ALL OF LIFE IS HERE
Il Trittico, Royal Opera House, 2011 *****
It has the makings of a lousy joke: what do a gritty dockside melodrama, a tale of religious redemption and a knockabout farce have in common? That’s the question posed by Puccini’s trilogy of one-act operas, and few directors have answered it with any confidence, which is why they are usually performed apart rather than in the sequence the composer intended. Richard Jones’s new production has no doubts that they belong on the same bill, however, and his conviction is persuasive – death binds them together as surely as it makes strangers of those it leaves behind.
The rehabilitation of the traditionally convent-set Suor Angelica as the true centrepiece of the triptych is the key to this production’s success. The action is transplanted to a children’s sanitarium run by nuns. What has long been played straight as a sentimental miracle tale is now transformed by tough love: there’s no sanctimonious hosanna; the ecstasy of faith and grief are shown to be closely related; and the dénouement, in which suicide separates the sisters from each other and calls their God’s grand design into question, is bleakly credible.
A substitute for an “indisposed” Anja Harteros, Ermonela Jaho gives her all as Angelica, the nun whose cloistered peace is shattered by the news of her illegitimate son’s death. Immersed in the role – and in her own tears, for more than moments – the Albanian soprano sacrifices total control to human truth, and we are all the better for it – Senza mamma (“Without your mother…”) has, for me, always benefited from the occasional wobble, but in Jaho emotion and artistry do not compete, they collude. I’ll be taking her performance to the grave with me, the gooseflesh still fresh in 50 years’ time.
The sets, by Ultz, Miriam Buether and John Macfarlane respectively, suggest a Europe at the turn of the Sixties. In their own way the worlds of Il Tabarro and Gianni Schicchi are as claustrophobic as the infirmary – and their disruption proves equally ruinous. Tabarro depicts the hardscrabble life of Parisian stevedores for whom dreams are a luxury that cost more than money; and in Schicchi a newly bereaved family of scheming grotesques have their greed turned on them by a wily outsider. Questions of class hang heavily over both, too, but to markedly different effect.
The ensemble cast gives a superb account of itself, most notably dramatic tenor Aleksandrs Antonenko as Luigi, a Brandoesque wharf rat; Lucio Gallo, as the crafty Schicchi (though not as Michele the dour bargemaster); and Ekaterina Siurina, who positively basks in the recital spotlight that is O Mio Babbino Caro (“Oh my dear papa…”), Schicchi’s daughter’s plea to her doting father to help her marry Rinuccio, whose family Schicchi goes on to best at their own game.
Music director Antonio Pappano gets an A for exemplary conduct across the triptych, coaxing from the pit an astonishing variety of responses, and not once at the expense of vocal audibility: sombre and troubled for Tabarro; ethereal and haunted for Angelica; and fleet and witty for Schicchi.
Below, the closing few minutes of Jonathan Meades’s Father to the Man, which revisits the places Meades’s father, a biscuit rep, took him to as a child. The tribute is as nakedly emotional as Meades gets, and it’s all the more affecting for the veil of irony he attempts to draw over it. It plays out to Eddie Calvert’s O My Beloved Daddy, The Man with the Golden Trumpet’s version of O Mio Babbino Caro from Gianni Schicchi.
Don Giovanni, Royal Opera House, 2012 **
Draw the curtains, dim the lights and… plonk a clonazepam in a mug of Horlicks. For here is a production that is way past its bedtime. Francesca Zambello’s take on Mozart’s masterpiece is only a decade old, but crow’s feet have seen off the wink in its eye, and Duncan MacFarland’s revival is no miracle jab. Don Giovanni, the legendary playboy, now curls toes by other means.
Apologies for the tabloid intro, but its tone is of a piece with the problems I have with this Don. With a lot of Dons, actually. I understand that, under the right baton, the music can be wonderful, but if we’re going to portray a serial sex pest, let’s find another setting for him, one that speaks to today’s rape culture and doesn’t have a smoking jacket draped over it. This Giovanni, powerfully voiced by Gerald Finley, appears to understand nothing about his condition except that he’s been raised to take advantage of it. He’s a career libertine, but we’ve no idea why. And we doubt he’s better informed. Denied the tragedy of self-knowledge, without great guile or guilt, he just does what he does, drugged on the need to get his end away, extracting nervous laughter as he goes, like some Tube train frotteur played by Robin Askwith, and not the rapist he undeniably is.
Of course, no production can give Giovanni the depth or conscience he doesn’t have, and Da Ponte’s libretto presents an utterly vacuous creature of appetite (Mozart highlights his hollowness by refusing him a full-scale aria, whereby characters in opera usually express their inner world). But the devastating effect of his actions might be more keenly registered if he isn’t offered up as a romantic hero gone wrong, and his sidekick Leporello – a basso buffo part here played with greasy relish by Lorenzo Regazzo – doesn’t come off as his comic foil.
This Don’s lack of moral seriousness serves its female leads miserably. Katarina Karnéus has a winningly brassy mezzo, but its highlights are lost to overacting. Her Donna Elvira is, by turns, ditzy, hysterical and scolding. Hibla Gerzmava gives us a complex and finely wrought Donna Anna, but the murder of Anna’s father is allowed to overshadow her own rape, and it isn’t until her fiancé joins her on stage that we feel she’s singing to someone other than herself. Lyric tenor Matthew Polenzani brings Italianate passion – as well as tender phrasing and flawless diction – to the ordinarily sappy Don Ottavio. His Dalla Sua Pace shushed stalls that had been full of catarrhal griping just seconds before.
The set, a revolving lump of scenery with faintly period adornments, is, at best, a distraction. A madonna gazes down with all the condolatory concern of a horse brass. Boredom triumphs, even as Giovanni is dragged off to hell and the stage is engulfed in gas-stove flames. Constantinos Carydis, who conducts sections of the score as though he were casting a requiem in treacle, doesn’t help.
A Magic Flute, Barbican, 2011 **
When the tunes are this good, what else do you need? A youthful cast of nine and some bamboo poles, reckons Peter Brook in his third operatic adaptation for the Bouffes du Nord, the Parisian theatre that has been his professional home for 37 years.
“Less is more” has been Brook’s mantra for as long as it takes a mantra to lose its magic, so French audiences have come to expect bare boards, shrunken casts and streamlined scores from the director. I believe British punters will wish that Brook had packed a little heavier for this tour.
At 90 minutes, this is the racing model of Mozart’s final opera – a piccolo Flute, no less. But if it is fast, it is far from furious. Cuts were made across the production: scenes that call for pomp have been dropped, there’s no chorus, the racist and sexist elements have gone, along with the Masonic symbolism, and two actors, speaking in French, move the narrative along, filling in some but, sad to say, not all of the dramatic gaps left by the edit. [Don’t worry, the musical numbers are sung in German.]
Whatever your opinion of Brook’s modifications – tender abridgements or flaming liberties – there can be little argument that they call for charismatic if not huge performances, and the cast struggles to deliver them. I suspect the problem lies with arranger Franck Krawczyk, who is their sole accompanist on piano. At times he appears to be just riffing on vaguely Mozartian themes, or merely quoting from the score. The voices that do arrest the ears, and they are few, leave them thicker for it: Leila Benhamza, as the Queen of the Night, is accurate but overemphatic in her coloratura, sending the notes home like nails into joinery. Virgile Frannais is endearing enough as Papageno, but we quickly tire of his humour, which sits at odds with the general – somewhat solemn – mood of the production; and Antonio Figueroa’s soft-whip tenor can handle a piano, but I doubt it could take on a full orchestra. The air of amateurism isn’t dispelled by Patrick Bolleire (Sarastro), who, for the entire duration of his appearance, is some distance out of tune.
This decluttering of The Magic Flute removes spectacle (and the definite article in the title) but adds nothing. Its lightening of the visual load doesn’t elucidate the plot (an occasionally indecipherable allegory about Freemasonry, which turns a prince’s quest to rescue his beloved into his initiation into the Brotherhood) – if anything it obscures it further. There is much to be said for Brook’s privileging of the human form over dizzying tableaux – and for telling the tale from the words up, rather than sumptuously reclothing it – but not, as I believe it is in this case, for its own sake.
Time to rewatch Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 made-for-TV film adaptation.
Elegy for Young Lovers, Young Vic, 2010 ***
Virtually unstaged in the UK since its 1961 premiere, Hans Werner Henze’s opera is a true rarity, and English National Opera is staging this “chamber version” (for 23 instruments), written in 1986, to mark the composer’s 80th birthday. There are dangers in reviving such a rarity, of course – if it fails, critics will weigh in with all the reasons why it should have been left alone. Successful revivals need to find solutions to a work’s shortcomings without apologising for them, and with this production I believe ENO has done precisely that.
Celebrated poet Gregor Mittenhofer is holed up with his entourage – PA, doctor, much younger mistress – in a boarding house in the Austrian Alps, where, for 40 years, Hilde Mack has been waiting for her husband to return from a climbing trip. She is haunted by his disappearance, and prone to raving visions, which Mittenhofer has been stealing for his verse. Her hallucinations dry up when a glacier gives up the body of her spouse, however, and the poet is forced to look elsewhere for his material.
The first of three acts is paced like a whodunit, although the villain is known to us from the outset. Stefan Blunier nurses the tension in the fine-grained score, with its touches of Weill, Stravinksy and Bernard Herrmann, and Tom Pye’s split-level design is icily – and effectively – spare, but the faint mustiness of a parlour game still clings to the curtains. And that’s because Elegy is little more than a garden-variety melodrama with modernist fittings, among them a libretto – by the poet WH Auden and his lifelong friend Chester Kallman – that satirises the romantic notion of the “hero genius”, revealing, instead, a monster who believes “art” is an adequate excuse for his abominable behaviour.
The director, Fiona Shaw, is wise to its flaws, however, and piles on a robust and at times madcap humour, which suits the stir crazy-making setting (imagine an Agatha Christie weekend at The Overlook Hotel).
In fact, the broader the treatment it gets, the better Elegy fares. The characters are not detailed psychological studies, after all, but sketches. Mittenhofer, who is reputed to be based on WB Yeats, with some Hugo Von Hofmannsthal thrown in for good measure, is no master manipulator – he’s a spoilt, past-it parasite whose powers of invention have so deserted him that he engineers the demise of a young couple simply to have something to write about.
A first-rate cast is led by a magnificent Steven Page, who sings impeccably and positively nails Mittenhofer dramatically, from his outrageous vanity to his frustrated rages. Tackling the initially deranged, then hilariously mordant Frau Mack, Jennifer Rhys-Davies has the most to do, but being busy plainly suits her: her coloratura trills, betokening the widow’s manic possession, would tax a choir of skylarks, but they are unerring in their flight.
When what could pass as a black comedy for much of its length takes a turn for the authentically tragic – having heard that a snowstorm is gathering, Mittenhoffer sends the aforesaid couple on a mission to bring him back an edelweiss from the mountains – the whole theatre seems to close in, like bad weather, and the lighting and Lynette Wallworth’s video projections combine to somehow lower the temperature. Countess Carolina, the poet’s high-born gofer (Lucy Schaufer giving a luminously layered performance), is sickened by the realisation of just what she’s been a party to, as the lovers, caught in a blizzard, succumb to the cold. Their death scene, wherein they imagine an old age together that they’ll never see – the children, even the affairs, they might have had – put my heart in a sling for weeks.
I reviewed opera for The Times, Independent, London Paper, Metro and Bachtrack for three years while I lived in London.
Below, a poor-quality trailer for the Young Vic production.
