Die Frau Ohne Schatten at the ROH

14/03/14

17/03/14 - some corrections and comments have been made for the second night performance, altogether a better experience.

Die Frau Ohne Schatten is one of those cultish operas that is a bit of an event when it is staged, because it's not quite standard repertoire, has the moniker of "Strauss's most ambitious opera", and is difficult to work out musically and philosophically, though many make great claims for it. Few would yield to me in my love of Strauss, but that shadowy cadre of Straussians for whom bigger is better, who claim that Die Frau Ohne Schatten is "Strauss's greatest opera", are in my opinion very mistaken. Robin Holloway has written brilliantly about this fascinating opera and calls this attitude "taking the will for the deed" i.e. accepting the lofty intentions of the creators as the measure of the worth of a work, rather than evaluating the actual artwork that lies in front of our senses and critical faculties. If Der Rosenkavalier is Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Figaro, a bittersweet comedy that inhabits a bustling, full, social world, Die Frau Ohne Schatten was intended as their Magic Flute - a fairy tale parable with a transcendent message. It is set in a mystical world with two couples - one "high", one "low", there are mysterious gods, trials, and an improving moral. But the purity and charm of Die Zauberflote has been inflated by Wagner (without capturing his breadth and depth), and Hofmannsthal has inadvertently imitated all the worst parts of Die Zauberflote without also mirroring its felicities - the illogical plot that falls to pieces in the second half, the blandly unfinished characters (apart from Papageno), the removal of personal agency by the much put upon "higher powers" that undermine the characters' choices. On the other hand, Die Frau Ohne Schatten is a sort of travesty (in the literary sense) of a Wagner opera. Superficially there are lots of similar elements - slow psychological action, leitmotifs, enormous voices, bigger orchestra, overtly philosophical in feel. But unlike Wagner there's no tension, no drama - the symbolism is empty and (ironically) unpregnant, the libretto fails to make a drama of Hofmannsthal's subject matter, the scenario self consciously epic but lacking in specificity and therefore bland and only psuedo profound.

Many an opera has survived a questionable libretto, but Strauss struggled to respond to the text, and the result, as always with Strauss when he isn't fully engaged, resorts to note spinning, professional grade glitter and splurge, music written by the yard with ceaseless energy, expertise, mastery even, but lacking true inspiration. During its composition he wrote as much to Hofmannsthal: "I'm toiling really hard, sifting and sifting - my heart's only half in it, and once the head has to do the major part of the work you get the breath of academic chill which no bellows can ever kindle into a real fire." At the same time Strauss, having just produced four operatic masterpieces (flawed or otherwise), was at the height of his stupendous technical powers and so there are of course passages of wondrous beauty and brilliance. The opening half hour contains the opera's best music by some distance and is consistently inspired. The end of Act I is also extremely beautiful and almost convinces that it is of commensurate quality. The opening imprisonment scene of Act III is also quite extraordinary and then moments in the remainder of that act make one marvel. But the end is banal, inflated and leaden, sugar cream and glitter masquerading as fulfilment and sublimity. Again Holloway hits the nail on the head when he says "The use of extreme intervals, in Act III especially, can epitomise the discrepancy between will and deed. They are literally attempts to soar out of the habitual, but they don't sear and hurt like comparable places in Bruckner 9 , Kundry's music or Mahler 10 (to say nothing of early Schoenberg) because the harmony is basically bland." This encapsulates the problem for me - the blandness of the harmony means the work lacks form, shape, momentum and contrast and no extremities of colour, pitch, volume, however vehement, can rescue it.

Claus Guth struggles to make any sort of statement with the piece, obfuscating the already limping dramatic frame with a jejune hospital sequence opening, and, incredibly, a final scene where the Empress wakes up and "it was all a dream". The Empress writhes with night terrors in the opening scene and seems to be in extreme psychological anguish, though we're not sure why. Then her nurse cooks up this fantastical story for her (in the dream? as a bed time story? as a therapist?), and continues to pull all the strings throughout the opera in the guise of a cartoonily gothic, rocky horror demon. There's lots of playing with doubles and mirror images as the Empress empathises with the Dyer's Wife (or rather the Dyer's wife is a projection of her own insecurities), after the bed ridden descent to the earth, which confirms that the opera in this production is in fact all a delusion of the Empress. Guth runs out of interpretive ideas and the concept becomes more tenuous and ever less probing as the story churns on into Act II, several decisive plot points lacking any obvious motivation or on stage stimulus (e.g. the Emperor deciding he has to kill his wife, the total changes of character in the Dyer's wife, the reason for the nurse's punishment). This can be chalked up to "dream logic" but it feels lazy and doesn't make for satisfying viewing since we don't know what The Empress is so cut up about in Act I and what all these Freudian images are a reflection of in the waking world. Add to this copious sexual imagery (pleasure/pain at being penetration by a husband's spear, sperm like "fishes" as the voices of the unborn children) and an embarrassingly literal physical rendering of the wounded gazelles that we are told about in Act I who return wherever there is an orchestral interlude, and we get a hodge-podge of sophomoric story telling that fails to congeal into a convincing whole for even a moment. The set designs by Christian Schmidt are unsuggestive and characterless - a curving wooden wall with a rotating panel at the back - which neither conjure the hospital "real world" or the dreamy fantasy world with any force or specificity.

In a sense it seems like the two central soprano roles have been cast the wrong way round. Elena Pankratova's smooth, silvery sound seems much more apt for the supernatural, insubstantial Empress, whose vocal writing also requires more flexibility. Emily Magee's earthy, heavy, solid voice seems more apt for the earthbound Dyer's wife, though the lack of a working chest register is less of a handicap in the Empress, the role she was hired for. Both Pankratova and Magee seemed a little out of sorts in Act I, though they both warmed up considerably for the more strenuous later acts. Pankratova's voice is very pleasing: strong in all registers, and with good German diction, famously difficult for Russians. [On the second night she was even better, dispatching some truly magnificent singing in the ridiculously demanding second act - soaring lines of extraordinary power without losing the fundamental silkyness. A very different singer from Goerke, but in her own way just as good, and she is surely one of the very best singing today in her vocal category. Special to witness and I'd love to see her in another Strauss or Wagner role.] Magee was less convincing I thought as the vocal production sounds very effortful with the line constantly broken to change register, or reach a high note, which happens constantly in this high lying role, though she got a very large ovation, so many obviously disagree with my assessment. Acting wise she was hammy and there was very rarely a feeling of true connection with the character. The one exception was the moment in Act I when she wasn't singing and was sitting next to the Dyer's wife. The production can't have helped any of them to create a sense of connection with their characters though as all performances felt rather on the surface acting wise.

Michaela Schuster has a very exciting, juicy mezzo, very resonant and powerful through her whole range, and does a good job of the Amme's extremely angular vocal lines. The voice slipped off the breath quite regularly though during quiet singing which lead to some lumpy phrases, and though she is a German native I understood only four words she sang in the entire evening. Quite strange, as this was vocally the total opposite of her recent ROH Klytemnestra. A compelling singer though. Johann Botha does his normal thing: mullet, goatee, park and bark come fitted as standard, but he is one of the very few heldentenors who can sustain the very high "Lohengrin" tessitura of the big Strauss roles. I don't think it's a particularly beautiful voice, and there's not much variation in timbre or care for text, but the stainless steel edge seems to expand to unlimited volume and with endless stamina - hard to complain too much in this role. Johan Reuter did very well as Barak, the voice large and the delivery committed, and on the second night he dispatched his lines with naturalness and ease. David Butt Philip deserves a special mention for his very good singing in the small role of the Apparition of Youth - he's a Jette Parker Young Artists that seems to be well above the normal standard.

Semyon Bychkov conducts the ROH orchestra with assurance through this gargantuan maze of a score. He still can't sell the pages and pages of gilded slag, but he stirs up a tremendous din when required and it flows along well enough. I'm not quite as sold on his Strauss conducting as many seem to be - I find that the line is often lost in the stolid harmonic firmness, and though the sound is very ripe, it rarely has that inner warmth and luminescence that the very greatest Strauss conducting achieves. He's obviously still very good! On the first night the ROH orchestra were not quite on best form in this tremendously demanding music, with quite a few moments of coarse musicianship in the solo playing - this is still Vienniese music and it needs that seamless elegance and refined beauty in the quieter moments. [On the second night the finale was given a much better shape and all five central singers seemed much more secure. A better all round performance]

All in all, despite many enjoyable moments of music making and some very exciting singing, this was a bit of a disappointing evening that failed to make light of this tricky work.

Review Catch up

ROH Carmen

ROH Don Giovanni

ROH Manon
ETO Paul Bunyan

ETO King Priam

I have been terrifyingly busy this past month, and this, combined with problems with my Google accounts in actually being able to post anything on the blog, has meant this blog has received a certain neglect of late. It's too late to post full reviews here, but here are a few reflections:

The new ROH Don Giovanni by Kasper Holten was certainly a better effort than his Eugene Onegin last season. The most superficially striking thing about it was the full stage projection, continually updating to project onto the moving, folding 3D set. I'm not sure how many will have realised quite what a technical feat this was. On the other hand, I got tired of the gimmick pretty quickly, and was irritated by the flickering edges caused by the combination of steep angles and pixels as the house turned. The non-descript, classless rotating house brings to mind the current Glyndebourne production and says as little. A common comment on Don Giovanni is that he is already on the decline and beset by problems at the beginning of the opera - we never actually see him wholly successfully seduce a woman as is boasted in Leporello's catalogue aria. Holten goes some way to changing this picture by making the women much more responsible for their liaisons with the Don. Just after "Orsai chi l'onore" for instance, during Ottavio's aria, Anna actually goes off to have sex with the Don, just hours after he has killed her father. A bit hard to credit, but we get the message - it takes two to tango. Holten also sees the Don's downfall as a descent into madness rather than a descent into hell. What causes this is guilt and the realisation that he lacks true love and intimacy: first he hovers around, dejected and forlorn during the three women's Act II arias, then then he is haunted by the ghost of the man he has accidentally killed. The finale is a bleak mad scene where everything drifts into nothingness, including the reactions of the other characters (which are cut). Overall it's not bad, and even after the gimmickry, it will do as a staple repertoire show. Holten never goes against the libretto, but his directorial choices always feel reasonable and "interesting", rather than engaging, moving or convincing. The cast were all very decent though for me lacked character.

The ETO's potentially exciting Spring season turned out to be disappointing for me. Paul Bunyan was a piece I'd never seen in the theatre, and Britten admirer though I am, I found it very hard going. What on earth were Britten and Auden thinking when they cooked it up? The heartless phoneyness of the cod-folk style reeks in every bar of text and music. The lack of dramatic line through what feels like an interminable duration makes it even harder to like. Not a piece I'd rush to hear or see again, aside from perhaps two pretty numbers. This production tried its best, but I was bored.

Also with the ETO, Tippett's King Priam. I thought I had heard this piece before and liked it but I must have had it confused with another of Tippett's operas - the music is uningratiating and oddly lacking in character and substance - quite unlike the ripeness of the early works, or mysterious twinkling oddness of the late ones. Anna Fleischle unhappily sci-fi inspired designs lack style and the stage space is extremely cramped. Acting also is as wooden as a bad sci-fi series, and none of the singing is quite beautiful enough to bring warmth to the stony hardness of the vocal writing. The orchestral pallette seems cramped and crude, but maybe these harsh timbres just need a larger space to resonate in? The libretto is full of platitudes and leaden, sullen characters, and by the time the chorus started running on stage for the battle singing "War! War! War!" whilst lamely swaying backwards and forwards with deer antlers, I was ready to give up.

Longer ago I saw the Zambello Carmen twice - once with Anita Rachvelishvili and Roberto Alagna (16/12/13) and once with Christine Rice and Yonghoon Lee (04/01/14). Zambello's production is surely due a renewal, and my guess is that Kasper Holten will have a shot at it, just as he has replaced her perennially unpopular Don Giovanni. Zambello is a director whose continued hiring at major opera houses is a mystery to me, and though her Carmen is nowhere near as bad as her Don Giovanni, it still doesn't offer many insights and is quite limited in how it treats the central characters. At least there's nothing in the characterisation that doesn't make sense: Carmen acts sexy and dominates the stage, Jose is suitably tortured and angry, Michaela is her usual wet self. But she never poses enough of a challenge to Carmen's carnality and sensuousness, and the moral dilemma of the drama seems token and by rote. The two casts proved interesting to compare. Rachvelishvili was a vocally very great Carmen I thought - power, accuracy, colour, sensuality, with a dark rawness in the sound, powerful chest notes, and a thrusting top. Alagna was vocally decent as Don Jose, but totally self involved acting wise, not connecting once with his stage partners. Vito Priante was vocally diminutive as the Torreador and simply miscast. Rice has a more polished sounding instrument that Rachvelishvili, and it's good to hear her again after a worrying and extended bought of illness. Another vocally very satisfying portrayal, though perhaps a little refined for my tastes - I'm a Callas admirer rather than a Price admirer in this role, to give two polar opposites. Tastes will differ. Lee can deliver terrifying decibels as Jose, and is not the most subtle singer, though he sang all the notes and was more interesting to watch dramatically than Alagna.

I saw the ROH Manon again with Ailyn Perez this time (click here for original review with Jaho). Perez proved to have a more pliant voice than Jaho, and she is more natural on stage, but the middle voice is lacking in resonance, and the lower voice a sliver, confirming what my thoughts after her Glyndebourne Falstaff last season (she is however much more suited to Manon than Alice Ford). Her cutesy smileyness, and dazzling good looks remind me of Danielle De Niese, but she is less magnetic on stage and the voice doesn't project as well in the theatre. Matthew Polenzani was even better than he was on opening night - a very beautiful performance of Des Grieux.

Hmm, a lot of negativity here. The main beauty of the last few weeks was the ENO Rigoletto that I just managed to post the review of. I feel like I've seen other things that I've simply forgotten to mention. Hmm. Not opera, but don't bother with the Sam Mendes' moribund King Lear at the NT with a very disappointing Simon Russell Beale in the title part, and the Duchess of Malfi at the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe is also worth missing (if it's still on), though I am excited to see how the space takes to an opera as it's a charmingly tiny theatre - Kasper Holten's production of L'Ormindo will be starting there very soon. Oh, and go and see the Lego Movie.

Rigoletto at ENO

13/02/14

Rigoletto is an opera I have seen many times before and have never previously loved, but after having seen this, I now fully understand the great appeal the music has in a great performance, and why it is such a staple repertoire piece.

Christopher Alden's production is pretty abstract, all taking place in a 19th century gentleman's club, the different locations overlapping, with characters in the same stage space not always in the same plane of the story. So the court becomes the same as Rigoletto's house and Gilda's imprisonment is spiritual. Like his production of Die Fledermaus from earlier this season, Alden's production is a mixed bag, but it has enough character and things to think about to make it more than worthwhile. The plot of Rigoletto is probably the paradigmatic 'silly opera plot', that stick that is used by the unsympathetic and insecure to beat the genre into a state of ridicule. Although this production probably assumes a reasonable familiarity with the story as normally presented, Alden tries to present it as an abstracted canvas in which we are encouraged to focus on the character relationships, rather than the the absurd plot elements which frame them. This approach when combined with the single set leads to a certain feeling of staticism, but when the music making is as fabulous as it is here, it works very well because we're allowed to focus on the ('right brain') emotional veracity of each moment rather than its logical absurdity (which the 'left brain' objects to. Drama is made of logical and emotional elements, and, for me at least, weakness in either leads to a difficulty in engaging with a piece of theatre). What I found most moving and insightful about Alden's presentation of the opera was in Rigoletto's relationship with Gilda - although it is obvious that he loves her beyond anything else, when actually faced with her in person he is too physically rough, too controlling, and finds it hard to communicate properly with her. In the end of course he ends up destroying her, which is his tragedy.

Quinn Kelsey's Rigoletto is simply stupendous. The endless wail of opera mavens that there are no great Verdi baritones any more has finally been answered. The two most famous baritones currently singing these roles on an international level are Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Simon Keenleyside, and though both have the control and command of the high tessitura that is required they also possess instruments that are essentially lyric in quality and so are in my experience rarely fully satisfying in this heavy repertoire. Kelsey similarly finds a superlative ease in the upper register and a wide palette of vocal colours, but his voice has a blade in it so he never resorts to bellowing, and the core of his sound is large, warm and burnished. On top of this, and perhaps most crucially, his singing is never just a exercise in bel canto - he actually manages to create a character in the sound. I can't praise him highly enough - let's hope we get him back soon for another Verdi baritone role.

Anna Christy's Gilda is very fine. She has an excellent technique and musicianship and in the ensembles she is wonderful. The fundamental timbre is not the most beautiful, and a certain hardness in the vibrato affects the middle voice, but the chest notes are there, and she sings the role as well as any I have heard live in the theatre. Barry Banks' duke is excellent in terms of his legato, and again his technique means that one is never nervous that he will come to any grief at any point. Acting wise he is a little weaker than his colleagues and occasionally a bit hard to credit as the lusty duke - he seems a bit cuddly and nice for that.

Under Graeme Jenkins the ENO orchestra play better than I have ever heard them. This was one of those performances that reminds you quite how transformative great conducting can be to an orchestra, and on the flip side, how few conductors there are at any moment that are capable of this. I don't think I've even heard better Verdi live in performance. Jenkins has a wonderful instinct for texture and colour, and drew out an atmosphere that I just didn't imagine existed inside this score. The sudden extreme shifts of mood in the piece told emotionally and dramatically, totally avoiding empty hysterics or shock tactics. The orchestra played as one organism, though on this first night there were a few moments in faster passages where pit and stage came slightly adrift, the only criticism I could make of this conducting. Most wonderful though was Jenkins' immaculate sense of line, the thing that really unifies an orchestra and allows melody driven music to attain real structure and momentum. Each number drifted along with dreamy ease, each phrase building on the arc of the previous one. So rare to hear, and such an immense pleasure when it is as spectacularly achieved as here.

Photos (c) ENO/Alastair Muir

Peter Grimes at ENO

29/01/14

An odd production this. It isn't boring, but it flattens Britten's drama into a piece of caricature and grotesque theatre. Paul Steinberg's sets are semi abstracted with their cubist angles and lack of detail, but are traditional in their pictorial rather than symbolic intention. Director David Alden confusingly pitches this against psychologically abstracted physical direction. By "psychologically abstract" I mean that the physical characterisation and movement of the chorus and principals can't be consistently attributed to psychologically motivated people - instead we see the "sorts of things" these people might do, often in alienated, abstracted ways. Thus there's mass choreography ("old Joe has gone fishing" is a dance sequence), slow motion walking, stormy arm swaying and silly walks. The Borough doesn't seem like it is comprised of individuals, but instead is an abstract "wave" of hatred and mistrust. The social situations aren't intended to be literal depictions of events which can be confusing, and the lack of clarity is compounded in Act I by the lack of certainty about where the sea actually is. Eventually we work out that the crowd's gormless stares at the audience are meant to be seaward glances. The "characters" that the principals play (except for Peter and Ellen), fit in with this directorial style, but feel reductive and one dimensional to me, and the less scary for it. Auntie is the most interesting perhaps with her masculine pinstriped suits, cropped hair and cabaret manner, and the absurdist action in her brothel at the beginning of Act III comes as a surprise. Her 'nieces', often portrayed as loose women, are here cartoonish twin school girls, certainly mentally ill, who are fondled by the apothecary to no one's particular concern. A grim picture of the sexualisation of girls that the Daily Mail reading borough don't mind (and further, don't even see), whilst simultaneously screaming about the rumours of boys being abused.

Ellen is not the brave, healing, mother figure that we have come to expect, nor is she Grimes's bridge to society. In fact she's almost the most solipsistic of the lot, responding fully only to invisible internal stimulus, which makes her repeated lapses into hopeless inaction seem nihilistic and selfish. In Act II she seems unperturbed by (the child) John's very obvious extreme psychological anguish. She is very moving as she enjoys the sunlight in the harbour, but then is coldly distant when she points out John's ripped shirt, which elicits from him a disturbingly protracted bout of demented scrabbling at his own neck and back. When she sees the bruise, instead of comfort she offers only a chilly lesson in the painful ways of the world. When Grimes appears she seems hopeful though soon lapses into despair, not unreasonably of course, but at an arbitrary moment, which again makes it about her. In Act III, her embroidery aria is delivered looking directly into the audience, another opportunity to drift into her own isolated thoughts. Balstrode attempts to make contact here, but he is well and truly ignored. Again, the apparently arbitrary moment of depressive doubt, once again in response to internal stimulus rather than an outside event, makes her quite unsympathetic. It's a take on the character that I haven't seen before, reinterpreting the dreamy warmth and nobility of Ellen's music as an alienated and egoistic escape from life. It didn't do it for me, because I like watching relationships on stage rather than alienated drifting around, and Ellen is sort of the linchpin of the piece in terms of the relationships contained in it, but it's an interesting critique of a character commonly seen as "good".

Grimes's misanthropy seems reasonably argued and comes from a place of surprisingly acute social sensitivity in the Prologue - he wants to silence rumours with a proper trial, because otherwise the fearsome Borough will not only continue to tell the stories, but elaborate on them, and the rumours will linger. His subsequent plans to escape his situation become ever more erratic and fantastical as he is increasingly ostracised from society. This production's picture of Grimes is closer to a traditional view of the character than is Ellen's, but the lack of social reality to his situation makes him a less interesting and complex figure than he usually is. Stuart Skelton is very impressive vocally in the role. His general bruskness fits the character well, but the spellbinding pianissimo that he started his great visionary aria "Now the Great Bear and Pleiades", held the otherwise noisy audience absolutely rapt for its entire duration. This happened again in the extraordinary mad scene, where Grimes's mind  thoughts flits and plays over the music of the entire opera, though now made uncanny by the lack of harmonic context. Occasionally, slight instability in the vibrato produced a few tense vocal moments, but perhaps this was first night nerves. Acting wise he did fine, but the direction provided scant opportunity for building a dramatic arc with his colleagues.

Elsa van den Heever's Ellen was unusual dramatically in the ways already mentioned, but vocally she provided a convincing portrait. Here voice in the upper register is shiningly full and very beautiful, but falls away in vibrancy of tone in the lower half of the voice. Rebecca de Pont Davies's rich voiced Auntie gets ever better as the evening goes on, and when she is joined by Heever, Mary Bevan, and Rhian Lois for the quartet "From the gutter" we get one of the highlights of the evening. Matthew Best's Mr. Swallow is vocally imposing of tone and character, though I couldn't fathom why his character had a lisp. Felicity Palmer is a delight as the steely voiced Mrs. Sedley, reacting with believable irritation at Ned Keene's piss staking sexual advances. Leigh Melrose and Timothy Robinson provide worst of the "character acting" as Ned and the reverend Horace Adams respectively, though I don't blame them for this, and both are vocally right for their parts. Iain Paterson's finely sung Balstrode rounds a vocally accomplished cast.

Edward Gardner draws some lovely playing from the ENO orchestra, and the score's softer beauties are his forte. He doesn't manage to inspire the energy and aggression of the faster, louder sections nearly so convincingly, the act II interlude for instance seeming wan and undernourished. There's a spot of wonderfully beautiful viola playing in Act II from the section principal, Amelie Roussel. The ENO chorus are on thrilling form.



The central theme of Peter Grimes, that of society against the individual, is terrifyingly presented by Britten because the victory of the Borough is so complete. The social glue, the thing that pulls this society of preening misfits together, is not a genuine belief in conservative values, but rather the hatred of and then destruction of a vulnerable and isolated individual. This is chilling. Grimes is a threat not because he is odd or violent (in actual fact all of the members of the society that we witness are extremely odd - threateningly eccentric, immoral, hypocritical, prurient, or drug addled, and we can only surmise that each of the members of the chorus are the same), but because he is unconcerned with and possibly simply unable to "keep up appearances". Something about him makes it impossible for people to feel neutral towards him. In some ways we know, by the rules of tragedy, that Grimes is doomed from the beginning. But Ellen's resistance, whether powerfully, or (as here) weakly presented, is also crushed, and her future seems pretty bleak. Is she next for this treatment from the Borough? One feels that this society will continue to prey on its weakest members until it has destroyed itself. An apocalyptic vision.






Photos (c) ENO/Tristran Kenton

Manon at ROH

14/01/14

Few operas are so obviously relevant to our own times than Massenet's Manon. The story is not dissimilar from Mark-Anthony Turnage's recent Anna Nicole which tackles the same spiritual/psychological themes but fails to address them with any depth or warmth. Massenet is not a composer we turn to to plumb the depths and scale the heights of the human condition, but he was the ideal composer to tackle a story centred on greed, fame for fame's sake, and the power of sensuality, lust and sexuality over morality and religion.* The other two 19th century "bad women" blockbusters, Carmen and La Traviata, have similar plot elements, though the moral message and approach of each is very different (and audiences of the time would have reacted very differently to the various characters).

I have never been comfortable with the idea that Manon is a simple ingénue - the complexity and unremitting sensuality of her music just doesn't support this for me. Massenet builds his acts to reflect his leading lady. The first act is almost irritatingly light (certainly too long), but Manon seems to me to have more self knowledge than she is usually given credit for - after all, in her own words she's being sent to the convent by her family because she is "too fond of pleasure"! The second act is musically richer, more beautiful and morally interesting, the third goes further still in all these regards. Only Massenet could have a scene in a church where the society ladies are attending services because of their arousal over the attractive young priest, without judgement or bitterness, whatever the wry moralising of the libretto was meant to be. Massenet empathises and just shows us with a smile that these things happen in the world. In the event, the image approaches the Proustian.


Act V can feel like it is the ending of another opera. During the first four acts good deeds and good people have been universally punished, and bad deeds and bad people have been rewarded, and there's been no hint of remorse, guilt, or pity. Suddenly, in Act V Manon is in her death throws, which feels pat and like it's merely a nod to weepy 19th century operatic convention and bourgeois morality, the latter of which has been so gloriously ignored (indeed inverted) up until this point in the opera. Everything we have just witnessed is guiltily rescinded, and then everything is instantly forgiven and forgotten. I find it unsatisfying and unbelievable in the context of the world that Massenet has created, and ultimately a cop out.




Laurent Pelly's production has plenty of interesting ideas, and is not awful, but is not well designed and so is not amongst his better shows. Chantal Thomas' set designs are abstracted but clearly reflective of fin de siecle Paris. The small Belle Époque details (e.g. strings of spherical lanterns) can't disguise the acres of gray concrete, crude railings, and ugly buildings, and Joel Adam's unromantic lighting adds to the cold sterility of Manon's drab world. Everything is a bit off kilter - pillars lean, floors are haphazardly ramped, all presumably to reflect a world gone awry. It could surely be less clumsily achieved. (And where did the electric lights and Manon's modern ball gown come from in Act IV?). The lush (one time epically horrible) costume designs are Pelly's own, which feed the eye and raise further questions about the role of image and image cultivation in women of the 19th century. He can't disguise the languors of Act I and II: the comedy scenes feel very long, and there's far too much business regarding running up stairs only to hesitate, descend, then decide to run up again, but then hesitate, etc. etc. etc. Women are endlessly running across the stage shrieking and giggling without obvious motive. Various Pelly clichés arise - the choreographed crowd scenes with freeze frames and audience facing narrations feel tired and lazy here. An example of the awkwardness of certain staging decisions: During the famous Gavotte of Act III many of crowd movements are aesthetically motivated whilst being totally inexplicable psychologically, and Manon often addresses and seduces her admirers facing away from them and with stock poses. The haunting skeletal accompaniment of the quiet second verse, and Manon's unexpectedly insightful words, go for nothing.


The central theme of Pelly's production is the male gaze and how sex is used as a bartering tool in a society in which women have no power. By no means is Pelly suggesting that women are all just innocent victims - like the men they are greedy and ambitious, it's just that sexual politics is their only tool for getting their way. There are a few moments that made a big impression - Guillot is brutally kicked by Lescaut after the otherwise jolly comic lechery of Act I, which is quite jarring and plunges us back into the cold waters of morality. Even more shocking and telling is the close of Act III. The ballet dancers, who look like they have walked out of a Degas canvas, are carried back onstage after their show, screaming and struggling against their male clients. Manon's ever watchful entourage are the shadowy gents that populate Degas' paintings. We are reminded that Degas' ballet dancers were prostitutes after hours, and were often in a lot of danger as a result: although life is good for Manon (at least for time being), many working women suffered terribly. It felt doubly weird when so many applauded this curtain.

A similar example of degradation in the last act is much less convincing - the soldiers escorting Manon limply prod and kick her as punishment, which just makes one think of the far more likely and obvious way that gangs of men have traditionally chosen to degrade hated women. All in all a mixed production that one feels has a good central idea that the director hasn't quite delivered on.

An aside: not for nothing did Beverly Sills describe the role of Manon as "the French Isolde" - it is extremely long, sits a lot in the middle voice, has frequent excursions below the stave, calls for great flexibility and line and requires ample support and resonance in every register. The rewards to the singer and audience are obvious however. Although a true Isolde voice would be quite unsuited to the part, as with Thais and Esclarmonde it's absolutely obvious from the vocal writing that Massenet did not write this for the light lyric voice that it is seems to be the opera world's current casting preference.

Ermonela Jaho was mixed in the title role. The big Act III arias and duets suited her best vocally, the high lying writing sitting exactly in her best range, and she seemed to have warmed up after a very shaky first two acts. In Act I and II the bright top gave way to an unstable lower middle voice and absolutely no support below the staff. The vibrato was very wide and fast, and the lack of core to the sound added uncertainty to an already unsteady sense of pitch. Feebly floated pianissimos arrived unexpectedly every two bars with no obvious musical logic. Thankfully the middle voice stabilised and the mannered vocal tricks diminished after the first interval and the fourth act was more convincing too. Acting wise, she was very convincingly girlish in the early part of the opera, Manon's wilful nature still charmingly unbridled and compulsive. Unfortunately her transformation to the vampish "princess" persona of Act III and IV was less successful - a very presentational acting style was adopted, that is "showing" the audience feelings and actions rather than them arising from and appearing motivated by concrete desires/objectives. Tellingly, the only time when there was real physical urgency in her interpretation was when she was engaged in a concrete activity which had a very strict time limit and clear standard of success - when she struggles to gather and hide the money in the gambling scene when she thinks the police are arriving. Most of the time it seemed that Jaho was doing an impression of someone who was sexually self confident and demanding - the hammy acting in the amazing seduction scene in the church at Saint-Sulpice a case in point, so too the Gavotte. While this could in itself be a valid acting choice for the character of Manon (that is, that she is merely putting on the sex kitten act and the airs and graces) we would need then to see the vulnerability when the mask is off. The transformation into goodly penitence of Act V was also not convincing, because Manon had been so unabashedly unapologetic before then, but as I have noted, this is a real difficulty of the opera, and so not a major failing of this assumption. I only go into so much detail here because I feel like this vision of the character contains many good things and is exciting, and that it is merely acting technique that is letting it down.

Matthew Polenzani's Chevalier Des Grieux is a simpler case. His singing is tireless and quite beautiful and he has a real sense of French style. It's not the most characterful voice, and there were croony moments during piano singing, but it's largely a very convincing vocal assumption of a challenging role. The physical characterisation is more straight forward and less interesting than Jaho's, but the role itself is less dramatically interesting and has less unusual tasks to do, so registers less as an acting challenge - he's always the manipulated party and so is mostly reacting to situations rather than . The rest of the cast are all quite acceptable though none stand out. Conductor Emmanuel Villaume inspired some good noises from the pit, but there was a lot that was scrappy too, and the music rarely glowed and coursed in the way that Massenet can.

Despite my complaints above, this looks good doesn't it, even if it
inexplicably modern. Perhaps the designs looked better from the stalls?

*His opera Thais has a similar but reversed journey for its leads - the man, Athaniel starts off being religious and because of Thais he discovers his sexuality and gives up religion. Thais starts off being a courtesan and through her meeting with Athaniel becomes a nun. It seems there's no hope for women though, as even although her journey is a path towards purity it's still her that dies and the man that survives.


All photos (c) Bill Cooper/Royal Opera House.

Ravel Double Bill at RCM

7/12/13

Ravel's operas are an odd choice in some ways for a student showcase production because they rely so little on vocal display and contain few roles that could be considered foundational for operatic careers. On the other hand the situation comedy L'heure espagnol provides an immense textual and dramatic challenge in the realm of rapid fire Gallic farce, and the fairy tale parable L'enfant et les Sortileges an object lesson in precise physical and vocal characterisation in each of the tiny roles that comprise the opera's mosaic structure.

Unfortunately James Bonas's double bill production did these young singers few favours. L'heure espagnole is a 'bubble of fancy' to steal Oscar Wilde's phrase, but as with any piece of theatre, we have to believe in the characters and situation and be moved by this set up before they can be truly funny to us. Here each character was instead reduced to a bland caricature floating around in an awkward, spacey set (by Ruari Murchison) which proved unhelpfully restrictive to the action. Containing nothing but a table and the two clocks in question as well as a clock face floor and spiral stair case, this set gave the whole thing the feel of an abstracted psychological setting, which might have made sense had the physical action hadn't been directed as a slap stick pantomime. The singers continually addressed the audience, always a difficult line to walk, and here it wasn't at all clear what the audience's function was within the opera/drama, as in who were we meant to be? What grated most on a purely practical level was that the clocks in which the characters are continually hiding in had open bottoms which were shown to the audience every time they were lifted, instantly destroying the illusion that the person was still inside. Of course we all know that they are not in there, but when we watch a show we buy into the make believe reality in front of us; carelessness like this interrupts and shatters our fragile illusions and unceremoniously ejects us back to our critical minds. Hard to think how something this basic was missed. 

 

L'heure was however saved by the high musical values of the show. Under Michael Rosewell, the RCM opera orchestra made a truly ravishing sound, warm waves of glitter and gold, with the effect that Ravel's masterpiece sounded something like the most luxuriantly gorgeous film music you've ever heard, even though composed a quarter of a century before Hollywood's golden age. The fact that everyone on stage overacted to such a great degree cannot be blamed on these young artists - if it applies to the entire cast we can usually safely blame the director. Musically all were good, but Kezia Bienek stood out as Concepsión - this is a voice of considerable power, incisive beauty, and is strong in every register. One senses that there is yet more to be unlocked and I look forward to seeing her sing again.


L'enfant et les Sortileges proved slightly more successful staging wise, Ravel's cascading sequence of images registering clearly in the first half, each character obviously making its mark on the child. Then in the transition to the garden scene, instead of a forest we got a return to the clocks of L'heure, via hanging chains and cogs - a curious way of binding the two shows together because its expressive function wasn't at all obvious. There was such chaos at the work's climax that in the fracas I and my companion totally missed the child's moment of contrition and reparation. As I said in the opening paragraph, the fragmentary, non showy nature of the piece makes it hard to single out young singers for special praise, but again all were up to the challenge vocally and Rose Setten's Enfent was great fun to watch, especially in the tantrums of the opening section. The orchestra again made a very fine sound.

A mixed bag then, more engaging musically than dramatically, but the RCM's upcoming Arianna in Creta will surely provide a more obvious platform to display the talents of their singing students.

Roberto Devereux with WNO

08/11/13
Bristol Hippodrome

The three Donizetti queens were never intended as a cycle, but the fact that they represent a historical succession and contain four of Donizetti's most vocally and dramatically formidable female roles gives them a peculiar fascination, and their subjects are of course currently particularly fashionable in this age of Philippa Gregory fever*. The part of Elizabeth I in Roberto Devereux is considered by many voice mavens to be the most challenging Bel Canto assoluta role, which is to say nothing less than the most demanding role ever composed for a woman's voice. Every voice will find different things more or less difficult, but in many ways it's hard to disagree with this assessment - the part is a virtual catalogue vocal techniques, requiring a very wide range, the most intricate fioratura, all dispatched with a dramatic vocal weight, and all this for great stretches of time. Most importantly, it goes to greater extremes than any of the contemporaneous bel canto roles in these things. It's the rarest done of the three Queens, so there's a certain morbid fascination and thrill in seeing someone tackle it.

It's very interesting to have a principal female character in an opera who is an older woman. Though a fictionalised piece of history, the action of this opera takes place 1598-160, when Elizabeth would have been between the ages of 65-68. As is to be expected in a role this challenging, it really needs a singer in their prime, and Alexandra Deshortie is not even nearly Elizabeth's true age. To age herself she adopts a very unusual physicality in which her movements are very angular and powerful, her posture stooped, and she has a limp that comes and goes. I found it all a little artificial and couldn't quite buy into it, and I did wonder what inspired it. After seeing the opera I looked for eyewitness reports of the older Queen - contemporary descriptions of her countenance and bearing are surprisingly and brutally honest, but notably comment on her grace and statelyness into her last years, so it's difficult to know where this idea came from.

Allesandro Talevi's production is rather arch, both revelling in and satirizing the gothic melodrama of Donizetti's opera. Madeleine Boyd's sets present an abstracted, quasi-modernised Tudor style, rich in deliberate anachronisms to create a "stylised historical" aesthetic just as Donizetti's libretto and music is. Matthew Haskins' lighting designs create a gloomy atmosphere, but Talevi's physical direction can't quite match the steampunk design for moody, referential, knowing grimness. The costumes, also by Boyd, are a mish-mash of styles, periods and fabrics and there are obvious references to Vivienne Westwood in the drooping grandeur of Elizabeth's dresses. The informative preconcert talk given by Sophie Rashbrook pointed out further similarities to the fashion designer in the person of Elizabeth herself - both are eccentric, powerful, ginger, matriarchal doyennes. There are strong visual elements in the production - one example that sticks in the mind is a nice piece of shadow play where the gigantic figure of Elizabeth is contrasted with her tiny ladies in waiting. In Act I Robert has brought Elizabeth a tarantula from his travels, which crawls around its cage; in Act II Elizabeth takes her revenge in a giant mechanical spider which is almost the definition of badass, even if it is also puerile, camp and silly. The opera is tricky, because so much of the action has already occurred when the curtain is raised, and much of the drama is psychological - sadly there's not that much insight offered into any of the characters in this production.

The central performances were quite strong. Alexandra Deshorties is in the rare position of having the right sort of voice for the role and basically sings the notes with expression, even if it's not the most ingratiating or flexible voice you've ever heard. The role doesn't call particularly for a beautiful sound it has to be said, and Deshorties certainly has her moments of acid and steel, but largely she does a good job musically in an impossible role. Leah-Marian Jones also has a very large voice, and again though it is not timbrally beautiful, she provides a musically very satisfying portrayal of Sarah because she has such an excellent legato and can effect beautiful nuances in the vocal line while maintaining full vocal support - the voice becomes beautiful through her musicianship - something not altogether common. Leonardo Capalbo's vibrato is a little wide at all times for my tastes, but he's definitely a tenor of some vocal accomplishment. I found his portrayal of Roberto hammy and self involved, but that might have been the production. As the Duke of Nottingham David Kempster has one of those rock solid voices where you just know that every single note in the entire opera will be hit without any risk. Some will like unfussy, solid singing like this, and again it's no mean feat to sing this consistently, but I found the timbral palette very narrow and as a result was not that interested in the characterisation. Daniele Rustioni's conducting throughout the evening was decent, certainly better than most of the ROH's recent bel canto offerings, though dramatic tension is never raised above "moderate" and it's difficult to transcend the score's tootling dum-de-dum sections without more urgency.

I'm glad I saw it and enjoyed what I could take from the production, but this was a decidedly odd evening of opera that didn't quite hang together well enough. In other news, the Bristol Hippodrome, just like the Birmingham Hippodrome where I saw the superb Lohengrin last season with the WNO, is an excellent venue for opera with very good acoustics and great sightlines. If only London had venues like this!

*this didn't seem to convert to there being a younger audience on the night I went.