The Queen of Spades, English National Opera, 9 June 2015

Coliseum

(sung in English)

Hermann – Peter Hoare

Count Tomsky – Gregory Dahl
Prince Yeletsky – Nicholas Pallesen
The Countess – Dame Felicity Palmer
Lisa – Giselle Allen
Pauline – Catherine Young
Chekalinsky – Colin Judson
Surin – Wyn Pencarreg
Chaplitsky – Peter van Hulle
Narumov – Charles Johnston
Governess – Katie Bird

David Alden (director)

Gideon Davey (designs)

Wolfgang Goebbel (lighting)

Lorena Randi (choreography)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Stephen Harris)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Edward Gardner (conductor)

 

Oh dear! What a maddeningly inconsistent director David Alden is. Or is he maddeningly consistent, his productions suiting some works, or perhaps better, some swathes of the repertoire, better than others? His ENO Peter Grimes was a brilliant reassessment of a work that is weaker than partisans allow; it engaged with Britten’s opera at a level deeper than most have dared. This Queen of Spades barely engages with Tchaikovsky’s opera at all. I cannot help but conclude that high Romanticism – call it what one will – is really not Alden’s thing. He exhibits no sympathy for any of the characters, nor for their predicament. He seems to have no interest in the plot, not even to deconstruct it. All we have is a tiresome parade of clichés, as if designed to rouse the ire of operatic ‘conservatives’ and nothing more. Dark glasses, piles of chairs, flippantly unmotivated cross-dressing, a ragbag assemblage of costumes from different periods (the Kruschchev era (?) meets something older, though not of course Tchaikovsky’s brand of Mozartiana, and with no real sense of interplay), a hospital ward, extras who are not extras but are treated as such until they are not, party guests with animal masks: all these and more put in their mandatory appearances. Contemptuously tossed bank notes might make a point, but it is all but drowned under the frenetic, meaningless goings on. Is there a hint that the Countess is a gay icon, even a drag queen? Perhaps, but it is taken no further. And why does the clock never reach twelve, even when we are told that it does? This audience member was long past caring. My fear was that everything lay in Hermann’s – or rather Alden’s – tortured, or careless, mind. What a novel idea! If you despise the opera and everything surrounding it quite so much, if you really think it so clichéd that you have nothing to add beyond further cliché, might there not be a degree of integrity in leaving it to the care of another director?

The orchestra, however, sounded terrific, as it generally does now, especially under Edward Gardner. Precision, weight, delicacy: all were present. If only Gardner’s prowess as an orchestral trainer were matched by insight into the score. His conducting was often stiff, save when he accelerated too quickly. There were moments of repose, not least in the realm of Mozartian parody (which Gardner clearly esteems more highly than Alden), but there was little to indicate a longer line. Continuity was fractured less than on stage, but Tchaikovsky needs more than that. The chorus was on fine form too, its virtues – and its acting, however misplaced – every inch the equal of the orchestral performance.

ENO also offered a splendid cast. Peter Hoare proved an unusually thoughtful Hermann, his detailed attention to the text (that is, to words and music) exemplary throughout. Giselle Allen’s Lisa provided a near-ideal mixture of, or perhaps better confrontation between, coldness and warmth; her confidante, Pauline (Catherine Young) mirroring and to an extent extending such qualities on her smaller scale. What on earth Alden was thinking of in her case, I hardly dare consider. Felicity Palmer retains the most formidable star quality; her Grétry aria was as moving as anything we heard. For once, a degree of stillness! The richness of Nicolas Pallessen’s baritone proved a welcome luxury in the role of Prince Yeletsky. Despite the absurdities of the production at large, there was always a proper sense of interaction between all on stage; almost all excelled. What a pity, then, that the director seemed determined to undermine, even to negate, such manifest virtues.

Benvenuto Cellini, English National Opera, 5 June 2014

Coliseum

(sung in English)

Benvenuto Cellini – Michael Spyres

Giacomo Balducci – Pavlo Hunka
Teresa – Corinne Winters
Fieramosca – Nicholas Pallesen
Pope Clement VII – Sir Willard White
Ascanio – Paula Murrihy
Francesco – Nicky Spence
Bernardino – David Soar
Pompeo – Morgan Pearse
Innkeeper – Anton Rich

Terry Gilliam (director, set designs)

Leah Hausmann (co-director, movement)
Aaron Marsden (set designs)
Katrina Lindsay (costumes)
Finn Ross (video)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Nicholas Jenkins)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Edward Gardner (conductor)

 

First, a sigh of relief: in almost every respect, this new ENO staging of Benvenuto Cellini marks a significant improvement upon Terry Gilliam’s ‘Springtime for Hitler’ Damnation of Faust. If that sounds like faint praise, for beating a ‘Holocaust as entertainment’ travesty is perhaps setting the bar unreasonably low, then such is not entirely the intention. Gilliam’s Cellini has its virtues, though for me they are considerably fewer than they seemed to be for the audience at large. It is far from unreasonable to depict anarchy and ribaldry in the Carnival, and indeed during the ‘carnival’ overture – though Gilliam’s reported remark that ten minutes of music are ‘too long for the audience to sit through waiting for the show to begin’ are unworthy of anyone working in opera. There is nothing wrong in principle with ‘staging’ an overture, but the reason should be better than that; if the results are a little over the top, they are certainly superior to the justification.

 

And yet… here and in the Carnival itself we also experience the main problem: Gilliam’s seeming inability to trust Berlioz’s opera, an infinitely more successful work than ignorant ‘criticism’ will suggest. Yes, there is excess, even at times an excess of excess, in Berlioz’s work, but what I suspect Gilliam’s fans will applaud as ‘wackiness’, be it the director’s or the composer’s, is far from the only or indeed the most important facet of the opera. Despite the handsome, splendidly adaptable Piranesi-inspired designs, the plentiful coups de théâtre, the impressive collaboration of set design and video for the forging, etc., etc., what matters most of all – Berlioz’s score and, more broadly, his musical drama – often seems forgotten. Perhaps that also explains the unaccountable cuts, which serve to exacerbate alleged ‘weaknesses’ – many of which turn out to be deviations from the operatic norm – instead of mitigating them.

 

Matters improve considerably after the interval, and there is a genuine sense of dark, nocturnal desperation to the foundry and surroundings at dawn on Ash Wednesday (though there was, admittedly, little sense of the significance or even the coming of that day of mortification). Much of the first act, by contrast, is overbearing and in serious need of clarification. Yes, by all means harness spectacle as a tool of drama, but too often it runs riot in an unhelpful sense; it also encourages a large section of the audience to guffaw, applaud, chatter, make other, apparently unclassifiable, noises, often to the extent that one cannot hear the music. I could not help but think that a smaller budget would have removed a good number of excessive temptations and resulted in something less perilously close to a West End musical. There are the germs, and sometimes rather more than that, of something much better here, but those ‘editing’ Berlioz perhaps themselves stand in need of an editor. The updating to what would appear to be more or less the time of composition, perhaps a little later, does no harm; indeed, it proves generally convincing.

 

Edward Gardner’s conducting of the first act was disappointing, the Overture, insofar as it could be heard, setting out the conductor’s stall unfortunately: excessive drive followed by excessive relaxation. Wild contrasts are part of what Berlioz’s music demands, of course, but there still needs to be something that connects. Throughout, there were many occasions once again to mourn the loss of Sir Colin Davis, whose 2007 LSO concert performance of this work was simply outstanding. The orchestra proved impressively responsive, though, and, once both Gardner and Gilliam had somewhat calmed down, truly came into its own, sounding as the fine ensemble that it undoubtedly is. Gardner is rarely a conductor to probe beneath the surface, but as musical execution, there was a good deal to savour following the (protracted) interval. Choral singing – and blocking – were more or less beyond reproach, a credit to chorus master Nicholas Jenkins and Gilliam’s team alike, as well of course as to the singers themselves.

 

Michael Spyres performed impressively in the sadistically difficult title role, there being but a single example, quickly enough corrected, of coming vocally unstuck. His stage swagger seemed true to Gilliam’s conception, and his vocal style – insofar as one can tell, in English translation – was keenly attuned to that of Berlioz. A few ‘veiled’ moments notwithstanding, especially later on in the first act, Corinne Winters impressed equally as Teresa. ‘Entre l’amour et le devoir’ could hardly have been more cleanly sung in the most exacting of aural imaginations. Nicholas Pallesen revealed himself to be a thoughtful and at times impassioned baritone as Fieramosca, though Pavlo Hunka’s Balducci sounded thin and generally out of sorts. Despite Willard White’s undeniable stage presence, his appearance as the Pope did little to dispel suspicions that, sadly, his voice is now increasingly fallible. Paula Murrihy, however, proved an excellent Ascanio: characterful and attractive of tone in equal measure. There were few grounds for complaint from the ‘smaller’ roles either.

 

ENO’s description of this opéra semi-seria as a ‘romantic comedy’ is puzzling. It is, to be fair fair to Gilliam and all those involved, a description that stands at some distance from their vision too. An opéra comique was originally Berlioz’s conception, but that is a matter of form rather than of sentimentality. We should doubtless be grateful that we were spared a ‘heart-warming’ Richard Curtis version. Nor does it help, of course, that we are subjected to an English translation, which inevitably sounds ‘wrong’ for Berlioz, especially when so apparently deaf to musical line and cadence as this present version. If only ENO would reconsider its stance on a once vexed question, now resolved by the use of surtitles, it could truly transform its fortunes.