Saul, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 8 June 2025

 

© Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photography by ASH

Saul – Christopher Purves
David – Iestyn Davies
Merab – Sarah Brady
Michal – Soraya Mafi
Jonathan – Linard Vrielink
Abner, High Priest, Doeg, Amalekite – Liam Bonthrone
Witch of Endor – Ru Charlesworth
Dancers – Lucy Alderman, Robin Gladwin, Lukas Hunt, Dominic Rocca, Nathan Ryles, Daisy West

Director – Barrie Kosky
Revival director – Donna Stirrup
Designs – Katrin Lea Tag
Choreography – Otto Pichler
Revival choreography – Merry Holden
Lighting – Joachim Klein

The Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus director: Aidan Oliver)
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Jonathan Cohen (conductor)

Saul (Christopher Purves)

I found myself listening at home to Saul a few months ago (Charles Mackerras’s outstanding Leeds Festival recording with Donald McIntyre, James Bowman, Margaret Price, et al.). It made for often uncomfortable listening, the ever-problematical identification of Handel’s Protestant England with the ‘children of Israel’ all the more when daily we see the Philistines’ successors mercilessly slain in the name of a latter-day ‘Eretz Israel’, itself the product of the imperialism on which the new, fiscal-military state of Great Britain had been founded. Culminating in news from the Amalekite – David’s ‘Impious wretch, of race accursed!’ – that Saul has been slain and Israelite exortation to ‘Gird on thy sword, thou man of might’, it seemed both a work both for now and absolutely not. At least it was not Joshua or Judas Maccabeus, I thought; and indeed its central dramatic concerns are not necessarily those, however glaring they may stand out now. The work’s political dimension is important, but is one of several and arguably not the most important. In any case, it extends beyond war and empire to broader questions of kingship—not least given the precedent of the Whig establishment’s treasonous support for the Dutch invasion that had removed ‘the Lord’s anointed’ within living memory, and without which George II would stand nowhere near the throne. 

Barrie Kosky’s Glyndebourne production of Saul was first seen in 2015: what may now seem a very different world, prior to Britain’s fateful referendum, Trump’s election, Covid, the invasion of Ukraine, and of course genocide in Gaza. None of those things came out of nowhere, of course, but the world was different. He was – and is – perfectly entitled to explore other aspects of the drama, and it is neither his nor revival director Donna Stirrup’s fault that events have overtaken us. Kosky offers a typically pugnacious, persuasive defence of staging such works at all and of his particular aesthetic in the programme. ‘But when you put Handel’s oratorios on stage you know that there will be a flood of opera reviewers who’ll say these pieces were not written for the stage, so why are we staging them? Get real! Opera is not about rules and regulations. Handel’s oratorios are sometimes more dramatic than his operas. We know that because we can hear it. Their musical landscapes are often more radical than those of the operas.’ I agree with every word. Why, then, beyond the inevitable unease concerning aspects of the drama, did I have my doubts—as someone who has long thought it cried out for the stage? 

There are problems intrinsic to the work, of course, as there always have been, lying beyond the cul-de-sac of alleged intention. The chorus’s role is one: how to deal with it onstage? Kosky certainly makes the most (as, for instance, in his Komische Oper Hercules) of his opportunities in this respect. An opening festal tableau, gestures arrestingly frozen, draws one in, Kosky’s detailed direction of each member of a crowd that also combines with excellence en masse dovetailing with Katrin Lee Tag’s painterly vision.An eighteenth-century audience, so it seems, participates, mirroring the dual function of the chorus itself, roots in Greek tragedy apparent and brimming with dramatic potential. 

David (Iestyn Davies)

The problem for me comes with elements of the conception of the protagonists. Not all of it: much shows great insight. A brazenly opportunist David is the trump card: charisma born of body and battle, seemingly willing to do anything – or anyone – to further his clear yet unstated lust for power. Why bother to spell it out, when the crowd will for him? ‘Saul, who hast thy thousands slain, welcome to thy friends again! David his ten thousands slew, ten thousand praises are his due!’ There is, moreover, a creditable effort to make more of Saul’s daughters and their roles, though that also leads us to more difficult territory. In that programme interview, Kosky states his dislike of realism, but that seems to refer to aesthetics rather than to psychology. (I actually would not have minded more on the former side and less dance, however finely accomplished; but that is a matter of taste, no more.) It is a particular form of psychological realism that, though I can see the temptation, also leads the drama to become less interesting and arguably less coherent. If one portrays calculation in such realistic way, there is nothing ‘mad’ about Saul’s reaction. Michal and still more Jonathan must simply be in love with David, which is obviously part of what is going on but surely not the only or overriding dramaturgical concern. And the decision to present Saul for much of the time as if already in Bedlam – perhaps even as if a flashback – is ultimately reductive, again crowding out other concerns. 

Set against that, the darker turn following the interval makes an undeniably strong impression. There is a splendid star-turn (literally) from the revolving solo organist onstage. When Saul visits the Witch of Endor, Kosky offers a nice sense of Tiresias in Beckettland, to the weird, disconcerting extent that Saul feeds from one of the Witch’s breasts. The doomed monarch also voices Samuel’s words himself: possessed or merely delusional? If Kosky and Tag’s Beckettland looks surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) close to that seen for their Castor et Pollux (ENO and elsewhere) and Don Giovanni (Vienna), most production teams have recognisable correspondences over time. Richard Jones & Co. anyone? The important question is what one does with them. 

Jonathan Cohen’s conducting I found more difficult to get on with: not only aggressively ‘period’, but of a variety that too often skated over Handel’s strengths as a musical dramatist. There was little grandeur, if often much rasping noise. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment strings might surely have been permitted fuller tone at times. Excellent woodwind fared better: characterful and dramatically telling. Handel’s writing for bassoon – not only in the Witch of Endor scene – is worth an essay alone from someone. It certainly sounded so here. Greater variety of tempo was achieved as time went on, if there were still cases, especially in choral numbers, when breakneck speed disrupted ensemble. 

Merab (Sarah Brady), Michal (Soraya Malfi), and Jonathan (Linard Vrielink)

Christopher Purves’s Saul was superbly acted, if sometimes a little close to Sprechgesang (leaving aside purely spoken interjections further to enhance the impression of insanity). There was often, though, a thinness of tone to his delivery that complemented Cohen’s way with the orchestra, but which on ‘purely’ musical terms left me at least missing something more bass-like. Iestyn Davies’s David was outstanding in every respect: word, tone, and gesture a model of characterisation.  Sarah Brady and Soraya Mafi offered a haughty Merab and an attractive, calculating Michal, in fine dramatic contrast both with one another and with the honeyed, imploring sincerity of Linard Vrielink’s Jonathan. Kosky’s amalgamation of Abner, High Priest, and Doeg, into a single Fool-like character elicited sinister ambiguity from Liam Bonthrone, who also took on the ‘cursed’ role of the Amalekite, mysteriously hooded in the auditorium. Ru Charlesworth offered a darkly vivid portrayal for Kosky and Handel’s strange conception of the Witch of Endor. The Glyndebourne Chorus likewise responded to a varied set of challenges – Handel’s, Kosky’s, and Cohen’s – with fine musical and dramatic dedication. 

My reservations, then, were relatively minor. Audience enthusiasm suggested they were little shared. This was a highly enjoyable occasion, though might it have offered more dramatically? To my dismay, I could not help but wonder whether a concert performance, albeit differently conducted, might have come closer in that respect.

Mary, Queen of Scots, ENO, 15 February 2025

Coliseum

Images: Ellie Kurttz
Queen Mary (Heidi Stober)

Queen Mary – Heidi Stober
James Stewart, Earl of Moray – Alex Otterburn
Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley – Rupert Charlesworth
James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell – John Findon
David Riccio – Barnaby Rea
Cardinal Beaton – Darren Jeffery
Lord Gordon – Alastair Miles
Earl of Ruthven – Ronald Samm
Earl of Morton – Jolyon Loy
Mary Seton – Jenny Stafford
Mary Beaton – Monica McGhee
Mary Livingston – Felicity Buckland
Mary Fleming – Siān Griffiths

Director, designs – Stewart Laing
Associate costume designs – Mady Berry
Lighting – D.M. Wood

Choreography – Alex McCabe  

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus director: Matthew Quinn)  

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Joana Carneiro (conductor)

Written to the composer’s own libretto based on Amalia Elguera’s unpublished play Moray – direct collaboration having proved difficult – Thea Musgrave’s Mary, Queen of Scots has had, by contemporary operatic standards, rather a happy history since its 1977 Edinburgh premiere. It has reached various stages in the United Kingdom, United States and Germany. Last year, a new production was mounted in Leipzig. Now, in co-production with San Francisco Opera, it receives its premiere at ENO. It may have seemed a bold step for the company in its current, parlous condition, yet it was rewarded with both an artistic success and something approaching a full house. It was a delight to see the composer, approaching 97, in the audience and receiving justly warm and prolonged applause. 

Earl of Bothwell (Barnaby Rea), James Stewart (Alex Otterburn), Mary

People can create, perform, and appreciate successful art regardless of personal circumstances; there nevertheless seems something apt for a Scottish woman who received part of her education in France (studying with Nadia Boulanger) who thereafter spent much of her life, if not in exile then working in another English-speaking country (the USA), to have written an opera on this theme. If it does not fall into the category of experimental opera, seeking to reinvent or reimagine the genre, to expand its theatrical and/or musical boundaries; nor is it seeking to do so, without proving self-consciously archaising. Mary Queen of Scots is rather a highly competent, engaging work which, in its three acts, come across as the equal of many an accomplished work by the likes of Britten or even, in some moods, Henze. In musical dramaturgy, if hardly language, the opera takes its place more in a line from Verdi than Wagner. Musgrave is equally, palpably adept at many of the classic set pieces and expectations of the genre, evoking with similar sureness requirements and shifts in general atmosphere, music for dancing, and crowd scenes set against individual feeling. Turning inwards for an aria, in which certain instrumentation colours a character’s – and our – response, music and drama might be understood as traditionally operatic, without pushing any particular aesthetic as to what anything other than itself should be.

Likewise, a broadly tonal musical language sounds straightforwardly to be what it is, rather than self-consciously reinstating tonality—or anything else. I could sense a mind at work planning its musical structure in tandem with the drama, without bringing that modernistically to the fore. The ENO Orchestra and (a regrettably thinned down) Chorus under conductor Joana Carneiro were surely instrumental to realising this success. One would never have had the sense this was not a repertory work they had been playing for years—save, perhaps for the keen sense of discovery. We felt, even knew, we were in safe hands, though. 

The cast was, of course, similarly crucial to such achievement. Heidi Stober gave a touching, multi-faceted performance in the title role, in no evident sense bound by the expectations such a portrayal must necessarily greet. One felt in her plight the twin demands of life and fate ground tragically by politics low and high. Alex Otterburn’s quicksilver James Stewart proved nicely enigmatic. If there remained a nagging suspicion one should dislike the character more than one did, that stood testament to the artists’ gift for bringing alive both the character and his own necessities. Rupert Charlesworth had one properly despise Darnley in his amoral weakness. I struggled somewhat to gain the measure of the Earl of Bothwell, but that seemed to be more inherent in the drama, perhaps the staging too, than in John Findon’s well-sung performance. Darren Jeffery’s Cardinal Beaton and Barnaby Rea’s Riccio were clearly, vividly presented; not that the two have much in common beyond that. Smaller roles were all well taken, rebuking the idea that one can, let alone should, uproot a company such as ENO and dump it somewhere else; such depth comes from building on a living tradition, not that the Arts Council has idea or interest in such an idea. 

David Riccio (Barnaby Rea), Lord Darnley (Rupert Charlesworth), James Stewart

Stewart Laing’s production was at best a mixed bag, though that may in part have been a matter of limited resources. If it tried to do more with a broadly comparable black-box space than Ruth Knight had for Britten’s Gloriana in 2022, Knight’s caution emerged all the wiser. A marquee was built and taken down with considerable noise: a metaphor, no doubt, yet one that added little. Other than that, we had strangely inappropriate costumes, their lack of social differentiation was puzzling. Warm anoraks were the thing across the board, perhaps because the opera is set in Scotland, although, especially in crowd scenes, we appeared to be closer to the world of The Flying Dutchman. If the idea – and I think it may have been – was to evoke twentieth-century Protestant-Catholic sectarianism, then it might have been more rigorously applied, strange exceptions throwing the whole thing into disarray, unaided by other aspects of the staging. To be fair, though, one could certainly understand why Mary would only have returned to this Scotland with the greatest of reluctance; it was difficult to imagine how what we saw would have been worth a mass, a Lord’s Supper, or anything else. 

Cardinal Beaton (Darren Jeffery)

I could not understand why Alastair Miles’s dour yet honest Lord Gordon wore a dog collar; let alone why, if so, he should be dressed more as Presbyterian minister than Catholic priest. But then his part in the drama more generally seemed strange on any discernible historical terms, not least in his stabbing of James Stewart (as the Earl of Moray is referred to). Conflation of characters, however much it may pain historians, is far from an unusual dramatic device; if we go down this route, we shall be here all day. This nonetheless remained a perplexing choice. Bothwell’s rape of Mary nevertheless registered in duly horrifying fashion. I do not know the work itself well enough – indeed at all, other than from this performance – to be sure whether the nature of the act is originally so clear. I sensed there might be a suggestion of greater ambiguity, though that may be entirely wrong. In any case, there none here; it cast its dark, terrible shadow over all that remained to be shown.

The Rake's Progress, Opéra national de Paris, 30 November 2024

Palais Garnier

Tom Rakewell – Ben Bliss
Nick Shadow – Iain Paterson
Trulove – Clive Bayley
Anne Trulove – Golda Schultz
Mother Goose – Justina Gringytė
Baba the Turk – Jamie Barton
Sellem – Rupert Charlesworth
Keeper of the Madhouse – Vartan Gabrielian
Voices from the Crowd – Ayumi Ikehata, Frédéric Guieu
Solo Voice – Laurent Laberdesque

Director, lighting – Olivier Py
Revival director – Joséphine Kirch
Designs – Pierre-André Weitz
Lighting collaboration – Bertrand Killy

Chorus of the Opéra national de Paris (chorus director: Ching-Lien Wu) 

Orchestra of the Opéra national de Paris

Susanna Mälkki (conductor)

Images: Guergana Damaniova / OnP

The Rake’s Progress seems, as Stravinsky admitted, almost ‘to have been to have been created for journalistic debates concerning: a) the historical validity of the approach; and, b) the question whether I am guilty of imitation and pastiche.’ Or so, once, it did—to me, at least, and I think to many others too. I no longer bother about such questions; I am not sure anyone else does either. That does not mean it has ceased to pose us questions. Far from it. Their nature, though, has changed and they tend to focus, quite rightly, on the musical drama rather than ‘legitimacy’ or even timeliness. If in some yet far from all ways, it marked the end of a line, or at least a high watermark, for the neoclassical Stravinsky, with distance, it seems far from the end of a musical line. More to the point, in its very artificiality and neither entirely like nor unlike Così fan tutte – their orchestras, as Stravinsky noted, similar in size – it seems increasingly to move audiences and indeed performers in ways all too readily missed by earlier generations. 

Entirely by coincidence, I had spoken a little about The Rake’s Progress in a session of my undergraduate class on Mozart’s operas earlier in the week, taking it and Der Rosenkavalier as two highly contrasted twentieth-century operas consciously written in Mozart’s wake. It was probably that that had lodged a further Stravinskian utterance in my mind: ‘If the Rake contains imitations, however – of Mozart, as has been said,’ Stravinsky owned, ‘I will gladly allow the charge (given the breadth of the Aristotelian word), if I may thereby release people from the argument and bring them to the music.’ That ‘if’, however is the point; it is actually rarely Mozart who comes to my mind, the coincidences being too obvious, whether in Stravinsky or in Auden (Da Ponte too, of course). If anything, that was even less so here, in a performance led by Susanna Mälkki which felt more remote both from such ‘debates’ and indeed from any performing tradition than another I can recall. There were things I missed:, the polemical Stravinsky, the ultra-referential Stravinsky, much of the archness and the bite, to which somewhat soft-centred playing from the Paris Opéra orchestra contributed (presumably at the conductor’s request). 

Other correspondences nonetheless arose: that of the balletic Stravinsky, not so much the ‘great’ scores of the early century as some closer in time to the Rake: the Scènes de ballet in particular, but also, at a somewhat greater distance, Jeu de cartes and even the Tchaikovskian Fairy’s Kiss. Such neoclassicism makes sense, of course, though it also draws into question the usefulness of the term, since it refers to and indeed means such very different things in different contexts and at different times, all the more so when unmistakeable ostinato kinship with Oedipus Rex (beyond that, also to Poulenc) reared its head. These may well have been as much my thoughts as anything intended; it is difficult to say. But what I did sense, quite strongly, was a more overt sense of sadness – partly tempi, which often felt slow – and even tragedy. It was as if the work, consciously or otherwise, were being assimilated into a more ‘operatic’, even Italianate, tradition such as Stravinsky himself spoke of, that of Verdi, but also at times that of Berg, the latter perhaps ironically, given the contrast Stravinsky himself drew with that tradition, eschewing ‘forms symbolically expressive of the dramatic content (as in the Daedalian examples of Alban Berg)’ in favour of number opera. But then should we ever take Stravinsky at his word, or at least at face value? 

That musical trajectory seemed to proceed broadly in tandem with Olivier Py’s production, here on the first night of its revival. Haunted by death, in the ‘person’ of Tom’s uncle’s skeleton, and also, at the front of the stage, by the memento mori of a skull and hourglass, it too seemed to say or accept that this was less an opera about opera than it was simply an opera. Anne bore Tom’s child, who had advanced a few years by the final scene. Again, there was loss, at least for me, not least in any sense of London, a major character not only in Hogarth but surely at least in Auden too. Perhaps, though, I feel that more keenly as a Londoner, and one should not be restrictive about such things. There was not so much either, though, of city life, even more generically. The production felt not so much abstracted as moving psychology to the foreground, almost to the exclusion of anything else. On its own terms, all was stylishly presented, Pierre-André Weitz’s designs showing a keen eye for colour schemes and correspondences. Dance, both in character and more abstract-interpretative, played a role, heightening that sense of kinship with the composer’s ballets. 

The cast was strong throughout, with a lovely central pair in Ben Bliss’s Tom and Golda Schultz’s Anne. Bliss’s performance engaged one’s sympathies through honeyed tone and acting alike. Schultz presented a stronger, more ‘present’ character than is often the case, and was all the better for it. Iain Paterson’s Nick Shadow was quite without caricature, a more rounded character in the conventional sense, in keeping with broader parameters of performance and production. Love her or hate her, you cannot ignore Baba the Turk, and that was very much the knowing showbiz strategy of Jamie Barton’s assumption of the role. I especially enjoyed Rupert Charlesworth’s auctioneer Sellem, perhaps the most vocally acted of all performances, manner and mannerism conveying so much with relatively little: highly Stravinskian, one might say. Other roles were all well taken, with a keen sense of theatre, chorus members and dancers included. If there were times when I felt the chorus, like the orchestra, lacked Stravinskian bite, that was doubtless in part a consequence of Mälkki’s interpretative stance than performance as such.   

Where, then, does that leave us? Going round in further circles? To an extent, yes; does it not always with this work? Yet the repertoire assimilationism did bring something new, surely to be welcomed, whatever my personal likes or dislikes. Once again, I was led to reflect on how much we, or at least I, might be steered by Stravinsky’s CBS recording, technically flawed yet in possession of qualities it is difficult not to think near-definitive. It is surely a sign of maturity that, however much that may be imprinted on some of our memories, the work and our reactions to it have multiple lives beyond any of its creators. I never sympathised with, say, Boulez’s condemnation to Cage: ‘Have you heard Rake’s Progress? What ugliness!’ though I understood why he might have thought so and perhaps in part wanted to agree. Right now, though, I am grateful to have gone beyond that, as surely we all should have, seventy years on. Debates change yet persist.

Die Zauberflöte, English National Opera, 14 March 2019

Coliseum

Images: © Donald Cooper

Tamino – Rupert Charlesworth

Three Ladies – Susanna Hurrell, Samantha Price, Katie Stevenson

Papageno – Thomas Oliemans

Queen of the Night – Julia Bauer

Monostatos – Daniel Norman

Pamina – Lucy Crowe

Three Spirits – Guillermo Fernandez-Aguaya Martin, Richard Wolfson, Nao Fukui

Speaker – Jonathan Lemalu

Sarastro – Brindley Sherratt

First Priest, First Armoured Man – David Webb

Second Priest, Second Armoured Man – David Ireland

Papagena – Rowan Pierce

Simon McBurney (director)

Josie Daxter (associate director, movement)

Michael Levine (set designs)

Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)

Jean Kalman, Mike Gunning (lighting)

Finn Ross (video)

Gareth Fry, Matthieu Maurice (sound design)

English National Opera Chorus (chorus master: James Henshaw)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Ben Gernon (conductor)

Tamino (Rupert Charlesworth) and Pamina (Lucy Crowe)

When Simon McBurney’s Magic Flute was first staged by ENO, it needed, I think it fair to say, some further work. That it seemed to have received at the time of its first revival, although there was certainly room for more. (Is there not always?) Here, upon its second revival, I could not help but think that there had been something of a reversion, or at least that a general aggressive silliness to the audience made it feel so. Is it really quite so side-splittingly hilarious for someone to write ‘The Magic Flute’ on a board, or for someone to take a photograph? (Worse still, is it really necessary to applaud within a number? A conductor should at least stamp upon such practices, rather than indulge them by pausing.) The most obviously ‘Complicité’ elements of the action, or better its framing, are still handled very well: in general lightly worn, the metatheatricality of sound effects, paper birds, and other ‘workings’ has meaning, wit, and if not quite poignancy, at least permits thoughts of that order. 

A balance is, of course, very difficult to strike in a work with so many competing demands. tendencies, sources, strands of reception; some might argue that it is better not even to try, instead concentrating on one or two. Perhaps. Something more all-embracing is, I think, required or at least desirable. This production certainly attempts that – and sometimes succeeds. It is certainly preferable to its predecessor (Nicholas Hytner), which did not even seem to try. What I missed on this occasion was a greater integration between different strands. A wartime setting seems hinted at, perhaps more than that. (Or is it just a fondness for combat fatigues?) Likewise a somewhat sinister bureaucracy for Sarastro’s brotherhood. (‘Of course’, you might reply, not without reason.) Alas, the logic, the mystery, the magic that might bind these to the rest of what is going on, do not seem to be there; either that, or – perfectly possible, this – I missed them. Inclusion of the Queen of the Night at the close is now such a cliché that it barely registers: nothing wrong with it in itself, but why? Again, it seems unmotivated. The work’s cosmos is unusually varied – not least because, written for a non-court-theatre, and as a Singspiel, it offered librettist and composer far greater freedom than they would ever have been granted for an opera seria or indeed an opera buffa. Making sense of that cosmos and its communicating through words, gesture, and music are key to a success in performance only intermittently realised here.

Papageno (Thomas Oliemans) and
Papagena (Rowan Pierce)

Stephen Jeffreys’s translation sometimes departs considerably from Schikaneder, yet offers welcome relief from the preening self-regard of usual suspects. The translation ‘Queen of Night’ – reproduced in the programme – is a bit odd: not incorrect, yet a departure from universal usage to ends unclear. More seriously, why are the Armoured Men (Geharnischter) listed in the programme as ‘Armed Men’, not at all the same thing? Do such things matter? Yes, especially for a company that prides itself on presenting works in English – and, for once, presented a good case for doing so, the cast’s diction proving uncommonly fine.

For the evening’s true rewards were to be found in the singing – and stage performances more generally. Rupert Charlesworth proved an excellent Tamino, beauty of vocal line allied to unmistakeable sincerity of purpose. It would have been a strange audience member indeed who did not root for him and Lucy Crowe’s equally touching, finely sung Pamina. Julia Bauer’s Queen of (the) Night came as close as many, closer than most, to fulfilling Mozart’s absurd demands. Thomas Oliemans’s Papageno proved a worthy successor to Schikaneder himself, alert to the role’s competing demands without ever alerting us to their difficulty. Brindley Sherratt’s considered – never too considered – Sarastro, Daniel Norman’s lively Monastatos, a fine trio of Ladies and pair of Priests/Armoured Men attested to a casting in depth that has not always been in evidence in recent years at the Coliseum, but which proved very welcome indeed.

Three Ladies (Susanna Hurrell, Samantha Price, Katie Stevenson) and Tamino

Ben Gernon’s conducting had much to be said for it: a few rushed passages notwithstanding, generally sane and varied tempi; command and coordination of the orchestra in the pit and the singers on stage; and undoubted knowledge of the score. What it lacked, at least for me, was any sense of magic, of awe. Partly, that seemed owed to a determination to keep the orchestra down, strings in particular. So much magic and meaning are to be found not on stage, in the pit, that much, alas, was lost. Moreover, as with the production, a sense of greater structure, of the construction of a musico-dramatic world, often proved elusive. How does it make sense for Papageno and the Queen of the Night to feature in the same work, indeed to interact meaningfully? How, moreover, does it make sense for a neo-Bachian chorale prelude and the Papageno-Papagena duet not only to coexist, but to form part of a coherent, meaningfully dramatic whole? The answer may be magical as much as logical; it may not be reducible to words. Karl Böhm and Colin Davis knew how to accomplish this. So have directors such as Achim Freyer and David McVicar, both surely close to their best here. This is where the order’s ultimate wisdom lies, its secrets vouchsafed to and by a band of initiates whom we should treasure. We continue, it seems, to search for an interpretative Tamino and Pamina to join them.

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (2), Ariadne auf Naxos, 14 July 2018

Théâtre de l’Archevêché

Images: Festival d’Aix-en-Provence 2018 © Pascal Victor / artcompress

 

Music Master – Josef Wagner

Major-Domo – Maik Solbach

Lackey – Sava Vemić

Officer – Petter Moen

Composer – Angela Brower

Tenor, Bacchus – Eric Cutler

Wig-Maker – Jean-Gabriel Saint Martin

Zerbinetta – Sabine Devieilhe

Prima Donna, Ariadne – Lise Davidsen

Dancing Master – Rupert Charlesworth

Naiad – Beate Mordal

Dryad – Andrea Hill

Echo – Elena Galistkaya

Harlequin – Huw Montague Rendall

Truffaldino – David Shipley

Scaramuccio – Emilio Pons

Brighella – Jonathan Abernethy

The Richest Man in Vienna – Paul Herwig

His Wife – Julia Wieninger

 

Katie Mitchell (director)

Chloe Lamford (set designs)

Sarah Blenkinsop (costumes)
James Farncombe (lighting)

Martin Crimp (dramaturgy, including additional dialogue, translated by Ulrike Syha)

Joseph W Alford (movement)

Orchestre de Paris

Marc Albrecht (conductor)

Ariadne auf Naxos is in many ways the ultimate opera about opera. (Or should that be Moses und Aron?) Many, perhaps most, operas would seem to be ‘about’ Orpheus and his art in some way or another. (In a shameless plug, I should add that such is the subject, or at least the starting-point, for a chapter on operatic culture I have written for the soon-to-be-published – i.e., proofs already checked – Routledge Research Companion to Musical Modernism, edited by Björn Heile and Charles Wilson.) It would be far from absurd to claim that an artwork can fail to be ‘about’ its art form, its genre, itself in one sense or another; or would it? Always we seem to be brought back to those oppositions, those dialectics, that haunt, arguably determine Western history and culture, whether we like it or not. Yet Ariadne seems to take it all in, the ‘business’ as and the ‘art’, the artists and the characters, the metanarrative and the narrative, ultimately also the transformation that may or may not transcend – Hofmannsthal and/or Strauss? – as well as the manifold absurdities and frustrations at which one can only laugh, except that is, when one can only cry.

 

Productions can approach such a work – in practice, with the possible exception of Elektra, almost any work! – in any number of ways. There is nothing wrong with emphasising one strand, one particular reading: single-mindedness has its place, just as much for, say, a Hans Neuenfels as for a Furtwängler or a Klemperer. (The idea of a Klemperer Ariadne in particular intrigues, not least on the basis of his Pulcinella Suite, but I digress – and I have no Music Master to restrain me or indeed to inflict cuts, justified or otherwise.) Ranking is a game for politicians and accountants – although donors perhaps have their place in this world too – but I am not sure that I have seen a production that has kept so many balls in the air at the same time, investigated their nature, and added a few of its own, as Katie Mitchell’s for the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence.

The Prologue comes across as relatively conventional: not in the sense of wanting ‘pretty’ frocks and so on, but it sets the scene, as perhaps it should, ready for the transformations to come. It is full of life, full of character; there is probably, as doubles would be the case in watching any ‘making of’ documentary, more than one can take in in a single viewing, yet by the same token there is no sense of overload. It is not ‘busy’ for the sake of it, as often seems to be a temptation – perhaps a valid one – here. One enjoys the splendidly camp yet undeniably successful and talented Dancing Master of Rupert Charlesworth: watch him rehearse his dancers and you will see that he knows his stuff as well as owning the room. One sees that room transformed into a stage and an audience – with, rightly, a flexible curtain of a barrier in between. Lights taken down and replaced suggest something afoot: a distinction being made between reception room and desert island. We are not yet sure, however.

 

Perhaps most important of all, we see and feel – this is a musical thing too, of course, but also in Mitchell’s staging – the emergence of Zerbinetta as a real person, as a human being, to an extent uncommon, perhaps even unparalleled, in my experience. The tenderness of Sabine Devieilhe’s performance is something; she can do the coloratura fireworks too, as we shall learn. So too, however, is the direction: her placing with (and not with) other characters at particular times, her reactions to them, leading up to a moment quite justified and yet also shocking: the furious slap she gives the Composer after his/her (self-)righteous words at the close. Has (s)he not listened to a word Zerbinetta has said? Most likely not; for even in a world such as Mitchell’s, in which gender is fluid, indeed performed, there is no doubting that masculinity rules the roost. Molière after all wrote Le bourgeois gentilhomme, after all, thus in a sense initiating or at least provoking this particular drama. In connection with that, it is perhaps worth noting that Marc Albrecht seemed particular attuned to the connections – and implicitly the contrasts – with Strauss’s incidental music too. His, overall, was a wise and splendid reading, never seeking attention for itself, yet fully aware of when the orchestra should soar – above all at the close. If an orchestra is unlikely ever to sound at its best outdoors, the Orchestre de Paris, a few scrappy string moments aside, offered warmth, clarity, and chamber-music responsiveness throughout. Albrecht’s gentle yet authoritative guidance nevertheless remained an absolute necessity.

 

Back, however, to the stage. (How difficult it is even to write about keeping all those balls in the air!) Already, in that Prologue, Mitchell and her team have slightly prised open the work (and its ‘work-concept’). The dialogue has not been quite as one remembered it, perhaps, although we all know how memories can play tricks. In ‘reality’, Martin Crimp has added some lines to fit what we see, some others have gone, and the surtitles seem to offer a further level of commentary and critique: never too much, but enough to have one wonder. Without returning to the 1912 version, with or without Molière – what a missed opportunity that was in Salzburg in 2012! – elements return or rather are rethought and transformed. The Richest Man in Vienna is there, in a dress, as his wife, who literally wears the trousers. They not only offer interjections, new yet rooted in memories of 1912, at least to begin with; they are offered opportunity to learn, to be transformed. Indeed, they interact with the ‘cast’ almost at will. It is, alas, not clear what, if anything, they have learned; audiences and patrons can be like that. Perhaps, though, it is too soon to tell, for which of us has not on occasion learned more from a performance than might initially have seemed to be the case? The final words, appropriately enough, are given to M. Jourdain’s successor: the experiment has been interesting, but it is unlikely to show the way to the future of opera. That, we may retort, and probably do, is at least as much up to us as up to you, however much you may throw your cash around.

 

Such is the metatheatricality. Perhaps the real truths of Mitchell’s, Hofmannsthal’s, and Strauss’s opera(s), however, lie in what is too often overlooked: what this Ariadne, partly the Composer’s, partly all manner of others’, does as an opera. Angela Brower’s Composer, beautifully, intelligently sung, has not left the stage; (s)he conducts, at times, although it is unclear whether anyone knows or cares. The Opera concerns, above all, Ariadne on Naxos. Lise Davidsen’s Ariadne proved one of the finest I have heard, possessed of an almost infinite dynamic range, subtly inflected, and endless reserves of breath for the longest of Straussian lines. I do not think I have seen – and this was surely Mitchell’s doing too – her suffer so greatly. The sheer misery of her condition shone through, long before it was revealed that she had been left with child, to be delivered and claimed by a rather nasty – should he not be just that? – Bacchus (Eric Cutler, who again can certainly sing the role). The taunts of Zerbinetta’s troupe – perhaps not intentional, yet no less hurtful for that – sting particularly in such a setting. Indeed, their erotic table-dancing, preening, and squabbling, stage realising words and music in properly post-Wagnerian fashion, seems rightly both beside the point and absolutely of it. When Bacchus offers Ariadne the choice of life or death, we have no idea what she will choose, nor for whom. Right up until the end, we fear she might use the revolver that is one of his ‘gifts’. Will she shoot herself, her child, him, someone else, the entire assembled company? In the end, she does not. A child has been born; so too has an opera. Perhaps, whatever our host may think and demand, the future or a future of opera has been too. We shall see and/or hear – or not.

 

Christ lag in Todesbanden/Der Kaiser von Atlantis, English Touring Opera, 5 October 2012

Linbury Studio Theatre

 

Bach – Christ lag in Todesbanden, BWV 4 (arr. Iain Farrington)

Ullmann – Der Kaiser von Atlantis

Emperor Überall – Richard Mosley-Evans

Death – Robert Winslade Anderson
Loudspeaker – Callum Thorpe
Maiden – Paula Sides
Harlequin – Jeffrey Stewart
Drummer – Katie Bray
Soldier – Rupert Charlesworth

James Conway (director)
Neil Irish (designs)
Guy Hoare (lighting)

Aurora Orchestra
Peter Selwyn (conductor)
 

Not for the first time, the heroic efforts of English Touring Opera have put to shame the larger, wealthier opera companies. Whereas ENO has elected to garner minor headlines by launching a silly campaign to encourage audience members to wear jeans and trainers, and from the 2012 productions I have seen on the main stage at Covent Garden, but one, Rusalka, has proved artistically first-rate, not only is ETO offering an autumn season composed of three twentieth-century operas – Albert Herring, The Emperor of Atlantis, and The Lighthouse – in the present production, it has risen impressively to the challenge.  

To preface Viktor Ullmann’s opera with Bach’s Christ lag in Todesbanden was a brilliant idea. (There was also a pre-performance rendition of a newly commissioned song-cycle by Helen Chadwick, Towards an Unkown Port, which I was unable to attend.) Bach’s cantata was arranged for the same chamber forces as the Ullmann, Iain Farrington’s arrangement showing both sensitivity to the score and an imagination that at times seemed to pay occasional homage to the Bach arrangements of Webern and Berio. (Was that a touch of flutter-tonguing I heard early on?) Harlequin and Death observe the performance, presented chillingly by four soloists – Katie Bray, Rupert Charlesworth, Paula Sides, and Callum Thorpe – with suitcases ready for the journey ahead. Though sung in German, Harlequin offers a rough and ready flash card translation, which at times he uses to incite Death, waiting with his scythe. This may be an Easter Day cantata, based of course upon Luther’s chorale, itself based upon eleventh-century plainsong, but it is hardly Bach at his most jubilant. Christ lies in bonds of death and though we progress towards a final ‘Alleluia’ – this from 1724, Bach’s first version for the final stanza having been lost – via, amongst other wondrous writing, it is sin, the wait for judgement and, above all, especially in a contest such as this, the stretto contest between life and death, that linger longest and most profoundly in the mind. Each of the soloists was excellent, as indeed was the Aurora Orchestra, the plangent beauty of Charlesworth’s tenor perhaps particularly worthy of praise.

 

Der Kaiser von Atlantis, or  to give it its full title, Der Kaiser von Atlantis, oder Die Tod-Verweigerung (‘The Emperor of Atlantis, or Death’s Denial’), followed on immediately. How does one listen ‘objectively’ even upon hearing the subtitle, given that one knows this was a Theresienstadt opera? One does not, of course, and it would be unreasonable to expect anyone to do so.  A Schoenberg pupil, on his teacher’s recommendation, Ullmann was made a founder member of the committee for the Society of Private Musical Performances. Having been taken to Theresientadt in 1942, he wrote this opera with librettist Peter Kien the following year, though it only went so far as dress rehearsal, before being realised for the thinly disguised satire that it was. Ullmann, Kien, and many of their colleagues would be transported to Auschwitz in October 1944, to be murdered there.

 

Yet Ullmann’s opera is not of mere historical interest; he was an established composer for quite some time before the Second World War, and it shows. ‘Eclectic’ would perhaps give the wrong impression of the score, since it does not dart around willy-nilly; however, it certainly draws upon elements of tonal Schoenbergian writing and more popular idioms, often bringing Weill to mind. Death’s withdrawal of his labour disturbs the Emperor Überall – here, in spite of the opera being sung in English, the name was wisely not translated, adding definite national resonance – in his campaign of total war. (Yes, that very phrase is uttered.) The non-death of the soldier and girl in the third scene echoes, questions, subverts the struggle between life and death in the Bach cantata. Eventually, the Emperor accedes to Death’s demand that he be the first to die in return for the freedom for others to die again. It is perhaps only in this fourth scene that the music lingers a little too long, but even that arguably has its dramatic point, given the Emperor’s reluctance to die. The final ‘rejoicing’ is set to a lightly modernist elaboration of, irony of ironies, Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott.   

Once again, the orchestra, expertly directed by Peter Selwyn, was on excellent form. James Conway’s direction was typically impressive throughout, each character well prepared for his or her actions within this almost surreally terrifying setting, the sets of Neil Irish and Guy Hoare’s lighting playing their part here too. One had a sense if not of the conditions of Theresienstadt – how could one? – then of how modest means can create something far and beyond what one might expect, of the defiance and, clichéd though it may sound, hope that artistic solidarity may confer in the darkest of circumstances. Especially noteworthy amongst the cast were, once again, Charlesworth as the Soldier, also Callum Thorpe’s intelligently presented Loudspeaker, informing the Emperor of the war’s progress, and Paula Sides’s attractively voiced Maiden. Richard Mosley-Evans wavered somewhat as the Emperor, but the whole performance remained far more than the sum of its parts.

 

The production will also be seen in Cambridge, Exeter, Tunbridge Wells, Harrogate, Aldeburgh, Malvern, and Buxton. Click here for further details from the ETO website.