Le nozze di Figaro, Opera Holland Park 15 June 2021

Holland Park

Count Almaviva – Julien Van Mellaerts
Countess Almaviva – Nardus Williams
Susanna – Elizabeth Karani
Figaro – Ross Ramgobin
Cherubino – Samantha Price
Marcellina – Victoria Simmonds
Bartolo – James Cleverton
Basilio, Don Curzio – Daniel Norman
Barbarina – Claire Lees
Antonio – Henry Grant Kerswell
First Bridesmaid – Naomi Kilby
Second Bridesmaid – Susie Buckle

Oliver Platt (director)
takis (designs), applied on the set for La traviata by Cordelia Chisholm
Rory Beaton (lighting)
Caitlin Fretwell Walsh (movement)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Richard Harker)
City of London Sinfonia
George Jackson (conductor)


What a welcome return to Holland Park this proved to be. Glorious weather helped, of course—quite a change from an earlier visit to Glyndebourne with altogether necessary overcoat and umbrella—but the achievement of Opera Holland Park first of all in putting on a season at all, let alone with its customary artistic success, deserves the highest praise.


One might think one could hardly go wrong with The Marriage of Figaro, though all too many recent productions have proved otherwise. In reality, it requires, like all Mozart, excellence in every respect. There is nowhere to hide, least of all in musical terms. The City of London Sinfonia was on good form, conducted by George Jackson, who fell prey to none of the traps readily walked entered by many of his peers. Instead, what we heard was an imaginative, wisely comprehending performance of Mozart’s score. Everyone will have his own ideas concerning tempi. In most cases, there will be various solutions. The trick is to make them work: largely, if anything but simply, a matter of ensuring a steady underlying tempo, which can certainly be varied, whilst at the same time hearing and conveying the act and ultimately the entire opera as a whole. There were, quite naturally, occasions when I initially wondered whether an initial tempo, at odds with how I might hear in my head, would work. There were none, however, when I was not swiftly convinced by Jackson’s choice: even Susanna’s emergence from the wardrobe, which showed a due sentiment of wonder can sound faster than I had believed.


A keen ear for orchestral detail, sometimes interpretative such as a cartoonish descending cello line, more often straight from the score, was in evidence throughout. Crucially, Jackson and his players conveyed an underlying melancholy, sometimes something darker still, as necessary counterpart to high spirits. There was room to breathe and to reflect: not so much a matter of speed, or even tempo, as of understanding and communicating the relationship between words, melody, harmony, and, this being opera, gesture. This was definitely Mozart’s comedy, not Rossini’s. The score was necessarily given in a reduced orchestration by Jonathan Lyness, which, lack of double wind notwithstanding, often tricked one into thinking one was simply hearing a small orchestra. Wind came naturally to the fore, balance not always as expected, but there was really no ground for complaint—and every ground for gratitude that this was happening at all, let alone so well.


Whilst there is no reason to be ageist about this, Figaro responds well to a cast of young singers—always, of course, provided they are capable of navigating its treacherous waters. This cast certainly was; it worked very well in ensemble too. The central quartet—Julien Van Mellaerts as the Count and Nardus Williams as the Countess; Elizabeth Karani as Susanna and Ross Ramgobin as Figaro—and others besides provided that necessary sense of reacquainting us with characters many fancy we know so well yet also of bringing something distinctive, of anchoring their portrayals in this particular Figaro, rather than some generic conception. All impressed in their various ways. Van Mellaerts, in combination with Jackson, had me sit up and take notice of quite what seria depth Mozart achieves in the Count’s third-act recitativo accompagnato and aria, ‘Hai gia vinta la causa … Vedrò mentr'io sospiro’. Detail and style matter here—not necessarily prescriptively, but generalisation will not do—as of course do their relationship to the whole. Williams brought great musical virtues to a finely balanced portrayal of dignity and sense of fun: this was Rosina, as well as ‘the Countess’. Karani and Ramgobin judged their standing at the centre of every intrigue extremely well: a musical just as much as a stage matter. Handling of recitative was just as impressive as their arias, which grew out of the former as musico-dramatic necessity.


Cherubino is a gift of a trouser role, yet no less tricky for that. Samantha Price had its measure, capturing not only its effervescence but a hint of the sadness—at least for those of us no longer quite so youthful—that lies with its distance. Victoria Simmonds and James Cleverton ensured that Marcellina and Bartolo, even shorn of their fourth-act arias, were more than stock buffo characters. As ever, the angel as well as the devil lies in the detail. A wily Daniel Norman as Basilio, and a bluff Antonio in Henry Grant Kerswell added to the fun; as did last, but far from least, Claire Lees’s beautifully sung, intelligently acted Barbarina. A small chorus, well directed and supplemented as is customary by the Holland Park peacocks, helped bind the action together in stage as well as musical fashion.


Oliver Platt, whose work I have admired in not one but two productions of Così fan tutte (Holland Park and the Guildhall), pulled off the difficult task of directing a Figaro for a time of social distancing. For the most part, one forgot—at least I did—that the characters were not interacting quite as normal. So much can be done, and was, with implication and choreography (for which plaudits to Caitlin Fretwell Walsh’s movement direction). Then there were moments, frozen as if for reflection, in which a sense of distance opened up: opening up being the operative word, since they were open to interpretation rather than dogmatically defined. The same might be said of a stylised, punkish look at costumes (takis) that were not quite what we might initially have thought. When we saw the servants, they were not really servants at all, let alone serfs. Crucially, they wore wigs. Who were they? People playing at being servants?


Moreover, whilst it would be difficult to claim this as an overtly political Figaro, it would be equally difficult not to draw political conclusions from the sense of judgement being passed on the Count and indeed the metatheatrical way the characters—perhaps partly out of character—turned on him and ultimately left him in isolation at the end of the second act. Judge not, that ye be not judged, takes on different meaning in a drama involving manorial justice—whatever the temporal context(s).


For opera is always constructed, never more so than now. Charlotte Chisholm’s resourceful work on a set necessarily conceived for two operas, this and La traviata, once again had one pretty much forget the restrictions under which we still labour—until a moment recalled the fact to us, at which one lauded the achievement. The action flowed with plenty of incident, yet nothing that jarred. Where there was anachronism, as for instance in the third-act ballet—what a history there is to that, as Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Memoirs so memorably recount—it was quite deliberately so. Distance intervened, momentarily, on and off stage; and then all came back together, audience included. That, surely, is what opera needs right now: solidarity and action in knowledge of the crisis that engulfs us.

George Benjamin Day: chamber works and Written on Skin, MCO/Benjamin, 19 March 2016

LSO St Luke’s and Barbican Hall

Purcell, arr. Benjamin – Fantasia 7 (1995)

Benjamin – Flight (1978-9)
Viola, Viola (1997)
Shadowlines (2001)
Bach, arr. Benjamin – Canon and Fugue from ‘The Art of Fugue’ (2007)

Members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra
George King (piano)
George Benjamin (conductor)

Written on Skin (2009-12)

The Protector – Christopher Purves

Agnès – Barbara Hannigan
Angel 1/The Boy – Tim Mead
Angel 2/Marie – Victoria Simmonds
Angel 3/John – Robert Murray

Benjamin Davis (director of semi-staged performance)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra 

George Benjamin (conductor)

George Benjamin’s Written on Skin could hardly have had superior reception. Wherever it has gone, it has triumphed. Bizarrely, an American opera house intendant, smarting at the acclaim accorded an opera that did not offer his favoured brand of neo-tonal pandering (Jennifer Higdon?!), lamented that Benjamin’s brilliant score was not something one would ‘sit down and play [a recording of] … at dinner’. All I can say to that is that Mr Gockley must host strange dinner parties – ‘honoured guests, meet your hostess, the lovely Lulu’ – and his preferred way of experiencing opera, eccentric for anyone, would seem in itself to disqualify him from running an opera house.  That, however, was not remotely consonant with the success witnessed on either side of the Atlantic, indeed on either side of the Channel.

 

I was a little suspicious first time around. Are not masterpieces supposed to fail before an initially uncomprehending public, incite a riot, or at least receive an insufficient performance? No, of course not, although such mythologies can be fun, not least in enabling us to feel superior to our predecessors. Surely, though, there must have been something wrong when critical and audience unanimity is so striking. (Yes, there will always be the odd exception, but who cares?) Nevertheless, when I saw the work at the end of its Covent Garden run, I had no option but to join the adoring throng. Happily, this Mahler Chamber Orchestra performance, again under the baton of the composer, confirmed me in my judgement that Written on Skin is an unalloyed masterpiece, although in some ways I find its predecessor, Into the Little Hill, the more provocative work and certainly a masterpiece too. I see no point in simply repeating a description of what has already become a repertory work; what I wrote in 2013 may, however be read here for those unfamiliar or in need of a reminder. (I was surprised, myself, about how much I had forgotten!) However, I shall make some remarks about what struck me on this particular occasion, and of course upon the performances themselves.

 

It seems almost obligatory for a serious new opera to reflect in some way upon the nature of opera; or is it that it is almost obligatory for a serious opera audience to do so? You see, the questions begin already. (Or is it that I am unhealthily obsessed with the operas of Richard Strauss…?) Here, at any rate, what struck me, perhaps still more so in what was close to a concert performance – not meant as disrespect to Benjamin Davis’s able direction – was how much the opera’s status is entwined with that of the Boy’s book, ‘written on skin’. That illuminates – in more than one sense – our experience of the work’s progress as drama and the complexity, somehow nevertheless simple, of the relationship between mediæval setting and contemporary reception. Martin Crimp’s libretto, of course, points the way in that respect, introducing anachronisms as well as well-nigh ritually identifying narration. Said the critic.

 

Had this been Birtwistle, say, there would surely have been a parallel, indeed questioning, ritual in the music. Despite the toing and froing of the Angels, I do not really hear that here. Benjamin’s way is different; I have no wish to ascribe ‘influence’ here; but in its length – perfect for but a few masterpieces by the likes of Monteverdi, Mozart, Wagner, and a very few others – and in the assuredness of its narrative, I was put more in mind of Berg and Janáček. The division into three parts is perhaps a minor indication of that. The astounding musical climaxes of each part are perhaps more akin to the great operas of Janáček, although Wozzeck is surely not so very far away in some intangible, maybe even tangible, sense. The score presents other points of reference, always refracted, and did, I think, in performance too. Benjamin wrote the opera with the particular sound of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in mind. Here it’s relatively small numbers, at least when it came to strings, were utterly belied by their sound, especially at those climaxes, but also in cushioning the voices and speaking, almost Wagner-like, as our Greek Chorus. Although famously a Messiaen pupil – sometimes one is tempted to ask: who was not? – it is not so often that I have heard Messiaen in Benjamin; here, in certain chords, even progressions, I fancied that I did (just, actually as I did in one of the works in the earlier concert, on which more below). Boulez, perhaps inevitably, came to mind too: again certain matters of kinship rather than influence, I think: the exquisite alchemy of melody, harmony, and timbre, for instance, with roots in earlier music surely renewing their musico-dramatic vows, poignantly reminding us that Boulez himself never wrote the opera he always planned, and which we always longed for. There is, I think, no parallel for the use to which Benjamin puts some of the most ear-catching instrumental solos: bass viol, glass harmonica, and so on. They may be used elsewhere, but there is nothing evidently Mozartian about, say, the latter. Nor need there be. This is confident writing in skin from a composer entirely bien dans sa peau.

There was nothing, needless to say, to beware of in Benjamin’s conducting of the score. His quiet authority seemed to speak almost unmediated, although that is of course ever an illusion of performance. Likewise, the playing of the MCO, reaching the end of a European tour with the conductor-composer, seemed almost beyond praise. Three of the original, Aix-en-Provence cast returned (Barbara Hannigan, Christopher Purves, and Victoria Simmonds). It might on some occasion be reassuring to find something adversely to criticise in a performance by Hannigan. Now was not, however, the occasion to do so. Her musico-dramatic portrayal of Agnès judged to perfection, almost as if emerging from the divided (at one point, Paul Griffiths’s note tells us, fifteen-part) MCO strings themselves, the character’s journey to selfhood, erotic fulfilment, and ultimately (necessary) tragedy. If it were Hannigan’s voice that ultimately continued to resonate once we had left the hall, the dangerous allure of Tim Mead’s counter-tenor came close. The complete identification of Purves with the role of Protector seemed, if anything, to bring still more dramatic daring than at Covent Garden. He could edge towards speech were he wished, without one ever suspecting that to be a musical failing. His eyes said it all; except his voice said more. Simmonds and Robert Murray brought subtlety and dramatic energy, as well as musical security, to their ‘lesser’ roles, still crucial – as, indeed, was every part of this outstanding performance.

Earlier in the day, a few minutes’ walk away at LSO St Luke’s, we had heard ‘Lunchtime with George’, a splendid survey of some of the composer’s chamber works from members of the MCO and, in the case of the piano piece, Shadowlines, George King. First was Benjamin’s arrangement of a Purcell Fantasia (Jaan Bossier (clarinet), Sonja Starke (violin), Maximilian Hornung (cello), Alphonse Cemin (celesta)). In one of his wonderfully engaging introductory conversations with Sara Mohr-Pietsch, Benjamin described Purcell’s early viol consort works as some of the greatest music ever written on this island. Indeed they are – and would that we heard them as often as their stature demands, or even a little more often. Already an old, verging upon archaic, genre when Purcell wrote them, they seem almost made to encourage such dialogue between past and present, and were indeed written, alongside arrangements by Oliver Knussen and Colin Matthews, as part of an Aldeburgh anniversary tribute to the English Orpheus. The second half in that concert was to be Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time; Benjamin switched Messiaen’s piano for celesta, imparting an unearthly feeling to the music which, in retrospect, might fancifully be heard as prefiguring that angelic glass harmonic in Written in Skin. Slow, steady progress of the first part and alternation with the quicker sections exchanged echt-Purcellian melancholy for something approaching high spirits, yet the suspicion of loss remained. Glassy, vibrato-less stringed instruments gained in vibrating allure, yet the journey was never one-way; this is thoughtful ‘authenticity’ rather than the fatwa of a period ayatollah. I thought at one point of Berio, although the sound and the sensibility are different. Music mediates, brings us together, perhaps especially when our way of listening – Pulcinella, anyone? – is called into question and enhanced.

Júlia Gállego was the solo flautist for one of Benjamin’s earliest-published pieces, Flight. Gállego worked with the composer seemingly as one, to convey, as well as melodic, Messiaenic profusion, a sense of harmonic ‘depth’, almost programmatically so, given the inspiration of ‘the sight of birds soaring and dipping over the peaks of the Swiss Alps’. Form was dynamically revealed; attack was endlessly varied. There was, ultimately, a splendid sense of numinous mystery: here, indeed, was a pupil of Messiaen.

 

Viola, Viola was written, at the invitation of Toru Takemitsu, for Yuri Bashmet and Nobuko Imai to perform at the 1997 opening of the Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall. If it managed to fill that hall, then it would scarcely have problems at St Luke’s. Nor did it under the violists’ worthy successors, Anna Puig Torné and Béatrice Muthelet. Confounding expectations seemed to me a theme, intentional or otherwise, of work and performance. Not only is this, as it were, an orchestral work for but two instrumentalists, but everything seems unpredictable, whilst making perfect sense after it has happened. (I have doubtless read too much Hegel to be thinking of him here, but such is the way of his dialectic, or indeed of theories of evolution.) Moments of éclat – Boulez on my mind here! – registered powerfully, unexpected yet anything but arbitrary. Harmonics, sometimes in tandem, sometimes not, could be understood at least in this sense to perform a similar role. Implied harmonies were again conveyed in masterly fashion, both as work and performance. (Apologies for any sexism there, but ‘mistressly’ really does not work!) Moments of Bartók seemed to echo, now strident, now tinged once again with Purcellian melancholy. Sometimes, if I closed my eyes, I could have sworn there were more than two players, whether ‘ancient’ consort or ‘modern’ quartet. A Mussorgskian bell, but no pealing? Maybe it was that I had recently heard Boris. Stravinskian games: almost certainly.

 

King’s performance of Shadowlines sounded to me equally authoritative. Benjamin’s compositional games, whatever he might have wished, perhaps came even more to the fore in the work’s canonical progress. We heard its six sections as a continuous whole, to be sure, but also very much with their own character. The first piece, marked ‘Cantabile’, proved the gentle curtain-raiser of the composer’s own description. I thought of a Boulez Notation, at least some of its harmonies. The hand-crossing of the second movement, ‘Wild’ with almost berceuse-like rocking beneath was captured as well as I imagine the work’s dedicatee, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, having done. Duetting in the ‘Scherzando’ movement – Benjamin suggested duetting bassoons – eventually broadened into a veritable chorus, putting me in mind, despite the modern piano, of the timbral possibilities of some nineteenth-century instruments. It was the fifth of the six movements that occupied the greatest time, and here it received a volcanic, perhaps again post-Messieanic performance, climax superbly judged. In the end, paradoxically or maybe dialectically, the composer’s stated wish that, as in the first movement of Webern’s Symphony, we lose perception of the canon was fulfilled partly in the mediated infidelity of our experience. Vertical and horizontal elements would dissolve and find themselves reinstated; or so I imagined. The epilogue truly sounded as such; I thought of Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales.

Finally, Benjamin’s arrangement of the Canon in Hypodiapason and Contrapunctus VII from the Art of Fugue (Paco Varoch (flute), Stefán Jón Bernhardsson, Manuel Moya (horns), Jagdisch Mistry, Timothy Summers, Michiel Commandeur (violins), Delphine Tissot, Joel Hunter (violas), Martin Leo Schmidt (cello)). It was composed at Boulez’s request for a concert in which his own music would alternate with arrangements of Bach. (What a wonderful idea!) Benjamin’s piece takes the unique (I do not know whether it is empirically, but please humour me!) instrumentation of Mémoriale. In this, the only work requiring a conductor, Benjamin took the Canon fast, yet it never seemed remotely hurried; rather, it sounded juste. Counterpoint was ‘revealed’ in every sense, again presaging the evening’s opera. The fugue offered a change of pace and, so it seemed, of perspective, in an almost Birtwistle-like sense. (Again, I think that was just my own fancy, but so be it.) The composer’s desire to suggest an organ here was mesmerisingly fulfilled: here a sixteen-foot bourdon, there the strange alchemy – that word again – of a horn and viola duet, a miracle of ‘registration’. It made me think that it would be a very good thing, were Benjamin to write for the King of Instruments itself. Fastidious expressivity came close to Boulez; Bachian reinvention suggested the music of the spheres. This was a concert so engrossing that it too might have been written on skin.

 

Written on Skin, Royal Opera, 18 March 2013

Royal Opera House

Agnès – Barbara Hannigan

Protector – Christopher Purves
First Angel/Boy – Bejun Mehta
Second Angel/Marie – Victoria Simmonds
Third Angel/John – Allan Clayton

Katie Mitchell (director)

Vicki Mortimer (designs)
Jon Clark (lighting)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

George Benjamin (conductor)

 

 

Near-unanimous approval tends to make me suspicious. However I might have tried, though – and, to be honest, I did not try very hard – I found myself unable to dissent. If George Benjamin’s new opera, Written on Skin, does not necessarily knock one for six, sixty even, in the way that a Birtwistle opera would, such is not Benjamin’s subtler – not superior, just different – way. The Mask of Orpheus and Gawain, for instance, make a cataclysmic impression akin to one’s first Wagner; in a sense, Benjamin requires closer, more attentive listening, not unlike that necessitated by Pelléas et Mélisande, and, just as important, readiness to consider what opera might be, what it might do, where it might yet take us. (Not, I hasten to add, that Birtwistle does not benefit greatly from the most attentive listening, but one might entirely miss the point of Benjamin without it.) Insofar as one can possibly feel emboldened to use the word after a single hearing, Written on Skin is a masterpiece. Perhaps most intriguingly, it seems to mark more of a beginning, Benjamin’s chamber opera Into the Little Hill notwithstanding, than a culmination. It may be the latter too, in that in retrospect, much of Benjamin’s œuvre seems to have been heading in this direction, but the opportunities opened up seem greater still.

 

Martin Crimp’s libretto derives inspiration from a thirteenth-century Occitan ballad, though no more than Benjamin’s music does it attempt any manner of pastiche. The story, at least on one level, is dealt with easily. A landowner, The Protector invites The Boy into his house and household to write an illustrated book, to be written on skin, a book that would chronicle and celebrate a good life and good deeds. Initially suspicious, the Protector’s Wife – his ‘property’, as he tells us – falls both for book and Boy, their combination a liberation for her, in a sense an instantiation of personhood. They become lovers, as documented by the Boy in his book. Though attracted to the Boy himself, the Protector kills him and serves Agnès a meal that includes the Boy’s heart. What is intended as revenge, as a way to subordinate her once again, provokes defiance, for Agnès is able to declare that the taste of the Boy’s heart will never leave her mouth. She frustrates her husband’s attempt to kill her by taking her own life.

 

So far so good, but in many ways, what most interests are the framing and the questioning. An opening Chorus of Angels takes the audience back eight centuries and bring to life the Protector and Agnès; one of them takes on the role of the Boy. The angels intervene and comment, drawing a parallel with Biblical Creation: man is invented and punished; woman is invented and blamed. Who provokes the dreams of the Protector, in which he learns of a secret page to the book, Agnès depicted therein ‘gripping the Boy in a secret bed’? There are many other such questions one might and should ask, but they are perhaps to be subsumed within the striking realisation that writing itself is at the heart of the drama. Fate in the guise of the pitiless angels is strong, but narrative formulations in which the protagonists speak of themselves in the third person present not only a degree of artificiality – ‘naïve’ art, in Schiller’s celebrated formulation, being no longer possible – but compel the audience to write and to interrogate its own dramas. We are involved in something old, strange, and yet new; at the same time, we are both of the Angels’ party and repelled by it. Benjamin’s music, is of course instrumental – in more than one sense – in accomplishing that too, if never straightforwardly. The fifteen scenes may in some sense be considered ‘cinematic’ but they are still more of the theatre.

 

But before coming to that, let us consider Katie Mitchell’s staging. The thing with ‘one size fits all’ metatheatricality is that, not unlike a stopped clock, from time to time it fits. And given the horror of her ENO Idomeneo, it is a matter of gratitude that Mitchell did not on this occasion try something different. I cannot in all honesty say that I perceived a particular need for the extras to be doing what they were doing rather than something else, at least for much of the time, but that, I think, was the point. A sense of something ongoing, indifferent to mere human concerns, angels as bureaucrats, one might say, came across so strongly for the very reason that Mitchell had paid such attention to apparently irrelevant – though who is to say? – detail. Action proceeding on different levels, physical as well as otherwise, here assists the story or stories, Vicki Mortimer’s contrasting ‘old’ and ‘new’ designs assisting equally in that respect.

 

I shall limit my remarks concerning Benjamin’s music, remarks which must necessarily remain generalised; I have only heard it once and have not seen the score. Nevetherless, even from a single hearing, it not only accomplished a necessary union of intellectual and emotional involvement; it enticed one to hear the work again and again. Sonorities old and new beguile, though it is worth reiterating that there is nothing of the pastiche even, indeed especially, to the use of an ‘old’ instrument such as the bass viol. Its Passion resonances may be unavoidable, but what most strikes is its apparent contemporaneity, to the action, to us, to wherever or whenever we might be. Likewise the use towards the end of glass harmonica might initially have one think ‘Mozart’, but what it does has apparently little to do with those strange miniature masterpieces Mozart composed under very particular circumstances. The ethereal quality remains, to be sure, but almost takes on an electronic- or, perhaps better, post-electronic quality, seducing our ears, expanding their range, hinting even at sounds we have yet to perceive. Stockhausen may seem quite distant, and in most senses he is, yet perhaps his ghost in that sense haunts.

 

Perhaps more striking still, however, are the use not of ‘unusual’ sounds, but of the orchestra as commonly understood and indeed of post-tonal – use what adjective one will – harmonic relations. One hears references, conscious or otherwise, above all to Pelléas and to Wozzeck – I was delighted to see Benjamin mention both works in a programme interview, having reached that conclusion for myself – but it is only occasionally, for instance in a Wozzeck-like set of intervals, that one can say for certain, and even when one can, it is admirably unclear what that might mean, if anything. The understatedness must surely have some inspiration in Pelléas, the only non-Benjamin opera the composer has conducted, making one listen, drawing one in, preparing the way for the moments of cataclysm, which register with power all the greater. The pacing and drawing of climax suggests, no embodies, a mastery of musico-dramatic composition to rank with some of the greatest. Vocal writing is grateful, yet again makes no deluded references to styles no longer possible.

 

About an hour and a half, moreover, proves once again a wise length for an opera. There are great operas that last for much longer, of course, operas from which one would rather slit one’s throat rather than have a single bar cut from them. However, one thinks more often of brevity in terms of its lack than its excess. (I vigorously, even furiously, dissent, but I have even heard people talk of longueurs in Elektra.) Janáček tends to have it just about right; so does Berg in Wozzeck. Wagner never fails in that respect – well, perhaps in Rienzi, though we should do well to grant ‘Meyerbeer’s greatest opera’ the opportunity to be heard ‘in full’, whatever that might be. Yet, as everyone knows, Wagner offers the most dangerous of models. Mozart and Monteverdi are similarly unapproachable, perhaps still more so. It is far better, then, to have an informed audience wondering whether there might have been room for a little more expansiveness than to have it constantly checking its watches.   

 

Performances were excellent. I assume Christopher Purves to have been a little under the weather, since so fine a singer would not normally have had recurring problems at the top of his range. Dramatic truth shone through nevertheless; it was at the time of hearing – and I do not mean this in a restrictive fashion – impossible to imagine anyone else in his role of Protector. Bejun Mehta and Barbara Hannigan both proved sensational as the Boy and Agnès. By now, at this stage on the production’s tour, this must almost be a repertoire work for them, but their combination of musical and dramatic intelligence felt as keen as I imagine it might have done at the premiere. Ethereal beauty, sensuous allure, and an inscrutable blend of apparent naïveté and knowingness marked Mehta’s Boy. Hannigan’s musico-dramatic excellence, her journey from subservience through sexual liberation to mastery – a deliberately gendered choice of word – over her husband were charted equally by stage presence, vocal line, and communication of the text. Victoria Simmonds and Allan Clayton offered admirable support as angels and as Agnès’s sister and brother-in-law.

 

Last yet anything but least, the performance of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House was breathtaking, not least in the sense that one had to remind oneself after the event that this was ‘new music’. Benjamin’s score was performed with both special, loving attention, every phrase sounding apparently as it should – again, I should stress, there is a degree of supposition here, without actually seeing it for myself – and the whole despatched as if, in the best sense, this were staple operatic fare. By that, I mean not to say that there was the slightest hint of routine, but rather that the confidence to express and indeed to seduce was paramount. If such playing did not convince, convert, then it is difficult to know what would.

 

It really is past time, then, to smash the museum, a museum all the more constraining – as any good Feuerbachian will tell you – because its alienation is imaginary. Opera houses – all of them, certainly not just Covent Garden – devote an inordinate amount of time to works of little consequence, endlessly repeated, for no other apparent reason than that historically they have formed part of the repertoire. What, then, sells out? Written on Skin and The Minotaur. Whenever one speaks to opera-goers – as opposed, doubtless, to people who attend ‘the opera’ as a social occasion – they thirst for new repertoire and for modernist classics, many of them unstaged in whichever house, city, even country one is considering. Would anyone really care if another note of Donizetti were never heard again? Many of us would be relieved. In any case, surely it is about time that Nono, Henze, Stockhausen, Busoni, Dallapiccola, Schoenberg, even Haydn and Gluck, had a chance, still more so composers who – cue a deep intake of breath – have the temerity still to be alive. What people talk about, care about, are willing even to travel across the globe for, are great reimaginings of repertoire masterworks – Parsifal from Gatti and Herheim, for instance – revivals of unjustly neglected masterworks – take the  Theater an der Wien’s recent Mathis der Maler – and great contemporary musical drama. Opportunities to hear the nth high C may be relegated to the circus. Boulez, from whom we still of course await an opera, once spoke of his admiration for the Red Guard, since it was willing to destroy; if audiences are to renew themselves, it will be through works such as those of Benjamin, Birtwistle, et al., works which themselves renew the operatic form to which so many of us are devoted.

 

Still, Kasper Holten’s new regime seems to be offering something of a new dawn for the Royal Opera; the recently announced 2013-14 season an undoubted improvement upon what has gone before. Contrasts with the artistic near-nullity on offer next year in Paris and Vienna is stark. Let us hope, then, that this splendid achievement will be built upon and that never again shall we hear that a new production of a wonderful opera such as Weber’s Oberon – hardly an avant-gardist work! – has been cancelled in order to make room for the third run within a single season of La traviata. If one’s reaction to a great opera performance, whether it be a newly-minted Figaro under Sir Colin Davis or a genuinely new work, is to wish to hear it again immediately, then that is what we need to feel about opera seasons as a whole. Let us toast, then, the Royal Opera’s plans to place new opera at the very heart of what it does, of what it is, of what it will be.