The Excursions of Mr Brouček, LSO/Rattle, 6 May 2025

Barbican Hall

Mr Brouček – Peter Hoare
Mazal/Blankytný – Aleš Briscein
Málinka/Etherea/Kunka – Lucy Crowe
Sacristan/Svatopluk/Lunobor/Domšík – Gyula Orendt
Würfl/Čaraskvouci/Councillor – Lukáš Zeman
Čišničeck/Child prodigy/Student – Doubravka Novotná
Kedruta – Hanna Hipp
Básník/Oblačný/Vacek- Arttu Kataja
Artist/Dohuslav/Vojta – Stephan Rügamer
Skladatel/Harfoboj/Miroslav – Linard Vrielink

Tenebrae (chorus director: Nigel Short)
London Symphony Orchestra
Simon Rattle (conductor)

Images: Mark Allan

Simon Rattle’s survey of the Janáček operas has proved a tale of two cities: Berlin (first the Philharmonic and latterly the Staatsoper) and London (the LSO). The latter has been mostly in concert, although it shared Peter Sellars’s concert staging with the Berlin Philharmonic. Now, on the back of Robert Carsen’s Berlin staging, originally seen at the Janáček Festival Brno, the LSO’s series reaches The Excursions of Mr Brouček to the Moon and to the 15th Century. 

Of those I have attended, this unquestionably marked the highpoint: one of those performances it is difficult immediately to imagine being bettered. At the heart of that was the magnificent playing of the LSO. Janáček had not previously played a large part in its repertoire, though I remember an interesting, also highly criticised Glagolitic Mass from Colin Davis. It hardly could, one might say, for a symphony rather than an opera orchestra, which incidentally reminds us of a long-term consequence of Davis and Clive Gillinson’s tenures, nurtured by their successors: regular performances of opera in concert, supplemented by occasional appearances in festival pits. Intimacy of acquaintance with Janáček’s writing, its melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, and timbral qualities, inextricably bound to the Czech language, told—as, I think, it did with Rattle, who has long championed this music and who no longer has anything to prove. Precision, heft, the way the orchestra ‘spoke’: this and so much more made for an ideal partnership, rendered all the more impressive by a uniformly impressive cast and chorus (the ever versatile Tenebrae choir, trained and sometimes conducted here by Nigel Short). 

From the opening of the first part, dance rhythms and orchestral colours, xylophone immediately recalled from Jenůfa, created a dramatic stage before our ears, so much so that it is difficult to imagine anyone truly regretting the lack of staging. Time of day, temperature (literal and metaphorical), place, and much more were palpable, indeed unavoidable. As dawn approached at the end of the first part, one felt it emotionally, overwhelmingly so, as well as temporally. For a tenderness embedded in the composer’s deep humanity was always apparent, in a reading that saw no reason to exaggerate the bizarre, zany elements, as perhaps did David Pountney in a memorable 2022 staging for Grange Park Opera. There is room for all, but this went deeper, also underscoring the extraordinary, innovative brilliance of the composer as a contemporary of Strauss, Schoenberg, and yes, Puccini. There was absurdity, yes, but in that absurdity lay deepest sincerity, and the second part, darker and more soulful from the off, proved more moving still. Soundworlds related yet distinct offered both contrast and connection between the opera’s two parts. 

Peter Hoare, who had also sung the title at Grange Park, proved if anything a still more captivating Mr Brouček, alive to his provincial, bourgeois absurdity, not without affection, yet quite without what would have been deadly sentimentality. Like his fellow cast, this was a portrayal that sprang from the page, deeply rooted in words, music, and their alchemy, without being bound by them. Lucy Crowe gave as fine a performance as I have ever heard from her, alternating various roles as Málinka, Etherea, and Kunka, bringing something special to each of them, refulgent of tone, yet acerbic where called for, and hinting without didacticism at what might unite them. Much the same might be said in principle of all those taking on multiple roles, world-class casting offered by the likes of Gyula Orendt, Linard Vrielink, and Aleš Briscein. Truth be told, there was not a weak link in the cast; more to the point, the drama lay in connection, collaboration, and of course conflict. We were fortunate, I think, to see and hear a cast that had mostly performed together onstage in Berlin. 

Dare we hope, then, for all of Janáček’s operas to feature in subsequent instalments? However tempting, we should probably retain perspective and simply enjoy them one at a time. Sometimes I worry that, in ever-straitening times, opera with full forces, be it staged or unstaged, might come to seem an ‘unaffordable’ luxury. Smaller versions, cleverly adapted, whether will slightly reduced orchestrations or full-scale reductions, can form a crucial part of our operatic ecology, but that must never be at the expense of the ‘real thing’. One can hardly hope for a better reminder of such ‘reality’ than the magical surreality of these Excursions.

Crowe/Sulayman/Drake - Mendelssohn and Liszt, 14 January 2025

Wigmore Hall

Mendelssohn: Abendlied, op.8 no.9; Erntelied, op.8 no.4; Keine von der Erde Schönen, WoO 4 no.1; Schafloser Augen Leuchte, WoO 4 no.2; Pilgerspruch, op.8 no.5; Frühlingslied, op.8 no.6; Das Waldschloss, WoO 17 no.1; Pagenlied, WoO 17 no.1; Romanze, op.8 no.10; Hexenlied, op.8 no.8; Todeslied der Bojaren, WoO 18 no.2; Ich hör ein Vöglein, WoO 18 no.1
Liszt: Tre sonetti de Petrarca, S 270/2
Liszt: Freudvoll und Leidvoll, S 280/2; Wieder möcht ich dir begegnen, S 322; Lasst mich ruhen, S 317; Ihr Glocken von Marling, S 328; Verlassen, S 336; Blume und Duft, S 324; Freudvoll und Leidvoll II, S 280b; Angiolin dal biondo crin, S 269/2; Go not, happy day, S 335
Mendelssohn: Volkslied, op.63 no.5; Maiglöckchen und die Blümelein, op.63 no.6

Lucy Crowe (soprano)

Karim Sulayman (tenor)

Julius Drake (piano)

 

An interesting recital of songs by Mendelssohn and Liszt raised questions concerning what we expect of and in a Liederabend. Contrasts are in general a good thing, yet might they impede the development of a guiding thread making the evening more than the sum of its parts? Can the contrary case also prove a problem? How do ideas transfer from paper to performance? Though we applaud versatility and adventure, complaining when performers and venues give us the same old repertoire over and over again, how much should a programme be constructed around performers’ acknowledged strengths? 

Often underestimated on account of his ‘Victorian’ reputation, Mendelssohn seems perpetually in need of reassessment. An assortment of songs, given in pairs by Lucy Crowe and Karim Sulayman, accompanied by Julius Drake, might have been just the thing, yet was the selection, ranging far from the beaten track, at least in some ways more interesting than satisfying? Crowe at any rate offered a nicely contrasted opening pair, though Drake’s piano parts at times sounded a little stiff. Although that in part have reflected the writing and there was benefit in laying bare the counterpoint ‘as written’, not least in voice leading, more overt advocacy might also have helped. Sulayman’s first pair, Byron settings (in translation), proved more ardent and imploring, revealing a beautiful lyric tenor, Crowe responding in Pilgerspruch with a well-placed ‘early Romantic’ approach emerging from earlier Classicism, yet in colouring extending beyond it. In general, where Mendelssohn become more ‘Romantic’, distancing himself from models that were perhaps more operatic, their fruits tending to sound a little fussy in the concert hall, the stronger the impression became. Narratives such as Das Waldschloss (Sulayman) and Hexenlied (Crowe) were cases in point. The highly unusual Todeslied der Bojaren also grabbed the attention, its dramatic starkness arresting and surprising, Sulayman imparting an almost visionary quality to it. In a charming Ich hör ein Vöglein, he hinted at waters running deeper, without trying to turn the song into something it is not. And the strangeness of the late Tennyson setting, Go not, happy day, was relished. 

In Liszt, the record was also mixed, perhaps more so. Crowe’s Sonetti de Petrarca, before the interval, received committed performances from her, although Drake might have offered a little more in the way of Romantic abandon. Whether they were quite her thing, though, lingered as a question. Whilst some way from strained, there were passages in which the longer, cantabile line proved elusive. There was a proper sense of a new world, new aesthetics, and so on, yet it was only in the third of the set, ‘I’ vidi in terra angelici costumi’, taken at a helpfully swift tempo, that the longer line truly emerged. Her second-half Angiolin dal biondo crin also benefited from being heard as if in a single breath, revealing perhaps unsuspected riches in a Liszt rarity (his first song, albeit in its 1850s revision). 

Liszt’s songs are not for everyone. Fischer-Dieskau, game to take them on, lacked some of the requisite Italianate quality (not the only one, but a sine qua non) for the Petrarch sonnets. Sulayman’s Liszt performances, bookended by two of his settings of Freudvoll und Leidvoll, tended mostly towards a world of reverie, the final of those Goethe settings offering welcome contrast in its tumult. If I did not especially mind, I wondered whether a little more contrast might have helped: a sequence of several slow songs, tending, as it were, toward the listless, lacked variety. That said, the desolation of Verlassen, the quiet ecstasy, piano bells and all, of Ihr Glocken von Marling, and the fragrance and flowers of Blume und Duft were all in themselves highly welcome. 

Perhaps anticipating potential criticisms, Drake announced that now, at last, we should hear the two singers together. In conclusion, Crowe, Sulayman, and Drake gave two vocal duets by Mendelssohn. Sensitively done and, especially in the case of the second, Maiglöckchen und die Blümelein, op.63 no.6, winningly animated, they arguably imparted a sense of what might have been, yet were nonetheless a delight. As an encore, we heard the unusual, intriguing Suleike und Hatem, a Goethe setting by Fanny Hensel. It had much in common with her brother’s songs: finely crafted, clearly in a Classical line, though perhaps not quite fully inside the Lied tradition. Whether that suggests we might revise our conceptions of the latter, founded (too strongly?) on Schubert, Schumann, et al., is a question worth asking from time to time.  

Stankiewicz/LSO/Roth - Schubert and Zimmermann, 19 February 2023

Barbican Hall

Schubert: Rosamunde, Overture and Entr’actes to Acts I and III
Zimmermann: Oboe Concerto
Schubert: Mass no.5 in A-flat major, D 678

Olivier Stankiewicz (oboe)

Lucy Crowe (soprano)

Adèle Charvet (mezzo-soprano)

Cyrille Dubois (tenor)

William Thomas (bass)

London Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Gregory Batsleer)

London Symphony Orchestra

François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

Trenchant opening chords giving way to a delightful oboe solo (Juliana Koch): the beginning of the so-called Rosamunde Overture, really the overture to Der Zauberharfe, offered a version in miniature of the first half of this LSO concert, arguably even of the concert as a whole. The introduction was undeniably on a grand, Romantic scale, though a fizzing ‘Allegro molto moderato’ proved more suggestive of Rossini than of Mendelssohn. François-Xavier Roth took it very fast, but crucially it worked, proving both nimble and full of incident, and if the lack of string vibrato surprised my ears, they (more or less) adapted. Ultimately, it put a smile on my face and proved a fine curtain-raiser. For the darker first entr’acte likewise proved suggestive of the theatre, of stage action about to commence. Its successor’s episodes offered delectable woodwind solos: not only oboe, but clarinet (Sérgio Pires) and flute (Gareth Davies) too. More veiled than sweet, the outer sections offered a different kind of intimacy given Roth’s non-vibrato approach. Signing off with string quartet rather than full strings proved a lovely idea. 

Olivier Stankiewicz joined the orchestra for Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s 1952 Oboe Concerto. Its first movement, ‘Hommage à Stravinsky’, pulled the older composer’s neoclassicism in multiple directions: homage, yes, but also embroidering and deconstructing. It was all despatched, as throughout, with the cleanest of lines, good humour, and a sign or two of something darker, carried forward into the central ‘Rhapsodie’, full of post-Bartókian night music. Magical solo (and other) evocations helped construct – for there was no ultimate doubt of the composer’s constructivism – a postwar pastoral, hinting at least at so much of what that historically might imply. Stankiewicz played this as the repertoire piece it should be, ably partnered by the LSO and Roth, the finale presented as a brilliant clash and reconciliation between serial and neoclassical tendencies: not only the earlier Stravinsky but Hindemith too. Passages of dissolution suggested men and machines, mannequins too, threatening to break down yet surviving—perhaps a metaphor for the work as a whole and, indeed, much of Zimmermann’s œuvre. 

What a joy, in the second half, it was to hear Schubert’s Mass in A-flat major. Why we do not hear Schubert’s masses all the time, I really do not know. It is a tremendous loss, and many will surely have been encountering this work for the first time. I doubt they will have been disappointed, especially in so sensitive and exultant a performance as this, a fine team of soloists and the excellent London Symphony Chorus now partnering Roth and the LSO. The opening exhortation for mercy sounded with humility, preparing the way for each of the soloists to introduce themselves with distinction in response: ‘Christe eleison’. This Kyrie as a whole had a splendid developmental quality, lightly worn, yet nonetheless telling: not the least example of Roth’s discerning musical judgement. Schubert sounded as a child of Mozart, yet with undeniable affinity to Beethoven, even to his Missa solemnis, as characteristic textures, ultimately to be reduced to no case of ‘influence’, were revealed before our ears. 

A whirlwind of praise was unleashed in the first section of the Gloria, incessant fiddling offering a flickering, moving halo to the choral company of heaven. Those cries of ‘Gloria’ could hardly fail to recall Beethoven, but not to the detriment of a more general impression of abiding, Austrian (perhaps rather than Viennese) loveliness. Lucy Crowe’s soprano duet with clarinet, paving the way once more for the entry of other soloists, in the second section, ‘Gratias agimus tibi…’ was not the least example of that; likewise Adèle Charvet’s rich mezzo solo a little later on, again entwined with clarinet, as well as bassoon. Once again, the LSO’s wind excelled themselves. Roth’s ear for orchestral colour suggested, in that well-worn cliché, a sensitive restoration of an old master painting, for instance in the Credo’s unusually colourful profession of faith. All concerned understood the task, varying in difficulty, of reconciling theological and musical imperatives, the ‘Crucifixus’ section’s pivotal ambiguity erupting in the glorious release of resurrection. Roth directed and shaped, without ever giving the impression of undue moulding. The censer swung in suggestion again of a characteristically Austrian otherworldliness in the Sanctus, both personal and beyond the personal. The Benedictus’s heavenly solo trio, soprano, mezzo, and tenor (an ardent Cyrille Dubois) must surely have had a few hearts skip a beat or two. Then the return of William Thomas’s dark-hued bass for the Agnus Dei rightly imparted a sense of completion: sadness and hope, even before the call to grant us peace.

LSO/Christophers - Haydn, 3 March 2022

Barbican Hall

The Creation (sung in English)

Lucy Crowe (soprano)

Andrew Staples (tenor)

Roderick Williams (baritone)

London Symphony Chorus (chorus director: Simon Halsey)

London Symphony Orchestra

Harry Christophers (conductor)

Forty years ago to the day, the Barbican Centre opened its doors to the concert-, theatre-, and exhibition-going public. The London Symphony Orchestra and its Music Director Claudio Abbado offered the Overture to Die Meistersinger, Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto (soloist: Vladimir Ashkenazy), Elgar’s Cello Concerto (soloist: Yo-Yo Ma), and Ravel’s La Valse. The current LSO Music Director, Sir Simon Rattle, had chosen his longstanding favourite—and mine—Haydn’s oratorio, The Creation, for this celebratory concert, but alas the aftermath of surgery meant that he ceded his place at a late stage to Harry Christophers. I say ‘alas’ for Rattle’s sake, since he would doubtless have loved to be there, but Christophers directed a collegial, eminently musical account of this most life-affirming of works, dedicated by the orchestra to the people of Ukraine. It will surely have lifted many spirits, at least in London, at so dark and terrifying a time. 

The public premiere of The Creation boasted on orchestra of 120, though a chorus of only 60. Here, I think, the numbers were more or less reversed, the chorus somewhat more than the number of Haydn’s players, the orchestra not even a handful more than the number of Haydn’s singers. There is no need to get hung up on such things; it was a different occasion, in a different occasion, for different ears, and so on. But it was gratifying at least to have what would once have been a standard Haydn-Mozart string section (12.12.10.7.5), perhaps increased for a large-scale work such as this, rather than something more parsimonious. There was plenty of mystery and potentiality to the ‘Representation of Chaos’, that extraordinary clarinet solo and woodwind writing more generally relished to the full, the pathos of the final descending flute line pointing to ethical and aesthetic imperatives to create. 

The simple, straightforward effectiveness of ‘and there was Light!’, Haydn’s greatest coup de théâtre, was heightened by the committed weight and clarity of the London Symphony Chorus, here as elsewhere on typically excellent form. For if there were times when I missed the sheer variety of scale (with no larger orchestra) the late Sir Colin Davis brought to this work, there were exceptions, especially on the choral side, the choral section ‘And to the ethereal vaults resound’ a little later on a case in point. There was, moreover, a fine edge, rhythmic and harmonic, to the orchestral playing for ‘endless night’ when, a little before, Uriel told of Hell’s spirits’ fate. The combination of orchestra and chorus was throughout excellent, the contrapuntal clarity of ‘The heavens are telling’ at times revelatory. Haydn’s pictorial instrumental imagery was given its delightful due throughout. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly given his experience in such repertoire, Christophers showed himself particularly alert to Haydn’s neo-Handelian turns, for instance in Raphael’s ‘Rolling in foaming billows’. A wonderful brace of oboes (Olivier Stankewicz and Rosie Jenkins) had me think of Bach, though I think that was more coincidence than direct influence. Here and elsewhere, Roderick Williams was a vivid, highly engaging narrator. Lucy Crowe was more inclined to ornament, sometimes further than one might expect, yet always with sound, stylish reason. Her despatch of Haydn’s coloratura, for instance in ‘With verdure clad’, spun from finest Egyptian cotton, was matched by beautifully centred intonation (and indeed by choral agility in ‘Awake the harp, the lyre awake!’) Her aria, ‘On mighty pens uplifted’ was simply outstanding, ‘cooing’ first coy, then ornamented and joined by LSO woodwind in a flourish of birdsong to have Messiaen eat his heart out. Andrew Staples also offered a communicative, sincere performance, very much in the ‘English tenor’ tradition. 

When all three soloists came together, with or without chorus, they complemented each other well—and, crucially, listened to one another and to their fellow musicians, unselfishly moderated by Christophers as conductor. The trio and chorus ‘Most beautiful appear … The Lord is great’ offered a case in point, though I wondered whether its choral close were just a little too bonny and blithe, lacking in the grandeur both Haydn and Handel deserve yet today all too rarely receive. Similarly, the tempo of the ‘Hymn’ in Part Three suggested a brisk jog around the Garden of Eden rather than the anticipated leisurely stroll. Those three flutes, though, who announced Uriel’s preceding accompagnato, made it abundantly clear why no one would ever wish to leave. Williams and Crowe offered an excellent balance between the knowing and the innocent as Adam and Eve.

Hearing the original English of the bilingual libretto by Gottfried van Swieten sometimes brought me, accustomed to hearing the work in German, a few surprises. (I know the English text well, yet I do not think I have ever heard it performed in concert.) Not only were there obvious differences in phrasing, but shifts in practical meaning too, for instance when ‘bespeak’ (Uriel’s aria, no.24) rather than ‘ihm Liebe’ was repeated. There was no denying, though, the sheer goodness of this work, something we need just as strongly as the war-torn Europe for which it was composed. Let us allow Haydn the last word. In 1801, a Bohemian schoolteacher, Charles Ockl, wrote to him, requesting support after unexpected opposition from the Prague consistory to Ockl’s plans to perform The Creation in church. Haydn replied:

… it was with considerable astonishment that I read of the[se] curious happenings, which … considering the age in which we live, reflect but little credit on the intelligence and emotions of those responsible.

The story of the Creation has always been regarded as most sublime, and as one which inspires the utmost awe in mankind. To accompany this great occurrence with suitable music could certainly produce no other effect than to heighten these sacred emotions in the heart of the listener, and to put him in a frame of mind in which he is most susceptible to the kindness and omnipotence of the Creator. – And this exultation of the most sacred emotions is supposed to constitute desecration of a church?

… it is not unlikely that the listeners went away from my Oratorio with their hearts far more uplifted than after hearing … sermons. No church has ever been desecrated by my Creation; on the contrary: the adoration and worship of the Creator, which it inspires, can be more ardently and intimately felt by playing it in such a sacred edifice. 

Perhaps we can say something similar today for the Barbican and other concert halls. In any case, happy fortieth birthday.

 

'Musick's Monument' - Crowe/Fretwork - Byrd, Gibbons, and Purcell, 7 October 2021

Wigmore Hall

Byrd: Prelude and Ground a 5: ‘The Queen’s Goodnight’
O Lord, how vain
Fantasia a 5: ‘Two parts in one the fourth above’
O that most rare breast
Gibbons: Two Fantasias of 3 parts
Now each flowery bank of May
Byrd: My mistress had a little dog

Purcell: Two Fantazias in 4 parts
O solitude, my sweetest choice, Z406
Gibbons: Two In Nomines
Faire is the rose
Purcell: Two Fantazias in 4 parts
Oedipus, King of Thebes: ‘Music for a while’
The Fairy Queen: ‘When I have often heard young maids complaining’

Lucy Crowe (soprano)
Fretwork (Richard Boothby, Asako Morikawa, Sam Stadlen, Emily Ashton, Joanna Levine)

Thomas Mace’s Musick’s Monument, or, A remembrance of the best practical musick, both divine and civil, that has ever been known to have been in the world divided into three parts, looked back wistfully at an age of English music almost passed. Conservative, even reactionary, Mace detested new-fangled French influences on the musical culture of his own time. He disliked ‘Squaling-Scoulding-Fiddles’, to be used only if balanced by ‘Lusty Full-Sciz’d Theorbos’, and, as favoured sacred music from the age of William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons, elevated music for viol consort, consort songs included, over newer styles and genres. If most of Henry Purcell’s music stood very much in the latter vein, Purcell, in his celebrated Fantazias of 1780, also paid tribute to the golden age of the consort, showing beyond doubt that a composer could be master of both. It was a farewell, though, however masterly—and probably ignored. They went unpublished until 1927, by Peter Warlock, and there is no evidence of performance in Purcell’s lifetime. This concert from Fretwork and Lucy Crowe, then, also looked back at English music of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, less from the standpoint of Mace than from that of Purcell. It proved enjoyable and instructive in equal measure. 

Byrd opened the programme and occupied much of the first half, shared with Gibbons, split between both halves, the younger composer a mediator between Byrd and Purcell. The Queen’s Goodnight, like so much of what was to come, flowed and gently danced: not reduced to merely ‘being’ a dance, but rather partaking its spirit, remembrance, and rejuvenation. The fascination of its harmonies spoke for itself without underlining, whether of false relations or other dissonances. This was a golden age of instrumental variations too, and it showed. Here was a lovely curtain-raiser, also enabling Byrd’s 1588 consort song tributes to Sir Philip Sidney, one to a text by Sidney himself, the other an explicit tribute by Sir Edward Dyer, to emerge as much as companion pieces as contrasts. Crowe’s floating of her melodic line atop the viol music proved undeniably affecting, perhaps especially in the Dyer setting, O that most rare breast. Undimmed in courtliness and affect, it negotiated and combined confessional traditions and boundaries as skilfully as Byrd himself, finally sublimated with quiet ecstasy on ‘thy friend here living dieth’. In between, for instruments only, Two parts in one the fourth above, gently suggested both affinity and variety within the family of consort music, much as one might with later instrumental music of Haydn. Pleasure derived both from occasional grit in the oyster, as well as the oyster itself, was the thing. Closing the first half, owing to a fine ballad-like performance by Crowe and her supporting musicians. 

Gibbons provided another voice, less expansive in the first of his two Fantasias than the second, and perhaps even another world in whose counterpoint one could readily, pleasurably lose oneself. In Fretwork’s performances, both of those Fantasias and two In nomines, it sounded lighter, perhaps more aristocratic, though not necessarily less ingenuous. If I find it less moving, on the whole, than Byrd or Purcell, that may just be me. Now each flowery bank of May had a different flavour, with a nice ambiguity in performance as to any ultimate message, should there be one: ‘… whose love is life, whose hate is death’. In the second half, Faire is the rose was short, sweet, and subtle. 

We lost a Duo in G for two bass viols by Christopher Simpson, Asako Morikawa having sprained her thumb—one would never have known from other performances—but heard four of Purcell’s four-part Fantazias. If there were times when I felt Purcell’s well-nigh Mozartian combination of seemingly effortless mastery and fathomless depth might have been served better by a touch of Romanticism, these were fluent, comprehending performances with their own agenda that had no need to be mine. At their best, they showed a splendid inevitability in unfolding and had me wanting more. Many counsel us against importing modern conceptions of sadness, melancholia, and so on into this music, but so much the worse for them. Purcell’s modernity remains as striking as his historicity; as with any great art, of which this is certainly an instance, the one encourages the other.

O solitude, my sweetest choice, as with all these songs realised by Richard Boothby for his own consort, likewise spoke with almost modern unity of words, music, and underlying sentiment in performance. At any rate, one could hear why Purcell’s word-setting continues to inspire Anglophone composers. Music certainly did our cares beguile ‘for a while’ in the celebrated, loveliest song from Oedipus, King of Thebes. ‘When I have often heard young maids complaining’, from The Fairy Queen, spoke with readier humour, perhaps, than Byrd’s mistress and her dog. It was an animated, captivating performance, as was the surprise encore, as you are unlikely to have heard it before: Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’.

BBC Proms (8) - BBC SSO/Volkov - Lewis and Beethoven, 26 August 2021

Royal Albert Hall

George Lewis: Minds in Flux (world premiere)
Beethoven: Concert Aria: ‘Ah! perfido’ op.65
Beethoven: Symphony no.2 in D major, op.36

Lucy Crowe (soprano)

Damon Holzborn (computer software design/realisation)

Sound Intermedia

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Ilan Volkov (conductor)

This year’s Proms premieres—those I have heard, anyway—have been a mixed bunch: professional enough, yet often safe to the point of anodyne, having one long instead for something decidedly ‘new’ from the repertoire, be it Haydn or Ligeti, Machaut or Schoenberg. George Lewis’s Minds in Flux, however, was the real thing: music with something to say, some point to it beyond fulfilling a commission, whether or not that ‘something’, that ‘point’, remains elusive to verbal expression. It was, dare I suggest, an Albert Hall work too, making full use of the notorious space and acoustic, not so as to be enslaved by it, but rather to create new space within and beyond it, by virtue—not unlike Stockhausen—of electronic means. From its opening, electronic sounds surrounding us, woodwind and their electronic shadows, progeny, Doppelgänger echoing across the hall like gulls, reference points proved but the starting point for music both familiar and unfamiliar. A Stravinsky-meets-jazz chorale, a song, a dance, a moment of rage, a moment of consolation: here was a sonic cornucopia always in flux, the product of minds in flux. If Mahler wanted a symphony to contain everything, a whole world, Lewis seemed to say: there are many more worlds; there are silenced voices too in our colonised world. Let us hear them; let us consider them. It was ominously inviting and invitingly ominous. Perhaps it referred, perhaps not; above all, it played and invited us, our minds and bodies, to play. Charles Ives, I fancied, might have understood this strikingly intelligent, strikingly democratic invitation.

Lucy Crowe joined the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov for Beethoven’s concert aria, ‘Ah! perfido’. It was an almost equally intense reading, dignified in its post-Mozartian, slightly neoclassical way, alert, like Lewis’s work and the performance we had heard of it, to musical shadows too. Strikingly sincere, Crowe showed us that any doubts we might have to the verse (Metastasian recitative, followed by an anonymous aria text) are our problem, or other performers’, not intrinsic. Well supported and, where appropriate, directed by Volkov, Crowe rightly took her time then, rightly, erupted. Here was Beethoven on a grand scale, with passages of moving intimacy both contrasted with and necessary to that scale. 

The Second Symphony followed, in a performance of many virtues, particularly during its second and fourth movements, yet one which never quite addressed that necessary Beethovenian question: what does this mean to us? Again, an answer need not, arguably cannot, be verbal, yet Beethoven’s humanism demands something. The introduction to the first movement was alert and detailed, characterised as elsewhere by fine playing from the BBC SSO. Volkov never quite pinned down a basic pulse, though, with the consequence that it sounded restless rather than expectant, a collection rather than a chain of ideas. The main ‘Allegro con brio’ was better: occasionally hard-driven, yet essentially permitted to speak for itself and all the better for it. If it lacked inevitability, that was more apparent in the ‘Larghetto’, heard also with a keen sense of the music’s sheer loveliness. There was darkness to its heart, too, speaking of and through dialectic necessity. The scherzo was again driven hard, distant rather than immediate. Its trio was well pointed, if slightly lacking in flow. Volkov captured very well the difficult balance at the onset of the finale between quirky incident and onward propulsion. If it was good natured, it had bite too.

Die Zauberflöte, English National Opera, 14 March 2019

Coliseum

Images: © Donald Cooper

Tamino – Rupert Charlesworth

Three Ladies – Susanna Hurrell, Samantha Price, Katie Stevenson

Papageno – Thomas Oliemans

Queen of the Night – Julia Bauer

Monostatos – Daniel Norman

Pamina – Lucy Crowe

Three Spirits – Guillermo Fernandez-Aguaya Martin, Richard Wolfson, Nao Fukui

Speaker – Jonathan Lemalu

Sarastro – Brindley Sherratt

First Priest, First Armoured Man – David Webb

Second Priest, Second Armoured Man – David Ireland

Papagena – Rowan Pierce

Simon McBurney (director)

Josie Daxter (associate director, movement)

Michael Levine (set designs)

Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)

Jean Kalman, Mike Gunning (lighting)

Finn Ross (video)

Gareth Fry, Matthieu Maurice (sound design)

English National Opera Chorus (chorus master: James Henshaw)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Ben Gernon (conductor)

Tamino (Rupert Charlesworth) and Pamina (Lucy Crowe)

When Simon McBurney’s Magic Flute was first staged by ENO, it needed, I think it fair to say, some further work. That it seemed to have received at the time of its first revival, although there was certainly room for more. (Is there not always?) Here, upon its second revival, I could not help but think that there had been something of a reversion, or at least that a general aggressive silliness to the audience made it feel so. Is it really quite so side-splittingly hilarious for someone to write ‘The Magic Flute’ on a board, or for someone to take a photograph? (Worse still, is it really necessary to applaud within a number? A conductor should at least stamp upon such practices, rather than indulge them by pausing.) The most obviously ‘Complicité’ elements of the action, or better its framing, are still handled very well: in general lightly worn, the metatheatricality of sound effects, paper birds, and other ‘workings’ has meaning, wit, and if not quite poignancy, at least permits thoughts of that order. 

A balance is, of course, very difficult to strike in a work with so many competing demands. tendencies, sources, strands of reception; some might argue that it is better not even to try, instead concentrating on one or two. Perhaps. Something more all-embracing is, I think, required or at least desirable. This production certainly attempts that – and sometimes succeeds. It is certainly preferable to its predecessor (Nicholas Hytner), which did not even seem to try. What I missed on this occasion was a greater integration between different strands. A wartime setting seems hinted at, perhaps more than that. (Or is it just a fondness for combat fatigues?) Likewise a somewhat sinister bureaucracy for Sarastro’s brotherhood. (‘Of course’, you might reply, not without reason.) Alas, the logic, the mystery, the magic that might bind these to the rest of what is going on, do not seem to be there; either that, or – perfectly possible, this – I missed them. Inclusion of the Queen of the Night at the close is now such a cliché that it barely registers: nothing wrong with it in itself, but why? Again, it seems unmotivated. The work’s cosmos is unusually varied – not least because, written for a non-court-theatre, and as a Singspiel, it offered librettist and composer far greater freedom than they would ever have been granted for an opera seria or indeed an opera buffa. Making sense of that cosmos and its communicating through words, gesture, and music are key to a success in performance only intermittently realised here.

Papageno (Thomas Oliemans) and
Papagena (Rowan Pierce)

Stephen Jeffreys’s translation sometimes departs considerably from Schikaneder, yet offers welcome relief from the preening self-regard of usual suspects. The translation ‘Queen of Night’ – reproduced in the programme – is a bit odd: not incorrect, yet a departure from universal usage to ends unclear. More seriously, why are the Armoured Men (Geharnischter) listed in the programme as ‘Armed Men’, not at all the same thing? Do such things matter? Yes, especially for a company that prides itself on presenting works in English – and, for once, presented a good case for doing so, the cast’s diction proving uncommonly fine.

For the evening’s true rewards were to be found in the singing – and stage performances more generally. Rupert Charlesworth proved an excellent Tamino, beauty of vocal line allied to unmistakeable sincerity of purpose. It would have been a strange audience member indeed who did not root for him and Lucy Crowe’s equally touching, finely sung Pamina. Julia Bauer’s Queen of (the) Night came as close as many, closer than most, to fulfilling Mozart’s absurd demands. Thomas Oliemans’s Papageno proved a worthy successor to Schikaneder himself, alert to the role’s competing demands without ever alerting us to their difficulty. Brindley Sherratt’s considered – never too considered – Sarastro, Daniel Norman’s lively Monastatos, a fine trio of Ladies and pair of Priests/Armoured Men attested to a casting in depth that has not always been in evidence in recent years at the Coliseum, but which proved very welcome indeed.

Three Ladies (Susanna Hurrell, Samantha Price, Katie Stevenson) and Tamino

Ben Gernon’s conducting had much to be said for it: a few rushed passages notwithstanding, generally sane and varied tempi; command and coordination of the orchestra in the pit and the singers on stage; and undoubted knowledge of the score. What it lacked, at least for me, was any sense of magic, of awe. Partly, that seemed owed to a determination to keep the orchestra down, strings in particular. So much magic and meaning are to be found not on stage, in the pit, that much, alas, was lost. Moreover, as with the production, a sense of greater structure, of the construction of a musico-dramatic world, often proved elusive. How does it make sense for Papageno and the Queen of the Night to feature in the same work, indeed to interact meaningfully? How, moreover, does it make sense for a neo-Bachian chorale prelude and the Papageno-Papagena duet not only to coexist, but to form part of a coherent, meaningfully dramatic whole? The answer may be magical as much as logical; it may not be reducible to words. Karl Böhm and Colin Davis knew how to accomplish this. So have directors such as Achim Freyer and David McVicar, both surely close to their best here. This is where the order’s ultimate wisdom lies, its secrets vouchsafed to and by a band of initiates whom we should treasure. We continue, it seems, to search for an interpretative Tamino and Pamina to join them.

The Cunning Little Vixen, Berlin Philharmonic, 12 October 2017

Philharmonie

Forester – Gerald Finley

Forester’s Wife – Paulina Malefane

Schoolmaster, Mosquito, Rooster – Burkhard Ulrich

Priest, Badger – Willard White

Hárašta – Hanno Müller-Brachmann

Vixen Sharp-Ears – Lucy Crowe

Fox, Crested Hen – Angela Denoke

Pásek – Friedemann Büttner

Mrs Pásková, Lapák the dog – Anna Lapkovskaja

Jay – Lotta Jultmark

Child soloists (in various of the smaller roles) – Anna Damiano, Ève Davillers, Victoria Florczak, Anton Hoppe, Artina Kapreljan, Raphael Küster, Johanna Mielisch, Luise Mielisch, Paul Mielisch, Johann von der Nahmer, Gabriel Pappalardo, Jonas Rattle

Peter Sellars (director)

Ben Zamorsa (lighting)

Nick Hillel (video)

‘Vocal Heroes’ Children’s Chorus from the Berlin Philharmonic’s Educational Programme

Vocalconsort Berlin (chorus master: David Cavelius)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Simon Rattle (conductor)

The best news, and indeed the most important news, is that this performance of The Cunning Little Vixen had clearly proved an invaluable experience for the children on the Berlin Philharmonic’s Educational Programme. It was not simply a matter of having participated in rehearsals and performance, but of a longer, deeper creative project, ‘MusikPLUS Fabelwesen' (‘Creatures from Fables,’ literally, which in this case probably works better than the more common ‘Mythological Creatures’), which had run from the middle of September until now. Under the artistic guidance of Berlin Philharmonic trombonist, Thomas Leyendecker, singer Judith Kamphues, and pianist Daniel Grote, children from St Paul’s School in Moabit had explored themes, musical and conceptual, from Janáček’s opera, in all manner of ways: music, movement, and so on. They had learned a good deal, it seems, about language too – given their multifarious backgrounds and the Czech of the performance. Splendid stuff then!

There was much to enjoy musically in the performance as performance as well, not least the excellent contribution of the children, whether chorally or as soloists. Mention should be made here of the work of Snezana Nena Brzakovic and Tobias Walenciak in rehearsing the child soloists and children’s chorus respectively. Otherwise, amongst the adults, I felt – not speaking Czech, I can say no more than ‘felt’ – a certain lack of idiom and intrinsic command at times and in certain cases, but nothing too grave. Willard White’s casting seemed odd; his voice is now, sadly, quite hollowed out. Angela Denoke, though, whose performances have proved vocally variable for quite a while, seemed at home in the role of the Fox; her dramatic commitment has never, of course, been in doubt. Lucy Crowe gave a spirited and vocally attentive account of Vixen Sharp-Ears herself. Gerald Finely proved typically thoughtful – if more than usually hamstrung by Peter Sellars’s bizarre collection of production clichés – performance as the Forester: more physical, indeed tortured, than Thomas Allen, say, but none the worse for that. As the Forester’s Wife, Paulina Malefane offered a well-judged balance between the strict and the likeable. Burkhard Ulrich, a justly esteemed Loge and Mime, emerged with great credit in each of his different roles: quite a test in itself.

The Berlin Philharmonic proved more than adept at communicating the changing demands both of the score and of Simon Rattle’s conception of it. The precision and almost Stravinskian (for Rattle) obsessiveness of the opening were balanced, or perhaps better opposed, by a well-nigh Straussian opulence later on, especially at climaxes and the approach to them. Perhaps there was room for something more in the way of mediation between such extremes, but that would be almost to find fault for the sake of it. It was a bold, dramatic orchestral performance, born of longstanding acquaintance with the score on Rattle’s part. There is so much in Janáček’s – frankly – miraculous score: perhaps more than can ever be conveyed, or at least appreciated, in a single performance. No one would have been disappointed by this, though, and I suspect that most would have heard things they had not heard before. Rattle’s role not just as conductor in the traditional sense but as enabler of the activities of children and adults alike showed him at his best: certainly something London has good reason to look forward to.

You felt a ‘but’ coming, dear reader? Of course you did, for it was ‘trailed’ in the second paragraph. This was not Peter Sellars at his very worst: may ENO’s Indian Queen – shudder – retain that title forever. However, it seemed bizarre both in its incoherence and in its often wild inappropriateness for children. ‘Distracting’ is a word so loved of operatic reactionaries that one hesitates to use it at all. However, it seems difficult to avoid doing so, and not worth the effort, with respect to the video screens dotted around the hall. The film had its justification, I suppose, when it showed pictures of ‘real-life’ versions of the animals singing at the time – although might not some small degree of costume or other stage indication have done the job better? Other scenes from nature did no particular harm either, although they showed a tendency, an irrelevant one at that, towards the generic wildlife documentary. The opening video sequence was, shall we say, very school biology class. But what on earth was Sellars thinking of when introducing a confusing – merely confusing, not ‘edgy’, not ‘transgressive’, not ‘daring’ – staged sequence in which the Forester appeared to have taken the Vixen home to have sex with her, sleeping together until discovered by his Wife. The poor Forester – ‘poor’ in terms of what was done to the character, not in terms of his deeds! – appeared then to be permanently traumatised by the whole affair, although the Vixen seemed fine.

Once again then, whatever his intentions, Sellars managed to turn something into a therapy session for that most vulnerable, threatened of groups: white men. Weirdly, the Forester and his wife appeared to live in a modern apartment block, several floors up; at least that seemed to be the indication of repeated footage (from the outside) of said apartment block. Quite what that was supposed to add, save for confusion about where much of the rest of the action was taking place, was, to say the least, unclear. If Sellars were trying to say that everything was in the Forester’s imagination, and that it was all an anthropomorphic projection, that certainly did not come across – either to me or to anyone else I asked. I eventually gave up on what I was seeing, insofar as that were possible. A concert performance, or concert staging in which the children at least could still have run around and enjoyed themselves, would surely have been a much better idea.

Die Zauberflöte, English National Opera, 5 February 2016

Coliseum

(sung in English, as The Magic Flute)

Tamino – Allan Clayton

Three Ladies – Eleanor Dennis, Catherine Young, Rachael Lloyd
Papageno – Peter Coleman-Wright
Queen of the Night – Ambur Braid
Monostatos – John Graham-Hall
Pamina – Lucy Crowe
Three Boys – Anton May, Yohan Rodas, Oscar Simms
Speaker – Darren Jeffery
Sarastro – James Creswell
Priests, Armoured Men – Rupert Charlesworth, Frederick Long
Papagena – Soraya Mafi

Simon McBurney (director)

Josie Daxter (revival director, movement)
Michael Levine (set designs)
Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)
Jean Kalman, Mike Gunning (lighting)
Finn Ross (video)
Gareth Fry, Matthieu Maurice (sound design)
 

Whilst the Arts Council - until recently plaything to that cultural luminary, Big Brother’s Peter Bazalgette, friend and appointee of Jeremy Hunt – has been doing its best to destroy the English National Opera, ENO has fought back in the best way possible: in the theatre. I felt ambivalent about this production of The Magic Flute first time around; it was certainly an improvement upon itspredecessor, but other than that, I was somewhat lukewarm. At the time, I welcomed its emphasis upon theatricality and the workings of that theatricality, whilst wondering whether a little less might have been more. That I still feel; it is not clear to me what is contributed by the writing of ‘The Magic Flute’ on a screen during the Overture, save, alas, for permitting noisy sections of the audience to laugh uproariously. If they find that – and, it would seem, pretty much anything – so utterly hilarious and/or conducive to loud discussion, then I might suggest that they seek help; the rest of us certainly needed help at times in order to hear the performance.

 

Whether the rest had been toned down a little, I am not sure; maybe I was just feeling less curmudgeonly, in which case I owe Simon McBurney and Complicité something of an apology; I certainly enjoyed the production more than I had last time. The sound booths, in which we see and hear the making or an impression of making of sound ‘effects’ is very Complicité, of course, and I suspect that some opera-goers loved it because it was new to them. I still wish that something more were actually done with these aspects of the production, that there were more interrogation of the work and what it might mean; yet, by the same token, there is an openness to interpretation that should not necessarily be confused with non-interpretation. There was, I thought or at least felt, a stronger sense of magic this time; whether that were a product of the production’s touring in the meantime, or of greater responsivity on my part, I am genuinely not sure. Stephen Jeffreys's translation is exemplary; if one is going to perform the work in English, a witty yet serious approach such as this is unquestionably the way to go. It enables one to approach the heart of the work rather than shouting 'look at me!'

 

For me, however, the strongest reasons to enthuse were musical. Mark Wigglesworth led an excellent account of the score. No, of course it was not Colin Davis; but we do not need to hear unconvincing imitation of past glories. Wigglesworth’s tempi tended to be swifter, although not unreasonably so; crucially, there was no sense of harrying the score, of preventing it from breathing. There was no absurd rushing through ‘Ach, ich fühl’s’, nor indeed through any of the most tender moments. Moreover, the ENO Orchestra and Chorus, fighting back again where it matters most strongly, were on excellent form throughout. Orchestral light and shade was present in abundance, even if I did not especially care for the use of natural trumpets. (That seems to be the latest fashion with modern orchestras, a fashion I confess to finding incomprehensible, when modern instruments are otherwise used.) The chorus, presently under threat from management cuts, showed incontrovertibly why it deserves our fullest support, its members as convincing individually as they were corporately.

 

Allan Clayton offered a fine vocal performance as Tamino, although I think the production might have made him a little more princely. Ardent and lyrical, he was a worthy successor to Ben Johnson. Lucy Crowe’s Pamina was as touching as one could hope for, musical and dramatic qualities as one; hers was a performance that would grace any stage. James Creswell’s Sarastro was unusually light of tone; there were times when I hankered after something darker, more traditionally Germanic, but on its own terms, this was an intelligent portrayal, with considerable stage presence. Ambur Braid may not have hit every note perfectly as the Queen of the Night – who does, at least on stage? – but hers was a committed, unusually human performance; I hope that we shall see and hear more from her. Peter Coleman-Wright’s Papageno confounded expectations. Here we had a highly convincing portrayal of a bird-catcher left on the shelf, the sadness arising from society’s contempt for the ageing as much as his usual predicament. (It seems a perfectly reasonable reappraisal in a work much preoccupied with age, which really had me thinking.) John Graham-Hall’s Cockney Monostatos showed what a truly versatile artist this is; it is only a few months ago that I saw him as Schoenberg’s Aron in Paris. All of the smaller roles were taken well, showing once again how crucial a sense of company is to performance; if only ENO’s management would watch and listen.

 

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.  

 

 

Il barbiere di Siviglia, English National Opera, 25 February 2013

(sung in English as The Barber of Seville)

The Coliseum

Fiorello – Alexander Robin Baker

Count Almaviva – Andrew Kennedy
Figaro – Benedict Nelson
Rosina – Lucy Crowe
Doctor Bartolo – Andrew Shore
Don Basilio – David Soar
Berta – Katherine Broderick
Ambrogio – Geraint Hylton
An Official – Roger Begley
A Notary – Allan Adams

Jonathan Miller (director)

Peter Relton (revival director)
Tanya McCallin (designs)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Genevieve Ellis)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Jaime Martin (conductor)

 

ENO’s advertising emphasises the ‘25^th anniversary year’ of Jonathan Miller’s staging of The Barber of Seville. It holds the stage well enough without offering any especial insight – at least by now. The programme book mentioned commedia dell’arte: Tanya McCallin’s designs are of that world, certainly, even if there does not seem to be a great deal in Miller’s production that goes beyond the general ‘look’ of that tradition. Unlike many endlessly revived productions, this, then, is not in itself particularly tired, and one can readily imagine it offering the opportunity for new casts to come in and assume their roles without a great deal of stage rehearsal. By the same token, when compared with, for instance, John Copley’s considerably more venerable Royal Opera La bohème, which I happened to see earlier in the month, the staging does not especially sparkle, enlighten, or indeed charm either. It would do no harm to have a little Regietheater cast Rossini’s way. Either that, or assemble a cast whose sparkle would lift the work above the merely quotidian.

 

I say ‘the work’, but this performance, unfortunately, put me in mind of Carl Dahlhaus’s ‘twin musical cultures’ of the nineteenth century: too clear a distinction, no doubt, but nevertheless heuristically useful. On the one hand, one has the culture of the musical work, as understood in an emphatic sense, that of Beethoven and his successors; on the other, one has ‘a Rossini score ... a mere recipe for performance, and it is the performance which forms the crucial aesthetic arbiter as the realisation of a draft rather than an exegesis of a text’. The problem was that this performance, taken as a whole, simply did not sparkle as Rossini must. One therefore became of the score as a decidedly inferior, indeed well-nigh interminable work. Repetitions grated and a good part of the audience was espied, furtively or less furtively, glancing at wristwatches. If Rossini’s ‘musical thought hinged on the performance as an event,’ then this was an unhinged performance – and not, alas, in the expressionistic sense.

 

Jaime Martin’s conducting started well enough. There was throughout a welcome clarity in the score; this was not, at least, Rossini attempting and failing to be Mozart or Beethoven. Give or take the odd orchestral slip, there might have been much to enjoy in the contribution of the ENO Orchestra, considered in itself.  However, impetus was soon lost, and any ‘purely musical’ tension soon sagged. Whether the first act were actually as long as it felt, I am not sure, but many during the interval opined that it seemed as though it was never going to end. If Rossini’s repetitions as opposed to development serve a dramatic purpose, one can readily forget them; here they were apparent in unfortunately lonely fashion. I could not help but mentally contrast the extraordinary use to which Beethoven, for instance in the Waldstein Sonata, puts simple tonic and dominant harmony, to the tedium induced on this occasion. For some reason, the fortepiano was employed as a continuo instrument: a strange fashion, which has enslaved musicians who would never think of using it in solo repertoire. Performance, then, failed to elevate the ‘work’. At least the English translation, by Amanda and Anthony Holden was a cut above the average.

 

The greater fault in any case lay elsewhere, above all in Andrew Kennedy’s Almaviva. His casting seemed simply inexplicable. Almost entirely lacking in coloratura, let alone Florez-like facility therewith, he resorted to mere crooning, a state of affairs worsened by the application at seemingly random intervals of unnervingly thick vibrato. His stage presence was of a part with his vocal performance. Benedict Nelson’s Figaro started off in reasonably convincing fashion, but by the end was somewhat hoarse and throughout lacked the pinpoint precision that might have lifted the performance. By contrast, Lucy Crowe was an excellent Rosina. Her coloratura was impeccable, her gracious stage presence no less so. Andrew Shore reminded us of his skills as a comic actor in the role of Doctor Bartolo, and Katherine Broderick also took the opportunity to shine as Berta. Sadly, the increasingly lacklustre conducting and the embarrassing performance of Kennedy conspired to negate those positive aspects of the performance, rendering one tired with the ‘work’, however it were considered.