Manon Lescaut, Opera Holland Park, 4 June 2019

Holland Park

Images: © Robert Workman

Manon Lescaut – Elizabeth Llewellyn

Lescaut – Paul Carey Jones

Des Grieux – Peter Auty

Geronte di Ravoir – Stephen Richardson

Edmondo – Stephen Aviss

Singer – Ellie Edmonds

Dancing Master – John Wood

Innkeeper, Sergeant of the Royal Archers – Alistair Sutherland

Backing Singers – Hannah Boxall, Susie Buckle, Lara Rebekah Harvey, Ayaka Tanimoto

Shadow Manons – Angelica Barroga, Isabella Martinez, Hanan Mugga

Karolina Sofulak (director)
George Johnson-Leigh (designs)

Rory Beaton (lighting)

Tim Claydon (choreography)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Richard Harker)

City of London Sinfonia

Peter Robinson (conductor)

Manon Lescaut is a curious opera. Its protracted genesis and sometimes unsatisfactory dramaturgy seem ultimately to work against it, whatever the attempted solution. A Leipzig revival of its original, 1893 version suggested that reinstatement of the original first-act finale was certainly not the answer. I am yet to be convinced that it can be made to work, though I shall happily be proved wrong. Perhaps Puccini’s greatest devotees feel the same way I should about La finta semplice, Feuersnot, or Die Feen. The operatic repertoire is full of works, after all, whose potential has been incompletely realised; we do what we can with them and should often be the poorer without them. The gap between potential and realisation can even prove part of a work’s fascination, especially in a knowing production and performance.

Elizabeth Llewellyn (Manon Lescaut) and Shadow Manons

Alas, Karolina Sofulak’s production, ambition notwithstanding, does not come across as engaging with quite enough of those apparently intractable problems – and a little too often seems unclear. The 1960s updating works well enough in theory and has its moments in practice too. A society preoccupied with style and with a strong tension between reaction and liberation has obvious parallels with the eighteenth-century world of the Abbé Prévost. Where Sofulak’s production does score is in trying to make something of the heroine. If only we had something of Manon and Des Grieux’s time in Paris, she might come across as more fleshed out. (Puccini continued to entertain such a possibility for a decade.) Instead, Sofulak offers us a nightclub singer and entertainer who attempts – I think – to take responsibility for her own career, to wrest its control from the lowlifes around her. The idea seems to me a good one; the problem lies, perhaps as with the work, in its partial, confusing realisation. There is nothing wrong with making an audience work, asking it to fill in certain aspects; not everything can be portrayed on stage or indeed in the pit. The clashes between ‘original’ and new setting, though, often seem arbitrary rather than productive. By the time one realises what is happening in the fourth act, that Manon is making her escape from this world, abandoning her lover too, one may have ceased to care. A keener sense of place, even if place explicitly not created, would have helped. One does not need to see Le Havre or the bizarre ‘desert’ outside New Orleans, but if much is to remain the same, either abstraction or knowing, purposive infidelity may need to come across more strongly. Perhaps, though, I was missing the point and might feel differently on a second viewing; it has happened before and will surely happen again.

That difficulty with caring or with otherwise feeling truly involved is part of the work’s problem, at least for many of us. Too often, I found myself wishing that this were Lulu or, somewhere in between, Boulevard Solitude. Perhaps, though, that did credit to much of the musical performance. If, in my heart of hearts, I might prefer a few more strings for Puccini, I could hardly fault the City of London Sinfonia under Peter Robinson, and do not wish to try. There were a few moments when pit and stage fell out of sync in the first act, but that can happen in the finest of houses. More to the point, Robinson and his players pointed up nicely the character of each act, permitting one’s ears to draw all manner of connections between Puccini’s roots, his future, and his influence and affinities. Wagner loomed increasingly large, but so did devices Puccini would adopt more successfully in subsequent works, as well as sounds one might have thought stolen from Debussy, Stravinsky, even Poulenc – save for the fact that, if anything, it must have been the other way around.

Lescaut (Paul Carey Jones), Manon, Geronte (Stephen Richardson)

Elizabeth Llewellyn unquestionably did what she could to have one care about Manon and her plight. If the character remains unsatisfactory, that is in no way to be attributed to Llewellyn, whose typically intelligent, sympathetic performance rose far above the vocal difficulties recent laryngitis occasionally revealed. Paul Carey Jones and Stephen Richardson brought similar depth to their roles as Lescaut and Geronte respectively, again supplying as much implied context as anyone could reasonably ask. If Peter Auty’s performance as Des Grieux proved somewhat generalised and gestural, there could be no doubting his enthusiasm. The Holland Park Chorus combined such enthusiasm with greater precision – vocal and staged; so too did other members of the cast, Stephen Aviss and Alastair Sutherland making a particular favourable impression.

Fidelio, Opera Holland Park, 5 July 2010

Leonore – Yvonne Howard
Florestan – Tom Randle
Rocco – Stephen Richardson
Marzelline – Sarah Redgwick
Jacquino – Nicky Spence
Don Pizarro – Phillip Joll
Don Fernando – Njabulo Madlala
First Prisoner – Peter Kent
Second Prisoner – Henry Grant Kerswell

Olivia Fuchs (director)
Jamie Vartan (designs)
Colin Grenfell (lighting)
Clare Whistler (choreography)

Opera Holland Park Chorus
City of London Sinfonia
Peter Robinson (conductor)

Olivia Fuchs’s production of Fidelio earned plaudits upon its first outing in 2003; though I did not see it then, it remains just as relevant and disturbing today. Guantánamo Bay references, brought out both in the stage direction and in Jamie Vartan’s excellent designs, need to be hammered home just as much as they did then. The United States may have a new administration and this country may have a new government, but the camp of infamy remains open for business and the war criminals who led us into Afghanistan and Iraq have never been tried. Even if some resolution had been reached, one would not need to look far to find equally urgent cases: Burma, Gaza, Tibet, let alone the domestic prisons of our own countries, cynically packed with unfortunate souls who have no reason to be there, solely in order to keep the likes of the Daily Mail happy – though when are such organs of poujadisme ever satisfied? This production’s revelation of the prisoners in their orange jumpsuits is shocking enough, but the way in which they are cowed, in need of the light yet almost unable to cope with it, is something to shame not only those who will never see it but those who have voted for or at least tacitly assented to such barbarism, even those of us who abhor it and yet have been unsuccessful in bringing it to an end.

It is, of course, tiresome to have to confront those who reckon Fidelio a failure; they so spectacularly miss the point that this is a work about freedom, and not in any sense that our political overlords would understand. Yet a production such as this might actually accomplish that confrontation for us. Fuchs’s reappraisal of Jacquino transforms a bit part into something truly horrifying: doubtless not an evil person, but a stupid one, brutalised by the situation, who engages in relatively ‘low-level’ abuse, or so the politicians would see it, of the prisoners. In another setting, he would doubtless be chanting ‘harmless’ nationalist slogans at a soccer match. And why should we trust the minister, who arrives with sinister bodyguards in shades? Likewise, the ‘media’, desperate to be let in to snap the first photographs? This souring of the final victory may not have been what Beethoven intended, but it works, and there is no harm in undercutting the music just a little, when it is done so well. It need not be done so every time, but is a valid option when confronted with an age of barbarism beyond anything the composer could have imagined.

Unfortunately, this proved to be very much a tale of the production and, to a lesser extent, the singing. Peter Robinson was the archetypal Kapellmeister in his conducting. There was no sense of the music meaning anything at all to him, let alone the astounding instantiation of a once-radical notion of bourgeois freedom. All he did was beat time. One could not only hear every bar line; one could set an atomic clock by the metronomic beat. The reading, or rather rendition – ‘extraordinary’ in its way – was free of Harnoncourtisms or worse, save for the kettledrum sticks, but that is the best one could say. The City of London Sinfonia played well enough, horns emerging triumphant from their ordeal in ‘Komm, Hoffnung’. Yet, even in a small performance space such as this, the strings were too small in number. One needs to be drowned in, driven on by, a torrent of symphonic lava. As it was, one concentrated on the fire of the production, with the orchestral contribution reduced to something akin to a soundtrack. This was not the orchestra’s fault at all, but a string section of 7.5.4.3.2 can only do so much.

The soloists compensated considerably. Tom Randle has always seemed to me a highly intelligent musician and so he was again here. His Florestan could only really work in a small-scale performance, but after initial wavering intonation on his cruel opening ‘Gott!’, he threw his all into the role, emerging with true musico-dramatic credibility. Jonas Kaufmann in Paris is an experience I shall never forget, but until there is opportunity to see and to hear his astonishing assumption again, this will do fine. Yvonne Howard was a sincere Leonore. One may have heard greater vocal power and beauty, but she convinced on stage, and navigated Beethoven’s often cruel demands without faltering. The Pizarro and Fernando were unimpressive, but Sarah Redgwick was a feisty, characterful Marzelline. Stephen Richardson was unusually credible as the compromised Rocco, who manages yet to do the right thing: a truly Beethovenian inspiration. Richardson’s fine command of the vocal text was a significant contributing factor here. Nicky Spence was equally convincing in the characterisation of Fuchs’s reappraised Jacquino. As for the dialogue, it is rarely anything but a trial when delivered by non-native speakers; I have heard worse though.

There were drawbacks, then, significantly so in terms of the musical direction. This is not a Fidelio one would wish simply to hear. But such are the production's strength and conviction that it remains necessary to see it.