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.

Tosca with Kristine Opolais at ROH

23/03/2012

I do try hard with Puccini. It's been three years since I last saw Tosca live, and though I have avoided it since due to my lack of enjoyment of it then, in music I find it interesting how tastes evolve and what exposure to other music, the passage of time and personal reflection does for expanding personal horizons. Unfortunately I liked it even less this time than I did before, and have realised that I just can't go to see Puccini's operas any more. I'm pretty certain they'll survive without my patronage. That said, I have already booked to see the upcoming Gheorghiu Rondine and then next season will certainly see the Manon Lescaut (I actually quite like this one, and don't mind Boheme either), but I just can't spend my evenings like this - being bored by the music, situation and characters.

What do I find so distasteful? I've explained partially before, but in general, the appalling music (excepting the often exquisite arias, everything else is banal padding finished to a high degree of surface polish, but repetitive, simplistic, vulgar, kitsch, maudlin, dull), lifeless characters, every event manipulatively designed to wring some emotion from you whilst lacking a coherent dramatic arc or genuine insight into dramatic material, the unflinching and unapologetic shallowness in all aspects and the combination of cruelty and sentimentality which permeates everything. The ultimate reason though for my extreme distaste must be the first reason given: simply that I find the music to be very poorly made (excepting the aforementioned arias, and once again, admitting a certain well polished professionalism in the surface). These things are common to everything by Puccini post La Boheme, but there are special features/failings in Tosca which struck me whilst watching that bear mentioning.

The first thing that I find difficult to stomach is the unlikeable couple at the heart of the piece. Cavaradossi is one of the dullest heroes ever sketched, lacking any character traits rendered in the music except his nauseating supplication towards Tosca. Truly hard to watch. And what in the first act makes us care about what will happen to Tosca? Her narcissism, constant challenging behaviour, desire to control Cavardossi and petty jealousy positively scream her subconscious desire for Cavaradossi to be a man and stand up for himself, but it also makes her very unlikeable. I think we're meant to care about her because of what happens in the rest of the piece, but her one dimensionality makes it very difficult indeed. The political subplot is paper thin: a plot device to set the characters up for the second Act's extremities that is clearly of no interest to Puccini in and of its own. The ultra crude use of leitmotifs introduced here in Act I and continued throughout the opera is risible and disrupts the flow of the music because Puccini so roundly lacks the required skill in counterpoint to make proper use of the technique (c.f. his contemporary Strauss who goes to the other extreme, where the technical facility is so great that everything can easily descend into an endless mush of undifferentiated themes and thence game playing).

Act II is by far the strongest dramatically and probably contains the best music. Most interesting for me, just before "Vissi d'arte", Scarpia, by far Puccini's most interesting character and in some ways surely an artistic self portrait, utters words which might be Puccini's artistic credo: "Che importa?! Spasimi d'ira... spasimi d'amore!" (Literally: What does it matter! Spasms of rage ... spasms of love!). Puccini is turned on by both equally, and when taken together all the better. It's clear whose side Puccini is on, and the opera becomes entirely flaccid once Scarpia meets his demise.

Act III is one of the worst final acts ever: shockingly tedious, with so little happening musically or dramatically: the endless musical repetitions of the opening, minimally atmospheric, the pointless boy soprano solo, a dramatically pointless Cavarodossi aria, an extremely discursive meeting between Tosca and her lover in which very little is relayed or expressed. Then the last four minutes in which we have a bizarre fake execution which turns out to be a real execution (both predictable and anticlimactic because the highly unusual situation of a fake execution just turns out to be the normal situation of a real execution), then 30 seconds of ludicrous action where the heroine, still in ballgown, shuffles off to a ledge and leaps to her death. Where's the tension? Bizarrely bad pacing considering that everyone says he's such a man of the theatre.

I have little to say about Jonathan Kent's production. It attempts a sort of realism with detailed "period" sets, but the lighting gives it an unnatural Disneyish edge (perhaps mostly resembling Beauty and the Beast) and there's an awkward cramping of the stage space and visual overstuffing with extraneous paraphernalia. In this revival characterisation was in general very undetailed, Yonghoon Lee's admirably sung Cavaradossi hampered by stock acting, and Kristine Opolais's Tosca exaggerated and hammy. The exception was Michael Volle as a very good Scarpia, dramatically committed and superbly sung, though overall he strikes me as too sensitive a singer for this role. Can we get him at the ROH in something German? His Mandryka is close to ideal. Opolais was the cause of some excitement in London as Butterfly two seasons ago and probably the reason why these three Toscas sold out this time round (certainly the reason why I came to see it again). She has a large voice that has been touted as ideal for Puccini, and while the sound production is even and the voice attractive, the chest register is nowhere near developed enough for this role, and there's very little variation in timbre. I was a little bored by her Vissi d'arte which is probably not a good sign.

Maurizio Benini generates truly stentorian sounds in the pit and shapes and colours everything as ideally as I imagine Puccini fans could hope for.