Manon Lescaut, Opera Holland Park, 4 June 2019

Holland Park

Images: © Robert Workman

Manon Lescaut – Elizabeth Llewellyn

Lescaut – Paul Carey Jones

Des Grieux – Peter Auty

Geronte di Ravoir – Stephen Richardson

Edmondo – Stephen Aviss

Singer – Ellie Edmonds

Dancing Master – John Wood

Innkeeper, Sergeant of the Royal Archers – Alistair Sutherland

Backing Singers – Hannah Boxall, Susie Buckle, Lara Rebekah Harvey, Ayaka Tanimoto

Shadow Manons – Angelica Barroga, Isabella Martinez, Hanan Mugga

Karolina Sofulak (director)
George Johnson-Leigh (designs)

Rory Beaton (lighting)

Tim Claydon (choreography)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Richard Harker)

City of London Sinfonia

Peter Robinson (conductor)

Manon Lescaut is a curious opera. Its protracted genesis and sometimes unsatisfactory dramaturgy seem ultimately to work against it, whatever the attempted solution. A Leipzig revival of its original, 1893 version suggested that reinstatement of the original first-act finale was certainly not the answer. I am yet to be convinced that it can be made to work, though I shall happily be proved wrong. Perhaps Puccini’s greatest devotees feel the same way I should about La finta semplice, Feuersnot, or Die Feen. The operatic repertoire is full of works, after all, whose potential has been incompletely realised; we do what we can with them and should often be the poorer without them. The gap between potential and realisation can even prove part of a work’s fascination, especially in a knowing production and performance.

Elizabeth Llewellyn (Manon Lescaut) and Shadow Manons

Alas, Karolina Sofulak’s production, ambition notwithstanding, does not come across as engaging with quite enough of those apparently intractable problems – and a little too often seems unclear. The 1960s updating works well enough in theory and has its moments in practice too. A society preoccupied with style and with a strong tension between reaction and liberation has obvious parallels with the eighteenth-century world of the Abbé Prévost. Where Sofulak’s production does score is in trying to make something of the heroine. If only we had something of Manon and Des Grieux’s time in Paris, she might come across as more fleshed out. (Puccini continued to entertain such a possibility for a decade.) Instead, Sofulak offers us a nightclub singer and entertainer who attempts – I think – to take responsibility for her own career, to wrest its control from the lowlifes around her. The idea seems to me a good one; the problem lies, perhaps as with the work, in its partial, confusing realisation. There is nothing wrong with making an audience work, asking it to fill in certain aspects; not everything can be portrayed on stage or indeed in the pit. The clashes between ‘original’ and new setting, though, often seem arbitrary rather than productive. By the time one realises what is happening in the fourth act, that Manon is making her escape from this world, abandoning her lover too, one may have ceased to care. A keener sense of place, even if place explicitly not created, would have helped. One does not need to see Le Havre or the bizarre ‘desert’ outside New Orleans, but if much is to remain the same, either abstraction or knowing, purposive infidelity may need to come across more strongly. Perhaps, though, I was missing the point and might feel differently on a second viewing; it has happened before and will surely happen again.

That difficulty with caring or with otherwise feeling truly involved is part of the work’s problem, at least for many of us. Too often, I found myself wishing that this were Lulu or, somewhere in between, Boulevard Solitude. Perhaps, though, that did credit to much of the musical performance. If, in my heart of hearts, I might prefer a few more strings for Puccini, I could hardly fault the City of London Sinfonia under Peter Robinson, and do not wish to try. There were a few moments when pit and stage fell out of sync in the first act, but that can happen in the finest of houses. More to the point, Robinson and his players pointed up nicely the character of each act, permitting one’s ears to draw all manner of connections between Puccini’s roots, his future, and his influence and affinities. Wagner loomed increasingly large, but so did devices Puccini would adopt more successfully in subsequent works, as well as sounds one might have thought stolen from Debussy, Stravinsky, even Poulenc – save for the fact that, if anything, it must have been the other way around.

Lescaut (Paul Carey Jones), Manon, Geronte (Stephen Richardson)

Elizabeth Llewellyn unquestionably did what she could to have one care about Manon and her plight. If the character remains unsatisfactory, that is in no way to be attributed to Llewellyn, whose typically intelligent, sympathetic performance rose far above the vocal difficulties recent laryngitis occasionally revealed. Paul Carey Jones and Stephen Richardson brought similar depth to their roles as Lescaut and Geronte respectively, again supplying as much implied context as anyone could reasonably ask. If Peter Auty’s performance as Des Grieux proved somewhat generalised and gestural, there could be no doubting his enthusiasm. The Holland Park Chorus combined such enthusiasm with greater precision – vocal and staged; so too did other members of the cast, Stephen Aviss and Alastair Sutherland making a particular favourable impression.

The Queen of Spades, Opera Holland Park, 2 August 2016

Holland Park Theatre

Herman – Peter Wedd

Lisa – Natalya Romaniw
Countess – Rosalind Plowright
Count Tomsky – Richard Burkhard
Prince Yeletsky – Grant Doyle
Polina – Laura Woods
Masha – Daisy Brown
Chekalinsky – Aled Hall
Surin – Simon Wilding
Governess – Laura Zigmantaite
Chaplitsky – Oliver Brignall
Narumov – Henry Grant Kerswell
Master of Ceremonies – Timothy Langston

Rodula Gaitanou (director)

Cordelia Chisholm (designs)
Simon Corder (lighting)
Jamie Neale (choreography)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Philip Voldman)

City of London Sinfonia
Peter Robinson (conductor)
 

The Queen of Spades has been doing rather well in and around London of late. I have only seen two stagings recently before this, but know of quite a few others. Of those: Opera North offered a rare lapse at the Barbican, about which the less said, the better; ENO, last year, offered strong vocal performances but a truly catastrophic production. All in all, then, Holland Park, as so often, came off best.

 

Rodula Gaitanou’s production tells the story well, and offers some probing beneath the surface – although not so much when contrasted with reports of Stefan Herheim’s recent staging in Amsterdam. (By the same token, however, OHP does a great deal with more limited resources; it would in any case be unreasonable or downright absurd to expect every opera production to be an event on the level of a Herheim production.) I did wonder whether the sight of two men beneath an arch in the penultimate scene was intended as an oblique reference to Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality, but, given the darkness, it was a bit difficult to tell. Perhaps that is the point. There is, in the late-nineteenth-century updating – time of composition, I presume – some sense of pitting a self-consciously beautiful society against more human desires, noble and base alike. Cordelia Chisholm’s designs will certainly delight those who wish to see ‘traditional’ productions, doubtless ignoring the fact that the opera is not set when it ‘should’ be.

The Countess seems to rule the roost in a fashion beyond what one might expect; this is, perhaps, an ageing society, unable to accept the need to change. If I felt that some of those points might have been pushed a little harder, there is something to be said for not doing so either. We all have particular tastes, and have no right to insist that everything should be as we should have done it; indeed, we should be willing to learn from things done differently – and done well. I found that, on reflection, the production had more to offer than I had initially thought; there is certainly much to be said for relative subtlety. (Just as there is much to be said, from time to time, for agitprop!)

 

It was, perhaps inevitably, Rosalind Plowright’s Countess who made the strongest dramatic impression. Although she does not have very much to sing during the first act – here, Tchaikovsky’s three acts were condensed into two – she held the stage just by entering, let alone by painfully, agonisingly, walking across it with her sticks. (I thought a little of my first encounter with Waltraud Meier in the theatre: as Ortrud as Covent Garden. The character has little to sing at all in the first act of Lohengrin, but I could not keep my eyes off her.) And the insight into her interior life, above all to her past, was moving, evoking an historical canvas far wider than we were explicitly or even implicitly told. Natalya Romaniw did not disappoint as Lisa, although I felt that her character came more into its own following the interval; a freer, more daring performance to be seen and heard. Again, perhaps that was the point. Peter Wedd’s Herman was, I am afraid, harder to like. The character seemed less impetuous than annoying, somewhat generalised, even wooden acting meaning that it was difficult to feel much chemistry between him and his beloved. As melodrama there was something to be said for such a performance, but there was much that it lacked; a fine vocal performance might have compensated, but that was not to be either. Grant Doyle’s Yeletsky, however, was very fine indeed: darkly conflicted, and beguiling of line.

 

Other, ‘smaller’ roles were all taken well, Richard Burkhard’s Tomsky, Daisy Brown’s Masha, and Laura Zigmantaite’s Governess particularly catching my ear – without that reflecting negatively upon any of the other singers. It was the Opera Holland Park Chorus, though, which so often stole the show. Expertly trained, not just musically but in its Russian too (insofar as I could tell!), by Philip Voldman, and responding well to detailed direction, choreography (Jamie Neale) included, the chorus members performed equally well as individuals (highly impressive waiters, for instance, in the first scene) and corporately. We shall doubtless see and hear more from many of them.

 

Ideally, we should have heard a larger orchestra than the Holland Park pit can accommodate. There were certainly times when the lack of a greater body of strings detracted from Tchaikovsky’s Romanticism. However, there is a good deal of (neo-)Classicism to the score too; that often thrived under Peter Robinson’s direction. The Mozart pastiche music – which, of course, never quite sounds like Mozart, but gives us a good idea of Tchaikovsky’s limited understanding of Mozart – came off particularly well, but so did the obsessive qualities of the score. The City of London Sinfonia woodwind were on particularly good form, and the strings performed creditably indeed, given their limitation in number. Opera Holland Park’s productions tend to evoke above all a splendid sense of company, of an evening that is considerably more than the sum of its parts; this was no exception.

 

 

Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi, Royal Academy Opera, 20 November 2014

Sir Jack Lyons Theatre, Royal Academy of Music

Suor Angelica – Emily Garland

Suor Dolcina - Nika Goric

Monitress – Laura Zigmantaite

Suor Genovieffa – Eve Daniell

Suor Osmina – Kirsty Michele Anderson

Mistress of the Novices – Helen Brackenbury
Abbess – Katie Stevenson
Zia Principessa - Anna Harvey

Lauretta – Charlotte Schoeters

Nella – Eve Daniell
La Ciesca – Katherine Aitken
Zita – Laura Zigmantaite
Gherardo – Richard Dowling
Rinuccio – John Porter
Amantio di Nicolao – Dominic Bowe
Gianni Schicchi – Ed Ballard
Marco – Henry Neill
Betto – Alistair Ollerenshaw
Guccio – Jamie Wright
Maestro Spinelloccio – Timothy Murphy
Pinellino – Michael Mofidian
Simone – Lancelot Nomura
Gherardino – Harriet Eyley

Will Kerley (director)

Jason Southgate (designs)

Royal Academy Sinfonia

Peter Robinson (conductor)

 

Two-thirds of Puccini’s triptych made for yet another excellent evening at the Royal Academy of Music. It may sound exaggerated to say that London’s conservatoire opera performances more often than not put its main houses to shame, but that does genuinely seem to be the case. Productions may be a more fraught issue, but when the vocal performances are superior, that says a great deal concerning both the quality of musicianship on offer at the Royal Academy and elsewhere, and also questionable casting decisions from the Royal Opera (Idomeneo fresh in the memory) and ENO.

 

Comparisons – from which she would have nothing whatsoever to fear – aside, Emily Garland’s Suor Angelica quite floored me: a startling mature performance. This is not the sort of repertoire one really expects to hear from singers so young; indeed, this was the first conservatoire performance I have attended of Puccini. But Garland’s voice was the real thing, her tragic plight involving one as only a fine vocal performance could. Puccini’s mix, especially here, of sadism and sentimentality can be hard to take, but we found ourselves here in expert hands. The supporting cast had not a weak link, and Anna Harvey’s elegantly-sung Zia Principessa made for a cruel foil indeed. My other doubt, a priori, would have concerned a small-ish orchestra, and there were occasions when, even in a small theatre, a few more strings would have helped. However, they were few and far between, and, if I have heard more symphonic Puccini, especially earlier on, than Peter Robinson’s, he was always attentive to the action. Moreover, the final scene’s emotional impact flowed as much from the tauntingly gorgeous orchestral sound as from Garland’s inspired performance. Will Kerley’s keenly-observed production makes excellent use of Jason Southgate’s resourceful set and of course an eager company of nuns; the musical drama, quite rightly, remains our focus, with little to distract us from its unfolding.

 

Gianni Schicchi emerged after the interval in gloriously garish colours – at least so far as the staging was concerned. I sensed a kinship, perhaps coincidental, with Richard Jones’s Covent Garden production, though the updating comes closer to our time, with Rinuccio cheekily capturing moments à la mode on his telephone camera. The liveliness of the direction, every character’s movements and reactions carefully attended to and utterly convincing, even in loving caricature, was matched by a string of fine vocal performances. Again, the cliché of not a weak link in the cast held triumphantly; moreover, there was a real sense, quite an achievement this, of a true ‘company performance’. Ed Ballard’s assumption of the title role was a joy, as alert to words as to music as to stage action: another singer here from whom we shall surely hear more. I doubt that anything will convince me that ‘O mio babbino caro’ is not an unfortunate mistake, a fly in the ointment, though doubtless a case can be made for a moment when the brilliance of Puccini’s scherzo stops. That said, Charlotte Schoeters sang it and the rest of her role beautifully, making a winning pair with John Porter’s ardent Rinuccio. When I say that it is difficult to disentangle the other performances, I mean nothing but praise by that; to attempt to do so would degenerate into a mere repetition of the cast list, and the whole was far more than the sum of the parts. Robinson and the orchestra were perhaps on finer form still, that glistening orchestral brilliance to which I alluded married to an unerring sense of dramatic direction. Congratulations to all concerned!