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

Capriccio at the Royal Opera House with Renée Fleming

19/07/13

What a gift. I was beginning to wonder whether Strauss' final and most perfect opera Capriccio simply was too rarely put on and too demanding in live performance for it to be likely that I'd ever see a really good one, but this was great. I was astonished to discover that the ROH has staged the opera fully only once - that was in 1991 with Kiri Te Kanawa. (In 1953 the Bavarian state opera came with a visiting production). This evening was a "concert performance" but it verged heavily towards "semi-staged" - Fleming and Skovhus, both of whom have done the opera many times, sang without music, and there was plenty of moving around and interaction from everyone. In fact it was an object lesson in how little has to happen for an opera to feel like it is being dramatically (rather than just musically) realised. It's probably my favourite opera so it's hard to be objective about how effective the set up was, but its cherished status for me means that it's also easy to be critical and I must say I was riveted and entertained throughout, which is more than I can say for some productions I've seen of the piece. How revealing to have Strauss' music for stage and scenery, with much of the action in the minds eye. Strauss gives us it all in his wondrous score which (as with all his operas) is so rich and detailed that it actually can become a challenge to stage.

The ROH used their "Royal Festival Hall" concert shell, with the orchestra on stage, the singers in front, and conductor Andrew Davis amongst the singers, a considerable distance from the orchestral musicians (many of whom weren't facing him as a result.) The concert shell does wonders for the ROH acoustic, at least for the front stalls where the sound can be poorly balanced and muffled. The ROH orchestra with Davis made for an interesting comparison with the Wiener Staatsoper orchestra (ostensibly the Vienna Philharmonic) and Christoph Eschenbach who I saw doing the piece last month (also with Fleming - see my review here). Individually, the playing of the ROH orchestra was sometimes questionable - the opening string sextet had some ropey moments (the offstage sextet sounded magnificent though!) and the gorgeous horn solo that introduces the famous final scene was hesitant and contained at least one crack - but overall this was by far the more convincing performance. The orchestral sonorities were more beautifully and warmly achieved, the underlying flow and momentum that links the fragmentary orchestral writing more convincing here, and the chiaroscuro contrasts of texture were more ably handled by Davis and his orchestra. Davis has a superb measure of the score, and conducts it with obvious love and affection - there were things in the orchestration that I'd never noticed before, and the vocal octets were more brilliantly performed than I have ever heard them before. The pacing always felt right and throughout the words were fully understandable from all - all in all then a superb ensemble achievement, niggles aside.

Renée Fleming did some wonderful things as the Countess Madeleine, proving she still has the goods when it counts. In Vienna last month she sang much better than she did here however - the line was firmer and purer, the text not so exaggerated. It is a common criticism of Fleming that she overinflects the text, and uses expressive portamentos to excess. As a Fleming fan (to put it mildly), these things have never bothered me in the past because the legato is so utterly flawless and in such perfect equipoise with the diction, the basic sound extremely firm and well supported, the phrasing pliant and sensitive, and the text so beautifully coloured by the voice. It's a voice I know supremely well, and here, I sadly felt that she was overcompensating for a slight loss of control that must be disconcerting for her - the scoops were often very extreme, even becoming yelps at times, especially in the more conversational moments where the line is harder to maintain, and sometimes the word stresses became so emphatic that the line was distorted. But then she'd whip out the trademark legato for one of the extended arioso moments and we'd hear the Fleming that we know and love from her recordings. In the final scene, she came on "dressed for dinner" in her Vivienne Westwood sequinned gown, now with a massive gold and silver overcoat, and we got her best singing of the evening - the huge dramatic outpourings which follow the recapitulated sonnet soared with powerful abandon, and the floating pianissimos of her final few phrases were magically dispatched. Fleming can be a very moving actress, but left to her own devices without a director her acting here felt unfocussed and even hammy - lots of pouting, posing questioningly with the sonnet, arm shaking, and the like. Again, she was at her most moving when she opted to do less, simply letting the music flow through her and naturally illuminate her expressions.

Christian Gerhaher was an almost perfect Olivier - I simply cannot think of a currently active singer who could be more ideal for this role. His precision and extraordinary way with the text is totally fitting for the character, but the beautifully balanced timbre and wonderful legato mean that Strauss' music is also fully served. It's a much bigger voice than I remember hearing when he did Wolfram in Tannhauser here back in 2010. Bizarrely and almost amusingly he totally muddled up the words for the sonnet when he was addressing Fleming in plain speech, but even before he went wrong, I thought his delivery of this spoken text wasn't quite heartfelt enough - the only weak part of an otherwise superb vocal assumption of the role. His head was mostly quite buried in the score, so I wonder if this was his first performance of the part?

Andrew Staples, standing in for an indisposed Joseph Kaiser, made an excellent Flamand. His pointing of the text was not quite as nuanced or touching as Gerhaher's but his vocal contribution never felt out of place next to his stellar colleagues, and his beautiful scene in praise of Madeleine was sung with Mozartian clarity and refinement but with Straussian surge when the music asked for it. The timbre is not the most distinctive, or at least not yet, but it is nevertheless very pleasing. A very fine showing for a very fine young singer. Peter Rose was an equally excellent La Roche. It's not the biggest or juiciest bass voice, but his German is excellent, he "gets" the role fully, is funny without buffoonery, and his legato is very good. He seemed to tire a bit towards the end of his climactic speech, but this was another very pleasing performance.

Christine Rice was in such beautiful voice in her recent Minotaur appearances that I was quite sad about her having to cancel these performances of Clairon due to a quite serious illness. I hope she gets better very soon. Her replacement Tanja Ariane Baumgartner made more of this role musically than one might have expected in what is traditionally seen as an actress's role (Strauss makes sure she could never musically upstage his heroine, just as he had with Zdenka/Arabella a decade before). She has a dark coloured mezzo voice that contrasted very nicely with Fleming's silvery soprano, and meant they were never "in competition" as sometimes can seem the case. Bo Skovhus sounded better here than he had in Vienna, less gruff and with a fuller tone, and though arguably the role doesn't require, or even shouldn't be cast with a beautiful voice, the voice is sounding quite hardened and monochrome at this stage, and Skovhus was never the most finessed singer. That said, this wasn't a bad performance, certainly not a disservice to the role. Barry Banks and Mary Plazas made a good pair of Italian singers, Banks being particularly impressive. The female singer is almost always cast with a very light voice, as here, and I never quite know why, because the first entry sits very low for a long time, and the coloratura requirements are hardly demanding.

There's a small but painful cut which the ROH, Vienna and the Met all practise, coming just before the Count suggests his brilliant solution to the other characters' quandary as to what subject to make into an opera. It always jars, because the Counts suggestion simply comes out of the air, and not from the discussion, and so seems out of character for such a professed opera sceptic. Am I the only one that misses this part? Probably.

All in all, a very satisfying evening and a wonderful close to the ROH season. I will (obviously) be at the next performance as well, so will report back on that if I have more to say.