Billy Budd at Glyndebourne

10/08/13

It's for evenings like this that the word Gesamtkunstwerk was coined. When all aspects of a production resonate together as coherently and powerfully as they did here, you remember again why it is that you sit through the many mediocre or even merely good opera performances: there is simply nothing as magnetically engaging and shatteringly powerful as this art form when it is done right.

On CD, Billy Budd can be a hard listen - the booming all male cast can become oppressively unvaried timbrally and the score is one of the toughest and least ingratiating that Britten had written by this stage of his career (1951) despite some magnificent moments. But in this production/realisation of Britten's opera these concerns don't even arise: director Michael Grandage (with excellent revival direction by Ian Rutherford) and designer Christopher Oram have conspired to produce a show where stage and score are in perfect equipoise; the visuals become inseparable from the sound, the set a resonating chamber for the music, the music losing all sense of formal or aesthetic procedure and instead becomes the drama, atmosphere, characters. I have previously watched the production on DVD and was not that enthralled, but comparison to this live show shows how woefully inadequate the transfer from stage to screen can be and how different they are as mediums.

The set consists of a view into the hull of HMS Indomitable, the ship on which the sailors find themselves, rendered in Oram's designs with awesome grandeur and beautiful attention to detail. The ship envelops the men and indeed the entire theatre like a huge womb, every surface bowed, curved, and it is hopefully not too fanciful to suggest that "she" provides the feminine element of the production. Changes of scene are achieved with the simplest of means - the rafters descend to create the cramped conditions of the lower decks, and for Captain Vere's cabin the space is transformed by the addition of a few windows near the front of the stage. Just as often a change of scene is managed using lighting, Paule Constable proving once again that she may well be the best lighting designer we have on these shores - it would be a very different production without her expertise. The brilliance of this design is not just that it looks and feels so atmospheric; the fact that the ship remains stationary and virtually unchanged throughout offers a very strong psychological underpinning to the production - the vessel is inescapable and claustrophobic, but also strangely comforting - the men cannot leave the ship, but they are also wedded to it and bound together by it. The character regie is simple and fairly traditional, but totally engrossing because it's so carefully observed and specific - there are simply too many touching moments to mention, but every relationship feels not just believable but fully real.

this picture doesn't even begin to do it justice

Musical values are very high indeed. Andrew Davis must be thanked in large part for allowing stage and score to blend with such choreographic and psychological precision - with conducting like this, suspension of disbelief is almost not required, so transported are you by the events that are unfolding. Singers are always fully audible and ideally supported by the superb playing of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and orchestral textures, whether glowering or shimmering, unfailingly make a dramatic as well as musical impact. The cast is uniformly of a very high standard and the whole thing is a real ensemble effort. In the choral scenes, the men's voices seem to emanate from the very bowels of the ship and the climaxes achieve a thrilling, sometimes brutal power. Jacques Imbrailo's slightly fluttery and youthful sounding baritone makes him a very distinctive Billy Budd, and his barely contained youthful ebullience and radiant, almost feminine energy, make it easy to see why he is so attractive to the other sailors. Brindley Sherratt, continuing a string of operatic successes, makes a wonderful Claggart, restrained and fearsome, the voice appropriately oleaginous, opaque and orotund, beautiful, even seductive. One of Britain's finest singers. Mark Padmore's gentle "starry Vere" is not as beautiful of voice as he might have been earlier in his career, but this opera is hardly about bel canto, and his is a touching and expertly sung assumption of the role. I know I'm meant to give balanced criticism, and mention negatives along with positives, and I could name a couple of minor cast members who convinced me slightly less than the rest dramatically, but it would be cavilling in the face of a truly brilliant ensemble achievement.

What an extraordinary end to the Glyndebourne season.



photos copyright Richard Hubert-Smith/Glyndebourne

NOTE!!! If you are under 30 there are still £30 stalls tickets available for the performance on the 22 August. Just do it.

Medea at the ENO

06/03/13

Sarah Connolly. All photos copyright Clive Barda and ENO

This is the first full staging of Charpentier's Médée of 1693 in the UK, and with the ENO's Castor and Pollux in 2011 and Glyndebourne's Hippolyte et Aricie this summer let's hope that French baroque opera (or for me more specifically and more ardently, let's hope Rameau) is here to stay on the major UK stages.


This is one of the best things the ENO have done in a while. Charpentier's score turns out to be tuneful, dramatically concise, beautifully orchestrated, occasionally inspired and fully worth the effort lavished on it. I say tuneful, but don't expect a Handel opera with 15 second bouts of action-recitative followed by a 7 minute aria exploring the character's emotional reaction. This is much more fleet paced with very little repetition of the words (which can make Act I and II a little hard to follow as there's so much pretext that is assumed). As a result, musically it unfolds mainly in a sort of lyrical arioso style, with true arias mostly saved for the extensive ballet sequences which form such an important part of French Baroque opera, but which also at least give them a more explicit narrative function than we might find in some Rameau operas. Medea herself doesn't get a proper aria until Act III, and what emerges is quite beautiful - we get piled on dissonances and suspensions in a muted string haze all slightly awkwardly arrayed, with a plangently understated melodic line that Sarah Connolly shapes wonders with. There is a similarly affecting aria for Creon when he goes mad, and the brief orchestral depiction of madness on flickering strings is quite brilliant. Elsewhere the score sometimes sags - Medea's invocation that brings up daemons to help her is disappointingly jolly and light - this is just the sort of thing that Rameau excelled at half a century later.

McVicar updates the opera to WWII without worrying too much about finding literal analogues for the situation, and nor does he try to transform the supernatural elements of the plot with psychologising. It works well because McVicar focuses on the story telling with his unerring directness and detail, and of course as he's gradually taken on the role of a modern Zeffirelli for the world's biggest opera houses, in the sense that he's unafraid of sensation and spectacle, he is not averse to throwing in the kitchen sink for the dance entertainments. Here we get a glittery pink plane with rotating propeller, ridden on by a camp cupid. Yep. There are also ludicrously camp army dances, and drag daemons, which completely clash with the style of the period being evoked, but somehow it doesn't jar too much because McVicar has his tongue firmly in his cheek, and clearly just wants to delight. Fatuous moralising is not an interest of his. Elsewhere, the main thrust of the story between Medea, Creon, Jason and Creusa is sensitively told in an uncluttered, unsentimental way, helped by the Christopher Cowell's translation which is one of the best I've heard for the ENO.


Visually this is a very beautiful show. The set is a corner view into a grand 18th century looking room, and furniture is brought in and out to suit the needs of each scene. What makes it so special though is the mirrored floor which provides lighting designer Paule Constable with endless opportunities for subtle and unusual effects that imbue the piece with a soft beauty, intimacy and coruscating glamour. Often the gilt furniture is lit from below, and feels like it's glowing from within, and during dance sequences the dancers float in double above the action in an extraordinarily beautiful way. I have loved Constable's lighting designs before for the McVicar ROH Figaro and Glyndebourne Meistersinger, though have also found them wanting occasionally (e.g. the Glyndebourne Vixen) but overall he seems to be one of the best people around for this stuff.

This sort of but doesn't quite show what I mean. Depicted here is Creon's vision, with the previous intimations of incestuous lust for his daughter consummated dramatically, if not literally, in a particularly memorable sequence. Yes we do get the "dancing clones" opera cliché here, but it was well done, I promise.

The cast is extremely good, one of the best I've ever heard at the ENO. By every metric Sarah Connolly's performance is quite brilliant: dramatically committed, textually deft and vocally gorgeous. It's such a generous and full sound that even in the sad acoustics of the Coliseum, the lovely legato, shining timbre and rich vocal colours come through with ease. So much better for her than the recent Wagner excursion at ROH, which was dramatically as fine as ever, but vocally not quite right. I can't wait for her Phèdre at Glyndebourne this summer. Occasionally the timbre is uncannily similar to Baker for a few notes, and then fully Connolly again, and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in the more recent past also bears a strong resemblance. Brindley Sherratt is in superb voice with a Tomlinson like resonance and timbre. When is he going to sing Gurnamenz/Hunding/Sachs at ROH? Am I the only one who thinks he's fantastic? He is.

Katherine Manley

Katherine Manley is a new name for me, but what a gorgeously gleaming lyric voice she revealed with a superb legato, exquisite dynamic control and even sound across the range. It's the sort of voice that I think everyone *thinks* Sophie Bevan has (based on casting). Manley seems to do loads of Baroque stuff, but she sings properly (support, vibrato wise etc.) and is quite special. She moves very naturally onstage and is mostly a good actress, though her death was a little artificial and disappointing staid (McVicar surely as much to blame). Sophie, Pamina and Zdenka are surely roles to hear her in soon (her website is infuriatingly scant on information), but this is a voice with a lot of bloom and firm roots, so I could see Tatyana, Figaro Countess, Manon, Liu, Rusalka, Arabella and Marschallin in the future as well as big Handel roles too.


Roderick Williams is also in lovely voice as Orontes, though overacts to such a degree that he is difficult to take seriously on stage. Still, he's surely one of the best English lyric baritones around. Jeffrey Francis is also dramatically challenged but seems underengaged, and though he doesn't struggle vocally, it's just not quite as beautiful a sound as any of the other four leads. Smaller parts revealed no particularly notable singing.

Jeffrey Francis and Sarah Conolly

The orchestral playing is almost faultless and conductor Christian Curnyn provides superb advocacy for the score, falling just short of the undisputed twin kings in this repertoire (Christie and Minkowski) but he's certainly one to watch. If slightly greater attention had been paid to the all important expressive French ornamentation I wouldn't have had a criticism.






Two (2) chairs are thrown. Think I'm going to start documenting this at the end of every review.

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.