Thebans World Premiere at ENO

03/05/14

How nice it is to have expectations confounded. I admit to having had mild reservations about Julian Anderson's Thebans before I even entered the theatre. Oedipus or Orpheus or Elektra are all very well as opera subjects in the neoclassicism of the 18th century or the intellectual milieu of early 20th century Central Europe, with Freudian thought ascendant and musical neoclassicism just around the corner. But an essentially straight, grand opera treatment of one of the central Greek myths, in 2014 seems, on the face of it, like a precious, out of touch undertaking, self consciously 'operatic' and purposefully distant from the zeitgeist, perhaps even reactionary. The actual myths remain fascinating to us, so it's not the content that is in question; what is difficult is the style. A big part of this problem stems from producing a libretto - what language and what dramatic devices will allow the ancient myth to live and resonate in our time and not feel like a museum piece before it's had its first lease of life.

While in this particular production perhaps not every one of these concerns is answered, for the most part I found this to be a very enjoyable evening: the music making is excellent, the production simple, tasteful and effective, and the score has many moments of extraordinary splendour and beauty. Julian Anderson is not one of the big 'names' in contemporary music, at least not in the way that say Adès, Benjamin or Turnage are, but on the evidence of this showing, his skill in operatic writing puts him above many of his more famous peers. The libretto by Frank McGuinness is lucid and perhaps stolid, which naturally affects the drama. McGuinness's characters constantly narrate their own histories, the action often having occurred off stage at an earlier date. Very Wagnerian then. The drama is primarily psychological in nature, though McGuinness's language is far less lyrical-poetic than Wagner's, avoiding direct allusions to emotion or too much sensual description, and one doesn't sense Wagner's attachment to massive metaphysical ideologies. It certainly has a character - it feels objective and slightly unadventurous, despite the essentially modern syntax and occasional contemporary phrases.

Anderson's music is hard to pigeonhole or describe. The harmonic language is fundamentally atonal and certainly not easy listening, but modal implications are constantly being felt, and he is capable of producing very evocative, highly differentiated, and strongly characterised textures that keep one rooted in a time, place and character. This is in no small part down to his orchestration, which is always expert, and sometimes breathtaking. In scene after scene Anderson gives us something extraordinary - sometimes easy to discern as in Tiresias' amazing basso profundo arioso accompanied by piccolo and staccato woodwinds, or the tremolo woodblocks, accompanied by whispered sighs from orchestral instruments and the chorus, underpinned by double bass groans, which creates the forest atmosphere of the opening of Act III. But at other times the aural mass is impossible to analyse in terms of instrumentation, and in fact the instruments seem to melt away - a humid nimbus of sound is what one experiences.

The music throughout is imbued with a pliant lyricism, and though we don't get traditional arias or melodies as such, it recognisably draws on a thorough knowledge of the vocal tradition. In fact one gets the feeling that Anderson's knowledge is close to encyclopaedic and the list of influences one feels is enormous and highly eclectic - Dutilleux, Carter, Ligeti, Takemitsu, Feldman, Benjamin, all surface, and the bewildering density, yet lack of murkiness of the orchestral palette shows he has learned much from all of these. It always appears transfigured seamlessly into his own peculiar brand of unshowy orchestral splendour. Perhaps a weakness is the lack of memorability of the motivic material, and focus on local shapes and effects rather than large range, but the result is satisfying and never bores.

Pierre Audi's production is not set in a specific time period, instead merging elements of ancient dress with modern dress. The main set items are large mesh cages which contain stones, which are cleverly used to represent a crumbling empire in Act I, brutal solidity in Act II and the natural world in Act III. In the first act, entitled "Past: The Fall of Oedipus", we see the state of Oedipus' kingdom, his people swathed in white robes that look almost like bandages. This act contains the main meat of the Oedipus story that we are most familiar with. The stark, blue tinged cross lights give a chilly, alienated feel to proceedings, but Audi doesn't quite manage to build a convincing shape in the drama, and there are lots of places where characters seem to be stumbling around aimlessly just to use all the space. It feels a little cluttered. Act II, entitled "Future: Antigone", depicts Oedipus' daughter Antigone's obsession with her brothers burial, and the final tragedy of her demise at the hands of Creon, who has seized power after Oedipus' downfall. Under this new regime, everyone wears neat black garb, and the architecture of the old regime is very effectively reused and reinterpreted under the new one: decaying pillars have become glittering walls of a fortress, lit from within, with a warm golden light bathing the stage, giving a noble, imperial feel to Creon's empire. The music is neat, clean and propulsive, revealing the brutal regularity of Creon's rule, though his vocal lines betray a much more emotionally fickle character. The appearance of Antigone brings a stark remembrance of the past, instantly recalled by the cold cross light of Act I. Act III, entitled "Present: The Death of Oedipus", fits chronologically in between the other two acts and provides context and elaboration for the events that precede and follow it. Again, the direction had many characters merely stumbling about the stage, though the the music in the latter half of the act sweeps all before it - first Polynices' arresting monologue, then the undefinable sense of 'endings', a magnificently beautiful passage in which Oedipus is reunited with Antigone, then upward gliding orchestral scales, swirling tendrils of sound, as Oedipus heads to the light of his final rest, and then a dramatic outburst from Antigone who cannot accept that she can't follow him. The opera ends with a startling single unaccompanied note from Antigone.

Edward Gardner's direction is deft, leading the orchestra through this formidable music, allowing the superb orchestrations to resonate and impact with full force. Of course one cannot comment on accuracy without anything to compare it to, but the playing is committed and beautiful, and the effect can be mesmerising.

The cast is mostly very good. Roland Wood was announced as having a severe throat infection, and apparently had not sung at all for two weeks, but he performed admirably, and cut a compelling character on stage. Susan Bickley was as dependably good as she always is, her steely mezzo well suited to Jocasta's music, with its luscious string clusters and then more angular declamatory portions. Peter Hoare's tense, wiry Creon is the best defined character on stage and his journey from smiling politician to authoritarian ruler is pleasing to watch. Matthew Best relies a little too much on his fabulous fortune teller diva costume as Tiresias, but the effect is so strong, and his music so well characterised that the character is still compelling. Julia Sporsén revealed an attractive voice in the role of Antigone, but sounds overparted until act III, though she was perhaps saving herself. Still, I have a feeling that the role requires a bigger voice as it stands. Christopher Ainslee's Theseus, Messenger and Haemon show up the only real point of weakness in Anderson's scoring - these counter tenor roles all have too much instrumentation underpinning them and Ainslee struggled to be heard - the case is different from the one with Antigone, because counter tenor voices are never really very large decibels wise. Smaller roles are well taken by young singers - Jonathan McGovern as Polynices makes the most of the beautiful solo passage mentioned above.

All in all a very exciting new opera, that I can't wait to see again. It feels like it could withstand very wide ranging interpretation. I would love to listen to a recording of it also, and hope against hope that some sort of memento might be preserved of this world premiere performance.

Lulu at Welsh National Opera

26/03/2013
Milton Keynes Theatre

copyright WNO/Clive Barda

Lulu is one of the most enigmatic operas ever composed. Cosi fan Tutte, Pelleas et Melisande and Parsifal are also operas which are often puzzled over, but at least these seem probe-able, if not solvable, by appeal to psychologising, interpretation, and knowledge of the composer's predilections and ideas. With Lulu there is no such guarantee: the meaning is either ultra closeted and personal, as is the case with most of Berg's music (the hidden gestures, encoded names etc. of the 19th century romantics taken to the nth degree) or simply vacant. The processes of construction essential to its creation hardly reveal themselves in the drama - there's the recapitulation of the three husbands as the three clients, but again there are so many enigmas here that knowing this barely elucidates anything beyond the much put upon symmetry of the piece. In Wozzeck Berg presents us with a world turned mad, but at least there's a logic to be thwarted - in Lulu, no such reality is established.

Lulu is difficult to stage because although the music is of the utmost intensity, obvious physical and emotional gestures are often (usually?) hard to find in the score - sometimes they're there, but more often than not, the brutal or disgusting happenings in the plot are barely reflected in the music, and always the score surges on with its unrelenting sensuality. Except in dance sections, it's not particularly evocative of setting either, and largely isn't expressionist in terms of being a psychic seismograph of the characters's psychological states like other 12 tone expressionist works of this period. There's a floating meaninglessness to it all, a dissociation and alienation of action and music, action and psychology - surely a reflection of Lulu's relationship with the world she finds herself a part of - a world of emotional extremes, but nightmarish, inexplicable ones that do not submit to analysis or reason.

The score is lush, erotically charged, an ultra dense, shuddering, throbbing, boiling, rippling canvas, maybe the most sheerly beautiful twelve tone score ever composed, and though it feels improvisatory and free it is as tightly controlled and precisely constructed as anything by the far more ascetic Schoenberg. The Lulu Suite presents the clearest case for the opera as a symphonic poem - all the lushest, most juicy portions of the score culled and collected together (just as the Drei Bruchstucke aus Wozzeck did for that opera) in a 33 minute symphony with most of the vocal lines cut. It's a far less oppressive piece without the tortured singing, and shows that the music is quite capable of existing separate from the words.

Director David Pountney makes a very good stab at trying to bring this opera into focus with a well thought out production which gains in potency through the evening. The curious circus metaphor episode that opens the show is extended intermittently into the opera, with characters donning animal costumes that are meant to reflect their personalities and influence their stage deportment - in practise I'm not sure how expressive this is partly because it's not taken far enough, and partly because it hardly seems supported by the music, but it's an interesting device to get things to cohere. Pountney overstuffs the piece with tangential and spurious imagery and symbolism - for example the animal tamer/Schigolch enters dressed as Wotan and Lulu dresses in apple coloured costumes apparently representating the fact that she is similar to Freia in Wagner's Das Rheingold: she keeps the other characters young (later they are seen to have temporarily aged when she is in prison). I (and it seems every other reviewer) would never have guessed this had I not gone to the pre show talk, and even when I did know, it hardly seemed like a huge stroke of insight. The corpses of Lulu's three husbands are hoisted up on hooks after their deaths, just as Lulu's costumes are lowered down - again Pountney says this is a reflection of the symmetries in the score and story, but visually this isn't clear and what registers is that the husbands hang over the rest of the play as hideous spectres.

Act I is probably the hardest to stage with its lightning fast exposition and highly episodic nature, and is the weakest here - it feels chaotic and unspecific, with the male characters not sufficiently differentiated, and the set entirely incidental to the action. Johan Engels' set is a circular metal frame work structure which loosely resembles a circus ring, with a spiral stair case at its centre. It never makes the vague spacial outlines of the score more concrete and is not properly integrated with Pountney's direction, and so is hard to commend. Pountney makes explicit the idea of alienation by encouraging stagey, cartoonish actions for the male characters here which again doesn't come off because the physicality is not quite specific enough. The frequent spoken dialogue is jarringly prerecorded (clearly not by the cast) and played loudly through speakers, which may be another attempt at alienation, and if so it works, but it also further fragments the dramatic flow and the audience's focus on the characters and to me again felt misjudged.

Happily, Act II is much stronger. Here the acting becomes much more natural and characters begin to interact with a degree of realism and even intimacy in the love scenes. Lulu's bed is comprised of huge sections of sagging, bulging flesh - a corpulent mound of languid excess and lethargic sensuality. The abstraction works well and serves to provide a much stronger impression than the semi real aspects of Act I. We are introduced to the tragic character of the Countess Geschwitz, hopelessly devoted to Lulu and very well played by Natascha Petrinsky - she becomes key to the emotional impact of Act III. The end of Act II is beautifully handled, Lulu's nudity not seeming at all gratuitous or shocking, but is instead powerfully revealing in a quite obvious but nonetheless potently metaphorical way. Act III reintroduces the animal characters but fails to conjure a party atmosphere - what hits home is the degradation and hopelessness that Lulu faces at the hands of her three clients now that she is forced to prostitute herself. The unforgiving cruelty and desperation of the interaction with her last client is almost too much to bear - the humour so black that death seems to be the only rational escape. The Countess' dying arietta is searingly direct and unexpectedly moving in an evening that has otherwise been rather light on emotional involvement.

The cast do well in a very challenging score, though one strongly gets the impression that very often they are stretched to their limits musically and so are not able to commit equally to the physical aspects of their portrayal. The exception is Marie Arnet who sails through the score on an ocean of calm, every note beautifully formed, with a silvery beauty and steadyness entirely befitting of the character. Her acting is similarly polished and calmly restrained - this was a very impressive and convincing interpretation of one of the most challenging roles in the repertoire. The other stand out cast member is Natascha Petrinsky Countess Geschwitz who superbly moulds her voice to the situation with a very wide palette of colours and intensities and she seems comfortable in any tessitura. It's not the most blended sound, and often is not even that beautiful (though enchanting sounds do also emerge from her throat,especially in the final scene) but always seems right - an exciting singer and one I'll be looking out for. Peter Hoare does a fine job as Alwa and is only occasionally overtaxed by the demands of his music. I also very much liked Richard Angas as Schigolch who is totally in the idiom and style of the music, declaiming it with a cabaret like precision and unstinting feel for the German language and style that sets him above his peers. Again it's hardly the most beautiful voice, but the intention is always precise and fully realised.

Lothar Koenigs' conducting presents the score unapologetically and with maximum energy, and though I enjoy Lulu to be played with more Viennese schmaltz (as if it were Korngold gone wrong), this was a clear headed and quite beautiful traversal of the score. The WNO orchestra are fully up to the demands of the music and achieve some wonderful things - a very satisfying account.

Julietta at the ENO

29/09/2012

Martinu remains a master of music whose time has still not yet come. Perhaps he will never achieve true popularity, but amongst sympathetic listeners he has his following. His profile is not as strong or quirky as his compatriot Janacek who has attained a degree of repertoire status, but he still has a very individual personality and his music rewards exploration. Part of the problem is that the sheer size of his output prevents wider dissemination: it's hard to get an overview when there are famously over 400 opus numbers, making him exceptionally prolific amongst 20th century composers. But his melodic gift, always instantly recognisable in it's Dvorakian generosity, memorability and folk inflected contours, allied with his luminous harmony and orchestration make him one of the most positive of 20th century composers. In the early career of the 20s, spiky neoclassicism is the preferred style, but this relaxes into a more lush romanticism in the 30s and 40s, which gets ever mistier and more complicated in the later symphonies, which have a peculiar aura, a chromatic haze, and buzzing restlessness which adds yet another interesting flavour to his fundamental warmth. His last few symphonies and chamber music are particular favourites for mine - the second cello sonata for instance I would rank the equal of any composed in the 20th century.

Julietta then is a departure: it is much drier and thinner than is Martinu's norm, but we are also told of his rewrites and revisions from his death bed - this was the piece about which he cared more than any other. The first thing that struck me were the clear and constant allusions to the Rite of Spring - not just in the high bassoon writing of the melodic fragment that opens the opera and keeps reappearing, but in the harmony, the orchestration, the little motivic fragments in their contour and use of intervals twist and wail just as they do in the Rite. It also shares the Rite's anti-lyricism, and psychological rawness - anti refinement, rather than anti sophistication. Folksyness is largely absent, though occasionally the familiar Martinu breaks through (usually during love scenes), with his unmistakable melodic sweep and harmonic circularity but it's only ever for a few bars, and we're back to dryness. Act I and II occur during the protagonist's sleep, and act III, only marginally less surreal, is set in the Ministry of Dreams, ostensibly existing in the real waking world, a place were people purchase dream fantasies. A dream within a dream? The music here in the 'real world' is considerably juicier, suggesting again that the dryness of the rest is a choice. We need to ask ourselves why Martinu chose to do this before dismissing the score's dessication, unappealing harshness and inconsistency of tone.

I think the key lies in the uncomfortable surrealism of the libretto - the opera isn't meant to be wacky in any way, but an exploration of the subconscious, fantasy and wish fulfilment. Dreams are only very rarely glowing landscapes and beautiful emotions (and Martinu does provide us with these things, if briefly), they are mostly fragmentary, inane, and occasionally unsettling. If they tell us anything, it is uncomfortable truths and hidden desires. Though I did enjoy Richard Jones's production visually I often thought that he was missing the point - he'd always go for a laugh when the libretto let him, rather than give a situation a more sinister or even disturbing undertone. A world in which no one can remember anyone, is a nightmarish one, not a whimsical one. That Michel chooses to remain in his fantasy, in love with his fictional lover even when he knows he's wrong is an interesting and jarring conclusion, in opera of all art forms which usually has such simple, black and white resolutions.

Still, Act I worked well, the acting and lighting choreographed to the music to a very impressive degree. The forest scene of Act II fell flatter dramatically, but Act III picked up again, at least for the first half with its army of zombie like people trying to escape life into dreams - a disturbing vision. Across the three acts, the over riding set motif was a huge accordion, which actually only appears in the libretto and music in Act I, but here each act offered a different view of it. Maybe it doesn't need to make sense logically in this of all pieces, and it certainly was one of the strongest things visually I've seen at the opera for a while, but then it could have pushed far more into the surreal and phantasmagorical, or gone much further with the perverse, bastardised logic of the libretto.

Peter Hoare did very well in the title role, leading us ably through the drama: he probably sings at least half the vocal writing in the opera - Julietta is actually a quite minor presence. There's a rough edge in the voice which didn't matter too much here, as lyricism is not what this character is about. (As an aside, in costume I thought he looked quite a lot like comedian Simon Amstel.) Julia Sporsén sung some lovely phrases as Julietta, though the vibrato is just a little wide and slow for me to honestly say that this is a beautiful voice - the ideal would surely be the creamiest lyric soprano available to reflect the wish fulfilment and fantasy that this character represents. The rest of the cast also acquitted themselves very well without anyone particularly standing out. A very good ensemble effort, and this is by no means an opera about vocal display.

I know I always complain about this, but the Coliseum's acoustics really hampered my appreciation of the often excellent orchestral playing (and I was sitting in the stalls!). In all honesty I think I couldn't tell you what kind of conductor Ed Gardner is because I've never really heard the sound that the ENO orchestra makes. His conducting seemed authoritative, but didn't have the special sparkle and energy of Macckeras' recording of excerpts - however, is this just the damp acoustics, or is it a genuine lack of focus in the playing? I want to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Berlioz's Faust

La Damnation de Faust
06/05/11
ENO

This show was rapturously received by the audience, but I left the theatre partially dazzled and partially confused. The whole thing is all about Terry Gilliam really - everyone wants to see what the ex-Python has done with this notoriously difficult to stage opera/oratorio/thing (Berlioz calls it a légende dramatique).

For me La Damnation de Faust is Berlioz's finest work, every section quirkily masterful, powerful and brilliant, and it contains almost no dross whatsoever. I am a big Berlioz fan but even I admit that he's rarely so consistently inspired as here. So what if it's not the most compelling retelling of the Faust legend dramatically? It's an epic, sprawling masterpiece, completely strange and completely wonderful. A piquant contrast to Thursday's Massenet (also that composers finest work) - suave sentiment versus gawky beauty!

The cast is mostly excellent, Peter Hoare in the horrendously taxing role of Faust sounding beautiful most of the time, Christine Rice's Marguerite very well sung too, if a tad bland, and Christopher Purves, a little rough around the edges these days, but with great presence and playing the part to perfection. The choir also sings their glorious music wonderfully (though outrageously someone started clapping before the end of their final quiet number - why do people do this?). Edward Gardner lead the hugely bolstered ENO orchestra brilliantly, and they responded in kind with some very fine playing indeed.

This production updates the action to 20th century Germany, covering the first and second world wars, with Faust caught up in the middle of it all. The number cultural references are bewildering, and I'm sure I missed loads. The opening has a landscape redolent of Caspar David Friedrich, the ne plus ultra of romantic nature worshipping teutonic heroism as a backdrop for Faust's evocation to nature. Leni Reifenstahl's film Olympia crops up too, as well as the outbreak of the first world war (in a daringly comedic pantomime), Brownshirts, communists and the rise of the Nazis, Kristallnacht, and it all ends in Auschwitz. When Faust dreams of Marguerite she appears as a sleeping Brunhilde replete with ring of fire, as the German public and Nazi officials look on (am I the only one who got this? No one else has mentioned it yet!). It's an extended commentary/critique/sending up of German culture and history, but how relevant is it really to the Faust story? What about this "konzept" really illuminates the characters or drama? I'm all for intelligent Regie theatre, but there needs to be some sort of essential and meaningful correspondance between the new situation and the original intention of the composer for it to yield any insights, or show the familiar piece in a new light. It just seemed that these two strands, Faust on the one side and German history on the other, were running along side each other with little interrelation; Mephistopheloes was the most common point of contact as far as it went, though again, it just seemed to be that he had two largely unrelated roles, with his manipulation of Faust on the one hand, and his orchestrating of Nazi activities on the other. This was an uncomfortable piece of staging partly because it didn't seem necessary - surely his dramatic role is almost exclusively to tempt Faust - and partly because Nazi Germany's crimes being the work of the devil seems a terrible abdication of blame to me. And actually the setting often detracted from the telling of the story - both because the staging was so visually confusing, with its consistently poor lighting (which didn't lead the eye at all, and unfairly left the sets looking rather ramshackle and poorly conceived) and over stuffing with ideas (no doubt paranoia that the piece is too slow dramatically on its own), and often because of the inexplicable relationship between what was going on stage to the actual action in the score. That is not to say that there weren't a lot of extremely visually arresting portions, especially those including video sequences, but it didn't quite live up to the promise of its designer/director's (over)fertile mind - it seemed to me that there was not enough editing of ideas, or thought about how it would actually look on stage. Not only did the drama suffer, but often the wonderful music was lost in the fray as well.

A case in point: Faust's love scene with Marguerite happens on Kristallnacht, and soon after, instead of going to prison, Marguerite, being a Jew, gets carted off to a concentration camp (no mention of her poisoning her mother!). Then in the finale scene, she is seen on a pile of dead bodies while the choir sings it's beautiful refrain about her return to purity, salvation and ascension to heaven. Apart from this being an inappropriately Christian sentiment for a Jewish woman, when the crowd sings that she died because love led her astray, in the current staging it isn't true - she died because of her race, and the unthinkable evil of the Nazis. It could have made sense if her liaison with Faust had caused her to be found by the Nazis, but again the staging was so unclear at that point, that if this was the intention, it was lost. And lets get back to that scene - she's lying on a pile of bodies in Auschwitz, accompanied by music of unearthly beauty, bordering on religious kitsch because of the embarrassing piety of the sentiment and situation as presented by Berlioz. Yes it's a powerful image and deeply shocking, but is it meaningful or telling in any way? Again I have to demur.

Despite all this it was a decent evening's entertainment I have to say, and it was well recieved - at least the ENO are taking risks! I think a lot of people will get swept away with it all and love it without thinking about it too much. And Berlioz's music is very well served by the conductor, orchestra, soloists and choir, even if it is often battling with the furor of the stage.