Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Deutsche Oper, 24 October 2019

 Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Image: Bettina Stöß

Hoffmann – Marc Laho

Stella, Olympia, Antonia, Giulietta – Heather Engebretson

Lindorf, Coppélius, Miracle, Dapertutto – Byung Gil Kim

Muse, Nicklausse – Irene Roberts

Andrès, Cochenille, Franz, Pitichianaccio – Andrew Dickinson

Mother’s Voice – Ronnita Miller

Spalanzani – Jörg Schörner

Luther, Crespel – Andrew Harris

Hermann – Matthew Cossack

Schlemihl – Timothy Newton

Natanael – Ya-Chung Huang

Laurent Pelly (director)

Christian Räth (revival director)

Chantal Thomas (designs)

Joël Adam (lighting)

Charles Carcopino (video)

Agathe Mélinand, Katharina Duda (dramaturgy)

Chorus (chorus master: Jeremy Bines) of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin 

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Daniel Carter (conductor)

It is a strange piece, The Tales of Hoffmann. I can only speak from my own experience, but, irrespective of performance, irrespective of production, irrespective of textual issues, it never quite seems to come off. Perhaps it is that, as a friend said to me last night, it is too ambitious. That seems to me a better emphasis than ‘problematical’, though arguably the distinction in meaning is negligible. It also points, as that wise and learned friend went on, to the opera’s charm: a more fragile and yes, perhaps, problematical beast, given scale and forces, than the more intimate, often acutely satirical opéras bouffes with which Offenbach is more naturally bien dans sa peau.

Something could – should – be done with those and other tensions, with the work’s metatheatricality, with the fantasy of a work that, after all, is designated an opéra fantastique. Laurent Pelly, alas, would not seem to be the director for any of that. If there is nothing especially wrong with his production, new last year, nor is there anything especially right with – or, better, compelling to – it, either. There are handsome, if highly conservative, set and costume designs (Chantal Thomas, with assistance from Jean-Jaques Delmotte in the latter case), accomplished revival direction and Spielleitung (Christian Räth and Eva-Maria Abelein), and that is about it. Of questions arising from writing an opera based on a play about a writer we have nothing; of any subtexts, be they political, aesthetic, sexual, anything at all, nothing; of a critical standpoint, nothing; of anything approaching modern, let alone contemporary, theatre nothing; and so on, and so forth. There was not even anything in the way of spectacle; unless, out of desperation, you were to count a large video projection of Antonia’s mother’s face, to accompany her voice from beyond. Were this the n^th revival, replete with a new lick of paint, of something in the repertory for four or five decades, one might think something once present had been lost; in this case, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Pelly had presented precious little to get one’s teeth into in the first place. There is so much more potentially here – one need not look elsewhere – than is acknowledged by so reactionary a standpoint. Just when I thought there might be the glimmerings of a concept, however circumscribed, in the Olympia act, seeing the mechanical doll’s visible stage apparatus, it turned out to be no such thing: sometimes visible stage apparatus is just somewhat unfortunately visible stage apparatus. One can recognise and celebrate the skilled work of all involved backstage – true, valuable skills – while wishing it had been put in the service of something more interesting. The version employed had its virtues and its problems; I shall leave them for another day.

If there was little in the way of theatrical interest, however, there was much to admire musically. This was the first time I had heard Daniel Carter conduct, but I hope it will not be the last. If I say that his conducting did not attract attention to itself, I do not intend to imply that it was dull, far from it; rather, there was a rightness to his choices of tempo, of balance, and everything else that fed the illusion was ‘simply’ hearing Offenbach. The Deutsche Oper’s orchestra and chorus proved estimable partners in crime: incisive, fantastical, wry, full of body as required. French vocal style seems a well-nigh impossible thing for modern, international – even modern French – casts to bring off; or perhaps my expectations are at fault. That said, there was an uncommonly high success rate with the language: never something to be taken for granted. And if some singing tended unduly towards the Italianate, it was not so difficult to enjoy it for what it was. Marc Laho and Heather Engebretson worked tirelessly in the central roles, both vividly communicative, the latter distinguishing and yet combining the demands of her various characters with great success – and scoring higher in the stylistic stakes than most. Byung Gil Kim’s bass-baritone proved a joy from beginning to end; darkly suave, this is surely a Don Giovanni in the making, perhaps already made. Moreover, I can imagine Boris Godunov knocking on the door a few years down the line. Irene Roberts’s Muse and Nicklausse were beautifully, honestly sung and acted throughout: another artist from whom I hope to see and hear more. Andrew Dickinson and – offstage – Ronnita Miller also shone; as, highly creditably, did the excellent tenor, Ya-Chung Huang in the role of Natanael. There were no weak links, though; and, as so often, at this house, a proper sense of company. If only there had been a production to match.

Der fliegende Holländer, Deutsche Oper, 22 September 2017

Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Erik (from a different cast, 2017 premiere)
Images: Thomas Jauk

Daland – Andreas Bauer

Senta – Martina Welschenbach

Erik – Robert Watson

Mary – Ronnita Miller

Steersman – Gideon Poppe

Dutchman – Josef Wagner

Christian Spuck (director)

Eva-Maria Abelein (assistant director)

Rufus Didwiszus (set designs)

Emma Ryott (costumes)

Ulrich Niepel (lighting)

Dorothea Hartmann (dramaturgy)

Chorus (chorus master: Jeremy Bines) of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Donald Runnicles (conductor)

Poor Erik. Most people who have seen and/or heard The Flying Dutchman must have thought that at some point, if only mildly and with a hint of contempt. It is in many ways a thankless role, perhaps not unlike Don Ottavio, albeit with less in the way of vocal beauty. And so, it is an interesting idea to place him at the centre of the action, to turn the drama into his story. The payoff in the third act of Christian Spuck’s production – we do not, thank God, have any intervals – is considerable. I rather wish, though, that what we see there might have been read back more clearly, strongly, or something at least, into the first two acts. Apart from Erik wandering around the stage, often sitting with his head in his hands, or wall hugging (yes, I am afraid so), everything else looks pretty ‘modern-ish-traditional’. Ulrich Niepel’s lighting creates, especially in the first act, plenty of dark atmosphere. Otherwise, Spuck’s production and Rufus Didwiszus’s designs look pretty much as you might have expected them to – at least unless you are of an unfortunately ‘folksy’ persuasion. (In that case, Wagner is probably not for you.) The small model ship we have seen in many other productions is there for Erik to hold. There is rainfall – its noise frankly distracting, and not in a good way, during the Overture; there is plenty of water; there are galoshes; there are nineteenth-century sewing machines; and so on.

Without Erik, then, there really would be no Konzept on which to remark. No problem with that: one strongly delineated idea may well be enough. It is not, though, unless we count his mildly surprising behaviour and his different, slightly more colourful, clothes. Perhaps it has all been his dream; it makes, I suppose, a change from Senta’s dream. His stabbing her at the close is a moment of genuine drama. Then, everything recedes –the image and acts of a repressive crowd familiar from almost every staging, for how could they not be present? – leaving him alone on the stage, as at the beginning. The decision to use Wagner’s later musical thoughts – I tend very much to prefer Dresden – is thrown into interesting relief here; what is the ‘redemption’ we hear but certainly do not see (even on the questionable terms of Senta and the Dutchman)? Is it utter Wahn? Again, I wish we had seen or heard something more of a trail leading up to this, beyond, that is, Erik’s frequent onstage presence. Perhaps the idea had been more strongly, coherently presented when the production received its premiere earlier this year; rehearsal time and repertory direction can sometimes mislead. On the other hand, I can only comment on what I saw.

And, of course, on what I heard – which was a perfectly decent repertory night’s performance, with some things very good indeed. Donald Runnicles was generally on secure rather than inspiring form, emphasising the numbers within the score – yes, a perfectly justifiable approach ‘historically’ – rather than its musicodramatic anticipations (and more than anticipations). Bar a strange transition, including one glaring missed entry – these things happen – to the second act, and some slightly lacklustre treading of aural water early in the third, there were solid virtues to be heard. On the other hand, when performing in one single span, and perhaps especially when incorporating the 1860 Tristan-esque revisions, more in the way of overt Fernhören might make for a more fulfilling dramatic experience. (‘Yes, Cosima,’ I hear you reply. Guilty as charged in this, but only this, respect.) It is a very difficult work to bring off, though, with such competing demands; perhaps that ideal performance in my head is simply unrealisable, even if someone else were to agree to my ‘ideal’. Those occasional fluffs notwithstanding, there was much to be enjoyed in the orchestral playing, secure of line, and often impressively dark in tone. Choral singing also impressed, not least the confrontation between the two bands of sailors in the third act, clarity and heft there quite beyond reproach.

Whatever one thinks of placing Erik at the dramatic centre, he will still only have the same amount to sing. In that respect, at least, much will still hang upon the Dutchman. Josef Wagner gave a deeply musical, considered performance. He perhaps occasionally lacked the last ounce of dramatic power, for instance, during his first-act duet with Daland, sounding slightly out-sung at times. That, however, was probably as much a comment on the estimable performance of Andreas Bauer, no mere caricature: flawed yet honourable. Martina Welschenbach’s Senta took a little time to get going vocally, but grew into something impressive indeed. Her obsession with the painting – a dialectical result of Erik’s obsession with her, real or otherwise? – registered strongly from the outset. And in the ‘non-title’ role, Robert Watson sang Erik’s part very well, clearly alert to its competing stylistic demands: a trickier task than many imagine. Gideon Poppe’s Steersman proved a vocal delight, having one wish, as so often, that he had more to do; the same went for Ronnita Miller’s typically likeable, yet not too likeable, Mary. Did this all quite fit into the Konzept? I am not so sure. However, I do not think that was in any sense the fault of a fine cast of singers: something one should never take for granted.

Le grand macabre, LSO/Rattle, 14 January 2017

Barbican Hall

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: The Triumph of Death

 

Piet the Pot – Peter Hoare

Amando – Ronnita Miller
Amanda – Elizabeth Watts
Nekrotzar – Pavlo Hunka
Astradamors – Frode Olsen
Mescalina – Heidi Melton
Venus, Gepopo – Audrey Luna
Prince Go-Go – Anthony Roth Costanzo
White Minister – Peter Tantsits
Black Minister – Joshua Bloom
Ruffiack – Christian Valle
Schobiak – Fabian Langguth
Schabernack – Benson Wilson
 

Peter Sellars (director)

Hans-Georg Lenhart (assistant director)
Ben Zamora (lighting)
Michelle Bradbury (costumes)
Nick Hillel (video)

London Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Simon Halsey)

London Symphony Orchestra

Simon Rattle (conductor)



Gepopo (Audrey Luna); Simon Rattle conducting the LSO
Production images: John Phillips/Getty Images

Breughelland is never far away. It certainly was not in the 1970s, when Ligeti composed the first version of his opera. For many of us, though, it has rarely felt closer, or at least not for a long time. A friend, Antonio Orlando, whom I met in the interval, mentioned the BBC film Threads, and we shared our experiences of something which, seen at our respective schools, changed us forever. Seeing it in the early 1990s, nuclear war became a far more terrifying, far more real prospect, even though its likelihood may well have been receding. It felt all the closer to home to this South Yorkshire schoolboy, since its harrowing portrayal of nuclear holocaust was set in Sheffield, amongst buildings – and their rubble – which he knew rather well: for instance, the ‘Egg Box’ Town Hall extension, which, I now learn, has long since been torn down in a typically English fit of anti-modernist philistinism. Now the United Kingdom has its first Prime Minister to have declared openly that she would use nuclear weapons, and the world – well, the world has Donald Trump.

 

Such thoughts would seem, not unreasonably, to have been on Peter Sellars’s mind when coming up with his concert staging of Le grand macabre. What we lose in sheer madcap surrealism – highly relatively speaking – we gain in contemporary immediacy: swings and roundabouts. In any case, there is nothing more blackly surreal than the mad idea of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), which one still hears from time to time from Internet and, alas, real-life sociopaths such as [complete according to political taste]. And so, the first two scenes take place at a nuclear conference in London and Berlin (the two venues of staging); having it relate to ‘clean’ nuclear energy brings a frightening, post-Chernobyl, pre-Hinkley Point C twist of its own. If the world, that of Breughelland and our own, needs an Angela Merkel, she is not even slightly evident here, as we flounder and err in identifiably post-Dr Strangelove territory. Excellent video imagery from Nick Hillel portrays the self-congratulatory world of our political leaders, plots the history of nuclear testing and worse, closes in on the devastation of the post-apocalypse. The congress of Astradamors and Mescalina takes place entirely online, despite their seating next to each other (very much of our virtual age). We make connections as we will, each of us different, but there is much to set our teeth into. I was less sure about the separation of Amando and Amanda, but perhaps I was missing something.

Peter Tantsits (White Minister), Joshua Bloom (Black Minister), Prince Go-Go (Anthony Roth Costanzo)

At the heart, of course, is the LSO, on world-class form here under its Music Director Designate, Simon Rattle. Whatever the vagaries of many of Rattle’s recent performances of Classical and Romantic repertoire, he has always been in his element in complex modernist and contemporary scores. So it was here, his orchestra-to-be fearless in its precision, sardonic in its wit, and not without tenderness when suggested (although how seriously should one take it?) Excellent though the ENO performance I saw and heard seven years ago may have been, this seemed to me in quite a different league. (Perhaps it was just a matter of my greater receptivity; my memory is not so sharp to be able to know for certain.) The orchestra, with a nod to music theatre, is dressed so as to suggest that its members are conference delegates. Its role as commentator, even as satirical Greek Chorus, is thereby heightened, whilst that of the actual chorus, joining us in the hall itself rather than on the stage, has us identify with its plight – just, one might say, as in Threads.

 

And at the heart of that heart, as it were, is Ligeti’s extraordinary score. Not unlike the brutalism of the surrounding Barbican Estate, which seems to become the more magnificent as it ages, or, if one will, is classicised, the music’s contemporaneous inventiveness becomes, like that of a reborn Haydn, all the more revealing upon closer acquaintance. This felt like a masterclass in informing us that the late 70s and early 80s saw the flourishing of all forms of resistance to neo-liberalism as well as the tightening of its iron grip from which we, frightened as well as hopeful, are only just beginning to liberate ourselves. A combination of instruments here, a turn of phrase there, a suggestion concerning what might be absent as well as what might be present: all these and so much more create allusions to a whole history not just of opera (Monteverdi onwards) but symphonic and other music(s) too. Ligetian parody, for instance in the ‘Collage’ with which Nekrotzar (The Donald? Or the force behind him? Or is that to look for the Wizard of Oz?) makes his entry, has a heart and a musical impetus of its own. There, the Eroica bass line’s treatment subverts a Beethovenian message that perhaps can no longer be ours, much as we need it; yet, at the same time, the dancing upon its ruins, the effort once again to construct, perhaps offers the hope of renascent humanity. And yet, the brilliantly hollow ‘moral’ – surely a homage to Don Giovanni and The Rake’s Progress – ensures that the Ligeti whose family had been lost in Auschwitz or, in his mother’s case, had survived it, has the last and darkest laugh of all.




Piet the Pot (Peter Hoare) and Astradorms (Frode Olsen) sit on a bed and Prince Go-Go (Anthony Roth Costanza) hides underneath it, whilst Nekrotzar (Pavlo Hunka) stands at the camera, about to usher in the apocalypse.

To praise thosee vocal performances deserving of praise would be to write out once again the cast list – not, of course, to forget the outstanding London Symphony Chorus. Peter Hoare’s abilities as singer and actor proved triumphant once again, as Piet the Pot. Whatever my doubts concerning Sellars’s portrayal of them, the duo of Elizabeth Watts and Ronnita Miller made for formidable music-making, their voices contrasted in colour yet more than capable of blend. Pavlo Hunka’s Nekrotzar was blackly bureaucratic, if that makes any sense (one might perhaps ask that of the opera itself in similar vein!) There was something that seemed both to go to the heart of the character, and yet also to show that there is no heart – and not only in a sentimental sense. Audrey Luna’s coloratura proved properly stage-stopping. I was also very much taken with the depth of tone and sheer sassiness of character to Heidi Melton’s Mescalina. Peter Tantsists, as the White Minister, revealed a finely honed tenor new to me; I hope to hear more. Last but certainly not least, Anthony Roth Costanza’s Prince Go-Go proved almost painfully beautiful of counter-tenor tone, the unearthliness tempered from time to time by something suggestive of more temporal (quite appropriately) concerns. If ever, though, a cast, indeed a performance and a production too, were more than the sum of its parts, it would be this. Shall we now enjoy the end times?