The Tempest, Met Opera Live, 10 November 2012

Metropolitan Opera, New York, viewed at Cineworld, West India Quay

Ariel – Audrey Luna

Miranda – Isabel Leonard
Trinculo – Iestyn Davies
Ferdinand – Alek Shrader
Caliban – Alan Oke
King of Naples – William Burden
Antonio – Toby Spence
Prospero – Simon Keenlyside
Stefano – Kevin Burdette
Gonzalo – John Del Carlo
Robert Lepage (director)

Jasmine Catudal (set designs)

Kym Barrett (costumes)
Michel Beaulieu (lighting)
David Leclerc (video)

Metropolitan Opera Chorus

Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Thomas Adès (conductor)

 

‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’ That was how I began my review of the Met broadcast of Robert Lepage’s production of Götterdammerung. I feared that it would do again for The Tempest, yet, although this was no triumph, save for some of the singers and indeed the splendid Met orchestra, nor, at least on the big screen, did it prove the excruciating embarrassment I had feared, largely due to excellent performances. I wonder how much of the rest of the salvage was due to clever filming, given that the voices of those in the theatre earlier on during the run, voices I respect, seem to have been united.

Let there be no misunderstanding: Lepage’s production was mindless in the extreme. No change there. The half-hearted attempt at meta-theatricality – are we not all tired of that now, unless it be the work of someone who really engages with the work as well – was one of the worst I have seen. All it seemed to involve was setting the opera at La Scala, for no other reason than that Prospero was once Duke of Milan, and then leaving a confused nonsense to play itself out, sometimes in front of the Scala theatre and some (eighteenth-century?!) spectators, sometimes not. Prospero, Ariel, and still more Caliban looked as if they were refugees from one of Lepage’s Cirque du Soleil shows. At one point there is an apparently non-ironic – though maybe I am just too stupid to plumb its deaths – of a filmed couple (Miranda Ferdinand) walking off into the sunset. There really is nothing more I can think of to say about the production, so I shall leave it there. 

Let there be no further misunderstanding: Adès’s stature remains inflated far beyond his talent. Still, that is not his fault; nobody forces others to stage his works, even though there may be a host of better claimants – or at least I assume no one does. The greater part of the first two acts was undistinguished in the extreme, rarely if ever rising above the level of a typical soundtrack for a middlebrow television serial. There is certainly nothing to frighten away even the most timid of horses, though I suspect that even equine or indeed bovine audience members might wonder what the point in such an enterprise might be. There is often a certain skill with orchestration, but then any decent postgraduate composition student ought to be able to manage that. Otherwise, harmonies are resolutely unchallenging – Britten sounds adventurous by comparison – and direction is unclear. O for a touch of Birtwistle! The third act picks up considerably. Whilst no masterpiece, there is greater dramatic focus, more of a sense of responding to the story, and the passacaglia towards the end, if obvious beyond the call of duty, does its business. Ariel must be one of the most irritating characters – if one can call her that – in the operatic repertoire, but at least that her insanely vertiginous coloratura adds a dash of interest. The shades of Couperin work better in context than when taken as a suite, but perhaps that is because the dullness of the score as a whole sets them in positive relief.

As for Meredith Oakes’s ghastly libretto, let there be no additional misunderstanding.  I cannot bring myself to recall, let alone to repeat, its doggerel. Not wishing to set Shakespeare ‘straight’ is perfectly understandable, but the only relief in this banal effort is the unintentionally comic. (Again, I cannot recall a particular instance, so the humour remains a relative concept.)

The Met Orchestra played splendidly for Adès, who, like Britten, except at a far lower level, consistently seems a more impressive performer than composer. (The moment we have a Turn of the Screw it will be worth a change of heart, but I am not sure we have yet heard the equivalent of the Britten Piano Concerto yet.) Incisive, full of tone, splendidly colourful: it is difficult to imagine a better performance than this. If only the orchestra’s talents had been lavished on a more worthy contemporary score. The Mask of Orpheus, perhaps? The chorus sang and acted well too. Moreover, there was a good deal of fine singing, most crucial of all Simon Keenlyside’s Prospero, whose performance at times came as close as humanly possible to moving, given the material. Audrey Luna’s Ariel was apparently effortlessly despatched, a splendid achievement. Alan Oke was creepily ‘different’ and yet unfailingly musical as Caliban, though something a little more threatening might have been in order. (Perhaps that was a matter of stage direction though.) Isabel Leonard and Alek Shrader were as beautiful and handsome of voice as of aspect, the latter especially touching in his sadness and his joy. Toby Spence and Iestyn Davies were as impressive as one would expect, Davies almost managing to convince one that his was a genuine Shakespearean – or Monteverdian – character. If only...

Maybe I set the bar too low, but this was better than Götterdämmerung. However, I beseech you not to take that claim out of context.

 

Götterdämmerung, Met Opera Live, 11 February 2012

Metropolitan Opera, New York: HD Live, viewed at BFI IMAX

Brünnhilde – Deborah Voigt
Gutrune – Wendy Bryn Harmer
Waltraute – Waltraud Meier
Siegfried – Jay Hunter Morris
Gunther – Iain Paterson
Alberich – Eric Owens
Hagen – Hans-Peter König
First Norn – Maria Radner
Second Norn – Elizabeth Bishop
Third Norn – Heidi Melton
Woglinde – Erin Morley
Wellgunde – Jennifer Johnson Cano
Flosshilde – Tamara Mumford

Robert Lepage (director)
Neilson Vignola (associate director)
Carl Fillion (set designs)
François St-Aubin (costumes)
Etienne Boucher (lighting)
Lionel Arnould (video image artist)

Patricia Racette (‘Live in HD’ host)
Metropolitan Opera Chorus
Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
Fabio Luisi (conductor)


Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. With the caveat that this is the only instalment of Robert Lepage’s Met Ring that I have seen, it really is as bad as everyone has said it is. In the face of uniformly negative reviews – I am sure there will be exceptions, but they have not come to my notice – Götterdämmerung proved to be one of the most vacuous productions of anything I have ever seen. Even the Otto Schenk production that this replaced seems in retrospect a monument to Wagner’s ‘emotionalisation of the intellect’ (the desired mode for reception of his yet-to-be-composed tetralogy, according to Opera and Drama). Well, not quite, but here, I am afraid, there is simply nothing. There has been a peculiar recent trend of presenting ideas-free or at least ideas-lite Ring cycles: witness Stéphane Braunschweig in Aix and Guy Cassiers in Berlin (and Milan). However one could fail to entertain any thoughts, however misplaced, about the Ring is a conundrum too far for me, but Lepage seems to have hit rock bottom. So far as I can discern, his only concern is the ‘machine’, about which we have all heard far too much already. A preposterously expensive mechanism for scene changes and video projections – disturbingly similar to Ex Machina’s ‘Cirque du Soleil’ – is not a substitute, or rather it is but not should be, for dramatic direction. A production that took technology as its starting-point could have a great deal to say. How about, say, starting with Victorian phantasmagoria in Nibelheim and making our way forward? (Memories of Patrice Chéreau’s hydroelectric dam necessarily return.) But here we simply have duller costumes than in Schenk, and video projections of a few natural phenomena. What is the drama about? What is at stake? The nihilism of Götterdämmerung, or at least that dramatised therein - Chéreau rightly characterised the world of the Gibichung court as ageing, pointing to the increasing desperation of its rituals, which seek some sort of moral code in a post-religious society that knows no morality, indeed finds it impossible to ‘know’ – is quite a different matter from presenting nothing at all. The mock-up horse seems so designed to appease ‘traditionalists’ that it would surely have been more honest to go the whole hog, if you will forgive the mixing of equine and porcine, and present a real animal on stage. It all looks at best like an expensive version of a school Viking play. Poor Waltraud Meier really pulls the short straw with Waltraute’s silly helmet.

Enough! If even the lobotomised would require a further lobotomy to find anything in the production, was there anything at least worth hearing? The score, after all, is not without interest. Fabio Luisi’s conducting was better than we tend to hear at Covent Garden; there was little of the stopping and starting that must be endured here post-Haitink. But if corners were for the most part safely navigated, the reading nevertheless struggled to rise above the efficient. How depressing it is to write that! In a brief interval conversation with Patricia Racette – may I never hear her inane questioning again! – Luisi claimed that he wished to rid the work of heavy German tradition. He accomplished that after a fashion, I suppose, but it might have been worth him considering whence that disparaged tradition arose. This was not a chamber reading – there is, up to a point, a place for such – but a dull one, quite uninvolving throughout. Again, I should remind you that we are talking about Götterdämmerung here. Choral singing, I am delighted to report, was excellent. The Metropolitan Opera Chorus was clearly well-trained, and sang with admirable heft, as well as clarity.

Meier’s Waltraute was, unsurprisingly, a highlight. Somehow she managed to wring some drama from the situation: she did so as only she can, with her extraordinary intensifying synthesis of word and gesture. Iain Paterson was an excellent Gunther, conflicted and insecure, and Wendy Bryn Harmer offered an excellent, complementary Gutrune, often quite beautiful of tone. Hans-Peter König’s Hagen was interesting. There were times when I thought him too benevolent, but his portrayal won me around: a nasty turn thereafter suggested that it might actually have been an act, Hagen’s act. We were left guessing. Sad to say, I missed Eric Owens’s Alberich: confusion – entirely my own fault – concerning the interval timings meant that I missed the very opening of the second act, surely one of the most extraordinary scenes in this extraordinary drama. Owens certainly received a rapturous curtain call. As for Deborah Voigt’s Brünnhilde, I have heard worse, but the view that her weight loss entailed a great deal of vocal loss seemed pretty close to confirmation here. There was a dignity to her portrayal that promised more than it delivered, but if hardly memorable, there was no disgrace here either. Jay Hunter Morris should probably be applauded for managing, more or less, to sing the well-nigh impossible role of Siegfried – we all have horror stories to recount in that respect – but there were times when he sounded strained, even in a recorded balance that offered undue emphasis to the singers. Moreover, this was a role for the most part presented as opposed to lived. The production of course did not help, but Meier and Paterson in particular showed what might nevertheless be done by intelligent singing-actors. Intelligence, alas, was not something with which Lepage and company credited their audience.

It was unfortunate that much of the final scene of the first act was vitiated by some problem with transmission. First an unpleasant noise replaced the music, then silence. Whether this were the fault of the broadcast or the cinema, I do not know. Strange computer announcements appeared on screen from time to time, too, and there were problems with the subtitles (quite apart from the often questionable translation). I shall not bore readers with too many of my thoughts concerning opera in the cinema – I have come rather late in the day to it, this being my first time – but this was, for whatever reasons, a far less involving experience than I had anticipated, and it would be good to hear a balance that sounded a little closer to what one might hear in the opera house. Wagner's great Chorus, the orchestra, suffered especially.

(See also the review by Classical Iconoclast, including links to reviews of previous instalments.)

The Rake's Progress, Royal Opera, 22 January 2010

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Trulove – Jeremy White
Anne Trulove – Rosemary Joshua
Tom Rakewell – Toby Spence
Nick Shadow – Kyle Ketelsen
Mother Goose – Frances McCafferty
Baba the Turk – Patricia Bardon
Sellem – Graham Clark
Madhouse Keeper – Jonathan Coad

Robert Lepage (director)
Sybille Wilson (revival director)
Carl Fillon (set designs)
François Barbeau (costumes)
Etienne Boucher (lighting)
Boris Firquet (video)
Michael Keegan Dolan (choreography)
Rachel Poirer and Milos Galko (revival choreography)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Stephen Westrop)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

First time around, I had rather liked Robert Lepage’s production of The Rake’s Progress, writing: ‘Lepage made a good case for the updating to 1950s America, for instance through his mention of Stravinsky's great interest in the new medium, delineation of Hollywood's 'false historicism', and citation of an essay in which Auden made clear his opposition to naturalism. The best case, however, was on stage, in which one was perfectly at liberty to consider the parallels between the setting and its original form, yet without feeling unduly constrained.’ A little later, I quoted Lepage saying that he had not ‘“set out to make a piece of social criticism, so the political and social dimension to the production has arisen through choices that seemed right to me”. This is interesting, since the political and social dimension came across strong and clear. Today's “celebrity”-fuelled culture, we were reminded, is in many respects nothing new, although it may somehow be even more vacuous than it once was. Hollywood and advertising, as we saw on stage, pursued this cult from the very earliest years, and the figure of Baba the Turk reminds us that notoriety was a great selling-point - literally - during the eighteenth century too. What could be more Hogarthian, post-war, or contemporary than setting off to the City in search of riches and losing them - and much else in the process?’

What, then, had changed? First, I suspect that the production itself is subject to diminishing returns. The Hollywood trappings – Nick Shadow filming, Tom Rakewell’s trailer, the swimming pool and so on – do not seem to offer up any more upon a second viewing. The loss of London grated rather more than it had, since the replacement did not seem adequate, an especially unfortunate moment coming during the third act when it was suggested that Tom had fled ‘to America’. Had he ever been away? Second, the revival direction seemed to me significantly less sharp than the original. Social criticism might not have been intentional the first time around, but it shone through nevertheless. Here, one wondered whether Hollywood were being enjoyed for its own sake; there was certainly little if any hint of McCarthyism. And third, the audience really did not help. Expecting anything much from the greater part of a Covent Garden audience is doubtless foolish, but this seemed to be an especially unimaginative, uncomprehending bunch. Applause and laughter could be heard all over the place, sometimes at the most truly inopportune moments. (What on earth was amusing about the graveyard scene?) The multiple alienations Stravinsky, Auden, and, one might at least have hoped, the production set before us went as pearls before swine; a friend of mine heard someone next to her exclaim that ‘the show’ reminded him of Hello, Dolly! Many of the people, moreover, would appear to have been deaf – rendering opera an eccentric choice for their evening’s ‘entertainment’ – since they could not even hear when numbers came to a close, applauding some time beforehand, sometimes whistling too (?!). These people, apparently determined to show off however much they have paid for their tickets, do not seem prepared even to attempt to think, and lessen the experience for the rest of us.

The musical performances varied. Patricia Bardon once again proved a strong Baba, touching in a way one rarely experiences, a trouper of the old school. (Stephanie Blythe had pulled out, likewise the anticipated Kate Royal as Anne Trulove.) There was nothing one could reasonably complain about in Kyle Ketelsen’s Nick, but he seemed to take time to warm up. Certainly by the second act, and then especially during the graveyard scene, he seemed properly possessed by the demon and his demons. Rosemary Joshua seemed to me a considerably stronger Anne than Sally Matthews had: purity of voice and character did not this time entail an inability to make her words tell, far from it. Graham Clark’s Sellem was more character actor than singer; his voice faltered alarmingly more than once. But sadly, the principal disappointment was Toby Spence’s Tom. There is a degree of blankness to the character, I appreciate, yet I was surprised nevertheless by Spence’s woodenness. The developmental aspect I noted to Charles Castronovo’s portrayal in 2008 was considerably less apparent. Moreover, there were times when the vocal line was not nearly so well shaped as it might have been. Choral singing improved, but was disturbingly unfocused in Mother Goose’s brothel.

Ingo Metzmacher’s account of the score ultimately proved puzzling, almost a mirror-image of that of Thomas Adès, whose conducting had proved the major drawback a year-and-a-half ago. There was much greater bite to the first two acts, a proper Stravinskian desiccation, which both repels and fascinates. For this, the fine form of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House must be credited. I longed for greater warmth – but that is just as it should be. To give in would be to risk collapse of the neo-classical conceit. However, the Bedlam Scene proved interminable, weirdly sentimentalised. Clearly a contrast was being drawn, but I wish it had not been, since much of the earlier good work was undone. Nothing though could quite detract from the brilliance of the graveyard scene, where Stravinsky achieves the near-impossible in harpsichord writing that does not make one long for the piano. Is this the mask dropping? It is probably just another mask, but at least the question is posed.

The Rake's Progress, Royal Opera, 14 July 2008

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Anne Trulove - Sally Matthews
Tom Rakewell - Charles Castronovo
Nick Shadow - John Relyea
Mother Goose - Kathleen Wilkinson
Baba the Turk - Patricia Bardon
Trulove - Darren Jeffery
Sellem - Peter Bronder

Robert Lepage (director)
Sybille Wilson (associate director)
Carl Fillion (designs)
Francois Barbeau (costumes)
Etienne Boucher (lighting)
Michael Keegan Dolan (choreography)
Boris Firquet (video)

Royal Opera House Chorus (chorus master: Renato Baldasonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Thomas Adès (conductor)

After reading a few reviews of earlier performances from this production of The Rake's Progress, I was not really looking forward to it, but Robert Lepage's production seemed to me to delve deeper than many critics had allowed. I had braced myself to overlook the absence of London from the stage but, the odd reference apart, I barely noticed it; even when I did, I could readily make a mental substitution, which did little harm. When I think about it, the laments about the absence of Hogarth's London from the stage seem unintentionally ironic, given the absence of eighteenth-century 'Idea' from Stravinsky's (very) pseudo-eighteenth-century style. In a programme note, 'Stravinsky in the early days of television,' Lepage made a good case for the updating to 1950s America, for instance through his mention of Stravinsky's great interest in the new medium, delineation of Hollywood's 'false historicism', and citation of an essay in which Auden made clear his opposition to naturalism. The best case, however, was on stage, in which one was perfectly at liberty to consider the parallels between the setting and its original form, yet without feeling unduly constrained. Auden, after all, was convinced - like his venerated Wagner - that myth was the stuff of opera, and myth by its very nature must transcend historical particularity.

Lepage writes that he did not 'set out to make a piece of social criticism, so the political and social dimension to the production has arisen through choices that seemed right to me'. This is interesting, since the political and social dimension came across strong and clear. Today's 'celebrity'-fuelled culture, we were reminded, is in many respects nothing new, although it may somehow be even more vacuous than it once was. Hollywood and advertising, as we saw on stage, pursued this cult from the very earliest years, and the figure of Baba the Turk reminds us that notoriety was a great selling-point - literally - during the eighteenth century too. What could be more Hogarthian, post-war, or contemporary than setting off to the City in search of riches and losing them - and much else in the process? Perhaps the setting that most impressed me was the updated Bedlam of the final scene. One need only have the most cursory or even intuitive understanding of Foucault to appreciate the dialectical relationship between modern liberal-capitalist society and the construction of 'madness'. This, in a sense, a construction that has been the story of the opera: Nick Shadow's 'project'. Here, at the end - bar the 'moral - one could see and hear at first hand what our society's barbarism does and has done to us. The relationship of such madness to art, even - perhaps especially - at its most neo-classical-Apollonian, is personified in the relationships between Tom, Anne, Baba, and of course Nick: the Devil - or Dionysus? - himself. In the asylum, the control-room atmosphere chimed perfectly with the ever-increasing tentacles of the administered society. This could doubtless all have been done in an eighteenth-century setting, but the relative distancing, both from our own time and from Hogarth's London, had the benefit, at least for some of us, of making us consider the parallels, the differences, and the historical progression - or regression.

It was the production rather than the musical performances that ultimately made the greatest impression upon me. I had no quarrel with any of the singers; indeed, I thought most of them very good. Charles Castronovo did not erase memories of the composer's Alexander Young (Sony), but then no one else ever has for me either. I wondered to begin with whether Castronovo was a touch anonymous, but then realised - whether by design or default, it hardly matters - that there was to be a great deal of development in his character. This is, however ironically, a rake's progress. Musically he had full command of the score and the intricacies of the libretto. Sally Matthews sang her part beautifully, although I often had difficulty, at least without glancing up to the surtitles, in understanding the words she was singing. This matters, when the libretto is one of the greatest ever penned. Anne's cabaletta, 'I go, I go to him,' was nevertheless exceptionally well done. John Relyea was a highly accomplished Shadow, chameleon-like in his re-invention, yet with a constant heart (?) of darkness to his very being. Patricia Bardon came across as both absurd and touching, a combination which seemed to me to penetrate to the very real heart of Baba. The choral singing was good, if not outstanding, although that must at least partly be attributed to the musical direction, which failed to impart the incisiveness the chorus required.

For my principal reservation lay with the conducting of Thomas Adès. Whilst enthralled by the production, I was so bored by the stodgy, oddly soft-centred approach to the first act that I briefly considered leaving during the interval. So eager, however, was I to see where the production would leave us next that this was not a serious option. However, the aggressive, polemical bite of Stravinsky's score was largely absent, without anything much other than drift to take its place. Matters improved considerably after the interval, although I have still heard much better. Rather to my surprise, the graveyard music, almost Schoenbergian in its remarkably unironic intensity, was splendidly handled, for which tribute must be paid both to the strings and to Christopher Willis on the harpsichord. With that execption, however, Adès, unlike Bardon, let alone Lepage, never seemed to me to penetrate to the heart of Stravinsky's apparently heartless score. This reminded of the mere cleverness I have often fancied I heard in Adès's own music - except here the conducting did not even seem especially 'clever'. Whereas, even when I have been most repelled by Stravinsky - I can accept his brand of neo-classicism much more readily than once I could - I have never doubted that there was a core to the music. By contrast, I have on several occasions wondered about the state of the imperial clothes in the case of Adès, never more so than when I heard The Tempest at Covent Garden, a work that evinced the aimlessness of Britten at his worst, albeit without the individual voice. (Lest this seem unduly harsh, contrast the gracious responses of John Adams and Steve Reich to Pierre Boulez's eightieth birthday with the sourness of Adès.) Despite that, which must be tribute indeed, I left Lepage's Rake - or, perhaps more properly, that of his company, Ex Machina - feeling that I liked and had been challenged by the work more than had been the case before.