Die Zauberflöte, English National Opera, 14 March 2019

Coliseum

Images: © Donald Cooper

Tamino – Rupert Charlesworth

Three Ladies – Susanna Hurrell, Samantha Price, Katie Stevenson

Papageno – Thomas Oliemans

Queen of the Night – Julia Bauer

Monostatos – Daniel Norman

Pamina – Lucy Crowe

Three Spirits – Guillermo Fernandez-Aguaya Martin, Richard Wolfson, Nao Fukui

Speaker – Jonathan Lemalu

Sarastro – Brindley Sherratt

First Priest, First Armoured Man – David Webb

Second Priest, Second Armoured Man – David Ireland

Papagena – Rowan Pierce

Simon McBurney (director)

Josie Daxter (associate director, movement)

Michael Levine (set designs)

Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)

Jean Kalman, Mike Gunning (lighting)

Finn Ross (video)

Gareth Fry, Matthieu Maurice (sound design)

English National Opera Chorus (chorus master: James Henshaw)

Orchestra of the English National Opera

Ben Gernon (conductor)

Tamino (Rupert Charlesworth) and Pamina (Lucy Crowe)

When Simon McBurney’s Magic Flute was first staged by ENO, it needed, I think it fair to say, some further work. That it seemed to have received at the time of its first revival, although there was certainly room for more. (Is there not always?) Here, upon its second revival, I could not help but think that there had been something of a reversion, or at least that a general aggressive silliness to the audience made it feel so. Is it really quite so side-splittingly hilarious for someone to write ‘The Magic Flute’ on a board, or for someone to take a photograph? (Worse still, is it really necessary to applaud within a number? A conductor should at least stamp upon such practices, rather than indulge them by pausing.) The most obviously ‘Complicité’ elements of the action, or better its framing, are still handled very well: in general lightly worn, the metatheatricality of sound effects, paper birds, and other ‘workings’ has meaning, wit, and if not quite poignancy, at least permits thoughts of that order. 

A balance is, of course, very difficult to strike in a work with so many competing demands. tendencies, sources, strands of reception; some might argue that it is better not even to try, instead concentrating on one or two. Perhaps. Something more all-embracing is, I think, required or at least desirable. This production certainly attempts that – and sometimes succeeds. It is certainly preferable to its predecessor (Nicholas Hytner), which did not even seem to try. What I missed on this occasion was a greater integration between different strands. A wartime setting seems hinted at, perhaps more than that. (Or is it just a fondness for combat fatigues?) Likewise a somewhat sinister bureaucracy for Sarastro’s brotherhood. (‘Of course’, you might reply, not without reason.) Alas, the logic, the mystery, the magic that might bind these to the rest of what is going on, do not seem to be there; either that, or – perfectly possible, this – I missed them. Inclusion of the Queen of the Night at the close is now such a cliché that it barely registers: nothing wrong with it in itself, but why? Again, it seems unmotivated. The work’s cosmos is unusually varied – not least because, written for a non-court-theatre, and as a Singspiel, it offered librettist and composer far greater freedom than they would ever have been granted for an opera seria or indeed an opera buffa. Making sense of that cosmos and its communicating through words, gesture, and music are key to a success in performance only intermittently realised here.

Papageno (Thomas Oliemans) and
Papagena (Rowan Pierce)

Stephen Jeffreys’s translation sometimes departs considerably from Schikaneder, yet offers welcome relief from the preening self-regard of usual suspects. The translation ‘Queen of Night’ – reproduced in the programme – is a bit odd: not incorrect, yet a departure from universal usage to ends unclear. More seriously, why are the Armoured Men (Geharnischter) listed in the programme as ‘Armed Men’, not at all the same thing? Do such things matter? Yes, especially for a company that prides itself on presenting works in English – and, for once, presented a good case for doing so, the cast’s diction proving uncommonly fine.

For the evening’s true rewards were to be found in the singing – and stage performances more generally. Rupert Charlesworth proved an excellent Tamino, beauty of vocal line allied to unmistakeable sincerity of purpose. It would have been a strange audience member indeed who did not root for him and Lucy Crowe’s equally touching, finely sung Pamina. Julia Bauer’s Queen of (the) Night came as close as many, closer than most, to fulfilling Mozart’s absurd demands. Thomas Oliemans’s Papageno proved a worthy successor to Schikaneder himself, alert to the role’s competing demands without ever alerting us to their difficulty. Brindley Sherratt’s considered – never too considered – Sarastro, Daniel Norman’s lively Monastatos, a fine trio of Ladies and pair of Priests/Armoured Men attested to a casting in depth that has not always been in evidence in recent years at the Coliseum, but which proved very welcome indeed.

Three Ladies (Susanna Hurrell, Samantha Price, Katie Stevenson) and Tamino

Ben Gernon’s conducting had much to be said for it: a few rushed passages notwithstanding, generally sane and varied tempi; command and coordination of the orchestra in the pit and the singers on stage; and undoubted knowledge of the score. What it lacked, at least for me, was any sense of magic, of awe. Partly, that seemed owed to a determination to keep the orchestra down, strings in particular. So much magic and meaning are to be found not on stage, in the pit, that much, alas, was lost. Moreover, as with the production, a sense of greater structure, of the construction of a musico-dramatic world, often proved elusive. How does it make sense for Papageno and the Queen of the Night to feature in the same work, indeed to interact meaningfully? How, moreover, does it make sense for a neo-Bachian chorale prelude and the Papageno-Papagena duet not only to coexist, but to form part of a coherent, meaningfully dramatic whole? The answer may be magical as much as logical; it may not be reducible to words. Karl Böhm and Colin Davis knew how to accomplish this. So have directors such as Achim Freyer and David McVicar, both surely close to their best here. This is where the order’s ultimate wisdom lies, its secrets vouchsafed to and by a band of initiates whom we should treasure. We continue, it seems, to search for an interpretative Tamino and Pamina to join them.

Oliemans/Martineau - Mahler, Strauss, Duparc, and Debussy, 11 July 2012

Wigmore Hall

Mahler – Frühlingsmorgen
Hans und Grethe
Erinnerung
Scheiden und Meiden
Strauss – Traum durch die Dämmerung
Nachtgang
Befreit
Duparc – Chanson triste
L’Invitation au voyage
Extase
Le Galop
Debussy – Trois ballades de Villon
Mahler – Rückert-Lieder

This was my first encounter with baritone Thomas Oliemans, though certainly not with the indefatigable Malcolm Martineau.  Oliemans already has an impressive C.V., including Salzburg Festival debut in 2005 (Gonsalvo Fieschi in Die Gezeichneten) and recent debuts at Covent Garden, Strasbourg, and for Scottish Opera. He is clearly also an impressive recitalist, as this performance made clear.

In a wonderfully constructed programme, Mahler appeared as alpha and omega, the first set comprising songs from his twenties. Frühlingsmorgen immediately displayed a ready communicative gift that went beyond the excellent German one tends to expect from Dutch singers. Working with the language, getting beneath the skin of the song, is more important still. Martineau’s handling of the intricacies of the piano part was equally impressive. Erinnerung showed an intensity and darkness of the soul not hitherto experienced: a matter of the songs’ nature than the performances, Oliemans shading his response intelligently and movingly. Intimations of Kindertotenlieder surfaced in Schieden und Meiden, a Wunderhorn song, the hushed stillness of a child’s passing a telling contrast – at least apparently, and that ambiguity registered powerfully.

Differences between Mahler and Strauss were subtly rendered apparent rather than emphasised, which is just as it should be. Strauss’s different manner of sophistication – no naïveté here, secondary or otherwise – was combined with a more evident, or perhaps ‘traditional’, lyricism, though both composers are surely two of the highest ranking princes of Lieder. Raptness in performance of Traum durch die Dämmerung was so finely achieved in part because the song was so clearly conceived as a whole, with a true sense of slowly pursuing the dusk (Dämmerung) of the title. Being drawn into ‘ein blaues, mildes Licht’ at the end was accomplished with a near-heavenly vocal pianissimo. Nachtgang likewise showed a proper sense of a formal and emotional whole, even to the extent that, as ever when faced with religion or even the metaphysical, Strauss tends towards a materialistic emptiness, as in the likeness here to saint, ‘mild, mild und grsoss, rein wie die liebe Sonne’. Befreit did not initially soar quite as would be ideal with Strauss – it is arguably easier for sopranos to do so in any case – but the second stanza rectified matters.

The Duparc set showed Oliemans to have an equally impressive sense of French pronunciation and style. (What a glaring contrast with some of the singers in Covent Garden’s Les Troyens!) Chanson triste quite rightly benefited from a Wagnerian tinge to its lyricism: there are many more routes from Wagner than those to Mahler and Strauss, Tristan here intriguingly, deliciously apparent. Likewise, of course, the Baudelaire setting, L’Invitation au voyage, its music most definitely ‘luxe, calme, et volupté,’ from both artists concerned. The setting of the sun was ecstatic, but musically so, rather than a forced imposition upon the text; Liszt too came to mind. Tristan again reared its head in Extase, not least through Martineau’s handling of Duparc’s harmonic progressions. A slight Gallic distancing was nevertheless maintained. The ghosts of Liszt and Schubert (Erlkönig in both cases) haunted yet never overwhelmed Le Galop and its transportation, not merely physical, into ‘l’inconnu profond’.

Debussy’s Trois ballades de François Villon opened the second half. Perhaps Oliemans’s rolled ‘r’ was more Dutch in quality than French; otherwise, the performance continued to be stylistically impeccable. (Again, I could not help but draw a contrast with some of the Italianate horrors experienced on the Royal Opera’s stage recently.) Martineau showed himself fully equal to the exigencies of Debussy’s piano writing. A Pelléas-like, ‘parlant’ style, with added mediævalism, was the hallmark of the ‘Ballade que Villon feit a la request de sa mere pour prier Nostre-Dame’. That quality, which so readily degenerated in the hands of lesser successors, was in Debussy’s hands properly magical, heightened by touching, yet sparing use of the head-voice. Quiet ecstasy – ‘La joye avoir fais-noy haulte Déesse’ – was to be heard in the conclusion. The ‘Ballade des femmes de Paris’ was nicely dry, in more than one sense. Oliemans even summoned up an authentically French shrug during the catalogue of place names: ‘Ay-je beaucoup de lieux compris?’

Mahler returned with his Rückert-Lieder. ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’ had touching inwardness, though its more outward protestations fared less well, proving less ecstatic than would be ideal. ‘Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder’ was another example of fine navigation to a tricky piano part. ‘Um Mitternacht’: it is almost impossible to say something about the song that does not sound irredeeembaly clichéd, but its desolate stillness was movingly conveyed. Again, its more external protestations were somewhat less happy, intonation an occasional problem, at least until a truly resplendent final stanza, but the Innigkeit was spot on throughout. ‘Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft’ requires absolute command of the piano line; that it received, spun as if ok silken thread, which in a way it is.  Inwardness was very much the hallmark also of ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’, though an occasional tendency towards crooning should be resisted.

Morgen, an encore I had hoped for, returned us to Strauss, after which came an initially vehement and then lightly stylish Wolf Abschied, by turns Wagnerian and (Johann) Straussian. We may just have a future Amfortas here.