The Nutcracker, ROH Cinema, 12 December 2013

Vue Piccadilly Cinema, London, 12.12.2013 (MB)

Sugar Plum Fairy – Laura Morera

Prince – Federico Bonelli
Herr Drosselmeyer – Gary Avis
Clara – Francesca Hayward
Hans Peter/Nutcracker – Alexander Campbell

Peter Wright (production, scenario)

Julia Trevelyan Oman (designs)
Mark Henderson (lighting)
Christopher Carr (staging)

Royal Ballet

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Tom Seligman (conductor)

 

This was my first experience of ballet in the cinema and, I suspect, an excellent starting-point. Indeed, though an in-the-theatre experience will always be different, more immediate, for all the problems that can entail too, this live cinema relay seemed to me to possess advantages over the unmediated version too – far more so, indeed, than my two viewings to date of opera in the cinema (Götterdämmerung and The Tempest, both from New York). Though one would think that this would apply to opera and ballet alike, and maybe it does more generally, close ups, at least as much of the dancers’ visual expressions as anything else, seemed far more telling here than in either of those operatic experiences. Perhaps that was as much testament to the excellence of the principals as to the form itself, but the greater depth of characterisation afforded was much appreciated.

 

Peter Wright’s venerable, yet far from tired, 1984 production was also doubtless an excellent choice. The curmudgeon in me might ask whether there is not room for a more ‘adult’, disturbingly Freudian version, yet Wright’s often magical evocation certainly does not preclude one thinking and exploring such thoughts for oneself. Just as in opera, the better productions open up possibilities, have one pose questions, rather than attempt to answer them all for themselves. ETA Hoffmann remains, then, for those willing to be more than passive spectators, whilst there is much spectacle – though far from empty spectacle – as anyone other than the most vulgar could desire. Childhood memories of Christmas, and/or memories of childhood Christmas, come together in the party, splendidly portrayed by all concerned, and there is a proper sense of broadening of focus following the interval.

 

The dancers all seem enlivened, liberated even, by the opportunities Wright’s production offers. Gary Avis’s Drosselmeyer appeared as a duly ambiguous figure: manipulative, yet to what end? Francesca Hayward offered a graceful Clara, her Hans Peter, Alexander Campbell, perhaps still more impressive: boyish, yet with admirable strength. Likewise Laura Morera and Federico Bonelli both impressed, whether in solo or partner work, as the Sugar Plum Fairy and the Prince. Perhaps I might have wished for a little more delight in Morera’s response to the score, but there could be no doubting the technique.

 

It was, moreover, a merciful relief to attend a performance that went uninterrupted by the behaviour of small children (or rather, by the inability or unwillingness of their parents to restrain that behaviour). Interruption, such as it was, came only from the applause on screen; how I wish here, just as in opera, people would refrain until the end of an act! Tchaikovsky’s score no more deserves such response than his Fifth Symphony does. Tom Seligman offered a well-shaped, commendably incisive traversal of the score. My sole reservation was, alas, that which I have almost always felt upon visits to the ballet, namely, regret that a more substantial orchestra had not been employed. Though this was the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, the string sound was often emaciated; the score needs just as much attention in this respect as does that for Eugene Onegin. Still, wind and percussion often sounded magical, imparting a quickening spirit to the moment of the narrative and to the longer durée. For the most part, then, an enchanting evening, and via the cinema, an evening to be enjoyed by many more than would otherwise have been the case.

 

Scènes de ballet/Voluntaries/The Rite of Spring, Royal Ballet, 28 May 2011

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Stravinsky – Scènes de ballet

Frederick Ashton (choreography)
André Beaurepaire (designs)
John B Read (lighting)
Christopher Carr (staging)
Gary Avis (ballet master)
Ursula Hageli (ballet mistress)
Lauren Cuthbertson, Sergei Polunin (principals)

Poulenc – Voluntaries

Glen Tetley (choreography)
Rouben Ter-Arutunian (designs)
John B Read (lighting)
Bronwen Curry (staging)
Ursula Hageli (ballet mistress)
Leanne Benjamin, Nehemiah Kish, Sarah Lamb, Valeri Hristov, Ryoichi Hirano (principals)

Stravinsky – The Rite of Spring

Kenneth Macmillan (choreography)
Sidney Nolan (designs)
John B Read (lighting)
Monica Mason, Christopher Saunders (staging and coaching)
Steven McRae (principal: The Chosen One)


This made for an interesting triple-bill musically, with revealing connections and contrasts. Poulenc owed a great deal to Stravinsky’s neo-classicism, of course, though he could rarely help but supplement it with a dose or two of naughtiness and/or Romantic longing. Stravinsky, meanwhile, was represented by two extremes, though one could add a good few more, of his balletic output: the Scènes de ballet, one of his most lightweight works, and The Rite of Spring, that twin solar plexus of twentieth-century music, to supplement Pierrot lunaire in the description so generously bestowed by Stravinsky himself.

One thing I realised immediately was how much Scènes de ballet benefits from being seen as a ballet. Even the most fervent Stravinskian would be unlikely to claim that he listened to the score that often, but it seems a good deal more inspired when staged, especially when as excellently choreographed as by Frederick Ashton. Neo-Tchaikovskian – and neo-Petipian – elements remain, but are subsumed into a distanced relative abstraction, which seems very much to take its leave from the rhythmic cells upon which Stravinsky bases his score. There is, unlike The Rite, no narrative as such, yet one should be equally wary of speaking of purity, or absolutes, whether concerning music or choreography. Lauren Cuthbertson and Sergei Polunin acquitted themselves very well as the leading couple, their performances cutting to the heart of the (skewed?) balance between strictness and fancy that lies at the heart here of Stravinsky’s and Ashton’s work. André Beaurepaire’s set design remains bewitching. Barry Wordsworth’s conducting, however, sometimes lacked bite: an essential ingredient to the music of that most polemical of neo-classicists.

Voluntaries is Glen Tetley’s ballet to Poulenc’s Organ Concerto. Heard merely as a performance of the concerto, one might have been a little nonplussed, not on account of Thomas Trotter’s playing, as precise and well-characterised as one might expect, but rather because an electronic organ – at least I assume it must have been, on account both of the house and the sound – cannot really pass muster here. The split personality of Poulenc’s music, in this case torn between an idea, however dubious, of Gothic cathedral splendour and the music hall, needs a grander canvas. That said, Tetley’s choreography presents a fascinating blend – there is nothing of the split personality here – of classical tradition and modern dance, upon which Leanne Benjamin, Nehemiah Kish, and their colleagues thrived, imparting grace, personality, and just the right degree of physicality. There were instances when the corps de ballet was not always quite together, and also occasional disjunctures with the pit, but they tended to be occasions one merely noted rather than recoiled from.



The Rite of Spring certainly does have a narrative of its own, as well as having proved an inspiration in terms of allegedly ‘absolute’ music to almost every composer who has followed. It drew, I thought, the best performance from Wordsworth, with the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House on fine form, its brass in particular. Whilst his conducting might have lacked something of the incisiveness of master conductors of this music in the concert hall, the experience as a whole proved considerably more engrossing than yet another rendition of the Rite-as-orchestral-showpiece such as one more often than not must nowadays endure. There was an impressive sense of line, which complemented Kenneth Macmillan’s light-footed yet primitivistically inexorable choreography. Dance rhythms likewise complement those of the score: not as much of a platitude as one might expect. Divergences, such as the employment of three elders rather than one sage, do no harm. Here we saw, in line with Macmillan’s own experiment from a 1987 revival, a male solo dancer, Steven McRae proving a fine first amongst equals. Both in itself, then, and in the context of the rest of the programme, this proved a refreshing Rite.

Cherevichki, Royal Opera, 20 November 2009

(Set design: Mikhail Mokrov)

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Solokha – Larissa Diadkova
The Devil – Maxim Mikhailov
Chub – Vladimir Matorin
Panas – John Upperton
Oxana – Olga Guryakova
Vakula – Vsevold Grivnov
Pan Golova – Alexander Vassiliev
The Schoolmaster – Viacheslav Voynarovskiy
Odarka – Olga Sabadoch
Wood Goblin – Changhan Lim
Echo – Andrew Macnair
His Highness – Sergei Leiferkus
Master of Ceremonies – Jeremy White

Principal Dancers – Mara Galeazzi, Gary Avis
Dancers of the Royal Ballet – Tara-Brigitte Bhavnani, Cindy Jourdain, Kirsten McNally, Pietra Mello-Pittman, Bennet Garside, Kenta Kura, Ernst Meisner, Johannes Stepanek
Cossack Dancers – Ivan Furgala, Arron Jones, Greg Smith, Bruce Tetlow

Francesca Zambello (director)
Mikhail Mokrov (set designs)
Tatiana Noginova (costume designs)
Rick Fisher (lighting)
Alastair Marriott (choreography)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Chorus of the Royal Opera House (chorus master: Stephen Westrop)
Alexander Polianichko (conductor)

Alexander Polianichko’s enthusiasm, when I interviewed him, for Tchaikovsky’s Cherevichki was infectious. His advocacy of the score in the theatre proved equally strong. No one in the audience could have been in any doubt concerning the identity of the composer. The characteristic Tchaikovskian ebb and flow, the orchestral sound, the sheen and sweep of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House’s strings: all were present and convincing. The need of which he spoke to allow the singers to be heard was met, without reducing the orchestral contribution in stature – the ‘accompanying’ route of lesser conductors. If the work came across as somewhat sectional, that is because it is, but also a consequence of the audience’s irritating habit of applauding everything (that is, when people could be distracted from coughing and sounding their electronic devices).

For the problem really lies with the work itself. The Royal Opera House should be applauded for mounting its first ever production. (Apart from a Garsington production in 2004, that seems to be just about it in terms of British stagings – and even the Bolshoi does not have the work in its repertory.) Cherevichki certainly deserves its chance to step out from the shadows and is indeed a better work than many that hold their place in the repertory – anything by Verdi, for instance. But Eugene Onegin or The Queen of Spades it is not, let alone Mussorgsky. The score has its moments, especially during the ballet music, here superbly choreographed by Alastair Marriott and exquisitely danced, making for a definite extra attraction for opera-loving balletomanes – or should that be the other way round? Royal Ballet principals Mara Galeazzi and Gary Avis impressed greatly, as did members of the corps de ballet and the Cossack dancers, three of them members of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. The St Petersburg music of the third act – in Tchaikovsky’s terms, that is, for here the four acts were presented as two – has its moments as well, not least the courtly evocations of The Queen of Spades. But the evocations of fate do not seem to lead anywhere; unlike the symphonies or the greater operas, nothing really seems to be at stake. The Italianate passages tend towards Glinka or indeed Verdi. Moreover, the lighter moments, of which they are many, tend towards the nondescript; humour was never really the composer’s forte. I should have defied anyone to find amusing the concealment of Solokha’s admirers in coal sacks, or their emergence therefrom, but the audience reaction proved me wrong.(Few operatic comedies are actually funny, and even when they are, for instance Le nozze di Figaro or Die Meistersinger, their greatness lies in a true sadness that eludes the composer on this occasion.) What often emerges is a surprisingly nationalistic Tchaikovsky, with considerable folk-song reference, but one who finds it hard to convince. Often he will do so by insistence; here he flits around somewhat, without achieving the magical lightness of touch of so much of his ballet music.

The singing was mixed. Diction was generally good; even as a non-Russian speaker, I think I could have transcribed a good number of the words. Maxim Mikhailov showed that he could act as well as sing, as the Devil, though one might have expected a greater ‘presence’ in both senses. Larissa Diadkova exhibited more of this as the witch Solokha, though with a few vagaries of tuning. Sadly, there were more than a few in Olga Guryakova’s, especially during the first act, where she was all over the place. Some might find the generosity of her vibrato idiomatic; for the rest of us it was something of a trial. She came more into her own in the final act, but there were too many unpleasant memories by then truly to be convinced. Her beloved, Vakula, received a stronger performance from Vsevolod Grivnov, hapless by intent rather than by default. The massed array of deep Russian voices did not disappoint, and there were notable performances in St Petersburg from Sergei Leiferkus and Jeremy White.

Francesca Zambello’s production plumbed no depths, but that is hardly what the work is about. The direction of the characters was alert and musical. I do not know how much input Marriott as choreographer had here, but whoever was responsible for tallying words, gesture, and music deserves gratitude. (Such an alliance should go without saying, but tone-deaf stage direction is, sadly, more often the rule than the exception.) The greatest impression was made by Mikhail Mokrov’s stage designs and Tatiana Noginova. Their Ukrainian naïveté and, during the Petersburg scene, courtly opulence are richly evocative. It made perfect sense to learn from a programme article that Mokrov is an illustrator, for it is a children’s picture-book that is most often evoked. As in the case of the Mariinsky’s Tale of Tsar Saltan, brought last season to Sadler’s Wells, it is difficult for a jaded Westerner not to take these scenes ironically, but I do not think that is how they were intended. Young children will, I suspect, be enchanted by them, though whether they will have the patience for a three-hour opera, interval included, is another matter.

The opera, then, is no neglected masterpiece, but this is so rare an opportunity afforded by Covent Garden that it is well worth grasping. There are plans to broadcast it on BBC Radio 3 (Saturday 5 December, 6.30 p.m.) and on BBC 2 at some point over Christmas. It is also scheduled for release on DVD, ensuring that a larger audience will be able to judge for itself. One small matter: the Royal Opera has, understandably, used an English title, The Tsarina’s Slippers rather than the Russian for the ‘slippers’, Cherevichki. Richard Taruskin, who ought to know, counsels that they are not slippers at all, but ‘high-heeled, narrow-toed women’s holiday boots’. I can understand why The Tsarina’s or, as we hear in the text, Tsaritsa’s High-heeled, Narrow-toed, Women’s Holiday Boots might not have been thought the best title, but ‘boots’ rather than ‘slippers’ perhaps?

(For more pictures of the set designs, see my interview with the conductor.)