Die Zauberflöte, Royal Opera, 15 September 2021

Royal Opera House

Tamino – Bernard Richter
Pamina – Salome Jicia
Papageno – Huw Montague Rendall
Queen of the Night – Brenda Rae
Sarastro – Krzysztof Baczyk
Monostatos – Michael Colvin
Papagena – Haegee Lee
Speaker – Jochen Schmeckenbecher
Three Ladies – Alexandra Lowe, Hanna Hipp, Stephanie Wake-Edwards
Two Priests – Harry Nicoll, Donald Maxwell
Two Armoured Men – Alan Pingarrón, James Platt
Three Boys – Rafael Flutter, Benjamin Jardim, Victor Wiggin

David McVicar (director)
Dan Dooner (revival director)
John Macfarlane (designs)
Paule Constable (lighting)
Leah Hausman, Angelo Smimmo (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Hartmut Haenchen (conductor)

Images: Bill Cooper. (C) ROH 2021

David McVicar’s 2003 Magic Flute production is really starting to look—more to the point, feel—its age. When fresh and new, especially when conducted by Colin Davis, it had a winning sense of theatrical wonder. If it never tried to plumb the work’s Enlightenment, Rosicrucian, or other depths, it left open possibilities in performance for others to do so. There was striking imagery in John Macfarlane’s designs and the story was told with clarity and intelligence—even if the final scene always seemed a little trite. Now, however, on its n^th revival, much has degenerated into mere silliness. There is enough there to remind us of what it once was, with stronger direction, but enough missing to have one regret its lack. Seeing the first night of this revival on the same day that Nadine Dorries was named Culture Secretary suggested a rare moment of Dorries enlightenment, given her strange claim that ‘left-wing snowflakes’ had somehow managed to ‘dumb down’ pantomime. Once we reached the stage of fart jokes, I began to wonder whether, politics and flakiness aside, Dorries might, perish the thought, have unwittingly hit on a point. I suspect coronavirus restrictions played a part, getting in the way not only of interaction but some of the more ambitious mechanical elements, but it was difficult not to think more interesting solutions might have been explored. Perhaps there was simply not enough rehearsal time.

Tamino (Bernard Richter)

Singing, at least, was in another league. Bernard Richter’s Tamino was everything one could reasonably expect: alluring of tone, careful of words, warmly sympathetic. Huw Montague Rendall’s Papageno proved both lively and thoughtful, likewise respectful of the text, whist appreciating that it is the starting- and not the end-point for a performance. His was a properly physical performance, which nonetheless appreciated that there is much more to the character than that. Salome Jicia’s beautifully sung and acted Pamina and Brenda Rae’s astonishingly accurate, far from entirely unsympathetic Queen of the Night impressed similarly. The Three Boys can sometimes prove a weak link, but not here, Rafael Flutter, Benjamin Jardim, Victor Wiggin comprising an uncommonly fine trio. Krzysztof Baczyk initially sounded a little underpowered as Sarastro, but came into his own in the second act. Choral singing had its moments, in positive and less positive ways.

Brenda Rae (Queen of the Night)

Hartmut Haenchen’s conducting could have been worse. Indeed, I have heard much worse, though a rushed, scrappy Overture, the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House on decidedly sub-par form, was cause for concern. Thereafter, breackneck tempi were not, let us be thankful, the order of the day. Indeed, speeds in themselves were rarely a problem. There was rarely much sense of grace, light, or indeed, where necessary, wisdom and weight in the orchestra and its direction, though; for that, the singers seemed more or less left to themselves. Instead, we trudged from number to number, sometimes even from bar to bar, without much sense of a greater whole. It was dutiful Kapellmeisterei, neither more nor less, a world away from Constantin Trinks’s revelatory Don Giovanni in here July.

An unruly audience did not help, applauding, even cheering etween and sometimes even in the middle of numbers: the second-act finale, for instance. That may occasionally, regrettably, happen, but Haenchen seemed to go out of his way to facilitate it. (He even turned for a bow at one point.) So, still more, did the revival direction, which went so far as to leave pauses without anyone or anything on stage. There is quietly accepting the near-inevitable; there can even be metatheatrical framing; there is also pandering to the lowest common denominator. If The Magic Flute is not about about gently, joyously assisting Bildung or self-cultivation, then I do not know what is. Ultimately, though, this speaks of how tired McVicar’s production has become. Time for a change, I think.

Papageno (Huw Montague Rendall)

When a work such as this is given in the original language—German at least, though little sounded especially Viennese—the dialogue needs greater attention. Fidelio often suffers similarly. Some performers were excellent in this respect, Richter and Montague Rendall first and foremost, and there were other perfectly reasonable performances. A few, however, spoke in bizarrely laboured fashion, at barely half speed. The effect was more weirdly expressionist than humorous. Given the dialogue fulfils a similar role here to recitativo secco, it deserves the same care in terms of pacing and rhythm, as well as pronunciation. Appearing to mean something would be a distinct advantage too, as would more accurate titles for those who insist on laughing uproariously at them.

For what it is worth, most of the audience seemed to love it. I was delighted to hear some excellent singing. The production may be seen on ROH Stream from Friday 1 October and is rep until 7 October.

Così fan tutte, Royal Opera, 25 February 2019

Royal Opera House

Dorabella (Serena Malfia)
Images: ROH 2019/Stephen Cummiskey

Ferrando – Paolo Fanale

Guglielmo – Gyula Orendt

Don Alfonso – Thomas Allen

Fiordiligi – Salome Jicia

Dorabella – Serena Malfi

Despina – Serena Gamberoni

Jan Philipp Gloger (director)

Julia Burbach (revival director)

Ben Baur (set designs)

Karin Jud (costumes)

Bernd Purkrabek (lighting)

Katharina John (dramaturgy)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)

Stefano Montanari (conductor)

Ensemble

First the good news. With one partial exception, there was much splendid singing, and stage performance more generally, to enjoy from an entirely new cast for the first revival of Jan Philipp Gloger’s Così fan tutte (reviewed here first time around). Our pairs of male and female lovers were nicely differentiated, whilst blending with equal skill and pleasure – crucial in an opera with so much ensemble writing, endlessly varied, endlessly revised and renewed. (There is dramaturgical genius in that, of course, not that sceptics and outright decriers – believe it or not, there remain a few – bother to think about that before regaling us with their ‘thoughts’ on the work.) Salome Jicia and Serena Malfia made for a sparkling pairing of ladies from Ferrara, linear clarity matched by complementary contrast such as one might enjoy in a fine wind ensemble. Much the same, perhaps still more so, might be said of Paolo Fanale’s Ferrando and Gyula Orendt’s Guglielmo, the former’s arias as sweetly sung, tenderly phrased as anyone might reasonably ask. Serena Gamberoni’s keenly sung Despina was properly knowing without lapsing into the unduly arch. Thomas Allen’s Don Alfonso had its moments, but it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that this, a role he long made his own, is now a vocal challenge too far, whatever his continued enthusiasm on stage. Hand on heart, I cannot say that any of these performances surpassed those at Holland Park last year, but I doubt that anyone would have had serious grounds for disappointment either.

 

Dorabella and Guglielmo (Gyula Orendt)

There were, alas, grounds aplenty for disappointment in both the conducting and the production: concerning the former, rather more than mere disappointment. Described in the programme as ‘charismatic’, Stefano Montanari certainly made his presence felt Charisma, however, entails a gift, not a curse, be it divine or otherwise. It is difficult to think of anyone more deserving of the claim than Mozart. If only we had heard a little more of his work and a little less of Montanari’s extraordinary – extraordinarily ignorant, too – arrogance. Arrogating to himself the fortepiano continuo too, Montanari went on to show us that he has little ability at conducting but considerable ability at obscuring scores with his own, allegedly witty, yet in truth tediously predictable, sonic vandalism. To begin with, his ‘contributions’ remained within the realm of the unnecessary, if still highly irritating. The level of premature ejaculation soon, however, reached the level of medical emergency, at times entirely taking leave of Mozart’s bass line and harmony so as simply to present some ‘songs from the shows’. It was the sort of thing a bumptious first-year organ scholar might have done over late-night drinks, albeit more cleverly; here, the results were quite unforgivable. Occasionally hard-driven, Montanari’s conducting was more often merely flaccid: nothing to do with speed, everything to do with a lack of harmonic and formal understanding; it was as if the performance were led by the lovechild of René Jacobs and Marc Minkowski. For a performance of Così fan tutte drag so much is an achievement of sorts, not one I wish to hear repeated. To hear it in the house that was once Sir Colin Davis’s was little short of scandalous.

Dorabella and Ferrando (Paolo Fanale)

Some changes have been made to Gloger’s production since its first outing, presumably by revival director, Julia Burbach. In the first act in particular, they are to its benefit, tightening and clarifying, although the second act fizzles out much as it had done before (if slightly differently). It is, perhaps, indicative of the state of British opera audiences that anyone would see something remotely adventurous in the hamfisted attempt at metatheatricality on show – ‘show’ being the thing – here. Clichés abound, without apparent awareness that clichés they are, and therefore might be played with. The more promising moment remains the substitution of applauding members of the real cast, initially seated in an audience box, for the cast in eighteenth-century garb on stage. There is nothing wrong with the idea that the characters might learn from a performance of the work; it has much to commend it. There is everything wrong, however, with the confusion – somewhat mitigated now, yet only somewhat – with which that is allegedly accomplished. Identities, acts, characters are not ambiguous; they appear simply not to have been thought through, rather as if this were an early sketch for a production rather than the finished article.

As for Gloger’s preposterous claim, allegedly justifying such confusion, namely that to be ‘realisable in realistic terms’, the female characters must ‘know from the beginning of the second act that the “foreign men” are really their own boyfriends,’ it is difficult to think of a graver admission of incompetence. By all means play with such an idea, should it prove dramatically fruitful. The idea, however, that such banal realism has anything to do with the work, that ‘we decided to explain…’ signifies anything other than a catastrophic misunderstanding of the opera’s artificiality and its dramatic consequences, is both saddening and infuriating. Perhaps there is scope for further revisions; I certainly appreciate the attempt. I cannot, however, claim to be hopeful. Like Montanari's conducting, if less so, the production thinks itself far cleverer than it is. More seriously, neither seems remotely to appreciate not only the intelligence but the profundity of this most ravishing of operas.