Parsifal, Royal Opera, 4 October 2026

 

Parsifal – Stanislas de Barbeyrac
Kundry – Ekaterina Gubanova
Gurnemanz – Brindley Sherratt
Amfortas – Christian Gerhaher
Klingsor – Mark Stone
Titurel – James Platt
First Knight of the Grail – Ryan Vaughan Davies
Second Knight of the Grail – Jack Sandison
Squires – Elizabeth Karani, Lily Mo Browne, Giorgi Guilashvili, Emyr Lloyd Jones,
Flowermaidens – Chelsea Zurflüh, Rhian Lois, Sarah Richmond, Sarah Brady, Marianna Hovanisyan, Ellen Pearson
Voice from Above – Nikola Printz

Director – Evgeny Titov
Set designs – Etienne Pluss
Costumes – Esther Bialas
Lighting – D.M. Wood
Movement – Otto Pichler
Video – Christopher Ash
Dramaturgy – Janine Ortiz

Royal Opera Chorus (director: William Spaulding)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Jakub Hrůsá (conductor)

 

I had not intended to write about the Royal Opera’s new Parsifal. I was present as a mere civilian, and do not delude myself that the world has any pressing need to hear my thoughts. Yet, when I saw the second night of Evgeny Titov’s staging, heard the musical performances, and also read something of hostile audience reactions, I felt I might have something to say and thought it might be helpful to have something for my own records. Here goes then. 

First, in the past decade or so of my Parsifal experience, Russian directors have scored a resounding victory. Not necessarily in Russia: about that, for better or worse, I have no idea, though I doubt whatever Valery Gergiev – remember him? – is currently serving up would detain many of us long. Yet, in the production history of a work that has distinctly fallen into historical phases – Bayreuth only; beyond the Festival-embargo; Wieland Wagner and beyond; now, Stefan Herheim and beyond – that final ‘beyond’ has for me been most fruitfully represented by the work of three Russian directors who, at some level, seem to have drawn on a distinctly Dostoevskian line of interpretation. That was perhaps clearest in Dmitri Tcherniakov (Berlin), for me very much the Parsifal that marked a new line of departure after Herheim, and in Kirill Serebrennikov (Vienna), but I think it is also present, albeit in more horrified, cynical form in Titov too. I am, of course, restricted by what I have seen, and make no comment on productions I have not, for instance that of Calixto Bieito, but mention this as much to frame what may have formed my thoughts as anything else. I also could not help but wonder whether some details and even themes might have been suggested to Titov by those two stagings, but have no idea whether that was actually the case. Sometimes, affinity is only that, and in any case broad lines of interest have a tendency to form in the wake of notable stagings as in any other interpretative work. 

More important, what do we see, feel, and think here? It is as dark a Parsifal, reading both with and against the grain and offering a welcome degree of critique. Perhaps the post-apocalyptic setting is a little predictable by now, but if so, it is because it fits. This is a religious community lying beyond whatever may or may not remain of civilisation: a community that has long since lost its way, assuming it had one in the first place. That, surely, is straight Wagner—and since we have no idea what Monsalvat ever looked like, since it is not a ‘real place’, this being a mythological rather than realist work, it seems bizarre and certainly un-Wagnerian to come to it with expectations. The idea, rather than its external manifestation, is what matters; or rather, the latter is part of how we might progress to the former. Yet this Monsalvat has not merely lost its way; it has degenerated, assuming it was at some point something else, into something horrifying, a place of violence and outright cruelty, in which its rite, as tends to happen under mere ritualism, constantly reopens Amfortas’s wound to replenish its lost souls with his own blood. Is that a perversion of Christianity? Yes. Is Wagner’s text? Yes. Is this dark extension beyond what remains a potentially optimistic Feuerbachian psychology of religion in Wagner’s text unreasonable? Why should it be? This is contemporary theatre, not Titurel’s rite (which no one actually paying the slightest attention to Wagner could surely see as good in itself). 

The cruelty visited on Amfortas may be graphic in a way we are not used to, but sometimes we need to be reminded of quite what might be at stake here, just as we do when contemplating Christ on the Cross, be it via the Isenheim Altarpiece or the St Matthew Passion. It is difficult to watch, as is Amfortas’s tortured state in what remains of his existence, wheeled into service by an unabashedly evil Titurel. But does anyone think Titurel here an admirable figure; and if so, why? (Feel free to do so, but that seems a directorial leap as great as any other.) The swan’s dying agonies, inflicted by Parsifal and pornographically prolonged by a Gurnemanz declining, for whatever reason, to put the poor creature out of its misery, are repeated and intensified in those of Amfortas as curdled Christ. There is thus a frightening sense of technological manipulation to this totalitarian world, whether ongoing screen surveillance, the cyber-creation of fembot Flowermaidens, or the literal power behind the visible throne, sonorously and with unusual immediacy intoned by James Platt as Titurel-Davros. Who is really in charge here? Perhaps him, or perhaps someone or something beyond. More likely the latter, since this hellish world continues without him, even as the Johnsonian bodybags pile high behind in preparation for his funeral. And the laughing, sinister, female progenitor of Flowermaidens and Kundry of second-act incarnation: does she exist at all? Or is she herself a cyber-phantom? Does it matter? This is surely our world too, or threatens to be. 

The coup sans grâce falls, as it must, at the close. I found it shocking, as I am sure did many others. How one reacts to that shock is a personal matter, but for me it was intellectually and dramatically productive to an extent that I am still reeling when I consider it, especially in combination with the score and Jakub Hrůsá’s conducting, on which more below. When dark knights come to arm Parsifal with the cybernetic force he requires – or better, that they require of him – there is already a sense that something will go horribly wrong. A strength of Titov’s production hereafter is that he intensifies the dramatic tension, making it far from clear whether it will. Perhaps Parsifal and Parsifal will do as they should—though we bear in mind the nested meanings acquired of Gurnemanz’s Act I ‘Weisst du, was du sahst?’ The problem may now be that Parsifal does know, that he knows only too well. If so, he ultimately cannot overcome the evil forces surrounding him—and us. He seems to give Amfortas rest, but what can that  actually be in this context? Whatever it is, it is not enough, Amfortas requires more and more from the spear, until Parsifal is himself driven to brutality with the spear, taking what he did to the swan, its death-throes again visibly re-enacted, and making it worse. He could not win, if winning were there to be had, and collapses beneath Amfortas’s trolley, broken, returned to the foetal position and role from which Kundry had apparently rescued him. ‘Durch Mitleid wissend…’? Not on your life—or anyone else’s. Therein lies the tragedy, its counterpoint with Wagner’s score itself the stuff of drama both immediate and reflective upon the Bühnenweihfestspiel: a utopian vision or was it always something darker? Here, tantalisingly, it is both realised and not, the work held to account in a fashion far more productive than detractors may have realised. 

Hrůsá’s conducting was remarkably assured for one conducting the work for the first time; it would have placed him in the ranks of serious Wagner conductors, if this were his fiftieth. One should never, can never consider Wagner as ‘absolute music’, but on the more absolute side, all the components were there: blend, balance, harmonic rhythm, integration of the moment’s detail with the longer line, and so on. So too was another key to opera more generally as well as Wagner specifically, the ability to make the orchestra speak as Wagner’s Greek Chorus, roots extending back at least as far as Gluck and Mozart, but in truth as much to Bach, and ultimately to Aeschylus & Co. Even here, there were passages that were felt as recitativo accompagnato and arioso, yet at the highest level of symphonic integration. There was all the time in the world, but never too much. It was never either/or. The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, clearly liberated by playing Wagner for its new Music Director, sounded for the most part the equal of any in the world, participants in the drama as much as their counterparts onstage. What fascinated and ultimately involved the most, though, was the dramatic counterpoint to stage action in Wagner’s ‘deeds of music made visible’. As the scene was initially set, then broadened, Hrůsá offered a more materialist Wagner, in whose sound the music found itself, as it found drama, participating as equal and ultimately leading protagonist, the thrilling urgency of second-act musical action an object lesson. So fine a musical account, conceived in tandem with, yet anything but subordinate to, the stage action, enabled the work in turn to question the questioning to which it had been subjected. If at Bayreuth, Stefan Herheim had presented the orchestra as the locus of redemption, here that hope persisted, but it was a hope rather than a certainty, a welcome questioning itself of Wagner’s reconciliation. That need not happen every time; but if one is truly drawn to, truly loves Parsifal, it becomes necessary to gain that critical distance. There is nothing to fear and much to gain 

Babreyrac’s assumption of the title role was equally fascinating. In the first act, his musical approach was at times Lieder-like, springing from the poem, not to the exclusion of other aspects of the work, but with that accorded apparent priority. As the character developed and in tandem, so it seemed, with Hrůsá’s musical strategy, so his more overtly lyrical art bloomed, in turn presaging (or, in Wagner’s artistic life, recalling) the drama of his son Lohengrin. (Let us leave Nietzsche’s jibe on one side for now.) He seemed appalled and shaken – how could he not be? – by what he had witnessed in the Grail Hall. That, as well as his more distant past, was part of the trauma to be worked through in the second act, in which Barbeyrac’s boyish portrayal, vocal and acted, was just the thing, a doomed yet necessary attempt to bring the ‘pure fool’ into being rather than simply assume him. In that sense, it would be foolish, as it were, to deny that his physical appearance played no role, but it was a starting point, not an end point, as were the dramatic wiles of Ekaterina Gubanova’s Kundry. She slipped in and out of personas with ease, yet not without dramatic cost. For she was trapped too—and elicited the sympathy our souls required and this cruel world would not permit. Her treatment and that of the Flowermaidens was anything but sympathetic, but do we really think Klingsor, here played with villainous relish and determination by Mark Stone, is one who respects and loves women? Christian Gerhaher seemed far more at home, if one can call it that, with Amfortas than he had with the Rheingold Wotan this Easter in Salzburg. In a near-absolute sense, rather than that of sentimental psychobabble, we felt his agony, analysing rather than merely embodying Schopenhauerian Mitleid. His engagement with musical, verbal, and performance text alike combined to a degree equal with those of Barbeyrac and Gubanova. By the third act, before which an announcement was made, Brindley Sherratt was clearly ailing, but he soldiered on with unswerving dramatic commitment. His is clearly a Gurnemanz to reckon with. The chorus, often offstage, though at the beginning of the third act shockingly present, sang its several Passion-like roles, participatory and commentary, in various spatial guises, recalling and redramatising for us spaces in Wagner’s conception, from Bayreuth to Siena, to whatever or wherever Monsalvat may now be. If ensemble wavered at times, there was ample compensation at others. 

This, then, was a dramatic engagement, not an exhausted rite. Only those who cling to the idea of Parsifal as the latter, frowning at anyone who even now dare applaud at the first act’s close, could possibly object in principle. But that in itself does not make any challenge worthwhile or successful. For me, Titov’s staging presents interesting and in the best sense provocative ideas, but falls down somewhat in failing to sustain them with equal strength across the drama. Much of the second act’s connection with the first and third too feels unduly tenuous; the first scene of the third comes across as needing further thought on how it might be conceptually integrated (or even aware). In the former case, the little girls who accompany Klingsor at the opening, presumably to be converted in more sense than one, seem surplus to requirements and uncomfortably close to Tcherniakov’s vision of a realm of paedophilia. Beyond that, the emphasis lies on Personenregie and the extraordinary acting capabilities of Barbeyrac and Gubanova. That is all well and good, but dramatically something is missing, and the final scene of the act seems almost banally conventional, disregard of the sign of the Cross included. (The truer transgression here would have been to have it made.) In the latter case, the impression, just or otherwise, is that greater planning by the production team may have been required—however impressive the performances, sung and acted. These are shortcomings reassessment for a serious revival may yet tackle. That may be frustrating, yet it is not so unusual; Bayreuth is not the only Werkstatt. And they are shortcomings: they take their place in any assessment, but should not be exaggerated. 

Despite its flaws, this marked a step-change for a work that, over the time I have been attending performances, has not fared well dramatically in this theatre, notwithstanding the musical virtues of performances led by Bernard Haitink and Simon Rattle. Its most recent production was understandably never revived. I hope and trust Titov’s will be, above all for the critical engagement it enables with Wagner’s text as a whole and the ever-shifting relationship between its elements. That may be the only Erlösung dem Erlöser remaining: more partial, say, than with Herheim, but our modern(ist) lot is more often than not fragmentary. It is surely preferable to face existential truths head-on than to bury our heads in the false, enforced reconciliation of an unredeemed Monsalvat. Is that not what Parsifal is, or should be, about?

 

Written on Skin, Deutsche Oper, 1 February 2024

Images: WRITTEN ON SKIN, Regie: Katie Mitchell,
Deutsche Oper Berlin, Premiere: 27. Januar 2024, copyright: Bernd Uhlig

Protector – Mark Stone
Agnès – Georgia Jarman
First Angel, The Boy – Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen
Second Angel, Marie – Anna Werle
Third Angel, John – Chance Jonas-O’Toole
Angel archivists – Leander Gaul, Yasmina Giebeler, Milli Keil, Maximilian Reisinger

Director – Katie Mitchell
Revival director – Dan Ayling
Designs – Vicki Mortimer
Lighting – Jon Clark

Dramaturgy – Sebastian Hanusa  

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper
Marc Albrecht (conductor)

   

More than a decade has passed since I first saw George Benjamin’s second opera, Written on Skin, at Covent Garden. The premiere, both of the work and Katie Mitchell’s well-travelled production, took place at Aix in 2012. Now it reaches, for the first time, Berlin in a further revival of Mitchell’s staging for the Deutsche Oper. It is my fourth hearing, since I attended both the Royal Opera’s 2017 revival and, the year before, a concertperformance at the Barbican with Aix’s original Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Greater acquaintance leaves my admiration undimmed; if anything, it glows all the brighter. For whilst the casts of my previous encounters had much, though not everything, in common, and Benjamin conducted them all, here we have something new in all but the staging, ably revived by Dan Ayling. 

I shall not attempt a broad overview, whether musical or dramatic, of the work, as I did in 2013. (My review can be read here, for those interested.) Rather, I shall point to some aspects of work, production, and performance that struck me on this occasion. First, I cannot now understand my lukewarmness concerning Mitchell’s staging. Maybe I have grown more accustomed not only to her work but to contemporary theatre more generally. If anything, the danger for me is perhaps the opposite, that I now associate the work with this particular production. There have, astonishingly for a new work, especially a new work that is not, shall we say, of the US ‘easy listening variety’, been numerous productions already; for now, though, this is the only one I have seen. Vicki Mortimer’s split-level set enables us to see the world of angels and that of men (specifically, the Protector, Agnès, her sister and brother-in-law, and The Boy) and, crucially, their transformative interaction, as, for, instance one of the angels is apprised of the situation – narratives already building upon one another – and assumes, as it were, the role of the Boy who will chronicle his patron’s life in words and images. That includes the liberating sexual relationship that arises between him and the brutalised Agnès, the Protector’s ‘property’, truly coming to life in an authentically musicodramatic marriage of words, music, and staging. Indeed, the eroticism here of Benjamin’s score struck me more strongly than ever before, perhaps a hallmark of conductor Marc Albrecht’s approach to the work.

 

So does what might seem a commonplace of drama, yet here seems particular, unique, partly because one is led to feel, not only observe, it in its very particular character: inexorability of fate. As tightly organised a score as The Turn of the Screw, yet less obviously so, holds us captive, almost like Agnès herself. It beguiles, perhaps even breaths a little of the Occitan air, mediæval and now, but never via an attempt to reproduce or even to represent. Illumination, in whatever sense we care, is both more complex and more immediate than that.  There is certainly commentary; it is inscribed, as it were, upon the very skin of the work. Yet however much the angels might classify, file away, their real work is in transformation: of persons and perhaps ultimately of souls.

Senses of time passing, of claustrophobia, of fate closing in – though never merely mirroring – the work – and indeed of an uncontrollable, dangerous joy that must be controlled, yet in that act of controlling requires new life are conveyed scenically in new layers of an activity that conspires both to be particular and quotidian. It is almost a religious ritual, bringing further to life a quasi-Passion of passion to join works such as Così fan tutte and Tristan und Isolde, as well as the more obviously (and musically) related Pelléas et Mélisande. In work and performance, this intriguing, almost mythical combination of straightforward action and elusive allusion that may or may not be symbolism suggests a temporal palimpsest. (Not for nothing, perhaps, is one of Benjamin’s major orchestral works an exploration of that idea.)

By the same token, though, there is no doubting the rawness and immediacy of acts, of things also being very much what they seem. In Agnès’s words not only of liberation, but also of the Boy’s instruction: ‘Love’s not a picture; love is an act.’ This and so many other moments confirmed and furthered my admiration for Martin Crimp’s libretto. Unlike so many attempts at writing for opera, Crimp’s work for Benjamin here and elsewhere permits plenty of space for music. Indeed, if one did not know, one might struggle to guess which came first; it would be fascinating to read any correspondence they may have had about this.

 

Performance is itself a necessary act. We are not here speaking merely of something written or drawn on the page. Albrecht and the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper gave a commanding performance, with all the freshness of discovery yet also an understanding and conviction that might have been born of repertoire status. (It is, arguably, a repertoire opera now, yet not yet in this house, for this was only its second performance.) Georgia Jarman made the role of Agnès very much her own, fully inhabiting a character come to life through the alchemy of music as well as words and staging. One felt her predicament strongly, shared her struggle and ultimate revenge, without the drama being reduced merely to them. Mark Stone’s Protector was cruel and, in his own way, righteous, torn himself between two loves, the question of his feelings for The Boy opened up rather than ‘dealt with’. Pride and vulnerability were both present. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen’s performance as The Boy might almost have stolen the show in its uncannily angelic combination of the worldly and otherworldly; that is, it might have done, had the cast not worked so closely together. Anna Werle and Chance Jonas-O’Toole, doubling as Angels and, respectively, Marie and John offered equally fine performances in smaller roles. For in richness of layering and sureness of fatal direction, this was a performance as well as a work created and recreated through its writing on skin.

Intermezzo, Garsington Opera, 6 June 2015

Images: Mike Hoban

(sung in English)

Garsington Opera House

Robert Storch – Mark Stone

Christine – Mary Dunleavy
Anna – Ailish Tynan
Franzl – Louis Hynes
Baron Lummer – Sam Furness
Notary – Benjamin Bevan
Notary’s Wife – Sarah Sedgwick
Stroh – Oliver Johnston
Commercial Counsellor – James Cleverton
Legal Counsellor – Gerard Collett
Singer – Barnaby Rea
Fanny – Alice Devine
Marie – Elka Lee-Green
Therese – Charlotte Sutherland
Resi – Anna Sideris

Bruno Ravella (director)

Giles Cadle (designs)
Bruno Poet (lighting)

Garsington Opera Orchestra

Jac van Steen (conductor)

 

Hats off to Garsington for championing once again some criminally neglected Strauss. I overheard someone there opine, ‘Of course, you can understand why it isn’t done very often.’ Well, only if you take as given the increasingly untenable assumptions some ‘major’ opera houses trumpet concerning their audiences – and perhaps not even then. That Birmingham Opera can sell out Stockhausen immediately and that the Royal Opera House – by any standards, a different animal – can sell out operas by Benjamin and Birtwistle puts paid to lazy talk and should put paid to lazy programming, though does so far less often than should be the case. If one takes as one’s core lazy listeners, consequences will follow; if one leads, and especially if one acts upon widespread thirst for modernist repertoire, broadly conceived, other, better consequences will do so. Strauss, it might be countered, is a different matter again, and perhaps he is. But he is hardly unpopular, and if many people have not heard Intermezzo, despite a recent staging at Buxton, then grant them an opportunity such as Garsington has.

An excellent performance was given by the Garsington Orchestra – only once, early in the second act, did I sense a little tiredness – under the baton of Jac van Steen. The conductor’s deep knowledge and understanding of the score, of its post-Ariadne idiom, of its opportunities and challenges had been displayed in my interview with him; it was displayed just as clearly here. Everything was in its place, as it must be; Strauss at his most unsparing allows no room for error. The orchestral interludes put me a little in mind of the ‘closed forms’ of Busoni and Berg, whilst very much retaining their own character. It was perhaps most of all, though, Strauss’s economy, which yet never denies his love of musical proliferation, that shone through. Not a note is wasted; nor was it in performance.

The cast proved persuasive advocates too. Mary Dunleavy’s vocal security was matched to a subtle reading of Christine’s character that extracted her from the realm of patronising, even misogynistic caricature: no mere ‘shrew’ here, but a credible woman of strengths, weaknesses, above all agency. Mark Stone made a powerful impression as her husband, perhaps the closest of all Strauss came to a self-portrait. (The creator of the role wore a mask so as to make him resemble the composer all the more closely. As Norman del Mar observed, this was a ‘striking volte-face after Strauss’s anxieties over the Young Composer in Ariadne’.) One could have taken dictation, verbal as well as notational, from most of his crystal-clear performance: Lied writ large in the best sense. Sam Furnes’’s Baron Lummer offered a well-judged mixture of vocal allure and immaturity of character. Ailish Tynan’s perky Anna proved just the right sort of knowing, informed servant. In a fine company performance, other singers to stand out included Oliver Johnston’s finely sung – and acted – Stroh, Gerald Collett’s equally impressive Legal Counsellor, and Benjamin Bevan’s honourable Notary. Everyone, however, made a considerable contribution.

Bruno Ravella’s production takes the work seriously, on its own terms, and succeeds accordingly. Giles Cadle’s resourceful set moves us in and out of a Garmisch-style villa, modern (to Strauss), without being avant garde. There is always a strong sense of who everyone is, and why he or she is acting in the manner we observe. The card game is, as the conductor observed to me, wonderfully, knowingly realistic; such understanding could hardly be feigned. The crucial element of communication and its speed – the telephone, the telegram, Strauss’s pace of conversation delivery – offered an excellent example of musical performances and production acting as one.

One can speak of the plot being trivial, if one wishes. (I suppose one can speak about anything if one wishes, so that was an especially meaningless claim!) But some of that seems to be snobbery; would we think differently, were these gods, or indeed from another class, ‘higher’ or ‘lower’. In his original Preface, replaced when the score was published, Strauss not unreasonably claimed to break genuine new ground in the variety of everyday life he had brought to the stage; Hindemith and Schoenberg would follow suit in Neues vom Tage and Von heute auf morgen. Still more to the point, though, (high) bourgeois domesticity matters to those involved in it; it certainly matters to the little boy caught at the centre of marital dispute and potentially breakdown, as countless children, sleepless with worry at raised voices downstairs, will tell you. (Young Louis Hynes deserved great credit for his portrayal of that difficult role, here rendered more difficult still.) Now Intermezzo is not essentially ‘about’ that, although I think it is more concerned with it than, say, Elektra is; but a subtle yet perceptible shift in that direction from the production did no harm in opening up the work.

Only one gripe, really: it was a great pity that the opera was sung in English, and that Andrew Porter’s translation was the version used. Given surtitles, there really is no need; Strauss really does not sound right in translation, still more so as here, when odd words remained in German, the contrast jarring. Moreover, accents tended to slide – or at least to slide more noticeably to an English ear. But, as ever with Strauss, in the battle of Wort with Ton, there was little doubt which would emerge victorious. This was a far from insignificant victory over Strauss’s critics, Garsington’s latest estimable contribution to a hero’s after-life.

 

Gloriana, Royal Opera, 20 June 2013

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Elizabeth I – Susan Bullock

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex – Toby Spence
Frances Devereux, Countess of Essex – Patricia Bardon
Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy – Mark Stone
Penelope, Lady Rich – Kate Royal
Sir Robert Cecil – Jeremy Carpenter
Sir Walter Raleigh – Clive Bayley
Henry Cuffe – Benjamin Bevan
Lady-in-Waiting – Nadine Livingston
Blind Ballad Singer – Brindley Sherratt
Recorder of Norwich – Jeremy White
Housewife – Carol Rowlands
Spirit of the Masque – Andrew Tortise
Master of Ceremonies – David Butt Philip
City Crier – Michel de Souza
Concord – Giulia Pazzaglia
Time – Lake Laoutaris-Smith

Richard Jones (director)

Ultz (designs)
Mimi Jordan Sherin (lighting)
Lucy Burge (choreography)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Paul Daniel (conductor)

 

The Royal Opera offered a strong performance and production, for the most part as excellent as we have any right to expect, of what remains, alas, a very weak opera. Aldeburgh fundamentalists, a highly vocal sect that is yet diminishing with age, will maintain that Gloriana’s dreadful initial reception was to be attributed to a philistine audience of coronation dignitaries and the merely prejudiced. (Richard Jarman, General Director of the Britten-Pears Foundation, writes in the programme of a composer ‘whose musical conservatism was attacked by the avant garde in his lifetime but whose reputation has outlived his critics.’ Well, he would, wouldn’t he?) The way some speak of the debacle, one would think that a a masterpiece of the order of Birtwistle’s Mask of Orpheus had been slighted. It is certainly difficult to begrudge the opportunity to find out for ourselves, in what is the first time since the brief 1954 revival that the Royal Opera has staged the work, but the flip side of that opportunity proves to be realisation that many of the criticisms levelled at the work in 1953 were justified after all.    

 

Though not really a criticism of the work as such, it is extraordinary to think that anyone could have thought this an appropriate subject for dedication and tribute to a new queen: it would surely have been far better left to stand on its own feet, appearing a few years later, after the composer had had more time to work on it. La clemenza di Tito, far and away the greatest of all coronation operas, may have been written in breakneck time, even by Mozart’s standards, but, wonderful conductor of Mozart though Britten was, he certainly lacked Mozart’s combination of greatness and incredible facility. The opera is certainly not helped by William Plomer’s dreadful libretto, laden down by unconvincing archaisms and cringeworthy rhymes of which ‘duty’ and ‘beauty’ is far from the worst offender; nor is it assisted by all too formulaic scene-by-scene alternation between ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms, which encourages a dramaturgy that barely advances, if indeed it does at all, beyond Verdi. (Half-hearted applause greeted the end of each scene, whilst Richard Jones’s metatheatrical production, about which more below, did its heroic to make the scene-changes of interest.) Schiller or Boris Godunov this conflict decidedly is not. Apart from Elizabeth I herself, and perhaps the Earl of Essex, characters, such as they are, tend to be products of plot situations rather than vice versa.

 

Yet even the manifold dramatic weaknesses do not excuse the weakness of so much of the score itself. Even the mild syncopations of the opening chorus sound shop-soiled: as if drawn from a Britten manual of how to add a little ‘modernity’ without frightening away the horses. Large sections of the orchestral writing seem little more than padding. At their best, there is a kinship in vocal lines to Purcell; much of the time, however, they veer between the merely nondescript and the inappropriately Italianate (as in nineteenth-century Italianate, certainly nothing contemporary). And if Norwich might not always be accepted as a heaving metropolis, does it really deserve the tedium of the ‘masque’? (I could not help but think of those dreadful shows the present Queen and Duke of Edinburgh must sit through when on an official visit, doubtless longing to be taken as quickly as possible to Balmoral or Newmarket.) Dramaturgically, there are signs of hope there: at least Britten is doing something different. Rarely, however, does his formulaic music rise to the occasion; it is actually more interesting when it alludes most strongly to Tudor styles, though the ‘real thing’ would be more interesting still. Matters were not helped by having the first and second acts run together without an interval; it made for a very long time, scene changes included, sitting through pretty insubstantial stuff.

 

That said, there could be no gainsaying the commitment of the Royal Opera’s forces to presentation of the work. If there were times when Paul Daniel might have sped things up a bit, one did not need to know that he had conducted the score before, for Opera North, to hear that he was fully in command of it. Likewise, the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House and the Royal Opera Chorus, as ever excellently prepared by Renato Balsadonna, responded with enthusiasm and sensitivity that lay almost beyond the call of duty, regal or otherwise. Casting was of great strength, the only real problem being Susan Bullock’s vocal fallibility in the title role; without too much effort, though, one could accept that as reflecting the fallibility of an ageing monarch. Otherwise, Toby Spence proved as fine an advocate as the Earl of Essex could ever expect: ardent, sensitive, headstrong as required. Mark Stone offered a finely-sung, equally finely-acted, darker-hued foil as Lord Mountjoy. It was an especial joy to hear Patricia Bardon’s true contralto, plaintive and full of tone, as the Countess of Essex, with Kate Royal’s Penelope equally well sung, if less clear of diction. (The weird outburst in the final scene, quite unmotivated by what little character development has previously been offered, is certainly not her fault.) Smaller roles such as Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Bayley), Sir Robert Cecil (Jeremy Carpenter), and Carol Rowlands's splendidly shrewish London Housewife offered ample opportunity for care with words and music, however undeserving. Likewise, Brindley Sherratt made the most of the tediously repetitive part for the Blind Ballad-Singer; again, comparisons with a superficially similar role in Boris Godunov are unfortunate, to say the least.

 

Richard Jones pursued his task as director with palpable relish. The production offers a metatheatrical view of staging a 1953 celebration, framed by a small procession of dignitaries. The idea might have been pushed further; as it stood, it did not really do a great deal other than remind us when the work was written. Perhaps that might have been more than the work could have taken, though Christopher Alden’s superb Midsummer Night’s Dream for ENO suggests bravery in staging may be the way forward for Britten’s slighter operas. Designs by Ultz – just ‘Ultz’, presumably like ‘Jesus’, or ‘Voltaire’, his ‘mystery’ enhanced by the lack of a programme photograph – were handsome, colourful, even witty. If we must have the 1950s on stage all the time, this was a model of how to accomplish the task. Lucy Burge’s choreography and the work of various actors and dancers were equally estimable. I could have done without the cumbersome business of each scene being introduced by a gang of children holding up letters to spell, ‘Nonesuch Palace’, ‘The City’, and so on, but apparently some members of the audience found that side-splittingly hilarious.  

 

It is meet and right that opera houses should grant the possibility to reassess works and indeed composers, lest unfair historical verdicts go uncontested. The production earlier this season of Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable is a case in point. Yet I suspect that the uninformed vitriol poured upon a flawed yet intriguing grand opéra will be matched this time around by calls of ‘disgracefully neglected masterpiece’. We should all like to find another operatic masterpiece, but wishing does not make it so; for that, we should do better to turn our attention to the future, not least to the new work Covent Garden has commissioned from George Benjamin and Martin Crimp. Works as different as The Minotaur and Written on Skin, masterpieces both, suggest ways forward; yet it does us no harm occasionally to reflect that creation of masterpieces may not only alleviate but also be facilitated by the possibility of failure elsewhere.

Eugene Onegin, Opera Holland Park, 31 July 2012

Eugene Onegin – Mark Stone
Tatiana – Anna Leese
Lensky – Peter Auty
Olga – Hannah Pedley
Mme Larina – Anne Mason
Filipievna – Elizabeth Sikora
Prince Gremin – Graeme Broadbent
Triquet – Patrick Mundy
Zaretsky/Captain – Barnaby Rea

Daniel Slater (director)

Leslie Travers (set designs)
Mark Jonathan (lighting)
Denni Sayers (choreography)

City of London Sinfonia

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Kelvin Lim)
Alexander Polianichko (conductor)

This was unquestionably the best all-round performance I have yet seen from Opera Holland Park, staging and musical performances alike often putting august metropolitan houses from around the world to shame. Where musical direction has sometimes proved variable, in Alexander Polianichko, OHP had recruited a fine Tchaikovsky conductor. (His reading of Cherevichki at the Royal Opera House was the first time I encountered his work.) Polianichko clearly felt at ease with the score and communicated that ease freely. Tempi and transitions were all well handled, nothing especially drawing attention to itself, the drama progressing ‘naturally’ from the musical ebb and flow – though, as we all know, it takes a great deal of art to conceal art. This might not have been the searing drama I heard Daniel Barenboim bring to Tchaikovsky’s opera in Berlin, but it served the work very well. It would be vain to suggest that the City of London Sinfonia would not have benefited from a greater number of strings – and there was room in the pit – but a chamber-orchestral performance worked far better than I had expected, noticeably better, indeed, than it had for Mozart or Beethoven, which suggests that the conductor and the performers on the night were at least as important  as actual numbers. Certainly the strings played with cultivation and commitment. If they were sometimes overshadowed by some ravishing woodwind playing, the problem of balancing was not their fault.

Daniel Slater’s production was manifestly superior in every respect to the lifeless, Made-for-the-Met offering Deborah Warner foisted upon the Coliseum earlier this season. It will be interesting to see how Slater’s staging compares with the new production Kasper Holten is preparing for Covent Garden, since during a couple of conversations I had with Holten earlier this year, he mentioned the importance of memory to his conception of the work. (I think I can give that away at least, since it is not really giving anything away!) That certainly shine through in Slater’s understanding too, Onegin a ghostly, dream-like figure often watching when he was not participating. Leslie Travers’s set – which might, and I mean this as a compliment – work equally well for an intelligent production of Der Rosenkavalier, evoke faded grandeur, the end of a line, aristocratic furniture upended, reminding us that Onegin was an outsider both chronologically as well as temperamentally. The third act, five years later, is set during the early years of the Revolution, the Polonaise treated as an opportunity for temporal relocation, young Soviet soldiers rearranging the stage, laying out a red carpet for (General?) Gremin and his well-connected wife, and, most touchingly, the nurse Filipievna snuffing out the candles from the Larinas’ chandelier. It rises again, in fine post-revolutionary fettle, seemingly powered by newer, electric means, putting one inevitably in mind of Lenin’s equation of communism as Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country. I wondered at first how the new, Leninist setting would benefit the work, but was entirely won over, for the point was not so much the Leninist setting – though might that not also be an interesting idea: Onegin as Bolshevik, soon disaffected? – as the passing of time. There is nothing wrong, of course, with that being expressed as originally envisaged, but Tsarist St Petersburg is not in itself the point any more than Leningrad might be.

Books play an important role too. When we meet Tatiana, she is very much engrossed in her book (Richardson, presumably), something of a plain-Jane in contrast to the flightier Olga. Her mother, of course, counsels her – whether it be wisely is another matter – that she had to grow out of the fictions her youthful reading engendered, in order to live in the real world. The replacement of the Larinas’ library by an all-red set of books – suggesting, perhaps, a Progress Publishers’ collected edition, even though that fabled firm would not be founded until 1931? – again provides an excellent visual shorthand for the changed circumstances of the third act. Tatiana’s frustration is powerfully represented by her sweeping those books from the shelves.

In many respects, I felt that Slater’s staging brought Tchaikovsky’s opera, or at least its central character, closer to Pushkin’s ‘original’ than is usually the case. For not only is Onegin an outsider, he is filled with restlessness, and one has a very clear sense of him journeying from one scene to the next, much as in Pushkin’s lyric narrative. There is one loss here – though this is far from confined to this particular staging – in that there is relatively little room for Tchaikovsky’s homoeroticism, intentional or otherwise. Still, no staging of an interesting work will be able to deal with every concrete aspect, let alone with every dramatic possibility. This was the only staging I can recall seeing in the theatre to compare with Steven Pimlott’s bizarrely underrated production for the Royal Opera.  

Mark Stone presented an Onegin handsome of tone as well as presence, aloof, restless, tormented without the slightest hint of exaggeration. Anna Leese was an excellent foil as Tatiana, her portrayal as intelligent, as dramatically progressive, as it was moving. Hannah Pedley’s Olga was pleasingly rich-toned, without detriment to her relative flightiness as a character (especially in this production). Whilst Peter Auty’s Lensky was well received, I found his performance and Patrick Mundy’s Triquet the only real disappointments in the cast, both somewhat coarse of timbre, the former in particular often sounding as if he would be happier singing Puccini. Otherwise, there was much to enjoy in the finely etched Mme Larina and Filipievna of Anne Mason and Elizabeth Sikora respectively, and in the less-geriatricly-portrayed-than-usual Gremin of Graeme Broadbent. The choral singing was excellent, an ideal match of clarity and weight, testament surely to excellent training from chorus master, Kelvin Lim. A memorable evening indeed.

The Gambler, Royal Opera, 11 February 2010

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

(sung in English translation)

General – Sir John Tomlinson
Polina – Angela Denoke
Alexey Ivanovitch – Roberto Saccà
Babulenka – Susan Bickley
Marquis – Kurt Streit
Blanche – Jurgita Adamonytė
Mr Astley – Mark Stone
Prince Nilski – John Easterlin
Baron Würmerhelm – Jeremy White
Baroness Würmerheim – Emma Bernard
Potapytsch – Dawid Kimberg
Casino Director – Graeme Danby
First Croupier – Hubert Francis
Second Croupier – Robert Anthony Gardiner
Gaudy Lady – Simona Mihai
Pale Lady – Elisabeth Meister
Dubious Old Lady – Elisabeth Sikora
Lady Comme Ci, Comme Ça – Carol Rowlands
Venerable Lady – Kai Rüütel
Rash Gambler – Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Hypochondriac Gambler – Steven Ebel
Hunchback Gambler – Alasdair Elliott
Aged Gambler – John Cunningham
Six Gamblers – Luke Price, Andrew O’Connor, John Bernays, Jonathan Coad, Olle Zetterström, Michael Lessiter
Fat Englisman – David Woloszko
Tall Englishman – Lukas Jakobski

Richard Jones (director)
Antony McDonald (set designs)
Nicky Gillibrand (costume designs)
Mimi Jordan Sherin (lighting)
Sarah Fahie (movement)

The Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Antonio Pappano (conductor)

The Royal Opera’s new production of The Gambler seems to me close to an unqualified success. This is the company’s first production of what is, save for juvenilia, Prokofiev’s first opera: sadly, not an unusual state of affairs, since it was only a couple of years previously that I had seen the Berlin premiere under Daniel Barenboim, in a fine production by Dmitri Tcherniakov. Only produced once during the composer’s lifetime, there is certainly no good reason to shun Prokofiev’s Dostoyevsky opera now, for it is one of his strongest stage works, as Richard Jones, Antonio Pappano, and an excellent cast demonstrated.

The action is updated to what resembles the inter-war period, so the time of the 1929 Brussels premiere, though I suppose it could be the time of composition, during the previous decade. One might, if one were so minded, question how credible that makes some details of the plot but it works well and looks good taken in itself, and the work is not in any especially meaningful sense tied to a particular period. Antony Macdonald’s designs splendidly evoke the cosmopolitan but empty world of Roulettenbourg’s hotel, whilst Nicky Gillibrand’s costumes permit the eye to assist the ear in the delineation of what can sometimes be rather fleeting characterisation, minor characters coming and going in Prokofiev’s finely observed vignettes. One of Jones’s extra touches is to set the first act in an adjoining zoo, rather than a park. Ideas of animal behaviour and of caging – and a wonderful turn for a performing seal (not real!) – nicely sets up the world we shall explore more fully. Likewise the framing device of the CASINO sign in front of the curtain at the beginning of each of the four acts. Given the recent wrecking acts of what some people curiously term the ‘financial services industry,’ these ideas could hardly be more topical, yet temptation to agitprop, should Jones indeed have felt any, is firmly resisted.

The musical pacing was sometimes just a little fitful during the first two acts. I do not wish to exaggerate, but there were occasions when Prokofiev’s motor rhythms seemed to follow the singers, rather than drive them as they should. There was no such problem following the interval: perhaps partly a consequence of the composer’s ratcheting up the tension, but also a sign that Pappano felt more able to reconcile his colouristic revelations with that increased rhythmic drive so necessary to the depiction of intensified gambling addiction. The more the orchestra was given its head, the better, and the players were certainly on excellent form, revelling in Prokofiev’s virtuosic scoring. For its brief appearance, the chorus was on equally excellent form.

Roberto Saccà captured the difficult balance between Alexey’s weakness of character and his increasing determination. Character progression was also finely observed in Angela Denoke’s Polina, a rounded and, by the end, moving portrayal. Sir John Tomlinson’s inimitable way was well suited to the General; whatever his flaws, one could not help but sympathise. Jurgita Adamonytė and Kurt Streit captured the rootless world of the international demi-monde in their Blanche and Marquis, without resorting to the seductive prospect of the mere stock character. It was, perhaps unsusprisingly, Susan Bickley’s Babulenka who stole the show: a consequence of the role, doubtless, but also of this wonderful artist’s musico-dramatic skills and commitment. Stefania Toczyska had made an equally commanding impression in Berlin; when Babulenka arrives, the clock should stop, as it did on both of those occasions. She sees through the ghastly array of hangers-on and ensures with style that the General will not inherit a sou, whilst movingly evoking the Mother Russia to which she returns. Other characters come and go – this is not a criticism, but an observation of how the opera works – but special mention might go to Mark Stone’s enigmatic Mr Astley, a lynchpin and yet not, and Carol Rowlands’s telling Lady Comme Ci, Comme Ça: concerned or detached, who knows?

My sole cavil relates to the decision to perform the work in English: very much the director’s decision, according to Tomlinson, in the interview he gave me a few days earlier. I can see the arguments in favour, not least the speed of conversation. And I am sure that Tomlinson is right to observe that the Russian language does not have time to colour the music in the way that it does, say, in Mussorgsky. But the sound of the words is very different and nothing can quite compensate for that, even for a non-Russian speaker such as myself. Though diction was generally very good and in some cases, such as Tomlinson’s utterly beyond reproach, one inevitably must consult the surtitles from time and time, in which case one might as well have the sound of the original. In addition, the titles did not always keep pace with the delivery of the words: a little confusing. Nevertheless, this was in most respects a fine achievement, for which three cheers should go to the Royal Opera.