The Cunning Little Vixen, English National Opera, 22 February 2022

Coliseum

 

Images: Clive Barda

Forester – Lester Lynch
Vixen – Sally Matthews
Forester’s Wife, Owl – Madeleine Shaw
Schoolmaster, Mosquito – Alan Oke
Priest, Badger – Clive Bayley
Poacher – Ossian Huskinson
Innkeeper, Cock – John Findon
Fox – Pumeza Matshikiza
Innkeeper’s Wife, Chief Hen – Gweneth Ann Rand
Dog – Claire Barnett Jones
Pepík, Woodpecker – Alexandra Oomens
Frantík, Jay – Ffion Edwards
Harašta – Ossian Huskinson
Dragonfly – Joy Constantinides
Frog – Robert Berry-Roe
Cricket – Ethan James
Grasshopper – Kavya Kutsa

Jamie Manton (director)
Tom Scutt (designs)
Lucy Carter (lighting)
Jenny Ogilvie (movement)

Children’s Chorus (chorus director: Patrick Barett)
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus director: Mark Biggins)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

Failure to love the operas—more generally, the music—of Janáček would be a strange, soulless thing indeed. It seems more to be opera companies, strange, incomprehensible entities, than opera-goers, be they casual or more seasoned and committed, that accomplish that strange, incomprehensible failure. Fortunately, since opera returned to London, we have had opportunity to see a Janáček opera at Holland Park, Covent Garden, and now at the Coliseum too, with Glyndebourne adding to the tally not so far away. Holland Park’s Cunning Little Vixen last summer makes ENO’s claim that the opera is ‘rarely staged’ especially peculiar, but arts advertising is another strange and incomprehensible world. We can and should be grateful for Janáček wherever we find his works staged; that is surely the important thing, not least at a time when humanity stands in danger of extinction from so many catastrophes at once.

The idea of Jamie Manton’s new production seemed to be that the human world aged more readily and found itself less capable of regeneration, perhaps in light of its incomprehensible despoliation of Nature, than the natural world of animals, to the detriment of the slow-witted former and probably the quicker-witted latter too. Deforestation was, I think, part of that tale, felled logs across the stage, living wood turned dead at the hand of man. Silent child and/or adolescent versions of certain characters—the Forester, his Wife, the Vixen, and the Dragonfly—heightened the sense of cyclical, generational narrative, freer than their elder selves, without merely getting in the way. Just as important, they and other silent roles gave opportunity to child performers, as of course did the children’s chorus. Vivid, painterly impressions of human life and the seasons were unfurled: always a dramatic reminder that what we think of as Nature, or at least what we can ever know of it, will always remain an uneasy compromise with the natural world 'itself'. 

There was also an intriguing sense of the story, or at least the human part of it, lying closer to earlier Janáček works such as Jenůfa and Katya Kabanova. When the Forester took the Vixen home, it was indoors, to a claustrophobic setting that would not have been out of place in a typical ‘contemporary’-minded production of either of those. This Moravia was far from a rural idyll, though it arguably had more in common with the stage of life at which Janáček wrote his opera, memories of his relationship with Kamila Stösslová colouring the Forester’s strange love for the Vixen and ultimately that sense of transcendental communion engendered by that love.

Martyn Brabbins led a loving—perhaps in the third act, a little too loving—musical account, especially strong in conveying not only the metrical implications of Janáček’s use of Czech speech rhythms, but how evidently felt they might be by performers and audience alike (even in English translation). Here was a score clearly internalised, whether its moments of rapture or its (often overlooked) harder edges, chiming nicely with what we saw on stage. By the nature of the work, a Vixen performance needs to be a company effort. That was certainly what we saw and heard here.

Sally Matthews shone in the title role, her bell-like soprano emotionally adaptive to a variety of situations, Pumeza Matshikiza’s Fox similarly likeable and (strangely?) relatable. The journey of Lester Lynch’s Forester offered a crucial dramatic counterpoint, ably supported and brought into relief by a host of sharply drawn cameos. It would ultimately be a little pointless to go through the large cast, but Madeleine Shaw’s Forester’s Wife and Ossian Huskinson’s Harašta seemed to me particularly vivid portrayals, in stage and vocal terms. Storm Eunice, the natural world in notably hostile guise, may have put paid to the premiere, but there will always be more to come, further opportunities. Like the Forester, we human beings must learn better how to take them—before it is too late.

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, English National Opera, 21 February 2015

Coliseum

(sung in English, as The Mastersingers of Nuremberg)

Walther – Gwyn Hughes Jones

Eva – Rachel Nicholls
Magdalene – Madeleine Shaw
David – Nicky Spence
Hans Sachs – Iain Paterson
Sixtus Beckmesser – Andrew Shore
Veit Pogner – James Creswell
Fritz Kothner – David Stout
Kunz Vogelgesang – Peter van Hulle
Konrad Nachtigall – Quentin Hayes
Ulrich Eisslinger – Timothy Robinson
Hermann Ortel – Nicholas Folwell
Balthasar Zorn – Richard Roberts
Augustin Moser – Stephen Rooke
Hans Folz – Roderick Earle
Hans Schwarz – Jonathan Lemalu
Night Watchman – Nicholas Crawley

Richard Jones (director)

Paul Steinberg (set designs)
Buki Schiff (costumes)
Mimi Jordan Sherrin (lighting)
Lucy Burge (choreography)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Edward Gardner (conductor)
 

Although the English National Opera has been decidedly sparing with its Wagner for quite some time now, its recent track record, leaving aside a disastrous Ring, has perhaps been better than that at Covent Garden. Above all, I am thinking of Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s production of Parsifal, sadly revived but once, with estimable conducting from ENO’s soon-to-be Music Director, Mark Wigglesworth, and a fine cast (bar an unfortunate Kundry). The contrast with the Royal Opera’s recent Parsifal – a production that appeared to offer a bizarre tribute to Jimmy Savile, a Music Director quite out of his depth, and a tenor whose replacement with a pneumatic drill would have been more or less universally welcomed – was telling. Here, a Meistersinger production originally seen in Cardiff again proved preferable to Covent Garden’s most recent offering (an especially sad state of affairs at the sometime house of Bernard Haitink). If we quietly leave to one side the most extravagant claims heard over the past fortnight – surely more a consequence of sympathy with and support for ENO in the face of financial and managerial difficulties than of properly critical reception – this proved something to be cherished, something of which ENO could justly be proud: a good, and in many respects very good, company performance.

Edward Gardner’s conducting certainly marked an advance upon his 2012 Flying Dutchman. One would hardly expect someone conducting The Mastersingers for the first time to give a performance at the level of a Haitink or a Thielemann, let alone the greatest conductors of the past; nor did he. Yet, once we were past a fitful first-act Prelude – I began to wonder whether we were in for a Harnoncourt-lite assault upon Wagner! – Gardner’s reading permitted the score to flow as it should. (I shudder in horror when I recall Antonio Pappano’s hackwork – a generous description – at Covent Garden.) If there was rarely the orchestral weight, the grounding in the bass, that Wagner’s work ideally requires, relative lightness of touch was perhaps no bad thing for lighter voices than one would generally encounter. Moreover, Gardner seemed surer as time went on: not an unusual thing in this score, for even so fine a Wagnerian such as Daniele Gatti gave a similar impression a year-and-a-half ago in Salzburg, coming ‘into focus’ more strongly as the work progressed. Moreover, orchestral playing, considered simply in itself, was excellent throughout; a larger body of strings would have been welcome, but one cannot have everything. The ENO Chorus, clearly well trained by Martin Fitzpatrick, offered sterling service in the best sense: weighty where required, yet anything but undifferentiated. Orchestra and chorus alike have prospered under Gardner’s leadership; they are treasures the company and country at large have the strongest of obligations to protect.

What of Richard Jones’s production? Clearly, to anyone familiar with the work of Stefan Herheim, or, from an earlier generation, say, Harry Kupfer and Götz Friedrich, there has again been an excess of extravagant praise. The production rarely gets in the way: certainly a cause for celebration. Yet, by the same token, it has nothing in particular to add to our understanding, however diverting the ‘spot the German artist on the stage curtain’ might be. (I could not help but smile at the mischievous inclusion of Frank Castorf.) A predictably post-modern mix of nineteenth- and sixteenth(?)-century costume could have been used to say something interesting about Wagner’s donning earlier, anachronistic garb (that is, Bach rather than something ‘authentic’). It would need to have been more sharply defined and directed, though; here, it remains on the level of the mildly confusing, or at least incoherent. One has a sense of community, but it is difficult to discern much in the way of the darker side of the work – without which, the light makes less impression, just as its ‘secondary’ diatonicism remains predicated, both immediately and more reflectively, upon the chromaticism of Tristan. I can see why Jones might have opted – at least that is what I think he was doing – to present Hans Sachs as suffering from bipolar disorder, doing an irritatingly silly dance at one point, prior to slumping into depression. Had that been a personal illustration of the Schopenhauerian Wahn afflicting the world more generally, it would have worked a great deal better, though, than an all-too-simple explanation for Sachs’s mood-swings. The translation, similarly mistaking the personal for the metaphysical, certainly did not help: ‘Mad! Mad! Everyone’s mad!’ for ‘Wahn! Wahn! Überall Wahn!’ If that were misleading, though, far worse was the bizarre reference to ‘ancient Rome’ instead of the Holy Roman Empire in Sachs’s final peroration, rendering his warnings meaningless and merely absurd. There is enough uninformed misunderstanding of this scene as it is, largely born, it seems, by Anglophone audiences being unable or unwilling to read what Wagner actually wrote; further confusion such as that is anything but helpful.

Jones certainly did score, though, in his adroit direction of the cast on stage, although much of that credit should certainly go directly to members of that cast. Andrew Shore’s Beckmesser was an unalloyed joy, treading the difficult line between comedy and dignity as surely as anyone was is likely to see today. His diction was beyond reproach, seamless integration of Wort und Ton almost having one forget the problems of translation. James Creswell’s rich bass similarly impressed, having one wish that Pogner’s role might be considerably expanded. David Stout’s Kothner elicited a not dissimilar reaction from this listener. Iain Paterson’s voice is less ideally suited to his role, that of Sachs, but there was no doubting his commitment to role and performance, the thoughtfulness of which offered many compensations. The other Masters and Nicholas Crawley’s sumptuously-clad Night Watchmen were an impressive bunch too. I wondered whether, to begin with, Gwyn Hughes Jones’s Walther was a little too Italianate in style; that is doubtless more a matter of taste than anything else, though, and either the performance or my ears adjusted – or both. He certainly went from strength to strength in the second and third acts, experiencing no difficulties whatsoever in making himself heard above the rest of the ensemble, without any recourse to barking. Nicky Spence’s characterful David – it would, admittedly, be an odd David who was not characterful! – struggled a little with his higher notes in the first act, but, like the cast as a whole, offered a portrayal considerably more than the sum of its parts. I was less keen on Rachel Nicholls’s somewhat harsh-toned Eva, having the distinct impression that her voice was being forced, perhaps on account of the size of the theatre. (But then, Wagner tends to be performed in larger theatres.) Madeleine Shaw’s Magdalene was straightforwardly a joy to hear, as impressive in its way as the assumptions of Shore and Creswell. Again, it was difficult not to wish for more.

So, despite certain reservations, this was a Meistersinger to be reckoned with. On a number of occasions, especially during the third act, work and performance brought a lump to my throat, even once a tear to my eye. That, surely, is the acid test – and it was readily passed.