Don Giovanni; Spinalba | Classical review
Coliseum; Guildhall School of Music and Drama: both London
These are dark and dangerous times for the publicly funded arts. “That was tripe. Thank God for government cuts,” a clearly angry audience member announced to the chill night air as we streamed away from English National Opera’s new production of Don Giovanni last week. While I wouldn’t for one moment join him in his embrace of the coming squeeze, this chaotic, teenage Halloween party of a show will do little to convince the funders to keep writing the cheques.
Rufus Norris, usually so interesting in the theatre, is making his operatic debut with a very 21st-century Don, majestically sung by Iain Paterson. This is no suave, irresistible seducer. He’s a seedy rapist who inhabits a squalid urban landscape peopled by devils and ghouls who manoeuvre walls, stairs and entire rooms around in a confusing clutter, clogging up the action and getting in the way of the music.
And this is the chief problem with this production: it doesn’t allow Mozart’s infinitely subtle score to speak for itself. Norris feels he has always to add some distraction, particularly at moments of greatest intensity; the quartet at the end of Act 1 is sung dodging the garish, whirling scenery; silly little demons wander pointlessly through the Commendatore’s graveyard scene; Donna Anna is made to do an Irish jig when in the depths of confusion and despair.
Sometimes his ideas take wing: when Don Ottavio (beautifully sung by Robert Murray) extols the virtues of fidelity, the stage fills with charming, doting couples; Leporello’s catalogue song is an aptly named spreadsheet presentation, and the Don’s mandolin aria becomes not another serenade to a new conquest but a lament for lost love: perhaps the core of the whole piece.
But however hideous the set or incoherent the costumes, good casting rides to the rescue. Brindley Sherratt is in magnificent voice as a grubby Leporello, Sarah Tynan delightful as Zerlina; and Sarah Redgwick, standing in at short notice for an indisposed Rebecca Evans, is a real find as Donna Elvira. Their interpretations would be improved still further if they had any real drive coming from the pit, but Kirill Karabits seems reluctant to reveal the true drama of the score, with pedestrian tempi and woolly definition.
“Is there no end to this despair?” asks Dianora, a character in Francisco António de Almeida’s rarely performed Spinalba, given an airing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama last week. Alas, you could feel the audience asking the same question as one endless da capo aria followed another through three unexceptional hours.
Much of the music is very attractive; the Portuguese Almeida was a contemporary of Handel and Pergolesi and wrote firmly in the Italian style. The problem lay in Stephen Medcalf’s cruelly patronising production. He chose, disastrously, to place this tale of desperate love (a jumble of Twelfth Night, King Lear and The Marriage of Figaro – all cross-dressing, mistaken identities and flown wits) in a modern-day home for the elderly, requiring most of the cast of twentysomethings to do miserable caricatures of 90-year-olds.
To take an already static piece and put it in the hands of decrepit puppets was simply crazy, slowing the action to a snail’s pace and condemning us to an evening spent looking at a dull semi-circle of orthopaedic chairs. Worse, we were unable to judge the true abilities of more than half the cast because they were made to totter about the stage with sticks and walking frames in a crude parody of what it is to be old – turning a supposed showcase for the Guildhall’s brightest young singers into a crime against their talents.
Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra of Venezuela; Benjamin Grosvenor, LSO; Promised End; Radamisto | Classical review
Royal Festival Hall, St Luke’s, Linbury Studio, Coliseum; all London
Dancing, hugging, weeping, stamping, whistle-blowing and, of course, wriggling into those trademark tricoloured jackets then tossing them aside with abandon, the Venezuelan Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra – named after a pioneering 19th-century composer-pianist who married enough musical husbands to form her own small chamber group – ended its European tour on a blazing and noisy high on Thursday in the second of two London concerts.
In age and expertise the orchestra is the younger sibling of the Simón Bolívars, who catapulted to fame with their conductor Gustavo Dudamel and put “Sistema”, not to mention “mambo”, into the language. All are alumni of Venezuela’s El Sistema, which gives children from every background a chance to learn music and now has imitators worldwide. Some 150 14- to 20-year-olds squeezed on to the Festival Hall stage and played Bernstein’s short, glittering overture to Candide as if it were the best piece of music ever written.
Competition for places is stiff and results impressive, but ordinary critical measures do not apply. There’s nothing normal about playing Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony with an orchestra containing 13 double basses and 33 woodwind. This endeavour inspires for other reasons: the shared sense of discovery, community, kinship and above all the knowledge that each of these young players has tasted the power of music from the inside, at its most pure and joyful.
Watching a conductor (Christian Vásquez), straining ears, brain and fingers to play in the right place and in tune, requires total discipline. In that respect classical music is as all-consuming as sport, and these young Venezuelans have made it just as cool. “I feel like a rock star,” observed a viola player from Caracas at the pre-concert talk. We cheered and applauded as if they were. One urgent message comes from this which every nation and government should heed: making music changes lives.
Earlier the same day another teenager, the pianist Benjamin Grosvenor, forced us to sit up in an all-Chopin lunchtime recital at LSO St Luke’s. He first won attention – and gasps – as an 11-year-old finalist in BBC Young Musician 2004. Now 18, he still gives no hint of showbiz razzmatazz, saving any revelation of personality for the music: he walks on stage briskly, gives a sheepish grin, sits down and plunges in, in this case to the fiendishly complicated B minor scherzo, which opens straightforwardly with two big chords then collapses into a frenzy of black notes like flocking birds, each autonomous but finding cohesion. If Grosvenor had any nerves as a result of the live microphones – he is a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist – he kept them hidden, with only a few splashed notes and, always, a sharp, imaginative energy. How’s it done? He practises eight hours a day, for a start. The Radio 3 broadcast is on 3 December.
When a composer takes a literary colossus and turns it into an opera, as Alexander Goehr has with Promised End, based on King Lear, there’s no point complaining that it’s not like the original. All that matters is does it add anything? After one encounter, I will put my head on the block and say I don’t know. Goehr (b 1932), whose crafted works have never offered instant gratification and ask more of the listener, has travelled an unexpected route: Japanese Noh theatre techniques, a condensed 24-scene narrative using the original text, selected with help from the late Frank Kermode, and small, subtle chamber orchestra.
Its mode of communication, unlike Aribert Reimann’s abrasive 1978 Lear, is strangely quiet. A huge influence on British music from his Manchester student days in the 1950s, to his stint as professor in Cambridge nurturing new composers, Goehr’s special gift is to illuminate any score with exquisite colour. The music hints at a far-off Moravian wedding band, with klezmerish clarinets and tonalities Janácek, a few decades on, might have enjoyed. But too often the tendency for order and method winnows the action of grit and nastiness.
Post-interval, that tight harness was released with far more variation of dramatic tempo and much more sense of Goehr’s intention. Gloucester’s blinding, with its brief, broken waltz played in a strained, metallic whisper, had real pathos. English Touring Opera mounted a skilful, well-cast staging by James Conway, expertly played by the Aurora Orchestra under the baton of Ryan Wigglesworth and with Roderick Earle in the title role. No doubt contrary to the composer’s wishes, I longed for surtitles, which would have relieved us of the struggle to identify these familiar words, restoring the music to the fore and engaging us more directly. Many perceived problems in the piece would recede. Will a generous donor provide this for the remainder of ETO’s autumn tour?
There’s no need to say much about English National Opera’s first staging of Handel’s Radamisto, transparently directed by David Alden, precisely designed by Gideon Davey and lit with skilful shadow-play by Rick Fisher. It’s first rate. It looks delicious, with Persian-miniature style, jewelled satin and organza costumes set against abstract backdrops of raspberry-coloured damask and curving, speckled mirrors. Conducted by Laurence Cummings, the musicians showed virtuosity and vivacity both in the pit and on stage. Countertenor Lawrence Zazzo headed the fine cast, with Sophie Bevan, Christine Rice and Ailish Tynan, whose loveliness was cruelly hidden, somewhat unnecessarily and in the one false move, by a buffa fat-suit, goatee beard, specs and fez hat. ENO’s Handel tradition continues, magnificently. The only pity was the number of empty seats. This is a stunner. Why not fill them?
The Turn of the Screw; Ariadne auf Naxos; Les pêcheurs de perles; Mitsuko Uchida | Classical review
Grand theatre, Leeds; Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff; Royal Opera House, London; Royal Festival Hall, London
What are the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw? However obvious the question it nags more insistently the closer you get to the story. In the original Henry James tale, the two dead servants who have a malevolent hold over two living children never speak. By contrast, in Britten’s chamber opera, shaped into a libretto by Myfanwy Piper, these phantoms are clothed with words and raised to life through music. Their first utterances prompt a dark twist in the score – black notes spill into the white harmonic canvas – and with it the start of a musical screw being turned every bit as insidiously as in the tale being told.
How the director chooses to portray Peter Quint and Miss Jessel tends to define the production – its style, if not its enactment. South African-born Alessandro Talevi, making a bold Opera North debut, lets them haunt from the shadows. The more you strain to see them, the more they shrivel into darkness. This absorbing, disconcerting new staging, designed by Madeleine Boyd with lighting by Matthew Haskins, never relaxes its claustrophobic grasp. In the pit the 13 players, crisply conducted by Richard Farnes, capture the mood with sinewy virtuosity. Despite the miracle of Britten’s music, The Turn of the Screw brings no delight. The undertow of sexual corruption, innocence bespoiled and generic neurosis leaves you gasping for air.
Talevi, who achieved remarkable feats on tiny resources as artistic director of Independent Opera at Sadler’s Wells, has restricted the action, here updated to the 1920s, to one puzzling room: part nursery, with mahogany furniture and a self-propelled rocking horse; part crooked fantasy, capable of shifting into an almost hallucinogenic landscape of blue lake and lurid succulents in the sickly bright colours of artist Marc Quinn’s recent In the Night Garden series (no coincidence that these plants tend to have common names like “prickmadam” and “love-restorer”).
Embroilment and complicity are implied through telling detail: Flora plays an impossible cat’s cradle with the benign but fearful housekeeper Mrs Grose (the excellent, implacable Yvonne Howard). The child’s puppet dolls are miniatures of herself and Miss Jessel, dangled menacingly over the canopy of the big four-poster bed where the virginal new governess endures her fevered nightmares. Room and bed alike resemble The Dream of St Ursula, the martyred virgin, as depicted by Carpaccio in Venice – the city where The Turn of the Screw was premiered in 1954 with the actor David Hemmings singing Miles.
Doubtless that original cast, which included Britten’s partner Peter Pears as Quint, was good but it’s hard to imagine any could improve much on Opera North’s line-up. Fflur Wyn had persuasive, light-toned inscrutability as Flora. Giselle Allen and Benjamin Hulett were precisely sphinx-like as Quint and Jessel. As the Governess, Elizabeth Atherton sang with restless ardour, in unbearable thrall to her charges and locked into her own battle between reality and the wispy figments of a love-starved imagination. Thirteen-year old James Micklethwaite mustered bewitching insouciance, intelligence and astonishing musicality as Miles. What a talent.
“When a new god arrives, we surrender without a word,” observes spiky-little-miss Zerbinetta at the end of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, as the music explodes and one thwarted love is replaced by the glorious, if tenuous joys of another. Typically of Strauss, the plot – an amalgam of two contrary stories which rudely jostle for dominion – keeps you emotionally at arm’s length, but the score seduces and by the end, even as here with the tenor love interest provided by a Bacchus resembling Brown Owl post-revels, reason is confounded.
Never easy to bring off without a solidly top-class cast, WNO’s revival made a heroic effort, going some way to recover balance lost a fortnight ago with a calamitous Fidelio. Sarah Connolly, an ever classy mezzo, captivated as the Composer, racked with frustration, idealism and devotion. Gillian Keith fizzed skittishly and effortlessly as Zerbinetta, an acidulous sop to Orla Boylan’s munificent, creamy but variably toned Ariadne. Ricardo Tamura’s Bacchus and the large ensemble cast threw themselves, with lively results, into the spirit of Neil Armfield’s cheerfully updated Noises Off staging.
There were first-night stumbles. Luckily the orchestra, under Lothar Koenigs, were playing so adroitly that the slipped dialogue and consequent collapse of surtitles in the prologue hardly mattered, expertly brought back on course by the nimble conductor. But never let us complain about the risks of live theatre. The starting point for this work is a rich patron – yes, one of those precious and highly desirable birds – and his whims regarding the entertainment he has commissioned: does he want comedy or tragedy, high art or low? Why not have both? Out of this daft bunfight, Strauss and his collaborator Hoffmansthal shaped a masterpiece.
That’s hardly the word you would reach for first to describe Les pêcheurs de perles, Bizet’s patchy early opera. Rather too hot on the heels of ENO’s recent The Pearl Fishers – there’s a limit to how often you want to hear that famous swooning and soupy male duet – the Royal Opera mounted two start-of-season concert performances. In the small cast, only Raymond Aceto as the zealous High Priest sounded absolutely at home either with the French or with the awkward, wrong-sounding vocal lines.
Nicole Cabell’s Leila was assured but prone to mawkishness. Gerald Finley’s Zurga and John Osborn’s Nadir had powerful moments. Orchestra and chorus grew in confidence as the work progressed and their contribution was a bonus. Throwing his energy into every note, the versatile Antonio Pappano conducted. Only days before he had been duetting fabulously as pianist with Joyce DiDonato at the Gramophone Awards in a languorous version of “Over the Rainbow”, on balance a piece that does bear frequent repetition though I can see I may regret that remark.
Mitsuko Uchida‘s musical flexibility is of a different kind. She’s not an obvious Wizard of Oz type, though knowing her adventurous and quixotic spirit, she probably knows all Judy Garland’s songs and the actions too. Her Royal Festival Hall recital to open the International Piano series focused on Beethoven, opening with the Sonata in E minor Op 90, Chopin and Schumann. His Davidsbündlertänze, a collection of short movements yoked into two sections, can lose its way in performance, but not under Uchida’s light, supple fingers and absolute musical discipline. Hear, too, her glorious new Decca recording.
After Chopin’s mighty B minor sonata, Uchida’s encore was the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight”‘ sonata. How she negotiated the fiendish pedalling and half-pedalling, on which whole essays are written, must remain a secret, since her feet were all but hidden beneath her flowing jade and aqua outfit. Uchida’s seamless, gossamer-fine, haunting playing, in a class of its own, suggested ghosts in the machine.
Proms 75 & 76 | Classical review
Royal Albert Hall, London
It’s been said that the Great Britain celebrated at the last night of the Proms is a country that no longer exists; that the half-concert, half-Pythonesque ritual is a monocultural fantasy, jingoistic and egregiously sentimental. Saturday’s instalment starred a Ukranian violist and American soprano led by a Czech conductor. Behind me were cramped Finnish, Polish and American radio presenters, while before and above me the sea of red, white and blue flooding the hall was comprised of flags representing the UK but also the US, Japan, Australia, the Czech Republic, France, Norway, Denmark and Russia.
Britannia herself was the American Renée Fleming, upholstered in a Vivienne Westwood dress whose soaring breast plates would drown a lesser voice. She had concluded the first half of the evening with some nuanced Strauss songs, but her best performances came in the second half, both in the dazzling vocal fireworks with which she adorned Arne’s patriotic ode and also in two arias from Smetana (Dobrá) and Dvorak (Song to the Moon). Fleming’s intensity and precision of feeling was a masterclass in itself, and also an inspiration for Jiri Belohlávek and his orchestra, who at last forgot how tired they all were.
Indeed, if anything marred the evening it was the lacklustre playing of an admittedly overworked orchestra, who singularly failed to meet on equal terms Fleming’s Strauss or Rysanov’s stirring adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s Roccoco Variations. This was a particular shame in a programme that was musically more thoughtful than many. Similarly, in the premiere of Jonathan Dove’s declamatory and upbeat Whitman setting, Song of Joys – which, in the best tradition of high-spirited English choral music left me feeling slightly queasy – and Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens, Belohlávek revealed his limits as a choral conductor.
The same could not be said of the previous night, in which John Eliot Gardiner held a packed auditorium spellbound for the diverse aural entertainments that make up Monteverdi’s 400-year-old Vespers. Gardiner has his detractors but his choir and orchestra’s devotion to his often idiosyncratic vision is an inspiration in itself. If ever there was a work, too, in which the depths of expression combine seamlessly with pomp and circumstance, and which plays to the acoustic strengths of the Royal Albert Hall, it is this – a Prom to remember.
Berlin Philharmonic/Rattle | Classical review
Royal Albert Hall, London
The Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle were the hottest orchestral ticket of this summer’s Proms, and for at least three-quarters of their two programmes, they sounded as if they fully deserved to be.
Friday night’s two symphonies, Beethoven’s Fourth and Mahler’s First, started in strikingly similar fashion: a sustained unity, with a melodic line stepping tentatively down. A new listener would have had no idea what was next, and that is how Rattle seemed to want us all to listen, rookies and veterans alike. Both performances brought a searching quality to the fore, making sense of Rattle’s unhurried tempos.
Even while the Beethoven sailed on the breeze of the orchestra’s crisp precision, the players seemed in the most exploratory passages of the first movement to be genuinely trying out new keys for size, rather than merely following the notes on the page. In the Mahler, the genial first main melody emerged slightly wistfully, as if it were already a memory, setting the tone for a performance in which the patches of shade were darker and more distant than usual – but the moments of true light burned brighter as a result, undimmed by the occasional tiny brass glitch. Some hear a hollowness in the triumph at the close of this symphony, especially in the context of the composer’s weightier work to come. Here, the victory might have been temporary – but hollow? Never.
The weaker spots came in the first half of Saturday’s concert, when Rattle’s spaciousness verged on just plain slow. Wagner’s Parsifal overture showcased some fantastically blended woodwind, but the first theme was made sluggish by a slight lag between instruments, and the music never quite hit its sublime stride. Similarly, Rattle took Strauss’s Four Last Songs so broadly that the soprano Karita Mattila was pushed to the limits of her lungs, and even in her most radiant moments seemed always to be holding something back.
The second half, however, was a return to form. Asking us to listen to them as if they were “Mahler’s imaginary Eleventh Symphony”, Rattle segued three sets of orchestral pieces by the Second Viennese School: Schoenberg’s Op 16, Webern’s Op 6 and Berg’s Op 6. It was quite possible to buy the idea of the Schoenberg pieces making up a kind of opening movement, with the Webern the pensive, tense interlude, and the Berg the climactic, more rhythmically driven finale. Each work gained much from the loving, sonorous care of the playing, but perhaps even more from the context of the works around it: together, they combined into a newly lush sonic experience.
Proms 56 & 57: Minnesota Orchestra/Vänskä | Classical review
Royal Albert Hall, London
The Minnesota Orchestra’s Proms with their music director Osmo Vänskä were object lessons in the creation of excitement and meaning without resorting to rhetorical extremes. Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony and Beethoven’s Ninth, given on consecutive days, were the main works. We have learned to think of both primarily in terms of grand gestures, but they work just as well, if not better, when some of the expected loftiness is removed.
Vänskä’s preference for tension and detail over volume and textural weight results in playing of exceptional lucidity from an orchestra that often functions with the precision of a chamber ensemble. Shorn of its usual upholstered opulence, Bruckner’s Fourth has a combination of rawness, sensuousness and grace that peers back through Wagner to Schumann and Beethoven. The latter’s Ninth, meanwhile, was extraordinarily volatile, even in the adagio – done with rapturous fluidity on this occasion.
Neither performance was without controversy. The Bruckner was given in a new edition by Benjamin Korstvedt incorporating cuts that, some have argued, were made under pressure and are therefore inauthentic. And Vänskä’s insistence on precise enunciation in the finale of the Beethoven led to syllabic, declamatory singing from the BBC Symphony Chorus. They sang from memory, though the less than ideally matched soloists remained score-bound.
The Bruckner was paired with Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, played with understated virtuosity and sardonic humour by Alisa Weilerstein. Berg’s Violin Concerto, meanwhile, accompanied Beethoven’s Ninth. Gil Shaham, a late replacement for the indisposed Lisa Batiashvili, was the soloist in a touching performance that combined great formal control with nostalgic intensity.
RPO/Nézet-Séguin | Classical review
Royal Albert Hall, London
Yannick Nézet-Séguin has big shoes to fill at the Rotterdam Philharmonic, where he took over from Valery Gergiev in 2008. His first Prom at the orchestra’s helm was not the sensation some might have hoped for; but then Gergiev has perhaps built a solid rather than sensational orchestra, and there was still enough evidence of why the Philadelphia Orchestra has snaffled the young Canadian up as its next music director.
Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser was very much a microcosm of the opera: the hurtling bacchanalian music was eclipsed by the godly opening chorale, which grew slowly into an impressive, sustained arc whenever it occurred.
One man who won’t have been listening is Simon Keenlyside, who will have been backstage still warming his voice up furiously in order to be able to float the high note in the first line of Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder quite so beautifully. Keenlyside is not an obvious Mahler baritone in the Fischer-Dieskau mould: the honey in his voice can be switched off as well as on. But it is at the rough edges that it becomes most interesting, and the few extra breaths he needed seemed part and parcel of a performance that was as committed as it was moving. He and the brass spared nothing in the last verse of Um Mitternacht: one man against the trumpets of Jericho.
Nézet-Séguin’s real test should have been Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. He certainly put his stamp on it, and the orchestra found a different sound, with sparing vibrato for the strings. Some of his phrasing ideas were counterintuitive; some were successful, some slightly impeded the flow. The music rarely lacked excitement, but it was more of the minute than part of the long game. Still, Nézet-Séguin can make those minutes magical, as the encore, The Fairy Garden from Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite, amply proved.
Proms 38 & 39: Bach Day | Classical review
Royal Albert Hall, London
The fashion for making big orchestral arrangements of Bach peaked in the first half of the 20th century, and then gradually disappeared as the early music movement got underway. In a day devoted to the composer, in which John Eliot Gardiner and his English Baroque Soloists had already traversed the Brandenburg Concertos at Cadogan Hall, the evening’s two main-stage Proms offered a largely nostalgic look at how audiences once heard Bach, and how later composers viewed him.
Two of the nine works in the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s Prom under Andrew Litton were new, though only one of them was really an arrangement. As a large-scale transcription of a movement from a viola da gamba sonata, Alissa Firsova’s Allegro was a bright and multicoloured piece that attracted attention through its command of instruments used in breeze-block manner – sharply defined, if not exactly subtle. Tarik O’Regan’s Latent Manifest drew on a few bars from a solo violin sonata to create a more personal canvas, taking us a long way from a literal reworking into the realms of evanescent fantasy, with delicately evocative results. The rest of the programme – which included showpieces by Stokowski and Respighi, as well as Walton’s dapper Wise Virgins suite, and more workmanlike orchestrations by Henry Wood and Malcolm Sargent – was interesting, though by the time we had heard the third reworking of Sheep May Safely Graze, it was starting to sound like lamb dressed up as mutton souffle.
Earlier, David Briggs marshalled the full forces of the Royal Albert Hall organ for the console equivalent of these orchestral extravaganzas. Virgil Fox’s arrangement of Komm, Süsse Tod took the prize for the most lurid. At its best, Briggs’s own arrangement of the Third Orchestral Suite sounded suitably grand; at its worst, grandiose.
NYO/Bychkov | Classical review
Royal Albert Hall, London
It was the Cleveland Orchestra that commissioned Fantasias, Julian Anderson’s latest orchestral work, and gave the premiere last November. But the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain got the chance of introducing it to the UK, and made it the centrepiece of its summer tour, framed by French music and conducted by Semyon Bychkov.
It is Anderson’s first multi-movement work for orchestra, and, for all their subtle interconnections, the five pieces that make up Fantasias aim at maximum variety and contrast. The opening fantasia, for brass alone and sounding like a Gabrieli sonata with a postmodern makeover, is followed by a movement overflowing with ideas and luscious, deliquescent textures, and a whispering, creaking nocturne apparently inspired by rainforest sounds. The tiny, evanescent scherzo and breathtaking prestissimo finale both introduce quarter-tones, giving a fuzzy strangeness to some of the harmonies. It’s a wonderfully rich score, which the NYO at maximum strength – six bassoons, five harps, three tubas – played with remarkable precision.
The rest of the concert was equally vivid. Bychkov set the tone with a wonderfully alert account of Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, brimming with wit and pictorial immediacy and showcasing some superbly characterised solo playing from the NYO principals. In the Symphonie Fantastique, the conducting revelled in the tonal possibilities of such a huge orchestra, sculpting the music in expansive sweeps and making Berlioz’s scoring seem even more tinglingly surreal than usual. The detail was remarkable, whether it was the evocative offstage cor anglais in the slow movement, the trio of tubas snarling magnificently in the March to the Scaffold, or the E flat clarinet that led off the final Witches’ Sabbath with manic glee. A fabulous, exhilarating concert.
The Duchess of Malfi; La traviata | Classical review
Great Eastern Quay, London; Royal Opera House, London
In a long queue outside a former pharmaceuticals factory near Gallions Reach in London’s Docklands, there is mounting expectation and one feels as if one has reached the rim of the world – a scrubby no man’s land of cow parsley and warehouses. The sense is of being on the edge of the known world artistically, too, waiting to see a most exciting and unconventional event – a collaboration between ENO and radical theatre company Punchdrunk. Tickets have already sold out (with frisky bidding on eBay) for this opera based on John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. The play’s jauntily disagreeable 17th-century plot – involving murderous violence and unbridled misogyny – is redeemed by its language, as fresh as if it had been written hours ago. The score is by the German composer Torsten Rasch, who has written the music for 40 films but never an opera – until now.
At the door, each audience member is handed a white mask and instructed not to take it off. The masks – spectacle-wearers take note – do not settle on the nose without pain. But perhaps one should not overreact to minor discomfort in an evening involving multiple murder and ending with the Duchess hanging by her feet in mid-air, like a joint in a butcher’s shop. Every floor of the factory is occupied by musicians, singers and surprises, and what you see – in semi-darkness – depends upon where you choose to go. Felix Barrett’s incredible talent, as a director and designer, is for creating atmosphere: a forest in which the branches are thickly coiled with plastic cables, a dark church with overbearing pulpit, a narrow room behind glass where a woman is overpowered by a man. I witnessed several members of the audience tripping over and, more than once, bumped into someone in the dark. You take your chance. It’s frightening. And Rasch’s music amplifies foreboding: harmonious persecution.
The challenge of the evening – and I struggled with this – is that you must be prepared to lose the plot. You will not see Malfi consecutively. You stumble upon fragments of the story, depending upon where you roam. And you must forfeit language too. The opera celebrates the play’s danger but is careless with Webster’s words (impossible to judge Ian Burton’s libretto, encountered in snatches). Nor must you fret about whatever it is you are missing in other rooms of the building (a lesson for life?). Yet I confess to having felt triumphant relief – like a hunter in search of prey – when I chanced upon Bosola, Malfi’s treacherous manservant (Richard Burkhard), on the second floor, pressing compromising apricots on the Duchess as she sat on a swing in the dark. He sings magnificently, straight from Webster. He observes that the Duchess, contrary to the fashion, “wears a loose-bodied gown”. He has discovered her pregnancy – one of the several secrets she fails to keep. As the Duchess, Claudia Huckle sings seductively, powerful yet doomed.
At one point, to impose order, I played “chase the conductor”. Wouldn’t Stephen Higgins go where the action was? But the man is as quick on his feet as he is with his baton: he kept giving me the slip, vanishing into the darkness ahead. Once, I pushed through a door into a forbidden room where the orchestra had assembled and were about to pour their music into the darkness. A pair of hands firmly redirected me. The highlight of the evening was sharing a pew with the musicians (wonderful to have the orchestra close and visible instead of in the pit). Their music stands had little crosses on them, conveying the sense of being in a graveyard, but the music could not have been more alive: the brass was ominously vivid and, together, the players preached a dark sermon.
The finale pulls cast, orchestra and audience together in high theatre – complete with swinging incense, scarlet dancers and a hellish host of hanged men. It leaves you terrified, footsore and stunned. Yet for all its breathtaking creativity and celebration of simultaneity, I think it unlikely this hide-and-seek opera is the shape of things to come – if only because shape is what it lacks. But what it does, it does brilliantly. Punchdrunk describes its work as “immersive”, and it is. It changes you from being a distant member of the audience to a voyeur (of the wild sexuality of the Duchess and her servant, Antonio) or a witness (to Malfi’s horrific end), and there are moments when you feel – as a dancer’s body brushes against yours – dangerously close to an accomplice.
When I was nine, I was taken to La traviata at Covent Garden – it was the first opera I ever saw. I remember weeping for Violetta – Mirella Freni’s tiny, ailing figure vertiginiously far below. It was a thrill that has stayed with me all my life. Seeing Angela Gheorghiu as Violetta (I missed her 1994 debut), I was thrilled by that same luxurious abandon – there is no more romantic opera than La traviata. Director Richard Eyre is working at the height of his powers, while designer Bob Crowley is in grandly early 19th-century mode.
And Gheorghiu is beyond criticism. Her great gift, whether in party dress or about to die, is to bring out the recklessness of the role. At one point she helps herself to ice and flings it into her face to show a carefree soul, and as a hint of the fever to come. She is consumed – by passion, despair, illness. James Valenti’s Alfredo is glorious – a most tuneful guardian, with admirable vocal delicacy. Zeljko Lucic is grave and velvet-voiced as Alfredo’s father.
There is an extraordinary finale in which the antic shadows of carnival figures pass the long windows of Violetta’s bedroom and she flutters, like a trapped butterfly, on the other side of the glass. Not that she, or the production, is actually trapped. In the transcendent moments that follow she runs, in a death-defying circle, into Alfredo’s arms – her whole life in her voice.
