Mark Simpson, Pleasure, Royal Opera, 12 May 2016

(London premiere)

 

Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith

Nathan – Timothy Nelson

Val – Lesley Garrett
Anna Fewmore – Steven Page
Matthew – Nick Pritchard

Tim Albery (director)

Leslie Travers (designs)
Malcolm Rippeth (lighting)

Psappha
Nicholas Kok (conductor)

New work from composers new to opera – sometimes, as here, in the guise of co-commissions from the Royal Opera, Aldeburgh Music, and Opera North – has been prominent amongst the highlights from the Royal Opera House’s recent seasons. The London premiere of Mark Simpson’s first opera, Pleasure, would doubtless have taken place in the ROH’s own Linbury Studio Theatre, had it not been closed for refurbishment; instead, we travelled across town to the Hammersmith Lyric as part of a welcome trend for collaboration between London’s opera houses and alternative theatres and spaces. It may have been a bit of a trek for those of us living in the East – not, I promise, the only reason for my enthusiasm for the Hackney Empire – but the results, compositional and performative, justified the journey, and it is always interesting in itself to discover how opera will flourish, or otherwise, at a different venue.

 

Pleasure, we learned from the composer’s own note, was inspired by his ‘own experience of Liverpool’s nightlife’ during his late teens and early twenties. ‘One evening, as I stood pouring my heart out to a toilet attendant in one of the clubs, I suddenly started to see the world around me with a new sense of objectivity. I asked myself whether she might know much more about the clientele than she appeared to.’ At about the same time, in 2008, Simpson had begun to read Melanie Challenger’s poetry collection, Galatea: ‘Up until this point I had never experienced the written word as viscerally as I had experienced musical sound.’ His Royal Liverpool Philharmonic commission, A mirror-fragment… was inspired by one of her poems, and he asked Challenger, ‘in the pub after the premiere’ whether she would be willing to write a libretto for the opera whose idea had been taking root. ‘She immediately agreed, and so began our fruitful collaborative partnership.’

 

Not having read the programme beforehand, I admit that I had not noticed the background presence of the Hephaestus myth until reading Challenger’s note. One can certainly experience the story, ‘about a woman working in a gay bar who helps the young, lost men but is also inexplicable to them,’ purely on its own terms. However, on reflection – and a good, non-disposable opera will surely, whatever the philistines claim, always lend itself to reflection – the act of revenge of the unwanted son has provided me not only with an analogy but with a foundation for further consideration of the events and their presentation. In that respect, this may be considered in the best sense a highly traditional opera.

 

Simpson’s score treads a successful line between two understandings of setting: that of environment and that of the words and action. ‘Sound world’ might be an overused term, but here, I think, it really deserves mention. There is no mere imitation or importation of the sounds of clubland; the magic Mozart works with eighteenth-century dance music is, after all, alchemical, not mimetical. There is nevertheless much that is evocative: not just the synthesiser sound – often present, but never overused, and rarely albeit tellingly employed as the principal sonic ingredient – and not just the rhythms (for instance, of drag queen Anna Fewmore’s most public commentary), but also, and perhaps for me most intriguingly, in the darkness of the typical band sonority. Redolent in some respects of Weill before he (more or less) sold out, albeit a Weill of now rather than ‘then’, the music presents and furthers not only such alienation but also invitation. Indeed, the one feeds off the other, the drama anything but Brechtian: again, if I may, rather traditionally operatic. Henze came to my mind as, if not an inspiration, at least a forerunner.

 

Likewise its structuring and the consequent crystallisation of moments of realisation, of emotional climaxes. Val’s final lament belongs to, or at least may be placed in, a tradition one might trace back through Janáček to Purcell, and further back still. Having lost her son, Nathan, once, through the distant yet present tragedy of her rape, she has now lost him again, finally, from an overdose, brought on by her denial that she was the woman he thought – and presumably still knew – her to be. ‘A son she never wanted to have/A son she never wanted to know’. She cannot quite rise to the occasion as a Puccini heroine would; that, surely, is the point. Yet, ‘I’ll embrace you as I should have done. I’ll tell you that I know you.’ Meanwhile, in time-honoured tradition, the sounds of a callous external world intrude; Anna Fewmore calls. ‘Come, all you exquisite creatures. Come!’ That final cry echoes and subverts, yet also offers catharsis of a sort. The loneliness of all concerned – to whom we must add Matthew, intoxicated by Nathan’s beauty, cruelly disabused by the cynical wisdom of the drag queen who has seen it all – is perhaps the strongest echo of all, brought to dramatic life in both of those understandings of ‘setting’: environmental and verbal.

 

That would have come to very little, of course, without strong performances and staging. Nicholas Kok led the Manchester-based ensemble, Psappha in an incisive performance. It should perhaps come as no surprise that some of the most arresting instrumental writing should have been for clarinets (Dov Goldberg and Scott Lygate), given Simpson’s prowess as a clarinettist. The whole ensemble shone, though: positioned on stage as upstairs ‘band’: a Chorus of and for this world. The excellent set and costume designs of Leslie Travers and Malcolm Rippeth’s lighting contributed greatly to so much of what I have outlined above. This was a setting in which one could believe, in which Tim Albery’s direction of the singers made sense and came to life – and death.

 

Leslie Garrett’s portrayal of Val duly tugged at the heart strings. In the opening scene, I was a little unsure. Would occasional imperfections of intonation prove too much of a difficulty? Not at all: vocal and verbal sincerity, coupled with palpable dramatic identification entirely won me over. Steven Page’s Anna was worldly-wise, yes, but just as emotionally truthful’. Not for nothing had Simpson’s original ambition been to write an opera set amongst the drag queens of Liverpool. Brought to life just as powerfully, just as intelligently, were the romantic yearning – this was certainly not all youthful lust – of Nick Pritchard’s Matthew and the tragic bewilderment and predicament of Timothy Nelson’s Nathan. All four singers, it seemed, not only believed in their characters; they created and gave form to them before our eyes and ears. Such is the godlike business of art, as Hephaestus’s father – or at least his poetic creators – might have told us. So also might Anna in her ‘art of decay’, born, Challenger revealed, of the ‘brilliant spit-and-sawdust humour of Mancunian drag queen, Divine David’. PLEASURE. then, was spelled out to us, sometimes completely, sometimes in forlorn or aspirant fragments: not just scenically, but musico-dramatically too.

‘Do you think,’ Nathan asked Matthew, ‘it’s possible to separate yourself and become something different?’ Performance and work alike asked more questions than they could answer; such, after all, is the role of drama. However, the part of that question that relates to opera in general as well as to this specific opera was, in a sense, answered, as well as further questioned, by so fruitful a development of tradition.

 

Stuart McRae, The Devil Inside, Music Theatre Wales, 3 February 2016

Peacock Theatre, London

 

Richard – Nicholas Sharratt

James – Ben McAteer
Old Man, Vagrant – Steven Page
Catherine – Rachel Kelly

Matthew Richardson (director)

Samal Blak (designs)
Ace McCarron (lighting)

Music Theatre Wales Ensemble

Michael Rafferty (conductor)

 

Images: Bill Cooper
Richard (Nicholas Sharratt) and James (Ben McAteer)

 

An excellent new opera, jointly commissioned and co-produced by Music Theatre Wales and Scottish Opera, The Devil Inside received its premiere at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow (23 January) and, following a visit to Edinburgh, continued its touring life in London. Not the least of the evening’s discoveries for me was the Peacock Theatre on Portugal Street: used by the LSE during the day, and turning properly theatrical at night. It is a splendid space, of which I hope to see more.

 

Richard and Catherine (Rachel Kelly)

Stuart McRae and his librettist, Louise Welsh, have produced a finely crafted opera in seven scenes, none overstaying its welcome, the whole more than the sum of its parts. ‘Inspired’ by Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Bottle Imp, we enter the sub-Faustian world of late capitalism and ‘property development’. That, however, is the setting rather than the substance; the bargain is the thing. James and Richard, lost in the mountains, meet an old man who offers them a way to become as rich as he is, if they buy a green bottle from him. Tempered in the flames of Hell, it contains an imp who will grant the owner his every wish; the catch is that, if you remain in possession of it when you die, you will go to Hell, and the only way of ridding yourself of it is to sell it on for less than you paid for it. And so, the story continues, James as rich as, well, a property developer, before selling it on to Richard, who remains haunted, consumed by it. Having met Catherine, who becomes his wife, James must regain the bottle when he learns of her terminal illness. The price has sunk so low that they must go abroad, where the currency is worth less. Eventually, and just in time, Richard, addicted to the bottle and its imp, takes it for one centime from Catherine, makes his last wish and dies. What, however, has Catherine wished for just before? If the Devil has made her pregnant, then...?

The libretto works as it should, as a libretto, rather than as a stand-alone piece. McRae clearly relished the opportunities it offered, for again, his music works as it should, as musical drama, not as stand-alone music. It is atmospheric, characterful, resourceful, and more. The smallish ensemble is full of intriguing solos and instrumental blends. Two harmonicas make for a frightening duet; interestingly (I only noticed this afterwards from the programme), they are played by the two violinists. Deep sounds – we are dealing, after all, with an opera forged in Hell – are often to the fore: alto flute, bass clarinet, contrabassoon, trombone. But so are fantastical, post-Britten glistenings, silver and gold, as befits the prize and the delusions it offers. The music for the bottle and its imp itself does not in any sense sound ‘like’ Wagner’s for the Tarnhelm, but the unnerving mixture of timbre and harmony produces what is perhaps not an entirely dissimilar effect. (Or maybe that was just my fancy!) It is perhaps inevitable that the sound of chamber opera in English brings to mind composers such as Britten and Birtwistle; I am not sure that I detected specific influence, although I am not sure that I did not, either. More importantly, the score sounds apposite, guides the action, indeed in many cases is the action (the interludes in particular, although not only then), and makes for a chilling night in the theatre.

 

James and the Old Man (Steven Page)

 

Michael Rafferty’s direction of the Music Theatre Wales Ensemble seemed wise and assured throughout, balancing musical and theatrical impulses to excellent effect, as did the playing of the instrumentalists themselves. All four members of the cast created their characters to equally fine effect; they sprang off the page into our mythical consciousness. Nicholas Sharratt’s Richard proved properly ambivalent, ultimately human and loving, yet not without weakness. Rachel Kelly’s Catherine seemed too good to be true, and in a sense was: was not her obsession with having a child as dangerous as the others’ obsession with the bottle and its imp? Ben McAteer made James’s sorry descent utterly credible from beginning to end. Steven Page’s Old Man and Vagrant (on the far-away island, briefly in possession of the bottle himself) made their theatrical point vividly and without histrionics. The resourceful production from Matthew Richardson and his team left nothing to be desired. So much can be done with intelligent direction, designs, and props, that attention was focused where it should be: upon what emerged as a new and important re-telling of an old, powerful tale.

For details of the production’s tour, visit the website of Music Theatre Wales.

Alexander Raskatov: A Dog's Heart, English National Opera, 20 November 2010

United Kingdom premiere

The Coliseum

(sung in English)

(Images: Steven Cummiskey. As ever, click to enlarge.)











Professor Filipp Filippovich Preobrazhensky – Steven Page
Peter Amoldovich Bormenthal – Leigh Melrose
Sharikov – Peter Hoare
Sharik the dog (unpleasant voice) – Elena Vassileva
Sharik the dog (pleasant voice) – Andrew Watts
Darya Petrovna – Elena Vassileva
Zina – Nancy Allen Lundy
Shvonder – Alasdair Elliott
Vyasemskaya – Andrew Watts
First Patient – Peter Hoare
Second Patient – Frances McCafferty
Provocateur – David Newman
Proletarians – Ella Kirkpatrick, Andrew Watts, Alasdair Elliott, Michael Burke
Fyodor/Newspaper Seller/Big Boss – Graeme Danby
Secretary – Sophie Desmars
Investigator – Matthew Hargreaves
Drunkards – Michael Selby, Christopher Speight
Old Women – Deborah Davison, Jane Reed

Puppeteers – Robin Beer, Finn Caldwell, Josie Dexter, Mark Down

Simon McBurney (director, choreographer)
Michael Levine and Luis Carvalho (set designs)
Christina Cunningham (costumes)
Paul Anderson (lighting)
Toby Sedgwick (movement)
Finn Ross (projections)
Blind Summit Theatre: Mark Down and Nick Barnes (director of puppetry)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Merry)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Garry Walker (conductor)

Three cheers – at the very least – for the English National Opera! ‘The current climate’ is a dreary, defeatist phrase, generally an excuse for enemies of all that it is to be human to diminish our humanity further; nevertheless, it seems to inform so much of what we do and even hope for at the moment, that to have a new opera by an un-starry Russian composer, of whom most of the audience most likely will never have heard, performed at the Coliseum is worth a cheer or two in itself. (The current practice of many companies and orchestras in parochially commissioning works only from British artists is unworthy of organisations that would claim a place upon the world stage.) A couple more cheers – again, at least – must be granted the show’s resounding theatrical success. For more than anything else this is a triumph for Simon McBurney and Complicite. After a number of false starts in its current mission to import values from the non-operatic theatre, however one wishes to term it, ENO, in collaboration with the co-producing Holland Festival, really hits the target this time.

A fuller synopsis can be found elsewhere, but briefly, A Dog’s Heart reworks Mikhail Bulgakov’s satire. Cesare Mazzonis’s libretto is here translated by Martin Pickard. The opera opens with a stray dog – the superb puppet work inspired by Alberto Giacometti (click here for the sculpture in question) – mistreated by men, apparently rescued and promised a dog’s paradise by a distinguished scientist, Professor Filipp Filippovich Preobrazhensky. The parallelism between the new workers’ state and the animal’s condition is revealingly maintained and deepened throughout, likewise the repellent superior pretensions of Preobrazhensky – the name will be familiar to students of Bolshevism and Stalinism – both as scientist and as human. Eventually, the professor sees his chance for true scientific glory. Having fed up the dog, whom he has named Sharik, he transplants human testicles and a pituitary gland, to create a ‘new man’, Sharikov. Sharikov’s antics leave him, the professor notes, at the most rudimentary evolutionary level, yet that is hardly Sharikov’s fault; indeed he garners hope from association with proletarian organisations, further horrifying his creator. The professor disowns him and conducts a second operation. The creature is once again a ‘mere’ dog. I could not help wondering about a potential English play on words: is the dog man another representation of our desire to create a god man?

What marks A Dog’s Heart out from many collaborations is that it was collaborative from the beginning, a joint project involving composer, librettist, and Complicite. This tells; I suspected it must have been so before I discovered that it was. A true sense of theatre is present from the very outset, the opera opening without warning. Pacing is keen throughout and the stage direction puts most to shame. The puppetry, previously mentioned, is wonderful – this includes a cat, whom Sharikov cannot help but chase – but so are mechanics such as scene changing, so often something hapless to endure in the opera house. Sets from Michael Levine and his assistant, Luis Carvalho, are exemplary: never fussy, but evocative both of period and of their stage in the drama. The grandeur of the professor’s rooms – envied by the proletarian house committee, but our scientist has friends in high places – provides an apt link with an older Moscow, whilst Finn Ross’s NEP-style projections make clear what has changed. The silhouetted – in part – operation was very well handled, bringing subsequent gore into greater relief.

This is, to my knowledge, the only opera whose first act closes with the injunction, ‘Suck my cock!’ Why, in the supertitles, coyly write ‘c*unt’ thus, when everyone could hear the word, and why suppose, especially in such a context, that the sensibilities of Daily Mail readers should be considered? The ‘profane language’ is not, in that bizarre circumlocution, ‘gratuitous’, but integral to the plot, above all to the dog-man’s characterisation. Where it can somewhat irritate in Ligeti’s Le grand macabre – though there is, of course, Dadaist (un-)reason for it there too – it would be several suburbanisms too far for anyone to object in the present case.

Music, it must be said, takes second billing, though that is not a unique phenomenon: Gérard Mortier’s parting shot at the Opéra national de Paris, Am Anfang, billed Anselm Kiefer’s installation before Jörg Widmann’s score, and Widmann is a more famed composer than Alexander Raskatov. And yet, though I flatter myself that I can be called a musician, I did not mind, which must say something about the sum of the parts. It was far from easy to discern where one ‘contribution’ began and another stopped. For instance, doubling of parts seemed to have a point beyond economy. This is not Lulu; there is none of Berg’s carefully-crafted parallelism and symmetry. But the taking on of different roles said something about anonymity, appearance from and disappearance into the proletarian crowd, and Warhol-like moments in the limelight.

I cannot imagine wishing to hear to Raskatov’s score outside the theatre – and whilst I should definitely be tempted by a subsequent dramatic project, I should find it difficult to evince enthusiasm for hearing his music in the concert hall. Nevertheless, it works in the theatre. (People say that of Verdi, but that apparent success has always eluded me.) It is recognisably ‘Russian’- sounding, closer perhaps to Schnittke than anyone else, though there may be other influences of whose work I am simply unaware. Often somewhat cartoonish, it occupies its (relatively) subordinate role cheerfully and has its individualistic moments, for instance in the use of bass guitar. Connections to earlier Russian composers are manifest too. This is not Prokofiev (certainly not Prokofiev at his operatic best, for instance The Gambler or The Fiery Angel), but it is a good deal more entertaining than most Shostakovich – or Schnittke, for that matter. I cannot say that I could hear much or any influence from late Stravinsky or Webern, music to whose qualities David Nice, in his helpful programme note, suggested that Raskatov aspired. (Incidentally – actually, not incidentally, but importantly – the programme features, McBurney’s contributions included, were of an unusually high standard.) Thinning of textures on certain occasions aside, it was difficult to discern any kinship with the iron discipline of those serialist masters. But Raskatov’s closed forms, whilst obvious, exert their own dramatic impetus in tandem with the events on stage, even if the vocal writing – melismata, scalic passages, and so on – swiftly becomes predictable. A passcaglia signals darkening of mood, likewise the odd Mussorgskian choral moment: again, perhaps, predictable, yet again, perhaps, ‘effective’: a word I recall my A-level music teacher counselling against using, but here undeniably ‘effective’.

Garry Walker’s command of the score sounded exemplary. The sweeping dramatic drive he imparted made me keen to hear him back at the Coliseum very soon. He certainly knew how to bring the best out of the excellent ENO Orchestra – who deserved a good number of cheers of their own. The musicians played their hearts out – perhaps an unfortunate metaphor in the context of the present work – so much as to make one tempted truly to believe in Raskatov’s score. Steven Page presented a convincing dramatic portrayal of Preobrazhensky’s dilemma: no hint of caricature here, though the vibrato may have proved a little much for some tastes. Peter Hoare did likewise, albeit in very different manner, for Sharikov, repelling and provoking sympathy. Other noteworthy performances included the aburdist coloratura part of Zina the maid (Nancy Allen Lundy) and the grotesque cameo of Frances McCafferty’s elderly Second Patient. How could anyone refuse? How could anyone not? The dog as dog has two voices: unpleasant, the distorted, loud-speaker-hailing soprano Elena Vassileva (also impressive as the professor’s housekeeper, Darya Petrovna), and pleasant, the fine counter-tenor, Andrew Watts. There was certainly no finer musicianship on stage than that of Watts, whose plangent tones inspired the most genuine sympathy of all without sentimentalising.

The theatre seemed full and the audience responded enthusiastically. I saw two composers – Raskatov aside – so I suspect there will have been more. So no, this was not a musical event to rank with the recent premiere of Alexander Goehr’s Promised End – English Touring Opera’s initiative rightly described by Michael Tanner in The Spectator as ‘astoundingly heroic’ – but as a musico-theatrical event, it scored very highly. Unlike, say, the dismal recent Rufus Norris Don Giovanni, which, had ‘theatre people’ come to see it, might well have put them off opera for life, this might just have intrigued some of them to explore musical drama further. Our political and financial masters would never understand this, let alone agree, but that is something to which one cannot affix a price.

Elegy for Young Lovers, English National Opera, 24 April 2010

Young Vic

Hilda Mack – Jennifer Rhys-Davies
Elisabeth Zimmer – Kate Valentine
Carolina von Kirchstetten – Lucy Schaufer
Toni Reischmann – Robert Murray
Gregor Mittenhofer – Steven Page
Dr Wilhelm Reischmann – William Robert Allenby
Josef Mauer – Stephen Kennedy
Servants at Der Schwarze Adler – Joyce Henderson, Stephen O’Toole, Sam Taylor, Emma Vickery

Fiona Shaw (director)
Tom Pye (designer)
Peter Mumford (lighting)
Lynette Wallworth (video)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Stefan Blunier (conductor)

Three cheers to ENO for staging Henze! It is more than time that one of our major companies did, nine years having passed since the Royal Opera’s superb Boulevard Solitude. (If only that might be revived, though there are of course more pressing concerns, such as hearing x and y in multiple revivals of La Traviata…) This Elegy for Young Lovers is on a smaller scale, but so is the work itself – and smaller is not necessarily lesser. Performances are generally good, and Fiona Shaw’s direction in the intimate space of the Young Vic impresses.

Elegy for Young Lovers is one of those works concerned with the figure of the artist: a subject that not unnaturally tends to delight a good number of artists. The writer, Gregor Mittenhofer exploits all those around him for the sake of artistic inspiration – which seems in his case to be more transcription of events than sublimation into something greater. Poor Hilda Mack, who lost her husband forty years ago, is of value only on account of her visions, which he greedily plagiarises. When Elisabeth forsakes him for his godson, Toni, he gives his blessing, but then, when the Alpine guide calls to warn of a blizzard, claims that he knows of no one out on the mountain, having sent them to gather flowers for him. The point is less revenge than that they can serve as the ‘inspiration’ for his new poem, Elegy for Young Lovers. It is with a public reading in Vienna – here on video – that the opera ends.

Shaw’s setting is essentially when and where it should be: the Austrian Alps in the early twentieth century. She directs the cast well, doubtless drawing upon her own theatrical experience, and even manages to get the singers’ spoken dialogue to sound as if it is delivered by actors: no mean achievement, as veterans of The Magic Flute or Fidelio will tell you. All, quite rightly, is ultimately focused upon Mittenhofer’s ego, but delineation of other characters is not neglected. A true coup de théâtre, for which Tom Pye’s design work should also be credited, comes at the end of the second act, when the ice clock, which has been chiming the hours, is smashed by Mittenhofer in his impotent rage, wishing the lovers dead but surely also an expression of his artistic inadequacy. What makes this especially memorable, is the reappearance of Hilda, who now realises how she has been exploited. She picks up a little ice for her drink, undercutting the melodrama – that is, Mittenhofer’s egocentric melodrama.

Stefan Blunier, whom I recently heard give a fine account of The Love for Three Oranges in Berlin, was equally impressive here – not in the pit, but above the stage. The balance between drive and tenderness was well chosen, and the mélange of styles – Berg and Stravinsky, not for the first time, loom especially large – was given its due, without ever sounding incoherent. Solo instrumentalists from the chamber orchestra were without exception excellent; it would be invidious to single out anyone in particular.

Steven Page commands the stage as Mittenhofer. Vocally, there are a few less than perfect moments, but the portrayal of the role is all: monstrous, self-satisfied, ultimately hollow. Lucy Schaufer brought out both the pride and the sadness in the Gräfin von Kirchstetten: an aristocrat and, more important, a woman who abases herself for the dubious cause of the artist. (In a telling moment, Mittenhofer acknowledges the other characters’ inadequacies, though not directly his own; the dramatic truth is that he is right, at least with respect to them. They are human, all too human, too.) I was not sure why her accent veered towards the transatlantic though. Kate Valentine and Robert Murray were likeable as the young lovers, and their final scene, in which they imagine their old age and the course of their married life, was genuinely moving. It is difficult, however, to consider Murray a success as a romantic, or Romantic, lead; character roles should be more his thing. Jennifer Rhys-Davies’s turns – in more than one sense – as Hilda Mack were appropriately show-stealing. Her increasing lucidity proved both convincing and unnerving. Is she more unhinged than the ‘artist’? It appears not. I found the aggressive Irishness of Stephen Kennedy’s mountain guide (a spoken role) rather out of place, but this was a blemish upon the production rather than a fundamental flaw.

It is interesting to note that Auden and Kallman dubbed the work – their equivalent to Arabella, dedicating it to Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Arabella is far from my favourite Strauss opera; indeed, I have never been able to make much of it at all, despite some wonderful moments. Moreover, apart from the hotel setting, it is not especially clear, at least to me, why they should think of Arabella. But one can see at least why the librettists might have been thinking of Strauss and Hofmannsthal, with their fondness for reflection on art and artists. Could Henze, though? He has often struck me as a Strauss-like figure, despite – or perhaps, on some level, because of? – his antagonism, which goes far beyond comments he might sometimes have made concerning, say, Wagner, Schoenberg, or Webern (though never, so far as I am aware, Stravinsky). ‘Beethoven regarded his whole enterprise as a contribution to human progress. As with Marxism, his goal is not God but Man, whereas there are other artists who have never given a thought to the moral function of their work; for instance Richard Strauss, who is for me – perhaps I’m going too far – something like a court composer to Kaiser Wilhelm II.’ Does the writer of these words, Henze himself, protest a little too much? And which artist is closer to Mittenhofer? A sadness for composer and librettists must be that they are constantly in danger of exploiting human experiences for the sake of something called art. Perhaps the imperative therefore ought to be that the art produced is good, for, as Adrian Mourby writes in a programme note concerning the Yeatsian inspiration for Auden: ‘It was Yeats’s failures as an artist that concerned Auden most. It was from these that he wished to distance himself. Mittenhoffer is not just a monster. He is probably not much of a writer.’ This production helps vindicate Henze and his librettists from at least that charge.

Così fan tutte, English National Opera, 6 June 2009

The Coliseum

Fiordiligi – Susan Gritton
Dorabella – Fiona Murphy
Ferrando – Thomas Glenn
Guglielmo – Liam Bonner
Don Alfonso – Steven Page
Despina – Sophie Bevan

Abbas Kiarostami (director)
Elaine Tyler-Hall (associate director)
Malika Chauveau (designs)
Jean Kalman (lighting)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Merry)
Stefan Klingele (conductor)

ENO’s new Così fan tutte hit the headlines – or at least the arts headlines – some time before it opened, owing to our Teheran Embassy’s inability to provide director Abbas Kiarostami with a visa. After interminable wrangling, an exasperated Kiarostami, eventually pulled out; he entrusted work in London, the production having been premiered last year at the Festival d’Aix en Provence, to his deputy, Elaine Tyler-Hall. Even in the dying days of New Labour, British foreign policy remains on every level a disgrace. Still, our American friends will doubtless be relieved to hear that they are not alone in erecting such barriers to artistic cooperation. Some allowances might therefore be in order.

Kiarostami, it seems, did not even know the opera before it was suggested he direct it. There is indeed a sense of first acquaintance, for, unlike so many directors, this one appears to take the action at face value. Kiarostami’s Così is set where the libretto says it should be: the Bay of Naples, in period too. I have no problem with that; with the exception of Vesuvius, surely a gift for a director, although I have never seen it acted upon, the setting in itself seems largely immaterial to me. There are a couple of hints that we today are observing and engaged with something then: the filmed backdrop of a Neapolitan caffé during the first scene, and the unfortunate filmed backdrop of the orchestra during the final scene. I say unfortunate, since it is extremely – and unproductively – distracting to endure the discrepancies between a filmed account and what one is hearing from the pit. But nothing more is made of these then-and-now suggestions.

I suppose, to quote Geoff Andrew’s programme note on the director, that we are intended, as with Kiarostami’s films, ‘to engage ... actively rather than passively ... to exercise our imaginations rather than submit to the film-maker’s will’. Again, I have no problem with that, up to a point, but my imagination struggled with what seemed a traditional-by-default staging, almost a throwback – though I am not at all sure this was intended – to Michael Hampe’s 1983 Salzburg production (available on DVD, under Riccardo Muti’s baton), with the caveat that one would have seen such a production quite differently a quarter of a century ago. A concert performance or a recording might have done a better job in terms of firing the imagination. There was nothing perverse about this Così: a relief one should not underestimate, especially in the wake of Jonathan Miller’s Covent Garden production, a travesty, inexplicably lauded, which transforms this darkest, most sophisticated of comedies into a vulgar farce. Yet productions as different as the two most recent Salzburg versions, the first from Hans Neuenfels, and subsequently from Karl-Ernst and Ursula Herrmann, have enlightened and provoked, without being inappropriate. (I await impatiently the latest offering, this summer, from Claus Guth, whose Figaro impressed me so much in 2007.) Here, everything that makes Così so unbearably painful appears not so much to be disregarded as unappreciated, a failing which, understandably, given the parameters set, carried through into much of what we heard too. If you like Jane Austen, especially in television adaptation, this might entertain you. Martin Fitzpatrick’s English translation did not help: if Così must be translated, and I fail to see what is gained, then sophistication, not cheap laughs, should be the order of the day in conveying Lorenzo da Ponte’s fine text.

The cast was a likeable bunch; if there was little in the way of dramatic penetration, this must in part be ascribed to the production. At her best, Susan Gritton impressed as Fiordiligi. She has a strong but not overwhelming stage presence and is a thoughtful musician. Yet her tuning was not always impeccable, a drawback which was sometimes difficult to ignore. Fiona Murphy was a spirited Dorabella, well differentiated from her more thoughtful sister. Liam Bonner’s Guglielmo had the occasional rough edge but for the most part this was a winning portrayal. Although Thomas Glenn’s voice is not unattractive, it was often over-parted as Ferrando. Stevan Page’s Don Alfonso was more character than vocal triumph, but so too, it seems, was the creator of the role, as is reflected in Mozart’s writing. Sophie Bevan was a characterful, unusually youthful Despina, without the irritating traits of so many of her predecessors, but also unfortunately prone to a few intonational difficulties.

Conductor Stefan Klingele has been touted in ENO’s publicity as a ‘Mozart specialist’. Poor man! I have no idea what a ‘Mozart specialist’ would or could be expected to do; the idea certainly in no way approaches what might best suit Mozart. Is Sir Colin Davis a ‘Mozart specialist’? Is Daniel Barenboim? Were Karl Böhm and Otto Klemperer? Of course not. They are or were great musicians with a particular but far from exclusive feeling for and understanding of Mozart’s music, such feeling and understanding enriched by the host of other music, art, and ideas informing their experiences. I tend to agree with Boulez who has described specialists, in particular those of the ‘authenticke’ brigade, as ‘specialists in nullity’. This is why he always insisted that those auditioning for the Ensemble Intercontemporain should play a classical piece as well as a modern work. One wants – or at least I do – to hear the Berg in Mozart and the Mozart in Berg. (To do just this, listen to Boulez’s recent Decca CD of Mozart’s Gran Partita and Berg’s Chamber Concerto – with the Ensemble Intercontemporain.)

What, then, did this publicity tell us about Klingele? Nothing: he has conducted quite a bit of Mozart, but also much else; indeed, his website opens to the strains of Salome. Most importantly, he did a good job in an extremely difficult assignment. I had a few cavils: there was an unfortunate tempo change, repeated and therefore not a slip, in the overture, and there were passages, for instance in ‘Alla bella Despinetta’ and the end of the first act finale, in which the conducting became noticeably foursquare. Yet, for the most part, he conducted fluently and with an evident love for the score. There were no authenticke mannerisms to endure and he generally brought the best out of the ENO orchestra. A sour oboe aside, the woodwind often sounded magical, as did, bar one unfortunately exposed slip, those horns of incipient cuckoldry in ‘Per pieta, ben mio’. I felt little of the extreme pain with which Mozart’s most ravishing score should instruct us, but the production provides some explanation for this. Moreover, given the horrors unleashed by so many contemporary Mozart performances, one could certainly be grateful for what one heard.

I am sure that most people attending will have had a relatively enjoyable evening; in many respects, I did. Yet, when one reflects, as surely one ought to after a performance of Così, not to have been disturbed by this most truly shocking of works, this most unsparing revelation and indictment of romantic love, is disturbing in the wrong way.