Leoš Janáček - The Cunning Little Vixen
La Monnaie-De Munt, Brussels - 2017
Antonello Manacorda, Christophe Coppens, Andrew Schroeder, Lenneke Ruiten, Sara Fulgoni, John Graham-Hall, Alexander Vassiliev, Vincent Le Texier, Yves Saelens, Mireille Capelle, Eleonore Maguerre, Maria Portela Larisch, Logan Lopez Gonzalez, Marion Bauwens, Kris Belligh
ARTE Concert - March 2017
In theory I like the way that La Monnaie actually take the animals out of their 2017 production of Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen, since the anthropomorphised creatures of the opera are really meant to teach us about human life. Yes, I'm aware that this seems to go against the whole purpose of the work being an allegory in the first place, but the danger with The Cunning Little Vixen is that the baby animals either make the work too cutesy trying to talk down to a younger audience or risk missing the point entirely. The Cunning Little Vixen can be a good opera for young children, but making the opera suitable for that particular audience can involve some amount of compromise.
In practice however, director Christophe Coppens' modernisation and de-animalisation of the work does also involve some measure of compromise with the original intentions of the work, to the extent that it almost - but not quite - distorts the meaning of the work; if you can even figure out what it is trying to achieve. In recognition perhaps that this version doesn't present the work entirely the way that Janáček intended, and does involve some reworking of the libretto (in the translation at least, but not in the actual sung text), the La Monnaie production of The Cunning Little Vixen is prefaced by the title Foxie!
It's not long before you recognise how much the original storyline is distorted in 'Foxie!'. The Forester in this version is something of a security guard for a school, with monitors in his office to keep an eye on the children going wild outside on a summer evening. The groups of children have their own little groups and cliques that match the creatures of the animal kingdom. Foxie is a young red-head girl phoning home for her 'Mami', but unable to get through, so the Security guy takes her across the way to a cafe. When he sees that Foxie still hasn't been picked up and is somewhat in distress, he brings her back to the control room and leads her to a backroom. Then it all goes a bit David Lynch.
The immediate problem that tends to go against the grain of the original to a worrying degree is that it changes the Forester capturing a fox into what looks like a case of child abduction and molestation. Foxie is introduced not into a yard with hens and a cockerel lording it over them, but some kind of surreal brothel from which she eventually escapes. This is definitely not a 'kiddie' version of The Cunning Little Vixen. Arguably, you could wonder whether that is not the underlying context of Janáček's version, which does indeed have a sexual undercurrent that is often played upon in other productions, but it still doesn't feel comfortable in this presentation. But I don't think it's meant to be comfortable, and Janáček's opera certainly doesn't offer any illusions about the harshness and cruelty of nature, and the nature of men.
While some of the imagery is indeed Lynchian, looking like it is a nightmare taken from 'Inland Empire', it's used to suggest a conflict in generational outlooks rather than attempt to probe split personalities or a mind in conflict with itself. There is also something of a Stefan Herheim feel to the production that is similar to his treatment of Rusalka at La Monnaie, where the water nymph was also a prostitute in an similarly elaborate street-scene production. The key difference however is that Herheim uses such techniques to delve beneath the surface of the fantasy to attempt to probe the underlying source or psychology of the story, either from what it tells us about the origins of the fairy-tale or what it tells us about the author and composer. In The Cunning Little Vixen the allegory is already there to allow us to explore and consider the underlying meaning, so any attempt by Christophe Coppens to change that risks altering its message.
But perhaps that's for a good reason. If there is a way of making sense of this production it's perhaps viewing the older Foxie as someone who is being persecuted by society for living an alternative lifestyle. That certainly is one notable change that is made in the subtitles, when Foxie accuses the poacher Harašta of wanting to kill her simply because she is different. That works with Foxie's back-to-nature fondness for the woods, living outside of conventional society. There also seems to be an emphasis on how her unconventional relationship with Goldie scandalises the neighbours, since there is little attempt here to make Goldie a male fox. You have to wonder whether the composer didn't intentionally score the role for a female to provoke just such a scandalous pairing, so there is validity in the production taking this path. The rather heavy petting that goes on between the two women does push this further than you might expect, so definitely not for the kids this one.
The question of how they produce cubs - such an essential element of the cycle of life that is the central theme of the work - is neatly covered by Foxie going on to become a gym teacher for a sports team of young girls. And it is all about allowing the younger generation to live free from the shackles of the tradition and morality of the previous generation, something that doesn't always come across in a more literal adaptation. Whether you find this all as an awkward attempt to fit an unwieldy, contradictory and often inexplicable concept on top of a work that has no real need to have any additional levels added to it, or whether you view the concept as having something meaningful to say about social change and tolerance being a necessary part of the cycle of life from one generation to the next, it does come up with a number of clever ways to make it work together, even if it takes it all a little further than Janáček might have intended.
The unconventional production certainly doesn't interfere in any way with the quality of the singing and musical performance. If anything, it gives the performances a youthful freshness and an extra edge. The role of Vixen/Foxie is sung exceptionally well by Lenneke Ruiten - one of the best performances I've heard of this role in recent times. The Forester is a rather more ambiguous figure in this production, but even there Andrew Schroeder makes it work and even come across as quite touching. There are no weak points anywhere else, all of the roles sung tremendously well. Antonello Manacorda's conducts the orchestra of La Monnaie and it's a vibrant, detailed and sensitive reading of the score that retains the rhythmic pulse and also recognises the folk elements of Janáček's brilliant, hypnotic score.
Links: La Monnaie-De Munt, ARTE Concert
Nicholas Lens - Shell Shock
La Monnaie - De Munt, 2014
Koen Kessels, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Claron McFadden, Sara Fulgoni, Gerald Thompson, Ed Lyon, Mark S. Doss, Gabriel Kuti, Eastman, Aimilios Arapoglou, Damien Jalet, Jason Kittelberger, Kazutomi Kozuki, Elias Lazaridis, Johnny Lloyd, Nemo Oeghoede, Shintaro Oue, Guro Nagelhus Schia, Ira Mandela Siobhan, Theo Lally, Gabriel Crozier
La Monnaie Web streaming - November 2014
La Monnaie in Brussels are in my view just about the most consistently impressive opera company in Europe at the moment and at the forefront of presenting opera as a cutting edge artform. Part of the reason for their success is their willingness to involve theatre directors and artists from outside the opera world, who often bring a new and refreshing perspective on the meaning and presentation of very familiar works, but the musical interpretation and the quality of the performers engaged is of a very high standard too. Their commitment to ensuring that opera remains a vital musical and dramatic force is also evident in their commissioning of exciting new creations every season. This year Shell Shock proved to be one of the most impressive new works I've seen for a very long time.
Characteristically, the strength of the work and the key to its success is in how La Monnaie have assembled a strong and imaginative creative team from a variety of disciplines. As some of these collaborators have little or no previous experience of opera, they often have few preconceptions about what opera ought to be. For this work, commissioned to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Great War, the Belgian composer Nicholas Lens (born in Ypres where the memory of the war remains fresh) was been paired with the Australian singer/songwriter and author Nick Cave, while the direction and staging of the work was placed in the hands of Belgian-Moroccan dance choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. The result is Shell Shock: A Requiem of War, A Dance Oratorio in Twelve Canti.
Evidently then, Shell Shock is not an opera in the traditional sense. It's part choral oratorio, it's part requiem mass, it's a ballet, it's a song cycle, but opera is a good enough description in how it encompasses and blends together these various musical and dramatic art disciplines. Made up of twelve separate cantos that describe the experience of the war from a variety of viewpoints (Canto of the Colonial Soldier, Canto of the Nurse, Canto of the Deserters, Canto of the Orphans etc.), there is however a strong thematic and even a narrative line that runs through the work, connecting the experiences. Even though there is little narrative dialogue within the canto format, the experiences being typically that of a single person or a group of people in a choral piece, there is nonetheless a vital dialogue established with the other elements. Not only is there a strong connection between the words and the music - as you would expect at the very least - but they form an meaningful dialogue and interact very much with the performers and dancers on the set, and with the various other theatrical stage devices, including the unconventional use of props, and projections.
This is an true operatic collaboration then in every sense of the word, where equal weight is given to each of the disciplines and they are informed, heightened and enhanced by their interaction with one another. Musically, Nicholas Lens draws on a variety of styles to match the content, some of it sounding like Vaughan-Williams in less pastoral more wartime music and, inevitably, closer to Britten's War Requiem. There is also a John Adams-like modern rhythmic quality in how the music is attuned to the sung English text, but without the minimalistic repetition. If it's difficult to pin down, the music nonetheless has a consistency and dramatic quality that works perfectly with the tone established by Nick Cave's texts. Unpretentiously called lyrics, they are indeed songs, Cave working to his strengths as a storyteller, expressing all the anger, exasperation, fear and horror of the conditions experienced by the soldiers, the nurses and the families of those caught up in nightmarish situations.
The connection between the words and the music is a strong combination that makes Shell Shock viable and deeply affecting as a concert piece in its own right, but Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's choreographed dances, movements and tableaux-like settings for the scenes really take the work to another level. The dances and movements manage to be strikingly beautiful without for a second glorifying the slaughter, without fitting the horror and confusion of the circumstances into any false sense of dramatic action, and without idealising the senselessness of the sacrifice. "War is reprehensible, not the man", is a line from the lengthy Canto of the Deserters section, but the theme is expanded on elsewhere, with lyrical and musical motifs referring to an Angel of Death and Kratos the God of War drawing together common experiences into a larger narrative.
Cherkaoui's dances, with Eastman leading the troupe, are also strikingly illustrative of these themes. It's a ballet of war where soldiers twitch with shell shock or contort as their bodies are disjointed, mutilated and torn apart by bullet fire and crawl over sandbags to form their own pile of corpse sandbags. The use of common objects found on the battlefield is employed imaginatively elsewhere, guns, bayonets and even stretchers flowing with the dancers into configurations that illustrate the stories and give expression beyond the literal. Bed sheets, for example, are used to capture charging soldiers, their faces and hands pressed against the canvas screen in a silent scream at the point of death. In combination with the music and the lyrics, it manages to be visually striking, expressive and horrific scene at the same time. Eugenio Szwarcer's projections and the stage lighting also come together with all the other elements to create further tableaux vivantes, or tableaux mortes if you can put it that way.
The singers are assigned various roles according to the Colonial Soldiers, Deserters, Survivors and Fallen of the Canti, some of them recurring throughout the opera as a whole. Essentially however, they are unnamed in the respect that each of them can fulfill multiple common designations within this war, and are identified only according to their singing role. The casting of a soprano (Claron McFadden), a mezzo-soprano (Sara Fulgoni), a countertenor (Gerald Thompson), a tenor (Ed Lyon) and a bass (Mark S. Doss) is clearly meant to be representative of the whole range of experiences covered here, but the choice of singers for those roles is also just about perfect. That's no coincidence either, several of these singers having worked with Lens before (Claron McFadden notably on Love Is The Only Master I'll Serve), but it's just another example of how La Monnaie strive for perfection on every level while stretching the capabilities of everyone to their limits. The results of this approach are evident to anyone viewing this remarkable work.
Links: La Monnaie, ARTE Concert
Gioachino Rossini - Otello
Buxton Festival, 2014
Stephen Barlow, Sara Fulgoni, Alessandro Luciano, Kate Ladner, Nicky Spence, Henry Waddington, Carolyn Dobbin, Leonel Pinheiro, Mikael Onelius, Andrew Brown
Buxton Opera House - 26 July 2014
I don't usually review concert performances of opera - the dramatic direction is as much a part of opera as the music and the singing - but a performance of Rossini's Otello is rare enough that that it's worth mentioning whenever it's presented. One of the principal reasons it's rarely performed is that it's hard to find singers good enough in this register, Otello notoriously requiring no less than five tenors in fairly challenging roles. Buxton get around this problem by using an alternative version of the opera that casts a mezzo-soprano instead of a tenor in the role of Otello. It's not so much getting around the problem as readjusting where the challenges lie, and you're still going to need four good tenors. All of which just increases the rarity value and interest in this performance.
A dramatic presentation of a work adapted from a Shakespeare play would, you think, be pretty much indispensable, but Rossini's Otello varies from Shakespeare's in a number of significant ways, not all of which will be satisfactory to the purist. The changes however are not arbitrary or ill-conceived, but are necessary to reduce the complexity and scale of the original play into a manageable music-drama format. To do that without losing the essence of the work is important, and while Rossini doesn't entirely succeed in some areas and can hardly be said to improve in any areas, in others the composer finds a successful medium, or at least one that has dramatic consistency.
The most controversial change in Rossini's version is of course the switching of Desdemona's handkerchief for a love letter. Written by Desdemona to Otello but never received by the latter, Iago convinces the Moor the letter that has come into his possession was intended for Rodrigo. This is much more tangible proof than a handkerchief, which means it doesn't take quite so much persuasion from Iago to convince Otello of her infidelity. It simplifies motivations certainly, but it's not just a shortcut, actually reducing the amount of chance and contrivance much that the drama relies on. Along with the suggestion that Iago's advances were once rebuffed by Desdemona, this also makes his motivations more credible than just evil ambition.
It's true however that the impulse to change certain aspects of the play derives more from Rossini need to adapt situation and characterisation to fit the structure of the number opera. With more long laments than action, Otello can also be seen to adhere more to the opera seria format, but Rossini respects the dramatic drive and innovates with accompanied recitative and interaction in duets between Otello and Rodrigo, Desdemona and Rodrigo, and - completing the triangle - between Desdemona and Otello. The placement of quintets, ensembles and choral pieces throughout the work all serve to create an even greater sense of the drama and situation.
A concert performance of the work just emphasises how dramatically effective Rossini's musical handling of the material is on it own terms. Or at least this one at Buxton did. It started off with the cast wearing formal evening dress and standing before music podiums, although Nicky Spence's Iago rakishly had his tie removed and shirt collar unbuttoned. By the end of the evening however, you'd have forgotten that this was a concert performance, all the singers seeming to have been caught up in the characterisation, the audience fully drawn into the drama by the escalating momentum of Rossini's arrangements.
It did however take a while to become accustomed to a mezzo-soprano in the role of Otello rather than Desdemona. It wasn't so much from a vocal standpoint however as a visual one and in male costume during a full production, it probably wouldn't have been an issue at all. Sara Fulgoni's powerful performance however made it easy to feel the extent of Otello's rage and the force of personality that would lead him to such drastic actions, and there was actually a discernible difference between the two female leads in the more feminine gowns worn by Kate Ladner. Ladner's performance was exceptionally good, devastating in her account of Desdemona's predicament, her Willow Song in particular deeply touching.
Buxton however managed to overcome the other singing challenges of this work such apparent ease that you'd almost wonder why all the fuss about putting on Rossini's Otello. Alessandro Luciano was certainly tested as Rodrigo, but came through it well, with clear bright enunciation and a strong dramatic tenor voice. Nicky Spence really impressed me with his Iago. This is a more dramatic role that requires a deeper and darker timbre than I've heard him sing in before, but he was thoroughly convincing and dramatically effective, singing the role with apparent ease. Under the fine direction of Stephen Barlow, the Northern Chamber Orchestra and the Buxton Festival Chorus were again simply outstanding, handling the intricacies of the work with an eye on the whole overarching structure and journey that Rossini's wonderful score thrillingly takes.
