Der fliegende Holländer, Royal Opera, 5 February 2015

Images: ROH/Clive Barda

 

 

Royal Opera House

The Dutchman – Bryn Terfel

Senta – Adrianne Pieczonka
Daland – Peter Rose
Erik – Michael König
Mary – Catherine Wyn-Rogers
Steersman – Ed Lyon

Tim Albery (director)

Daniel Dooner (revival director)
Michael Levine (set designs)
Constance Hoffmann (costumes)
David Finn (lighting)

Chorus of the Royal Opera House (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Andris Nelsons (conductor)

 

I wonder whether we need a new way of thinking – and talking – about operatic ‘revivals’. Perhaps the term is more meaningful when it comes to works that have been dead and buried for years, before being rediscovered by subsequent generations. However, when it comes to productions, I cannot help but think that it increasingly obscures rather than aids understanding. Where, after all, has the production been in the mean time? Hades? More to the point, though, I think we tend to underestimate, at least in many cases, the role of the revival director. (The often problematical ‘repertory’ system employed in many German theatres is a different matter; I am thinking here of theatres operating according to what is essentially a stagione principle.) In this particular case, Daniel Dooner seemed to make a better job of ‘reviving’ Tim Albery’s production of The Flying Dutchman than Albery had made of presenting it in the first place. Or was it a matter of a better-adjusted cast? The one does not exclude the other, of course; indeed, the two are not unlikely to have been related.

Steersman (Ed Lyon)

The 2009 ‘premiere’ had greatly disappointed, eschewing Wagner’s interest in myth for a  form of dreary realism, quite out of place and seemingly determined – understandably, I suppose, given its misguided premise – to downplay the figure of the Dutchman as much as possible. It did not make sense and it did not involve. The irritants have not entirely gone away, especially during the third act, in which the drunken antics of the townsfolk – here, it must be admitted, very well portrayed by the chorus and Ed Lyon’s Steersman – still seem to be far too much ‘the point’. But they are counterbalanced and, on occasion, supplanted by a stronger sense of the Dutchman’s plight and its consequences. ‘Revival’ seems something of a misnomer for a hugely beneficial shift of emphasis, unless we mean that the work itself experiences something of a revival – which, I think, it does, at least vis­-à-vis its outing six years ago.

 

The Dutchman (Bryn Terfel)

Bryn Terfel’s performance certainly seems less ‘revived’ than brought to life for the first time. In 2009, he had disappointed perhaps even more than the production. There were still occasional unwelcome tendencies towards crooning, especially towards the end of his first-act monologue. They were occasional, though, and Terfel followed up his excellent Proms Walküre Wotan – almost certainly the best thing I have heard him sing – with a world-weary Dutchman who, moments of tiredness aside, yet had powers of something mysterious in reserve for when the moment called.  This time the words were not only crystal-clear – always a formidable weapon in Terfel’s armoury – but invested with a true sense of dramatic meaning. Adrianne Pieczonka’s Senta was at least his equal in terms of dramatic commitment; arguably, this thrilling, unmistakeably womanly performance went still further. I say ‘womanly’ since this was a reading that seemed thoroughly in keeping with a recent, welcome understanding of Wagner’s earlier heroines to be more than virginal male projections. Peter Rose made the most of Daland’s character: venal, yes, but also looking to the future for his daughter as well as himself. Michael König offered an alert Erik, Catherine Wyn-Rogers a properly maternal Mary. Often threatening to steal the show was Lyon’s Steersman, as fine a portrayal as I can recall: an everyman, perhaps, but one with agency, for which verbal and musical acuity alike should be thanked.

 

Senta (Adrianne Pieczonka) and Erik
(Michael König)

Andris Nelsons’s conducting for the most part brought out the best from the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. However, the interpretation as a whole did not seem quite to have settled; I strongly suspect that subsequent performances will impress more. The Flying Dutchman is a difficult work to bring off; despite fashionable claims for overplaying its (alleged) antecedents, it really works best as a whole when viewed, as Wagner would later do so, in the light of his subsequent musico-dramatic theories. Senta’s Ballad may not originally have been its dramatic kernel, but it has become so. Nelsons sometimes seemed unclear which way to tilt, especially during a drawn-out Overture, whose extremes of tempo threatened to negate any sense of unity. There were sluggish passages elsewhere: not hugely drawn out, but enough to make one wonder where the music was heading. The third act emerged tightest, and may well be a pointer to what audiences will hear later in the run. Choral singing was not entirely free of blurred edges, but there was much to admire, and again, I suspect that slight shortcomings will soon be overcome. This remained an impressive ‘revival’, all the more so, given its manifest superiority to the production’s first outing.  

 

Bayreuth Festival (2) - Der fliegende Holländer, 12 August 2012

Bayreuth Festspielhaus

Daland – Franz-Josef Selig
Senta – Adrienne Pieczonka
Erik – Michael König
Mary – Christa Mayer
Steersman – Benjamin Bruns
The Dutchman – Samuel Youn

Jan Philipp Gloger (director)
Christof Hetzer (set designs)
Karin Jud (costumes)
Urs Schönebaum (lighting)
Martin Eidenberger (video)
Sophie Becker (dramaturgy)

Bayreuth Festival Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)
Bayreuth Festival Orchestra
Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Assuming that Rienzi and Wagner’s two earlier operas will not enter the regular Festival repertory, and discounting Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, The Flying Dutchman was my final work from the Wagner canon to hear at Bayreuth. Unusually, early controversy was elicited not by the production, but by casting. Evgeny Nikitin, as the whole world must now be aware, was forced to withdraw, or ‘asked to resign’, owing to an absurd over-reaction to a tattoo claimed to be a swastika but which was not. Bayreuth’s nervousness concerning the slightest possible connection to its darkest period is understandable, but the Festival would be far better advised to confront its past head on, as Katharina Wagner seems commendably determined to do, rather than to resort to such quick-fix public relations gimmicks, which will always backfire.

Nikitin is a fine artist and was sorely missed, his replacement Samuel Youn to be lauded for acting as a last-minute replacement but hardly for his performance. Whilst he started off resoundingly dark and clear of tone, he did not reach the end of his monologue before intonational problems set in. Alarmingly, there were entire phrases during his performance when he was as much as a quarter-tone off-pitch; it was not a matter of odd notes. Perhaps the audience was being indulgent on account of the special situation, but this was some way by now from the first night; I could not help but think that the warm reaction Youn received signalled an audience for the most part unable to discern his tuning, even if one were to put aside a rather dour stage presence.

His colleagues, save for a rather nondescript Mary – why does this role seem so difficult to cast? – provided a good deal of vocal compensation. Adrienne Pieczonka had a few moments in which her tuning too left a little to be desired, also on occasion her diction, but for the most part, hers was an impressive, unusually womanly, performance. This Senta was no girl and seemed, which fitted well with the production, to know very much what she was doing. Her Erik, Michael König, showed himself possessed of a fine, mellifluous tenor, even if he were a little stiff on stage. Benjamin Bruns was quite a revelation as the Steersman. His is a still more mellifluous, at times ravishingly beautiful, voice; I wished that more had been written for him. Perhaps best of all was Franz-Josef Selig’s Daland, unerringly centred with respect to pitch and words, and just as unerring when it came to tonal warmth. Perhaps he ultimately sounds a little too kindly for the role, but that is really to nit-pick.

Christian Thielemann drew an echt-Bayreuth sound from the Festival Orchestra. He certainly knows how to work both orchestra and Festspielhaus acoustic. Not that this reading was undifferentiated in its darkness; there were splendidly light, almost fairy-like, Mendelssohnian textures to be enjoyed too. However, there were problems with Thielemann’s performance – at least for me, though the audience again reacted almost ecstatically at the endless curtain calls. A recurring trait in some, though far from all, of his performances is a tendency to pull around the music arbitrarily, almost because he can. Whilst it can occasionally prove refreshing, if only as a counterblast to unimaginative or doctrinaire-metronomic performances, here there were too many occasions, as in his Philharmonia recording of Schumann’s Second Symphony, in which it sounded merely contrived and interrupted the flow. There was a wonderfully pregnant slowing at the end of Senta’s ballad, fully justified by the anticipation it engendered. Balanced against that were frankly bizarre gear-changes such as a sudden slowing during the transition to the third act. (The opera was performed in an unbroken span, and in Wagner’s later version.) I was also a little surprised to hear the old operatic forms so clearly delineated; yes, Wagner marks them in the score, but I have yet to hear a performance of the ‘number-opera’ as opposed to the ‘music-drama’ variety that has proved entirely convincing. More than once I longed for Klemperer’s level-headed yet visceral communication of the score. Choral singing was first-rate throughout.

I was left somewhat nonplussed by Jan Phillip Gloger’s production, new this year. It has some excellent visual touches, not least thanks to Christof Hetzer’s striking set designs and Urs Schönebaum’s evocative and equally striking lighting. I liked the use of red to denote Senta’s realm of adventure, drawing together her dress, the red with which she daubs boxes to bring about her own modest Dutchman installation – the equivalent to the painting – and the sometimes shocking use of blood. And the way silhouetting is imaginatively employed to make the fantasy of not only a boat but a liberating cityscape is impressive indeed. The modernity of Daland’s factory is chillingly conveyed, but it is not entirely clear to me that it is enough for a production of this work to indict contemporary capitalism – contemporary to us, that is. I have no particular problem with the setting being an electric fan factory: spinning of a sort, I suppose. Yet it did not seem to add anything very much, save for the very end, when, courtesy of an opportunistic mobile telephone picture taken by the Steersman, Wagnerian redemption is splendidly undercut by transformation of the fan design into a memento of the suicide of Senta and the Dutchman. That was by far the most savage indictment of the evening of our sick and sickening system of production.

The presentation of the Dutchman as a weird, android-like figure, presumably a product thereof, seemed more odd than anything else. At his entrance, wheeling in – yes, you have guessed it – a suitcase, he appeared to me to be injecting himself with a syringe. He did not seem very practised at it, for a great deal of blood was spilled. Apparently that was the point, cutting himself to show that he was human after all, but I was not the only person to have missed that in the theatre, having instead to resort to a programme interview. There were, indeed, too many instances where the action, especially for a relatively small theatre, was on too small a scale properly to understand, or was simply, at least to me, obscure. I had the sense that there was a better production waiting to break out; let us hope that the Werkstatt principle will enable refinements in years to come.

Prom 18 - WEDO/Barenboim: Beethoven, Symphony no.9, 27 July 2012

Royal Albert Hall

Beethoven – Symphony no.9 in D minor, op.125

Anna Samuil (soprano)
Waltraud Meier (mezzo-soprano)
Michael König (tenor)
René Pape (bass)
National Youth Choir of Great Britain (chorus master: Robert Isaacs)
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

 

Few composers seem as remote and yet as necessary to our age as Beethoven, and perhaps the symphonic Beethoven in particular. Irony is a foreign word to him; blazing affirmation and indeed intensity of struggle seem too much for us. Most conductors seem either fearful or simply uncomprehending of his demands, of the powerful, indeed overwhelming moral import of Beethoven’s work. Divested of meaning, reduced to the level of a performance kit - follow a metronome marking, make the strings sound unpleasant, drive as mercilessly as you can – that nonsense, which, if not initiated by Toscanini’s cretinous remark on the Eroica (‘Some people say it is Napoleon, some Mussolini, some Hitler, but for me it is Allegro con brio’), is certainly symbolised by the at best disingenuous claim to play ‘as it is written’, seems to have reached its ultimate conclusion in absurdity. If only it were merely absurd; in reality, it is pernicious beyond words, for no age, least of all our own, can afford to cut itself off from Beethoven’s message, irrespective of whether ‘mere’ words can ever come close to expressing that message. We take refuge, of course, in the great performances of the past: above all, Klemperer and Furtwängler, extraordinarily different though they may be. Yet, whilst it would be madness ever to forsake the recordings – or still, in the enviable case of some people, actual memories – of those conductors, it is an intolerably unhealthy situation when so many of us find ourselves fleeing from the Beethovenian unity of the concert hall for solitary reassurance, or at best communion with souls of the dead, proffered by the gramophone. Words such as these from Furtwängler in 1943, and behind him Wagner, would be more likely to elicit incomprehension than impassioned debate:

... refinement, or even only what one might call heightened sensuous culture, is lacking in Beethoven. He has enough natural sensuousness, but an elevated, masculine form, Self-indulgence is as far from his nature as feminine loss of control. What Wagner felt edified by and enthusiastic about in Beethoven was the massive ‘grip’, that directness and grandiose clarity of expression unsurpassed in the whole of music, that ‘oratio directa’, as Wagner calls it ...

The Ninth is perhaps the sternest task of all, at least for those few conductors today who might be willing to take on the full interpretative moral burden entailed. It would be difficult to come up with a keeper of the flame – perhaps Sir Colin Davis, not least in the light of last year’s astounding Proms Missa Solemnis – as likely to rise to the occasion as Daniel Barenboim. Moreover, Barenboim had a number of trump cards up his preparatory sleeve. First, the very nature, the very existence, of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, its underlying philosophy almost an instantiation of the hopes expressed for the brotherhood of man by Schiller and Beethoven. Second, placing the performance at the conclusion of a cycle of all Beethoven’s symphonies, each instalment urging on conductor, players, and audience to greater heights. Third, the example of earlier performances, though not this, in performing Beethoven’s symphonies in conjunction with works by Boulez. In Hans Sachs’s words, ‘Es klang so alt und war doch so neu.’ Beethoven is rarely if ever writing in similar fashion to Boulez; that is not the point of the comparison. Nor is it enough simply to say that both musicians as revolutionaries, though they certainly are. But hearing the very idifferent responses to material necessitated not only by serial method but also by the æsthetic and, yes, moral dictates of another time helps bring home to us both the singularity and the universality – somehow, miraculously, Beethoven’s music can still speak to us, just as Marx expressed wonder in the case of the art of ancient Greece – of Beethoven and of his symphonies in particular. Perhaps it was a pity that the opportunity was not taken to pair another Boulez work with the culmination of the Beethoven cycle. Imagine, in the Royal Albert Hall, a performance of Répons, or, failing that, Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna. Or perhaps even a new work, whether by Boulez, or by someone else, Walther von Stolzing’s hour finally striking? One will always, however, be able to come up with alleged ‘improvements’ and ‘enhancements’, and up to this concert, all but Beckmesser would have been immeasurably grateful for what they had experienced. How, then, would the grand finale measure up to such formidable or even impossible expectations?

There was a bemusing false start, in which applause greeted – well, no one.  Second time around Barenboim appeared, to initiate a performance with anything but a false start. Time was when one could speak quite freely of the opening of the Ninth Symphony as a representation – almost in Schopenhauer’s sense – of creatio ex nihilo; that time came again, displacing or rather rendering supremely irrelevant even the slightest thought of positivist pedantry. There would be throughout the first movement an elemental quality that would be difficult not to relate to Wagner, far more so, for me, than to Bruckner, despite the obvious temptation. Though that primæval stirring owed a great deal to Furtwängler, a Klemperer-like stentorian quality soon revealed itself as a dialectical counterpart in Barenboim’s reading. (A greater debt to, or better, a greater sense of commonality with, Klemperer has been one of the especially intriguing aspects of this series.) Another dialectic, for Beethoven is surely the dialectical composer par excellence, perhaps in a sense related though not identical, would be that between a motivic integrity and network cohesion that was surprisingly Wagnerian with the tectonic workings of harmony and its demands upon sonata form, Haydn remaining a powerful presence, however different the scale of expression. The sense of exposition in the first movement was very strong; ‘exposition’ was not a mere word, nor an all-too-ready formula. This, despite Wagnerian intimations and Mozartian echoes – Don Giovanni, in particular – was emphatically symphony rather than aspirant music-drama. The coda tested that rule – and how! Its bass line was spine-chilling, terrifying, its contagion spreading to the entire orchestra. Would humanity overcome (apparent) Fate?

The scherzo’s kinetic energy came from within, from deep understanding of harmonic rhythm, not as sadly so often is the case, as an exhibitionistic importation from without. There was some wonderfully rollicking brass playing in a movement that exhibited more gruff Beethovenian humour than might have been expected. The whole was relentless in the proper sense, harmony dictating that it should be so. Once again Barenboim’s handling of transition, in this case to the trio, was of an order rarely encountered today. Wagner once called the art of transition his most subtle art; one might well have said the same of Barenboim. In the trio itself, the world of The Magic Flute seemed to fuse with Pastoral reminiscences, to create something quite new, an early pre-sentiment of the emergence of that tune in the finale. The last recurrence of the scherzo material was all the more powerful for its lack of hysteria: Klemperer again?

Tempo and formal understanding were finely judged in the slow movement. Barenboim’s command of line permitted an almost Gluckian noble simplicity, which yet dialectically revealed itself to be complexity. If the unfolding variations lacked quite the heightened luminosity and sublimity of Furtwängler, then Barenboim is not alone in that; indeed, it is Furtwängler who stands alone. Perhaps wisely, this at least opened in more modest fashion, yet remained beautifully sung, suffused with longing – and sheer goodness. More than once I felt kinship with the slow movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony: a little surprisingly, since I am not aware that this is a symphony Barenboim has conducted. (I shall be happy to stand corrected though.) Nevertheless the cumulative effect of experiencing Beethoven as supreme master of variation form was powerfully felt. Even when I wondered whether the first brass intervention towards the end might have been given a little more time, it was the second time around, the latter thereby intensified.

The celebrated cries at the opening of the finale were taken at quite a speed, without sounding hurried or harried. There was real depth of tone to be heard from the cellos and basses in their responses. The first enunciation of the theme was miraculously hushed: quite extraordinary. A sense of communion was engendered, as the players’ orchestral brothers – and sisters – joined; the brass entry sent shivers down the spine and had tears welling up, though we still lacked the word, perhaps even the Word. There were a couple of points when the music threatened to run away with itself, but it just about held together, and all was put right by René Pape’s Sarastro-like entry. His diction was straightforwardly superlative. more to the point, not only could every word be heard; every word meant something, and something important at that. The choral declaration, ‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder, wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt,’ was for this listener at least, emotionally overwhelming. Words, music, and performance came together as so much more than the sum of their parts. For the performance given by the National Youth Choir of Great Britain was as fresh as it was weighty, its layout – vocal parts dotted throughout the choir rather than split into sections – heightening the sense of mankind’s variety. I was again quite taken aback by the high quality of the diction, not an easy matter in which to succeed in this choral writing. ‘Und der Cherub steht vor Gott!’ was enunciated more clearly than I can ever recall, and that in an acoustic that really cannot help. Barenboim held the final ‘Gott!’ for an ecstatically long time, or so at least it felt. Anna Samuil’s rendition of the soprano part was somewhat problematical, not only lacking blend but at times quite unpleasant of tone; Waltraud Meier did a perfectly good job, as one would expect, but one does not listen to the Ninth for the mezzo, even for that mezzo. I thought Peter Seiffert was on much better vocal form than I had heard him for some time, before realising that he had been replaced by Michael König. The ‘Turkish March’ sounded just right in terms of tempi, contrast, and balance. Thereafter, the return of ‘Freude, schöner Götterfunken’ genuinely lifted the spirits; I could not help myself smiling, nor did I wish to do so, infected with ‘Freude’. The questioning, ‘Ihr stürzt nieder Millionen?’ was splendidly mysterious, imparting a sense of gradual revelation quite in keeping both with Schiller and Beethoven. The great combination of the ‘Freude’ and ‘Seid umschlungen’ themes was taken at an exhilarating tempo, full of life, and still full of expectation, full indeed of joy. Structural underpinning continued, however, to have a great deal in common with Klemperer’s granitic example. The final accelerandi were of course Furtwängler’s province, if less extreme. The very particular circumstances that enabled Furtwängler’s response no longer pertain; this was a Ninth that honoured tradition but spoke of our present condition, and to an audience of the present day.

It was a genuinely lovely touch at the end of the symphony for Barenboim to shake the hand of every member of the orchestra; it also reminded us that the West-Eastern Divan is so much more than just an orchestra. A speech was expected and came: succinct, resolute, even Beethovenian in spirit. Though a forthcoming concert in East Jerusalem had had to be cancelled, some elements in the Occupied Territories having objected to the orchestra as a role of ‘normalisation’ – how wrong could they be?! – the work of listening to each other, the democracy of a musical society in which every member was an equal, would continue. They might not be able to change the governments of the Middle East, but those governments would never change them.