Calixto Bieito's Fidelio at ENO

25/09/13

Opening night at the ENO proved to be a much more exciting affair than the run of the mill Turandot that the ROH proffered. The ENO has taken on two of Calixto Bieito's less shocking stagings over the last two seasons, though they are still unexpected and radical enough to raise a few eyebrows and boos, always a good thing when you see who it is who's booing. This is a thought provoking production, and my criticisms are extensive only because I sense that it has the seed of something very powerful.

For Bieito, all of the characters in Fidelio are in a prison of sorts, be it mental or otherwise. The astonishing set (designed by Rebecca Ringst) is a 3D maze constructed out of perspex and strip lighting, which the characters wander through looking for an escape. The opening sequence, set to the Leonore III overture (which works superbly), is a breathtaking spectacle. The actors crawl out of the pit into the desolate, flickering beauty of the labyrinth. Tim Mitchell's lighting designs are exceptional here and throughout. The meaning is ambiguous, but perhaps Bieito is showing the characters choosing to enter the prison and is by extension saying that we choose and define our own restraints. Once all the characters are in, it's surprising however how literal the prison remains.

There's a weird episode in the first scene where Jaquino forces himself on Marzelline as if to rape her in his frustration - a horrible and shocking display of what his own prison of sexual obsession has done to him. She pushes him off, but the whole event doesn't convince - two seconds later she looks totally happy as if nothing has happened, and is singing joyously of Fidelio. Most of Act I passes slowly and even verges occasionally on being boring as the plot becomes abstracted by the lack of dramatic logic. Act II flows better and raises more interesting questions. After the interval, the set pivots down into a horizontal position, making the prison seem more real and physical now than mental. When Florestan is rescued by Leonore a really surprising thing happens - a caged string quartet descends from the sky, playing the unearthly slow movement Heiliger Dankgesang of Beethoven's op.132, while Florestan and Leonore sit quietly with each other. It's a profoundly touching moment, and we realise that even though Florestan has been rescued by his love, he is either not ready or too damaged to be helped by her; Bieito seems to be saying we cannot truly be "saved" by others. Before this though there's a major dramatic misfire - the ecstatic duet that precedes this scene sees the newly united couple first dressing into a suit and elegant dress, while singing about the joy of the other's embrace. Bieito deliberately ignores the words, showing us that these two seem far more interested in propriety and getting back to their old gender roles than they are in each other. Again it's the music that's the sticking point here though - Bieito is clearly trying to make this scene laughable, but it isn't emotionally or dramatically convincing because nothing has prepared us dramatically for these actions, and Beethoven's music (let alone the text) makes this dramatic choice feel phony and utterly implausible. Ironically avoiding Beethoven's total lack of irony is one thing, but comedy and irony requires just as much truth as serious drama and the characters still need to have some sort of logic to them if we're meant to believe in their onstage reality.

The ending is extremely ambiguous. With Don Pizarro's plot foiled, Don Fernando enters from one of the ENO's boxes as a bewigged, wealthy 18th century gentleman/prince, totally at odds with the rest of the production's period or aesthetic - a representative of a past era which was exactly what Beethoven was saying in this piece that we needed to get away from. What I took it to mean was that with all the talk of equality, hope and freedom, this nobleman playboy is still required to actually grant everyone freedom, and he sees his role in the rousing final chorus as a fun amusement for himself. Don Fernando is not subject to the rules that everyone else is (OK, possibly a clear message in line with what I've just said) - he shoots Florestan dead, but then Leonore mysteriously revives him, and the episode isn't further commented on. I have no idea why or how this happens.

As so often with Bieto, the "Konzept" seems interesting and pregnant with possibilities and is rendered with a compelling visual strength, but these things are far stronger than the moment to moment action. In Bieito's narrative, it's clear that the characters are meant to be alienated from each other, but this usually manifests itself in vague standing around, ironically not so far from the park and bark aesthetic of a bygone era. Interaction between characters, especially during the big conflicts always seems both clumsy and overly rehearsed ("now you fall down here"), intentions rarely specific or easy to read.

But even if this is deliberate, and the characters are meant to seem physically unconvincing, and even if they're not talking to each other, or are talking past each other, for me at least, characters still need to be acting within the confines of whatever psychological situation they find themselves in for us to believe in them. I need to feel that they are experiencing something, even if it's only a mental phenomenon.* Alternatively, if planning a very unusual production like this, where the actors (deliberately) feel dislocated from what they expect in a role, they need to be provided with a new language of acting in order to be expressive and interesting as characters. Here every character seemed very generic and unspecific to me. I don't mind when directors have a political point that they want to make about an opera using a radical "konzept" - it adds to the variety of the stultifying canon and may possibly make us see a work afresh, which is always a rare gift. But for me at least, it has to work as drama on a moment by moment basis too. Opera is not primarily an intellectual art form: this aspect has to work alongside the emotions and senses. These things are the remit of the music - it cannot be ignored.

If the ENO want to continue doing modern productions like this, and I strongly think they should, in my opinion they really have to look at their translation policy, since they also seem committed long term to opera in English as an idea. Me and my companion (coincidentally also a translator) found that David Pountney's translation felt consistently totally at odds with either the piece or the style of the production. The beautiful passages by Borges for the spoken parts made the contrast all the keener. Is rhyme really the most important aspect of this libretto? So often in this translation it takes precedent over good grammar, beautiful language, and appropriateness to the setting. I mean some people might value rhyme above poetic sense, but for me it seems that translation is one of the very few a chances we get in opera to change the "sacred" text! Surely the opportunity should be used to bind text, drama and music together better. This same thing was one of my only criticisms of last season's brilliant ENO Wozzeck.

Musically, the cast is very good. Emma Bell makes a vocally thrilling Leonore, her fierce commitment to expression and communication totally overshadowing the slightly approximate moments of coloratura. The range of colours she gets out of her voice is admirable - it's not that it's the widest palette ever, but rather that they are always precise and apt. Stuart Skelton is similarly very impressive as Florestan - a truly heroic voice that is capable and unafraid of singing with detail and finesse. His crescendo opening word "God" was simply astonishing - exactly what was wanted. Sarah Tynan's Marzelline was the most vocally impressive of the rest of the cast, possessing a voice with a youthful Mozartian timbre and flexibility. Philip Horst's Pizarro was sometimes straining to be heard, but he convinced dramatically at least. James Creswell's Rocco offered the reverse - a sonorous voice, but the most at sea dramatically. The ENO chorus is on excellent form.

Edward Gardner does fascinating things in the pit. There was a precision and elemental power in the overture that was transfixing. Elemental not in the normal sense of "man and nature" that we expect of Beethoven - elemental in the sense of it seeming to correspond with very precise and fundamental mental/psychic states. The late quartets and piano sonatas contain this same quality, which seems to entirely transcend style and period. This almost worrying yet cool intensity extended to almost all of the purely orchestral passages of the opera and worked wonderfully with the staging. The vocal music is treated rather differently. Gardner makes it sound like Beethoven was picking up where Mozart left off with Die Zauberflote - dancing, joyous, almost graceful, that most un-Beethovinian quality! The contrast is large, but it seems to me not entirely unwarranted - Gardner brings to the fore the experimental nature of Beethoven's score, and also the wealth of influences it contains. Although this lightish approach to the vocal music can jar aesthetically with the darkness of the staging, Bieito's production is clearly trying to get us to question our assumptions about the piece, so paradoxically Gardner is not at odds with the spirit of the staging. He cements his place as one of this country's most talented opera conductors.

Bieito's Fidelio is not great as drama, but it is as an intellectual exploration of Beethoven's opera. Certainly worth seeing for this reason, and musically also.

*Maybe not everyone thinks this?

Lohengrin at Welsh National Opera

13/06/13
Birmingham Hippodrome

Wagner's steady journey from talent to genius is a very satisfying development to follow. The marked improvement from each opera to the next, both in the level of the greatest music, and also in the ratio of good to mediocre is so consistent that you have to marvel at the ability and willingness to learn from mistakes, the commitment to his native talent which was hardly precocious or even particularly promising at first, and his following through of a singular vision to conclusion in each work even when he might have moved on artistically by the journey's end. Lohengrin comes right at the cusp of his full maturity - it's his last opera that feels fully at the heart of the Romantic tradition rather than a highly singular development of it* (however radically he has moved the genre on), the last that he wrote before fully setting down on paper his idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and the last opera he composed before the fateful meeting with King Ludwig II of Bavaria.

The level of inspiration is very high and the music that attains genuine greatness far outweighs the merely bombastic; certainly there is a higher percentage of good to bad than in Tannhauser, which in turn had a higher percentage of good to bad than Der fliegende Holländer. The range too is greater than ever before - the diaphanous radiance of the opening "Ferne Land" music in the overture (which reappears throughout the opera) is a wonderfully successful experiment which he learned from but never repeated with such purity in the rest of his work. The way it very gradually, almost imperceptibly, builds from intimacy and tenderness towards it's climax is also a sign of things to come. On the other side, the "public" grandeur of the choral writing is overwhelming at times, though this is a direction that Wagner found it hard to incorporate into his later operas, Meistersinger aside, which is the most obvious fruit of this music's promise.

This is all to say that in this WNO production of Lohengrin, we feel the work resonating at the heart of his output as it looks forward to the mature music dramas in theme, scope, and more than occasionally in the music, and backwards to German Romantic opera in form, plot and structure, and once again, just as often in the music. The production's setting of the 1840's attempts to put it politically in the context of Wagner's time of composition: soon after writing the opera, Wagner was involved in politically dangerous activities that had as a goal a Germany united under new leadership. In Lohengrin there is a crisis in society caused by an ambiguity in leadership, so the parallel that is trying to be drawn is obvious. It's an interesting idea, but not fully realised in the staging, and the resulting design can be quite ugly and inelegantly achieved - Antony McDonald's sets feel constrictive and confining in terms of the range of movement they offer and the grimy "realistic" finish can't cover a fundamental lack of believability (why are these people, experiencing these significant events, meeting here rather than anywhere else?) or beauty. Dilapidation derives its effect, meaning, and charm (or horror) from its context - the original edifice has to be grand and magnificent enough for the fall to have its piquancy.

Where this production really succeeds is in the detailed and believable character relationships, subtly suggestive, touchingly acted, and never melodromatic even when the plot is at its most contrived (McDonald, known primarily as a designer, paradoxically succeeding much better in his other role here as director). The first act falters a little as Matthew Best's Heinrich der Vogler seems disconnected from everyone else despite convincing vocal contributions, and unfortunately Simon Thorpe's Friedrich von Telramund is a weak link throughout in his lack of specificity vocally and dramatically. He is a cover though, brought in to replace an ailing John Lundgren, who has not yet sung a show. Things improve with the entrance of Peter Wedd's ethereal Lohengrin who instantly has an intense chemistry with Emma Bell's otherwordly Elsa - the two seem to float in another plane above the central action. This is in part due to the superb lighting of Lucy Carter who metaphorically and literally illuminates the action with sensitivity and masterful simplicity. Susan Bickley's Ortrud remains a silent presence throughout Act I, though is fascinating already due to her obvious keen emotional involvement in the events unfolding despite having no direct part in them. Haughty calmness that contains a furnace of ill will is the hallmark of her characterisation and feels just right in this production.

Act II, more interesting musically, finds the production at its best - the scene between Ortrud and Elsa shows both in exceptional voice, and great dramatic form - so much is said with so little. Then the wonder of the chorus as Elsa prepares to enter the church (thankfully interrupted so that we get to hear it again), then Ortrud's violent outbursts and dispatch by Lohengrin. The Act III "bedroom scene" becomes the emotional heart of the work, here very intimate. Elsa's all too understandable desire to know Lohengrin's background and past actions, even when it's not the reason why she loves him, comes painfully but inexorably. When she's brought to earth from her dream land at the instigation of Ortrud's questioning, it is her undoing, both in plot and as a study in psychology.

There are certain things which I heard Wagner fanatics chirping away delightedly at in the interval. First, that during the Act I ensemble for the principles it is only Ortrud and Lohengrin, the opera's extremes of character that do not kneel. So too, the humble kneeling of King Heinrich in support of Elsa, an unprecedented act for a King and therefore deeply significant of the strength of emotion he must be feeling (if only it had showed in the rest of characterisation!). Perhaps more significant on a practical level is the problematic matter of the swan. Here we see Gottfried, Elsa's brother, half swan, half boy, stuck in adolescent form, unrecognised by the others. It neatly solves the physical issue of having a swan on stage, makes the transformation more understandable and also makes more explicit and credible the curiously tender (not to say homoerotic) relationship between Lohengrin and the swan.

I don't think a finer Elsa could be currently found on these shores than Emma Bell. The voice is quite dark and often sounds a little "heavy" with a slightly slow vibrato and a rounded solidity that means it's not the most naturally girlish sound. But, what she does with it is just wonderful - the floated pianissimos are beautifully supported and consistent, and she can move smoothly to a full bodied fortissimo in every register with no loss of beauty in the sound. This endless flexibility and superb technical security gives her enormous freedom to be expressive: she manages Wagner's vocal writing with appealing fluidity and ease, to a degree that is rare to hear live in the theatre. Acting wise too, she creates a very touching character on stage, elegant and floating, very much in line with the vocal portrait. She took a while to warm up, having intonation issues during her first entrance, and it took me a while to get used to her full timbre, but once settled, this was a great assumption of this role. One looks forward to next seasons Fidelio Leonora at ENO with relish.

Ortrud may be the ideal role for Susan Bickley. The basic timbre is steely, incisive and forthright but like Bell, the intonation and placement is faultless, as is the control and commitment to expression. In her acting she is the fearful opposite of Elsa's dreamy girlishness - the embodiment of steely womanly strength and power, harsh, but not emotionless, and certainly never a caricatured witch figure. Peter Wedd's Lohengrin is also a fine achievement. In the Kaufmann/youtube epoch, expectations for this role are extremely high, but Wedd really doesn't suffer in this company. His "In Fernem Land" was exceptionally beautiful in the piano phrases, and though it's quite a covered sound, the voice expands to heroic proportions when it needs to. Occasionally his intonation suffered in quiet passages, especially after a bout of extended dramatic singing, but this is always an extremely testing challenge, and he will no doubt learn to manage this better as he grows into the role. Overall it's a sensitive assumption, finely acted, and he makes an ideal couple with Bell.

As ever with the WNO, the chorus sound magnificent, and Lohengrin is an opera that really shows them off. Conductor Lothar Koenigs manages the contrasts of the piece with élan, the WNO orchestra sounding exceptionally sweet in the opening (after the intonation settled down) and then reverberating with impressive grandeur in the climaxes. Once again, an extremely impressive showing from this opera house, which demonstrates that it is easily as good as the ENO or ROH when at its best as here.





Incidentally the Birmingham Hippodrome is a great place to see opera. The acoustics are excellent, you feel very close to the stage, it's situated very near to the central train station, which is easy, fast, and cheap (if you prebook) to get to from London.

photos copyright Bill Cooper.


*Though Götterdämmerung contains echoes of Grand Opera in the libretto, written as it was immediately after Lohengrin.

The Cunning Little Vixen at Glyndebourne

03/06/2012

Janacek is very close to my heart, and there is absolutely no question for me that his operatic output is one of the finest contributions to the stage, musically and dramatically of any composer. While he does have a major following, it is likely that he will never be truly popular or a sure box office draw - his idiom is too gnarled and personal, too painful, too strange; the subjects are too odd, too unsentimental, too close to the bone; the main roles are the opposite of traditional operatic fair, and don't ever give an opportunity for vocal display or show boating and so the really major singers of each generation will only occasionally sing them. They also seem to present difficulties in staging for many directors because they're so compressed, so detailed and layered (though to me these things seem like gifts to an opera director.) Are they too real?

But what a treasure trove of riches they present, what a cabinet of curiosities, beauties, what an unfathomable range of expression and mood! Each one is so unlike the others as well in mood and feel, though Janacek's radiant voice and highly personal means of making music always shine through.

The Cunning Little Vixen is seen by many as a good entry point, though it's not without its difficulties. The lack of espressivo, eschewal of all operatic convention, and humorous, elliptical libretto may shock the unsuspecting customer. "What's going on here?" The wilful resistance to give the audience what it wants and expects, a Tosca's pain, a Butterfly's heartache, an Othello's jealousy, a Salome's depravity etc. etc. can seem to the Janacek neophyte like a stubborn refusal to bestow pleasure, like it's all going his way, and he's not holding up his end of the bargain. But familiarity with the idiom, his other music, and indeed each individual opera, reveals that he's just doing his own thing, in his own way, and that they have just as much to offer the sensitive, open minded listener as anything in the standard operatic repertoire.

Though I wasn't very keen on this production, the music making more than made up for it, and I am very very glad to have gone.

Melly Still returns to Glyndebourne after having made her opera directing debut in 2009 with Rusalka that other supreme Czech opera rooted in nature and the Bohemian forest (technically Janacek's forest is Moravian.) A few of the same problems that plagued the Dvorak are also problems here. The set is consistently underlit by Paule Constable (also the lighting designer on Rusalka), and though so often she's aiming for dusky glimmer and evening warmth the result it rarely comes off. More annoying is again the reluctance by Still to explore the psychological underpinnings of the work, or what it might mean. Like in Rusalka, any excuse to add a humorous sex scene is pounced upon by Still, but why is there here so little characterisation or differentiation between the characters? Why so little detail in the interactions?

The basic plot concerning the Vixen is well handled, and her capture, escape, courtship and death are all clearly delineated, and sometimes touchingly presented. There's often a lot of humour, and Still really chooses to play the piece for laughs. This is fine as much of the libretto is very funny, but the problem is that this is where her approach ends. The human scenes are muddled and confusing - for those not familiar with the opera/score/libretto (which is surely the majority of the audience), it's often extremely difficult to tell who is being addressed, and how the characters relate to each other. The parallel between the silent Teryncka and the Vixen is made obvious early on, but then its later significance barely registers. As a result the dramatic and emotional purpose of the human scenes becomes nebulous and they only seem in vague relation to the main thread of the opera, beyond some vague talk about young love and yearning for the past.

The human and animal world are also poorly distinguished. The animals are invariably dressed as humans (costumes by Dinah Collin), and usually it is very hard to tell which animal they are until the libretto tells us. The foxes at least are easy: they are dressed as orange clothed gypsies, with ginger hair and fox tails that they carry around in their hands. The tails are sometimes used to expressive effect, but too often seems to hamper a scene as the actors negotiate these clumsy implements. Why not just have them attached but with handles?

The chickens become tottering, wigged, corseted sex workers, though the cockerel is strangely drab and unexciting looking, especially as Still seems to suggest he is only a symbol of proud male fertility (he has a big red penis and balls permanently attached to his hands). There is simply almost nothing animal-like in the way these actors move, behave or look, except that occasionally they'll impulsively try and shag each other. The woodpecker is a bearded lady with a hammer, frogs are people with nets (and eyes on their hands a la Pan's Labyrinth), dragonflies are men in dresses, sparrows become people with blue sparkly tops, flowers in their hair and sticks, etc. etc. Although I think this lack of precision and contrast ruins certain symmetries and beauties in the opera, the idea of having the animals as humans could be be interesting if there was some sort of reasoning behind it, or new truth revealed by it. But there's no evidence to suggest that Still really means anything by this directorial decision - the animals really are meant to be thought of as animals, and nothing more or less.

This score is the most delicate, refined, crystalline and bejewelled of all of Janacek's operas, though of course it still has the urgency, rawness and immediacy that are the hallmarks of his music. Rawness is not crudity though, a distinction not reflected in the set design (Tom Pye). The main set item is a large tree made of pieces of square cut timber and perspex sheets with leaves and flowers, and in the background a steep cartoony path winds up a slope. Occasionally nice perspective effects are made possible by this, and the path also becomes the fox/badger hole a couple of times.  Unfortunately the extreme crudity of the finish doesn't at all square with the gossamer detail and broad sweeping grandeur of the most beautiful parts of the score, nor the snappy incisiveness of its more insouciant portions. The seasons change, but again that's where the idea stops.

Perhaps the biggest casualty is the last scene which is meant to be an awesome affirmation of the power and majesty of nature, but the Forester nostalgic reminiscences and then startled moment of soaring elation are here only communicated by the overwhelming beauty and surge of the music - on stage, singer Sergei Lieferkus just watches the animals playing around him, smiles, then lies on the floor.

As already mentioned, Janacek rarely attracts star singers (excepting perhaps his earliest masterpiece, Jenufa) because it's emphatically not about divadom or showy vocalising (the main character of Makropulos Case, notwithstanding). Lucy Crowe's role of Vixen Sharp Ears is by far the opera's biggest role, and she sings and acts it very nicely. There a touch of hoarseness in the climaxes which is not at all inappropriate for the role, and the rest is very nicely pointed. Sergei's Leiferkus' Forester didn't register as the major character he was meant to be - it's a fine voice and he can sing the notes, but more subtle acting and beautiful singing would have been welcome in this part. Emma Bell's Fox and Lucie Špičková's Dog were also good; Everyone else did the music justice, whilst never offering anything truly memorable. The chief glories were emanating from the pit.

Vladimir Jurowski lead the London Philharmonic orchestra in an incandescent performance, one of the finest pieces of Janacek conducting I've ever heard. During his life, Mackerras essentially owned this repertoire, but since his sad departure the field has been opened to conductors who really understand this music to pick up the mantle and continue bringing it to the public with the highest possible standards. The rhythmic and timbral precision made one hear this score afresh, and Jurowski really let it soar in the brief moments that Janacek allows it. Above all, the extraordinary luminosity, warmth and generosity of this music came across with huge force, and one hopes (nay, prays) that Jurowski will continue to conduct Janacek's scores in the future. Does his last season as musical director of Glyndebourne next year preclude his conducting in future seasons? Again, one hopes not.