Ein Landarzt/Phaedra - Guildhall School, 8 June 2015

Silk Street Theatre, Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Landarzt – Martin Hässler

Aphrodite – Laura Ruhi-Vidal

Phaedra – Ailsa Mainwaring
Artemis – Meili Li
Hippolytus – Lawrence Thackeray
Minotaur – Rick Zwart

Ashley Dean (director)

Cordelia Chisholm (set designs)
Mark Doubleday (lighting)
Victoria Newlyn (movement)
Dan Shorter (video)

Orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Timothy Redmond (conductor)

Once again, many thanks are owed to the Guildhall School for courageous programming, fully vindicated. A double-bill of Henze operas, neither of them straightforwardly designated as such by the composer, surely offered one of the most enticing offerings in London for quite some time. Henze’s early, short radio opera, Ein Landarzt, presents a number of problems, not least of which might be: how should one, or simply should one, stage a ‘radio opera’ at all? Premiered in 1951, it is, as Henze recounts in his autobiography, Bohemian Fifths, ‘a word-for-word setting of Kafka’s short story of the same title’. Martin Hässler’s performance proved deeply impressive, in attention to words, text, gesture, and their marriage. It doubtless helps to be German, but that is only the beginning. Indeed, as conservatoire presentations go, this must have been one of the most challenging (for the artist) I have heard. Yet there was no gainsaying Hässler’s achievement, in what might consider almost a whimsical (or not) male-voiced Erwartung, with more than the odd backward nod to Schubert.

 

Whether it really benefits from staging, I am not sure. Henze certainly had no problem with it being presented in that way; one such performance was staged by Madeleine Milhaud. However, the production here did not really seem to me to add up to much beyond the scenery; perhaps concert (or indeed radio) performance remains preferable. There were a few tentative moments from the orchestra – hardly surprising in such a score – but for the most part, the young players offered a committed performance, firmly directed towards its denouement by Timothy Redmond. In any case, Hässler’s marriage of language, musicality, and stage presence offered ample rewards. At the end, we remained properly unsure whether anything had ‘happened’ at all, or whether the doctor’s difficulties were of his own imagining.

The 'concert opera', Phaedra was first heard in London at the Barbican in 2010. It is a measure of this Guildhall performance that, not only did I find it not wanting by comparison with a British premiere from the Ensemble Modern and Michael Boder, I actually found myself considerably more involved. Perhaps that was at least in part a matter of better acquaintance. (I have certainly heard a great deal more Henze since then too, partly on account of my academic work.) But in 2010, I had wondered whether a slightly irritating cleverness in Christian Lehnert’s libretto might actually be offset by full staging. Probably, would be the answer, because now the question never presented itself. Nor did my suspicion of a little note-spinning on Henze’s part. I am, then, more than happy to offer a mea culpa.

Reenactment and ritual proved generative: not quite as in Birtwistle, for the composers are very different, but presenting interesting parallels, for all the title might (misleadingly?) edge us towards Britten or the French Baroque. Ashley Dean seemed very much to have saved his best for this opera. The ruined labyrinth of the first act (‘Morning’) asks more questions than it answers: less, as so often, proves more, even when dealing with complexity. A surprising transformation into a modern operating theatre proves just the thing for the ‘Evening’ of the second act. Hippolytus eventually arises from the efforts of the divine medical team, though no one will ever be quite sure what happened, the drama finally broken down – not unlike the images we have earlier seen on screen – into dance.

Just occasionally, there were a few slips and imprecisions on the orchestra’s part, although this was a fine performance by any – not just youthful – standards. Henze’s love of flickering colours and their transformation – again I thought, whatever he himself might have made of this comparison, of Strauss’s Daphne – shone through, as full of dramatic propulsion as harmony and rhythm. Redmond’s direction again proved sure, indeed more than that: vital. Lawrence Thackeray’s tenor led the way, navigating Henze’s often difficult lines and tessitura with greater ease than one perhaps has any right to expect. Meili Li’s countertenor Artemis brought due strangeness to the endeavour, blurring boundaries as that final dance blurs events and motives. Laura Ruhi-Vidal and Ailsa Mainwaring offered proper contrast, considerable range and differentiation of colour employed to sometimes searing dramatic effect. The sonorous bass of Rick Zwart’s Minotaur signalled that he would also have made a compelling Landarzt. (He and Hässler were alternating roles on different evenings.) My immediate reaction was that I really needed to see everything again, to piece more of the work together. I suspect that that is part of the point: we think we can, yet it remains fragmentary. A performance, however, needs to remain purposeful, compelling: this unquestionably did.

 

 

Powder her Face, Royal Opera, 26 April 2010

Linbury Studio Theatre

Duchess – Joan Rodgers
Hotel Manager, Duke, Judge – Alan Ewing
Electrician, Lounge Lizard, Waiter, Rubbernecker, Delivery Boy – Iain Paton
Maid, Confidante, Waitress, Mistress, Rubbernecker, Society Journalist – Rebecca Bottone
Actor – Tom Baert

Carlos Wagner (director)
Conor Murphy (designer)
Paul Keogan (lighting)
Tom Baert (choreography)

Members of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House and Guest Artists
Timothy Redmond (conductor)

First performed in 1995 by Almeida Opera at the Cheltenham Music Festival, Thomas Adès’s Powder her Face has received a number of productions: a rare accolade for any ‘new’ opera. This production from Carlos Wagner was first seen at the Royal Opera in 2008, but is based on the director’s production for De Vlaamse Opera. That said, though I have heard much about it and have heard excerpts, this was my first full encounter.

What to make of Powder her Face, then? It is certainly preferable to The Tempest, which I heard on its first night, sounding like imitation Britten, with a dash of greyest Hindemith tossed in to churn out the requisite number of bars. By contrast, the music here can be fun, even if, in its relentless parody, it soon wears thin. Peter Maxwell Davies did something superficially similar quite some time ago, albeit with more winning and, I suspect, more substantial results. There are all sorts of resemblances: Berg, Strauss, Weill, Britten, popular music, and so on. But they only ever seem to be resemblances, for what makes the ‘original’ sounds into music is absent; almost everything here is but skin deep. That may be the point; it certainly seems to be a suggestive starting point for Carlos Wagner’s excellent production. Is it, though, enough? Allusion not only veers perilously close to pastiche, but a heartless pastiche, whose real character seems to lie in the admittedly brilliant rummaging around in the ruins of tonality, the brittleness, the not-quite-disjunctures. More of those and less of the parody might ultimately have proved more productive. As a first opera, this would by any standards represent an auspicious debut, but is it more than that? I realise that I am falling into the trap intended, wishing for ‘profundity’ in worthy, Teutonic fashion, yet is the work as clever as it thinks it is? Adès’s music is clever enough, but Philip Hensher’s libretto is startlingly variable, sometimes far too attention-seeking for its own good. If the work is an indictment of celebrity, is it not straining at celebrity a little too much itself? Much of the final scene, especially the Duchess’s solo ‘mad scene’, acquires a surprising gravity, however, reminiscent in its broken chorale and its instrumentation of Busoni; one can see why it would be undercut – ‘Darling, nothing so vulgar as a tragedy,’ one can hear the creators saying – but, in a way, that is a pity, since what follows is once again too clever, too lengthy, and more tedious than anything else.

Performances, however, were of a high standard. Joan Rodgers threw her all into the role of the Duchess, dramatically and vocally, and even succeeded, in that final scene, in engaging one’s heart. The only kindness she has ever experienced, as she laments, is that for which she has paid. Alan Ewing, suffering from a throat infection, coped well with the muiltifarious demands of his roles; one could readily have heard much worse from someone in better health. Iain Paton likewise convinced in his considerably more varied roster of portrayals, lightness and agility of voice in evidence throughout. I find Rebecca Bottone’s high soprano a bit shrill and unvaried, but it chimes with what she is asked to do, and she can act too. Paton and Bottone make a truly grubby pair of rubberneckers, pleasuring themselves at their moral disapproval during the trial: how the Daily Mail would love them and the judge, who follows suit and goes still further. If the constant turnover of roles is confusing – I assume that Lulu is the model here, but there a clear point is being made – then that is no fault of the cast, though the production could sometimes have been more helpful in that respect. It surely does matter precisely who these people are. Diction, however, was not always what it might have been. Timothy Redmond conducted the orchestra with verve and precision, the players responding in kind, clearly relishing the dance rhythms and the array of soloistic colours. Again, if it all becomes a bit loud and unyielding, they are not the ones to blame.

Carlos Wagner’s production plays on the Duchess’s star quality, Conor Murphy’s stylish designs – and if the opera is anything, it is stylish – including outsize beauty products, the most striking of which is the neo-Botticelli compact from which the heroine emerges. The mimed fellatio scene from the electrician at the beginning neatly presages what is to come, though the real thing is actually a little puzzling. When the Duchess is at work on the waiter, a naked, more conventionally alluring man emerges in between them: presumably her fantasy, as opposed to reality, but I am not quite sure that such should be the point here. Her search, at least, does not seem to be for physical perfection. Elsewhere, however, production and performances did the work proud. As for the opera itself, though, celebrity seems more to have been more attained than deconstructed.