Boris Godunov, Hamburg State Opera, 4 October 2023

Images: Brinkhoff/Mögenburg
Boris Godunov (Alexander Tsymbalyuk)

Boris Godunov – Alexander Tsymbalyuk
Andrey Schchelkalov – Alexey Bogdanchikov
Nikitch (Police Officer) – Hubert Kowalczyk
Mityukha – Julian Arsenault
Prince Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky – Matthias Klink
Pimen – Vitalij Kowaljow
Grigory Otrepiev – Dovlet Nurgeldiyev
Hostess of the Inn – Marta Swiderska
Varlaam – Ryan Speedo Green
Missail – Jürgen Sacher
Xenia – Olivia Boen
Xenia’s Nurse – Renate Spingler
Fyodor – Kady Evanyshyn
Boyar – Mateusz Lugowski
Holy Fool – Florian Panzieri

Frank Castorf (director)
Wolfgang Gruber (assistant director)
Aleksandar Denić (set designs)
Adriana Braga Peretzki (costumes)
Rainer Casper (lighting)
Andreas Deinert, Severin Renke (video, live camera)
Maryvonne Riedelsheimer (live editing)
Patric Seibert (dramaturgy)

  
Children’s and Youth Choir of the Hamburg State Opera (director: Luiz de Goday)

Chorus of the Hamburg State Opera (director: Eberhard Friedrich)

Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra

Kent Nagano (conductor)

It is, of course, the opera for our time; arguably, it is for many other times too. Boris Godunov, in whatever incarnation – a more complex question than it is even for a Bruckner symphony – has nonetheless come under attack from some frankly bizarre nationalists who consider it should not currently be performed. The Polish National Opera’s Waldemar Piotr Dąbrowski announced cancellation of a Warsaw staging with a string of non sequiturs he could not possibly have believed. Ukrainian protestors mobbed La Scala to demand cancellation there. The country’s Minister of Culture went further and, incredibly, demanded other countries boycott all Russian culture. What on earth do they think happens in the opera? Boris’s reign is hardly characterised by its success; whatever this opera is concerned with, it is certainly not a ‘how to’ guide. It is rather like those strange people who think Hitler might have been politically inspired by the Ring. We can be fairly certain he noticed what happened to Wotan, Siegfried, and any other hero. And if we are to take the claims made for Russian culture seriously, surely we should seek to understand it, as of course we should Polish, Ukrainian, and any other culture: all part of our world.

Frank Castorf’s new production for the Hamburg State Opera is arguably not so new. It was due to open in September 2020, but was thwarted by coronavirus. Three years later, it has its chance in a very changed Europe. (You will struggle to go far in Germany without seeing a Ukrainian flag.) Layers of resonance, like those in the work, make it more rather than less relevant, and show those who would cancel or ban artworks for the fools, as well as the knaves, that they are. All societies write and rewrite their history. All respond to myth as well as to evidence, to the present as well as to the past. This is what we see here, in a Russian Empire whose costumes (brilliantly designed by Adriana Braga Peretzki) may be of the twentieth century, but also look back all the way to the Time of Troubles and beyond, boyars from before Peter the Great had their beards shorn. (Is that not, after all, what Stalin did with his ‘Great Patriotic War’?) These pasts are, in many ways, now, whether in Pimen’s chronicle or the electronically changing and updating battle maps of Boris’s imperial quarters, whose billiard games afford little relaxation, yet provide plentiful metaphors for surrounding machinations.

The writing and the dramatising are the thing. Many of us have probably fallen into the trap of taking Pimen’s witness for the truth. He seems so plausible. Perhaps Grigory/Dmitri did too; that is left rather more to our imagination. And does not the tragedy make more sense if Boris was guilty? (Yet if he was, why not, as dramaturge Patric Seibert points out in an excellent programme essay, give the people what they want? Confess and crush his enemy, who is nowhere near victory, in any case?) Perhaps it would, if this were a ‘classical’ anything, yet the rough edges of Boris, its very problematical qualities, are itself the grit of its drama and, perhaps, of its truth. In this, the 1868-9 version (speaking of ‘original’ or otherwise only muddies the water further), we see and hear, to quote Richard Taruskin in typically trenchant yet not unpersuasive form: ‘a set of scenes very roughly hewn from Pushkin’s unwieldy block of poetic marble, selected according to diverse and unrelated criteria. … Far from showing how carefully Mussorgsky structured his dramatic conception, the first Boris boldly displays a quintessentially realist disdain for a well-made play.’ 

‘No Polish scene?’ I hear you lament. Well, yes or no. For Castorf, permitted a degree of leeway here in the opera house to draw on his theatrical practice of introduction of other texts, fills in some of the gaps on film between scenes. Avaricious, cynical, lustful, and a great deal more: it is difficult to imagine the Grigory and Marina we see there as offering much of a solution for the ever-suffering Russian people, whose manipulation by church and nobility is clearly signalled. So too is that of Poland and the Roman Catholic Church more generally, as we see in the presence, also on film, of John Paul II and dispersal of propaganda leaflets headed by iconic – for once, surely, the term holds – emblems of ‘Solidarność’. More traditional icons are to be seen amongst flags and other emblems too: here is nothing if not a contested sphere.

This is less a revisionist (or, if you prefer, historically informed) portrayal of Boris and his rule than one which, in Shakespearean style, declines to judge and leaves that to us, should we wish. We may, of course, learn more by similarly declining: a controversial message,’ if message it be, right now. We certainly learn more by being afforded the privilege. As the action progresses, framed by yet another superlative revolving set of contrasts and connections from Castorf’s longstanding collaborator Aleksandar Denić, we head towards more than one tragic denouement. There is that of Boris, and what we might read into him as representing: perhaps a more ideal form of Soviet rule? His concern for the people seems genuine enough and he feeds them: a point made clearly here. One thing, moreover, that differentiates Boris from today’s politicians – those in power, anyway – is, as Seibert notes, his a conscience. His personal tragedy, and that, it seems here, of Russia too, is that that conscience proves his undoing; it kills him. A Gorbachev, perhaps? For there is the greater political tragedy too. What comes of nefarious external interference, aided and abetted by the Shuiskys (and Romanovs) within?

Fool (Florian Panzieri)

Boris dead, the set revolves once more for Fyodor to see what the future holds: the swift substitution for socialist realism of Coca-Cola, in the form of a huge, again ‘iconic’ bottle centre stage, with a straw whose colours are that of Yeltsin’s (and Putin’s) Russia. ‘Flow, flow, bitter tears,’ as the Fool would have sung again in a different version; the words nonetheless ring in our ears and the curtain falls. What we have seen, whether on stage, on live video close-up, or on film, and what we have still not seen, that variety of sources notwithstanding, may have helped us make up our own minds. What does Pimen do when he retreats inside? Who is exploiting whom at the Polish court? To what extent, if you will forgive the school examination format, is Boris the victim of psychological manipulation? Or we may emerge all the more confused at the complications of art and reality. There are far worse lessons than that. 

Kent Nagano’s conducting of the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra intrigued me too. On the one hand, some of it sounded what I am tempted to call unidiomatic, though I should not exaggerate: closer to Tchaikovsky (though hardly Rimsky) than to Mussorgsky. Yet if we draw those lessons from the production, what of the musical performance? Should we not beware the idea that there is a correct or true path? If we cannot settle on a text for the work ‘itself’, should we not open that out in other ways? Nowadays, we pride ourselves on appreciating the radicalism of ‘pure’ Mussorgsky, even to the extent of preferring (to my mind, somewhat dubiously) the version heard here. What have we lost in the meantime? And can we seriously maintain that those before did not know what they were doing? For Nagano certainly knew where the music was going and, so it seemed, where it had more broadly come from. It was a reading that complemented and even complicated what we saw in stage, even if sometimes I longed for a little more starkness and bite.

 

Fyodor (Kady Evanyshyn)

In the title role, Alexander Tsymbalyuk offered a similarly thoughtful and complex portrayal: sympathetic yet never banally so. We might trust his witness no more than that of anyone else, but we could certainly trust the alchemy between music, words, and gesture. Matthias Klink’s wheedling Shuisky and Dovlet Nurgeldiyev’s sweet-toned faux-innocence as Grigory made their points in similarly thoughtful ways. Shuisky’s first-hand ‘happening’ to see Boris’s breakdown offered a duly chilling moment. Marta Swiderska presided in colourful, characterful fashion over a raucous hostelry close to the Lithuanian border, Ryan Speedo Green’s Varlaam a properly larger-than-life patron. Vitalij Kowaljow’s Pimen seemed very much the holy man we were given to believe, yet far from ruled out more sinister possibilities. All contributed to the greater whole, as of course did the chorus, whose disappointments, privations, and other sufferings were all too real. Not that they were not in some sense responsible too. Expertly trained by Eberhard Friedrich, with them we knew where we were—or rather, we thought we did.

Zukerman/Staatskapelle Berlin/Shani - Elgar and Mussorgsky, 13 January 2020

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Elgar: Violin Concerto in B minor, op.61

Mussorgsky-Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition

Pinchas Zukerman (violin)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Lahav Shani (conductor)

Strange though this may sound to the uninitiated, Daniel Barenboim’s Staatskapelle Berlin now stands second to none in contemporary Elgar performance. Barenboim’s long association with the composer has latterly seen an Indian summer, much of which I have been privileged to hear. This evening, in the fourth of the orchestra’s seasonal subscription concerts and the third to include music by Elgar (!), it was time to hear from Barenboim’s similarly long-term associate, Pinchas Zukerman, and a more recent associate, Lahav Shani, with whom the orchestra already seems to be on good terms.

The opening tutti certainly suggested a similar affinity on Shani’s part for the composer: passionate, urgent, and flexible as required, as idiomatic as it was ‘objectively’ convincing. The Staatskapelle, moreover, played as if it were playing for Barenboim himself. Tender, noble, rich, and dark: one could not reasonably have asked for more. This was a Romantic rather than a modernist Elgar, but there is nothing wrong with that. There would have been little virtue in attempting to present a performance someone else, let alone Barenboim, would have given. Zukerman’s entry suggested something similar, his golden, even glamorous tone recognisable of old. There was something, moreover, intriguing, not just here in the first movement but throughout, to the Brahmsian confrontation of soloist and orchestra we heard: these interpreters again very much their own men. Sadly, the charms of what increasingly sounded more like aggression on Zukerman’s part began to pale. Not only was he sometimes out of sync with the orchestra in his passagework – however craftily Shani covered up for him – but the unyielding, squarer quality of his playing was less than suggestive of much in the way of musical sensitivity. At its best, the glamour was irresistible, but was it Elgar? The slow movement fared better, roots in German Romanticism clear and meaningful. It was taken very slowly, but was none the worse for that. Shani, however, was still doing most of the real work. The finale was probably better forgotten. By turns unduly deliberate and running away with itself, it never settled down and threatened to seem interminable. There were wonderful moments, but the golden thread proved sadly elusive. A pity.

I felt no such reservations or difficulties concerning the second half: Pictures at an Exhibition in Ravel’s orchestration. Insofar as I had any at all, they related as ever to Ravel’s enterprise itself; even on that count, I had fewer than usual. Shani, seemingly liberated, conducted without a score, leading a performance full of incident but also possessed of long-term coherence. The opening Promenade had a similar urgency to the opening of the Elgar, yet rightly opened the door to music of very different qualities. ‘Gnomus’ boasted depth of string tone and agility in equal measure, colour, and above all mystery. There was not a little of that to ‘Il vechhio castello’ too, Gallic suavity – also heard later, in ‘Limoges: Le marché’ – balanced by occasional hints at an intriguing post-Mozartian sensibility. ‘Bydlo’, however, was more Russian, Ravel’s crescendo and diminuendo notwithstanding. (Surely he had to do something along such lines anyway. Mussorgsky’s strategy could hardly have worked as it did with orchestra.) Its shadow darkened the following Promenade and seemed also to inspire the portrait of ‘Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle’. Antisemitic? Undoubtedly, yet we lose something if we sit too sternly in judgement. Wagnerian brass turned Russian as we toured the catacombs. The spirit of Boris Godunov appeared not for the first time in the unease and sheer malevelonce of ‘Cum mortuis in lingua mortua’. Baba Yaga’s arrival took one’s breath away, Shani’s insistence on motor rhythms strongly suggestive of Prokofiev. Perhaps perversely, I missed the piano most for ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’, though there was no doubting the excellence of the playing, nor Shani’s command. Ravel’s cunning hints at Boris-like orchestration made their point in any case.

Boris Godunov, Royal Opera, 19 June 2019

Royal Opera House

Images: (C) ROH 2019/Clive Barda

Boris Godunov – Bryn Terfel
Andrey Schchelkalov – Boris Pinkhasovich

Nikitch – Jeremy White

Mityukha – Adrian Clarke

Prince Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky – Roger Honeywell

Pimen – Matthew Rose

Grigory Otrepiev – David Butt Philip

Hostess of the Inn – Anne Marie Gibbons

Varlaam – John Tomlinson

Missail – Harry Nicoll

Frontier Guard – Alan Ewing

Xenia – Haegee Lee

Xenia’s Nurse – Fiona Kimm

Fyodor – Joshua Abrams

Boyar – Christopher Lemmings

Holy Fool – Sam Furness

Richard Jones (director)

Miriam Buethner (set designs)

Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)

Mimi Jordan Sherin (lighting)

Ben Wright, Danielle Urbas (movement)

Gerard Jones (associate director)

Trinity Boys’ Choir

Royal Opera Chorus and Extra Chorus (chorus master: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Marc Albrecht (conductor)

Dmitri (David Butt Philip ) and Pimen (Matthew Rose)

Maybe there is something to be said after all for the 1869 version of Boris Godunov. There is obviously a huge amount to be said for what we see and hear, the problem lying in comparisons with later versions. However, unlike 2016, when Richard Jones’s production had its first outing, I actually felt – as opposed to being able to come up with an argument in my head – what particular virtues it might have. It no longer came across as the ‘sketch’ of which I wrote three years ago, so long as one were able to keep 1872, or indeed aspects of Rimsky-Korsakov, out of one’s mind. That I was, more or less, speaks perhaps of still more distinguished performances than last time around – and not only of greater receptivity on my part during Britain’s own, unending Time of Troubles.

Shuisky (Roger Honeywell) and Boris (Bryn Terfel)

That began, I think, at the top – or rather in the pit. Last time around, Antonio Pappano had offered one of his better performances at Covent Garden. Marc Albrecht, however, proved surer, more focused, more grimly fatal, aided by an Orchestra of the Royal Opera House on fine, impressively dark form. Just what this version in particular needs then: almost enough to have one shrug at losing the Polish act, if not quite the clock. The chorus, almost as much the opera’s foundation as the orchestra, was on good form too: the sound of Mother Russia and her tribulations resounding from and through multiple pasts: that of the historical Boris Godunov, nineteenth-century reinventions, and our own. The rawness of its cries certainly brought out that quality in Mussorgsky’s ‘original’ text. One could doubtless pick holes, were one so inclined; I admit my lack of competence to judge the Russian. Neither this chorus nor any non-Slavic one will ever quite attain that ‘Russian’ sound many have in their heads from recordings, some from performances too. But so what? This is an opera for the world; if your sole objection is that it does not sound as you ‘feel’ it should, based upon what you have heard before, then perhaps the fault may lie with you. Nationalism may help to ground nineteenth-century opera; it should have no place in twenty-first-century performance and reception.

Holy Fool (Sam Furness) and children's choir

The same goes for the stage performances too, most highly distinguished on their own terms. Bryn Terfel’s portrayal of Boris seemed to me to have developed considerably from last time, though it had had much to offer then too. In some ways, his facial expressions, his haunted demeanour, their combination with vocal delivery seemed to have drawn closer to a great, non-Russian predecessor in the role, John Tomlinson (seen at Covent Garden under Semyon Bychkov in 2003). Not that this was anything other than Terfel’s own portrayal, of course. As Varlaam, Tomlinson himself proved in finer vocal fettle than I had heard for some time, his as fully committed a performance as we have come to expect over the years. It was, perhaps, Matthew Rose as Pimen who offered the finest vocal performance of all, the monk and chronicler – apparently innocent, but who knows? – brought vividly to life with surpassing vocal radiance. David Butt Philip’s Grigory benefited from a typical detailed, intelligent performance, with Roger Honeywell a properly wheedling Shuisky. This was a Boris with no weak links, cast from depth, other impressive performances coming from Jette Parker Young Artist, Haegee Lee and treble, Joshua Abrams, as the doomed ruler’s children. Sam Furness's Fool rightly held sway in his scene - and perhaps swayed the tsar too.

Boyars, Pimen, and Boris

Jones’s production has much to be said for it, especially when compared to more recent stagings I have seen from him (Katya Kabanova and La Damnation de Faust, for instance). The ritual re-enactment above of Dmitri’s assassination not only chills, but imparts unity and immediacy. That we see the re-enactment re-enacted, or threatened to be, below too heightens the sense of never-ending sorrow, of political and cultural impossibility. The red hair that marks out erstwhile and present Tsarevichi, as well as pretender Grigory, is but the most visible strand that seemingly marks out the fate of all. Lightly nineteenth-century dress reminds us, like Pimen’s chronicle, here literally writ large, that this is a contested history, in which generation after generation, not least those of Pushkin and Mussorgsky, will continue to rewrite to their own purposes. There is no peace in Russia, no peace in the world at large. It is not, perhaps, a production that has a great deal to say in and of itself, but it amply permits us to continue on our sorry path, both as chroniclers and readers.

Murder of Tsarevich Dmitri

With that, it is goodbye to the Royal Opera House for me for a little while. Next month, I shall leave the country again for a while. Will the ‘will of the people’ to which Boris attributes the Tsarevich’s death continue to prevail? As much and as little as ever. Who will be tsar when I return? A Godunov, a Shuisky, a Romanov? May God have mercy on the souls of the crowd, if not those whose Kremlin machinations have done this to us.

Szeps-Znaider/LSO/Jordan - Mussorgsky, Szymanowski, and Tchaikovsky, 25 October 2018

Barbican Hall

Mussorgsky: Night on the Bare Mountain

Szymanowski: Violin Concerto no.2, op.61
Tchaikovsky: Symphony no.5 in E minor, op.64


Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider (violin)
London Symphony Orchestra
Philippe Jordan (conductor)



I was about to say that the LSO excels in music such as this, but then it tends to excel in pretty much any kind of music, especially given the right conductor. Nevertheless, its trademark precision was vividly on display in a duly wild – controlled wild – performance of Night on the Bare Mountain. It was fantastical too, Mussorgsky’s obstreperous lack of development in a Germanic sense largely vindicated; there are other ways for music to unfold in time. (Yes, I know what that says about my sense of musical gravity, about my construction of a centre and periphery; so be it.) There was ‘Russian’ soul too, especially from the lower strings. Philippe Jordan seemed to relish, as well he should, this Rolls-Royce of an instrument with which to play. Does it all quite hang together, or did it on this occasion? I am genuinely not sure. It was fun, though.
 

The sound Jordan and/or Szymanowski conjured from the orchestra for the latter’s Second Violin Concerto was no less fantastical, but cooler, darker, less opulent: definitely a later Szymanowski than that of the First – and indeed of much of his most popular music. Its hard edges glistened, whilst Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider – he has reverted to the fuller version of his surname – spun a more typical, yet no less alluring golden thread. At least that was the early balance of play; one of the fascinations of this fine performance was the constant shift in such relationships, even in standpoints and perspectives. A different, later mode of definition endured: when those great washes of sound came, they were more golden than kaleidoscopic, more damask than magic carpet. This was a dramatic world born in the Tatras Mountains rather than Sicily. Earthy mazurka rhythms, spellbinding solo virtuosity, a languor closer perhaps to Lulu than to Pelléas, definitely of a world following King Roger: these were not mere incidental points of interest but crucial to the revelation of musical structure in time. It is a structure, a work sui generis and sounded as such. Szeps-Znaider’s Bach D minor Sarabande encore proved impressively variegated, even febrile: here was something still more vulnerable, with a little of the viola or even the cello to its musical soul.

 

Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony opened with a tone more rounded than that we had heard in Mussorgsky. That is, of course, partly a matter of writing, but also of performance. Superlative clarinet duo playing from Chris Richards and Chi-Yu Mo would not be the least of the LSO delights on offer here and throughout. Many thanks should also go to the telephone improvisation at the close of the first movement introduction. Jordan imparted a sense of urgency, of fate, to the exposition proper, the LSO cultivated and incisive. Soon, however, that drive tilted into the merely hard-driven, not helped by the congested Barbican acoustic. (How desperately we need a new hall!) If only his structural grasp or communication had been so unfailingly excellent as the orchestral playing. It was certainly not without merit, notably eliciting a fine sense of return at the onset of the recapitulation and true defiance in the closing bars. Nevertheless, the music found itself on several occasions driven or held back without evident reason: this in a Tchaikovsky symphony more in need than any other of a Brahmsian mind.

The slow movement’s horn solo (Guglielmo Pellarin) proved delectable, yet was ‘only’ first among wind equals. Save for a few passages of excessive moulding, Jordan shaped Tchaikovsky’s music well here. Had he let it sing more freely, it would have proved more moving still. The waltz was graceful, finely detailed, if not especially warm, although again the Barbican surely had a hand in that. There was no denying, however, the richness of the LSO string sound at the finale’s outset. Very much on the fast side, it nevertheless worked in a straightforward fashion. A little more relaxation might not have gone amiss, but this was perhaps the strongest of the four movements. If its virtues could have been read back into its predecessors, the first movement in particular, it would surely have been to the benefit of the whole.

 

The Fair at Sorochintsy, Komische Oper, 2 April 2017

Komische Oper, Berlin

Dream Vision ballet sequence
Image: Monika Rittershaus

 

Solopu Cherevik – Jens Larsen

Khivrya – Agnes Zwierko
Parasya –Mirka Wagner
Gritsko - Alexander Lewis
Afanasy Ivanovich – Ivan Turšić
Gypsy – Hans Gröning
Kum/Chernobog, Master of the Demons – Tom Erik Lie
Choral Solos – Friederike Meinke, Paula Rummel, Volker Herden, Matthias Spenke
 

Barrie Kosky (director)

Katrin Lea Tag (designs)
Ulrich Lenz (dramaturgy)
Franck Evin (lighting)

Children’s Chorus of the Komische Oper, Berlin (chorus mistress: Dagmar Fiebach)

Chorus of the Komische Oper, Berlin (chorus master: David Cavelius)

Vocalconsort Berlin

Orchestra of the Komische Oper, Berlin

Henrik Nánási (conductor)

Who would not want to stage a third opera by Mussorgsky? Boris Godunov and Khovanschina are universally regarded as two of the greatest musico-dramatic works of the nineteenth century, even if neither, and the latter in particular, is performed nearly so often as it should be. Thanks are due, then, to the Komische Oper and Barrie Kosky simply for performing The Fair at Sorochintsy for the first time since 1948, in Walter Felsenstein's very first season, let alone for doing it so well. This new production is something of which all who have taken part can justly be proud.

 

There are problems, of course, but there always will be with this work (if indeed one can call it that). If one has to piece together something that cannot fail to be somewhat fragmentary, all the better for active listening and spectating. The theatre is not, or should not be, a place simply to sit back and ‘enjoy’. Richard Taruskin’s New Grove article lists four versions that have been staged. This is the fourth, now standard insofar as one can speak of ‘standard’ for such a rarity: the edition by Pavel Lamm, completed and orchestrated by Vissarion Shebalin, first performed in Moscow in 1932. (An earlier version of this version, as it were, similarly prepared by Shebalin, had been given in Leningrad the previous year.) Even without the textual difficulties – to put it mildly – the listener would most likely experience something of a shock, or at least a surprise, upon hearing the music that is unquestionably Mussorgsky’s. Very little stands in the radical line of Boris. The opera is not a tragedy, but a comedy of peasant life, after a story by Gogol, and the musical style is simpler, closer to a more ‘popular’ conception of what is Russian. Taruskin, having noted that it ‘is frankly a number opera,’ – impossible to dissent from that! – goes on to say that it is ‘possibly modelled to some degree on Gulak-Artemovsky’s popular “Little Russian” Singspiel Zaporozhets za Dunayem,’ and, ‘as traditionally befits a peasant comedy, even the dialogue scenes are modelled not on speech but on folktunes’. Indeed, there is one such recurring theme I half-wondered whether I recognised from The Rite of Spring, but suspect that it was similarity rather than identity. (I should happily be informed and/or corrected!)

 

Shebalin’s orchestration and composition likewise – to my ears, anyway – distance the music from what I have come to think of as authentically Mussorgskian. Brighter, more ‘conventional’ orchestral colouring, seemingly more characteristic of other nineteenth-century Russian composers, Tchaikovsky included, is accomplished, but does not necessarily sound quite ‘right’. Perhaps, though, that is my fault, in expecting this very different work to sound more like Mussorgsky’s other operas than it should. The interpolated music was as follows: before the first and after the third: Rimsky-Korsakov’s Hebrew Song, op.7 no.2; and, between the first and second acts, Mussorgsky’s own ‘Trepak’ from his Songs and Dances of Death; between the second and third, his ‘Cradle Song’, also from that celebrated cycle; in the third act, ‘The Field Marshal,’ likewise from that set.

 

A Gogol opera would almost seem made for Barrie Kosky, offering magic, sex, exoticism, and of course grotesquerie. He and his production team certainly do a fine job here. Katrin Lea Tag’s set designs are relatively spare, without being minimalist; they provide an excellent frame for Kosky’s always detailed, convincing Personenregie. There is no doubting the mastery of his craft here. Costumes are undogmatically suggestive of when and where one would expect: no fetishisation, but again a way into the drama. The Dream Vision ballet sequence is, unsurprisingly, an exception to any hint of spareness. The sudden appearance of St John’s Eve on Bald Mountain seems bizarre, even incongruous, but one comes to feel that is part of the point (which, in a sense, of course, it is). Kosky’s fantastical imagination here runs riot. One does not necessarily understand, although one may feel compelled to attempt interpretation nevertheless. It is spectacle in the best sense, though, mysteriously changing what we have seen and heard forever.

 

The lavish banquet for diabolical beings with pig heads (Chernobod, Master of the Demons, speaking to us with hellish amplification) has been clearly prefigured, moreover, in the second-act scene in which Khivyra has her assignation with the priest’s son, Afanasy Ivanovich. After some sexually inventive shenanigans with the contents of her larder, she must hide him quickly, her husband, the drunken peasant Cherevik and others returning. Stuffing him as far as he will go into a pig’s head is, rightly, both absurd and absurdist, and yet also preparing the way for what is to come. Jens Larsen and Agnes Zwierko both gave strong, characterful performances in those two roles, a fine sense of theatre contributing to their musical success. As their daughter and her suitor, Parasya and Gritsko, Mirka Wagner and Alexander Lewis also shone brightly, their lyrical moments beautiful indeed, stylish and on occasion even heart-rending. As so often in this house, there was a very fine sense of company, all contributing to something greater than the sum of its parts. (If only British houses still retained such a thing as a company in that emphatic sense.)

Henrik Nánási shaped the action well, in an account of the score that seemed to relish rather than to feel any hint of embarrassment towards the interpolations, revisions, orchestrations, and so on. It did not sound like Boris, for it could not. The orchestra was in any case on excellent form: precise and colourful, supportive and spectacular. So too were the magnificent choruses, their members’ acting as impressive as their command of the musical and verbal text. That goes for the children too. All choral singers had clearly benefited greatly from the preparation offered by David Cavelius (also the furnisher of arrangements of three of those four interpolated items, the ‘Cradle Song’ remaining, touchingly, in its original form) and Dagmar Fiebach. No wonder Nánási brought Cavelius forward. Olga Caspruk made an excellent impression as bandurist, returning us to a Ukraine that, imagined or otherwise, inevitably provoked complicated emotions in 2017. What to make of it all? That was as much up to us as the performers: in this problematical work, just as in many others, that will always, quite rightly, be the case.


(This first night performance may be viewed here on The Opera Platform, for the next six months.)

Barghouti/Palestine Youth Orchestra/Edwards - Beethoven, Rahbani brothers, Ahmad, Fitkin, and Mussorgsky, 1 August 2016

Royal Festival Hall

 

Beethoven – Overture: Leonore, no.3, op.72b

Rahbani Brothers – Ahtarifu al Huzna wal Intithar

Zakaria Ahmad – Bi Ridhak ya Khaliqi

Rahbani Brothers – Ruddani ila Biladi

Graham Fitkin – Metal

Mussorgsky, orch. Ravel – Pictures at an Exhibition

Nai Barghouti (voice)

Palestine Youth Orchestra

Sian Edwards (conductor)

This could hardly have failed to be a moving event, far more necessary by its very nature than any ‘ordinary’ concert. That the Palestine Youth Orchestra even exists, let alone that it has been able to tour the United Kingdom, is a cause for wonder and celebration. As Suhail Khoury, the General Director of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, told us in his brief spoken introduction, making music in Palestine, let alone Palestinians making music abroad, is ‘a constant struggle against the odds’. He also told us that two of these wonderful young musicians’ number, a fifteen-year-old trumpeter and a fifteen-year-old violinist, had not been able to join their friends, having been cruelly denied exit visits from Gaza by the occupying Israeli government. The orchestra is, to quote a former member, Mohamed Najem, ‘a world where passports and nationalities disappear, a place where Palestinians who live in different countries can meet and non-Palestinians can share’. These are musicians who, almost every day of their lives, live with far greater, more direct experience of terror than I did a single night in Munich last month; yet they come together and play, which involved learning how to live with each other. If that does not give us hope, then I do not know what will. It will not solve political problems, it will not free Palestine, but, like the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, it does something; like the WEDO, it does it very well, with considerably younger musicians, and, in a nice touch on this occasion, involved a sprinkling of young British conservatory students too.

 

To hear Beethoven’s third Leonore Overture performed by such musicians was always likely, then, to be an overwhelming experience, and so it proved. The introduction’s opposition of darkness and light spoke truthfully – as sometimes only Beethoven can. Every note felt weighted with concrete meaning; if it meant that much to us in the audience, how much it must have meant to those on stage. Horns sounded hope, Hoffnung. And when the trumpeter, Sani Paul Meo, played his solo, first unseen, distant, then, visible and audible from a box high above, tears inevitably flowed. Some gorgeous woodwind playing and real depth from the strings offered, under Sian Edwards, a true incarnation of Beethoven’s spirit. As Layth Sidiq, the orchestra’s leader, put it, in one of several eloquent (wonderful English!) introductions and summaries from the players: ‘We hope you’ll find powerful metaphors in all the music we play tonight.’ Indeed we did.

Nai Barghouti, singer, flute player, and composer (!) joined the orchestra for the next three, vocal, items. There were two songs by the Rahbani brothers, written for the Lebanese singer, Fairuz. ‘Ahtarifu al Huzna wal Intithar’ (‘Grief and waiting are my profession’) was written for the musical, River of Return. Fairuz played a small child living with her aunt in a tent, as a Palestinian refugee following the 1967 Six-Day War. The orchestra imparted an air of mystery and unease, first on a double bass solo, other instruments joining, before the voice had entered. There were grief, pain, agony to be heard from all concerned, great vocal virtuosity too. There was also hope (the planting of trees), hope which, alas, unlike in Beethoven, would be dashed. ‘Ruddani ila Biladi’ (‘Take me back to my country’) was also written for Fairuz, for an evening, ‘With Stories’, on Lebanese television in 1970. The inability of Palestinians to return to their homes is a wound that runs deep indeed, and so it sounded here. Again, however, it was not all doom and glook. Swarming strings (not un-Ligeti like!) and chirping woodwind (I thought of ‘Forest Murmurs’) took me by surprise: a recollection of ‘the banks of my happy childhood’. A catchy popular sing, with ever-interesting ‘accompaniment’ – rather more than that in reality – proved once again what star presence Barghouti has. Members of the orchestra hummed softly towards the end, her vocal shadow.

 

In between those two songs came Zakaria Ahmad’s Bi Ridhak ya Khaliqi, written for the Egyptian singer, Oum Kalthoum in the 1944 musical film, Salama, which starred Kalthoum in the title role of an Omayed courtesan who befriended a hermit from Mecca. However, before the song, to my delighted surprise, we heard improvisations from the ‘accompanying’ instruments to be, violin (Sidiq), oud (the other front-desk first violin player, Mostafa Saad), and cello (Naseem Atrash). There was no gainsaying either the virtuosity or the character of their playing, which provided a splendid introduction to the song and much at which to marvel in its own right.

 

To conclude the first half, we heard Graham Fitkin’s Metal. Ten months ago, the PYO had sent out a call for scores from British composers; Fitkin’s work was chosen for this concert, the programme told us, ‘as the PYO’s homage to contemporary British classical music’. There was much for the four percussionists in particular to tuck into, the ‘metal’ referring to some of their instruments: it opens with untuned scaffolding, and four tuned bells (in the original performance, ship’s bells, a reference to the piece’s role in opening Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall in 1995) become increasingly prominent too. The orchestra as a whole, Edwards too, clearly relished its big orchestral minimalism in a highly rhythmical and colourful performance. The performance was introduced by Scottish bassoonis, Rhiannon Carmichael, a guest with the orchestra, who repeated her final sentence in (I think!) Arabic, much to the delight of her fellow musicians.

 

Rarely, if ever, have I so enjoyed a performance of Ravel’s orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition. Normally, I find myself in curmudgeonly fashion asking why on earth Ravel bothered, when the piano version says it all and says it better. Here, no such objection entered my mind. A swift opening ‘Promenade’ led to a ‘Gnomus’ full of Romantic colour, imbued with foreboding, even terror. The following ‘Promenade’ sounded more Ravelian than anything that had gone before; indeed, a hallmark of the performance was the balance between Mussorgsky and Ravel. ‘The Old Castle’ benefited from a splendidly shaped alto saxophone solo, courtesy of Jamil Ajrab, and wonderfully grainy bassoon playing too. The ‘Tuileries’ proved to be gardens full of fleeting pleasure, whilst ‘Bydlo’ shattered the earth. A splendidly piquant, even humorous, ‘Ballet of the Chicks in their Shells’ prepared the way for a performance of ‘Samuel Goldberg and Schmuyle’ in which the Palestinian strings really dug into their instruments; there was splendid trumpet playing too. ‘The Market Place at Limoges’ sounded well-nigh balletic, albeit unquestionably with teeth (those, perhaps, of Mme de Roumbousac?) In ‘Catacombs’, we heard brass with a decidedly Russian accent, doubtless testimony to Edwards’s long experience in Russian music. There were shades of Boris Godunov to be heard in the string shivering of ‘Cum mortuis’, whilst the woodwind sounded – quite properly – more Ravelian. ‘Baba Yaga’ was duly barbarous. Motor rhythms seemed to foretell Prokofiev, whilst the strings once again showed quite astonishing body. The middle section’s unease proved properly telling. Finally came ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’: jubilant in it post-Rimsky Technicolor, although the more austere, more genuinely Mussorgskian (in colour, that is) passages were equally crucial to its progress.

 

As encores we heard, first, Malcom Arnold’s Scottish Dance no.3. (The orchestra had rehearsed for a week in Glasgow, as the guest of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.) It made for an enchanting encore. The principal oboist, Deogracias López Garcia (a UK guest musician) deserves especial mention, but playing was excellent throughout, not least from Lohengrin-like violins. And for an unexpected second encore – we had been told there would only be one! – solo clarinet, flute (Barghouti now as instrumentalist), violin, and cello, against a full orchestral backdrop, returned us quite rightly to music from the Arab world. I shall leave you with words from Nigel Kennedy, following the Palestine Strings’ Prom in 2013 (which, alas, I missed): ‘I was struck by the down-to-earth, phenomenally positive attitude that the kids were displaying. And that is reflected in their music as well. It has such deep soul, a wholehearted commitment, and a value attached to every moment of music making and life itself.’

 

Boris Godunov, Royal Opera, 14 March 2016

Royal Opera House

Boris Godunov – Bryn Terfel

Andrey Schchelkalov – Kostas Smoriginas
Nikitch – Jeremy White
Mityukha – Adrian Clarke
Prince Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky – John Graham-Hall
Pimen – Ain Anger
Grigory Otrepiev – David Butt Philip
Hostess of the Inn – Rebecca de Pont Davies
Varlaam – John Tomlinson
Missail – Harry Nicoll
Frontier Guard – James Platt
Xenia – Vlada Borovko
Xenia’s Nurse – Sarah Pring
Fyodor – Ben Knight
Boyar – Nicholas Sales
Holy Fool – Andrew Tortise

Richard Jones (director)

Miriam Buethner (set designs)
Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)
Mimi Jordan Sherin (lighting)
Ben Wright (movement)
Elaine Kidd (associate director)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Antonio Pappano (conductor)

 

I really only have one grumble, so I shall get it out of the way first. Why the original, 1869 version of Boris Godunov? Yes, it was a Royal Opera, although not a Royal Opera House, first? Yes, it has its particular fascinations; one might even argue it more radical or at the very least still less beholden to operatic convention than Mussorgsky’s revised version, first performed long before the original was exhumed. Yes, there is the very real advantage in the theatre of not having the action broken by an interval. But does anyone seriously think we are better off without the Polish act, without Marina? Does anyone seriously think that Mussorgsky’s sometimes drastic reworking of Pushkin is not more successful operatically (however we understand the term)? Does anyone seriously think the grander scale of the opera as a whole and the (still) greater opposition between tsar and people are not more or less unambiguously to the dramatic good? For seasoned opera-goers, one might argue that that is all less of a problem; we shall know the revision anyway. We might even know the Rimsky-Korsakov reorchestration. Indeed, we do, although I have yet, alas, to hear a performance of Rimskyfied Boris, and should like the opportunity to do so before I die. That said, I should hesitate before staging either 1869 or Rimsky in this country, at least, given that performances of any version have been bizarrely infrequent. I cannot imagine anyone would dispute the standing of the work as the greatest of all Russian operas. Perhaps it seemed less so on account of the version to the first-night audience; I cannot be sure. At any rate, I was surprised by the muted reception: quite undeserved. Maybe these were just people who thought they were in for Russian Donizetti.

 

If the 1869 version will always seem more akin to a fascinating draft to me, what a draft it is! This was a strong performance all around. Antonio Pappano sounded far more at home here than he ever has in German repertory. There were some oddities, not least the over-emphatic phrasing of the very opening bars. Even that, though, served to underline its Janáček-like vocal prophecy. More concerning, at times, was a tendency towards smoothing away some of Mussorgsky’s sparest, uncompromising writing, rather at odds with the version but, more importantly, occasionally suggesting a kinship with more conventional, even Italianate, operatic practice which, to my ears at least, should not be there. (Whatever Richard Taruskin might claim, I really do not hear a rapprochement with Verdi in the revised version.) That said, however, there was splendid playing from the orchestra, on as fine form as I have heard in some time. Pappano, moreover, should surely take some, at least, of the credit for the force with which particular musical moments stood out: not like a sore thumb, but with an underlining of a telling shift, harmonically, timbrally, or both. Pacing was sure, too: perhaps still more important in this succession of scenes, whose own formal radicalism – sorry to keep using that word, but it seems so apt in this case! – was enabled thereby truly to make its mark.

 

Bryn Terfel gave one of the finest performances I have seen from him. Truly, he embodied the role; and, in an opera so concerned with succession, it was truly unnerving to witness him grasp John Tomlinson’s mantle, as the latter gave an inimitable performance in the role of Varlaam. Not that Terfel sounded remotely like Tomlinson, of course; if one were expecting, and insisting upon, a ‘traditional’, deep, ‘Russian’, performance, one would doubtless have been disappointed. There is no more reason, though, to insist upon one correct way to perform Mussorgsky than there is with Elgar. Terfel’s care with the text – musical, as well as verbal – was striking; so was its visual incarnation. I had no doubt that this was Boris. As for Tomlinson, his larger-than-life assumption of Varlaam was spot on; the extraordinary double act, spoons and all, with Harry Nicoll’s Missail proved a joy, its grim humour well-nigh Shakespearean. Let us hope we shall one day see Tomlinson’s Lear.

 

David Butt Philip’s intelligent portrayal of the growth of a false Dmitri had one, rightly, both sympathise – why not have a go, in such a world? – with and suspect Grigory. Vocally as well as dramatically, this was a fine performance, which had one all the more regret the loss of the Polish Act. Ain Anger’s Pimen was something no one present is likely to forget, a world-weary yet canny chronicler more in control (perhaps!) than any other of these tormented – and tormenting – characters. This was, surprisingly, his Royal Opera debut; it will surely not be long before we see him at Covent Garden again. Ben Knight gave an astonishingly mature performance as Fyodor; this was the real thing, no doubt. The extraordinary versatility of John Graham-Hall took another turn with his Shuisky: wheedling, yes, but ultimately a sad figure, a more rounded assumption than one generally sees (and hears). Schchelkalov assumed greater, more chilling stature in Kostas Smoriginas’s performance than I can recall. Andrew Tortise’s Fool was, again, the Shakespearean thing; this talented singer deserves greater exposure on our opera stages. Were I to continue, and perhaps I ought to, I should simply be listing the cast and saying ‘well done!’ to each of them, for there was no weak link; there was, indeed, an abundance of fine character-singing and acting from all concerned.

 

Choral singing was excellent, as were Richard Jones’s direction of the chorus and Ben Wright’s movement direction. Here, although there are of course losses with respect to the version, there is arguably considerable gain too. The truly extraordinary prose recitative of the Coronation Scene shocked as it should. In 1869, and indeed in 2016, we stood as distant from Rimskian Technicolor and, so it seemed, not so far from a mix of Monteverdi with Schoenberg – in Russian. It is here, ironically, that one is probably better off either with the original or with Rimsky. Renato Balsadonna will be leaving a chorus in very good shape for his successor, William Spaulding. (As any operagoer knows, Spaulding’s work at the Deutsche Oper, Berlin, augurs extremely well for London.)

 

Jones’s production is honest, straightforward, direct, with some of the tell-tale designs we expect, but nothing irritating. The upper, silent level of action in which assassins meet – a disturbingly Orientalist image here, I am afraid, although I doubt it was intended that way, nor is it necessarily intrinsically so – plotters scheme, and, above all, a child meets his cruel death is the realm of memory. We see as well as hear it haunt Boris; we sympathise, as we should, although, as with his would-be usurper, we do not only sympathise. Whether what we see be ‘true’ or no, we cannot know. The more disturbing question, or rather the implicit answer to that question, is: who cares?  Such is a crucial question in the work, and it is vividly, almost ritualistically instantiated here. Otherwise, below, a story is clearly and indeed colourfully told; it is difficult to imagine even the most ‘traditionalist’ of operagoers having any quarrel with Jones’s staging or – and, sadly, this is what such operagoers exclusively seem to mean by ‘productions’ – with the designs by Miriam Buethner and Nicky Gillibrand, all well thought out and finely executed.

I cannot help but wish that the production were a little more daring in its political terms of reference. If ever an opera cried out for a little contemporary or near-contemporary signposting, it is surely Boris. Is there a Russian regime to which the work could not be updated? Gorbachev’s might be trickier than most, although even then, Boris the reformer might intriguingly come into play. By the same token, however, we are free to draw our own comparisons, and anyone with half a brain cell will do so. In some ways, it is not unwelcome to have a construction – and Jones is too clever to approach the opera unmediated, whatever first impressions might suggest – of old Muscovy placed before us; if some silly souls take that as ‘fact’ or, God forbid, as ‘beautiful’, then that ultimately is their problem. At any rate, the evening offered a convincing, powerful musico-dramatic whole.

 

The performance on 21 March will be broadcast live to cinemas worldwide.