Showing posts with label Nicholas Hytner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nicholas Hytner. Show all posts

Tuesday, 16 September 2014

Serse, English National Opera, 15 September 2014


Coliseum

(sung in English as Xerxes)

Serse – Alice Coote
Arsamene – Andrew Watts
Amastre – Catherine Young
Ariodate – Neal Davies
Romilda – Sarah Tynan
Atalanta – Rhian Lois
Elviro – Adrian Powter

Nicholas Hytner (director)
Michael Walling (revival director)
David Fielding (designs)
Paul Pyant, Martin Doone (lighting)
 
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Dominic Peckham)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Michael Hofstetter (conductor)
 

It was a delight to welcome Nicholas Hytner’s charming, witty staging of Serse, or Xerxes, intelligently revived by Michael Wallingm back to the Coliseum. Some of ENO’s so-called ‘classic revivals’ have stretched the term beyond breaking-point; this, however, does seem to qualify both as a revival in more than name and, in its own way, as a ‘classic’. Having won an Olivier award on its first outing in the anniversary year of 1985, Hytner’s production lightly frames an opera which, if we are honest, has nothing meaningful to do with ancient Persia, in terms of a re-imagined eighteenth century. Images from something akin to Georgian Vauxhall – topiary, newspapers, aristocratic finery – merge happily and without the slightest pedantry with hints at the Enlightenment archaeological imperialism of the British Museum, ‘anachronisms’ such as deck chairs in the park, the anonymised ritual of white-faced courtiers, the celebrated Handel statue in Westminster Abbey, and so forth, to enable our minds and memories to play upon whatever associations they will, without damage to the slight comedy that is the ‘drama’ of the piece and which is really more of an excuse for a fine succession of Handelian melodies than anything else. (That said, the sense of a different æsthetic, not just that of opera seria, but also of the often-unacknowledged experimentalism of Vauxhall, is present too, perhaps especially in the revival.)
 

Whilst, even in this, one of the strongest of Handel’s operas, it is difficult and would probably be perverse to care about the characters and their actions in the way one would in the greatest of his dramatic oratorios, let alone in an opera by Monteverdi or Mozart, the cast offered not only a generally strong set of vocal performances but, for the most part, more than plausible acting too. Alice Coote seemed to be an audience favourite but, for me, hers was a strikingly mixed performance: at its best very good, especially rich in the lower range, but too often resorting to downright shouting, and with decidedly mixed results when it came to coloratura. Andrew Watts’s coloratura was often found wanting too; I had the sense that he would have been happier in contemporary than Baroque opera. Otherwise, there was little about which to cavil at all. Sarah Tynan’s Romilda was beautifully sung throughout, with a fine sense indeed of how coloratura can, even in Handel opera, strain towards true dramatic meaning. Rhian Lois captured to a tee the character of her scheming yet ultimately insouciant sister, Atalanta, and was just as impressive in vocal terms. Catherine Young offered relative gravity and, again, equally excellent singing as the disguised heiress, Amastre (Amastris here). Neal Davies and Adrian Powter were more than serviceable in the smaller roles of Ariodate and Elviro. Direction of the chorus was finely judged too.
 

I feared the worst at the beginning of Michael Hofstetter’s account of the Overture. Vibrato-less strings and a hard-driven tempo had me thinking we should be in for something akin to typical English ‘Baroque’ – actually, nothing of the sort – puritanism.  However, within the bounds of what is (sadly) nowadays possible, Hofstetter’s conducting and the ENO Orchestra’s response showed considerably flexibility and an enlightened approach towards musical expression of which I had more or less given up hope. There was not, of course, the rich tone of the old ‘live’ recording (in German) from Rafael Kubelík, with Fritz Wunderlich no less, but the performance compared well with Charles Mackerras (this production, on DVD). Not only was there genuine ‘life’ to be heard in the pit, it sounded like an orchestra rather than a tired end-of-pier band, such as more recently suffered here from so-called ‘specialists’. This work’s particular fluidity of recitative and aria – perhaps harking back to one of Handel’s sources in Cavalli’s version? – was well served, dramatic impetus not, at least after the Overture, being mistaken for the tyranny of the bandmaster. If there were times when a little more warmth would not have gone amiss from the strings, they were fewer than one might have expected. Continuo playing was alert and, again, far from inflexible. ENO could do far worse than ask Hofstetter back in such repertoire – especially when one considers the alternatives.

 
There will be a broadcast on BBC Radio 3, on 4 October.



Friday, 14 September 2012

Die Zauberflöte, English National Opera, 13 September 2012


(sung in English as The Magic Flute)

Tamino – Shawn Mathey
Papageno – Duncan Rock
Queen of the Night – Kathryn Lewek
Monostatos – Adrian Thompson
Pamina – Elena Xanthoudakis
Speaker – Roland Wood
Sarastro – Robert Lloyd
Papagena – Rhian Lois
Two Priests, Two Armoured Men – Nathan Vale, Barnaby Rea
Three Ladies – Elizabeth Llewellyn, Catherine Young, Pamela Helen Stephen
Three Boys – Edward Birchinall, Alex Karlsson, Thomas Fetherstonhaugh

Nicholas Hytner (director)
Ian Rutherford and James Bonas (revival directosr)
Bob Crowley (designs)
Nick Chelton, Ric Mountjoy (lighting)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Nicholas Collon (conductor)

 

Images: Alastair Muir
Three Ladies (Pamela Helen Stephen, Catherine Young, Elizabeth Llewellyn),
Papageno (Duncan Rock), Tamino (Shawn Mathey)


‘The last-ever performances of Nicholas Hytner’s production of The Magic Flute,’ claims the programme. Maybe they are, maybe not; the same has been said before. It is, at any rate, difficult to think that they should not be. Quite why such reverence should be accorded what at best one might call a ‘straightforward’ production is beyond me. Some will doubtless applaud the lack of anything so strenuous as an idea or two, anti-intellectualism being so ingrained in certain quarters of this country’s commentariat. (Remember the outrage at the Royal Opera’s splendid Rusalka?) Some, ignorant of or simply uninterested in, the Rosicrucian mysteries of the work, will doubtless have been happy with a naïveté that sits at best awkwardly with our age, irreversibly ‘sentimental’ in Schiller’s sense. But surely even they would have found this revival tired, listless. Apparently some of them did not, however, given the raucous laughter issuing from around the theatre: any time a rhyming couplet appeared on the surtitles, some found it almost unbearably hilarious. Moreover, audience participation went beyond even the usual coughing, chattering, and opening of sweets. (A woman behind me must have made her way through a good quarter of the city’s stocks of Wine Gums). Someone even saw fit to disrupt the performance by shouting out a proposal of marriage to Papageno just at that saddest, pathos-ridden of moments when the music turns and he resolves to take his life. No matter though: it elicited a great deal of hilarity. And that of course is all that matters. Those who laughed at the priests’ dialogue may or may not have been aware how offended Mozart was at someone who did the same in the composer’s presence. Presumably the same people thought it ‘amusing’ to boo Adrian Thompson’s rather good Monostatos too. They seemed, however, a little hard of hearing, for their applause generally began long before the orchestra had concluded.
 

Jeremy Sams’s ‘English version’ doubtless egged them on in all their boorishness. I have asked before what is held to be wrong with Schikaneder. One can point to shortcomings, no doubt, though one should always bear in mind Goethe’s admiration. But the only good thing one can really say about this hodgepodge is that it is not nearly so bad as what Sams has inflicted upon The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni. It remains intensely pleased with itself, drawing attention to itself rather than shedding light upon the drama, and remains distant enough that ‘version’ is wisely substituted for ‘translation’. Yet, given the difficulties so many of the cast had with delivering the dialogue, it really might as well all have been in German. That would also have relieved us of that terrible clash between the text we know in our heads – especially for the text set to music – and that we hear on stage and/or see in the titles (the latter two not always being the same). Different accents are ‘amusingly’ employed; one might have thought it offensive to find a Welsh accent (Papagena) intrinsically funny, but apparently not.

Pamina (Elena Xanthoudakis), Sarastro (Robert Lloyd), Tamino
 

Nicholas Collon’s conducting was disappointing. One often hears far worse in Mozart nowadays; yet, as so often, it was difficult not to long for great performances of the past (Furtwängler, Böhm, Klemperer, et al.), or indeed of the present (Sir Colin Davis). ‘Lightness’ was for the most part all, a peculiar mannerism being the falling off into nothingness at the end of many numbers. Quite why one would wish to make this score, often but a stone’s throw, if that, from Beethoven, sound so inconsequential, is beyond me; at least it was not brutalised, as ‘period’ fanatics would wish. That said, the brass sounded as if they were natural; they may or may not have been, since modern instrumentalists are sometimes instructed perversely to ape the rasping manner of their forebears, and I could not see into the pit. At any rate, the result was unpleasant. A few numbers were taken far too quickly, but for the most part it was the lack of harmonic grounding that troubled rather than speeds as such; we were spared the ludicrous Mackerras triple-speed approach to ‘Ach, ich fuhl’s,’ one of the worst atrocities I have ever had the misfortune to hear inflicted upon Mozart. But as for the lily-gliding of introducing a glockenspiel part into the final chorus... Mozart is not Monteverdi; he does not need to be ‘realised’, and certainly not like that. A good number of appoggiaturas and other instances of ornamentation were introduced to the vocal lines, not least to those of the Three Ladies at the beginning. The fashionable practice does no especial harm, I suppose, but nor does it really accomplish anything beyond drawing mild attention to itself.

Papageno and Papagena (Rhian Lois)


Vocally there was more to enjoy, though the record was mixed. Elena Xanthoudakis made for an unusually rich-toned Pamina. Best of all was Duncan Rock’s Papageno, for the most part quite beautifully sung, though his dialogue veered confusingly between outright Australian and something less distinct. Kathryn Lewek had some difficulties with her intonation as the Queen of the Night, but then most singers do; more troubling was her tendency to slow down to cope with the coloratura. Shawn Mathey resorted to crooning more than once during his Portrait Aria and was throughout a somewhat underwhelming Tamino. Robert Lloyd’s voice is, sadly, not what it was; Sarastro’s first aria sounded very thin, though matters improved thereafter. There was luxury casting, however, when it came to the Three Ladies; Elizabeth Llewellyn is already a noted Countess, and it showed. The Three Boys were excellent too: three cheers to Edward Birchinall, Alex Karlsson, and Thomas Fetherstonhaugh. Choral singing was a bit workmanlike but that may have been as much a matter of the conducting as anything else. One certainly had little sense of the kinship with Mozart’s other Masonic music.
 

The website and programme have the Two Armoured Men as the ‘Two Armed Men’, a strangely common yet baffling error: the German is perfectly clear. At least the production had it right, the men donning breastplates at the opening of that great chorale prelude. The Queen of the Night remains, for some reason, the ‘Queen of Night’.
 
 

Sunday, 25 January 2009

Die Zauberflöte, English National Opera, 24 January 2009

The Coliseum, London

(sung in English as The Magic Flute)

Tamino – Robert Murray
Pamina – Sarah-Jane Davies
Papageno – Roderick Williams
Papagena – Amanda Forbes
Sarastro – Robert Lloyd
Queen of the Night – Emily Hindrichs
Speaker – Graeme Danby
Monostatos – Stuart Kale
First Lady – Kate Valentine
Second Lady – Susanna Tudor-Thomas
Third Lady – Deborah Davison
Three Boys – Charlie Manton, Louis Watkins, Harry Manton
First Priest/First Armoured Man – Christopher Turner
Second Priest/Second Armoured Man – James Gower

Nicholas Hytner (director)
Ian Rutherford (revival director)
Bob Crowley (designer)
Nick Chelton and Guy Aldridge (lighting)

Chorus of English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Merry)
Orchestra of English National Opera
Erik Nielsen (conductor)

Last season’s twelfth revival of Nicholas Hytner’s 1988 production had been billed as its last, yet here it is, back again, not merely by popular demand but, according to the company website, ‘due to overwhelming popular demand’. I am in no position to complain, since this is actually the first time that I have seen it. Having read about it over the years, the general critical consensus seems to have been: enjoyable but not profound, more West End than Masonic. That seems to me about right, for although there are certainly scenic representations of a recognisable Egyptian temple – Bob Crowley’s designs are impressive in a straightforward kind of way – there is little or, most likely, no hint of esotericism. A story and more specifically the story is told, which is good, especially for those who do not know the work inside out and back to front. (For those of us who flatter ourselves that we do, there was, however, a certain alienation to experience, about which more below.) However, surely one of the most remarkable aspects of The Magic Flute is its multiplicity of meanings, its mixing of genres, and the perfection with which this is accomplished. Having origins in a book of fairy tales – Wieland’s Dschinnistan – does not mean that the work should be reduced merely to being a fairy tale. To treat with other aspects or indeed to introduce – dread word for many... – some kind of Konzept, need not lessen the magic; done well, it should be heightened, as was immeasurably the case in Achim Freyer’s unforgettable circus Zauberflöte for the Salzburg Festival. Still, as I said, the production, replete with birds – very skilfully handled on stage - and bears (of the human variety, I should add) was enjoyable in its way. Whilst elements of the eighteenth century made their way onto the stage, this did not really go beyond the costumes. For a more thoroughgoing or inventive way of playing with audiences then and now, one could turn to Hytner’s own Xerxes for ENO, or to David McVicar’s Royal Opera House Magic Flute.

McVicar of course had, at least on the first outing of his production and on DVD, the incalculable advantage of the greatest living Mozart conductor, Sir Colin Davis, in the pit at Covent Garden. Making his ENO debut was Erik Nielsen, Kapellmeister at the Frankfurt Opera. I feared the worst when, as so often seems to be the case nowadays in Mozart operas, the overture was taken far too fast. However, things settled down and tempi, whilst by no means slow, were thereafter generally well judged. There was certainly none of the absurdity of Sir Charles Mackerras’s breackneck ‘Ach, ich fuhl’s’ in a revival of the Covent Garden production. Nor, let us give thanks, was there any crude ‘authenticism’ in the orchestral sound projection. Indeed, a few minor fluffs aside, the ENO orchestra was on good form, in particular the commendably warm strings, though they could have done with being greater in number, and a pair of bubbly bassoons. One could hardly expect so subliminal – and sublime – a connection with Mozart’s inner and outer world as that resulting from Sir Colin’s lifetime of experience with the work; yet, as a parallel to an enjoyable but far from searching production, this worked well enough. My greatest reservation was the lack of grandeur to the ceremonial aspects of the score; if not Freemasonry, then might we not at least hear a little Handel? Thus the finale to the first act sounded merely inconsequential, although that to the second was much improved. And I wish we could have heard the silences of the celebrated dreimalige Akkord given their Brucknerian due. At least the ill-considered quasi-double dotting of the Overture – I think it was on purpose yet, given the alternation here between rhythmic rigidity and slackness, it was difficult to tell – was not pursued.

The singing was generally of a high standard. Even if there was little in the way of the unforgettable, there was a nice sense of company interaction – assisted, I suspect, by Ian Rutherford’s able stage direction. I was very taken with Sarah-Jane Davies’s dignified, sweet-toned Pamina, every inch the princess. Robert Murray’s admirable Tamino exhibited similar qualities. Robert Lloyd gave us an eminently musical account of Sarastro’s part, less dark in tone than one often hears, yet with an enviable command of line. The Queen of the Night – or the ‘Queen of Night’, in the somewhat jarring usage of the translation – is a well-nigh impossible role, but Emily Hindrichs came close to nailing it, her intonation proving faultless until a considerable distance was into the Queen’s second act aria. This side of Diana Damrau – I am not sure that there is another side – one is unlikely to hear better. Stuart Kale acted well as Monostatos but the demands of the text, quickly delivered, sometimes led to a disjuncture between stage and pit. I was delighted to hear the Three Boys demonstrate that one does not need to go to Vienna or Tölz for their parts to be winningly taken. Their coaching, by assistant chorus master, Nicholas Chalmers, should be commended.

Roderick Williams’s Papageno brings me to my two connected final points. Williams acted and sang very well indeed. As often proves to be the case, Tamino was somewhat overshadowed: hardly surprising here, given the production’s lack of emphasis upon the serious aspects of the drama. But Williams above all was more than a little hamstrung by the ridiculous, cod-Northern accent he was compelled to assume for the sometimes over-long dialogue. (I presume that this was not his own idea and, as a Yorkshireman, think that I know the real thing when I hear it.) The Three Ladies, decently sung, were also allocated – somewhat patronisingly, I thought – different ‘regional’ accents when speaking. Although a few members of the audience, probably overlapping with those who applauded not only within the acts but sometimes within numbers, found this hilarious, I found it a source of considerable irritation. Yes, the work has its roots in Viennese popular theatre, but this is an all-too-easy attempt to play upon that, and since when has the Coronation Street-style charwoman of the production’s Papagena represented an equivalent to suburban Vienna? Moreover, Mozart reported from the first performances to Constanze that the expected numbers had been encored, ‘but what gives me most pleasure is the silent approval,’ indicating ‘how this opera is becoming more and more esteemed’. Playing for cheap laughs does not seem to have been what he had in mind. Edification need not preclude entertainment but it cannot be reduced thereto.

Jeremy Sams’s translation was rightly referred to as a ‘version’ in the programme. Some instances of undeniable wit were interspersed amongst passages that failed to capture an appropriate tone. Others seemed at best a paraphrase of Emanuel Schikaneder’s text, with more extreme examples, especially during the dialogue, appearing to be pure invention. Is Schikaneder’s text really that bad? Goethe it is not, though one should not forget Goethe’s unbounded admiration for the work, yet it performs its purpose very well and remains deeply ingrained upon so many consciousnesses. Indeed, I question the point of performing such a work in translation at all. One might, I suppose, claim a degree of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt in compelling an audience to hear a new ‘version’ – I was sometimes put in mind of those dreadful new ‘versions’ of the Bible that trendy vicars press upon congregations thirsting for the certainty of the King James Bible – but irritation such as this elicited does not seem an especially worthy outcome. Given that ENO now provides surtitles for all of its productions, is it not time to admit that, at least in such circumstances, opera in translation is an idea whose time has passed?