Il barbiere di Siviglia, Pop-up Opera, 21 June 2016

Images: Richard Lakos



 

Thames Tunnel Shaft, Brunel Museum, Rotherhithe

Rosina – Katie Slater

Count Almaviva – Ciarán O’Leary, Joseph Doody
Figaro – Leif Jone Ølberg
Bartolo – James Schouten
Basilio, Fiorello – Tom Asher
Berta – Emily Blanch

James Hurley (director)

Fiona Johnston, Kate McStraw, Clementine Lovell (producers)

Berrak Dyer (musical director, piano)
 

Having been ground down almost beyond endurance by the referendum ‘debate’, I was surprised and delighted to be picked up so splendidly by Pop-Up Opera’s Barber of Seville. The Thames Tunnel Shaft might not, on the face of it, have seemed an obvious venue for Rossini, but neither I, nor, I suspect, anyone else had any doubts, let alone complaints, once down the steps. The intimacy of the occasion more than compensated for any acoustical issues; my ears soon adjusted, and all that remained was to sit back and enjoy.

 

The performance was sung in Italian, with silent film-style titles projected on the wall (sometimes text and translation, sometimes translation, sometimes commentary, sometimes wittily and only vaguely ‘after’ the original). Soloists and piano (with a mercifully brief outing for deliberately-inappropriate synthesiser as Figaro’s guitar) well-nigh perfectly captured the often elusive essence of Rossini’s opera. In all but the best performances, it can readily seem over-extended, even tedious, the composer’s clever formulae all too quickly losing their sparkle. Not here; indeed, I am not sure I have witnessed a more committed performance. Berrak Dyer’s sterling work on the piano was such that I never missed the orchestra; indeed, in conjunction with those titles, the sound of the piano seemed especially apt. James Hurley’s stage direction and the work of a fine team of producers (see above) left nothing to be desired. Disguises were donned, simple props telling employed, but above all, it was the characters who came so vividly to life – both as opera buffa types, which is surely crucial here, but also with a degree of humanity that yet did not sentimentalise.

 

For that, of course, we have primarily to thank a highly talented cast of young sisters, all of whom I should more than happily see and hear again. Rossini’s technical demands held no fears for any of them, nor did the quicksilver stage action that must accompany, indeed incite, it. Katie Slater’s coloratura impressed greatly as Rosina; so did her knowing glances. Ciarán O’Leary, suffering from an allergy, nevertheless made the most of the first act as Almaviva, revealing a lovely tenor voice, and technique to match; having had to withdraw, he was ably succeeded by the similarly accomplished, eminently likeable Joseph Doody. James Schouten’s handsome baritone proved another joy to hear as Bartolo. Tom Asher – who, I have just noticed from the programme, hails from my home town of Rotherham, and is therefore necessarily a good thing – revealed excellent comic and musical talent as Basilio and Fiorello. Emily Blanch, long relegated to the sidelines in her role as Berta, nevertheless made the most of her aria, warmly received.



Figaro (Leif Jone Ølberg)

 

 

If I had to choose, though, my first prize would go to the outstanding Leif Jone Ølberg as Figaro. Ølberg inhabited the role at least as completely as any artist I have seen. His baritone voice is darkly attractive, seemingly effortlessly agile, capable of all manner of subtlety – and he can act. Such an energising presence would have melted even the sternest of hearts. If he were first among equals, though, that achievement would never have registered without so fine a sense of company from all concerned: on and off stage. The most heartening opera performances often to be found where you least expect them, even at the foot of a tunnel shaft.

For details of Pop-Up Opera’s nationwide tour, please visit their website here.

Murray Perahia - Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms, 20 June 2016

Barbican Hall

Haydn – Variations in F minor, Hob.XXII:6

Mozart – Piano Sonata no.8 in A minor, KV 310/300d
Brahms – Four Piano Pieces, op.119
Beethoven – Piano Sonata no.29 in B-flat major, op.106, ‘Hammerklavier’)
 

There could be no doubting the seriousness of the programme, nor the seriousness of Murray Perahia’s purpose, for this Barbican recital. With respect to the first half – Haydn, Mozart, and Brahms – I confess to wondering whether two out of the three pieces might have been more digestible; it is not as if any of us would have thought Perahia was otherwise veering down the Lang Lang circus-act route. In the face of such pianism and musicianship, though, it would be churlish to complain about having been treated to a little more. There was only one movement concerning which I entertained serious reservations; I shall come to that in due course.

 

The opening bars of Haydn’s extraordinary F minor/major Variations – Alfred Brendel opened his final London recital with this very work – brought us that renowned limpid tone, dissolving to reveal a range of colours none but the greatest pianist could conjure forth. The first theme could be surprisingly forceful too, never inappropriately so; this is music that peers into the nineteenth century, and so it sounded. By contrast, the F major second theme seemed to look back (rather as Beethoven would in much of his early music), not unlike a trio. It was Mozart who came to mind in the pathos of the first variation. Chromaticism always helps in that respect, but if there were Mozartian tendencies, they sounded as the culmination of Haydn’s own career of writing for the piano; they never sounded imposed upon the music, nor did anything else in this recital. The strength of purpose in the second variation again hinted at Beethoven, without forsaking the composer at hand. Turning back to the major, a more carefree note was struck, but it was more a creation of carefreeness than anything more arbitrary; Perahia had thought about every note, so it seemed, without that tending towards pedantry. The return of the F minor theme sounded noble indeed, although I was a little unsure about the abruptness of the transition to the Coda and some ornamentation thereafter.

 

Mozart’s A minor Sonata followed, its first movement exposition forthright yet variegated; I should not have minded it yielding a little more, its driven quality perhaps pushing it, ironically, closer to Haydn than one might generally prefer. The repeat, however, was more yielding, more variegated, so that in retrospect, Perahia’s design seemed quite right. A terse development led to a still more intense recapitulation, the turn to the tonic minor evincing unforced tragic eloquence. The beauty of the pianist’s passagework throughout simply had to be heard to be believed. I have heard more charming accounts of the slow movement, but Perahia’s awe-inspiring sense of line, deepened surely by his Schenkerian studies, offered its own rewards. This was not a Mozart of Meissen china; nor should it have been. The complexity of the most vehement music in particular highlighted its closeness to Schoenberg, even if that were not Perahia’s intention. (I recall him once frankly admitting in an interview that he did not understand twelve-note music. I suspect he could play it very well anyway, if he wished.) The finale is always very difficult to bring off; here, one might have thought it the easiest thing in the world to have done so. Technical control is, of course, crucial, but also a willingness and ability to let meaning arise through the offices of the music rather than to impose an external narrative upon it. Again, Perahia’s command of line provided the finest of frames.

 

Brahms’s op.119 Pieces were perhaps darker still. The first’s opening phrase signalled that intervallic and colouristic concerns were as one. (I could not help but think of Webern.) Rhythm is equally important, especially at so strikingly slow a tempo as this – and in that respect too, Perahia’s understanding was unerring. The second piece sounded initially as a greater contrast than it was ultimately revealed to be. There were shades of agitation from the Brahms of old, but its ‘lateness’ was equally apparent. Exquisite craftsmanship and darkness of emotion were inseparable. Much the same might be said of the third Intermezzo; yet, if a dark dance, it nevertheless danced. The final Rhapsody had a terrible sense of fury barely repressed by iron control (compositional and performative). Organisation, vertical and horizontal, were almost frighteningly clear, making Schoenberg seem almost lackadaisical by comparison (well, perhaps not quite). There were a couple of brief, not very noticeable slips; in context, they came almost as a relief.

The second half was devoted to the Hammerklavier Sonata. (We are stuck with the silly nickname, I think, so there is no point in moaning about it too much.) Its opening movement was the one with which I had difficulties. It was fleet, lighter on its toes than one generally hears. There was great clarity in the fugal writing too. It all sounded a little skated over, though, at least to me; formal dynamism did not imprint itself as it would under, say, Pollini. Perhaps such a comparison is, however, more odious even than usual. Well-sprung rhythms in the Scherzo suggested it almost as a forerunner of the late Bagatelles. Until, that is, it went on another, more complex path, although even then… Perahia’s view intrigued and, in its way, convinced. A gravely beautiful slow movement could have had no one straining to find depth. There was, moreover, a Romantic grandeur to the lyricism flowering above: always founded upon harmony, though. That command of line was once again unerringly communicated: our thread through the labyrinth. If this were not so radical a way with the work as Pollini’s, then te music’s radicalism could hardly fail to shine through in any case. The strangeness of the opening bars to the finale registered without showmanship. As Beethoven’s material announced itself – and one felt that illusion, as opposed to Perahia announcing it – building blocks were assembled, but blocks that might ever be in danger of cracking under the strain. They did not, and I have heard performances in which they came closer, performances of considerably greater violence; the balance and/or dialectic can be conveyed in different ways and there is no reason to be dogmatic. That the way was always relatively clear did not, however, mean that Beethoven’s obstinacy was short-changed. Sometimes I wondered how Perahia could possibly be playing all those notes at once. I also wished, however vainly, to hear what he might make of the deconstruction of this monstrous work in Boulez’s Second Sonata.

 

Idomeneo, Garsington Opera, 19 June 2016

Garsington Opera House, Wormsley Park

Ilia – Louise Alder

Idamante – Caitlin Hulcup
Elettra – Rebecca von Lipinski
Arbace – Timothy Robinson
Idomeneo – Toby Spence
High Priest – Robert Murray
Neptune – Nicholas Masters

Tim Albery (director)

Hannah Clark (designs)
Malcolm Rippeth (lighting)
Tim Claydon (movement)

Garsington Opera Chorus (chorus master: Susanna Stranders)

Garsington Opera Orchestra
Tobias Ringborg (conductor)
 

Opportunities to see Idomeneo are not so frequent as they might be, certainly not so frequent as they should be. Even so fervent a Gluckian as I should happily admit that Mozart here goes beyond his great predecessor (and contemporary), perhaps not consistently, but Mozart is saddled with a vastly inferior libretto. In any case, that Gluckian musico-dramatic line is only one of the many facets of Idomeneo’s greatness. Its Salzburg luxuriance – yes, I know it was written for Munich; I refer here to the Salzburg Mozart as opposed to his Viennese successor – has its own extravagant rewards, even when the musico-dramatic focus is not quite so tightly disciplined as that of, say, Iphigénie en Tauride. Moreover, no Iphigenia is a match for Mozart’s Elettra. As for the orchestral and choral writing, it is surely a match for Don Giovanni; even its chromaticism, its masterly exploration of remote reaches of the tonal system, do not come so very far behind. And yet, even so fervent a devotee as I was only seeing the work in the theatre for the fourth time. Following the Vienna State Opera (2006), ENO (2010), and the Royal Opera (2014), here came Garsington Opera to the rescue.

 

For that, and indeed for much else, Garsington deserves a hearty vote of thanks. Musically, this was a strong performance, despite cuts that scarred the work more than I should have preferred. I can, to a certain extent, understand the temptation to make considerable cuts to the recitatives, although Mozart’s achievement here is surely not his least. To do so to the extent that the story does not quite hang together, though, is a disfigurement that seems to misunderstand the role of recitative, whether dry or accompanied, in eighteenth-century opera. One can probably fill in the gaps, but is that really the point? And unlike, say, Don Giovanni, which suffers greatly from use of the ridiculous composite of Prague and Vienna versions, this is a work for which superfluity, is part of the attraction: let us have as much of the rest as we can. I could not help but wonder whether certain arias were not present in order to facilitate a transformation of three acts into two. There will always be choices to be made, for there is no ideal ‘version’, but so far as this listener is concerned, the more one can hear, for the most part the better. The loss of the ballet music I mind more than once I did; once one realises how dramatic ballet can be, especially in the magnificent French tradition in which Idomeneo partly stands, there is no turning back. Martin Kušej’s tableau for Covent Garden is doubtless a one-off; as a visual, harrowing instantiation of regime change, it made its dramatic point to those willing to think. (Needless to say, that excluded most of the audience.) Still, we had what we had.

 

That is still more the case with a fine cast and chorus as here. The work of Susanna Stranders is training the Garsington Chorus had clearly been thorough and well directed; choral singing proved lithe and weighty, as required, very much in consonance with the kaleidoscope of colours offered by the excellent orchestra. In the title role, Toby Spence offered a typically thoughtful performance, quite different from any I have heard (and which I retain in my head), but that is no reason to criticise. Idomeneo’s torment was starkly apparent from the outset, visually and vocally, still more so as a broken man (and king) at the conclusion. I have heard no finer, no more moving Ilia than Louise Alder’s, taking its leave from words and music alike, and above all from the alchemic synthesis of the two. After a first aria shaky of intonation, Caitlin Hulcup’s Idamante proved equally impressive; indeed, so convincing was she as the prince that I initially thought I was hearing a countertenor. Rebecca von Lipinski’s Elettra was just the tour de force that one needs; if only the production (on which more anon) had helped give more context to her fury and equally to a humanity too often lost in performance, but not here. Timothy Robinson’s attentive Arbace, the perfect counsellor, had one miss more than usual his aria (not, even I should admit, Mozart at his greatest). Robert Murray’s relatively small role as the High Priest did not disappoint: a typically intelligent, intriguingly ambiguous performance. Even Neptune (who appears, rather convincingly, as a neo-Monteverdian apparition, rather than being mediated by an oracle) was convincingly brought to life by Nicholas Masters.

 

If Tobias Ringborg’s conducting had a few too many Harnoncourtisms for my taste, not least drastic, rhetorical gear changes in the Overture, then it was dramatic throughout. (I hasten to add that I have nothing whatsoever against tempo variation; but few Mozart conductors seem able to convince in that respect today, Daniel Barenboim, who has never conducted the work, an obvious exception.) Ringborg also proved somewhat of the interventionist school in his fortepiano (what is wrong with a modern piano?) continuo. Balanced against such irritants, there was no doubting the conductor’s living and breathing the music. His enthusiasm was infectious; the orchestra’s vivid response – perhaps a little vivid in the case of clattering (period?) timpani – was not the least of the evening’s special qualities.

I am afraid a ‘but’ is coming, and it relates to Tim Albery’s production. As with his Wagner productions for the Royal Opera House, Albery creates, insofar as I could discern, little beyond a string of clichés. The principal characters appear in stylised eighteenth-century dress, whilst the set designs and the chorus evoke a contemporary port. (Alas, I could not help but recall Katie Mitchell’s catastrophic ENO staging, its second act in an airport terminal – which I only later discovered had been a ferry terminal, as if that made all the difference.) There is almost always something one can do with such juxtaposition; I assumed Albery would at least do something with the large seafaring container, opened to reveal an eighteenth-century room. But no, that seems to be it: different dress, and opening and shutting of the container. It seems designed to flatter people who wanted to say they had seen something ‘modern’, without engaging with any of the possibilities of contemporary theatre, let alone presenting something as outré as a concept. The story ‘itself’ actually comes across quite strongly, despite the cuts, and that, I admit, is not an insignificant achievement. By the same token, though, it might as well have been entirely in eighteenth-century dress and in an eighteenth-century setting.

 

Jerusalem Quartet/Kam - Beethoven, Bartók, and Brahms, 17 June 2016

Wigmore Hall

Beethoven – String Quartet no.6 in B-flat major, op.18 no.6

Bartók – String Quartet no.3
Brahms – Clarinet Quintet in B minor, op.115

Alexander Pavlovsky, Sergei Bresler (violins)

Ori Kam (viola)

Kyril Zlotnikov (cello)

Sharon Kam (clarinet)

 

This proved to be another excellent concert in the Jerusalem Quartet’s twentieth-anniversary celebrations. The final quartet from Beethoven’s op.18 set opened in immaculate, fizzing post-Haydn and post-Mozart style, judging so well the debts to both composers, as well as the undeniable originality of their challenger. The first movement’s exposition was possessed of great energy, its ‘repeat’ – something of a misnomer in a properly dynamic performance such as this – still more so. The second group thus sounded (both times) all the more contrasted, especially melting the second time around. Announcing the development’s opening phrase with Beethovenian brusqueness, the players nevertheless acknowledged once again the composer’s inheritance from Haydn – who, after all, could be a little terse himself – in several respects, not least motivic working. The recapitulation’s concision was striking; so was the reality that everything, even when, especially when, it seemed the same, had changed. The slow movement was as serene, as disturbing, as full of mystery as its counterpart in, say, a Mozart piano concerto, never more so than when it moved into the minor mode. This was, initially, the Beethoven of the operatic scena, a quality captured to near perfection here. With the return to the tonic, however, invention and joy were as ‘purely’ instrumental as one might imagine. Syncopations were relished in all their generative glory in the scherzo. The trio likewise hit just the right note: trying to relax, yet never quite being able to do so.

‘La Malincolia’ is Beethoven’s marking for the Adagio introduction to the finale. Its indubitably melancholic fragility looked forward, without exaggeration, to the world of the late quartets, not least in the rarity of the air it breathed. The passion characterising the music that ensued, in the Allegretto quasi Allegro, had an almost Schubertian quality to it, punctuated by the fondest of glances back to the music of Beethoven’s eighteenth-century precursors. Insistence, subtly marked out in performance, left one in no doubt that this was Beethoven. Likewise the musical interruptions, the strange turns the music took: perhaps born of, yet never reducible to, the example of Haydn. The players left one in no doubt of their consummate command of idiom and, dare I suggest, meaning.

 

Bartók has as good a claim as any to be the greatest of all successors to Beethoven in this genre. It would, at any rate, have been impossible to dissent from such a view in the light of this performance. The Prima parte of the Third Quartet opened in properly disconcerting fashion, at least for a few bars or so, followed by a slight thaw, followed by a glance back, or an intensification: so the music’s multiple dialectics began to develop. Lest that sound unduly abstract – I am not sure one can be unduly abstract in this of all Bartók’s quartets, but anyway – there was genuine anger to be heard too, then withdrawal. This was Bartók at his most radical, his greatest. Concision and mood swings suggested Beethoven’s example – perhaps even something of Webern too, although most likely qualities in common rather than ‘influence’. There was certainly no denying that every note counted: in itself, horizontally, and vertically.

 

The Seconda parte, quite properly, both emerged from and announced its difference from what had gone before. Something akin to tonality advanced a claim, all the more touching for the combination of strength of assertion and equivocal success. What could be more Beethovenian than the protean dynamism we heard here? The so-called Ricapitulazione della prima parte and Coda proved both questing and questioning, with a sadness all their own. Glassy, febrile passages almost suggested Ligeti, and yet they were thoroughly integrated with neo-Lisztian transformation of the ‘Hungarian’: another description that raises more questions than it answers. What music this is!

 

Sharon Kam joined the players for the Brahms Clarinet Quintet in the second half. The two violins of Alexander Pavlovksy and Sergei Bresler immediately announced a different world, of Viennese sweetness, melancholy, and melancholy in sweetness, with all the painful lateness and distance that are Brahms’s own. That distance was intensified by the entries of the other players, not least the parallel or successor announcement of what might be at stake by Ori Kam and Kyril Zlotnikov, on viola and cello. Kam entered, seemingly more a mediator than a ‘soloist’, or rather no ‘mere’ soloist. The motivic complexity of Brahms’s writing is inescapable here. (Why should anyone wish to escape it?) So too, however, was its good-natured quality – still, perhaps, grasping Mozart’s mantle. On the other hand, there were times when we sounded but a stone’s throw from Verklärte Nacht. There were to come some exquisite, yes soloistic, whisperings from the clarinet, especially in the development section of this first movement, whose optimistic exhaustion, if I may call it that, put me in mind of Mendelssohn. The recapitulation sounded more autumnal, yet also more intense, not least motivically: such is the dynamism of form, of developing variation. A well-nigh Beethovenian climax truly surprised and truly fulfilled, after which the players sang with the truest of melancholy.

 

The Adagio sounded ‘later’ still, which I think it probably is. Its exhaustion was nevertheless the setting for rare solo gems indeed (not just from the clarinet, by any means), in which ghosts of the Viennese past were to be encountered, even welcomed. Nevertheless, it was the clarinet which, rightly, emerged as first among equals, Kam’s arabesques both free and yet laden down with the accumulated weight of tradition that Brahms felt so keenly. Post-Beethovenian serenity vied with anticipations of Schoenberg: layer upon layer. The third movement, by way of relative contast, sounded summery (if still ‘late’ summery). Motivic integrity and fascination remained as great as ever; there was nothing comfortable to what we heard, underlying agitation suggestive again both of Beethoven and of Schoenberg. The finale sounded wonderfully ambivalent, ambiguous. Once more, every note counted, just as it had in the Bartók Quartet, but the sense of tragedy here was almost Mozartian, all the more poignant for knowing that it never quite would or could be.

 

King Arthur, Spitalfields Festival, 14 June 2016

Image: Club Inégales

Wilton’s Music Hall

Cupid – Iestyn Morris

Cold Genius – Alya Marquardt

John Dryden – Chris Meade
Master of Ceremonies – Murray Lachlan Young

May Kindred-Boothby (animation, design)

Murray Lachlan Young (original texts)
Apple & Biscuit Recordings (sound, videography)

Notes Inégales
Academy Inégales
Chorale Inégales (chorus director: Mary Wiegold)
Peter Wiegold (conductor)

The Spitalfields Festival and Notes Inégales promised a ‘reimagining of Purcell’s masterpiece like no other’, and that is certainly what we had, most refreshingly so. Indeed, given a considerable degree of improvisation, alongside a new realisation by Peter Wiegold and Martin Butler, what I heard may well have been considerably different from what the second evening’s audience would have encountered. One grows sick and tired of pointing out the absurdities of the ‘authenticke’ brigade; it does not, after all, take much to reduce their arguments to rubble. And yet, they continue to rule the performative roost, ever-vigilant lest an arbitrarily proscribed moment or two of vibrato transgress their internally, let alone externally, incoherent commandments of Werktreue. No such problems here, thank goodness! It is, admittedly, easier to follow one’s own inclinations in a Purcell semi-opera than almost anywhere else, for does not everyone? That is actually rather odd, for one quite clearly could perform King Arthur as Dryden – and Purcell, for that matter – ‘intended’, at least insofar as one can do that with anything, a considerable ‘insofar’ indeed; yet even the provisional wing of the Conventicle for Righteous Antiquarianism in Performance seems to cavil here, thereby reducing its ideological edifice to – well, to rubble once again.

Enough of that, anyway; they have still not listened to Theodor Adorno, so they are certainly not going to listen to me. What did we see and hear? If I say that I am not entirely sure, then that is not meant as an adverse criticism, but as an observation of the experimentalism of ‘work’ and ‘performance’. In this reimagining, following some words, a neo-pagan invocation of sorts, from the Master of Ceremonies, we begin with the celebrated Frost Scene, take one path through a new tale of love, its contents, and its discontents, with further commentary and participation both from the MC and from Mr Dryden himself. (‘Authentically’, however one might understand that word, no part is played by King Arthur; indeed, I can only recall one reference to him, and that is an introductory reference to his absence from what we are to see and hear.) The mini-drama having proved insufficiently exploratory, it starts again, ‘with feeling’, as our MC instructs the musical director, with help from faux-naïf animation. And so on – and once again. We experience two re-tellings, but are not necessarily any the wiser. However, rather like the musical numbers in an ‘original’ semi-opera, that does not necessarily matter, at least not in a linear sense. Something of the music-hall tradition, itself owing something to that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century past is with us – and that is before we even consider the site-specificity concerning the adorable Wilton’s Music Hall.

Musically, we hear a not entirely dissimilar mixture, which yet takes its own path(s). Does it cohere? Again, I am not sure that is the question. But this listener not only listened; he greatly enjoyed. Some music is performed relatively ‘straight’, at least for a while, although never unrelievedly so. No one would claim that King Arthur should always be done like this; that, after all, is the open-endedly performative point, or at least I think it is. Notes Inégales, created by Peter Wiegold and David Purser, is charmingly described as ‘devoted equally (or unequally) to improvisation as well as written music’. The players can also, as the biographical note claimed, swing. Here, its members (on electric guitar, percussion, double bass, taegŭm flute, trumpet, bassoon, and oboe) were joined by two guest players, Gamin (piri, taepyeongso, and saengwhang), and Maya Youssef (kanun), as well as Academy Inégales, ‘brought together by Club Inégales and the Institute of Composing for ten months’, on another variety of instruments: violin, Arabic violin, clarinets, percussion/musical saw, tuba, keyboards/electronics, guitar, percussion, vocals, keyboard/melodica, and tabla. Part of me tends toward the claim that the oft-claimed kinship between ‘early music’, whatever that might be, is in generally wildly-overstated, but here that did not seem to be the case. Again, there is no need for dogmatism, and every need for its banishment. We heard skilfully woven lines, an ever-changing array of sounds, a developing variation, if you like, that was far from bound to the thematic. If there were occasions when I felt that instrumental balances did not quite work, that was a small price to pay for such enjoyable and provocative musical invention.

For there was no doubting the quality of musical performance on offer. Likewise vocally: Iestyn Morris, whom I had last heard far too long ago in 2011 (Il ritorno d’Ulisse at ENO), revealed once again a sure, indeed thrilling, musico-dramatic touch. His range, like that of Cupid himself, is wider, more colourful than one might initially suspect; such, I think, was very much part of the drama and its retelling. Still more so might that be said of Alya Marquardt, a singer with a particular interest not only in improvisation but also in Iraqi music. Her Frost Scene involved genuinely surprising turns of the conventionally gendered screw, whilst her ‘concert’ singing proved not only the perfect foil for Morris’s countertenor (and haute contre), but a genuine source of ravishment in its mezzo-like depth (description as a soprano notwithstanding). Both singers are highly likeable stage-artists as well as consummate musicians.

More please, then: from them, from our instrumentalists and composers, and from the estimable chorus members, their excellence both individual and corporate. A small Purcellian choir, subtle yet full-blooded, proved just as capable of musical transformation as the acoustic and electronic instrumental sounds – and the ‘work’ itself. Peter Wiegold and Martin Butler have worked some wondrous, never-to-be-quite-repeated magic with Purcell here, as have the performers. Multicultural modernity is, not least in this part of East London, not so far from where I live, both the Purcellian past and the Purcellian future, truer to the spirit of the music and venue than almost any such performance I can recall.

Further good news, is that the performance was filmed. So watch, if not this space, then that of Club Inégales.

For Che Guevara's Birthday: Hans Werner Henze's Raft of the Medusa (Das Floß der Medusa)

Perhaps more celebrated initially for its Hamburg premiere, disrupted by rightist opposition, not only from without, but also from within the RIAS Chorus, eventually abandoned, Henze's oratorio is dedicated to Che Guevara. Perhaps we do better now to listen to the work in its typically eclectic majesty. Here, though, are Henze's words - on it, rather than its non-premiere.


'The score of this oratorio dates from the years 1967 - 68 in Marino where I wrote it after years of planning and following the completion of the libretto by the poet Ernst Schnabel, to whom I owe the original idea. The piece is a sung reading of the logbook of a ship accidentally wrecked on the open sea and laden with dying people. The dying are the people of the Third World, the victims of the heartless and selfish world of the rich and powerful. Ernst Schnabel also had the dramatic idea of dividing the platform into two halves, one for the living, the other for the dead. Charon the Ferryman, a speaking part, mediates between these two worlds, which also differ from one another in their complement of instruments. Breathing (wind) instruments are assigned to the living whilst the dead, who briefly intone classical Italian from Dante’s Inferno as they enter their new realm, are accompanied solely by strings.


The outside world – that is to say a quite different reality from that of my music – influenced the work during the course of its composition. Forced, as I was, to encounter this burning subject as a composer, to depict betrayal, misery, and desperation caused by suffering and madness and to identify with the victims who speak in this piece, I felt my self growing closer to them, and the love and solidarity I felt for the persecuted, for those who suffer and fear for their lives, for the minorities who represent the majority, for the humiliated and wounded, grew with it. Schnabel and I envisaged the work as an allegory, as a description of struggle: of a struggle for clear life, out of which the spirit to fight and the determination to end an unbearable state of affairs will one day emerge.'



Now, as the forces of late-capitalist reaction stand both more powerful and yet more vulnerable than ever, such thoughts and indeed such music seem all the more necessary than ever. In the wake of The Bassarids, his great - too great? - bourgeois triumph in Salzburg, this oratorio both builds upon its musico-dramatic achievement and undermines it, dissatisfied with a musical world he had just rejected with such anger in purely verbal terms: 'Unnecessary are new museums, opera houses, and world premieres. Necessary, to set about the realisation of dreams. Necessary, to abolish the dominion of men over men. Necessary, to change mankind, which is to say: necessary, the creation of mankind’s greatest work of art: the World Revolution.' Here is a ravishing aural foretaste of what that work of art might be, eclectic in its discipline and disciplined in its eclecticism.

The Cunning Little Vixen, Glyndebourne, 12 June 2016

Glyndebourne Opera House

Badger, Priest – Alexander Vassiliev

Forester – Christopher Purves
Cricket – Tate Nicol
Grasshopper – Kitty Casey
Mosquito, Schoolmaster – Colin Judson
Frog – Krishan Shah
Young Vixen Sharp Ears – May Abercombie
Forester’s Wife, Owl – Sarah Pring
Vixen Sharp Ears – Elena Tsallagova
Dog – Marta Fontanals-Simmons
Pepík – Eliza Safjan
Frantík – Rhiannon Llewellyn
Cockerel – Hannah Sandison
Hen – Natalia Tanasii
Pásek, Innkeeper – Michael Wallace
Fox – Alžběta Poláčková
Jay – Shuna Scott Sendall
Woodpecker – Angharad Lyddon
Harašta – Alexandre Duhamel
Innkeeper’s Wife – Natalia Brzezińska
Dancers, Fox Cubs

Melly Still (director)

Tom Pye (set designs)
Dinah Collin (costumes)
Mike Ashcroft (choreography)
Paule Constable (lighting)

Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus master: Jeremy Bines)

London Philharmonic Orchestra
Jakub Hrůša (conductor)

 

Images: Richard Hubert Smith

Four years ago, almost to the day (13^th to 12^th), I saw Melly Still’s production of The Cunning Little Vixen during its first Glyndebourne run. I found myself surprised how much more warmly I responded to it this time. Speaking to various Glyndebourne people beforehand – you will, I trust, be pleased to learn that I unsubtly went on the offensive for easy box-office prospects, such as Gluck and Nono, to Sebastian Schwarz, the company’s new General Director – I was told that revisions had been made. However, I cannot honestly tell you whether my change of heart were owed to them, to a newfound sunnier disposition (maybe not), or to being able to see the entire stage rather than half of it. I shall leave comparisons on one side, now, then, and respond to what I heard and saw, which I enjoyed very much. (In fact, although I offer a link, I have not actually re-read my earlier review, and you may wish to follow suit.)

Still’s production nicely blurs boundaries between opera and ballet. There is, of course, a good deal of ballet music ‘proper’ in the opera, as well as mime, but there is not always so much of a dividing line anyway, and the visual æsthetic seen here, the animals more stylised, less realistic, than often, strengthens the almost-hybrid impression. Paule Constable’s lighting plays just as important a role as Dinah Collin’s costumes, if a rather different one: it helps to delineate the scenes, in conjunction with Tom Pye’s resourceful sets, themselves visually arresting even before humans and animals litter them (sometimes in more than one sense). Whilst I do not find that the production unduly sentimentalises, and its moments of absurdist humour welcome, I missed a stronger sense of the darkness that also lies at the heart of this tale of lifecycles and the collision of human and animal worlds. Perhaps, though, it is that quasi-balletic æsthetic that most characterises the production as a whole and grants its unity; perhaps it is also that to which I find myself better able to respond, if not entirely without reservation, than I did in 2012.

 

Jakub Hrůša’s conducting of the London Philharmonic seemed to me to quite close in character and sonority to that of Jiří Bělohlávek in London’s recent concert Jenůfa. Even for a non-Czech speaker such as I, there is no mistaking not only the conductor’s apparently instinctive ease with every musical idiom, but also the give and take between vocal and orchestral lines, not just texturally but also generatively. Having heard quite a bit of my earliest Janáček from Charles Mackerras, whose way with the composer’s music I continue to admire greatly, I often find myself intrigued that what I had taken (perhaps naïvely) to be somehow typically ‘Czech’ is not always the way with Czech conductors, not that they hold any monopoly on Janáčekian wisdom. (The composer, just like Elgar, is far too important to be confined by national considerations.) That almost Viennese sweetness, which in that Jenůfa performance, I hesitantly dubbed Bohemian rather than Moravian, was often to be heard again in the LPO’s playing, without that shading into any smoothing over of lines. So maybe I should be still warier of such easy – too easy? – typologies, and simply enjoy the often golden fruits of what I have heard. That is very much what I have done in practice, anyway. Angularity was certainly not absent; nor, on occasion, was weight of sound that looked forward to From the House of the Dead. But, like the operatic-balletic action on stage, aural impressions were often fleeting, or at least constantly self-transformative. Mackerras, in 2010 at Covent Garden, perhaps granted a still stronger sense of the life-arc of the whole, but a drawback on that occasion was translation into English. This was, in any case, an estimable performance, pretty much irreproachable with respect to orchestral playing.

 

As with that 2010 performance, indeed as with any performance I can recall having attended, there was an unusually strong sense of the cast acting as a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Somehow, this opera seems to inspire an especially strong sense of ensemble in those taking part; or perhaps it is partly a matter that it would not be worth putting it on if it did not. Elena Tsallagova, who also took the title role in a Paris performance I saw in 2008, has seen neither her vocal nor her stage athleticism dim with greater experience. Quite the contrary: this was a tour de force of effervescence, and thus very much a visual representation of the character herself as well as her deeds. Alžběta Poláčková’s Fox proved an excellent complement, embodying many of the same characteristics in principle, the character’s pride and affection palpable throughout. Christopher Purves made for a characterful and soulful Forester, master of and yet also mastered by the natural world into which he found himself persistently, almost Narnia-like, drawn. Sarah Pring, as his wife, played with, yet never merely relied upon, ‘peasant’ or at least ‘folk’ stereotype; I should never have guessed, without consulting the cast list, that she had doubled up as an equally convincing Owl. Likewise for the other doublings. Alexandre Duhamel revealed a rich yet agile baritone as Harašta. Colin Judson’s turn as the Schoolmaster offered one of many ‘character’ highlights. I could go on, but should essentially be repeating the cast list. As so often, it was the Glyndebourne Chorus, as ever excellently trained (by Jeremy Bines), which bound much of the musical drama together, almost as well as the orchestra. No one hearing this performance would have doubted either the stature or the sheer wonder of this most singular of operas.

 

La bohème, Opera Holland Park, 11 June 2016

Holland Park Theatre

Mimì – Anna Patalong

Rodolfo – Shaun Dixon
Marcello – Andrew Finden
Musetta – Elin Pritchard
Schaunard – Frederick Long
Colline – John Savournin
Benoît – David Woloszko
Alcindoro – James Harrison
Parpignol – Michael Bradley
Customs Sergeant – Alistair Sutherland

Stephen Barlow (director)

Andrew D Edwards (set designs
Howard Hudson (lighting)

Opera Holland Park Children’s Chorus and Chorus (chorus masters: Scott Price and Richard Harker)

City of London Sinfonia
Matthew Waldron (conductor)

 

Ever since a friend was reported as having said he’would like something in return for modern-dress Shakespeare (how quaint that term seems now, as if anyone would bat an eyelid!), namely an Elizabethan-dress staging of Look Back in Anger, I have been curious about the possibilities of ‘down-dating’, as I suppose we might call it. Rarely, if ever, do we see it, though. Stephen Barlow’s new production of La bohème does just that, however, relocating the action to that very same period. Indeed, I notice that the RSC’s Props Department is credited in the programme for ‘their co-operation and contribution’. Andrew D Edwards’s designs look gorgeous: both sets, making excellent use of the Holland Park stage and environment, and costumes.

 

What are we to make of such a move? Not having asked Barlow and that, perhaps, not being entirely the point in any case, I shall, without implying ‘intention’, say a little about what I made of it, or thought one might make of it. One could, I suppose, say that it does not matter, say what ‘we’ often say about the time and period, that in some respects, at least, it is the least interesting aspect of a production. That, I think, would be a half-truth, but a half-truth nevertheless. I doubt many of us would be complaining if an opera set in Tudor England were convincingly updated to nineteenth-century France, and certainly not to the present day, although we might well ask why, and with what success. Why there and then, in that case? For me, the immediate resonance was with Shakespeare’s London. Rodolfo, our poet, perhaps something of ‘Will’ about him: perhaps more Shakespeare in Love than Shakespeare ‘himself’, but how much do we know of the latter anyway? A leather doublet becomes him, as does distraction from his quill. Given not only the poetical but metatheatrical concerns of the work, I wondered whether, following the first or even the second act, we should discover that it had all, or partly, been a play within a play, or some such device, but no – with the possible exception of the decidedly, deliberately artificial device of casting snow upon the scene in the third act. Perhaps that is the point, or at least could be made to be the point: we are all metatheatrical now, we all create our own metatheatre, even when something is apparently played ‘straight’. That, I think, is undeniable, although I suspect the particular relocation is, at any rate, not entirely arbitrary. Shakespeare’s London, or our creation of it, speaks to an English audience as strongly as pretty much any other possibility.

 

Perhaps the justification is that: we know it, or think we know it, and thus we find it easier to explore. I have no problem in principle with exchanging Montmartre and a Southwark tavern. It was all rather fun, and genuinely surprising. Other productions might delve deeper – although, frankly, very few do. Not everything can be directed by Stefan Herheim, whose Oslo staging is in a class of its own. This works well, on its own terms. The enigmatic programme quotation from Two Gentleman of Verona – which I only saw afterwards – might speak for itself, then, so long as we do not start silly gushing about alleged ‘timelessness’. Nothing is timeless; nor is it helpful or interesting to consider it so. ‘Oh, how this spring of love resembleth/The uncertain glory of an April day/Which now shows all beauty of the Sun/And by and by a cloud takes all away.’ We are free, then, to consider correspondences and connections insofar as we wish.

Having a young cast of such considerable theatrical ability helps. Rarely has the sexual attraction between Mimì and Rodolfo seemed so evident. Anna Patalong offers a beautifully sung, clearly heartfelt performance. It would take a sterner heart than mine not to root for her. Shaun Dixon sometimes sang out a little too much for my taste, but the acoustic can be a tricky one. There was certainly no doubting his commitment, nor his idiomatic command. Andrew Finden’s Marcello was intelligent, thoughtful, impetuous: the quicksilver quality of his exchanges with Elin Pricthard’s gloriously charismatic Musetta, every inch the self-conscious stage queen, yet most genuine in concern and charity at the close, would have been worth the price of admission alone. Frederick Long and John Savournin made at least as much of Schaunard and Colline as any artists I can recall. The sense of student camaraderie can rarely, if ever, have been so strong; nor can the dangers of that play-acting which ultimately fails our tragic heroine. David Woloszko’s Falstaff-like Benoît was not only an obvious comic turn, but very well sung too, as indeed were all of the ‘smaller’ roles’.

The OHP Chorus and Children’s Chorus were, quite simply, outstanding. Barlow’s work with them had clearly been thoroughly internalised. They knew what they were supposed to do, and did it, without ever seeming over-rehearsed. Vocally, one could hear every word, and in a coherent musical whole too. Matthew Waldron’s conducting doubtless helped greatly in that respect. There was never the slightest danger of sentimentalisation, in a sharp-edged account, which kept the excellent City of London Sinfonia on its toes throughout. I was surprised how little, if at all, I missed a larger body of strings; in a fine performance, one’s ears (almost always) adjust. It was not all so driven, though; where the music needed, wanted to dance, it could do so happily, not least during Musetta’s second-act ‘show’. There would be no harm in relaxing a little as the run progresses; by the same token, however, there is nothing to complain about, and a great deal to savour, here. OHP’s Puccini Midas touch works its magic once again.

 

Tristan und Isolde, English National Opera, 9 June 2016

Isolde (Heidi Melton), Brangaene  (Karen Cargill), Tristan (Stuart Skelton), Kurwenal  (Craig Colclough)

 

 

Coliseum

Tristan – Stuart Skelton

Isolde – Heidi Melton
King Marke – Matthew Rose
Kurwenal – Craig Colclough
Melot – Stephen Rooke
Brangäne – Karen Cargill
Shepherd – Peter van Hulle
Steersman – Paul Sheehan
Young Sailor – David Webb

Daniel Kramer (director)
Anish Kapoor (set designs)
Christina Cunningham (costumes)
Paul Anderson (lighting)
Frieder Weiss (video)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Stephen Harris)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Edward Gardner (conductor)

My first Tristan, indeed my first Wagner, in the theatre was ENO’s previous staging of the work, twenty years ago, in 1996. The experience, as it should, as it must, although this is alas far from a given, quite overwhelmed me. Whether it would now is beside the point: I have no way of knowing and could not, would not go without a considerable number of Tristan- and Wagner-experiences in between. ENO’s new Tristan has its faults, but it also has far from negligible virtues. If the acid test might be said to be whether it reminds one that Tristan is, will surely always be, the greatest musical drama of all – with, that is, the possible exception of the St Matthew Passion, depending on how one considers Bach’s supreme masterpiece – then ENO succeeded not so very far off triumphantly. Given the strength of the company’s enemies within and without, that success deserves trumpeting loudly.

There are certainly some very good things in Daniel Kramer’s production. I use that somewhat limp phrase deliberately, for the overriding impression, or at least an overriding impression, is that it would benefit from revision, from a strong hand that would enable greater coherence and ruthless elimination of the irrelevant. (The latter is perhaps the worst foe of all in Tristan: remember Christof Loy? If not, do keep it that way.) In retrospect, it is the first act that stands out as seemingly from another production. Give or take the division of the stage into Isolde’s world and Tristan’s, strongly reminiscent of Herbert Wernicke’s excellent Covent Garden production, absurdly dispensed with in order to prepare the way for Loy, it seems really to be a straightforward, almost ‘traditional’ staging. I have no problem with that; it lets the work speak, and there is much to be said for that. Whatever one does with Tristan, one is ill-advised indeed to do something to it. Its status as an almost entirely metaphysical drama renders it curiously, almost uniquely, impervious, to such Konzept­-driven treatment. (Or at least it has done so in my experience: it is foolish and indeed absurd to rule things out ‘in principle’.)  Alas, Kramer has a bizarre mini-concept, or whatever we want to call it, concerning Kurwenal. Of any character in opera, I find it difficult to think of a less camp specimen. Undoing or undercutting conventional views of masculinity might be an interesting project here, but simply turning him into a camp monstrosity, dressed, like Brangäne, as if he were a refugee from a highly stylised presentation of Alice in Wonderland, is bizarre and, frankly, extremely irritating. He spends a good deal of time and energy spraying perfume, or air-freshener, or something at Tristan before the latter’s confrontation with Isolde. To what end? I am afraid I have no idea. Something, I think, to be eliminated from the revival I hope will come. The very peculia costumes (in themselves well designed by Christina Cunningham, but again, to what end?) would benefit from rethinking en masse.

 

In the second and third acts, Anish Kapoor’s striking designs do a great deal – perhaps a little too much? – of the work. The lack of specificity is no bad thing. Tristan is certainly not about Cornwall. (Imagine a Tory-UKIP production, in which the whole problem never arises, because Cornwall’s borders are ‘secure’ and our ‘migrants’ are never able to disembark thanks to Theresa May’s ‘tough’ stance on immigration. Or rather, do not.) The love duet takes place in something not so very far removed from what Wagner stipulates; the landscape supplies its own, neo-Romantic (quasi-lunar?) magic and ‘beauty’, without becoming ‘the thing’, which is surely as it should be. The death-wish, that sickest Romanticism-cum-Schopenhauerism, which pervades the whole work is intelligently brought out in Kramer’s vision of neurotic self-harm. It certainly convinces far better than the unbearable dullness – it might work as Konzept, but in the theatre, with this most particular, resistant of works? – of Christoph Marthaler’s Bayreuth production. If the hospital beds and physical restraining of the final scene are perhaps a little too overt, I did not find them unforgivably so. For English audiences, notoriously resistant to modern musico-dramatic theatre, there is sometimes something to be said for spelling things out (although preferably not in this particular work). Again, the costumes are weird: here almost Dr Who-like. Again, rethinking for a revival, so as to bring out more strongly what matters? We can but hope.

 

Brangaene, Isolde, Tristan, and King Marke (Matthew Rose)
 

The central ideas of the third act are strong too, Kapoor’s designs and Frieder Weiss’s video providing an æsthetically inviting setting and a necessary visual confrontation with the sapping away of Tristan’s life force respectively. One would hardly be able to avoid, in the case of the latter, Tristan’s loss of blood; the way in which it both horrifies and yet remains a thing of compelling beauty is surely quite in the spirit of the work. It complements the score without overshadowing it, very much what is required. Paul Anderson’s lighting, excellent throughout the evening, offers just the right mixture of subtlety and night-day contrast. The neo-Beckettian direction Kramer offers seems far more appropriate than the strange distractions of the first act. If the attempt at transfiguration does not entirely succeed, that is at least in part Wagner’s fault. He almost gets away with it, but the rupture with tonality, with reality, with pretty much anything and everything should have been so extreme during Tristan’s monologue that Isolde’s Verklärung both enraptures and misses the point. I have yet to see a production that took quite such an Adornian line, although Peter Konwitschny arguably comes close at times, whilst also veering in completely the opposite direction; here, in a broadly traditional sense, Kramer characterises the act pretty well as a whole.  

 

Tristan, his blood draining away

Edward Gardner led a largely successful, often highly ‘theatrical’ account of the score. Its metaphysical basis might have suffered somewhat, but does it not always when Furtwängler, or at least Carlos Kleiber, cannot make it? On its own terms, whilst sometimes considerably driven (echoes perhaps of Böhm, if not quite with his symphonic, post-Beethovenian grounding?), there was considerable give and take, a sense of melos much stronger than his Meistersinger, and a well-judged balance between the requirements of the moment and those of the greater line. If the orchestra sounded at times a little thin, especially in string sound, during the first act, it played for the most part magnificently. Even earlier on, there was to the playing a productive, ever-surprising physicality, a true sense of bow touching string and sparking off something one cannot, should not put into words. The offstage (in-theatre) brass at the end of the first act was a mistake: far too loud, far too much a distracting ‘effect’, but such things are worth trying, at the very least. Some outstanding woodwind playing was greatly valued, not least, of course, the expert English horn solo in the third act (Helen Vigurs).

Tristan and Kurwenal

 

Stuart Skelton’s performance in the title role showed just how much this generous artist has to give in Wagner (and not just in Wagner). He made everything he could out of the words, out of the notes, and out of the mysterious alchemy Wagner here achieves between them. If he seemed a little tired onstage, although not vocally, later on during the third act, that may readily be forgiven; indeed, it offers its own dramatic justification. I have said this before, and fear that I shall have to say it again: it is frankly beyond belief that Covent Garden offers Skelton nothing, especially when one considers the Wagner tenors it has continued to inflict upon us. Heidi Melton was strongest during the first act. Again, she made much of the words, although some of her vowels were decidedly peculiar; however, some of her singing later on was distressing in quite the wrong way. She seemed miscast, unduly stretched by the role. Karen Cargill, on the other hand, made for a lovely Brangäne indeed, despite the bizarre nature of her treatment by the production. This was someone in whom one would readily confide, beauty of tone part of the dramatic assumption rather than a thing-in-itself. I wondered whether we might have been better off with her as Isolde. Craig Colclough suffered more from the production than anyone else, but his Kurwenal managed vocally to rise far above such limitations. His third-act Beckettian best-friend portrayal, true nobility of tone again very much part and parcel of what we saw and felt dramatically, was one of the most moving aspects of the entire performance. Likewise Matthew Rose’s dignified – if oddly, coldly treated by Kramer – King Marke. It is, I think, a more difficult thing to sing this part, arguably any of these parts, in English than in German. Rose, like the rest of the cast, but perhaps more so still, made one of the best cases in practice for performance in the vernacular I can recall hearing. Here, for once, was that vaunted dramatic immediacy, with the outstanding diction it requires. The smaller roles were all taken very well indeed, David Webb’s Sailor song setting the scene with considerable distinction. All in all, this is a Tristan that deserves to be seen, still more to be heard.