Ligeti - Le Grand Macabre (LSO, 2017)

György Ligeti - Le Grand Macabre

London Symphony Orchestra, 2017

Sir Simon Rattle, Peter Sellars, Peter Hoare, Ronnita Miller, Elizabeth Watts, Pavlo Hunka, Frode Olsen, Heidi Melton, Audrey Luna, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Peter Tantsits, Joshua Bloom, Christian Valle, Fabian Langguth, Benson Wilson

Barbican Hall, London - 14th January 2017

Maybe it's just a reflection of the strange times we are living in, but György Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre actually seemed to make a lot of sense in this timely semi-staged version of the composer's difficult and absurd anti-anti-opera. If anything the world has become even more absurd than Ligeti could ever have imagined in these post-truth, hard Brexit leaning times, a week away from Donald Trump becoming the President of the USA. Honestly, the goings-on on the stage at the Barbican made more sense and were more credible than last night's news. Truly, it seems that we are now living in Breughelland.

That's a tribute really to Peter Sellars, a director who has worked with Ligeti and who was instrumental in convincing the composer to work on the revised 1997 version of Le Grand Macabre, but it's also to the credit of Simon Rattle and the LSO, who unexpectedly turned a concert performance of this work into a revelatory experience. A semi-staged performance barely seems adequate for this work, nor does a serious treatment of it seem appropriate, but remarkably the comic absurdity and difficult music produced what turned out to be a meaningful, invigorating and thought-provoking experience at the first of its brief run of two performances at the Barbican.

The challenges of performing Le Grand Macabre, not to mention the relatively small specialised audience that it would appeal to, mean that we don't often get a chance to see this opera staged. If you were to rely solely on the most recent UK production of the work directed by La Fura dels Baus at the Coliseum, you would likely then only have a view of one side of the work where the emphasis is on the irreverence, the surreal, the vulgarity and the spectacle and it's unlikely that you would really have connected with any of the deeper content or message in the work. Sellars and Rattle show however that there is another side to Le Grand Macabre, many sides even, and in the process they show why consideration of a variety of interpretations of any work of art is important.

If there was one essential element or key theme in Le Grand Macabre that the La Fura dels Baus production and Peter Sellars share, it's the idea of the opera taking place in an apocalyptic end-of-times moment. Hence its absurdity. It's no surprise either that for Peter Sellars - who has collaborated with John Adams as the librettist for Doctor Atomic - the expression of that apocalyptic theme takes the form of us being on the brink of nuclear Armageddon. As Ligeti and his family experienced some of the worst horrors of the Holocaust and the Cold War, this is certainly a theme that is present as a dark undercurrent to the work.

There's not a lot of stage dressing needed to make this theme apparent in a semi-staged version. There are a couple of barrels of glowing toxic nuclear waste to both sides of the stage, but most of the context is relayed through screen projections at the back of the stage. Nick Hillel's video footage and projections are not just the familiar imagery you might expect, although mushroom clouds are certainly shown and there is footage of the meltdown of the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, but there is also a certain amount of humour at the irony and the horror of the nuclear arms race, a tone that is entirely appropriate within the context of Ligeti's work.

The realisation that it's all madness and that death is just around the corner seems to come to nuclear corporate executive Piet the Pot while doing a presentation for 'Clean Futures' at a Nuclear Energy Summit (London - Berlin 2017). He's taken a few drinks to steady himself for presenting something he presumably no longer believes in, so the combination of stage nerves and the alcohol seems to play havoc with the reality that he sees around him. The words of his colleagues in white lab coats, Armando and Armanda, seems suddenly suggestive and erotically inclined towards death, while his boss seems to materialise before his eyes in the form of Nekrotzar, Le Grand Macabre.

There are limits to how far you can take that kind of absurdity with all Ligeti's accompanying unconventional and often atonal music, and it's particularly difficult to sustain such a relatively thin premise across four scenes. The message, you would think, has been made abundantly clear very quickly indeed and the second scene between the astrologer Astradamors and his wife Mescalina seems to have little to add to the absurd situation. Nekrotzar's assumption of Astradamors' marital duties - carried out via the emotional distancing of an on-line chatroom here - is hammered home at the end of Act II with a map of the world being blasted with an infographics display of all the nuclear bombs that have been detonated since 1945. It's horrifying to imagine the damage that must have been inflicted not only on the the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in those first bombs, but also the scale of the cumulative environmental impact of such tests.

It's the quality of the work itself and its deeper meaning that reasserts itself in the second half, or rather it is assertively deployed by Sellars, Rattle, the LSO and an exceptional cast of singers. Geoffrey Skelton's English translation also makes a stronger impression when it has been placed in this context, the libretto's nonsense verse, wordplay, alliteration and invention revealed to be very clever and witty, revelling in the absurdity of all the madness and death of Nekrotzar's war machine. Witty and inclined to make you laugh, but not in itself laughable. This is a deadly serious business and seen in the light of where we stand now - god help us - Ligeti's stance seems to be the only irrational response towards it.

The key factor in carrying the work through to its dark meditations is unquestionably the performance of Audrey Luna in Scene III as Gepopo the Chief of the Secret Police. In semi-staged concert performance, there wasn't perhaps the ability to present Gepopo in his three disguises as bird of prey, a spider and an octopus, but all the colour and drama in this character were brilliantly expressed and conveyed by Luna, strapped down into a bed on the stage, singing directly into a camera that projected her performance at the back of the stage. In combination with Anthony Roth Costanzo's beautiful countertenor Prince Go-Go it created an extraordinary impression, Luna's stratospheric babblings more intelligible and coherent than the average Donald Trump speech.

The same level of commitment was evident throughout a work that is filled with singing and dramatic challenges. The LSO assembled an impressive cast here for these performances at the Barbican, with Heidi Melton deserving mention for the particularly difficult Mescalina, Frode Olsen fearlessly pushing the depths of the bass role as Astradamors and Pavlo Hunka an imposing presence as Nekrotzar. There were some gorgeous lyrical moments from the combined singing of Ronnita Miller and Elizabeth Watts as Armando and Amando, contrasting terrifically with Peter Hoare's gradual derangement and disintegration as Piet the Pot. Sellars also made great use of the whole Barbican Hall for the chorus, with individual musicians and singers popping up on all of the levels, ensuring a surround sound experience that included the audience as citizens of Brueghelland.

What the semi-staged concert performance permitted above all else however was that it literally places Ligeti's music centre stage, and that was nothing less than revelatory. It's very easy for the true nature of Ligeti's music for Le Grand Macabre to get lost in all the absurdity so that it sound like nothing but wildly diverse and fractured accompanying noise, with atonal parodies of Beethoven and other forms of music, but Simon Rattle and the LSO showed how consistent and of-a-piece the music is. Its little miniatures are expressive of the moment, alternately skittish and playful, darkly reflective or shrilly terrifying, but they all contribute to the greater impact and rich tone of the work in its totality.

It's hard to say that it's Ligeti's greatest work, but Le Grand Macabre is certainly his most sustained and demanding piece; richly dynamic, a compendium of all the extravagance, experimentation, absurdity and inventiveness that are characteristic of the composer. In the form of this opera and in the light of where we are today, the dark undercurrents from Ligeti's personal experiences that inspire the themes of Le Grand Macabre now suddenly seem all too apparent and relevant.

Links: LSO, Peter Sellars talks Le Grand Macabre

Adams - Nixon in China (Wide Open Opera - Dublin 2014)

John Adams - Nixon in China

Wide Open Opera, Dublin 2014

Fergus Sheil, Michael Cavanagh, Barry Ryan, Claudia Boyle, James Cleverton, Hubert Francis, John Molloy, Audrey Luna, Sharon Carty, Imelda Drumm, Doreen Curran

Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin - 11 May 2014

For a modern opera that is based on a relatively recent historical event, John Adams' Nixon in China is proving to be an enduring work that continues to gain new productions worldwide. What is even more surprising, and which perhaps accounts for the place it is gaining in the repertoire, is how each production manages to find a new way of approaching the work's themes. It's clear that Nixon in China is about more than one specific event of historical significance only to the 1970s, but is a work of multifaceted complexity that makes it open to continuous reinterpretation and re-evaluation.

Undoubtedly, that's got a lot to do with Alice Goodman's libretto. It doesn't entirely hold together and it can be difficult to comprehend at times, getting bogged down in the competing ideological, political and philosophical views of each of the participants in US President Nixon's visit to Communist China in 1972. Certain passages of the opera feel the weight of some very obscure esoterica, but the libretto also has the ability and the insight to look beneath the jargon, the showmanship and the politicking to make some very pertinent points about the nature of the figures in question as human beings.

In order for the work to endure however, it needs to extend this out beyond the specific to the universal, and while the political landscape has changed much in the intervening years, with the respective powers and influence of both China and the USA starting to reverse, the human aspirations behind them hasn't changed that much. Even if Nixon in China were only to remind us of this fact, highlighting the present by showing us how it once was, or how indeed it all started to change from a globalised technological perspective, it would still be an interesting work, but as this latest Dublin production from Wide Open Opera makes clear, there's evidently much more to the opera than that.

Wide Open Opera's Dublin production of Nixon in China for example threw up a new aspect to the work that I had never considered before. Is Nixon in China a feminist opera? It seems unlikely for a work set in the 1970s based on the meeting between two male heads of state alternately back-slapping each other and competing to prove the supremacy of their vision of the world. In fact, with Henry Kissinger's reputation and attitude towards women satirised in the dances of Act II ("Whip her to death!"), with Pat Nixon being the model First Lady and housewife, deferential to her husband's important career, and China's treatment of women hardly being anything to be proud of, despite Chiang Ch'ing's contribution to the Cultural Revolution, it's not surprising that the possibility of the work having a feminist agenda is rarely considered.

The fact that these issues are shown at all, even in a seemingly unfavourable light, is significant, but the women in Nixon in China are actually very strong personalities, and can even be said to be the true heart of the work. Part of this might be to do with the librettist being female, but in reality it's much more to do with there being considerable thought and attention paid equally to all of the main characters. In attempting to make them real, in attempting to look beneath the surface and see a real person, those issues and how Pat Nixon and Chiang Ch'ing might feel about them are taken into consideration. If there is a feminist view in Nixon in China, what is wonderful is that it's not presented in any dogmatic fashion, but arises out of treating each of the characters as equals in human terms. It's when this conflicts with the public personas, and with the male and the political agendas, that the whole question becomes much more complex.

Part of the reason why there are so many ways of interpreting and looking at Nixon in China is just down to the nature of its creation, and the nature of opera itself. It's not just Alice Goodman's libretto that is important or the only aspect of the opera that plays with ideas, but rather it's the multidisciplinary nature of how it interacts and conflicts with real-life, with the focus, structure and dramatic concept of Peter Sellars' original idea, and with John Adams' music. That reflects and complements the competing personalities on the stage and it creates a dialectic that really opens the work up. And when you hand that over to a new stage director, a new music director and new singers, you have something that can be even more fluid and mutable.

Wide Open Opera's production of Nixon in China originates from Michael Kavanagh's 2010 production for Vancouver Opera. It's a very fine production that retains the historical basis of Nixon's visit to China and adheres relatively closely to Peter Sellars' structuring of the work. At the same time however it finds its own way to capture the spectacle and the grandeur of the event and get underneath to the rather more difficult to define aspects of the personalities that are brought out by the libretto and the music. Broadly speaking however, the tone of the work and the stage direction is defined by its three-act structure.

Act I is all show, making use of impressive projections that show Air Force One landing in Peking Airport, using bold colours and national flags to indicate the jostling for power, position and philosophical superiority between the leaders of the two great nations. There is at the same time a mutual respect and appreciation for each other, for the power that they wield and how they exercise it, and both are fully aware that this is a unique and unprecedented opportunity to extend their influence and reputation across the world via new satellite technology. The staging fully supports the joyous fervour that this generates, each of them dancing around, drunk on power, lost in their own wonderfulness.

Dancing in fact plays a large part in this production, and it highlights just how important it actually is as another means of expression in the work itself. Aside from the obvious Revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women in Act II (a dance of death, liberation), there are references to dancing at the ball put in honour of the Nixons in Act I (a dance of celebration, assertion, joy) and there's a melancholy waltz in Act III (a slow dance of sadness and introspection), each of which conforms perfectly to the tone of the three acts. The deeper interiority of Act III is more difficult to stage and make work than the more obvious tone and the action of the first two acts, and it doesn't quite come together in the opera itself, but Michael Cavanagh's direction, the use of mists (for time, memory, distance) and the use of connections made though the dancing, finds a through-line that holds it all together surprisingly well.

It's important that all this works with the music and singing performances. The musical challenges alone are considerable for a work that makes use of unconventional orchestration with saxophones and electronic keyboards, but Fergus Sheil and the RTE National Symphony Orchestra provided an invigorating and thrilling performance that balanced the rhythms with the nature of the drama expressed in the libretto and on the stage, as well as with the expression of the singers. The program notes that microphones are required to amplify the singers above the orchestra (although a reduced orchestration allowed the Châtelet in Paris to perform it acoustically), but the singing, diction and expression was so strong here that you scarcely believed it was necessary.

As if to confirm the importance of the women figures, the singing was particularly impressive from Claudia Boyle and Audrey Luna. Claudia Boyle's Pat Nixon was confident and accomplished, but touching too, with a real sense of sympathy for her character and the importance of her as the heart of the opera. Audrey Luna's Chiang Ch'ing saw more of the stratospheric notes the coloratura soprano hit in her Met performance of Ariel in Adès' The Tempest. Where the use of microphones might have been useful here was in allowing the male singers to sing rather than project. Barry Ryan's Nixon was accordingly wonderfully musical, showing the lyrical qualities that are in the writing of this character which we rarely hear in English language opera. Like Ryan, we also had sensitive performances from James Cleverton as Chou En-lai, Hubert Francis as Mao Tse-tung, with John Molloy fully entering into the spirit of the playful but sinisterly depicted Henry Kissinger.

Presenting a modern opera to a Dublin audience was always going to be a challenge, but it's one that, following their marvellous The Importance of Being Earnest, has again paid off impressively for Wide Open Opera. This is a far cry from La Traviata or Madama Butterfly, and a new and sometimes challenging experience for many, but judging from the enthusiastic response of the audience at the opening night at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre for Nixon in China, many were clearly struck at the possibilities this form of music theatre can offer. That's clearly a mark of Wide Open Opera's approach to ensuring quality at every level, and genuinely having something new to bring to the arts and theatre-going public in Ireland.

Adès - The Tempest

Thomas Adès - The Tempest

Metropolitan Opera, New York, 2012

Thomas Adès, Robert Lepage, Simon Keenlyside, Audrey Luna, Alan Oke, Isabel Leonard, Alek Shrader, Toby Spence, William Burden, Kevin Burdette, Iestyn Davies, Christopher Feigum, John Del Carlo

The Met Live in HD, 10th November 2012

Following the furore surrounding his controversial high-tech production of Wagner’s Ring cycle for the Metropolitan Opera across their past two seasons, Robert Lepage returns somewhat to his roots as a traditional theatre director for a work that may not be equal in scale and stature to Wagner’s epic work, but is ambitious and challenging nonetheless, to say nothing of a bit of a commercial gamble. Lepage, as was made clear repeatedly in interviews and in programme notes, has directed Shakespeare’s play ‘The Tempest‘ eight times in his career, so you would expect him to know what works and what doesn’t (something that might not have been so clear in his handling of the Ring). An opera based on ‘The Tempest‘ is however a different prospect altogether, particularly one that has been necessarily condensed and ‘translated into English’, and requires a very different approach to staging. Fortunately, in this production for the Metropolitan Opera, ambitiously broadcast live in HD to cinema theatres across the world, Lepage was considerate of the different requirements that opera and Shakespearean theatre demand. It’s fortunate also that composer Thomas Adès also has a very clear view of the work and brings it across marvellously and musically in The Tempest.

Shakespeare usually has to be considerably reworked when adapted to an opera, meaning that it is necessarily condensed, streamlined and stripped largely of its poetry. Having a kind of musical element of its own, ‘The Tempest‘ however would appear to be a work that is more open to musical adaptation than most other Shakespeare works. Considering its scope and range - taking in comedy, family drama and political intrigue - but most notably having a supernatural and musical element that takes in the spirits of the spheres through Ariel and the baseness of the earthy Caliban, the whole drama taking place on a magical island of “noises sounds and sweet airs” - The Tempest would appear to be both a challenge and a gift for a capable musician. Adès manages to integrate all the rich elements of Shakespeare’s work wonderfully, not just accompanying the various strands of comedy, drama and romance that are rather compressed in the dramatic playing, but making up for the lack of poetry in the libretto by deepening the sentiments through the musical dimension. It’s not always the most melodic of arrangements, but it’s wholly appropriate to the context of the scenes, never discordant and often quite beautiful in its symphonic sweep.

The most difficult element - from the point of view of composition, from the nature of the singing challenges and from the assault on the ears of the listener - is undoubtedly in the tricky characterisation of Ariel. It’s necessary that Ariel appear to be a spirit creature from another, higher dimension, but held under the power of Prospero the pain of his captivity and his desire to escape from earthly bonds should also be an element in the character’s make-up. Adès expresses this in the highest extremes of the soprano range, which is by no means easy on the ear or even entirely intelligible, but it does have an otherworldly quality. That however is just the most extreme example. Elsewhere Adès shows himself capable of strong individual characterisation in each of the roles and personalities, in the comedy of Stefano and Trinculo, in the romance of Miranda and Ferdinand, in the dark scheming of Antonio and Sebastian, and in the nobility of the King of Naples in his grief for Ferdinand whom he believes dead. What is marvellous about Adès’ writing for The Tempest is that he not only fully characterises and enriches expression of each individual character - without having recourse to themes or leitmotifs - but that he makes them coexist and work together. In drama that’s difficult enough, but to bring those musical elements together into a coherent piece is much more challenging. That’s however where opera traditionally excels and Adès shows wonderful facility for this necessary ability.

And then, of course, there’s Prospero, with his thoughts of revenge for having being usurped from the throne of Milan by his brother, his enslavement of Ariel and Caliban, his exercise of power over the island and his daughter Miranda, and the relinquishing of all those powers and claims by the end of the work. Not only must the development of Prospero’s character arc encompass all these elements, but his personality must be seen (and heard) to exert an influence over everything that happens - his watchful eye monitoring the activity of the crew that his storm has shipwrecked on the island. If the final realisation and capitulation of his powers still seems a little hurried and arrived at without too much deliberation or conflict, Adès nonetheless manages to characterise this as successfully as it could possibly be. Much inevitably depends on the quality of the singer, and Simon Keenlyside (reprising a role that he helped create in the original 2004 Covent Garden production of the work) is a commanding presence that brings Prospero to life and brings a necessary degree of humanity to the part. It’s an extremely challenging role - particularly in the singing - and Keenlyside did show a little strain in places, but nothing that couldn’t be seen as characterisation of Prospero’s own personal conflicts and dilemmas.

The singing and characterisation was marvellous almost right across the board here, and it went some considerable way towards making a difficult work much more accessible and enjoyable. Audrey Luna was simply astonishing as Ariel, as lithe and agile in her movements as in her voice (Lepage effectively keeping Ariel almost exclusively floating up and above or outside the drama as a mischievous but otherworldly sprite), and the casting of Isabel Leonard and Alek Shrader as the beautiful couple of Miranda and Ferdinand - the great hope for the future - could hardly be more perfect. Leonard’s rich and luxurious mezzo-soprano was wonderfully expressive with clear diction and real strength of character, blending wonderfully with Shrader’s handsome tenor voice. Caliban might have been a little marginalised as a character here, never really working his way into the main drama, but Alan Oke made something wonderful of the role in his singing and performance, interacting well with the character pieces of Stefano and Trinculo. Countertenor Iestyn Davies - who made a strong impression in last season’s Rodelinda at the Met - again demonstrated a voice of incredible beauty and clarity. Adès’ writing is so strong that it provides notable roles also for Toby Spence (the original Ferdinand) as Antonio and particularly William Burden who gave wonderful expression to the grief-stricken sentiments of Naples. Only bass-baritone John Del Carlo seemed to struggle with the difficult range of the vocal writing of Gonzalo, but nonetheless sang his Act III solo piece (not quite an aria) very well.

If the singing went some way towards making a potentially difficult work more accessible, Robert Lepage’s stage direction and Jasmine Catudal’s clever set designs played their part in helping it all flow together marvellously. The importance of the direction shouldn’t be underestimated, as it any one element in the machinery of an opera can impact on all the others, and - working perfectly in accord with the music as opposed to a preconceived idea of Shakespearean ought to look like - Lepage’s contribution was a perfect fit for the work. The setting of the first act within a reproduction of the La Scala theatre certainly ties in with the notion of music, theatre, opera and even Prospero’s claim to be Duke of Milan, but more than being notional, it provided a conceptual approach to the theatricality of the staging, with figures slipping beneath the platform of the stage, and dropping into the prompter’s box. The Native Indian tattoos and markings on Prospero beneath his military greatcoat, with feathers woven into his hair, and the shaman-like appearance of the disinherited Caliban hinted at some of the underlying themes in the work relating to colonisation and exploitation of native populations, without needing to take this any further and over-complicate the progression of the drama.

The colour and spectacle of the production was well-served then by the simple magic of theatre props and machinery, the planks of the stage replacing the rather more high-tech planks of the unwieldy (but nonetheless impressive) Machine for Lepage’s Ring cycle - and it was a simplicity that worked alongside the music and with the themes here rather than try an impose a presence on them. As a consequence, with the composer Thomas Adès himself directing the orchestra from the pit, working to the strengths of the singing and to the movements on the stage, this felt like a truly complete opera production, one where all the elements work with and support the other to create that particular magic that comes only from this particular fusion of music and theatre - opera.