Trinity Laban SO/Jackson - Elgar, 6 May 2016

Great Hall, Blackheath Halls

Elgar - Symphony no.1 in A-flat major, op.55

Trinity Laban Symphony Orchestra with members of Welsh National Opera Orchestra

George Jackson (conductor)

Members of the WNO Orchestra have been joining young players at the Royal Welsh College of Drama, Birmingham Conservatoire, and Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, for ‘side-by-side’ mentoring, rehearsals, and performances. In a welcome note to the programme, Trinity Laban’s Head of Orchestral Studies explained: ‘Not only then, are the students encouraged and trained to play to the highest professional level, but they also experience the focus and discipline required to prepare a performance in limited rehearsal time – again a crucial discipline for the aspiring professional orchestral musician.’ The results, under Trinity Laban’s Sir Charles Mackerras Fellow in Conducting, George Jackson, were impressive indeed. Impressive and moving.

 

The excellent Blackheath acoustic helped to bring out both the warmth and immediacy in the orchestral playing. If the lamps were going out all over Europe at the opening of the first movement, there was strength too. The transition to the second group and the character of its material were smoothly, dramatically handled. Disintegrative tendencies – particularly in the brass earlier on, but later also in some beautifully dissolving string lines – were present but not exaggerated. Jackson imparted a strong sense of line throughout; there was no doubt that he knew where the music was heading, nor of his ability to communicate that to his players and to the audience. The timpanist’s underpinning of the dramatic trajectory often proved especially telling.

 

The scherzo was just as alert dramatically – drama, an idea to which I kept returning – as it was rhythmically. (There is no real distinction, of course.) Darkness was of a kind familiar from Elgar’s own no-nonsense approach to the score. The trio, tonally distant, sounded outwardly different, at least to begin with, but underlying unease remained, indeed mounted. The slow movement was in that respect not dissimilar, albeit with the ordering, as it were, reversed. There was a songful quality to this Adagio: certainly not on the slow side, but nor was it ever harried. Occasional passages of thinner string sound were to be heard, but such a cavil – almost my only one – should not be taken too seriously, for there were many more passages of noble passion.

The Lento opening to the finale was unmistakeable in its sense of darkness, even malevolence, such as at least to match what had gone before. ‘What had gone before’ was of course to be heard in thematic reminiscence, arguably more than mere ‘reminiscence’. Elgar’s practice here inevitably brought to mind some of his greatest symphonic predecessors, not least Beethoven in the Ninth Symphony, albeit with the crucial caveat of there being no vocal entry, with all that that entails (or does not). There is much more to the movement than that, of course, but there was a heavy load to be borne. Elgar offers no fixed boundary here between past and present; nor did the performance, whose flexibility, even protean quality, greatly enhanced its capacity to move. The final peroration, if one can call it that, was as equivocal as many of its Mahlerian counterparts.

 

 

 

Moses und Aron, Welsh National Opera, 25 July 2014

Moses (John Tomlinson) and the Israelites
Images: Bill Cooper

Royal Opera House

Moses – Sir John Tomlinson

Aron – Rainer Trost
A Young Maiden, First Naked Virgin – Elizabeth Atherton
A Youth – Alexander Sprague
Another Man, An Ephraimite – Daniel Grice
A Priest – Richard Wiegold
First Elder – Julian Boyce
Second Elder – Laurence Cole
Third Elder – Alastair Moore
Sick Woman, Fourth Naked Virgin – Rebecca Alonwy-Jones
Naked Youth – Edmond Choo
Second Naked Virgin – Fiona Harrison
Third Naked Virgin – Louise Ratcliffe
Chorus of six solo voices – Fiona Harrison, Amanda Baldwin, Sian Meinir, Peter Wilman, Alastair Moore, Laurence Cole

Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito (directors)

Jörg Behr (revival director)
Anna Viebrock (original designs)
Tim Mitchell (lighting)

Chorus and Extra Chorus of Welsh National Opera (chorus master: Stephen Harris)

Orchestra of Welsh National Opera
Lothar Koenigs (conductor)

 

Once again, we find ourselves thanking an unrepresentable being for Welsh National Opera’s commitment to its mission. It is a sad state of affairs when a season that includes both Boulevard Solitude and Moses und Aron is considered exceptional, but it is – and is all the more so when one contrasts such seriousness of purpose with the endless revivals of La traviata which, Die Frau ohne Schatten notwithstanding, seem to occupy so much of the Royal Opera’s effort. That said, if the Royal Opera has not undertaken what would be only its second ever staging of Schoenberg’s masterpiece – the first and last was in 1965, long before most of us were born! – then at least it has engaged in a very welcome ‘WNO at the Royal Opera House’ relationship, in which we in London shall have the opportunity to see some of the fruits of the more adventurous company’s endeavours.

 

All of that would be more or less in vain, were the results not to attain the excellence Schoenberg demands. They were, in pretty much every respect, any of the doubtless inevitable shortcomings being of relatively minor importance. This was probably the finest work I have yet heard from Lothar Koenigs – to whose partnership with David Pountney we clearly owe many thanks.  There can be no faking the necessary depth of musical understanding in this score, any more than there can be in Wagner or Brahms (or, indeed, anything that matters). Koenigs’s textual clarity and clarity of purpose not only enabled the drama to develop; they were in good part the Wagnerian embodiment, even representation, of the musical drama – not the least here of Schoenberg’s dialectics. There were occasional slips by the WNO Orchestra, but in no sense did they detract from a wholehearted contribution, which might have suggested that the work had been in its repertoire for years. (Recent Wagner, Berg, and indeed Henze will have done no harm, but even so…)

 

Perhaps the most exceptional work of all – though opera is, or at least should be, one of the supreme elevations of collaboration over miserable, bourgeois ‘competition’ – came from the WNO Chorus. In an interview to accompany Pierre Boulez’s second recording of Moses, Schoenberg’s great – alongside the very different Michael Gielen, his greatest? – interpreter and critic remarked:  ‘People always say that it’s not an opera but an oratorio, which Schoenberg later turned into an opera. That interested me, because I disagree with it. The chorus, for example, is the most important character in the opera. It’s like a chameleon, speaking for or against, sometimes even internally divided or emphatic in its support of one particular party; it is angry, it is docile, it comments on the action.’ Musically and dramatically – indeed, quite rightly there seemed little distinction to be made – the chorus succeeded in fulfilling Boulez’s and Schoenberg’s expectations. Whether en masse, soloistically, or at various stages of in between, whether singing, speaking or at various stages of in between, Schoenberg’s highly charged and often ravishingly beautiful choral writing – I was often set thinking of his psalm settings – were faithfully, viscerally communicated. And of course, communication, both its necessity and its impossibility, is very much the thing in this of all operas; or rather, it is one of the things, all of them, like the score itself derived entirely from a single row, proceeding from the necessity and impossibility of representing the Almighty Himself. If indeed that is who He is, for at least at times, an element of doubt should and did set in, with respect to whether Moses is on the wrong track all together. This is and was a drama, not a tract.

 

I had my moments of doubt concerning the production too. Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, as revived – very well, insofar as I could tell – by Jörg Behr present the entirety of the action in a single, courtroom venue. Law  is of course a concern of the drama in several respects, the law-giving properties of the twelve-note method involved in a complicated, dramatically generative relationship with Mosaic law and the law of Creation itself. Moreover, as Aron points out to Moses, the Tables of the Law are ‘images also, just part of the whole idea’. That said, the idea or ideas of law do not seem to be especially emphasised, and – without wishing for some entirely impractical as well as undesirable Cecil B. de Mille Biblical ‘epic’ presentation, which would make only too clear the truth of Adorno's charge that grand opera prepared the way for popular cinema – it is difficult to feel, at least at first, that there is not an element of dramatic constriction in the monothematic scenic realisation. (I am not entirely sure what was meant by the description of having been ‘based on an original design by Anna Viebrock’, given that no further design work was credited.)

 

(Aron) Rainer Trost

And yet, so long as one is prepared to do some thinking – and anyone who is not should not be allowed anywhere near this opera – it is perfectly possible to glean a great deal; what appears to be constriction was in some sense also mental liberation, which again is one of the crucial dialectics at work in the drama itself, concerned as it and indeed all modern philosophy are with the Kantian antinomy between freedom and determinism. Not only can the courtroom – if indeed that is what it was – readily convert itself, sometimes with a little scenic rearrangement but above all through the engagement of our minds, into a venue for political and/or religious activity or, through Aron’s manipulative-representational skills, into a cinema, upon which the crowd can watch the orgy, as we watch the crowd. We, the receptive and creative audience – at least, that is what we should be – have to employ our minds to represent what the Israelites were seeing, and thus to engage in that very necessity and impossibility of representation of which Moses and Aron spoke and sang.  That is not to say, of course, that we should never see what goes on; Reto Nickler’s excellent Vienna production (available on DVD, under the inspired musical direction of Daniele Gatti, with the Vienna orchestra playing this music as only it can) shows what can be done with modern communicative messages of advertising and pornography. But what first seems as though it may simply be a cowardly – or even financially necessary – abdication of responsibility is revealed to be something much more interesting and, at some level, even provocatively Schoenbergian.

 

John Tomlinson’s assumption of the title role was predictably imposing. There was a good deal of what Gary Tomlinson has called the ‘Michelangesque terribilità’ of Schoenberg’s flawed hero, though I could not help but feel that the melodrama was overdone in the final scene. Still, the tragic grandeur, very much in the line of Wotan,  of Tomlinson’s Moses was unquestionable. Although he seemed to have tired a little in the first half of the second act, Rainer Trost’s Aron proved a fine foil. I am not sure I have heard so clear a contrast between Sprechstimme and sinuous twelve-note bel canto (with a good deal of Siegfried  et al. thrown in). Spatial matters played their role in the first act; placing on stage heightened the unbridgeable contrast between the two characters competing on unequal yet still justified terms. (One should never fall into the trap of saying that Moses is right and Aron is wrong; Schoenberg tilts the scales but remains some way from upending them, and there are certainly occasions when Moses is shown to be unambiguously, even unimaginatively in the wrong.)

 

Were I to proceed to hymn musico-dramatic excellence in the smaller roles, I should probably find myself simply repeating the cast list. However, I shall, in the spirit of the work, attempt the impossible, and single out Richard Wiegold’s stentorian Priest, the exemplarily alert contributions of Daniel Grice and Alexander Sprague, and the – literally – unearthly beauty summoned up by the chorus of six solo voices: Fiona Harrison, Amanda Baldwin, Sian Meinir, Peter Wilman, Alastair Moore, and Laurence Cole.  For a work that struggles, like Aquinas, with a theological via negative, there was a great deal to be positive and thankful about. Three cheers to WNO!


To read more about Moses und Aron, please click here.

 

 

Boulevard Solitude, Welsh National Opera, 13 March 2014

(sung in English)

Milton Keynes Theatre

Armand des Grieux – Jason Bridges

Manon Lescaut – Sarah Tynan
Lescaut – Benjamin Bevan
Lilaque père – Adrian Thompson
Francis – Alastair Moore
Lilaque fils – Laurence Cole
Mr Man – Tomasz Wygoda

Mariusz Treliński (director)

Boris Kudlicka (set designs)
Marek Adamski (costumes)
Felice Ross (lighting)
Bartek Macias (video)
Tomasz Wygoda (choreography)

Welsh National Opera Chorus (chorus master: Stephen Harris)

Welsh National Opera Orchestra
Lothar Koenigs (conductor)

 

As I took the unlovely walk towards the theatre from the railway station, up Midsummer Boulevard, I began to wonder whether I was the victim of a hoax. Was the claim that the Welsh National Opera would be staging Boulevard Solitude in Milton Keynes simply a way of sending up the absurd pretension of the street-naming in this most notorious of England’s ‘new towns’? Whatever would I find when my long march came to an end? The answer proved to be: a first-rate performance of Henze’s first full-scale opera, in a rather impressive, small but not too small, municipal theatre, boasting friendlier staff than I can recall encountering in any opera house, large or small.

 

Indeed, though I have not seen so very many of WNO’s productions, this was undoubtedly the finest in my experience. A few frayed moments aside, the orchestra showed itself well matched to Henze’s protean, eclectic idiom(s), Lothar Koenigs’s direction equally adept. Each scene was well characterised, whilst a sense of onward progression was maintained throughout. Whether the echoes of Lulu – near-plagiarism or tribute, according to inclination? – or the strains of Stan Kenton-like jazz, each style had its due in a performance that winningly conveyed the sheer exuberance of Henze’s youthful explorations.  After the Hanover premiere in 1952, a journalist compared Henze with Judas Iscariot; 500 marks had allegedly been the price for betrayal of German art. Here one heard renewal, not afraid, Stravinsky-like, to use rather than venerate tradition, yet in that use nevertheless manifesting a truer respect than the pieties of misplaced nationalism. Already, moreover, one hears –and in performance, heard – the unwillingness of the composer to settle for serialist orthodoxies, twelve-note writing not only interspersed with frank diatonicism, whether parodic or relatively unmediated, but also, Berg-like, dramatising its own working out. The dramatic contrast between Schoenberg and Stravinsky expressed in, say, Der Prinz von Homburg sounds, if anything, more adventurously, certainly more freshly here.  

 

Mariusz Treliński’s production works impressively in tandem with score and performance. The chic emptiness of Boris Kudlicka’s sets, occasionally visited by cinematic flashes  and clashes, not least thanks to Felice Ross’s skilful lighting, convincingly evokes the mood of background and foreground and the dubious ‘modern’ atmospheres of railway station and hotel bar comings and goings, permitting the central tragedy to speak for itself, growing out of that setting. One can perhaps make too much of the filmic quality, whether of work or staging, since this remains very much a theatre piece, but it was certainly present. Indeed, as Henze would write in his autobiography, Bohemian Fifths, this ‘was a subject that had suggested itself to me … [partly] as a result of Henri-Georges-Clouzot’s recent film, which was set at the time of the French Resistance and starred Cécile Aubry’. I wondered to start with whether Treliński was focusing too much on Manon and not enough on Armand, but then reconsidered: to an extent, that is what Henze does himself, allowing Armand to emerge from the depths of the story’s pre-history as anti-hero rather than being imposed upon it from the outset.  

 

The cast was excellent. Jason Bridges portrayed movingly and sensitively the descent of Armand into seasonal and metaphorical winter. Well supported by Koenigs and Treliński, the sudden rush as Armand did his first line of cocaine packed quite a punch; so too did the plaintive moments in which Bridges had him rise above mere self-pity. Sarah Tynan made for an excellent Manon, those Lulu echoes ever-present and yet not overpowering; this was not simply a tribute act, but a woman with at least a degree of agency of her own, even vis-à-vis Benjamin Bevan’s suitably thuggish Lescaut. The rest of the cast did far more than make up the numbers, the Lilaques (Adrian Thompson and Laurence Cole) nicely contrasted yet sharing the benefits of financial and social privilege, both spoken and unspoken. Alastair Moore offered an intelligently sung and acted Francis.

 

The British premiere took place at Sadler’s Wells, in 1962; I therefore assume that would have been given in English too. After a minute or two, I more or less forgot that I ‘should’ have been hearing the work in Grete Weil’s original German, such was the conviction of the performance. Three cheers, then, for WNO!

 

Tristan und Isolde, Welsh National Opera, 2 June 2012

Millennium Centre, Cardiff

Tristan – Ben Heppner

King Marke – Matthew Best

Isolde – Ann Petersen

Kurwenal – Phillip Joll

Melot – Simon Thorpe

Brangäne – Susan Bickley

Shepherd – Simon Crosby Buttle

Yannis Kokkos (director, designs)

Peter Watson (revival director)

Chorus of Welsh National Opera

Orchestra of Welsh National Opera

Lothar Koenigs (conductor)

Wagner famously declared to Mathilde Wesendonk that only mediocre performances of Tristan could save him, the power of the work being such that it would otherwise be banned. ‘Perfectly good ones will be bound to drive people mad, – I cannot imagine it otherwise.’ Alas, he – and we – must endure the opposite problem; when, at least in the theatre, do we ever have the chance to find out. It is difficult enough to find an orchestra with the requisite body of sound, let alone a conductor with the skill to communicate the melos of Wagner’s miraculous, treacherous score. Daniel Barenboim comes close, but the only conductors I have heard live truly to fulfil that heroic task have been Bernard Haitink and Semyon Bychkov. As ever, one longs for Furtwängler. I am delighted to report that Lothar Koenigs did a more than reasonable job, a distinct improvement upon his Proms Meistersinger. Moreover, the orchestra sounded far better here than it had done in the vast expanses of the Royal Albert Hall. I should be dishonest if I said there were no occasions on which the lack of a greater body of strings did not register, even on occasion painfully so, but far more often, I was taken aback at the degree of success with which the strings punched above their weight. The WNO woodwind section often excelled itself, clearly delighting in some interesting highlighting of lines often overlooked. (Barenboim often does something similar, in a nod to his experience with the orchestral sonorities of French music.)

To return to Koenigs, there was little here that seemed arbitrary, and if Wagner’s vast architectonic forms did not always register as they do in the finest hands, sections thereof possessed conviction, shape, and direction. Particularly impressive were the more menacing sections, for instance the violence one hears upon the arrival of Marke and Melot at Kareol, and Kurwenal’s response. Sadly, much of the good work was undone by the near-criminal cuts imposed upon the score. If I remember correctly, that in Act Two was not the so-called ‘traditional’ excision, but it was no less disorienting, the very heart of Wagner’s drama, verbal as well as musical, treated with disdain. (And yes, I am well aware that, conductors I revere, Haitink included, have acted similarly, though not always so.) The cut in Tristan’s monologue was worse still; indeed, its shock was so disorienting that I could not tell you precisely what was done; tonally, as well as verbally, it made no sense whatsoever. Doubtless the cuts were made for vocal rather than interpretative reasons, but they are no more excusable for that, which brings me to my next point.  

For, if conductors almost always fall short, their part almost seems the easiest to fulfil. What of the cast, and especially what of Tristan? I have never heard a singer up to its demands, at least not in the theatre. We all know what happened to Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld – or rather, we all tend to know the legend. At any rate, the days of a Windgassen, let alone a Suthaus, let alone a Melchior, seem to be gone forever. That said, some Tristans fare better than others. I had been heartened by reports from the first night, suggesting that Ben Heppner’s voice had rallied. (His 2009 appearance at Covent Garden was not a happy experience.) For the first act, the least challenging for the part, that just about seemed to be the case. One might even have made a claim for ruggedness as part of the character. And, to be fair, there were moments during the agonies of the third act monologue in which Heppner’s struggles – not just in terms of his vocal difficulties – proved moving, if perhaps more appropriate to Peter Grimes than to Tristan. Heppner really does not do erotic. I defy anyone, however, not to have found painful in the worst sense the swathes of the score in which there were not so much intonational problems as an inability to sing, apparently even to hear, the correct notes at all. There were certainly plenty of occasions when he was more than a tone out of kilter with the score. Moreover, the bareness in many registers of the voice, even when in tune, now sadly seems quite beyond repair.

That said, if one inevitably harks back to Nilsson, Flagstad, et al., Ann Petersen’s Isolde was more than creditable. There is neither the Lieder-singer’s detail that Nina Stemme brings to the role, nor the searing intensity of the unforgettable Waltraud Meier, but this young pretender is far from negligible. She sang intelligently, and for the most part with good command of line, though her tuning, especially during the second act duet, was not always so good as it might have been. Susan Bickley’s Brangäne was again an intelligent portrayal, alert to musical and verbal requirements, though oddly, the interjections from her second-act watch proved rather on the tremulous side. Phillip Joll’s Kurwenal was at best gruff, more often, I am afraid to say, merely crude. I almost always find myself saying that King Markes rarely disappoint; yet, if it would be exaggerated to say that Matthew Best’s assumption disappointed, his lament often lacked focus.

If, somehow, one had succeeded with respect to conductor, orchestra, and soloists, whatever, then, would one need to do successfully to stage the work? It needs staging; of that I have no doubt. And yet, it seems to need so little. Abstraction has in my experience always worked best, though one should not be prescriptive about it. Herbert Wernicke’s properly Schopenhauerian understanding impressed at Covent Garden under Haitink, only to be replaced by some typical reductionism from the dread Christof Loy. (At best, one can simply express relief that Loy’s effort was not quite so appalling as his Salzburg Frau ohne Schatten.) There are doubtless some who will applaud Yannis Kokkos’s apparent lack of any idea concerning the work, beyond presenting a diagonal onstage. It is only, however, if one compares this production to the likes of Loy’s that one could feel anything approaching relief. By all means do very little, but do not fetishise the stage directions, the realm of the day in those most nocturnal, metaphysical of dramas. I could not care less whether one sees a ship or not during the first act, though there is no harm in doing so. However, when, at the end, one is faced with sailors upon the masts, to no apparent purpose, one at best thinks the stance more appropriate to townsfolk rioting in Nuremberg, and in reality cannot help to be irritated by the naïveté of it all. Likewise the appearance of soldiers with Marke and Melot; they might have contributed something dramatically, I suppose, but on this occasion they certainly did not. There was no threat, merely distraction. The production has doubtless served its purpose after a fashion, but should surely now be replaced, though, given the potential horrors of a replacement, one can well understand the trepidation that might be felt in going ahead.

La Bohème, Welsh National Opera, 1 June 2012

Millennium Centre, Cardiff

Mimi – Anita Hartig

Musetta – Kate Valentine

Rodolfo – Alex Vicens

Marcello – David Kempster

Schaunard – Gary Griffiths

Colline – David Soar

Annabel Arden (director)

Stephen Brimson Lewis (designs)

Tim Mitchell (lighting)

Nina Dunn (projections)

Philippe Giraudeau (choreography)

Chorus of the Welsh National Opera

Orchestra of the Welsh National Opera

Carlo Rizzi (conductor)

Puccini, I think it is fair to say, will never be my favourite composer, but I have always admired his craftsmanship, and find much of interest in his harmony and his orchestration. Even if I dislike the obvious emotional manipulation, I used to feel not entirely dissimilarly with respect to Strauss, and long ago shed most, if not all, my qualms about that. I remain irked by the obviousness of some of the writing, the lack at times of anything much beneath the surface, and that seems to me a particular problem with some, though not all, of La Bohème. Nevertheless, there is not a single work I have heard by Puccini that I have not found more interesting than anything by Verdi, let alone Donizetti.

When it came to the Welsh National Opera’s staging, I confess that I had failed to do my homework beforehand. Upon seeing Annabel Arden’s offering, I therefore initially assumed it to be a venerable old production, very much on its last legs and was astonished to discover that this was in fact the first night of a new production. It was allegedly updated to Paris just before the outbreak of the Great War, but frankly, I doubt that anyone would have noticed had it not been pointed out. Apparently, the different hats – I am not making this up – gave away the slight updating. Quite what the point was eluded me, especially if one required an advanced diploma in millinery studies to appreciate it. For really, this resembled on stage the most overtly ‘traditional’ production one could imagine. The size of the garret was frankly ludicrous: surely any director and designer would wish to go beyond Zeffirelli; it is not, after all, difficult to advance beyond the utterly mindless. And when one appears not to have the resources to put anything in the space, one ends up with Zeffirelli-lite.

More seriously, it was difficult to discern even the slightest glimmer of an idea in Arden’s approach. WNO might as well have stuck with what it had before. O for the directorial ingenuity integrity of a Peter Konwitschny to make itself felt in such repertoire… (Stefan Herheim has mounted a highly-regarded Bohème in Oslo.) It would have the added benefit of annoying, probably even scandalising, all those people who attend ‘the opera’ for all the wrong reasons. Doubtless they were appeased on this occasion. I suspect, however, that they would have been as mystified as I was as to why, in an otherwise hyper-‘traditional’ production, a man dressed as a monkey appeared at the Café Momus. As for the projections between scenes, they at best resembled a computer screen saver: a waste of time, effort, and doubtless money.

 Carlo Rizzi, a former Music Director, conducted ably enough, but this was not a memorable orchestral account. A considerable amount of first two acts sounded a little on the ‘light’ side, more akin to a certain school of Mendelssohn performance. That was doubtless partly a matter of the orchestra, which at times simply did not have the necessary reserves of string sound on which to fall back, though on other occasions, it acquitted itself rather well, the woodwind in particular. However, it was difficult not to long for the Vienna Philharmonic, and/or for Karajan. Rizzi’s pacing was fine for the most part, although the fourth act dragged, even if that is partly a matter of the score.

The ladies for the most part fared better than the gentlemen. (I am afraid I cannot offer a full cast list, since I did not buy a programme and WNO’s website only identifies the principals.) Anita Hartig was for the most part a touching Mimi. She certainly has a beautiful voice, though her tuning sometimes went a little awry. Kate Valentine’s Musetta was perhaps the most captivating portrayal, a slight edge, especially during the second act, differentiating her nicely from Mimi. Indeed, the lilt, expertly judged, to Valentine’s rendition of ‘Quando me’n vo’ imparted character and sheer enjoyment in equal measure. Increased warmth of tone during the fourth act was apt and telling. Alex Vicens’s Rodolfo was not bad, though at times it veered dangerously close to a not very successful, indeed considerably underpowered, parody of Pavarotti, the sobs irritating beyond measure. If Puccini’s music is to be taken seriously, then that sort of bad tradition really ought to be stamped upon. David Kempster’s Marcello was sung well enough, but it was difficult to overlook his relative maturity, appearing more like a kindly great-uncle than a young artist.

The principal disappointment, however, remained Arden’s staging, a missed opportunity indeed. I remain hopeful that my next Bohème, in Salzburg this summer, will offer more, or at least some, food for thought. Perhaps it will persuade me that there is more dramatic continuity than I have been able to discern so far; at any rate, it will have the Vienna Philharmonic, Daniele Gatti, Anna Netrebko, and a director whose words at least give the impression of having considered what relevance this dangerously sentimental opera might yet retain.

Prom 2: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Welsh National Opera, 17 July 2010

(concert staging)

Hans Sachs – Bryn Terfel
Walther von Stoltzing – Raymond Very
Eva – Amanda Roocroft
Sixtus Beckmesser – Christopher Purves
David – Andrew Tortise
Magdalene – Anna Burford
Nightwatchman – David Soar
Veit Pogner – Brindley Sherratt
Fritz Kothner – Simon Thorpe
Konrad Nachtigall – David Stout
Hans Schwartz – Paul Hodges
Balthasar Zorn – Rhys Meirion
Ulrich Eisslinger – Andrew Rees
Augustin Moser – Stephen Rooke
Hans Foltz – Arwel Huw Morgan
Kunz Vogelgesang – Geraint Dodd
Hermann Ortel – Owen Webb

Chorus and Orchestra of Welsh National Opera (chorus-master: Stephen Harris)
Lothar Koenigs (conductor)

Most reports of Richard Jones’s new production of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg have been laudatory, though there has been a significant minority report decrying a perceived conservative turn. Not having seen it, I am in no position to assess Jones’s contribution, but this visit to the Proms from the Welsh National Opera granted an opportunity to appraise its musical values. There were many virtues to be heard here, but there were also significant drawbacks one might more readily have overlooked in the theatre.

Bryn Terfel was clearly the main attraction for many. It was depressing to note the BBC presented him as such in its television coverage. ‘Bryn Terfel sings Wagner’s Meistersinger’. Nice to see the composer gain a mention, I suppose, though it also makes one wonder what other Meistersinger it might have been, if not his. At any rate, Terfel’s legion of fans will not have been disappointed. This is a role better suited to him than that of Wotan, let alone that of the Wanderer, from which he notoriously cried off for the Royal Opera. His other recent London Wagner appearance, as the Dutchman, ought to have suited him better but was marred by alternate whispering and barking. This was not necessarily a Sachs for the ages, nor was it a profoundly philosophical reading: it was difficult to imagine the folio in which he was absorbed at the opening of the third act being, as has often been suggested, a harbinger of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation. There were, moreover, cases in which important lines and phrases were somewhat casually thrown away. Nevertheless, the cast gained from Terfel’s undeniable star quality: there was a palpable upping of game as soon as he set foot upon the stage. And he generally took great care with his words, all of them audible, most of them invested with meaning. His acting at the end of the Wahn monologue was odd, though, seemingly dissociated from what he was singing, more the ardent, romantic hero.

At least as impressive, to my mind more so, was Andrew Tortise’s David. Deliciously camp, though never excessively so, it was difficult to imagine this apprentice having much interest in Magdalene. But from the outset, one could not be impressed by his careful distinction between the various tones of master-singing, without ever sounding unduly contrived. Wagner helps, of course, but it is no mean feat to bring this off so intelligently and so musically. There were manifold nice touches such as the word-painting, visual too, on the ‘brummt’ (buzz/hum) of ‘Nach dem Wort mit dem Mund auch nicht brummt,’ and withdrawal of vibrato for the ‘eitel Brot und Wasser’ (pure bread and water) melody. In the third act, his intervention to Sachs, ‘Am Jordan Sankt Johannes stand,’ was genuinely funny in its recollection of Beckmesser’s serenade: a trick that can only be pulled off with secure musical and theatrical grounding, sporting just enough crudity to draw the listener into the joke, but without undue disruptive effect. Tortise has an appealing lyric tenor voice that can yet withstand competition with Wagner’s orchestra, and can clearly act too – even in a ‘concert staging’. I hope to hear – and to see – more from him.

Christopher Purves was a fine Beckmesser, credible as the serenading lutenist too (though sadly, he tired a little towards the end of his song). Real anger was imparted during the confrontation with Sachs in his shop – and crucially without sounding a mere caricature. His was a portrayal that clearly itched to be on stage; I wish I could have seen him in the theatre. I have heard more imposing Pogners than that of Brindley Sherratt, but this was intelligently sung. Simon Thorpe’s dry Kothner veered alarmingly in terms of pitch, however. I liked Anna Burford’s colourful Magdalene; as so often, I wished that there were more to hear in this role. Likewise as so often, I found myself wishing that she could trade places with her Eva. Amanda Roocroft’s intonation was not quite so variable as when I heard her as Tatiana at Covent Garden, but in conjunction with intrusive, thick vibrato, this was not a part to savour. Her diction left a great deal to be desired too, and her over-acted style on stage, which may possibly have worked from a distance in the theatre, here simply made her look like a woman too mature for the part. Raymond Very’s Walther was equally disappointing: more accurate, doubtless, but thin, even elderly, of tone and in no sense credible as a charismatic hero. For rendition of the Prize Song merely to sound dull is an achievement I do not wish to hear repeated.

Lothar Koenigs’s conducting had its moments, but could often sound rushed or arbitrarily slow. Koenigs began well, with a first-act Prelude clearly born of experience in the theatre. Woodwind chatter and contrapuntal clarity registered nicely, as did magnificent kettledrum playing from Patrick King – not for the last time, for this was a genuine highlight of the performance throughout. The first act sounded as though it was going to end most impressively, the conductor screwing up the tension well as the bickering began, but unfortunately it degenerated into a rush. (Acting was of a high standard throughout the scene though, perhaps, as I suggested, testament to Terfel’s arrival on stage.) The Preludes in many ways constituted the better part of the conductor’s vision, that to the Second Act duly playful, and the great introduction to the Third gravely and meaningfully slow, cellos digging deep here for a tone that was sadly not always present during the performance. For it must be said that, whilst the orchestral playing was generally committed, the body of strings was simply too small for a true Wagnerian sound unerringly to emerge. One cannot always expect the Staatskapelle Dresden – though who can forget its golden sound under Karajan? – but greater heft is not an entirely unreasonable expectation. What might have passed muster in a small house was not always sufficient for the Royal Albert Hall. Moreover, Koenigs could meander, as during the baptismal scene, when one might have fancied Wagner’s orchestral chorus a mere agent of accompaniment. True choral singing was, however, mightily impressive, especially during the Festwiese scene, for which garlands should be presented to chorus and chorus-master, Stephen Harris.

This was an enjoyable Meistersinger, then, even when shorn of most visual aspects of its production. I did not, however, have the impression that it was born of a production that had penetrated into the darkness, the Wahn, at the very heart of this extraordinary work. This is a rare comedy, in that it should move as does any tragedy. I am tempted indeed to compare it to the greatest of Mozart and Shakespeare. For that, however, I must cast my mind back to the unforgettable performances from Bernard Haitink at Covent Garden – or, of course, listen on record to Furtwängler, Kubelík, and a select few others.