Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (5) - L’Erismena, 15 July 2017

Images: Festival d’Aix-en-Provence 2017 © Pascal Victor / artcompress

Théâtre du Jeu de Paume

Erismena – Francesca Aspromonte

Idraspe – Carlo Vistoli

Aldimira – Susanna Hurrell

Orimeneo – Jakub Józef Orliński

Erimante – Alexander Miminoshvili

Flerida – Lea Desandre

Argippo – Andrea Bonsignore

Alcesta – Stuart Jackson

Clerio Moro – Tai Oney

Diarte – Jonathan Abernethy

Jean Bellorini (director, lighting, set designs)

Véronique Chazal (set designs)

Macha Makeïeff (costumes)

Cappella Mediterranea

Leonardo García Alarcón (conductor)

Whose first thought when Cavalli is mentioned is anything other than Raymond Leppard? Certainly not mine. Whilst many, indeed pretty much all, such associations will be simplifications of varying degrees of grossness, and some bizarrely, often chauvinistically, incorrect – Bernstein and Mahler, for instance – Leppard’s role in the rediscovery and revival of Cavalli’s operas can hardly be gainsaid. What I should have given to hear one of his imaginative, luscious realisations in the flesh. Much has changed in the meantime, of course: save for the very occasional actual ‘reorchestration’, it has long been a capital offence to perform seventeenth-century music on modern instruments. I suppose we should be grateful that the fatwas of ‘authenticity’ have extended less frequently towards staging, although the vaguely ‘stylish’ mishmash that often results tends at best to be a mixed blessing.

What we saw and heard here was much in that line, and proved enjoyable enough in its way, although I could not help but wish that something more daring had been attempted. The theatre itself, the Théâtre du Jeu de Paume, is a delight. However modernist one’s view of other matters may be, the growth of opera houses into outsize monsters should surely be deplored by all. Presumably someone will object that it is an eighteenth-century theatre; in which case, kindly get thee to seventeenth-century Venice and leave the rest of us in peace. Leonardo García Alarcón and his small, yet far from shy, Capella Mediterranea played in the accustomed ‘we’re Mediterranean and thus “sensual”’ style, or alternatively, ‘sex please, we’re not Christopher Hogwood’ – which is certainly preferable to, well, Christopher Hogwood and other puritans. It is, though, all a bit predictable after a while, not nearly so ‘interesting’ or indeed ‘sensual’ as it thinks it is – or, indeed, as audiences in thrall to ‘authenticity’ have been trained to believe it is. Have a ‘colourful’ continuo group, turn as much as you can into dance music, accompany that with a good deal of silly dancing on stage, hint at largely spurious parallels to other traditions, be they folk, jazz, anything other than the dread ‘symphonic’, and you are ‘counter-culturally’ away.

It is a business, of course, and it has succeeded greatly in those terms, not least by its ruthless suppression of the ‘competition’. And unlike those frankly unlistenable-to Northern European puritan forerunners – the Leonhardts, Goebels, Hogwoods, et al. – it is in many respects welcoming. Perhaps it is too much so, or at least too complacent in its remarkably non-reflective conception of history. (Nikolaus Harnoncourt was an exception in that latter respect; his greatest problem was a peculiar inability to phrase.) There is more, though, to ‘Mediterranean’ culture, and indeed there is more to Cavalli, than that. Moreover, violin intonation was sometimes little short of excruciating, although no one else seemed to mind.

Whatever one’s thoughts on the orchestra and conducting (how ‘inauthentic’!) though, the singing was excellent. A young cast, with acting abilities largely to match, held the drama, such as it is, in its hands and projected it with the vocal excellence that has long been the trump card of so much of the ‘early music’ movement. If I were compelled to single out one soloist, I should unhesitatingly opt for the bright, clear, and yes, sensual countertenor of Jakub Józef Orliński; it was a great pity he did not have more to sing. But this was a true company achievement. Orliński’s countertenor companions, Carlo Vistoli and Tai Oney also greatly impressed, each voice and character ‘naturally’ differentiated from the others. So too did Susanna Hurrell’s Aldimira and Stuart Jackson’s properly outrageous nurse-in-drag, Alcesto. There is a good deal of ensemble writing here, yet I cannot recall a single case of problematical balance.

Jean Bellorini’s staging falls into the aforementioned stylish-‘modern’ category. No particular point of view or framing seems apparent. Clothes are ‘modern’ and a good deal of attention is productively paid to movement and interaction. Again, though, I could not help but think that something a little more than having light bulbs  disintegrate at critical moments might have been done with the opera. For it is, frankly, difficult to care too much about the characters and their fate; this is neither Monteverdi nor top-drawer Cavalli. There is probably too much silliness; Leppard, anything but humourless, nevertheless remarked upon an all too easy tendency towards disguise and cross-dressing for the sake of it in a good number of Cavalli works. Indeed, Leppard was actually highly selective concerning those he selected for editing and performance. We, however live, for better or worse, in an age of completism. Not that that problem arose here; this is an opera eminently worth performing. Perhaps, though, at some stage, it might be done in a realisation and staging a little more interested in stretching our eyes, ears, and minds.

Serse, Longborough Festival Opera, Young Artists Performance, 30 July 2015

Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music

Serse – Jake Arditti

Arsamene – Tai Oney
Amastre – Lucinda Stuart-Grant
Ariodate – Jon Stainsby
Romilda – Alice Privett
Atalanta – Abbi Temple
Elviro – Matthew Durkan
Chorus – Chiara Vinci, Laurence Painter

Jenny Miller (director)

Faye Bradley (designs)
Dan Saggars, Andy Bird (lighting)
Rebecca Hanbury (assistant director)
Michael Spenceley (choreography)

Longborough Young Artists Orchestra

Jeremy Silver (conductor)

What an excellent idea for the Longborough Festival to bring its Young Artist Production to London for a performance at the Royal College of Music! Yes, I know, a Londoner would say that, but like it or not, and I am sure we can all agree that centralisation in a not-remotely-central city is a curse upon all manner of activity in this country, London is the centre of English operatic life and metropolitan exposure can only help all concerned. (No one believes more strongly than I that the Royal Opera and ENO should tour, and to hell with the Arts Council’s absurd geographical demarcations! After its behaviour with respect to ENO alone, disbandment would, frankly, be too kind a fate for that organisation, presently headed by a friend of Jeremy ‘Hunt’, Peter Bazalgette, of Big Brother fame.) London performances are perhaps especially important in the case of young singers, all of whom performed creditably, and in most cases, considerably more than that. A taste of Longborough, especially for those of us without cars, is of course more than welcome at this end too. Perhaps we might even hope for more in the future? Would it not be wonderful, if the Proms were to invite the Festival next year, perhaps for Tannhäuser or Jenůfa?

A Handel opera, in any case, made for an eminently sensible choice in the present situation. Focused on singers, with a small (too small?) orchestra, Serse fared well in musical terms, save for the somewhat scrawny playing of the strings. I think they were modern instruments, but it was not easy to tell, testament to the near-total victory of ‘period’ imperialism. Apart from that, Jeremy Silver directed (from the harpsichord) a mostly sensitive performance, tempi appropriate, with little of the absurd rushing (with occasional, equally absurd grinding to a halt) that characterises the Handelian exhibitionism of our allegedly ‘authenticke’ times. For a full, noble orchestral sound, we must return to first-choice Rafael Kubelík in Munich (in German, with a tenor Xerxes, no less than Fritz Wunderlich!) or, in an Italian-language performance, Brian Priestman (with Maureen Forrester) in Vienna.

But as I said, the singing was really the thing. Jake Arditti offered a bravura yet eminently sensitive assumption of the title role: as well acted, with proud petulance and wounded humanity, as it was heroically sung. For those sceptics who (still) doubt the ability of the counter-tenor voice to portray the requisite range of emotions, the performances of Arditti and Tai Oney as Arsamene would surely have proved a useful corrective. Oney’s beautifully-sung performance pulled off without any difficulty the task of sufficient difference in timbre and character, without a hint of the hootiness which, in days gone by, infected far too many such performances. Alice Privett threw herself into the role of Romilda, passing with flying colours: a properly high dramatic performance. If they were my pick of the cast, that is probably as much a reflection of the opportunities their roles offer as anything else. I should certainly not be able to offer you a weak link, nor should I wish to. Longborough’s programme clearly engenders a real sense of company, something that cannot be feigned.

My principal reservation concerned Jenny Miller’s production. It was very pink, which may or may not be one’s taste. I learned afterwards, upon reading the programme, that it had been set in a ‘contemporary setting, more immediately familiar and neutral – a nightclub or hotel bar’. I could then see that it had been, but if I am honest, whether through stupidity or inattention on my part, or a lack of clarity on the director’s, I had not realised at the time. Initially, my thought was that we were amongst Mafiosi, but then it all turned surprisingly camp – and not a little silly. Anyway, we were supposed to have asked whether it was ‘Xerxes’s bar … [whether] he owns a string of them, planning global expansion,’ and so on. By ‘shedding many of the specifically period references, we can concentrate on the comedy of the lessons in love being handed out’. Perhaps; I certainly hold no brief for confining a work to its period, although some of the satire here might have worked better, had we experienced more of a dialogue between ‘period’ and ‘contemporary’. (Or perhaps I am too content with Nicholas Hytner’s seemingly evergreen ENO production, which can be caught on DVD with Charles Mackerras and Ann Murray.) I think Miller is probably right to say, with respect to the work itself, that ‘satire about the exercise of unlimited power … is not the main theme of the power’. However, I cannot help but wonder whether a more absorbing theatrical experience might be the outcome of a production that treated it as if it were. The cast did its best to make us care about the characters, but there is a limit to what can be done in that respect within the confines of a Handel opera seria. Besides, if the ‘period references’ can be rejected, cannot a too rigid conception of ‘intention’? Much of the audience seemed, however, greatly to enjoy the sometimes outlandish costumes and antics of the entertainment, and what I say immediately above should be considered as musing rather than prescription. I look forward to Longborough’s next visit to the capital.

 

 

 

 

Hogarth’s Stages – Five short operas, Royal College of Music, 17 May 2014

Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music

 

Josephine Stephenson: On False Perspective

Professor – Jerome Knox

The Raver – Rebecca Hardwick

Reader – Katie Coventry

Barista – Nick Pritchard

Mathematician – Keith Pun

Algirdas Kraunaitis: The Bet

Cait Frzzell (soprano)

Mélisand Froidure-Lavoine (alto)

Daniel Farrimond (tenor)

Julien van Mellaerts (baritone)

Matthew Buswell (bass)

Lewis Murphy: Now

Alice – Rose Stachniewska

Ruby – Laura Possonnier

Sarah – Charlotte Howes

Tim – William Wallace

Rupert – James Davies

Hunter Coblentz: Hogarth’s Bastards

Don Giovanni – Tai Oney

Donna Anna – Gemma Summerfield

Donna Elvira – Rannveig Káradóttir

Don Ottavio – Craig Jackson

Commendatore – Simon Grange

Edwin Hillier: Serpentine; or, The Analysis of Beauty

Architect – Nicholas Morton

Ida – Elizabeth Holmes

Will – Peter Aisher

Louche – Mark Nathan

Curl – Cait Frizzell

Coil – Rachel Bowden

Bill Bankes-Jones (director)

Sarah Booth (designs)

Royal College of Music Opera Orchestra
Tim Murray (conductor)

The café of false perspective

 

It is a brave composer – or indeed librettist – who writes a Hogarth opera in the wake of The Rake’s Progress. Yet those concerned seemed neither to have been intimidated nor hamstrung by the precedents of Stravinsky or Auden and Kallman. Indeed, it was striking that there seemed to be no ‘leave-taking’ in that sense at all. We had instead five short operas, of roughly a quarter of an hour each, inspired by different paintings and engravings, yet contemporary in their settings, brought together as more than the sum of their parts by Bill Bankes-Jones staging and Sarah Booth’s designs, in which eighteenth-century periwigged onlookers mingled with their twenty-first century counterparts. Traffic included characters from previous operas, encouraging one to make connections, rather than too strenuously insisting upon them. Tim Murray and the excellent RCM Opera Orchestra offered excellent advocacy, as did an array of young singers.

 

The Bet

 

Not the least remarkable aspect of the evening was that all five composers are RCM composers: four of them Master’s students, one an undergraduate. With that in mind, and without in any sense intending to condescend, it is unlikely that many, perhaps any, of the composers will write as they have done here once they have fully discovered their mature ‘voices’. Yet they all proved themselves assured writers, employing a variety of styles. In the crudest sense, the musical language employed in Hogarth’s Bastards by Hunter Coblentz stood closest to the nineteenth century, that of Edwin Hillier, in the closing Serpentine, stood closest to the later twentieth and early twenty-first, the other composers falling somewhere in between.

 

On False Perspective, music by Josephine Stephenson, libretto by Benjamin Osborn, opens with an eighteenth-century reader (Professor) of John Joshua Kiry’s pamphlet on linear perspective, for which Hogarth provided the frontispiece, A Satire on False Perspective. That introduction frames – visually as well as metaphorically – a Sunday morning’s exchanges in a modern café ‘in the city of false perspective’, the morning after the police shut down a rave that broke the laws of physics. Water flows backwards and falls upwards, at the barista’s behest. In Stephenson’s score, one hears the musical counterpart to such antics, though the score never merely ‘depicts’; it contributes to the drama, as good operatic music should. Likewise, each one of the singers here – as in the subsequent operas – added something both musical and dramatic, indeed showed the danger of separating the two categories.

 

Now

 

 

And so, the scene was set for The Bet, for which Algirdas Kraunaitis wrote both text and music, and for Now (music: Lewis Murphy; libretto: Laura Attridge). Visual framing connected On False Perspective with The Bet, but there was rhythmic contrast too, between all three scores. Dance rhythms appeared in different guises, sometimes more Germanically swung, sometimes more insistent, even perhaps Stravinskian. Instrumentation was resourceful, command of colour imaginative and apt. I must admit I could not quite understand why one character in The Bet was made to sing with a cod-American accent, ‘g’ omitted from the ends of gerunds, and so on; it jarred, at least to my ears. But again, the singers as a whole impressed, showing splendid commitment and versatility. Dystopia came to the fore in Now, but equally some sense of resolution, even hope.

 

The second half offered the aforementioned ‘extremes’ of Hogarth’s Bastards and Serpentine. The former (Coblentz/Jordan O’Connor) offered interaction between five singers prior to a performance in an apparently disastrous run of Don Giovanni. Coblentz’s score is allusive and witty, even in its allocation of Don Giovanni to a counter-tenor (the excellent Tai Oney). I was not entirely sure, though, why the audience found use of ‘fucking’ in the libretto so hilarious; doubtless there is a matter of confounding alleged expectations, but even so… There is nice characterisation, though, in O’Connor’s text: a good deal is done in a short amount of time.

 

Hogarth's Bastards

 

Serpentine; or, The Analysis of Beauty (Hillier; Edward Allen) was for me perhaps the most intriguing. Structure and instrumentation interact with dramatic possibility suggestively. The necessity both to ‘toe the line – the Serpentine Line’ in a club, measured up by the Architect, combines with a clear sense of liberty, or perhaps license. Hogarth’s eighteenth-century dance hall is reimagined, the ‘S’ figure curve visualised on stage and somehow also suggested by Hillier’s music. There was some exuberant transvestism to be enjoyed too. This seemed more dangerous, more exploratory, perhaps more ready to question what opera is and what it might be. That said, the truly striking impression of the evening was of an abundance of talent from all concerned: there is hope yet for a form which has always been far better placed to re-invent itself than the exaggerated prominence of its largest and often most conservative institutions might suggest.