The Indian Queen, English National Opera, 26 February 2015

Coliseum

Hunahpú – Vince Yi

Teculihuatzin – Julia Bullock
Doña Isabel – Lucy Crowe
Don Pedrarias Dávila – Thomas Walker
Don Pedro de Alvarado – Noah Stewart
Ixbalanqué – Anthony Roth Costanzo
Mayan Shaman, Zapatista – Luthando Qave
Leonor – Maritxell Carrero
Mayan Deities (dancers) – Sonya Cullingford, Alistair Goldsmith, Lucy Starkey, Jack Thomson
Tecum Umán – Jack Thomson
Leonor as child – Rosanna Beacock

Peter Sellars (director)

Gronk (set designs)
Dunya Ramicova (costumes)
James F. Ingalls (lighting)
Christopher Williams (choreography)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Christopher Bucknall)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Laurence Cummings (conductor)

As Peter Sellars might enjoin us, ‘Hey, let’s accentuate the positive!’ Or, as his relentlessly hyper-ventilating character, Leonor, might loquaciously, nonsensically have put it, ‘Throbbing through the long, hot, dangerous night, he, o he, that wondrous mixture of virility and divinity, ah, how the thrusting of his white, masculine loins and my ever-flowing beauteous womanhood must maximise and conjoin all that is awesomely towering and breathtakingly divine in river-creating accentuation of the, o, how ecstatic, the majestically positive.’

I had better start again: let us attend to the virtues of this performance. They were entirely musical, and in many cases, estimable indeed. Much to my surprise, after his dry, charmless Messiah for ENO, Laurence Cummings conducted an often richly expressive account of Purcell’s music. There was even, wonder of wonders in this puritanical age, vibrato – more, admittedly would have been welcome – to be heard from the violins. A decent-sized orchestra and well-endowed – sorry, Leonor – continuo group gave as fine a ‘live’ account as I can recall of much of the composer’s greatest music, its chromaticism beguiling and disconcerting in equal measure. The occasional ill-chosen tempo aside – an absurdly rushed Trumpet Tune, if I remember correctly – the music took its time, its melancholy and, on occasion, languor permitted to tell. I am not sure, moreover, that I have heard more committed choral singing of Purcell’s sacred music – what it was doing there is of course another matter – than that from the ENO Chorus, its expressive range pleasingly unconstrained by ‘early musicke’ dogma.

Much of the solo singing was very good indeed too. Lucy Crowe’s soprano brought welcome lyricism, elegance of line, and emotional depth, contrasting with the lighter, yet not slighter contributions of Julia Bullock. The two counter-tenors were more variable.  Vince Yi was accurate, and rather more than that on some occasions, but his voice, especially in its higher reaches, was somewhat thin of tone. Anthony Roth Costanzo struggled with intonation and register earlier on – almost as if he were expecting the music to be sung at a different pitch – but revealed himself later to be the more expressively-voiced of the two. Noah Stewart’s virile yet sensitive – yes, Leonor – tenor had one wishing for more. (We heard nothing at all from him in the first half, although we saw plenty.) I hope that ENO will invite him back for a more musically substantial role. Likewise Thomas Walker, whose stylish contributions were not the least of the evening’s virtues. Luthando Qave was a little woolly of tone.

Had we been treated to a concert of Purcell’s music, that would have been all well and good. Alas, we had Peter Sellars’s intervention to contend with. The programme description ‘unfinished semi-opera in five acts with a prologue by Henry Purcell, completed by Peter Sellars’ was, at least in one way, uncharacteristically modest; for what we had was, the ‘soundtrack’ notwithstanding, entirely the baleful creation of Sellars’s half-baked ‘ideas’. Doubtless they would have been thought daringly post-colonial, and will be praised as such by fashion victims; yet, in truth, there was little of the ‘post-’ to them. There are problems, to put it mildly, with the twenty-first century presentation of Purcellian semi-opera, but I cannot imagine that we could have been worse off with something approximating to the original play, described by Sellars as a ‘bizarre fantasy’. It takes one to know one, I suppose. I can only assume that the spoken texts from Rosario Aguilar’s The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma became more thoroughly lost in translation. What we hear seems in its banality to cater to the lower end of the Woman’s Own market, an irredeemable mixture of very mild soft pornography and tedious 'right-on' platitudes.

Sellars seems to present, although I may have misunderstood, an unthinking mixture of Aztec and Mayan civilisation conquered by the Spanish. The patronising presentation of the ‘Other’ as primitive victims strains toward, never quite reaching, the intellectual coherence and emotional depth of a gap-year student’s attempts to find him- or herself. Of what might interest us about other civilisations there is little, unless one counts a risibly choreographed parody of Mayan mysticism at the beginning, replete, I am sorry to say, with recorded generic ‘jungle’ sounds. There is still less to credit in the gaudy, jumble-sale-style costumes. ‘Foreign’ people are so colourful, and unspoilt, you see. Designs, attractive enough in a one-dimensional, touristic sort of way, are by ‘Gronk’, who ‘since the early 1970s has been using guerrilla street performance, video, film, photography and conceptual art to upstage the mainstream art world and proclaim the outside existentialism of Chicana/or artists.’ At least we are spared the participation of Bill Viola, although we are certainly not spared the ardours of a preposterously long evening: three hours and forty minutes, with one interval. It seems much longer, especially during the second of the two acts, despite its slightly greater dramatic coherence.

Then there is Leonor – who, for the most part, confusingly appears to speak as her mother, Teculihuatzin, lover to Don Pedro (Leonor’s father). It would, I hope, be difficult to find anyone in polite society who would not be utterly horrified by the genocidal acts of the Spanish conquerors. So banal and excitable are Leonor’s interventions, though, that one almost begins to sympathise. Were the squaddies to put her out of our misery, it would unquestionably be a merciful release. I do not know whether the actress, Maritxell Carrero, was simply following orders. However, even if one could overlook the aggravating mispronunciation of words such as ‘lieutenant’, she came across as something close to an ‘amusing’ 1970s caricature of an ‘exotic foreigner’. Perhaps, however, such caricatured North American presentation is creditably true to this Indian Queen, for ultimately, so self-indulgent a show seems concerned with little beyond a director’s self-imposition upon self-righteously adopted ‘causes’. If ‘self’ appears too many times in the preceding sentence, that sorry deed, at least, has not been carried out entirely unknowingly.  

 

 

Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, English National Opera, 24 March 2011

Young Vic Theatre

(sung in English, as The Return of Ulysses)

Penelope (Pamela Helen Stephen)
Images: Johan Persson

L’Humana Fragilità, Pisandro – Iestyn Morris
Il Tempo, Antinoo – Francisco Javier Borda
La Fortuna, Minerva – Ruby Hughes
Amore, Melanto – Katherine Manley
Penelope – Pamela Helen Stephen
Ericlea – Diana Montague
Eurimaco – Thomas Walker
Ulisse – Tom Randle
Minerva – Ruby Hughes
Eumete – Nigel Robson
Iro – Brian Galliford
Telemaco – Thomas Hobbs



Benedict Andrews (director)
Börkur Jónsson (set designs)
Alice Babidge (costumes)
Jon Clark (lighting)
Sean Bacon (video)

Members of the Orchestra of the English National Opera
Jonathan Cohen (conductor)

Minerva (Ruby Hughes) and Ulisse (Tom Randle)

ENO has hit form again, offering my best operatic experience since Elektra last summer in Salzburg. And with Monteverdi: I should hardly have expected it, not least since my prejudices lie very much against contemporary performance practice and translation of his libretti from Italian. The intimate, verging upon claustrophobic, space of the Young Vic was doubtless crucial: a proper rather than merely fashionable experience of theatre ‘in the round’, which could never have worked in the Coliseum.

Though in a literal sense it would be quite true to say that I had travelled over the course of two evenings from musical drama of the present day (Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s new opera, Kommilitonen!) towards the early days of opera, the statement might be found misleading, for this was a thoroughly modern Monteverdi we encountered. Kommilitonen! proved enjoyable but also a little dated. Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, as one of the two surviving late operas by Monteverdi, already stands quite distinct from his first, L’Orfeo, let alone from slightly earlier works by other composers. The dramatic orbit of Ulisse and L’incoronazione di Poppea almost inevitably puts one in mind of Monteverdi’s contemporary, Shakespeare; both dramatists remain strikingly modern, not least when contrasted with many of their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century successors. Purcell notwithstanding, one must look to Gluck and then to Mozart to find a musical dramatist fully worthy of the honour of heir, if unwittingly so, to Monteverdi. Yet, if Poppea still shocks to the core, its devastating psychological realism placed in the service of a truly amoral, (quasi-)historical tale, its Homeric predecessor has struggled somewhat to escape its shadows. ENO’s decision to devote its now-annual excursion to the Young Vic to Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, or The Return of Ulysses (to his Homeland), was therefore welcome indeed – and must surely have convinced any doubters that this is a work fully worthy to be ranked with its more celebrated sibling. As ever, there remained the problem of translation into English, but this translation, Christopher Cowell’s, was much better than most of those recently foisted upon us: it respected Giacomo Bodoaro’s libretto after Homer, for which many thanks.

Three suitors (L-R: Iestyn Hughes, Samuel Boden, Francisco
Javier Borda), Penelope, and Minerva

The Prologue makes it quite clear that this is a contemporary drama. Human Frailty is abused, Abu Ghraib style, by Time, Fortune, and Cupid, the evidence gloatingly captured on camera. I was reminded of Barrie Kosky’s Iphigénie en Tauride for Berlin’s Komische Oper; perhaps the resemblance is not entirely coincidental, for director, Benedict Andrews, also Australian, divides his time between Sydney and Berlin, and works at the Schaubühne Theatre. During this abuse, we see Penelope’s parallel agonies on screen, Sean Bacon’s excellent video footage permitting us still-closer-up attention to detail, often but not always that of Penelope. As the Prologue comes to an end, Ithaca’s palace comes into our view – and will never leave it. A stylish, modern apartment (or hotel room?), encased by glass that is smeared by a series of depredations, it is Penelope’s prison: the ever-visible space for the ‘life’ of a ruler’s wife. Börkur Jónsson’s set designs are first-rate, drawing us in and yet repelling us at the same time. Maids fuss and conspire – whom can she trust? – whilst sharply-suited dressed political suitors roam. The tie pins give them away, though: we know that none would be able to string the bow of Ulysses. These cowards, brutal if ultimately ineffectual, pleasure themselves with no thought of Penelope as a woman. In what seemed to me a rare miscalculation, she appears to respond briefly to them physically as they offered their gifts. Perhaps her acts are intended as a trap, but they jar with her constancy and do not seem to lead anywhere.

Suitors, Ulisse, Iro (Brian Galliford), and Melanto
(Katherine Manley)

Some scenes are missing, of course: one cannot help wondering what the sea-music for nereids and sirens was like, likewise the ballet of the Moors. To augment the ravages of time, the director introduced large cuts, the remaining score running – according to the programme, though I did not check – for two-and-a-quarter hours, three acts compressed into two parts. Neptune, Jupiter, and Juno disappear completely. As so often, we seem uncomfortable allotting the gods their role. Minerva remains, though, adopting Penelope’s form and availing herself of the suitors, she perhaps seems more the trickster than Ulysses; is she a goddess at all? Apart from the musico-dramatic loss in itself, there are dramatic consequences, for we miss out on Neptune’s crucial emphasis upon ‘ritorno’ (‘return’). Andrews’s emphasis, however, seems quite different: this is less the story of Ulysses’s return, or rather still less than is often the case, and more Penelope’s tale. However, it works: there is no claim that this was a definitive Ulisse, but it was a powerful musico-dramatic experience.

Moreover, at the end, the balance shifts once again. Reminding us of the images of war that have permeated the drama throughout, not least on the apartment television screen (war in the Mediterranean? surely not…), we suffer Ulysses’s pain upon return: the lack of a role, the rejection, and of course, the bloody revenge he inflicts upon those who have defiled his home, captured on film, just like the initial abuse of the Prologue. After that, his extended shower scene attempts to cleanse, but the only hope, and it may prove vain, lies with Penelope; whatever the beauties of the final duet, the future is uncertain. Cuts may have reshaped the drama but ultimately they did not distort it.

Eurimaco (Thomas Walker), Iro, Penelope, and
Antinoo

Jonathan Cohen led members of the ENO Orchestra with great dramatic flair. I might hanker after Raymond Leppard, or, better still, Hans Werner Henze’s extraordinary Mediterranean realisation, but this was not hair-shirt Monteverdi, puritanism that would be quite at odds with his Renaissance/Early Baroque world - as a celebrated former Ulisse noted in an interview he gave me not so long ago. The musicians may have been relatively few in number, but a large band was not necessary in the Young Vic; again, the Coliseum would have been another matter. The continuo group was varied. Rebecca Miles’s recorder added variety to the one-to-a-part strings during certain ritornelli, whilst the introduction of Daniel Jamison’s bassoon brought just a hint of Henze’s earthy pagan reimagining.








Penelope and Ulisse (final scene)

If ever a role were made for Dame Janet Baker, it was that of Penelope, though it is hard to imagine Pamela Helen Stephen’s great predecessor in this particular production. It is to Stephen’s credit that she very much made the role her own; I only mention Baker since she would have been an inevitable reference point for many. What Stephen lacked in refulgence and sheer nobility of tone, she made up in dignity – and misery – of stage presence. We felt her pain in anything but the modern, debased, sentimental way. Tom Randle is such an intelligent musical actor that it would be easy to take him for granted, but one hardly could on this occasion. The complexities, some of them dark indeed, of Ulysses’s character were searingly portrayed, without the slightest hint of melodrama. Thomas Hobbs made an interesting Telemachus, vulnerable – including memories of the accursed Helen – and scarred by his experience, not least that of ‘rescue’ by Ruby Hughes’s ambiguous Minerva, another fine portrayal. Katherine Manley and Thomas Walker played dangerous, erotic – and utterly convincing – games as Penelope’s maid, Melanto, and her lover, Eurymachus; their lust, for power and for pretty much everything else, was an ongoing reminder of the real (godlike?) forces at play. My only regret concerning Diana Montague’s Ericlea was that she did not have more to sing: what a pleasure it was to hear Montague again, and to share in so faithful – in every sense – a performance. It was an equal pleasure to welcome back long-standing Monteverdian Nigel Robson, who provided a moving portrayal of the honest shepherd, Eumaeus. Brain Galliford’s childish, yet nevertheless sinister, parasite, Irus offered splendid contrast, though the strange scene of his demise, in which Monteverdi’s speech-rhythms seem (at least) to presage Mussorgsky and Janáček, offered pathos too. A ghastly trio of suitors completed the cast, Francisco Javier Borda, Iestyn Morris, and Samuel Boden, all throwing themselves wholeheartedly into Andrews’s – and Monteverdi’s – vision. I was especially taken by the finely shaped tenor of Boden and the icy clarity of Morris’s counter-tenor.

This, then, strikes me as essential theatre for anyone who can still acquire a ticket. Three cheers to all concerned!

Prom 39: BBC SO/Brabbins - Jonny Greenwood, Stravinsky, and Birtwistle, 'The Mask of Orpheus,' 14 August 2009

Royal Albert Hall

Jonny Greenwood – Popcorn Superhet Receiver
Stravinsky – Apollon musagète
Birtwistle – The Mask of Orpheus: ‘The Arches’

Orpheus (the man) – Alan Oke
Orpheus (myth/puppet) – Thomas Walker
Euridice (the woman) – Christine Rice
Eurdice (the myth)/Persephone – Anna Stephany
Hecate – Claron McFadden
Charon/Caller/Hades – Andrew Slater
Fury 1/Woman 1 – Rachel Nicolls
Fury 2/Woman 2 – Anna Dennis
Fury 3/Woman 3 – Louise Poole
Judge 1 – Christopher Gillett
Judge 2 – Håkan Vramsmo
Judge 3 – Tim Mirfin

BBC Singers (conductor: Stephen Betteridge)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Martyn Brabbins (conductor)
Ryan Wigglesworth (second conductor, Birtwistle)
Ian Dearden (sound projection)
Tim Hopkins (concert staging)

This was a strange programme. The first piece was very much a thing-in-itself, of which more below. Apollo and Orpheus are of course, in some versions of the story, father and son, but it is not clear to me that this particular Stravinsky ballet – Apollo or, as Stravinsky preferred, which is good enough for me, Apollon musagète – and Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus have a great deal in common. Much of Stravinsky and almost all of Birtwistle, yes, but not so much here, so it is perhaps better to see Stravinsky at his most Apollonian and Birtwistle’s savage complexity as providing contrast rather than connection. I should much have preferred the Proms to stage the whole opera, but we should be grateful to hear a single act, given the twin failures of ENO to revive its sole production and of the Royal Opera to present a new one.

Jonny Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver was doubtless well intended. I noted that Greenwood stayed in his seat to listen to both subsequent works, which I can imagine many in his position signally failing to do. But I found it impossible to take this work, performed by the massed strings of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, seriously. Framed by two similar sections of saccharine harmonies, partly punctuated by endless swarming noises and aimless series of glissandi, some on almost-major-scales, it lacks any sense of direction. Indeed, I thought it sounded like a series of excerpts from incidental music to early-1990s Channel 4 television dramas. More happens than in Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, with respect to which the string sound imparted a certain resemblance, but to find more interest in the present work than in the tedium of ‘holy minimalism’ is about as far as I can go. The central section was straightforwardly bizarre: a popular-music-style rhythm appeared out of nowhere, with sub- (very sub-) Bartókian pizzicato heard above. And then, it was back to Channel 4, with poor Vaughan Williams being subjected to time with Pärt.

Apollon musagète received a decidedly ‘inauthentic’ performance. Commissioned by the Library of Congress for small orchestra – and three or four dancers – Stravinsky’s ballet here received a performance, like its predecessor, from massed strings. The BBC SSO played with a sheen of which Karajan, though I suspect not Stravinsky, would have approved. Try as I might, I cannot bring myself to appreciate this work’s virtues anything more than intellectually. Its whiteness, its avoidance of incident, makes it a high water-mark of neo-classicism; for me, and not only for me, it seems a dead end. If only the composer had embarked upon his serialist renewal earlier, impossible though that might have been in practical terms... Earlier on, there was a keen sense that this was music to be danced to; indeed, I wondered whether dancing would have helped its cause. But it seemed as though Martyn Brabbins’s direction flagged somewhat later on, at least in places. There was much pleasure to be gained, however, from Andrew Haveron’s delectable violin solos. The variations of Polyrhymnia, Terpsichore, and Apollo were decently characterised. And the Apotheosis was grave, if more than a little bland.

It delights me than to say that I cannot summon up a single criticism for this thrilling performance of the second act from The Mask of Orpheus. The commitment from every performer was palpable, inducing similar commitment from a good number at least of the audience. (Sadly, some individuals staged a series of walkouts; the loss was entirely theirs, but is not such a reaction to Birtwistle just a touch passé?) What we hear in this act, introduced by Orpheus’s First Shout of Gratitude, is the vast sequence of The Arches. Orpheus’s descent into and return from the underworld is revealed and narrated as a dream – a truly nightmarish dream, especially as it develops – in which the characters have their basis, as so often in our dreams, in ‘real’ characters whom he knows. Song overcomes them. But Euridice of course must die. And so must Orpheus, who hangs himself. What makes this so complex and yet so astoundingly rewarding in musico-dramatic terms is the familiar, yet intensified Birtwistle path of retelling and reimagining myth, and approaching it from different standpoints, with the aid on this occasion of a tripartite representation of the principal characters: Orpheus, Euridice, and Aristaeus, each of whom is represented as Man or Woman, Hero or Heroine, and as Myth. Added in this particular act are the dream representations too: Orpheus as Hades, Euridice as Persephone, Aristaeus – who does not appear ‘as himself’ here – as Charon, and the Oracle of the Dead – also absent from the second act – as Hecate. This would doubtless be rendered both clearer and more complex in a fully-staged performance – cue another plea for at least an ENO revival... – but Tim Hopkins did a good job with the necessary minimal ‘concert staging’. We had to make do without puppets, but movement assumed an appropriately hieratic quality, whilst the use of mirrors to reflect light around the hall proved an effective device.

Whatever the complexities of the work – and I have no desire to downplay them – it was the sheer immediacy of its dramatic impact that came across most strongly. Those with ears to hear could have been in no doubt that this was part of a masterpiece. Brabbins, assistant conductor to Sir Andrew Davis at the 1996 Royal Festival Hall concert performance recorded for NMC, now moved up to first conductor, assisted by the excellent Ryan Wigglesworth. The conductors’ command of the score could hardly have been bettered, its vast structure clearly delineated, and the orchestral colours as vividly portrayed as – arguably more so than – could be imagined. Likewise, the playing of the BBC SO was beyond reproach: how good to hear this orchestra truly back on form, playing the music that should be central to its repertoire. From the gravely beautiful, Stravinskian wind of Orpheus Man’s introduction, through the magnificent percussion work of the first arch – ‘Water flows over the edge of the arch’, and how it did... – the staggering virtuosity of the ‘painted pictures caught on the white tendrils’ seen under the sixth, the arch of wings, the increasing nightmare madness from the twelfth arch onwards, to the bewitching electronics (tape interlude courtesy of the late Barry Anderson at IRCAM, with Ian Dearden on sound projection) and orchestral sounds of the conclusion, this was a spellbinding performance.

The vocal contributions were equally outstanding, not least from the BBC Singers. One might be tempted to take for granted the quality of their performances in contemporary music, but one should not; their contribution was invaluable: distinctive, yet blending effortlessly with the other performers. It seems invidious to single out any one member of the cast, but special mention must surely go to the heroic Alan Oke. Whether speaking or singing – Schoenberg will out – Oke’s command of the role of Orpheus as man was complete. In what must be a truly exhausting task, he held the audience spellbound throughout this terrible dream. As myth, he was complemented and more closely defined by Thomas Walker, who also, like Anna Stephany as the mythical Euridice, revealed, within the constraints of the occasion, revealed a fine stage presence. Andrew Slater’s bass-baritone was put to good use as Charon and Hades: duly sepulchral and with a chilling sense of where all might lead. Christine Rice, recently Ariadne in The Minotaur, seemed to me to give a still finer, less remote, performance here as Euridice Woman. The trio of Furies – Rachel Nicholls, Anna Dennis, and Louise Poole – proved terrifying, both dramatic and in musical accomplishment, whilst the trio of judges – Christopher Gillett, Håkan Vramsmo, and Tim Mirfin – showed that stentorian need in no sense mean a lack of dramatic thrills. Finally, there was the astonishing Claron McFadden as Hecate, her musical prowess as electrifying as her screams. The Second Scream of Passion, that of Hate, simply defies description. You had to be there. I shall conclude as I began, with the imperative for some company, in this country or indeed abroad, to demonstrate the courage, the necessary belief in the future of musical drama, to produce The Mask of Orpheus. Not only does the work demand it, these performers are owed the opportunity too.