Claudio Monteverdi - Il Ballo delle Ingrate
Judith Weir - Scipio’s Dream
Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin - 2018
David Adams, Caitriona McLaughlin, Leah Redmond, Katie O'Donoghue, Matthew Mannion, Ben Escorcio, Robert McAllister, Ana-Maria Acunune, Katie Richardson McCrea, Hannah Traynor
The Abbey Theatre on the Peacock Stage - 29 March 2018
The pairing of two operas written almost 400 years apart is an intriguing one and neither are by any means an obvious selection for students of the Royal Irish Academy of Music working on a stage production of the programme in collaboration with the Lir Academy of Dramatic Art. You might expect the intention of juxtaposing Monteverdi's Il Ballo delle Ingrate (1608) with Judith Weir's Scipio’s Dream (1991) would be to throw up interesting musical contrasts as well as highlighting how social attitudes have changed over the years, but in reality the subjects of both works display a common social conservatism. In the case of Monteverdi's work, the deeply serious treatment of a tragic subject could be seen to merely reflect the attitudes of the times in which it was written, while Judith Weir's more overt comedy is more obviously critical of similar ideals.
What the two works really have in common however is - somewhat obviously - is that they are being performed to a modern audience, and what they have to communicate to that audience must be the primary consideration of a director. Rather than seek to connect the works thematically, which might only strengthen the less liberal sentiments expressed in them and send out mixed messages, Catriona McLaughlin approaches each of the two short pieces on their own terms. Updating them to a more modern setting, the RIAM/Lir production seeks to remain to the original intentions of both works while at the same time finding a way to explore the relevance they have for a contemporary audience living in Ireland. From that point of view, with that as a starting point but with a little bit of a shift in perspective, the timeless quality of both works and the truths they reveal comes through well.
In the case of Scipio's Dream, the updating of ideas towards a modern perspective has already been made by Judith Weir, since her work is based on Mozart's Il sogno di Scipione, written in 1771 when the composer was 15 years of age. Weir's comic opera was adapted for TV in 1991 and updated into a contemporary office background, where a businessman has to make a decision whether to follow the allegorical paths represented by the goddesses of Fortune versus Constancy. Catriona McLaughlin's production actually returns the work closer to it original story based on Cicero's 'On the Republic' by re-envisioning Scipio as the leader of a Republic state; as Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland, whose dilemma is the choice between following the fortune of the UK's Brexit decision or to remain constant to the security offered by remaining in the EU.
The choice is perhaps not realistically one that the Taoiseach has to consider, so it's not as if there's a political point to be made here, but placing him in this position at least makes the allegorical aspect of the work more relatable. And funny, which is a vital part of the charm of this particular work; at least in Weir's version as I'm not sure Pietro Metastasio had laughs in mind when he wrote the libretto. It might be a little heavy-handed and unnecessary for Fortune to hold up a mask of Theresa May, for Constancy to hold up a mask identifying her as Angela Merkel and for the other players to similarly identify their European leader counterparts, but it certainly gets the laughs and engages the audience with the conceit. And perhaps there are a few little political points to be made along the way, even if the Irish angle doesn't really mirror the reality of the personal or political challenges faced by Leo Varadkar.
What is surprising about the work, I found, is that while it is certainly modernised, Weir retains the musical language of Mozart's time for her contemporary adaptation of Scipio's Dream. The enchantments of the goddesses of Constancy and Fortune are therefore represented by seductive arias and vocal ornamentation, which are handled well by Leah Redmond and Katie O'Donoghue. The role of Scipio also has its own vocal challenges that baritone Matthew Mannion capably managed, at the same time displaying good presence and successfully delivering the comic touches that are very much part of the charm of the work. The ensemble singers also impressed as they brought a hard border solution that may not be Scipio's dream, but perhaps the only realistic consequence of putting one's faith in the goddess of Constancy.
Despite the underlying sentiments of Il Ballo delle Ingrate, the dance of the ungrateful women condemned to Hell for refusing to submit to the love of a man, there is also a message in Monteverdi's 400 year old work that is relevant to the times. Rather than place it in an equivalent contemporary setting that would undoubtedly distract from the beauty of the piece and probably be an inadequate response to the complexities of the reality faced by women in the world today, the director allows a little modernised tweaking of the translation of the words of the Madrigal make the relevance a little more 'present', but it's the tragic melancholy tone of the extraordinary music of the work itself that aligns it more closely to the fate of abused women, giving it a haunting quality that clearly resonates with a modern audience.
In common with Scipio's Dream the story relies on allegorical figures of gods and goddesses to raise the subject above the level of personal drama to a mythological and moral dilemma. Poor Venus and Eros (Venere and Amore) are distraught that Cupid's darts are no longer as effective as they once were when women used to accept their fate and obeyed the fortune bestowed upon them by the love and attentions of a man. They bring their complaint to Pluto (Plutone), God of the Underworld, who determines that the women are indeed ungrateful and, although it appears harsh to bring them to a place where there can be no return, they must pay the price for contravening the vital rules of nature.
Pluto, as sung by bass-baritone Robert McAllister is indeed a formidable figure, and in McLaughlin's production the torments that the ungrateful women are subjected to by his demons is indeed degrading and horrific. There's no need for elaborate visions of hell, the demons all wear jackets and ties, sitting around the same Prime Minister's office desk that was used in Scipio's Dream. The women are paraded, mocked, stripped of protective clothing and pawed by Pluto's 'Ombre d'Inferno' minions. Enduring their fate, their closing lamentation becomes less of a warning to other ungrateful women than an anthem for all the women who have suffered at the hands of monsters.
That could be a hard angle to sell in such a short piece were it not for the fact that the work is by Monteverdi and a masterpiece that is more than capable of expressing such sentiments. The RIAM Baroque Orchestra performance of Il Ballo delle Ingrate under the direction of David Adams was simply mesmerising, holding the flow and line of the work beautifully, but more importantly finding the dark melancholic poignancy at the heart of the work. The singing also lifted the work to this level, contrasting the exceptional singing of Robert McAllister's marvellously controlled and resonant Pluto with the almost heavenly chorus of the 'ingrate' at the conclusion, weeping not so much for their own miserable fate as much as in solidarity for the fate of all those other women throughout the ages who have lived in hell of one kind or another.
Links: RIAM, The Lir, Abbey Theatre
Richard Wagner - Tristan und Isolde (Berlin)
Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin - 2018
Daniel Barenboim, Dmitri Tcherniakov, Andreas Schager, Stephen Milling, Anja Kampe, Boaz Daniel, Stephan Rügamer, Ekaterina Gubanova, Adam Kutny, Linard Vrielink
Culturebox - February 2018
Even if the setting is very different from what you might expect, and there are one or two interpolations or diversions from the script, Dmitri Tcherniakov's production of Tristan und Isolde adheres fairly closely to the original specifications in the libretto, much like his last production of a Wagner opera at the Berlin Staastoper Under den Linden, Parsifal. There's always a case to be made for a more abstract setting for both works, which operate more on a spiritual level than a geographical one, and that was certainly the case with Harry Kupfer's production which this new one replaces. Tcherniakov however seems to reject this high-flown abstraction and throw out the Schopenhauerian philosophical elements that one would think an essential element of the opera, attempting rather to bring the work firmly down to earth and see it in purely human terms. Surely this is a mistake with a work like Tristan und Isolde?
Well, you would think so, but Tcherniakov nonetheless managed to introduce other ideas and ways of looking at Parsifal into that production, and if not quite reach the heady heights that the work can aspire to (although Daniel Barenboim, with Anja Kampe and Andreas Schager certainly helped the reach the mystical dimension of the work in the music), he did at least find an alternative and perhaps more relatably human way to address some of the questions that this work poses. The same team of Barenboim, Tcherniakov, Kampe and Schager apply a similar approach with this new Tristan und Isolde.
Act I takes place here in a wood-panelled lounge of a luxury liner, where a group of businessmen in suits sit around enjoying a few post-meeting drinks. They seem to be happy to have conducted a successful deal in Ireland, bringing back a Queen for King Marke of Cornwall. A screen shows voyage updates and video cam footage around the ship, Isolde becoming increasingly irritated as they approach the English shores. Other than the obvious modernisation of the set however, there is little that deviates (and there's little room to deviate one would think) from the original stage directions.
The one area where there is opportunity to establish a character on the work in Act I is obviously the drinking of the love potion and here Brangäne, visibly distressed at Isolde's desire to use a death potion, obviously doesn't add it to the drink, but neither does she switch it for a love potion. Sharing a hefty glass of vodka, you are left with the impression that it's just the alcohol that breaks down Tristan and Isolde inhibitions and reveals their true feelings for each other. It's hardly the most romantic depiction of the love potion scene, but there are other musical and dramatic elements at play here and Tcherniakov superimposes a brief green-tinted projection of Isolde nursing the wounded Tristan from their encounter in Ireland over the proceedings. It's not much but it does achieve the necessary background for the deep shift of overwhelming and uncontrollable desire that defies normal human boundaries.
Those boundaries however in Tcherniakov's vision remain the rather more mundane ones of middle class morality and social convention. In Act II we're in an elegant drawing room, the walls again decorated with wood panelling and images of trees and a lamp to update the original stage directions. It's the same kind of society that we see in Tcherniakov's productions of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, but here Isolde is an outsider in a world of her own, enraptured by the Goddess of Love. I don't know about Tcherniakov, but Barenboim and Kampe raise the game considerably in Act II, peaking to a fury and a force as Tristan not so much slips in to meet Isolde as practically dances in. Tcherniakov shows two people unbridled and enraptured by something greater, dancing with joy, oblivious to the world outside, giving no thought to social niceties that would restrict and bear down heavily on their illicit union.
It may take some of the spirituality and philosophical musing out of the opera, but as a reflection of how it relates to Wagner's inspiration and desires and his attempts to elevate them into something more meaningful, Tcherniakov's approach has validity and, whether you find it appropriate or not, it strips away the work's metaphysical pretensions. Tristan and Isolde's love is not some transcendence of human desire, but a defiant challenge to any kind of social convention or middle-class morality that might seek to disapprove of it or refuse to recognise the purity of feeling within it. And yet, as the green projections reappear and the "O sink hernieder" Night of Love duet establishes an otherworldly setting,you still get a sense of being in the midst of something that surpasses the mundanity of everyday existence, of something that we would all strive to be able to reach. An impossible height? Of course, but if anyone can persuade you that such a state can exist, it's in how Wagner makes the impossible possible in his music.
At the stage in Act II however the tragic crash between the ideal and reality is not yet on the radar of Tristan and Isolde or Wagner, so it's still possible to believe in the impossible and there's no need for faux-solemnity and gravity that is customary in this opera, but rather the evocation of a state of supreme sublime bliss. That element of danger crashes in by the end of Act II however, and when it does it ought to be felt viscerally. No matter what else you make of the Berlin production as a whole, it's in the musical expression and performance of those states under the direction of Daniel Barenboim that the work just soars. Barenboim's pacing and drive is superb, the score measured in mournfulness, ecstatically driven where necessary without ever being aggressive, shifting from lyrical to dramatic, from a roar to a whimper. With emphasis (at least in the mix of the streamed recording) on brass and woodwind rather than the darker strings, there is more colour given to those moods, shifting emphasis in ways I've never heard before.
Barenboim also takes care in the conducting to allow space for and support of the singing voices. Accordingly, Act III of this Tristan und Isolde is one of the most complete and impressive I've ever seen. Andreas Schager almost makes Act III look effortless, drawing on inexhaustible reserves. You might think that he is perhaps too lively for a mortally wounded man - although there is no obvious wound struck in Act II - but it's clear that if he's going to expire it's won't be from a sword wound but rather exploding with ecstasy, which indeed is more true to Tristan's fate. It's here that the director interpolates somewhat, showing Tristan lost in memories of his mother and father, or reveries even since his mother is pregnant with him in the acted-out domestic scenes that share the stage with him (and a cor anglais player) in his room on Kareol. Tcherniakov at least attempts to make something more of the words and it's certainly more thoughtful than playing the scene with him just writhing in delirium.
Whether you can rationalise it as being something to do with death and rebirth, somehow the simple image of an alarm clock and the drawing of a curtain over the little back room where the prostrate lifeless form of Tristan has been carried creates an extraordinarily effective and moving finale. I don't know if it's really within Wagner's intentions, whether it just finds another way to approach what Wagner intended, but aligned to that remarkable music, with Barenboim's conducting and Anja Kampe reaching those incredible heights, Dmitri Tcherniakov's production does seem to find its own way to capture the indescribable beauty of the sentiments of the final scene. Whatever else you might think about the production, if it gets you there and makes that kind of impact, it's done something right.
Links: Berlin Staatsoper, Culturebox
Giacomo Puccini - La Rondine
Teatro Carlo Felice, Genova - 2018
Giuseppe Acquaviva, Giorgio Gallione, Elena Rossi, Giuliana Gianfaldoni, Arturo Chacón-Cruz, Marius Brenciu, Stefano Antonucci, Giuseppe De Luca, Didier Pieri, Davide Mura, Francesca Benitez, Marta Leung, Marina Ogii
TCF Streaming - 21 March 2018
It has some supporters - the Royal Opera House and Angela Gheorghiu among them - but for a work that comes in the midst of Puccini's mature period, La Rondine is surprisingly a mostly forgotten and neglected work. I entirely forgot about it myself when I assessed the strengths and weakness of Puccini's work post-Butterfly in my recent review of Turandot, but it's at least 15 years since the only time I saw the work performed - in Dublin - and despite it having Puccini's familiar melodic strengths, it's clearly not the most memorable work, and it's hard to see how it can be rehabilitated for a modern audience.
It's not that La Rondine is a bad opera as much as it feels like a misstep by Puccini, who uncharacteristically appears to look towards other operas for inspiration and direction rather than follow his own instincts. La Rondine comes across as an attempt to look back at Verdi's La Traviata and attempt to do for Paris what Strauss did for the glory days of Vienna in Der Rosenkavalier; taking a light operetta setting and likewise filling the score with dance melodies that are ironic and nostalgic at the same time. As lovely as it can look and sound, La Rondine nonetheless comes across as slight and superficial, with none of the same sense of engagement that Strauss and Hoffmansthal had with Der Rosenkavalier, and hence none of its sense of fun and sophistication.
Everywhere in La Rondine you get a sense of compromise - compromise that resulted in no less than three versions of the opera, as Puccini struggled to give it some shape and depth. Even the plot seems to only really superficially resemble the setting and action of La Traviata without really connecting to any true emotions or the social commentary that fired Verdi's response to the subject. La Rondine opens with the party of a courtesan, Magda. Amidst the scene-setting introductions to the characters, which present Puccini with a number of songs and dance melodies that he sets beautifully, Magda reflects on her position, and on a lost love in the past that a new visitor Ruggero has brought to mind. When the guests leave, she wonders whether she might still have a chance at love and, disguised as Paulette, she follows him to a night spot that had been recommended by some of the other guests.
Puccini can't but follow his own style however, and the scene at Bulliers in Act II of La Rondine owes more to La Bohème's Cafe Momus; the scene filled with life, glamour, colour and the promise of romance, no matter who you are or what your past is. Elsewhere, La Bohème likewise remains like a model imposed unsuccessfully over La Traviata as a way of treating the subject. In Act III, when 'Paulette' and Ruggero go to Nice to be free to love outside the constraints and gossip of Paris society, Puccini introduces a tension similar to Act III of La Bohème. Although like Violetta and Alfredo there are financial problems with this arrangement and a crisis of conscience for Magda who doesn't want to destroy the young man's reputation, her self-sacrifice here comes like Mimi's in the form of a decision to return to her wealthy benefactor Rambaldo in Paris, who loves her for who she is and can provide for her.
And Puccini, in the second version anyway, leaves things there, with none of the fire and fury of La Traviata, and none of the melodramatic and heart-rending deaths from tuberculosis scenes of either La Traviata or La Bohème. It might be refreshing to have the heroine live at the end, but it doesn't provide a strong narrative arc in the sense of love being taken through to death that makes Tosca, La Bohème and Madama Butterfly such perfect dramatic opera creations. Like Manon Lescaut, La Rondine feels like it's short of an Act that might better round out the drama, characterisation and bring some further emotional engagement with the characters and their situation. Without it, Puccini's music in La Rondine feels empty and perfunctory, just as Manon Lescaut feels over-elaborate for its slightness.
There is one respect in which Puccini is characteristically successful and that is his association of mid-19th century Paris with the idea of glamour, romance, music and colour. All of the characters constantly vaunt its charm in their conversations; its night-life, its writers, its music, its dancers, its women - a place where anything can happen and dreams can come true, but it's also a place that can turn the head of the unwary. It's also a place where for some who are supposedly living the dream, like Magda, it can bring social pressures and expectations that are hard to continue to live up to in opposition to one's deeper needs and nature, and the swallow (la rondine) needs to fly south. It's a rounded portrait of the attractions and pitfalls of the City of Lights, if not a socially realistic one, or even a La Bohème verismo one which the harsh deaths in La Bohème and La Traviata at least bring emphatically to the forefront.
Giorgio Gallione's production for Genoa captures the essence of both Paris and Nice well, as well as mark the contrasts between them, without having to rely on hackneyed Belle Epoque imagery. The period is updated to another stylish era that has echoes of the 1920s, albeit a little more hyperstylised and glamourised. There are plenty of party-goers and lots of dancers doing choreographed moves at Magda's party in Act I and at Bulliers in the colourful night club scenes of Act II, but it also manages to convey a sense that it is all forced, as the disguises and the contrasting behaviour between the couples of Magda and Ruggero and Prunier and Lisette suggest. Act III in Nice is also highly stylised, more open and easy going by Paris, but with a single fallen tree and sun terrace figures in the background, it also hints that pressures remain and all is not ideal for Magda and Ruggero.
I don't find Puccini's music for La Rondine particularly inspired, memorable or well-attuned to the dramatic action. It feels perfunctory in its distribution of arias, in its weaving of songs and dance melodies and rarely displays any of the composer's true character. It's performed well though by the Carlo Felice Genova orchestra under conductor Giuseppe Acquaviva, who keeps it light and buoyant. The singing certainly has its challenges, but they seem to be more in the bel canto register that you rarely find anywhere else in Puccini, although there are certainly dramatic and lyrical challenges in the role of Magda, which Elena Rossi sings very well. The lead tenor role doesn't particularly have great character to it in this opera, but Arturo Chacón-Cruz brings a romantic charm to Ruggero. and there's lively support from Giuliana Gianfaldoni's Lisette and Marius Brenciu as Prunier.
Links: Teatro Carlo Felice, TCF Streaming
Luigi Dallapiccola - Il Prigioniero
Wolfgang Rihm - Das Gehege
La Monnaie-De Munt, Brussels - 2018
Franck Ollu, Andrea Breth, Ángeles Blancas Gulín, Georg Nigl, John Graham-Hall, Julian Hubbard, Guillaume Antoine
La Monnaie MM Streaming - January 2018
The challenges of writing an opera in the serial music form could perhaps be measured by how few actually make it to completion and by the shortness of length of those that are actually finished. Even Schoenberg, the inventor of the twelve-tone dodecaphonic system only completed one short opera in this form, Von Heute auf Morgen, and left his one longer masterpiece Moses und Aron unfinished. Berg likewise left his the troubled Lulu unfinished at the time of his death, while Wozzeck only has twelve-tone elements. There are however other notable extended operas that are largely written in the serial form including Bernd Alois Zimmerman's Die Soldaten and Ernst Krenek's Karl V. As Wozzeck, Lulu and Moses und Aron testify however, while the composition of such complex works presents considerable and sometimes insurmountable challenges, they also bring specialised demands for staging, performance and use of musical resources.
As formidable as they often appear to be however there is nothing limiting about the works in terms of musical expression, and Luigi Dallapiccola's Il Prigioniero finds a terrific range of expression even within the limitations of a 50 minute work set almost entirely within the confines of a prison cell. Just as Schoenberg was able to extend the situation of a biblical story to explore more personal ideas and obsessions, the richness and uniqueness of the musical language available permits Dallapiccola to delve more deeply into the themes that arise for a political prisoner in relation to freedom, political expression, hope and disillusionment, and apply it to greater concerns in the troubled times of the 1940s.
Il Prigioniero opens then with a dramatic soprano voice, the mother of the prisoner, speaking out at the horror of the regime that has led to her son being held and tortured in prison. Dallapiccola follows this cry of despair with a lament from a large chorus, "Lord have mercy on us. Our hope lies in you". It's in this state that we find the prisoner about to give up all hope until a single word changes his outlook and insinuates itself into the mood of the whole piece; "fratello" - brother. The jailer who offers this lifeline to grasp follows it with another word, "spera" - have faith. Finding the door left open, one perhaps more metaphorical than real considering the developments, the prisoner follows the path of hope down the corridor outside his cell.
The chorus fill in again, their lament turned to praise for the light, which brings an "Alleluia" out of the prisoner for freedom, but it's premature and illusory, as the path is one that leads to his execution. The fullness of expression, the use of words, the chorus, as well as the post-romantic sweep of the score in the dynamic between the dark and the light is one that recalls a similar use of these elements in Moses und Aron. It's brought out fully in Dallapiccola's score, given wonderful expression in Franck Ollu's direction at La Monnaie in Brussels, and in the writing for the contrasting voices of Ángeles Blancas Gulín as the mother, Georg Nigl as the prisoner and John Graham-Hall offering hope in the form of the jailer only to take it away as the Grand Inquisitor.
Andrea Breth's direction also tries to give as much expression as can be found in the work, in the darkness, in the cage of a cell, opening it up with light, bringing sudden cuts to black, stripping the stage bare at the conclusion when all hope is gone and opening the back of the stage to a blinding heavenly light that shines out on the emptiness within. It was Andrea Breth who worked with Franck Ollu (and Nigl and Graham-Hall) to similarly striking effect on Wolfgang Rihm's Jakob Lenz at La Monnaie in 2015 and the collaboration reunites to present another Rihm short opera that is paired brilliantly with Dallapiccola's Il Prigioniero.
Although deriving from the other half of the twentieth century, Rihm's Das Gehege (The Enclosure) also has roots in the post-Romantic, in Richard Strauss rather than Schoenberg, although not so much the lush orchestrations of latter-day Strauss as the jagged rupturing of post-Romanticism in the expressionism of Salome and Elektra. In the expression of a woman who has captured an eagle and sets it free only to kill it when she realises that it no longer has the vitality and strength to survive, Das Gehege bears a similar tone of intense dark eroticism, with even a hint of the fantasy world symbolism of Die Frau ohne Schatten.
Breth's direction draws out the Salome-like underlying erotic fascination in a woman who is filled with dark desires and ends up killing the thing she professes to love by having the woman in the cage, the enclosure, joined by a series of men with bird heads and wing attachments in a dance of death. Outbursts of anguished singing are broken up with brief instrumental expressions of lust and fury that are accompanied in the darkness by disorientating strobe lighting that leaves behind a trail of bodies. More than just in the use of the same cage that held the prisoner - the woman likewise a prisoner of fatal unquenchable urges - there are other visual cross-references and correspondences made with Il Prigioniero, notably Georg Nigl playing one of her avian victims and a staircase that offers a descent as much as a way out.
As explosive as the musical expression is, its fractured structure carrying an underlying tug of lyrical romanticism, a considerable amount of responsibility for carrying the force of the whole of Das Gehege lies with the soprano singing the Frau, the only singing role in the opera. Ángeles Blancas Gulín, already showing stamina and ability to meet the highly pitched demands of the mother in Il Prigioniero, gives another impressive performance here that is electrifying and terrifying, striking that balance between being derangedly in thrall to her passions, but tempering any over-intensity with a seductive lyrical tone. She has to do that while climbing the cage, hanging upside down over the shoulder of one of her paramours or sprawled in one shape or another and somehow never falters a note.
Links: La Monnaie,
Giacomo Puccini - Turandot
Teatro Regio Torino, 2018
Gianandrea Noseda, Stefano Poda, Rebeka Lokar, Jorge de León, Erika Grimaldi, In-Sung Sim, Antonello Ceron, Marco Filippo Romano, Luca Casalin, Mikeldi Atxalandabaso, Roberto Abbondanza, Joshua Sanders
OperaVision - January 2018
Puccini's position in the pantheon of opera greats is pretty much unshakeable, with works like Tosca, Madama Butterfly and La Bohème likely to remain as much of a fixture in many opera houses as the stalls seats. Even in those great works, it's the musical qualities that elevate the manipulative twists of the drama and, in some cases, compensate for the thinness of the characterisation. Puccini's other works around his glorious Trinity are variable and equally flawed, but often more interesting. I remain agnostic on La Fanciulla del West, where as interesting as the musical development is it can't redeem the banalities of its stock Western gold rush clichés, and I think that the earlier Manon Lescaut has been elevated beyond its merit, but Il Trittico is a fine showcase that extends the range of Puccini's musical and dramatic palette. And then there's Turandot, whose unfinished state offers an intriguing contemplation of what might have been.
Puccini's struggle to finish the work before his death in 1924 perhaps gives some indication that the finished work might inevitably have been just as flawed and compromised as the endings that were written for it by Franco Alfano and Luciano Berio. It's as if Puccini had solved the first two of the Princess Turandot's riddles and hadn't yet figured out the answer to the third, but the two thirds of the work completely scored by the composer offer an intriguing glimpse of a new direction that Puccini might have further explored. The first act alone is monumental on the scale of the Triumphal March from Verdi's Aida, but it carries an undercurrent of menace and a through-compositional flow that is equal to Wagner at his most charged and lyrical. All too often (The Met, Royal Opera House), Turandot's true qualities risk being obscured and mired in kitsch Oriental fairy-tale fantasy when there is actually a much darker tale in there.
The question then is what to do with Turandot, which risks falling into so many operatic traps and mannerisms that can obscure its true nature and potential. Calixto Bieito's production was the first I've seen that attempted to delve into the dark terror of a cruel authoritarian regime that is vividly depicted in the fairy tale. Instilling fear in the people, blinding them with obscure ideological riddles, oppressing free expression of the individual through the arts, Bieito's vision is a controversial rewriting certainly, but it's a treatment nonetheless that is commensurate with the grand scale of the work's grand musical expression. Interestingly, Bieito's production doesn't attempt to resolve or fix an unfinished work and lets it end on the dark note of Liù's death, and that is also the sentiment that Gianandrea Noseda and Stefano Poda strive to match in their production for the Teatro Regio Torino.
While you could also see some measure of Bieito's vision of Turandot as a totalitarian nightmare in the Turin production, the approach of Stefano Poda is rather more abstract and focussed more on a kind of tyranny of the mind. "Turandot," we are told by Ping, Pang and Pong "does not exist" and Poda takes that as the basis for his production, concerned more with Turandot as an obsessive instinct on the part of Calaf to want to take part in some impossible and unrewarding ideal. According to Poda, Turandot is a dream, the conflict of Calaf struggling to escape his own mind and exist outside of himself. If the case of what to do with Turandot isn't entirely answered by these ideas in the Turin production, perhaps that's because it's an impossible task anyway.
Poda, who designs the costumes and the sets as well as directing, accordingly places Turandot not in some oriental location but in "a non-place made of light". There's something cold and scientific about the setting, all of the figures looking alike, as if cloned, devoid of personality or indeed imperfections. There is a vaguely sinister aspect to this, as it would be if it were the ideology of a nation or state, with Ping Pang and Pong carrying out experiments on dead bodies, but Poda sees it rather as the idealised worldview of someone with no real experience of the outside world. The lines bisecting the almost entirely naked bodies of the dancers in the production are not the result of some experiment operated on them as much as it represents a kind of metaphysical dualism.
Whether you buy into this conceptual idea or not, or whether you even find that it makes sense, the production does at least seek to address the issue of the mythological in Turandot rather than depicting it as a rather improbable and meaningless fairy-tale as it would be if it were taken literally. Little of the traditional stage directions are adhered to, the production representing the usual outward manifestations of torture, beheading and riddle-playing as more of a metaphorical struggle. Purely in terms of spectacle the production looks incredible and is wonderfully choreographed, but it also works in conjunction with Puccini's extraordinary score to create something otherworldly. Noseda's conducting of the work highlights the qualities and the unusual elements of the orchestration that makes a strong case for the opera as the pinnacle of Puccini's output.
The linked interviews here with Stefano Poda and Gianandrea Noseda reveal other interesting thoughts on the subject, Poda observing that Turandot is the last great opera of the Italian tradition. Italian opera could certainly be said to have reached its apogee in Turandot and it ends here appropriately with Puccini's death. It's significant then that the work is unfinished, as if it had nowhere else to go, and Poda is content for it to remain in that state. So too is Noseda who proposed this purist approach towards Puccini's score, noting that Turandot is a product of a post-war unease, looking back for answers in older forms of dramatic expression like Carlo Gozzi. It's no coincidence that many find the ending of Turandot dramatically unsatisfying since Puccini himself was unable to find the answers he was looking for in it.
Poda and Noseda then are both of the opinion that what Puccini has completed is enough and that in its curtailed unfinished state, the work can nonetheless provide a more satisfying or realistic resolution than anything Puccini or any one of the composers who have tried to complete it were able to achieve. Whether you agree with the approach of directors like Stefano Poda or Calixto Bieito before him, the results speak for themselves, revealing that there is far more to Turandot than is often thought and that it deserves to be taken seriously on its musical terms rather than as a piece of operatic kitsch. Those musical and singing challenges are not inconsiderable either and they are given a fine account under Noseda's musical direction. The singing in Turandot can also be very challenging and although Turandot, Calaf and Liù are treated very much as ciphers here, Rebeka Lokar, Jorge de León and Erika Grimaldi perform admirably. Between this and Bieito's production, there's plenty to suggest that Turandot merits this kind of considered approach and in as far as using the unfinished version, it makes a strong case that less is definitely more.
Links: Teatro Regio Torino, OperaVision
Gioachino Rossini - Le Comte Ory
L'Opéra Comique, Paris - 2017
Louis Langrée, Denis Podalydès, Philippe Talbot, Julie Fuchs, Gaëlle Arquez, Éve-Maud Hubeaux, Patrick Bolleire, Jean-Sébastien Bou, Jodie Devos, Laurent Podalydès, Léo Reynaud
Culturebox - 29th December 2017
There's a general consensus that Rossini's final opera Guillaume Tell is the pinnacle of the composer's relatively short but prolific period as an opera composer (around 40 operas in just 20 years), but there are other lighter and more playful pieces in Rossini's late French works that are equally as accomplished as William Tell. True there may arguably be greater masterpieces among the earlier Italian works like Mosè in Egitto and - who am I to dispute it? - the perennial charm of Il Barbiere di Siviglia - but leaving aside the re-works of Le siege de Corinthe and Moise et Pharaon, the operas composed for a French audience like Il viaggio a Reims and Le comte Ory are remarkable confections that combine a lightness of touch and crowd-pleasing numbers with extraordinarily beautiful and inventive melodic arrangements.
Le comte Ory might not have much of a plot to speak of, but the musical writing is equally as impressive and sophisticated in its expression and arrangements as the work that preceded it, Il viaggio a Reims, an opera that was written for the one-off occasion of the coronation of Charles X in 1825. Believing music too good to be lost (as it would actually be for 150 years or so), Rossini reused much of it for the composition of Le comte Ory. The earlier work had more of a variety show numbers feel to it (Rossini ahead of the game there, much as he was in his development of grand opéra and bel canto, or unforgivable depending on your viewpoint, although he can hardly be blamed for the excesses or banality of others in those fields), so Rossini had to be a little creative in how he reworked the musical material to fit a dramatic plot for Le comte Ory.
You can hardly call the plot sophisticated, as the first half of the opera involves a nobleman, the Count Ory, who disguises himself as a wise hermit so that he can seduce the credulous wives of all the men who have left them alone and unloved and gone off to fight in the Crusades. In the second half, the licentious young Comte Ory puts into play a suggestion that his page Isolier has concocted as a way that might get himself close to the Countess Adèle, sister of the lord of Formoutiers, who he is in love with. Using the page's idea for himself, Ory disguises himself and his men as nuns on a pilgrimage so that they can gain access to the otherwise inaccessible womanly delights that are locked away in the Countess's castle, fearful of the storm outside and looking for comfort.
As a way of providing a variety of colourful scenes for the composer to apply his melodic and effervescent music to however, Le comte Ory gets the job done. And with considerable style and aplomb. It's almost casually brilliant in making it all seem effortlessly light and entertaining. In fact, the work is filled with dramatic and comedic expression, allowing opportunities for individual virtuosity that impress as much as they amuse. The extravagant coloratura and high notes are more often used for comic emphasis and expression of the whirlwind of emotions that are stirred up rather than just being thrown in for the sake of showing-off. Boosted by a capella harmonised ensembles and invigorating choruses, the work transmits that sense of joyful abandon to the audience in the most direct and engaging way that any opera should.
The perceived silliness of the plot however often - in the relatively rare occasions when it is performed - leads modern directors to add a distancing effect (The Met, Pesaro) that actually has the effect of diluting the wholly intentional silliness and comedy of the situation. Why can't they just play the comedy 'straight', so to speak? Well that's what Denis Podalydès does in this wonderfully entertaining production at the Opera Comique (the Paris opera house that knows the real value of light French comic opera) with the result that the work just sparkles with the natural verve and brilliance of its composition. Not to mention that it has a superb cast capable of bringing out all those inherent qualities in the work.
Podalydès doesn't need any clever device or framing structure to make this confection any sweeter. The comedy is in the situation itself and the director just ensures that the performers play them up to the hilt and for all they are worth. Eric Ruf's set for Act I is no more than a country church and Ory is disguised more as an eccentric priest than a hermit, but I guess you might think that the distinction is negligible as far as giving people false hopes in mystical advice to a gullible congregation while serving one's own interests. It functions dramatically, other than the intentional thinness of the count's disguise of course. Act II's set places a group of anxious women huddling from the storm in a rather austere castle interior that protects their virtue from the likes of Count Ory, where rather than a bed, the Countess seems to sleep on a stone tomb.
While the setting heightens the contrasts between the repressed women and libidinous behaviour of Ory and his men, the humour in Act II is mostly derived from men, some of them with beards, all disguised as nuns forgetting to act demurely and in a holy way and instead hiking their skirts up and singing boisterous drinking songs. And if that's not funny, I don't know what is. Well, apart from some ménage-a-trois bedroom farce antics of course and Podalydès direction ensures that it is played entirely for as many laughs as it's possible to get out of the situation. In a nice little twist he also makes the Countess not quite as credulous and submissive as you might think, entering fully into the bed-hopping shenanigans which, with Isolier in a trouser role, already has some gender-ambiguous suggestiveness.
If there's a reason why Le comte Ory is actually considerably funnier in performance than it might sound on paper it's got a lot to do with Rossini's music, and it's given a vigorous outing here by Louis Langrée. Sophistication and precision aren't always a prerequisite for a Rossini musical performance, when sometimes what it needs more is fervour and passion, but Langrée's musical direction enjoys the best of both worlds. There's detail in the colouring of the instrumentation as well as precision, pace and passion in the rhythm and rich melodic flavours of the scenes and the arias. The singing, which is extraordinarily challenging for such a light comic piece, is handled with aplomb and character by Philippe Talbot's Comte Ory, who has a lovely lyrical timbre that carries even to the high notes. Julie Fuchs is a sparkling countess, putting her high notes to good use as exclamations and as a release of repressed emotions. The singing and performances are a joy from all the cast, with Gaëlle Arquez an impressive Isolier and Éve-Maud Hubeaux an irrepressible Dame Ragonde.
Links: L'Opéra Comique, Culturebox
Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill - The Threepenny Opera
Northern Ireland Opera, Lyric Theatre - 2018
Sinead Hayes, Walter Sutcliffe, Kerri Quinn, Matthew Cavan, Orla Mullan, Tommy Wallace, Jolene O'Hara, Paul Garrett, Richard Croxford, Jayne Wisener, Brigid Shine, Maeve Smyth, Mark Dugdale, Steven Page, Gerard McCabe
Lyric Theatre, Belfast - 30 January 2018
An opera that isn't really an opera is an interesting choice for the directorial debut of Northern Ireland Opera's new Artistic Director, Walter Sutcliffe. His predecessor, Oliver Mears however opened his tenure in a similarly non-traditional and low-key fashion with Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium - also in a theatre rather than the opera house - the indication being possibly that opera has much more to offer than La Traviata and Madama Butterfly, and that it can and should be accessible to everyone. Indeed Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's street-theatre piece The Threepenny Opera has precisely the same ideal of breaking down traditional barriers, and if anything that's the real beauty of the work, and not a bad statement of intent either if you want to see it that way.
Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera is just one in a long tradition of works that have brought a taboo-breaking common touch to opera. The Threepenny Opera was modelled on John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), putting a glamorous criminal 'Mack the Knife' and the low-life of society at the heart of an opera, filling it with popular accessible music and bawdy scenes. If you want, you can go right back to Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea for similar daring shifts in the subject of opera to appeal to a wider audience, and you could take it right up to Thomas Adès's scandalous Powder her Face, a work which indeed has also recently made its mark in Belfast at the Lyric Theatre in an NI Opera production. In that respect, Walter Sutcliffe's production of The Threepenny Opera continues a tradition of exposing audiences to opera that challenges and entertains.
It's difficult then to judge a production of The Threepenny Opera by traditional standards. It has to be judged on its own terms, and perhaps its aims - to challenge and entertain - aren't so different from those presented to its original audience in Berlin in 1928. Leaving aside whether it really meets the criteria of opera - where boundaries are flexible and are still being pushed forward in works like Evan Gardner's Gunfighter Nation, where the musicians are also the dramatic and singing performers - the basic principle of putting on a show with musical numbers that tells a story is there in place in The Threepenny Opera, and it can be used as a means of expressing or exposing social attitudes or issues in the world today. Some things - money, greed, criminality, corruption - never change or go out of fashion, it seems.
Walter Sutcliffe makes perhaps only a token effort at any contemporary political or local social reference, but the nature and structure of the work itself with its Brechtian theatre innovations can be the best vehicle for making us think about what The Threepenny Opera tells us about the world today; ie. there's a lot of theatre involved. The focus then is rightly about making this an engaging piece of musical theatre with grotesque exaggerated characters, bold sets, colourful costumes, colourful language too and swinging musical numbers that, thanks to it becoming a swing standard over the years, even has an instantly recognisable bona-fide classic hit in its repertoire, the wonderful 'Mack the Knife'. If that doesn't draw you straight into The Threepenny Opera, nothing will.
There were perhaps just a little bit of self-consciousness and nerves early in the preview shows of the NI Opera production at the Lyric Theatre, but then director Walter Sutcliffe doesn't make it easy for the cast by making practically the entire stage a steep cabaret staircase with narrow steps for them to teeter down on heels while singing the famous opening number. Dorota Karolczak's sets and costumes however are entirely appropriate, telling us - as if it isn't already apparent from the garish costumes, heavy make-up and colourful wigs - that this is purely a theatrical confection; don't be expecting any hard-hitting social realism here. This is a show, and we're here to entertain you.
And although it might take a little while to warm to the exaggerated and unfamiliar form of 1920s German jazz-cabaret theatre, entertain it does. By the time we get to the conclusion, we've been caught up in the sordid little dealings and womanising polygamy of 'Mack the Knife' Macheath, the money-making exploitation of the poor beggars by Jonathan Peachum, the mistreatment of the Wapping prostitute Jenny Diver and her girls, the bribery and corruption of police superintendent Jackie 'Tiger' Brown and his officers, and even the compicity of the church is called out in Reverend Kimball's blessing of the union of Mack and Polly Peachum. There's plenty there played out in broad strokes to entertain, and if it no longer shocks in the same way, it's at least a shock that such goings-on are now nothing more than we've come to expect from celebrities, politicians and the establishment.
Other than the inclusion of the local vernacular, Sutcliffe is probably wise not to draw any obvious comparisons to current affairs and political events in the world today, in this particular work anyway. There's only one overt contemporary reference where the famous image of Syrian refugees marching into Europe is displayed. It's a reminder, in the spirit of the original, that even behind the fiction and glamour the dealings of this little group of individuals relies on the exploitation of the less fortunate masses whose fate is casually ignored. Mack being saved from the gallows at the final moment may be a moment of Brechtian theatre drawing attention to the artificiality of dramatic narrative, but in its own way it also points to the truth that those with power, money and influence write their own story and, unlike the people whose lives they destroy, they tend to come out of such scandals relatively unscathed.
Judging it by the casting alone, which is made up more of actors more familiarly seen on the Lyric stage than the Grand Opera House, The Threepenny Opera is more musical-theatre than opera in the traditional sense. That doesn't mean however that the standards that need to be met aren't just as high, nor that they weren't indeed met. Even if there's a measure of musical-theatre belting it out, there were some very impressive singing performances. Jayne Wisener's Polly Peachum has a light voice, but it's sung in a way that was a perfect match for her character's delightfully ambiguous moral outlook, her calculated ruthlessness and casual indifference to all manner of criminal activity and moral depravity masked by a disarming sweetness. Brigid Shine's Lucy Brown showed an impressive range and control in her singing, again matching the feistiness of her character. Mark Dugdale has plenty of experience in music theatre and carried the role of Mack with a confident swagger and charm. Where caricature and exaggerated counted more than singing ability, Matthew 'Cherrie Ontop' Cavan's Mrs Peachum and Richard Croxford's scouse Jackie Brown all delivered wonderfully entertaining performances, and in baritone Steven Page's Jonathan Peachum you had the best of both disciplines.
Behind all the exaggeration and caricature, fleeting moments of human sentiment and character emerged, principally in the character of Jenny Diver, sensitively performed and well sung by Kerri Quinn. If The Threepenny Opera is to deliver that kind of range between crowd-pleasing belters and moments of quieter reflection it needs to be well managed from the point of view of the music. The musical rhythms are vital, charming and engaging, with unusual instrumentation and harmonies to throw us off and hint at an underlying unease and sleaze. Sinead Hayes brought that out with a somewhat more refined arrangement, the restraint allowing for greater emotional expression and sensitivity than you might expect from the smoky swagger of Kurt Weill's score. The placement of the orchestra to the wings of the staircase - all dressed in character - also provided a perfect balance and stereo separation between the music and the singing. Look out, old Macky is back.
