Noye's Fludde, English National Opera, 3 July 2019

Theatre Royal Stratford East, London

God – Suzanne Bertish

Mrs Noah – Louise Callinan

Mr Noah – Marcus Farnsworth

Lyndsey Turner (director)

Soutra Gilmour (designs)

Oliver Fenwick (lighting)

Luke Halls (video)

Lynne Page (movement)

Wayne McGregor (choreography)

Eva Sampson (assistant director)

Children from Brampton Primary School and Churchfields Junior School

Community Choir

Orchestra of the English National Opera and other musicians

Martin Fitzpatrick (conductor)

First and foremost, the young – in certain cases, less young – performers in this Britten collaboration between ENO and Theatre Royal Stratford East gave all that they had. They will have learned a great deal from the experience: not only in a specifically ‘musical’ sense, but about cooperation, collaboration, being part of something bigger than themselves. They relished their moments on stage and in the orchestra, supported by professional performers; so too, very clearly, did friends, families, and other supporters, not least a wonderfully appreciative child seated not so far from me. Solo spots were often beautifully done, one boy treble in particular. (Alas, I cannot credit the child performers, since all parts were doubled, and I have no indication who was performing on which night.) Some may go on to study and to make music; most will probably not. Many, however, will in other ways recall and build on this experience of community opera. There are lessons social, political, theological, artistic to be learned here, as much by the audience as those on stage. Let us hope that they will be – just as they were in the ‘original’ Chester mystery plays.

Lyndsey Turner’s – and her team’s – production told the story of Noye’s Fludde clearly, directly, and colourfully. I was initially a little surprised to see God begin to divest Herself of Her clothing at the close, but shall not spoil the surprise. The final rainbow could not help but make a point beyond Noah’s tale. Soutra Gilmour’s designs were very much part and parcel of this, likewise Wayne McGregor’s choreography for the raven and dove. Once again, all was considerably more than the sum of its parts, albeit with no disrespect to often considerable parts. It proved a welcome touch to have the Old Testament God as a woman, in a (spoken) performance both declamatory and humane from Suzanne Bertish. Marcus Farnsworth and Louise Callinan proved decidedly luxury casting as Mr and Mrs Noah, rightly taking – and showing – just as much care as they would have done onstage at the Coliseum. The placing of the orchestra was not ideal: on a platform above the stage action, much potential immediacy was lost, at least initially. One’s ears almost always adjust, though; Britten’s construction soon began to take meaningful dramatic and musical shape, after a fashion surely perceptible to all. I can imagine the work having been conducted more incisively than by Martin Fitzpatrick, but his priorities doubtless lay elsewhere in challenging yet rewarding coordination of such varied forces. The hymn sections with which we all joined in imparted enough sense of observance to remind us of the truer purpose of Noye’s Fludde and its performance. Let us hope for more such occasions.

Così fan tutte, English National Opera, 22 May 2014

Coliseum

Fiordiligi – Kate Valentine

Dorabella – Christine Rice

Guglielmo – Marcus Farnsworth

Ferrando – Randall Bills

Despina – Mary Bevan

Don Alfonso – Roderick Williams

Phelim McDermott (director)

Tom Pye (set designs)

Laura Hopkins (costumes)

Paule Constable (lighting)

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

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

I hoped I should never live to see a worse staging of Così fan tutte than Jonathan Miller’s; indeed, I should not have thought it possible. It may resemble the proverbial variety of judgement concerning angels on a pinhead – though I have never quite understood the objection to scholasticism as such – but Phelim McDermott’s mindless farrago may well have edged to victory, or to whatever we shall elect to call it. Having deliberately waited a couple of days, to give my initial anger time to cool, I still find McDermott’s ‘entertainment’, for want of a better word, one of the most offensive vulgarisations Mozart can ever have received, even if we include nineteenth- and twentieth-century maulings of the text.

 

Miller at least spoke about the artificiality of the work being crucial to its understanding, though it was difficult to see how that informed a staging that was merely tacky. McDermott seems to have no ideas whatsoever, whether appropriate or otherwise. The designs are doubtless what had been requested; the problem is the lack of any justification for them or for what unfolded in front of them. This most exquisitely painful of works, in which that artificiality is the only way we can deal with realities that are otherwise simply too agonising to bear, becomes a silly story – well, barely even that – set, for no apparent reason, in a 1950s (?) American seaside resort. Now where Così is set really does not matter; it is in no sense ‘about’ eighteenth-century Naples, though an eighteenth-century understanding of musical form and parody remains absolutely crucial. (How on earth can one perform, stage, or appreciate ‘Come scoglio’ without some inkling of the opera seria it parodies? It is akin to the iconography of saints; some things one simply has to know, in order to understanding the painting in question.) Abstraction tends to work better, as in the case of the Magritte-like Salzburg production of Karl-Ernst and Ursel Herrmann, and/or an exploration of the work’s dark eroticism, as in Salzburg’s unforgettable predecessor, from Hans Neuenfels. At any rate, there is no danger of representation, let alone probing, of musical and/or verbal parody, of eroticism, or of anything whatsoever. Instead, we have a series of scenes whose sole purpose seemed to be to bring on an irrelevant troupe of circus-like artists, the ‘Skills Ensemble’. A moronic audience laughed at everything it did: people drawing words out of a box and holding them up resulted in helpless belly-aching.

 

Still worse, though, was the applause endured not only between numbers, but within them. I am not sure that I have heard greater violence done to Mozart than by those ‘clapping terrorists’. As for having Despina’s appearance as notary transformed into the appearance of a Texan (the accent…!) entertainer, to which some of the audience elected to clap along, I can safely say I have never experienced anything like it, and earnestly pray that I shall never do so again. In the context, the ‘traditional’ cuts I usually deplore might usefully have been expanded, perhaps to the extent that Mozart’s music were preserved entirely for another occasion. Jeremy Sams’s self-regarding ‘translation’ did not help. Veering wildly between something akin to translation and free composition, it had no settled voice of its own. For some reason, any forced rhyme – for instance, ‘rabbit’ with ‘grab it’ – elicited yet more helpless laughter from the audience. ‘Fifty bucks’ cued yet more hilarity; is it not utterly hilarious that someone should mention American currency? Perhaps the nadir, though, came with a bizarre interpolation of gratuitous racism, one of the men – I cannot remember which – saying that he would rather marry a ‘gypsy on a dung-hill’ than either of the ladies. It must, I think, have been at the exchange ‘Vorrei sposar piuttosto la barca di Caronte/La grotta di Vulcano’. Quite why that would suggest such a slur upon a vulnerable people is quite beyond me; needless to say, the audience exploded.

 

There was not a great deal to cheer about in the performances either, though, with one exception, they marked a significant improvement upon the staging. That exception was Randall Bills’s Ferrando, quite the worst I have heard: a mixture of strenuous over-emoting on top with persistent weakness of tone and flatness lower in the range. I have not had much patience with the talk in some quarters that ENO should be casting more English artists; it is not, after all, an extension of UKIP.  In this case, however, it is difficult to understand why one would go to the trouble of importing an American tenor who was so clearly not up to the job. Marcus Farnsworth, however, showed a good degree of swagger as Guglielmo. Kate Valentine and Christine Rice had their moments as Fiordiligi and Dorabella. There was palpable sincerity to much of what they sang, though neither quite had the measure of Mozart’s coloratura, and blend sometimes proved elusive. Mary Bevan’s Despina was strongly projected, if some way from a paragon of style. Even Roderick Williams, a singer whom I have always greatly admired, seemed somewhat out of sorts, his first scene in particular weakly sung, almost to the point of inaudibility. No one, however, should have been asked to indulge in the embarrassing finger-clicking that accompanied (I think) ‘È la fede delle femmine’. Maybe, with the exception of the tenor, matters would have improved dramatically with a better staging; maybe some of the cast were just having an off-night. If so, one could hardly blame them.

 

Ryan Wigglesworth’s conducting proved disappointing too. The Overture was not only taken far too fast; it was brutal. As those of us who are regulars at the Coliseum know very well, the ENO Orchestra is a fine ensemble. Here it sounded dull and uninvolving, picking up a little in the second act. Of grace, agony, wonder, any of the human and divine qualities Mozart demands, and through which his drama develops, we heard little of all. It was not really a matter of tempi, although, more often than not, they were on the fast side. More fundamentally, there was little sense – and of course the staging did not help – of what lay in, between, beneath the notes. Wigglesworth is an excellent musician; Mozart, however, is very clearly not his thing. If only it had been possible to lie back, to think of Sir Colin Davis…

Der Freischütz, LSO/Davis, 21 April 2012

Barbican Hall

Ottokar, Zamiel – Stephan Loges
Kuno – Martin Snell
Agathe – Christine Brewer
Ännchen – Sally Matthews
Kaspar – Lars Woldt
Max – Simon O’Neill
Hermit – Gidon Saks
Killian – Marcus Farnsworth
Four Bridesmaids – Lucy Hall
Narrator – Malcom Sinclair

London Symphony Chorus
London Symphony Orchestra
Sir Colin Davis (conductor)


The unfashionableness of Der Freischütz in England is a little baffling. In its day, not only was the opera celebrated across Germany, it soon conquered other European stages and indeed theatres worldwide. Premiered at the Berlin Schauspielhaus in 1821, by the end of the decade it had already received productions in Danish, Swedish, Czech, Russian, English, French, Hungarian, Polish and Dutch, and by 1850, stagings had been mounted as far afield as Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, and Sydney. Of course, it is in many ways the quintessential German Romantic opera, though one should always remember how much influence other ‘national’ traditions wield over it, but it is saddening that we, or at least the powers that be, should apparently evince so little interest in this tradition. Oberon was programmed to appear this season at Covent Garden, a mouthwatering prospect, only to be cancelled in favour of yet another run – within the same season! – for La traviata. The only staging of Der Freischütz I have seen in London, or indeed elsewhere, was that by ENO in 1999. Meanwhile, Calixto Bieito has just presented a new production in Berlin for the Komische Oper, a must-see staging by all accounts. Perhaps ENO, with its reinvigorated interest in co-productions will bring it across the Channel at some point; we can but hope. Many thanks, in any case, are due to the LSO for this concert performance.

It is not, of course, a work without its problems, first and foremost of which is surely Johann Friedrich Kind’s libretto (even if that seems a masterpiece when compared with the ludicrous effort from James Robinson Planché for Oberon). The dialogue, especially in a concert performance, can present difficulties for a non-German cast, so it is understandable that a decision was made to ditch it in favour of an English narration by Amanda Holden. Whether the latter in any sense marked an improvement remained unclear, to say the least. Malcolm Sinclair’s delivery, whilst clear, was definitely on the ac-tor-ly side, the narration itself prosaic and yet lodged precariously between sanitised fairy-tale – fairy-tales should be anything but sanitised! – and camp. Of the work’s darkness there was little or nothing to be heard. In 1841, sickened and impoverished by the superficiality of Parisian musical culture, the homesick Wagner wrote of a performance: ‘It seems to be the poem of those Bohemian woods themselves, whose dark and solemn aspect permits us at once to grasp how the isolated man would believe himself, if not prey to a dæmonic power of Nature, then at least in eternal submission thereto.’ For a sense of that crucial quality, one had to turn to the music – and indeed, perhaps one always did.

Sir Colin Davis has a lengthy history with the work; he recorded it with the Staatskapelle Dresden – Weber’s own orchestra, of course, and Wagner’s too – twenty years ago, and these two performances have been recorded for release on LSO Live. This was not a reading of incendiary drama such as one hears on Carlos Kleiber’s legendary recording, also with the Dresden orchestra, but won over as one can hardly fail to be by that performance, it is easy to forget how unorthodox it is. Take, for instance, the waltz in the first act, preceding Max’s recitative and aria. Kleiber’s tempo is, on the face of it, bizarrely fast, though somehow it works. Furtwängler takes it far more slowly, as did Davis, though his reading sounded closer to the sound and at times implacability one might have expected from a Klemperer Freischütz. (Now there is a thought; he certainly conducted it in his youth; indeed he made his debut at the Prague Deutsches Landestheater with it, in 1907.) These were sturdier peasants; I can imagine some finding the results staid by comparison, but there was actually a subtler vigour at work.

The Overture was another case in point, its opening gravely Beethovenian. Despite the difference in tempo and almost everything else, I was somehow put in mind of Coriolan. An unfortunate split horn note was heard upon the horns entry, but thereafter, throughout the work, the LSO’s horns were on excellent form, just as required in this of all operas. There was a sense of fairy-tale: I thought of Davis’s Hänsel und Gretel for the Royal Opera. But there was also, and increasingly so, Wagnerian gravity to be heard, reminding us that, so many times in this work, Siegfried is but a stone’s throw away. Fafner’s lair takes form in the Wolf’s Glen Scene. And there was no shortage of dramatic drive to the conclusion of the Overture, but Davis and his wonderful orchestra saw no reason to resort to anything hinting at superficial display. Orchestral malevolence was to be heard in spades at the opening of Kaspar’s aria, ‘Schweig! damit dich niemand warnt,’ and a proper storm was cooked up in that celebrated finale to the second act. (Electronic sound effects proved slightly alienating, but what does one do in a concert performance?) If not exactly folksy – and does one really want that? – there was certainly a nice orchestral jauntiness to Ännchen’s ‘Kommt ein schlanker Bursch gegangen’. Whilst a list of notable orchestral solos would doubtless extend to almost every section principal, I feel I cannot fail to mention the superlative contributions of leader, Carmine Lauri, Rebecca Gilliver (cello), Gareth Davies (flute), and of course, the viola obbligato in ‘Einst träumte meiner sel’gen Base’ (it looked like Paul Silverthorne to me, although the programme said otherwise, so I should probably credit Edward Vanderspare too, just in case).

The London Symphony Chorus was on predictably fine form too. Its choral weight and attack registering unfailingly from the opening Huntsman’s Chorus onwards. Both the chorus and Davis were keenly aware of the echoes of Haydn’s Die Jahreszeiten – they recorded it relatively recently – a little later on during the first act. Would that one could hear more choral singing of such distinction in the opera house! Simon O’Neill performed a decent, professional task. He can sing the notes – and did. He can sing the words too, but there remains, as I have generally found with this artist, a lurking suspicion that he is not always entirely clear what the words mean. Moreover, the pinched quality of his voice is, despite its heft, becoming increasingly pronounced. It is perhaps easier to take here than in a work on the scale of Die Meistersinger, but one could hardly call it ingratiating. Christine Brewer again certainly has the required vocal heft for the work. Her wobble became unduly pronounced in her second act aria, but sincerity of spirit won through here, and in a lovely third-act cavatina. To start with, I found Sally Matthews’s timbre a little pallid, but was soon won over. There was certainly much to esteem in her clarity of line (not least vis-à-vis certain of her colleagues), and she handled the coloratura not only with ease but with a sure understanding of its dramatic purpose. A distinguished performance indeed! Lars Woldt was a late replacement for Falk Struckmann as Kaspar. He shone in the role, not least on account of his natural ease with his native tongue. I can imagine some might have found his vibrato a little heavy – I did not – but there was, vibrato aside, something impressively resounding to his tonal quality and delivery. The appearance of Stephan Loges as Ottokar – it is pretty much impossible to judge his electronic appearance as Zamiel – made one wish, from its elegance of delivery, that the character had more to sing. Gidon Saks wobbled a bit as the Hermit, but I am not sure that matters too much with respect to that particular role. I should also definitely mention a winning, stylish Killian from Marcus Farnsworth; again, it was difficult not to wish that the role might be expanded. Martin Snell and Lucy Hall rounded off with aplomb a cast of many virtues.

If it is difficult, then, quite to see those Bohemian Woods in the concrete jungle of the Barbican Centre, and the nature of the concert performance made for a less Romantic rendering than one would hope for in the theatre, this performance exhibited many singular qualities. It will certainly be worth hearing on CD.