Rameau - Hippolyte et Aricie (Berlin, 2018)

Jean-Philippe Rameau - Hippolyte et Aricie

Staatsoper Unter den Linden, Berlin, 2018

Simon Rattle, Aletta Collins, Anna Prohaska, Magdalena Kožená, Gyula Orendt, Reinoud Van Mechelen, Peter Rose, Adriane Queiroz, Elsa Dreisig, Sarah Aristidou, Slávka Zámečníková, Serena Sáenz Molinero, Roman Trekel, Michael Smallwood, Linard Vrielink, Arttu Kataja, Jan Martiník

ARTE Concert

The tragédie lyrique operas of Lully and Rameau, since they were written for the French royal court in the 18th century, must be seen above all as grand spectacles. There are moral lessons to be imparted in their treatments of ancient Greek mythology that can still carry through, but what essentially strikes a modern audience when these works are performed is their extravagant blend of music, dance and colourful dramatic presentations that they seem to inspire. That spectacle can take many forms, from the ultra-traditional (Hippolyte et Aricie, 2012 Atys 2011) to the stylishly modern (Les Boréades, 2003),  or radically reworked (Les Indes Galantes, Bordeaux 2014) but whatever the case, the visuals must match up with the elaborate musical arrangements.

The 2018 Berlin Staatsoper production of Hippolyte et Aricie clearly doesn't go for the traditional approach of Paris 2012, and to be frank, it doesn't even go for anything recognisably contemporary like Jonathan Kent's 2013 Glyndebourne production or anything remotely naturalistic. On the other hand, there's nothing particularly naturalistic about the mythological subject and, looking back on Rameau's musical presentation of Racine's Phèdre today, there is something now otherworldly about the arrangements and the sound of the instruments themselves that, apart from Handel making them a little more familiar, is not commonly heard in the main repertoire.

Since the story revolves around Theseus's descent into Hades (following the traditional prelude of a dispute between the gods) you might at least expect there to be an otherworldly quality to the presentation, but this production very much has its own visual interpretation of those places. When you delve into such places and act outside the laws of nature - Phèdre falling in love with her husband's son Hippolyte and upsetting the order of her own marriage and Hippolyte's marriage to Aricie - well, then those consequences have far-reaching impact. That's something you can hear in the music and that's interpreted with some originality in the Berlin staging.

It certainly has extravagance and spectacle. The opening prelude is a dazzling display of mirrors and laser beams that are reflected and spread out across the auditorium of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden. Jupiter takes the form of a glitterball and even Phèdre is dressed in a gown of small fractured mirrors. The subsequent scene in the Underworld sees Theseus, Pluton and Tsiphone under individual coloured lights, each with their upper body bound up in a frame of interlocking circles, while dark furies shuffle around them on the stage, and the Parques (Fates) fire out superhero-like laser beams from their fists. Designer Ólafur Elíasson puts on quite a show.

So the production certainly has a distinct character of its own and is appropriately and literally dazzling as a spectacle, but it is still very much in keeping with the otherworldly character of the operatic places of mythology evoked by Rameau's elaborate rhythms and harmonies. Those aspects of the world of the immortals spills over into the 'real' world of Hippolyte and Aricie, and the production design takes this into account, allowing the dramatic impact of all this on the human characters to play out and speak for itself when Theseus returns to find his wife in a compromising situation with his son. You don't need special effects to see how he feels. Is this any way to greet someone who has just come back from the dead?

In the second half of the production Aletta Collins continues to explore whatever elements of stagecraft and choreography can best represent the underlying sentiments of Hippolyte et Aricie, never settling for anything conventional, but simplifying it to let the human emotions reassert their prominence. Sometimes that is nothing more than a Bill Viola-like projection of rippling water, but when Rameau's music steps up a gear, you get the full visual accompaniment and dancing.

It's a worthy attempt to revisit and re-envisualise Rameau, but it doesn't really make the work come alive, engage and having meaning the way that the impressive 2013 Glyndebourne production did. It's always great to hear what other performers can bring to these roles however and I think Gyula Orendt comes out as the strongest character here with his Theseus. Magdalena Kožená is not ideally suited to Phaedre or is perhaps not best suited to the more elaborate rhythms of French Baroque (even though her Gluck Orphée et Eurydice in the Paris Robert Wilson production is still a favourite of mine). Anna Prohaska and Reinoud Van Mechelen are fine as Hippolyte and Aricie, but they always feel like bland roles to me. Peter Rose is an excellent Pluto. Simon Rattle's conducting of the Freiburger Barockorchester didn't really grab me, but like most period baroque, it probably needs to be best experienced live. That perhaps goes for the production as a whole as well.

Links: Berlin Staatsoper Unter den Linden, ARTE Concert

Rossini - La Cenerentola (Belfast, 2017)

Giacomo Rossini - La Cenerentola

Opera North, 2017

Wyn Davies, Aletta Collins, Wallis Giunta, Sunnyboy Dladla, Quirijn de Lang, Henry Waddington, Sky Ingram, Amy J Payne, John Savournin

Grand Opera House, Belfast - 16th March 2017

It can't be easy to put on a programme of fairy-tale operas outside of the Christmas holiday season, as Opera North are doing in their current tour, but it at least provides an opportunity to rethink what the stories tell us and whether they are really all that linked to the seasons. The Snow Maiden aside - and even that proves to extend beyond its winter setting - Hansel and Gretel and Cinderella are both operas that you associate with the Christmas period without there being any real justification other than that they also make great pantomime material.

Opera North's production of Rossini's La Cenerentola attempts to take the pantomime elements out of the more traditional performance of the work and tries to find another way to present the vital ingredient of magic in a more contemporary and relatable context. There is nothing that is actually seasonal specific in Rossini's version of Cinderella anyway, the opera further dispensing with such traditional trappings of the golden slipper lost at the stroke of midnight and much of the fairy transformations. Aletta Collins's production for Opera North prefers to rely on other worthwhile elements in an opera that is too good to be left to compete with the pantomime market.

Collins's production takes place in a dance school, where everyone has been bitten by the 'Strictly' bug and dreams of cutting a glamorous figure on the dance floor. Anxious mothers pursuing the dream through their daughters, bring them to Don Magnifico's Scuola di Danza, where Don Magnifico's haughty and arrogant daughters Clorinda and Tisbe also hope to display their talents. Angelina, the Cinderella figure of the story, would also love to be able to dance, particularly as the prince has invited every lady in the land to a ball so that he can choose a wife, but Cenerentola's stepfather and step-sisters have more menial cleaning duties for her to perform. You know how it goes...

Traditionally Cinderella relies on glamour and set-pieces, with lots of sparkle and snow, but perhaps it puts too much trust in the need for spectacle. Aletta Collins trusts more in the inherent comedy of the piece, in the bright, dazzling music and in the actual romantic drama as being all that is really needed. As I mentioned in the case of Opera North's Hansel and Gretel, magic should be another essential ingredient in the fairy tale opera, but magic can come in many forms. Sometimes that magic can be a little more down to earth, a case of rising above one's impoverished circumstances and following a dream.

If it's often presented in a mild and inoffensive way, Cinderella also has a background in an unhappy home situation that she wants to escape. The damage caused by being the neglected child in a remarriage that leaves a young girl with an uncaring father and two bullying half-sisters can nonetheless be a traumatic experience. It might be dressed up in comedy, but you can feel the hurt and rejection and sympathise with Angelina's dream of revealing her true worth, of her beauty and talent being discovered. Rather than achieving that dream through marrying a Prince, it's perhaps easier to recognise that living the dream sentiment through being discovered in a reality-TV talent show.

Aletta Collins's production with sets designed by Giles Cadle, doesn't quite transfer it wholly across to this TV dance show format, but manages to retain a kind of in-between state between the dream and the reality. Evidently Opera North resources are limited and touring necessities don't allow for elaborate sets for three operas, but this works well with the effort to keep the production modern and real. Projections allow for some magic mirror tricks however, and there's is a delightful comic absurdity in many of the situations and details. One area that you can't skimp on however is in how you match it with Rossini's bubbly musical confection and Opera North know exactly how to present that in the best possible light.

Primarily, of course, it's in the playing of the music itself.  The effervescent rhythms, the clever arrangements, the 'magic' of the score are all brought in Wyn Davies' conducting of the orchestra. Instead of the usual strident galloping, Davies has a lightness of touch here that brings out the comic brightness of the underlying Mozart in the music, but it’s well measured for all its essential moods and tempi. You pay attention to Rossini's score like this and you'll also bring out the dazzling, energising writing for the vocal line and the cheeky ensemble pieces.

That's not easy to achieve without some exceptionally good singers and the singing here is first class. Rossini is always incredibly demanding in this respect and La Cenerentola is no exception, placing great virtuoso demands on the Angelina and Don Ramiro roles. When they are sung well however it's certainly noticeable and Wallis Giunta and Sunnyboy Dladla are both capable and impressive, flawless in technique but also in delivery, keeping everything bright and exuding charm as that other form of 'magic'.

What Rossini also clearly learned from Mozart is the importance of establishing strong personalities for all the individual characters, right down to the smallest role. In the case of La Cenerentola there are few minor roles, so the opportunity is there to really make something of the characters and that's exactly what the Opera North production does. Characters like Clorinda and Tisbe are too good to waste evidently and Sky Ingram and Amy J Payne live up to the larger than life harridans, and display some great singing too. The other roles are likewise wonderfully sung and played. Quirijn de Lang had the understated comedy of Dandini down perfectly and made a great impression alongside Henry Waddington's preening Don Magnifico and John Savournin's Alidoro. All of them contributed greatly to the colour and dynamic of a production that valued the magic of character and performance over empty gloss and spectacle.

Links: Opera North

Poulenc - La Voix Humaine/ Purcell - Dido and Aeneas

Francis Poulenc - La Voix Humaine
Henry Purcell - Dido and Aeneas

Opera North, 2013

Wyn Davies, Aletta Collins, Lesley Garrett, Pamela Helen Stephen, Phillip Rhodes, Amy Freston, Gillene Herbert, Heather Shipp, Louise Mott, Jake Arditti, Nicholas Watts, Rebecca Moon

Grand Opera House, Belfast, 8 March 2013

Opera North's Winter 2103 touring programme wonderfully covers four centuries of music, with Mozart's Clemenza di Tito from the 18th century, Verdi's Otello from the 19th, Francis Poulenc's La Voix Humaine from the 20th century and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas from the 17th century.  It's the combination of the latter two operas on the same bill however that represent the widest dynamic in such a way that they hardly seem complementary at all.  In reality however - particularly with the source of Dido and Aeneas stretching back 1,000 years to its source in Virgil's 'Aeneid' - what they demonstrate is the universality and commonality of human emotions that still have resonance in the 21st century.

The common theme that relates the two works is of course one that opera has specialised in over the years - that of the woman seduced, betrayed and abandoned.  The two works given here however represent lesser-known examples of that theme and certainly approach it musically and dramatically in very different ways.  As different as they are however, they each present a unique take on the subject and stand as important, powerful pieces that demonstrate the power of expression of the operatic art form.

Composed by Francis Poulenc in 1959 to a libretto by Jean Cocteau based on his own 1930 dramatic monologue, the one-act opera La Voix Humaine is unusual opera work in that it is written to be performed and sung by a single person, and sung moreover as a one-sided conversation that takes place on the telephone.  The unnamed woman ('Elle') is alone in her room, waiting anxiously for a phone-call from her ex-lover.  The conversation, occasionally interrupted by the unreliable service and a party-line, reveals that the man who had been her lover for five years is now about to be married to another woman and 'Elle' has been contemplating suicide.

There's an interesting ambiguity and modernity in the fact that the woman's desire for the warmth of love in the comforting sound of the human voice (la voix humaine) is brought to her electronically through a telephone line, but Poulenc and Cocteau's little drama abounds in such contradictions and ambiguities.  Is it a monologue or really a one-sided dialogue?  A dialogue would imply that the conversation is two-way, but it's clear that there is only one person who hopes to gain or express anything through the conversation.  In many respects, the woman is speaking to herself, grasping at the meagre lifeline that is being held out, but only for as long as the call lasts, trying to fool herself that all is not lost.  When that is gone all she is left with is that terrifying figure she sees reflected in the mirror before her.

Opera North's production, directed by Aletta Collins, played further on the ambiguities within the work with some clever visual references to that hateful mirror.  It not only reflects the truth about her lie that she is glamorously dressed after an evening dinner date, revealing instead a tired, graying woman on the edge of breakdown contemplating a bottle of pills on the dresser, but she can also see reflected in it all the horrors of her imagination, seeing her ex-lover enjoying parties and affairs with other women.  It's as vivid a visual representation of the harsh reality of the woman's situation and her mindset as it is possible to imagine.

With Lesley Garrett singing the role of 'Elle', it's also about as effective and expressive a performance of the woman's situation as you can imagine.  Poulenc's composition of the music and the singing part reflects the cadences of the spoken voice in a similar way to how Janáček would write, with rhythms and pauses, the rising and falling of tones and inflections, but evidently that's particularly relevant to a work that is called La Voix Humaine.  As a singer whose spoken voice alone is most musical, Lesley Garrett is the ideal kind of singer for this kind of piece, even if it is far from the more popular style of singing that she is famous for.  Her every gesture and inflection - singing the work in English - was perfectly judged in a way that made her character's circumstances compelling to watch and her inevitable fate as touching as it was chilling.

Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (c. 1689) is one of the earliest versions of a subject that Francesco Cavalli first covered in his opera La Didone (1641), but which became something of a standard in the Baroque opera repertoire with at least 50 works adapted to Pietro Metastasio's libretto (Didone Abbandonata) in the 18th century (including Hasse, Galuppi, Porpora, Vinci and Piccinni).  It might not have been the model that Poulenc's La Voix Humaine draws from, but the essential characteristic of a woman left to face her demons alone is just as vividly depicted in the fate of Dido when her lover Aeneas, who has "stopped over" in Carthage with the fleeing Trojans and then abandoned her to fulfil the destiny that the gods have in store for him in Italy.

Although it is fully scored - innovatively without recitative at this stage in the development of opera - and has a larger cast than Poulenc's mono-opera, the strength of this version of the Dido and Aeneas story (unlike Berlioz's Les Troyens, to take the most extreme example) is that it similarly focusses all its musical and dramatic elements on the predicament of the lone figure of a woman abandoned.  Dido's confidante Belinda tries to warn her and turn her away from her dark thoughts and Aeneas even appears and attempts to put his case to her, but the opera remains firmly viewed from the perspective of a woman who has suddenly become aware that her youth and happiness are slipping away.  

Like the reflections in the mirror of La Voix Humaine, Dido's thoughts, fears and nightmares are vividly real, given human form in witches and visions of herself - as a younger woman? - that follow her, mimic her, torment her and drive her to her doom.  This element is beautifully expressed in Aletta Collins' direction and Giles Cadle's set design of the darkened bedroom of long shadows, with spectres in the form of dancers that slip out from under and behind the bed, hovering in the background and persistently at the edge of Dido's vision until they overwhelm her.

Just as effective is the rhythmic drive of Purcell's score as performed by the Orchestra of the Opera North under conductor Wyn Davies, switching over to Baroque period instruments after the interval.  Although Dido threatened to become swamped by the figures and doppelgangers of her nightmares, there was no danger of Pamela Helen Stephen losing her grip on her character.  Purcell's Dido is as strongly defined as any of the many different depictions of this character in other works.  It may be short, around an hour long, but the focus on Dido and her reaction to her predicament is deep and intense.  Stephen gave that full expression in her singing, never more so than in those final moments of Dido's rejection of Aeneas' weak justifications.

Like the other two productions in this Opera North Winter 2013 touring programme, there was a wonderful completeness and attention to detail in the concept and the execution for both these short works.  From the casting of the roles, the direction of the performances, the staging, the costumes and the musical delivery, great care has evidently been put into making sure that everything comes together as a whole to express these works in the best possible light, and that was all the more evident in the complementary approach taken towards works as diverse as La Voix Humaine and Dido and Aeneas, separated by almost 300 years, but shown here still to be vital and relevant in the 21st century.