The Lighthouse, Royal Opera (Jette Parker Young Artists), 22 October 2015

Samuel Sakker as First Officer, Yuriy Yurchuk as Second Officer. David Shipley as Third Officer. All images: (C) ROH. Photographer: Clive Barda

 

 

Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House

Sandy, First Officer – Samuel Sakker

Blazes, Second Officer – Yuriy Yurchuk
Arthur, Third Office – David Shipley

Greg Eldridge (director)

Alyson Cummins (designs)
Warren Letton (lighting)
Jo Meredith (movement)

Southbank Sinfonia

Jonathan Santagada (conductor)

 

 

Peter Maxwell Davies’s chamber opera, The Lighthouse, made an excellent showcase for three singers from the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker Young Artists Programme. More to the point, they made an excellent case for the opera, which has been fortunate indeed in London over the past few years.

 

The opera, as I wrote when reviewing English Touring Opera’s 2012 production, has the gripping quality of a superior detective – and ghost – story. Inspired, as the cliché has it, by a true story, in this case an account from Craig Mair’s A Star for Seamen: The Stevenson Family of Engineers, the opera’s unsettling mix of courtroom drama, in almost modern televisual terms, and all-too-real (or is it?) Revelation-style apocalypticism presents both narrative and self-critique, verbally and musically. It makes sense out of, or at least deals with contradictory ‘truths’ – and the magpie tendencies, which yet synthesise, of Davies’s score lie at the heart of that achievement. Words and music from characters in ensemble come together to present something that may or may not be more or less truthful than what it is they and we think they are saying individually. The difficulties of the three men’s relationship – they have been penned together for several months – is menacingly conveyed, though not without affection either. Parody is present, of course, most evidently in the reimagination of the ballads – a street variety from Blazes and Sandy’s sickly drawing-room version – and hymns. Arthur is the sort of pig-headed Protestant fundamentalist who has always drawn Davies’s ire, but there is an element again of affection, such as memories so often bring in spite of themselves, as well as anger in Davies’s presentation and subversion of the hymn tunes. The rhythm of the closing automation – ‘The lighthouse is now automatic,’ we hear at the end of the Prologue – sounded as stubbornly memorable as ever in this performance from the Southbank Sinfonia and Jonathan Santagada.

 

Their performance had been a little hesitant at first. Indeed, a lack of definition at times, mostly from the strings, had made the Prologue drag somewhat. There were no such problems in ‘The Cry of the Beast’, in which the players and Santagada seemed very much in their element, a far more colourful and rhythmically alert performance. In that screwing up of dramatic tension, the orchestra seemed at one with Greg Eldridge’s period staging: straightforwardly presented, yet seething with menace later on. Alyson Cummins’s designs proved a major contributor, likewise Warren Letton’s lighting; in Eldridge’s words, he and his designer had ‘tried to capture the dichotomy between the naturalistic action and the heavy supernatural elements present throughout the score. In the world of the music everything is metaphor and this sis a theme that we have continued in our design. Everything on the stage … is physically real … but also serves a representative purpose that underscores a symbolic element of the story.’

 

Within that staging – that imprisonment, we might say – our singers brought the drama to life. Samuel Sakker’s lyric tenor covered an array of musico-psychological states as Sandy. He even pulled off the difficult trick of questionable singing – in the ballad – as character portrayal, rather than from inability to sing it ‘right’. Yuriy Yurchuk’s diction was on occasion a little occluded, yet for the most part his was a powerful performance as Blazes, again encompassing a good deal of musical and dramatic virtuosity (to refer to a concept the composer has suggested is necessary, and surely is). David Shipley’s Arthur was possessed of as well as by frightening fanaticism, all founded upon a splendidly deep bass voice. Interaction between all three soloists was convincing throughout. I look forward to hearing them again.
 

Tristan und Isolde, Royal Opera, 5 December 2014

 

Royal Opera House

 

Sailor – Ed Lyon

Isolde – Nina Stemme

Brangäne – Sarah Connolly

Kurwenal – Iain Paterson

Tristan – Stephen Gould

Melot – Neal Cooper

King Marke – Sir John Tomlinson

Shepherd – Graham Clark

Steersman – Yuriy Yurchuk 

 

Christof Loy (director)

Julia Burbach (associate director)

Johannes Lieacker (designs)

Olaf Winter (lighting)

 

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Sir Antonio Pappano (conductor)

 

Images: ROH/Clive Barda

 

 

 

 

Christof Loy has established rather a nice line in taking on works he admits he dislikes, or worse, and ignoring them whilst claiming to direct them. The ne plus ultra was surely his Salzburg Frau ohne Schatten, in which he set aside Strauss and Hofmannsthal completely in favour of his own banal story in which ‘an emerging young singer, sheltered and pampered by her well-to-do family is asked to take on the role of the Empress for a complete recording of Die Frau ohne Schatten.’ That was more or less it. His Royal Opera Tristan does not go so far as that, though his Lulu came close; nevertheless, his words speak for themselves. Loy, we read in the programme, cannot ‘really equate the couple’s position as outsiders with a Schopenhauerian denial of the world’. Wagner and many others since have managed to do so, but obviously what matters is a director’s inability or unwillingness to understand the work; that, after all, is what he is paid for. ‘Character direction which is rich in detail and specific’ is what interests Loy most as a director, which is why, he says, he had generally steered clear of Wagner, notorious, the reader will doubtless agree, for his inability to characterise. Tristan, however, seemed to Loy, who, it is once again worth reminding ourselves, the most important figure in all of this, something of an exception. It does not seem that he necessarily wished to traduce the work, then, but he has certainly misunderstood it. Of all Wagner’s works, it is perhaps least of all concerned with what he claims to interest him, and most concerned with metaphysics.

 

So much, then, for the misconception, but how does it play out in practice? Music and the arts in general are, after all, littered with examples of great works founded upon questionable æsthetics. Not too badly, to start with; indeed, I began to think that either my unfavourable memories from 2010 had played tricks upon me or that there had been radical revision. Julia Burbach was listed as an associate director and I think she probably has mitigated a few of Loy’s most irritating excesses; the supremely irrelevant canoodling between Brangäne and Kurwenal, for instance, seems toned down, although it is not, alas, eradicated. A good part of the first act is relatively abstract – pretty much always a good thing in Tristan – or at least may be seen as such with a degree of good will (towards Wagner, if not Loy). Then, when they have a little break, Tristan and Isolde are all over each other. What is the problem with that, one might ask? There seem to be two principal problems. One relates to the specificity of the setting, even if we are not quite sure of what that specificity is. In some building – a palace, perhaps? – awaiting her wedding and thereafter facing the consequences, Isolde manages somehow to escape for long enough to take off her wedding dress and be mauled by Tristan for a while. Still more oddly, she manages to do so for longer still during what may or may not be the wedding reception in the second act. Were there less specificity, this would not matter; playing fast and loose with time and location would not be an issue, and we could accept the overarching mythological claims. Here, however, we are just aware that it is at best rather trivial – Tristan for those who would prefer EastEnders, although a real soap opera viewer would doubtless expect more external action sooner – and often puzzling or downright nonsensical.  

 

The other brings us to the heart of Loy’s error, or, perhaps better, to the heart of Wagner’s – remember him? – work. Wagner’s action is resolutely metaphysical: not exclusively so, but the physical matters only insofar as it draws us towards, or in Schopenhauer’s terms, represents, the metaphysical drama. Since there are no metaphysics in Loy’s view, all we have is an extremely prolonged soap opera, tinged with the occasional aspiration towards Ibsen. Ironically – unknowingly, I suspect – Loy’s acknowledged inability to deal with Schopenhauerian denial of the world seems to have led Loy him to stage the second act as conventional ‘opera’, rather as Wagner acknowledged he could have written it, set against a backdrop of a brilliant court ball, ‘during which the illicit lovers could lose themselves … where their discovery would generate a suitably scandalous impression and the whole apparatus that goes with that.’  Wagner, of course, rejected that possibility he aired for a second act in which almost nothing but music happens. And even when external action intrudes, Wagner came to regard it as of lesser importance at best. His prose sketch had, for instance, drawn to a close, Götterdämmerung-like, with the words, ‘The bystanders are profoundly moved,’ concluding, ‘Marke blesses them’. However, when, in 1859, he summarised the work’s concerns for Mathilde Wesendonck, Wagner went so far as not only to omit the King’s  forgiveness, but also Tristan’s agonies at Kareol; they no longer mattered to him. True action, the Handlung of his own description, now lay in the noumenal world: ‘redemption: death, dying, destruction, never more to waken!’ Such, needless to say, was not what we were permitted to experience here. I should be the last person to claim that, as a general rule, production must exhibit some illusory, disingenuous Werktreue. However, in this particular case, it does seem that a staging of Tristan will not work unless it follows Wagner’s lead. Not for nothing did Nietzsche call it the opus metaphysicum. I know that I was not the only one in the audience looking back fondly to Herbert Wernicke’s comprehending, yet largely uncomprehended, production for this very house.

 

Wernicke’s production had of course been fortunate indeed to have Bernard Haitink, one of the greatest Wagner conductors of our age, in the pit. Haitink, as we know from his Bruckner and Mahler, is a master of large musical structures, and so he proved here. Antonio Pappano seems to have been thinking in similar terms to Loy, with not dissimilar results. Indeed, the scrappiness of the orchestral playing made it markedly inferior to Pappano’s previous accounts, let alone to Haitink’s. Missed entries, thinness of string tone (had I not seen the section with my own eyes, I should have sworn that it was considerably smaller), wavering intonation: none of those helped. More grievous still, however, was Pappano’s seeming inability to let a musical line, let alone a paragraph or some greater structure, unfold. The seemingly arbitrary nature of his beat was mirrored in the aimless meandering of the score. It seemed for the most part very slow; whether it was by the clock, I am not sure. The lack of direction was the problem, though, especially during the second act, which at times seemed almost to grind to a halt. Pappano gave the impression of following rather than leading the singers; that is not, to put it mildly, a recipe for success in Wagner.

 

 

Isolde (Nina Stemme)

Where, however, this Tristan did score over Wernicke and Haitink was with respect to those singers, who, as a cast, are deserving of considerable praise. Nina Stemme offered everything we have come to expect of her as Isolde. With her, words and music formed an indivisible whole; Wagner’s æsthetics emerged triumphant in a variegated reading that yet always belonged to a conception greater than the moment. She even presented us with Nilsson-like angry sarcasm in the first act. Stephen Gould proved a dependable Tristan. Despite a few passages of dubious intonation in the third act, he stayed the course and provided us with as many of the words and notes as it is reasonable to ask. (Haitink was cursed by his Tristans in particular.) Sarah Connolly, at least in the first act, did not offer as rich-toned a Brangäne as I had expected; indeed, Stemme sometimes sounded more the mezzo. Connolly’s reading seemed more focused upon words than line, but without unnecessary disruption of the latter. Iain Paterson offered an intriguingly boisterous, yet at the same time most sensitively sung, Kurwenal. The role seemed to fit him like a glove. Only John Tomlinson’s Marke disappointed. All Wagnerians owe Tomlinson gratitude for his extraordinary years of service, but, undimmed stage presence notwithstanding, the vocal flaws now render such an outing ill-advised. I was most impressed by Neal Cooper’s Melot; before consulting the programme, I had assumed this to be a German tenor. He is, we learn, covering the role of Tristan here and will sing it next year at Longborough. Impressive! Ed Lyon's Sailor was finely sung in very sense. Graham Clark made his typically characterful mark as the Shepherd; as, perhaps more surprisingly, given the brevity of his part, did Jette Parker Young Artist, Yuriy Yurchuk as the Steersman.