Ariadne auf Naxos, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 18 May 2013

Glyndebourne Opera House

 

Music-Master – Sir Thomas Allen

Major-Domo – William Relton
Lackey – Frederick Long
Officer – Stuart Jackson
Composer – Kate Lindsey
Tenor. Bacchus – Sergey Skorokhodov
Wigmaker – Michael Wallace
Zerbinetta – Laura Claycomb
Prima Donna, Ariadne – Soile Isokoski
Dancing Master – Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke
Pianist – Gary Matthewman
Naiad – Ana Maria Labin
Dryad – Adriana Di Paola
Echo – Gabriela Iştoc
Harlequin – Dmitri Vargin
Scaramuccio – James Kryshak
Truffaldino – Torben Jürgens
Brighella – Andrew Stenson

Katharina Thoma (director)

Julia Müer (set designs)
Irina Bartels (costumes)
Olaf Winter (lighting)
Lucy Burge (movement)

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

 

Katharina Thoma’s Glyndebourne debut had been heavily publicised. Sad to say, not only does her production of Ariadne auf Naxos fail to live up to any expectations that might have been engendered; it fails dismally to live up to Strauss and Hofmannsthal, indeed even so much as to engage with them. Audience members would apparently erupt into uproarious laughter when someone, anyone, so much as walked onstage seemed delighted, but there was more sign of the artwork we know, love, and desperately wished to have interrogated in the miserably paraphrased surtitles – is it that difficult to offer a reasonable translation? – than on the Glyndebourne stage, at least during the Opera proper.

 

The 1940s seem almost to be de rigueur for a certain breed of opera directors at the moment; this staging follows in the dubious footsteps of David McVicar’s not entirely dissimilar Médéefor ENO. A pandering desire to ‘entertain’ – ironically here, given the concerns of the Prologue, though the irony seems entirely accidental – replaces genuine dramatic, or indeed almost any other variety of, engagement. And yet, of course, Zerbinetta does not appeal to the lowest common denominator; that she both amuses and touches is owed to an expected level of Kultur on the part of the audience. Insofar as what she offers is ‘low’ culture, and that is a considerable ‘insofar’, that only has meaning in terms of contrast with its ‘high’, seria antipode – or cousin. Here, we simply have her reduced to a ‘mad’ person, straitjacketed in a wartime hospital, who, tedious ‘joke’ of tedious ‘jokes’, sings some of her high notes whilst having an orgasm induced by a visitor. I am not sure what is more offensive: the transformation of mental illness, presumably a product of wartime, into fodder for laughter, the refusal so much as to listen to the text (and no, the orgasm does not betoken serious study of the score), or the fact that so many seemed to respond so positively to Carry on Ariadne. Naiad, Dryad, and Echo are nurses, whose every shaking of a sheet elicited helpless guffaws from that vocal section of the audience.

 

A still greater indignity suffered by the work comes at the end when Ariadne, reuinited with her fighter pilot Theseus, has him land himself on top of her behind a curtain. It was difficult to decide whether such prudishness were preferable to a more full-frontal vision; either path would simply have been embarrassing in context – or rather, weirdly out of context. Hoffmansthal’s concern with transformative myth receives not so much as a nod, but then nor does the transformative power of Strauss’s music. Goodness knows what the Composer has been doing, wandering around the Opera, not unreasonably lost; to start with I thought he was a doctor, then a patient, but he really seemed to be there to give the false impression that what we see is somehow connected with the Prologue.

 

For that is the greatest problem of all with this staging, bafflingly so, since one would have thought that, whatever Konzept or none, it would have been pretty straightforward to get right. Much of the Prologue is presented reasonably enough: no particular insight is gained, but it does not jar especially with what we are seeing and hearing. (Many audience members appeared to be doing neither, instead reading the shoddy titles and responding accordingly, that is when they were not simply chattering to each other. Stony glances had no effect whatsoever upon them.) The setting is said to evoke the Glyndebourne of the period, that is of the arbitrarily selected early 1940s, though I am not sure one would have known that without being told. But things happen pretty much as they should; rather in the sense of an ultra-conservative staging, one gleans little but has ‘the story told’. (Christof Loy, as his wilful, equally un-engaging Salzburg Frau ohne Schatten shows, is not necessarily the most sympathetic director of Strauss, yet he engages with the Royal Opera House in a considerably more revealing version of the site-specific approach in his staging of Ariadne.) Then suddenly, at the close of the Oper, the melodrama of an air attack bursts upon the scene. Some people, apparently, ‘just loved’ the ensuing fire: an effect quite without cause, slightly to misquote Wagner on Meyerbeer. For the rest of us, it seemed more akin to a desperate attempt to ‘do’ something with or to the work, given that for some, unspecified reason, the richness of Strauss and Hofmannsthal was not nearly enough for Katharina Thoma.

 

But far worse is to come, for any idea of the Opera as a staging suggested in the Prologue appears to have been thrown out of the window. There really is no connection between the two sections of the work. Instead one has the house transformed into a wartime hospital, in which for some reason Ariadne awaits the return of her aforementioned fighter pilot. The very essence of the work, not just its delicious satirising of responses to ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, but its metatheatrical probing of opera as a performative art, has simply been passed over. Thoma comments in a programme interview, ‘But sometimes when I leave the theatre and see the news, and there are catastrophes, think, what have I been worrying about? There are more important matters in the world.’ Unfortunately, the æstheticism of the work and its creators is not so much undercut as rejected in favour of uninvolving incoherence.

 

Musical performances were better, though I suspect – and hope – they will improve as the run proceeds. Vladimir Jurowski had the excellent LPO on a tight leash: often too tight, harrying the score rather than giving it time to speak. Strauss of all composers does not need to be sentimentalised, but, despite certain kinship or rather pre-emption, this is not Stravinskian neo-Classicism. A half-way house, akin to Busoni, would be perfectly justifiable, intriguing even; however, for much of the time one desperately wanted to ask the conductor just to calm down a little, perhaps more than a little. The Opera fared somewhat better than the Prologue in that respect, though its musical course did not come across, as it should, as if in a single, long breath. Strauss may be an ambivalent Wagnerian here, but a Wagnerian he remains, especially in that requirement for understanding and communication of the melos.

 

Although the voice is not what it was, Thomas Allen still imparted to the Music Master a theatrical authority so evidently lacking in the stage direction; Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke provided an effective foil as Dancing Master, though he was perhaps inclined to overact. Of the principal characters, Laura Claycomb’s Zerbinetta was by some distance the most successful. Notwithstanding an unfortunate passage of extremely stray intonation during her big aria, she otherwise managed her coloratura very well, and acted the part in as lively and sympathetic fashion as the staging would permit. Soile Isokoski’s Ariadne improved as the Opera progressed, her music before ‘Es gibt ein Reich’ having suffered from severe inability to sustain, let alone, to float a Straussian phrase. Yet, though matters improved in that respect, hers was not an involving portrayal. (Much of the fault may of course have been the director’s, but not all of it.) Sergey Skorokhodov experienced technical difficulties as Bacchus – one can readily forgive some of them, given Strauss’s cruel writing – but also managed on occasion to display greater mettle; his is certainly a performance I can imagine becoming more impressive on subsequent evenings. Kate Lindsey, though she threw herself commendably into the role of the Composer on stage, disappointed vocally; the voice lacked any of the richness, even vocal variegation, one longs for in the role, however unfair it may be to hark back to Irmgard Seefried. Smaller roles were generally well taken, offering a properly ‘Glyndebourne’ sense of theatrical company; Dmitri Vargin (Harlequin) is a singer whose future we might be well advised to watch.

                                 

Yet, despite the wonderful surroundings and some more than creditable music-making, the evening was sorely let down by Thoma’s staging. It offers neither ‘fidelity’, whatever that slippery concept might mean, nor the courage to try something new and to pursue its conclusions; the incoherence is its ultimate problem. Where the work presents a myriad of possibilities, the production closes them down, without offering anything satisfying in their stead. And if that makes me of the Composer’s party, so be it. Ultimately, we all know that, though Strauss plays his games of masks at least as cleverly here as anywhere else, the moment when they drop, when we hear his voice, is the Composer’s ‘Musik ist eine heilige Kunst...’. All of us, it would seem, except Thoma.

Der Rosenkavalier, Royal Opera, 22 December 2009

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Die Feldmarschallin Fürstin Werdenberg – Soile Isokoski
Der Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau – Peter Rose
Octavian – Sophie Koch
Herr von Faninal – Sir Thomas Allen
Sophie – Lucy Crowe
Jungfer Marianne Leitmetzerin – Elaine McKrill
Valzacchi – Graham Clark
The Marschallin’s Major-domo – Robert Anthony Gardiner
Faninal’s Major-domo – Steven Ebel
Italian Singer – Wooyung Kim
Notary - Lynton Black
Mohammed – Ostin D’Silva
Noble Widow – Glenys Groves
Doctor – Alan Duffield
Innkeeper – Robert Worle
Commissioner – Jeremy White

John Schlesinger (director)
Andrew Sinclair (revival director)
William Dudley (designs)
Maria Bjørnson (costumes)
Robert Bryan (lighting)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Kyrill Petrenko (conductor)

After a number of recent disappointments at Covent Garden, I am delighted to report that this Rosenkavalier marked something of a return to form. John Schlesinger’s production has a wisdom born of age – it is not that much younger now than the Marschallin – yet does not seem tired. It is quite different in spirit, for instance, from the Otto Schenk production in Munich, which really needed to be retired as soon as Carlos Kleiber stopped conducting. Whilst the sets in some respects look similar – though there is less ostentation in London – one resembles a museum piece, and the characters inhabit it as such, whilst the other sets a frame for musical drama. Time has passed – it is, after all, ein sonderbar Ding – but that is not necessarily a bad thing in this of all works. Andrew Sinclair’s revival direction seemed to highlight comedy rather more than I recall Schlesinger having done: a valid enough choice, I suppose, but I could have done without it.

Kyrill Petrenko was clearly anxious not to wallow; indeed, his aim seemed to be to highlight the modernist tendencies, so often misunderstood or straightforwardly ignored, in what is anything but a benign score. There were occasions when this perhaps went a little far: a few clarinet lines, for instance, which shrieked to little avail, evoking neither Elektra nor Mozart. However, as a guard against undue nostalgia, this was on the whole an estimable account. The orchestra played gorgeously, the Viennese sweetness of the violins a perfect joy. As so often when not labouring under the baton of its music director, its world-class status was reaffirmed.

Singing was a little patchier. There were no bad performances, but there was probably only one that truly stood out, namely Peter Rose’s Ochs. This seemed to me a considerably stronger account than I had heard from him at the beginning of the year in Berlin. It combined the subtle virtues of that performance, nowhere more so than when dealing with Hofmannsthal’s German, with a greater stage presence, yet without any danger of falling into the all-too-typical boorish caricature. This Ochs was a nobleman, if a provincial one. Soile Isokoski’s Marschallin exhibited commendable Lieder-like attention to the text, but lacked charisma, especially during a rather frosty first act. There is something a little amiss if one does not immediately fall in love with her, as one had in different ways with Renée Fleming and Dame Felicity Lott, the two previous Covent Garden reincarnations. I have heard better from Sophie Koch, though there was nothing, save a degree of anonymity, especially wrong with her performance. (How, though, I longed for Angelika Kirchschlager!) And Lucy Crowe made a reasonable enough job of Sophie, though she lacked the beauty many singers have brought to the role. If she could not prevent the character from exhibiting a certain irritating pointlessness, then that is hardly her fault; almost no one can. It was, though, a joy to witness once again the sheer professionalism of Sir Thomas Allen as Faninal: his fiftieth role for the Royal Opera (as discussed in an October interview).

Philharmonia/Salonen - Gurrelieder, 28 February 2009

Royal Festival Hall

Waldemar – Stig Andersen
Klauss-Narr – Andreas Conrad
Tove – Soile Isokoski
Wood-dove – Monica Groop
Peasant – Ralf Lukas
Speaker – Barbara Sukowa

City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Simon Halsey)
Philharmonia Voices
Philharmonia Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)

This was a wonderful opening to the Philharmonia’s series: ‘City of Dreams: Vienna 1900-1935’. A performance of Gurrelieder could hardly fail to be an occasion but the performance was excellent in pretty much every respect. I was reminded me quite how much I love this extraordinary work. It certainly evinces its composer’s unswerving integrity, even if the Wagner references in the choral writing can draw a little close for comfort. It is the most heartfelt of farewells to the nineteenth century yet it also looks forward, especially in the Speaker’s melodrama, to so much of what is to come. Indeed, the work’s progress, marked by its increasingly ‘modern’ orchestration – Schoenberg broke off that work between 1903 and 1910 – enables us to experience an ongoing critique of its earlier self, without any cost to our appreciation of the sheer gorgeousness of Part I.

Esa-Pekka Salonen’s performance with the Philharmonia captured perfectly the ever-shifting balance between late Romanticism and early modernism, without ever so much as hinting at the temptation to become duly astringent. We have all, I am sure, heard passionless, anti-septic performances of music from the Second Viennese School, which might have put us off for life. The point is not that Schoenberg’s modernist music becomes less ‘emotionally’ intense, quite the contrary; the sheer concentration of such intensity is what some listeners still find difficult to cope with. Rather to my surprise, the opening was a little shaky, the woodwind – especially flute – figures not sounding fully integrated and exhibiting a certain rhythmic insecurity. Yet there was barely another weakness to the performance. The Philharmonia was on good form as I can ever recall, perhaps even better. Certainly the warmth and silkiness of its strings would have put many Continental orchestras to shame, whilst the orchestral blend was, following that initial uncertainty, almost faultless. To marshal such huge forces is an achievement in itself but Salonen’s true achievement was to go beyond such ‘traffic control’ to engage musically with the work. After the bitter disappointment of Monday’s Flying Dutchman, in which the conductor had proved unable or unwilling to maintain any musical line, this was an object lesson in how to do so. Tempo variations were all successfully integrated into a varying, supremely flexible pulse. Orchestral detail, for instance the beautiful harp figurations, was highlighted, but never too much. And, in the balance, or rather dialectic, between symphonic cohesion and motivic definition, Salonen proved himself as true a Wagnerian as a Schoenbergian. I do not think I have ever heard, in the Wood-dove’s lament, the ’cellos’ evocation of the monk’s sounding of the Angelus so beautiful and so closely integrated into the dove’s narrative. Yet it never stood out as ‘mere’ pictorialism; it contributed to the ‘purely’ musical development rather than detracted from it. What Willi Reich called ‘the work’s infinitely subtle motivic cohesion’ was superlatively served on this occasion. Now I want to hear Salonen in Wagner.

The singing was throughout of a very high standard. Stig Andersen and Soile Isokoski proved sure interpreters of their parts. One might at times have thought them just a little ‘safe’, but it is no mean achievement to have presented so musical and coherent a reading. Isokoski’s experience in Lieder-singing shone through; thought had clearly gone into every word and its relationship to the music. Andersen’s slightly elderly-sounding Heldentenor sounded quite appropriate to Waldemar; unlike so many of his ilk, he can sing the part and never resorted to barking. I do not think I have encountered a better Wood-dove than Monica Groop, her lament as plangently moving as it is possible to imagine and her storytelling impeccable. Ralf Lukas was an admirable Peasant, whilst Andreas Conrad was a truly Mime-like Klaus-Narr, bringing home the similarity to an extent I do not recall previously having appreciated. Barbara Sukowa was at least as excellent a Speaker as she was on Claudio Abbado’s superlative Vienna recording. Her text was so internalised that she could deliver it with a freedom, always intimately connected to the music, which apparently transcended any impression of rehearsal. It was a great pity, though, that the use of microphones was not only so clearly audible, but so crass that she sounded as if she were almost in an entirely different acoustic. Perhaps it is necessary, or advisable, to use microphones here, although I doubt it; if so, however, it really needs to be handled better. The choral singing was equally excellent, the Wild Hunt duly terrifying and ghostly – shades of the Dutchman, mediated very heavily by Götterdämmerung – whilst the sheer honest exultance of Schoenberg’s final hymn to the sun was captured ecstatically.

It was a good idea to provide surtitles, rather than have everyone spending half the time at following the programme – often a line or two behind. However, the translation left more than a little to be desired, not so much in terms of accuracy as with respect to strange infelicities of style, unsure whether it was aiming at archaism or efficient modern rendering. The appearance of ‘Gurre-on-Sea’ was unfortunate, to say the least, evoking images of Clacton rather than Teutonic mystery. And the audience was sadly on typical form when it came to shuffling and coughing. Sometimes the latter is unavoidable, I know, but surely the woman sitting next to me could have waited a little longer than the end of the second bar. The shifting impressionistic textures of the Prelude suffered particularly in this regard. Yet such irritations remained minor in the face of so movingly assured a performance. If the rest of the series lives up to the expectations now engendered, London and various other European cities are in for a rare treat. Next stop: Verklärte Nacht and Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony.