Coliseum
Hunahpú – Vince Yi
Teculihuatzin – Julia BullockDoña Isabel – Lucy Crowe
Don Pedrarias Dávila – Thomas Walker
Don Pedro de Alvarado – Noah Stewart
Ixbalanqué – Anthony Roth Costanzo
Mayan Shaman, Zapatista – Luthando Qave
Leonor – Maritxell Carrero
Mayan Deities (dancers) – Sonya Cullingford, Alistair Goldsmith, Lucy Starkey, Jack Thomson
Tecum Umán – Jack Thomson
Leonor as child – Rosanna Beacock
Peter Sellars (director)
Gronk (set designs)Dunya Ramicova (costumes)
James F. Ingalls (lighting)
Christopher Williams (choreography)
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Christopher Bucknall)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Laurence Cummings (conductor)
As Peter Sellars might enjoin
us, ‘Hey, let’s accentuate the positive!’ Or, as his relentlessly hyper-ventilating
character, Leonor, might loquaciously, nonsensically have put it, ‘Throbbing
through the long, hot, dangerous night, he, o he, that wondrous mixture of virility
and divinity, ah, how the thrusting of his white, masculine loins and my
ever-flowing beauteous womanhood must maximise and conjoin all that is awesomely
towering and breathtakingly divine in river-creating accentuation of the, o,
how ecstatic, the majestically positive.’
I had better start again: let
us attend to the virtues of this performance. They were entirely musical, and
in many cases, estimable indeed. Much to my surprise, after his dry, charmless Messiah for ENO, Laurence
Cummings conducted an often richly expressive account of Purcell’s music. There
was even, wonder of wonders in this puritanical age, vibrato – more, admittedly
would have been welcome – to be heard from the violins. A decent-sized orchestra
and well-endowed – sorry, Leonor – continuo group gave as fine a ‘live’ account
as I can recall of much of the composer’s greatest music, its chromaticism beguiling
and disconcerting in equal measure. The occasional ill-chosen tempo aside – an absurdly
rushed Trumpet Tune, if I remember correctly – the music took its time, its
melancholy and, on occasion, languor permitted to tell. I am not sure,
moreover, that I have heard more committed choral singing of Purcell’s sacred
music – what it was doing there is of course another matter – than that from
the ENO Chorus, its expressive range pleasingly unconstrained by ‘early musicke’
dogma.
Much of the solo singing was
very good indeed too. Lucy Crowe’s soprano brought welcome lyricism, elegance
of line, and emotional depth, contrasting with the lighter, yet not slighter
contributions of Julia Bullock. The two counter-tenors were more variable. Vince Yi was accurate, and rather more than
that on some occasions, but his voice, especially in its higher reaches,
was somewhat thin of tone. Anthony Roth Costanzo struggled with intonation and
register earlier on – almost as if he were expecting the music to be sung at a
different pitch – but revealed himself later to be the more expressively-voiced
of the two. Noah Stewart’s virile yet sensitive – yes, Leonor – tenor had one
wishing for more. (We heard nothing at all from him in the first half, although
we saw plenty.) I hope that ENO will invite him back for a more musically substantial
role. Likewise Thomas Walker, whose stylish contributions were not the least of
the evening’s virtues. Luthando Qave was a little woolly of tone.
Had we been treated to a
concert of Purcell’s music, that would have been all well and good. Alas, we
had Peter Sellars’s intervention to contend with. The programme description ‘unfinished
semi-opera in five acts with a prologue by Henry Purcell, completed by Peter
Sellars’ was, at least in one way, uncharacteristically modest; for what we had
was, the ‘soundtrack’ notwithstanding, entirely the baleful creation of Sellars’s
half-baked ‘ideas’. Doubtless they would have been thought daringly post-colonial,
and will be praised as such by fashion victims; yet, in truth, there was little
of the ‘post-’ to them. There are problems, to put it mildly, with the
twenty-first century presentation of Purcellian semi-opera, but I cannot
imagine that we could have been worse off with something approximating to the
original play, described by Sellars as a ‘bizarre fantasy’. It takes one to know
one, I suppose. I can only assume that the spoken texts from Rosario Aguilar’s The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma became
more thoroughly lost in translation. What we hear seems in its banality to cater to the lower
end of the Woman’s Own market, an
irredeemable mixture of very mild soft pornography and tedious 'right-on'
platitudes.
Sellars seems to present,
although I may have misunderstood, an unthinking mixture of Aztec and Mayan
civilisation conquered by the Spanish. The patronising presentation of the ‘Other’
as primitive victims strains toward, never quite reaching, the intellectual
coherence and emotional depth of a gap-year student’s attempts to find him- or
herself. Of what might interest us about other civilisations there is little,
unless one counts a risibly choreographed parody of Mayan mysticism at the
beginning, replete, I am sorry to say, with recorded generic ‘jungle’ sounds. There
is still less to credit in the gaudy, jumble-sale-style costumes. ‘Foreign’
people are so colourful, and unspoilt, you see. Designs, attractive enough in a
one-dimensional, touristic sort of way, are by ‘Gronk’, who ‘since the early
1970s has been using guerrilla street performance, video, film, photography and
conceptual art to upstage the mainstream art world and proclaim the outside
existentialism of Chicana/or artists.’ At least we are spared the participation
of Bill Viola, although we are certainly not spared the ardours of a
preposterously long evening: three hours and forty minutes, with one interval.
It seems much longer, especially during the second of the two acts, despite its
slightly greater dramatic coherence.
Then there is Leonor – who,
for the most part, confusingly appears to speak as her mother, Teculihuatzin,
lover to Don Pedro (Leonor’s father). It would, I hope, be difficult to find
anyone in polite society who would not be utterly horrified by the genocidal
acts of the Spanish conquerors. So banal and excitable are Leonor’s
interventions, though, that one almost begins to sympathise. Were the squaddies
to put her out of our misery, it would unquestionably be a merciful release. I do
not know whether the actress, Maritxell Carrero, was simply following orders. However,
even if one could overlook the aggravating mispronunciation of words such as ‘lieutenant’,
she came across as something close to an ‘amusing’ 1970s caricature of an ‘exotic
foreigner’. Perhaps, however, such caricatured North American presentation is creditably
true to this Indian Queen, for ultimately,
so self-indulgent a show seems concerned with little beyond a director’s self-imposition
upon self-righteously adopted ‘causes’. If ‘self’ appears too many times in the
preceding sentence, that sorry deed, at least, has not been carried out entirely unknowingly.
