Carmen

If it would be a gross exaggeration to call Barenboim’s conducting of Carmen Wagnerian, such exaggeration may point, circuitously, in the right direction. Everything was not frenetic; all was not, in the banal sense, merely ‘colourful’. There was at times something almost glacial to the work’s progress, in recognition of bolder claims and connections. There was space – and this was not only, or even principally, a matter of speed – for reflection, for questioning, for self-interrogation. Savage turns, sometimes yet not always pretty on the surface, could then register with the bite they deserved. With the Staatskapelle Berlin playing at the height of its powers, resonances which rarely if emerge were able to do so. At the opening of the third act, for instance, truly exquisite horn playing, tone and phrasing clear as they was warm, momentarily had me imagine, if not a Mahlerian vista, then of an attempt to summon one up. It was not that playing or conducting in any sense suggested Mahler, let alone ‘sounded like’ such music, but rather that this was not a performance delimited by self-imposed constraint; it was open to what we, as well as it, might bring to the work. I realised that Berio’s play with Spanish Boccherini, Quattro versioni originali della ‘Ritirata notturna di Madrid’, was closer to the mark; rather it soon became so. We were not so very distant, then, from Seville after all. The scale and cruelty, however, of the musicodramatic canvas, or rather the cruelty that could develop within, was the point, mirroring, intensifying, even inciting what unfolded onstage.

Frasquita (Alyona Abramova), Moralès (Adam Kutny), Carmen, Lillas Pastia (Klaus Christian Schreiber),
Mercédès (Serena Sáenz) 

Much unfolded courtesy of Anita Rachvelishvili in the title role. Her lower register must be heard to be believed: not only its tonal richness, but also what she accomplishes with it. Hers was a magnetic, thoughtful, and far from lazily conventional performance from beginning to end. Likewise Michael Fabiano’s typically committed Don José. Christiane Karg’s Micaëla was perhaps not best served by the concerns of the staging, yet beguiled anyway. The chorus, inexplicably booed by one audience member behind me, was excellent in every respect, a good few of which would not always be called upon in a production of Carmen; likewise the large cast of extras. Jaka Mihelač, Ziad Nehme shone remarkably as Dancaïro and Remendado, whether in stage or vocal presence. Only Lucio Gallo’s woolly Escamillo seriously disappointed, more a minor Sopranos character than a virile toreador. If not every cast member’s French language and style perfect, it would be curmudgeonly to say more than that; the dramatic whole outweighed any minor shortcomings. A Carmen, then, to make one think; there are all too many others for those who would rather not.

Il trittico, Royal Opera, 29 February 2016

Royal Opera House

Il trittico

Michele – Lucio Gallo

Giorgetta – Patricia Racette
Luigi – Carl Tanner
Tinca – Carlo Bosi
Talpa – Jeremy White
Frugola – Irina Mishura
Song Seller – David Junghoon Kim
Lovers – Lauren Fagan, Luis Gomes

Suor Angelica

Suor Angelica – Ermonela Jaho

Suor Dolcina – Elizabeth Key
Monitress – Elena Zilio
Suor Genovieffa – Lauren Fagan
Suor Osmina – Eryl Royle
Mistress of the Novices – Elizabeth Zikora
Abbess – Irina Mishura
Princess Zia – Anna Larsson
Novice – Katy Batho
Nursing Sister – Jennifer Davis
Alms Sisters – Emily Edmonds, Renata Skarelyte
Nuns – Tamsin Coombs, Kiera Lyness, Anne Osborne, Amy Catt, Cari Searle

Gianni Schicchi

Gianni Schicchi – Lucio Gallo

Lauretta – Susanna Hurrell
Zita – Elena Zilio
Rinuccio – Paolo Fanale
Gherardo – Carlo Bosi
Nella – Rebecca Evans
Gherardino – Gabriele Montano
Betto di Signa – Jeremy White
Simone – Gwynne Howell
Marco – David Kempster
La Ciesca – Marie McLaughlin
Maestro Spinelloccio – Matteo Peirone
Ser Amantio di Nicolao – Tziano Bracci
Pinellino – Simon Wilding
Guccio – David Shipley
Buoso Donati – Peter Curtis

Richard Jones (director)

Sarah Fahie (revival director, Il tabarro and Suor Angelica)
Benjamin Davis (revival director, Gianni Schicchi)
Ultz (set designs, Il tabarro)
John Macfarlane (set designs, Gianni Schicchi)
Miriam Buether (set designs, Suor Angelica)
Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)
Mimi Jordan Sherin (lighting, revived D.M. Wood)
Sarah Fahie (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Nicola Luisotti (conductor)

 

Until last summer, when I saw Opera Holland Park’s excellent production, I had never seen Il trittico as a whole in the theatre, something I had been intending to remedy for a while. Such was perhaps easier said than done, given that complete performances, whilst probably less rare than at one time they had become, are less frequent than one might expect. (Alexandra Wilson’s programme note was interesting on that subject.) At any rate, I wanted to wait for the right occasion, and OHP has a very good track record in Puccini. Now I have seen another, which seemed to me almost, yet perhaps not quite, as successful, but which should surely disappoint no one. That quite a few friends – I learned this only afterwards, so it did not colour my expectations – had been disappointed on the first night, especially in vocal terms, I find surprising; I have no reason to doubt them or their judgement, but can only say that, going on the second night, my experience was different; it was, after all, a different performance, and such is the magic – and indeed the frustration – of a performing art. Even the weakest of the three operas, considered purely vocally, was only comparatively so.

 

I will admit to a little disappointment that Richard Jones seems to have made little, if any, effort to unite the three operas. Three is no iron-clad rule which says one must, of course, but surely it would be interesting at least to make the attempt when the director is common to all three. It is, after all, perfectly clear how different they are on the surface; what, however, if one digs a little deeper? Yes, one can – and should – do one that oneself, but to say there is no need for a director to do so comes close to saying that there is no need for a director, at least in the strong sense, at all. Ably revived – with the caveat that I had only seen the Gianni Schicchi before, when it was paired with L’Heure espagnole – by Sarah Fahie and Benjamin Davis, there was, however to these stagings no doubt concerning the Personenregie nor the general sense of theatre. Jones treats Il tabarro as one would usually expect it to be seen, in naturalistic fashion. If I am honest, I was relieved to be spared his usual visual trademarks – no flock wallpaper, thank goodness! – and being set when and where it ‘should’ be makes a good deal of sense. (Not, I hasten to add that it must be, and if one were seeing the opera all the time, one might think differently.) It is atmospheric, though, and the designs – surely that is crucial, if one is going to be naturalistic – convince in a realistic fashion. There is perhaps more than a hint of Zola, or at least that this is recognisably of Zola’s world. The barge convinces as a barge, as do Ultz’s handsome street designs and Nicky Gillibrand’s costume designs. Paris, the very particular Paris of these workers by the Seine, emerges as perhaps the central ‘character’, and that is surely a good thing.

I am less sure about the children’s hospital ward setting of Suor Angelica; it feels a little contrived throughout, and especially at the end. Indeed, substituting for the nun’s vision a child running forward to hug her comes across, whatever the intention, as kitsch sentimentality, which is the last thing Puccini needs. Anti-clericalism is one thing, Puccini’s thing, although ultimately not a very interesting thing; this, for me, is another, something which seemed unable to take religion seriously at all and which was therefore to be found lacking. A full-on, atheistic attack – admittedly, of the post-Voltairean variety, and yes I know Voltaire himself was a deist, rather than the silly contemporary nonsense of Dawkins et al. – might be interesting; this is not it. Within these confines – and admitting, again, the excellence, on their own terms of the designs, this time by Miriam Buether – the story is told well enough, at least until the end.

Gianni Schicchi is, as one would hope, full of life, well observed, and certainly seems to respond to the music. Presumably Sarah Fahie’s movement coordination deserves credit there. It might not dig so deep as Calixto Bieito’s production for the Komische Oper,Berlin, despite their surface similarity, and of course the latter’s brilliant pairing with Bluebeard’s Castle – now there is an example of someone pursuing a compelling line through two operas – renders the comparison problematical. Having seen Bieito, I found this a little too obvious in its ‘zaniness’, a little lacking in a sense of what the work might mean. There is little, nevertheless, that should really trouble anyone, save for those ultra-reactionaries who object to the business of updating ‘on principle’. How I wish, though, that the audience could have been at least a little more quiet! Its incessant laughter was disruptive and wearying. (Is the opera really so funny that people cannot control themselves?) Applause following ‘O mio babbino caro’ suggested as strongly as audible sighs when that aria began that the perpetrators had little sense of irony, nor of the audible and visual (cinematic still) inverted commas around it. Whatever they were doing, they were certainly not applauding ironically, with a sense of the metatheatrical.

The real continuity came from Nicola Luisotti’s excellent conducting of the orchestra. To begin with, I wondered whether the orchestral sound in Il tabarro were a little too pastel of shade. However, it increasingly drew me in rhythmically, and soon I noticed and responded to the close connection with harmonic rhythm. Colour and its variation, rhythm and its variation, harmony and its variation: these and their interconnection progressed as if the score were plotting the course of the River Seine itself. That, arguably, is very much part of what it is doing. I was able to hear to an unusual degree the opera as a masterly symphonic poem with voices. That certain rhythmic figures and their development found their way into Suor Angelica was even more striking. Musical differences asserted themselves too, of course, but the sense of unity and diversity missing from the staging was undeniable in the pit. Gianni Schicchi’s scherzo-like writing thrilled as it should: with the quickfire alternation and sheer variety of character-voices above, I felt again that the truest action was in the symphonic poem so brilliantly played. Luisotti was economical with climaxes; however, my doubts as to whether he was perhaps being a little too parsimonious were readily assuaged by his long-term strategy, ably put into practice by the Covent Garden orchestra, sounding as Puccini players to the manner born.

 

Vocally, this felt somewhat like a ‘company’ night. The Royal Opera may not really possess a company in the old-fashioned sense; more is the pity. Nevertheless, there was considerable strength in depth and a true sense of cooperation, both between singers and between them and the production. Il tabarro, as I said, was somewhat less impressive in straightforward vocal terms, although Lucio Gallo’s relative dourness was surely part of his portrayal of Michele. Carl Tanner’s Luigi and Patricia Racette’s Giorgetta had impressive moments, although they were not so sustained as one might have wished. Irina Mishura was an arrestingly spirited Frugola. Ermonela Jaho’s Suor Angelica was properly sympathetic, indeed heart-rending; if her vocal strength is not sustained equally throughout her range, then that is the case with a good many singers. One employs what one has, and this she did very well; there was no doubting her honesty of portrayal and her commitment. Lauren Fagan’s moment as Suor Genovieffa, admitting her desire once again to hold a lamb, was touching indeed. Anna Larsson gave a remarkable performance as Princess Zia, her cold dignity scene-stealing; what a splendid contrast with the Wagner and Mahler in which I have most often heard her! Elena Zilio shone both as the Monitress and still more as Zita, the focal point – arguably more so than Gianni Schicchi himself – of activity in the final opera. Her stage and vocal presence were as one. Gallo’s more energetic – how could it not be? – performance as Schicchi clearly sprang from the words with, dare I say it, a native Italian ease. Gwynne Howell showed that he still very much has ‘it’ as Simone. Susanna Hurrell and Paolo Fanale offered youthful, fresh-tone relief as Lauretta and Rinuccio. As elsewhere, though, everyone contributed to the evening’s success. This was a properly human comedy.