Mavra and Pierrot lunaire, Royal Opera, 17 May 2022

Linbury Studio Theatre

Parasha – April Koyejo-Audiger
Hussar, Mavra – Egor Zhuravskii
Mother – Sarah Pring
Neighbour – Idunnu Münch
Pierrot – Alexandra Lowe

Anthony Almeida (director)
Rosanna Vize (designs)

Lucy Carter, Alan Mooney (lighting)
Anjali Mehra (movement)

Britten Sinfonia

Michael Papadopoulos (conductor)

Images: Helen Murray / ROH

The Royal Opera’s Young Artists Programme celebrates twenty years with a Linbury double-bill of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Mavra and Pierrot lunaire. It is an odd combination: one of Stravinsky’s less-loved works, a very short opera, with a cabaret melodrama that is no opera, yet is probably its composer’s single most celebrated work. If one tried hard enough, one could doubtless fathom a tenuous connection, but then one could probably do so between anything. Director Anthony Almeida, then, is probably right to have left his guiding thread at little more than surface level, concentrating instead on presentation of two unequal halves. 

All too readily underestimated, Mavra, here given in a chamber arrangement by Paul Phillips, is in many ways emphatically a Russian work. If aspects of Stravinsky’s very particular sound world are necessarily lost—it was not solely on account of where I was seated that my experience was piano-heavy—an imaginative realisation, alluding consciously or otherwise to scores such as The Soldier’s Tale, presents other possibilities. Pushkin, in any case, seems unusually apparent, even, perhaps especially, in a staging that emphasises the formalism of something akin to face. Stravinsky always revels in patterns, in allusion, in parody, and in disjuncture: this has it all, musically and scenically. Colour and ‘look’ are to the fore, part of a surface that may or may not preclude discovery of anything beneath. The drag transformation of officer Vasily into maid Mavra amounts in a Warhol-like way to something, despite its essential nothingness. Is that, perhaps what a host of bin bags tell us? It also engineers a connection of sorts to Pierrot, where Almeida has a woman by contrast turn period androgyne. Indoors becomes outdoors; lighting becomes both alternative lighting (moon) and pitch blackness. Reappearance of Mavra’s cast seemed to me a little more forced, the sign interpreter more animated. Pierrot’s presence early on in in Mavra added little other than mild confusion, at least for me. Thought had been given, though, to an attempt to combine; that was enough, really. 

Michael Papadopoulos, members of the Britten Sinfonia, and an able, alert cast captured well the knowing devices of Stravinsky’s score. It twists and turns, so long as one listens, and provides a splendid counterpoise—it certainly did here—to stage action that continues to surprise in its entirely unsurprising course. April Koyejo-Audiger reminded us, throughout, that whatever the games Stravinsky may have been playing, a Russian heart beat, sometimes irregularly, always metrically, beneath. Egor Zhuravskii offered dislocated bel canto contrast and complement. Sarah Pring and Idunnu Münch navigated with wit the fine line between stock characters and their light deconstruction, Glinka and the 1920s. If there were times when I missed the full instrumentation, the youth of this eternally young work nonetheless shone through. 

Stravinsky must surely rank as one of Pierrot’s most quoted admirers. ‘The solar plexus as well as the mind of twentieth-century music,’ he called it, hailing on another occasion the ‘instrumental substance’ that had ‘impressed me immensely. And by saying “instrumental”, I mean not simply the instrumentation of this music but the whole contrapuntal and polyphonic structure of this brilliant masterpiece’. That came through, clearly, in a performance whose lines, reciter’s included, were supremely well balanced, wandering in tonality as in character. A touch more expressionism might not have gone amiss, but there are many worse things than a somewhat classicising Pierrot. Given its all-encompassing yet contradictory nature, the work doubtless resists a ‘complete’, let alone ‘ideal’, performance. It was nonetheless difficult to imagine Alexandra Lowe’s personal combination of speech, pitch, and gesture being readily improved upon.

If Pierrot took a slightly Stravinskian turn, what could be more contextually appropriate? Not that there was not darkness too, likewise catastrophe and sheer weirdness, but the balance had shifted. There will be other Pierrots, other attempts, as Beckett had it, to ‘fail better’, but this will have made new converts, who, like the rest of us, should prepare to be surprised once again by this ever-surprising chameleon of a work.

The Cunning Little Vixen, Glyndebourne, 12 June 2016

Glyndebourne Opera House

Badger, Priest – Alexander Vassiliev

Forester – Christopher Purves
Cricket – Tate Nicol
Grasshopper – Kitty Casey
Mosquito, Schoolmaster – Colin Judson
Frog – Krishan Shah
Young Vixen Sharp Ears – May Abercombie
Forester’s Wife, Owl – Sarah Pring
Vixen Sharp Ears – Elena Tsallagova
Dog – Marta Fontanals-Simmons
Pepík – Eliza Safjan
Frantík – Rhiannon Llewellyn
Cockerel – Hannah Sandison
Hen – Natalia Tanasii
Pásek, Innkeeper – Michael Wallace
Fox – Alžběta Poláčková
Jay – Shuna Scott Sendall
Woodpecker – Angharad Lyddon
Harašta – Alexander Duhamel
Innkeeper’s Wife – Natalia Brzezińska
Dancers, Fox Cubs

Melly Still (director)

Tom Pye (set designs)
Dinah Collin (costumes)
Mike Ashcroft (choreography)
Paule Constable (lighting)

Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus master: Jeremy Bines)

London Philharmonic Orchestra
Jakub Hrůša (conductor)

 

Images: Richard Hubert Smith

Four years ago, almost to the day (13^th to 12^th), I saw Melly Still’s production of The Cunning Little Vixen during its first Glyndebourne run. I found myself surprised how much more warmly I responded to it this time. Speaking to various Glyndebourne people beforehand – you will, I trust, be pleased to learn that I unsubtly went on the offensive for easy box-office prospects, such as Gluck and Nono, to Sebastian Schwarz, the company’s new General Director – I was told that revisions had been made. However, I cannot honestly tell you whether my change of heart were owed to them, to a newfound sunnier disposition (maybe not), or to being able to see the entire stage rather than half of it. I shall leave comparisons on one side, now, then, and respond to what I heard and saw, which I enjoyed very much. (In fact, although I offer a link, I have not actually re-read my earlier review, and you may wish to follow suit.)

Still’s production nicely blurs boundaries between opera and ballet. There is, of course, a good deal of ballet music ‘proper’ in the opera, as well as mime, but there is not always so much of a dividing line anyway, and the visual æsthetic seen here, the animals more stylised, less realistic, than often, strengthens the almost-hybrid impression. Paule Constable’s lighting plays just as important a role as Dinah Collin’s costumes, if a rather different one: it helps to delineate the scenes, in conjunction with Tom Pye’s resourceful sets, themselves visually arresting even before humans and animals litter them (sometimes in more than one sense). Whilst I do not find that the production unduly sentimentalises, and its moments of absurdist humour welcome, I missed a stronger sense of the darkness that also lies at the heart of this tale of lifecycles and the collision of human and animal worlds. Perhaps, though, it is that quasi-balletic æsthetic that most characterises the production as a whole and grants its unity; perhaps it is also that to which I find myself better able to respond, if not entirely without reservation, than I did in 2012.

 

Jakub Hrůša’s conducting of the London Philharmonic seemed to me to quite close in character and sonority to that of Jiří Bělohlávek in London’s recent concert Jenůfa. Even for a non-Czech speaker such as I, there is no mistaking not only the conductor’s apparently instinctive ease with every musical idiom, but also the give and take between vocal and orchestral lines, not just texturally but also generatively. Having heard quite a bit of my earliest Janáček from Charles Mackerras, whose way with the composer’s music I continue to admire greatly, I often find myself intrigued that what I had taken (perhaps naïvely) to be somehow typically ‘Czech’ is not always the way with Czech conductors, not that they hold any monopoly on Janáčekian wisdom. (The composer, just like Elgar, is far too important to be confined by national considerations.) That almost Viennese sweetness, which in that Jenůfa performance, I hesitantly dubbed Bohemian rather than Moravian, was often to be heard again in the LPO’s playing, without that shading into any smoothing over of lines. So maybe I should be still warier of such easy – too easy? – typologies, and simply enjoy the often golden fruits of what I have heard. That is very much what I have done in practice, anyway. Angularity was certainly not absent; nor, on occasion, was weight of sound that looked forward to From the House of the Dead. But, like the operatic-balletic action on stage, aural impressions were often fleeting, or at least constantly self-transformative. Mackerras, in 2010 at Covent Garden, perhaps granted a still stronger sense of the life-arc of the whole, but a drawback on that occasion was translation into English. This was, in any case, an estimable performance, pretty much irreproachable with respect to orchestral playing.

 

As with that 2010 performance, indeed as with any performance I can recall having attended, there was an unusually strong sense of the cast acting as a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Somehow, this opera seems to inspire an especially strong sense of ensemble in those taking part; or perhaps it is partly a matter that it would not be worth putting it on if it did not. Elena Tsallagova, who also took the title role in a Paris performance I saw in 2008, has seen neither her vocal nor her stage athleticism dim with greater experience. Quite the contrary: this was a tour de force of effervescence, and thus very much a visual representation of the character herself as well as her deeds. Alžběta Poláčková’s Fox proved an excellent complement, embodying many of the same characteristics in principle, the character’s pride and affection palpable throughout. Christopher Purves made for a characterful and soulful Forester, master of and yet also mastered by the natural world into which he found himself persistently, almost Narnia-like, drawn. Sarah Pring, as his wife, played with, yet never merely relied upon, ‘peasant’ or at least ‘folk’ stereotype; I should never have guessed, without consulting the cast list, that she had doubled up as an equally convincing Owl. Likewise for the other doublings. Alexandre Duhamel revealed a rich yet agile baritone as Harašta. Colin Judson’s turn as the Schoolmaster offered one of many ‘character’ highlights. I could go on, but should essentially be repeating the cast list. As so often, it was the Glyndebourne Chorus, as ever excellently trained (by Jeremy Bines), which bound much of the musical drama together, almost as well as the orchestra. No one hearing this performance would have doubted either the stature or the sheer wonder of this most singular of operas.