Britten - Death in Venice

Benjamin Britten - Death in Venice

English National Opera, 2013

Edward Gardner, Deborah Warner, John Graham-Hall, Andrew Shore, Tim Mead, Laura Caldow, Sam Zaldivar, Joyce Henderson, Marcio Teixeira, Peter van Hulle, Anna Dennis

Opus Arte - Blu-ray

Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice' would have been a work that chimed with Benjamin Britten's sensibility on a number of levels.  It deals with several recurring subjects - children, innocence, death and corruption - that can be found in the composer's most famous works. If Britten's final opera has however never achieved the same recognition or popularity as his masterful treatment of those themes in Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Screw, it's probably less to do with the strength of the musical composition itself - which is among Britten's most adventurous and powerful - as much as the difficulty of presenting the awkward subject matter and the dark undercurrents found in Mann's short novella in an accessible way to a modern audience.

On a personal level, Death in Venice deals with some less comfortable private matters that Britten himself struggled with in regards to his homosexuality and his attraction to young boys. Perhaps more significantly, or at least deeply connected to these issues, the work also deals with the question of the nature of the artist in the later stages of his life. In the figure of writer Gustav von Aschenbach, Britten would surely have recognised the nature of the artist's struggles with his darker impulses, the line between maintaining order and finding freedom of expression, the need to keep some matters private and make other personal observations public, the recognition of what is an elevated thought and what is derived from a basic urge. All the while Britten, like Aschenbach, has to deal with ordinary human struggles with illness, age, and with the fear of being isolated or set apart from other people.

Thomas Mann's extraordinarily rich work then is fully comprehended by Britten and brought across into musical terms with remarkable facility and precision. The libretto, by Myfanwy Piper, captures the detail and essence of the work while Britten's music makes it come alive and feel real, allowing us to sympathise with the elderly writer's queasy fascination for a beautiful young boy observed on the Lido beach in Venice. The attraction is more than just lustful, but is inspired by the love of youth itself. As a writer, Aschenbach recognises however that there is something of a self-destructive urge in his abandoning himself to the passions stirred up by the Polish boy, Tadzio, whom he observes playing with his brothers and sister, but never actually approaches.

Already on his way to his hotel in Venice through an encounter with Apollo and Dionysus and in his crossing the Styx on a "coffin black" gondola, the elderly writer already has an awareness that his travelling entails a certain amount of self-exploration, a "sudden desire for the unknown" that involves breaking down his formerly rigid position on simplicity of beauty and form. Ordered, stylised and measured, he feels the need to give himself up to something freer, something closer to purity and perfection that can only be achieved through a recognition of the darker side of perfection. "To exist in it and of it", to live it and make it more than merely words on a page.

Such self-knowledge however only comes in old age from the experience of a life lived, and that there is a bitter cruelty or irony when this is confronted with the beauty and perfection of blithely ignorant youth. In youth there is everything that one aspires to enjoy, but the knowledge only comes when one has lost it and can never regain it. There's a fatal attraction then in what this old man feels for the young boy, a idealised desire to possess what one cannot have, a sincere wish to see this wonder of youth and beauty elevated and worshipped, but also a horror at the possibility of his own corruption, sickness and old age corrupting it.

Words can only take this description of Aschenbach's sentiments so far, and Piper's libretto achieves this extremely well, but Britten's extraordinary music takes our understanding for it much further and allows those other unspoken and undignified sentiments to be expressed. Most obviously there are Eastern references in the music and the instrumentation that speak of the Sirocco conflating it with Aschenbach's old age, sickness and corruption, but the musical language and small-scale, chamber-like structure finds other unconventional means of expression, including a counter-tenor to sing Apollo and using a dancer instead of a singer for Tadzio.

Small-scale and intimate it may be, but the sweep of the ideas expounded requires a much bigger canvas, and that presents certain challenges for the theatrical presentation of the work.  Deborah Warner's critically acclaimed production for the English National Opera with Tom Pye's inventive set designs achieve that quite brilliantly. There's an openness and simplicity to the designs that works with the text of the libretto without over-illustrating it, creating the mood and atmosphere of Venice through the use of colour, light and silhouettes with imagery suggesting water and skies. It looks ravishingly beautiful as well as suggesting an openness of scale. The space also allows room for the ballet dancers to express all that youthful freedom and ambiguity that is contained within the figure of Tadzio, or projected upon him by Aschenbach.

A lot then evidently rests on this first-person perspective of Aschenbach and it could hardly be better expressed than John Graham-Hall's performance here. Seen recently on DVD in a vivid and fearless performance of Britten's Peter Grimes, Graham-Hall's light tenor, beautiful in timbre and enunciation, is also perfectly suited to the character of Gustav von Aschenbach. In an interview made during the live television broadcast of this performance, the singer stated that despite the challenges of being the centre of the entire work and singing on-stage for a large part of the opera, the quality of Britten's writing makes the performance easy. He may be right, but there's more to it than he modestly suggests. It's a role that requires commitment and sensitivity to the variations of tone in Aschenbach's descent from order to chaos, and Graham-Hall's demeanour from sophisticated traveller to crumpled madman is perfectly judged and delicately phrased throughout.

English National Opera have really only recently embraced the idea of filming, broadcasting and releasing productions for the cinema and DVD, and if this production is anything to go by, we've a lot to look forward to in future projects. On Blu-ray this looks and sounds outstanding. The image quality is crisp and captures this magnificent, colourful production of Death in Venice beautifully. It might be a little to clinically perfect for some even. The audio tracks are also impressive, both LPCM 2.0 and DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 crystal clear, revealing all the detail of Britten's unconventional instrumentation. You can hear every single instrument and note in the superbly balanced mix and the quality and clarity of the singing. There are no extra features on the disc other than a Cast Gallery, but the booklet contains an essay and an outline synopsis of the 17 scenes. Subtitles are English, French, German and Korean only.

Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier

Richard Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier

English National Opera, London, 2012

Edward Gardner, David McVicar, Amanda Roocroft, Sarah Connolly, John Tomlinson, Sophie Bevan, Andrew Shore, Madeleine Shaw, Adrian Thompson, Jennifer Rhys-Davies, Jaewoo Kim, Mark Richardson 

The Coliseum, 24 February 2012

If the previous night’s production at the Coliseum of the Richard Jones directed The Tales of Hoffmann was an example of throwing everything at a production to less than optimal effect, David McVicar’s production of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier the following night was a lesson in the virtue of understatement. Understatement is not a quality you often associate with either Richard Strauss or indeed David McVicar, and the use of the term is indeed relative. This revival of the English National Opera’s 2008 production is by no means minimalist, the stage lushly decorated in authentic-looking period design and costumes, but it makes the most effective use of that set design across all three acts with thoughtful arrangements and little fuss.

This is undoubtedly the best way to approach Strauss’s most extravagant and lushly detailed work. Every single word and gesture is already expressed, enhanced and accompanied by carefully considered notes and instruments to add layers of meaning and significance, and what they don’t need is for the stage direction to ignore them or work against them. That approach might be valid for introducing or bringing out notes of irony in relation to the subject in another opera, but Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s playful farce set amongst the nobility of mid-eighteenth century Vienna is already loaded with ironic intention and musical references to Strauss waltzes and to Mozart’s comic operas of lecherous nobles. It doesn’t need any other layers to confuse matters or disrupt the delicate balance in a manner that tips it over into being far too clever by half.

Surprisingly for this director, McVicar even chose to figuratively draw a veil (or stage curtain) over any on-stage visualisation of Strauss’s famous musical expression of the opening bedroom romp between the Marshallin and her young lover Octavian, preferring to let the stage bask in the golden afterglow of the morning after. Without any further stage devices other than the subtle shifts of golden light, Act 1 serves up the gorgeous luxuriousness of Strauss’s expression of those moments, the subsequent encounter with Baron Ochs and the Levée without any unwelcome distraction, intrusion or interpretation. Simply creating an appropriate environment for the detail of the score and the libretto of Der Rosenkavalier to work its own magic is sufficient, and that is brilliantly achieved here.

That makes it sound easy, but there is actually a lot of consideration put into actually understanding what the opera is about. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in a review of a recent Baden-Baden production, the opera is more than just a satire of 18th century Viennese society or a fond tribute to the Mozartian class comedy, but, setting it in an idealised past, it’s very much concerned with the passing of time, with the ways of the old making way for the way of the new. That’s not only expressed directly in the libretto, particularly in Marschallin’s reflections at the end of Act 1, or in the tradition of the Rosenkavalier itself for arranging marriages of convenience, but it’s reflected in the very fabric of the music, each of the long three acts taking place in real time where every second and every nuance of every moment, every expression of every character, individually and sometimes together, is crystallised in the most exquisitely detailed musical arrangements. Occasionally, it can feel excessive and over-elaborate, over-generous in its emotional expression to almost Puccini-like levels, leaving little for the listener to interpret for themselves, and leaving them merely as observers, but, my goodness, what brilliance to simply sit back and luxuriate in!

It’s a willingness on the part of director McVicar and conductor Edward Gardner to refrain from adding any personal touches or interpretations and simply take the cues from the score and the libretto, that serves the ENO’s production so well here. That’s not a matter of stepping back however and not being involved, but rather directing their efforts to where it is best employed, and that is in service of the performers on the stage. The drama moves along here so fluidly, with all its enjoyable little moments of visual humour and personal interaction, that it’s clear just how much consideration has been placed in giving the opera its best possible presentation, never getting bogged down in the cleverness of the detail, but with an eye to the bigger picture. Never in my experience of this work have those three acts of Der Rosenkavalier felt so perfectly a whole, with not a note out of place, not a gesture unwarranted, not a single moment that wasn’t simply thoughtful, delightful and entertaining.

A very great deal of the success of the work, no matter how thoughtful the attention given to the other elements of the production, lies in the casting, and the ENO’s current line-up delivered performances of astonishing quality. Individually, it would be hard to improve on a cast that includes Amanda Roocroft, Sarah Connolly, John Tomlinson and Sophie Bevan, but collectively they also work well together, giving appropriate weight and balance to the characters. A high-profile soprano in the role of Marschallin can tip the balance too much towards sentimental reflection, but while Amanda Roocroft is undoubtedly one of the top English sopranos she never let her character’s dilemma over-dominate proceedings. Marschallin’s self-sacrifice to the happiness of the young couple at the end was consequently deeply moving, particularly in the light of the perfection of how the production handled Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s setting of the scene.

The overbearing nature of Baron Ochs can also lead to this character dominating the show - the opera was indeed originally conceived with Ochs to the forefront and even went under the title of Ochs auf Lerchenau while it was being written - and that is certainly a possibility with as fine a singer as John Tomlinson in the role. Not only was the diction of his bass clear, musical and beautifully resonant, but his playing of the role of Ochs made the old goat genuinely sympathetic, without contradicting the less pleasant aspects of his character. He played Ochs not as a buffoon but as a throwback to the “old ways” of the privilege of nobility, formerly secure of his position, dishonourably regretting the reduction of his influence, but ultimately accepting of it as being in the nature of the passing of time and the way of youth to usurp the place of their elders.

The fact that Roocroft and Tomlinson impressed so greatly without over-dominating the proceedings is not only testament to the fine handling of the stage direction, but to having equally fine and impressive singers in the roles of Octavian and Sophie. Sophie Bevan was a spirited Sophie, her youthful innocence and purity matched by the depth of her feelings expressed so beautifully in her words to Octavian and in their delivery. Fitting in with the overall approach to the work, Sarah Connolly’s Octavian was a model of how to make an impact and have presence through understatement, or at least without overstatement. There’s a balance to be maintained between the comic and the serious elements in Octavian’s make-up, between his youthful enthusiasm and growing maturity, his sensitive delicacy and his hotheadedness, and as performed by Sarah Connolly, you could see that character develop in real-time over the course of the opera. She was in fine voice.

Certainly one of the best all-round performances I’ve ever seen of Der Rosenkavalier, the ENO production was also one of those all too rare occasions when the full potential of a great opera was fully realised and its impact could be felt throughout the house.