Muhly - Marnie (New York, 2018)

Nico Muhly - Marnie

The Metropolitan Opera, New York - 2018

Robert Spano, Michael Mayer, Isabel Leonard, Christopher Maltman, Iestyn Davies, Denyse Graves, Janis Kelly, Marie Te Hapuku, Anthony Dean Griffey, Deanna Breiwick, Dísella Lárusdóttir, Rebecca Ringle Kamarei, Peabody Southwell, Gabriel Gurevich, Jane Bunnell, Stacey Tappan, Ian Koziara, Ashley Emerson, Will Liverman, James Courtney

The Met Live in HD - 10 November 2018

Hitchcock's 1964 film Marnie hasn't aged well, nor frankly has Hitchcock's once unassailable reputation over the last decade. A lot has changed with regards to how we view a woman's response to inappropriate advances from aggressive male bosses - particularly in the film world - but it has to be said that regardless of how he was behaving off-screen, Hitchcock was at least one of the few filmmakers willing and daring enough to explore aberrant psychology (including his own) in mainstream popular cinema. Nico Muhly's opera version, world premiered at the English National Opera earlier this year, could be seen as a timely work in that respect, but it's debatable that the source material allows it to probe any deeper or any more successfully than Hitchcock managed in 1964.

Ironically the difference between how the two works approach the subject of how Marnie's childhood trauma manifests itself in later life is where the weakness lies in both, so perhaps it's the source material of Winston Graham's novel is at fault here. Hitchcock, perhaps for his own prurient motives, dared at least to extend the psychological impact into Marnie's sexual relations with men, or rather her lack of them, rather reductively depicting it in terms of 'frigidity'. Muhly's opera perhaps wisely skates around the pseudo-science and psychoanalytical aspects and perhaps lets Marnie's actions speak for themselves without the overblown melodrama. He attempts rather to express the hidden side of Marnie's character and her inner struggles in the music, but it's not entirely successful there either.

In terms of laying out the drama, plotting and pacing, the opera version of Marnie is faultless. It develops and progresses wonderfully, in part due to Nicholas Wright's lean concise adaptation and Muhly's rhythmic musical flow, but director Michael Mayer - last seen at the Met in their visually stunning Las Vegas Rigoletto and the initiator who suggested the idea of Marnie to Muhly - also makes every scene and action count within Julian Crouch's wonderfully stylised production designs. Every effort is made not only to keep the drama moving along and engage the spectator through the visual and musical representation of the drama, but there is also an effort to extend that to the characterisation, finding ways to hint at deeper and darker impulses.

The main manifestations of Marnie's 'issues', which also works well for dramatic tension, are in her criminal behaviours and her changes of identity. Set in England in 1959 - Muhly and director Mayer retaining the period character of the source novel - Marnie (as office secretary Mary Holland) isn't long in making off with the contents of her employer Mr Strutt's office safe, soon after rejecting an awkward advance he makes towards her. She changes her appearance and name and applies for a post far away from Birmingham with a firm in Barnet in London, but is horrified to find that it is run by one of Strutt's clients, Mark Rutland.

Rutland however doesn't appear to remember or recognise her, but when she finds herself fighting off the advances of Terry. Rutland's brother and deputy at the company, Marnie decides it's time to help herself to the company safe and disappear again. She is caught however by Mark who has recognised her and known about the theft at Strutt's, but is in love with her and blackmails her into marrying him. The honeymoon consequently doesn't work out terribly well, there's an attempted rape (toned down here) and the situation leads Marnie to attempt suicide, an action that brings to the surface the truth about the family trauma that lies behind her criminal actions, her changes of identity and her inability to get close to anyone.

Michael Mayer's period stylisations appear initially to draw not so much on Hitchcock as the lushly colourful Technicolor romantic melodramas of Douglas Sirk (where arguably the film's subject matter might have fitted better) with some Saul Bass-like image projections to show Marnie in her various identities. There is some considerably effort however made to get beneath the surface glamour of the period and show the underside of Marnie's working class background, but also to show the various aspects of Marnie's identity beyond the changes of name and appearance. Four women accompany her on stage - singing roles - to reflect those different sides to Marnie, and a team of shady dancers in hats and long coats haunt and swirl around her.

The staging goes some way towards providing a more rounded and psychological portrait of Marnie and Nico Muhly also puts considerable effort into making that characterisation just as rich in musical terms. Muhly places solo instruments behind each of the voices to give them individual character and perhaps also hint at underlying psychology, but how successful this is can be difficult to determine or even audibly detect. (The sound mixing, I have to say though, didn't really give a good account of Robert Spano's conducting at the live cinema screening). Musically, Muhly's score is reminiscent of John Adams, but despite all the efforts in the solo and ensemble instrumentation, it never develops a character of its own for the purpose of the drama, accompanying rather that revealing other depths.

If the work is nonetheless successful in bringing Marnie to life, it certainly has something to do with the composer's writing for the voice. On the surface at least the voice types are carefully chosen; Marnie's mezzo-soprano, Mark's baritone, Terry's countertenor and Marnie mother's contralto all giving a particularly character that works with the music to alternately suggest surface strength and personality weakness. More than anything however it appeared that the real success lay in Isabel Leonard's superb performance. She looks stunning in Arianne Phillips's costume designs, maintaining an edge of cold detachment but one that you can clearly detect from her mannerisms and voice (not just her shadow-Marnies or the musical undercurrents) is hiding powerful emotional forces.

The singing in the other roles is also good, but determined to a large extent by how well the characters were written. It's difficult to sympathise with Mark Rutland's crude way of treating Marnie, but he's also a man of his time and he probably does love her in his own way, and despite the stiffness of character Christopher Maltman holds that balance well. Quite where this fits in with any #MeToo narrative is a connection probably best avoided, particularly considering the Met's own problems with sexual abuse scandals, but there were a few tentative attempts in the commentary to invoke it as relevant. Iestyn Davies was terrifically spiky as Terry Rutland, providing more menace than his brother despite having a lesser role, and Denyse Graves and Janis Kelly make a great impression as the domineering mothers despite the thinness of the characterisation.

Links: Metropolitan Opera

Schreker - Die Gezeichneten (Munich, 2017)

Franz Schreker - Die Gezeichneten

Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich - 2017

Ingo Metzmacher, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Tomasz Konieczny, Christopher Maltman, Alastair Miles, Catherine Naglestad, John Daszak, Matthew Grills, Kevin Conners, Sean Michael Plumb, Andrea Borghini, Peter Lobert, Andreas Wolf, Paula Iancic, Heike Grötzinger, Dean Power

StaatsoperTV - 1 July 2017

Franz Schreker's opera Die Gezeichneten is an unusual work, characteristic of a very specific style and of the period of its composition. It's a fairy-tale for the turn of the 20th century, with a late Romantic approach to its ideas and musical development that is perhaps a little too decadent and rich for modern tastes. In this opera, as in much of his other lyrical-dramas, Schreker poses some interesting questions in relation to the function of art that the post-Wagner opera world was (and perhaps still is) struggling to resolve. After 100 years of near neglect, the growing popularity of this particular opera suggests however that it's a question that is not only still relevant but becoming a more urgent issue for our contemporary society.

As far as Schreker is concerned, the pressing question of what should be the function of art and the role of the artist as an outsider is similar to the one considered by Wagner in nearly all of his important opera works. Composed in 1919 however, the world that Schreker explores in Die Gezeichneten is a very different place, and the rules and guidance that might have served as an example no longer seem relevant or are unable to take hold in a rapidly changing world that has gained a new perspective on humanity through Freudean psychoanalysis and the horrors of the First World War. If Die Gezeichneten follows the path of a fairy-tale, it's a fairy-tale where the darker undercurrents are now laid bare on the surface to serve as a reflection of what they say about modern society.

The post-Wagner/post-Parsifal/late Romantic composer/artist/idealist would like to believe that art provides a means of human transcendence from these horrors, but the former ideas about what constitutes art and beauty are now no longer quite as clear or as pure as might once have been thought. Elysium, the Utopian island of marvels and beauty created by the deformed dwarf Alviano Salvago in Die Gezeichneten, has become corrupted as a playground for the rich and the powerful to cultivate 'exotic' tastes, abducting children and exploiting the misery of others for their own pleasure. As Count Tamare describes it, it's a corruption of the realisation of a dream of beauty. There's clearly something there that resonates with our own times and this is keenly explored by director Krzysztof Warlikowski in his new production of the work for the 2017 Munich Opera Festival.

With its creator a deformed and ugly figure of ridicule, the Elysium created by Alviano in Die Gezeichneten (The Stigmatised) is in himself representative of the function of art to transform the ugly reality into something beautiful. Carlotta is another artist capable of recognising the beauty of Alviano's true nature and expresses it in the painting of his pure soul. It's the validation of their belief in a higher purpose for art that leads them to love, but also to believe that they have a true and purer understanding of art and beauty. Unfortunately their great ambitions prove to be not only incompatible with the reality of the world, but they prove to be corrupting of their own nature. The seductive power of beauty in the form of Graf Andrea Vitellozzo Tamare leads Carlotta astray, while for Alviano, love has given him god-like aspirations that reveal an ugly side to his nature.

"Give me Carlotta" pleads Alviano when he is in danger of losing her love to the debauched libertine Tamare, "then I'll be a prince, a king, a god". Love has conferred Apollo-like aspirations in Alviano that align with the Wagnerian ideal of the supremacy of the artist in society, but instead he shows himself to be vindictive and egotistical, a "troll" at heart. It seems that the moment the true nature of beauty is grasped by the artist, it confers a sense of power and influence that turns him into a monster who is incapable of responding to that supreme vision of beauty without corrupting and destroying it by his very nature.

That's certainly the image that Krzysztof Warlikowski emphasises in the 2017 Munich production with his usual cinematic references. The director relies on the imagery of David Lynch's depiction of 'The Elephant Man' as a beautiful soul trapped in a monstrous body, but there are also significant scenes projected for classic silent horror films. There is the scene from 'Der Golem' where the monster is confronted and destroyed by the beauty of a child with a flower; a similar confrontation in that famous scene at the lake in 'Frankenstein'; the unmasking of 'The Phantom of the Opera' reveals the ugly side of his nature; and in 'Nosferatu' beauty will expose the monster to an unbearable light that destroys him. Apart from a scene of Duke Adorno working out in a boxing ring and figures starting to appear as mice, Warlikowski sticks fairly closely and directly to this principal theme in the first half, with Elysium a modern art gallery, replete with a Tate Modern style turbine hall showing a brilliant disc, where the idea of art is something living rather than traditional.

In Act III however, after a spoken word reading of Schreker's account of himself as an artist that associates him with Alviano, Warlikowski and Malgorzata Szczesniak's sets and costumes take these themes in an entirely unexpected and unpredictable new direction. So rich is the enigmatic ideas and imagery of the latter scenes of Die Gezeichneten, and so untethered to any kind of musical resolution, that you would expect a similarly free-associative and imaginative response from the director and he certainly delivers. There is an acceptance of art as a "realm of magic" and for Warlikowski the realm where all these concepts can be considered and explored is indeed that of the opera stage. So figures with heads of mice, virtually naked dancers, a reclining figure in a glass cage, all form part of the Elysium of the opera stage, where art is beauty, but it is also challenging and - vitally - alive.

The performances of John Daszak and Catherine Naglestad in particular are perfect fits for Warlikowsi's ideas. Daszak is simply outstanding, his voice lyrical and flexible, full of expression and capable of revealing a darker edge. Catherine Naglestad has a rather more robust soprano voice than the usual piercing but brittle edge of Straussian sopranos like Manuela Uhl or Anne Schwanewilms with whom we usually associate Schreker roles, but her voice brings a rich corrupting glamour to Carlotta. Christopher Maltman is a strong presence as Tamare. I'm not a fan of Tomasz Konieczny's bass-baritone voice and don't find it pleasant here, but as Duke Adorno it doesn't have to be and it strikes an appropriate note of discordance that lies within the music also.

Conducting the work, Ingo Metzmacher wrings all the troubling beauty out of chromatic lines that suggest that a resolution to the themes raised in the opera is unattainable, but between Schreker, Metzmacher and Warlikowski you almost feel that this is as close as the work can come to a state of transcendental perfection. An ambitious selection of works have been instrumental in the success of the Bayerische Staatsoper's exceptional 2016-17 season, attaching creative directors to the projects, finding the right conductor and singers who can bring some new and original ideas to them, and Die Gezeichneten is no exception.

Links: Bayerische Staatsoper, Staatsoper.TV

Wagner - Das Liebesverbot (Madrid, 2016)

Richard Wagner - Das Liebesverbot (Madrid)

Teatro Real, Madrid, 2016

Ivor Bolton, Kasper Holten, Christopher Maltman, Peter Lodahl, Ilker Arcayürek, David Alegret, David Jerusalem, Manuela Uhl, María Miró, Ante Jerkunica, Isaac Galan, María Hinojosa, Francisco Vas

Opus Arte - Blu-Ray

Bold, brash, colourful and comic are not adjectives that you'll find applied to a Wagner opera very often, but Das Liebesverbot is most definitely not a typical Wagner opera. Written before the composer had found his own musical voice for the expression of his philosophy of the importance of art and mythology as a foundation for German culture, Wagner's earlier non-canonical work would have been more in the thrall of the Italian bel canto and French grand opéra. Meyerbeer's 5-Act epics would be the model for Wagner's subsequent opera Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen, but it's the much lighter touch of Bellini and Donizetti that can be detected in Das Liebesverbot.

Das Liebesverbot is notable also for being based on Shakespeare's comedy 'Measure for Measure'. It's not one of the playwright's more famous dramatic works and it seems to be one less likely to be suited for an operatic treatment. It deals with the Duke of Vienna, who has introduced harsh measures to deal with the growing problem of drunkenness, vice, licentious behaviour and the increasing number of establishments of ill-repute in the city. Going in disguise as a friar, the Duke leaves his deputy Lord Angelo to carry out his orders, wishing to see for himself how the law is implemented. He not only sees the unintended consequences of his laws, but he also sees how they can be misused by corrupt individuals for their own ends.

Like most adaptations of Shakespeare to opera, Das Liebesverbot isn't terribly faithful to the original. Wagner relocates the setting from Vienna to the hedonistic Palermo in Sicily, where the corrupt regime in charge of implementing the strict laws are the Governor Friedrich and his Chief of Police, Brighella. The opera version at least retains the characters central to the drama, if not its main players, as it's the relationship between Claudio and Juliet that is to bring the unintended consequences of the laws. As they are not yet married, Claudio has been arrested and condemned to death, the law effectively a ban on love - Das Liebesverbot. His friend Lucio brings the news to Claudio's sister Isabella, who is a nun in a convent. She goes to plead with the governor for the release of her brother, but Friedrich intends to take advantage of the vulnerable young woman's position and tries to seduce her.

If the drama isn't exactly the type of material you would normally associate with Wagner, there is perhaps some indication of his interest in the subject in how it relates to his anti-authoritarian and libertarian views. Even in this early work, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music as he would for all his operas, but otherwise there is very little that is recognisably Wagnerian about the subject or the musical treatment. If you can get past the idea that it has something of an academic workshop quality to it, or that it even comes across as a pastiche, Das Liebesverbot is a hugely enjoyable work, masterfully constructed to create a fine musical drama out of a difficult Shakespearean drama. Wagner works with the contrasting and inconstant tones of the drama, filling it with great melodies and racing rhythms, if not any particularly memorable arias.

Rather than try to integrate the work somehow into the Wagner universe, which seems an impossible task, Ivor Bolton and Kasper Holten instead do their best to capture the pace and dynamic of all its colourful scenes and the musical variety purely on its own terms. Visually, Holten's bold, stylised, cartoon-like approach suits the opéra-comique nature of the plot, with rolling platforms keeping things moving across the stage. The director struggles nonetheless to find ways to hold interest through some of Wagner's excesses. The duet of the meeting between Isabella and Claudio at the start of Act II, for example, is unnecessarily long drawn-out without any compensating musical qualities. Even with good direction, using mobile phones and text messages to try and catch the absurdities of the scene, it still drags.

It doesn't help that this scene is followed with another scene - a trio between Isabella, Lucio and Dorella - that likewise feels rather academic in its composition and utterly lifeless in the staging. This scene highlights another problem with the opera - although it's evident from quite early on - and that's finding the right kind of voices to sing it. Regardless of the model it is based on, Das Liebesverbot is not bel canto, and the lighter, lyrical and agile voices that are cast here might sound lovely, but they are frequently overwhelmed by the orchestration and challenged by the length of the scenes. The cast would be more at home in the post-Wagnerian works of Strauss or Schreker, but that doesn't quite work here, suggesting that Das Liebesverbot demands the range of Strauss along with traditional Wagnerian stamina. Within those limitations however Manuela Uhl is certainly pushed but copes well as Isabella, but it's only Christopher Maltman's Friedrich who holds up consistently, albeit to lesser challenges.

The colourful production however comes into its own at the absurd comedy of the finale. A little more convincingly than Shakespeare (but not much), Wagner conceives a fancy dress party as a means of tricking Friedrich into sleeping with his own wife instead of Isabella. There are still problems with this idea of the governor who banned pleasure being invited to a carnival (with the Chief of Police Brighella also being lured into making a fool of himself for good measure), not to mention the strange circumstance of his wife being a nun (María Miró an excellent Mariana), but it's a good excuse to set the revelations and resolutions to vibrant carnival music that bring the whole affair to a lively conclusion. In that respect, Kasper Holten does justice to Das Liebesverbot in a production that should satisfy Wagner completists but, much like finally getting the chance to experience Strauss's Feuersnot or Guntram, you'll probably not be in any great hurry to see it again.

The Teatro Real production of Das Liebesverbot is nicely presented on the Blu-ray release. The image is clear and colourful and the sound mixes present the musical performance well in uncompressed high definition mixes. As often seems to be the case, the mixing tends to favour the orchestral performance, particularly in the DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 surround track, with the already weak voices further submerged in the centre channel. They come across a little better in the LPCM Stereo, but are still a little low. The only extra feature on the disc is a Cast Gallery, but the circumstances of the composition of the opera and discussion of its content (where more of its inconsistencies and problems are identified) can be found in an essay by Chris Walton in the booklet. A synopsis is also provided. The BD is region-free, with subtitles in English, French, German, Japanese and Korean.

Links: Teatro Real Madrid

Puccini - Manon Lescaut (Royal Opera House 2014 - Cinema Live)

Giacomo Puccini - Manon Lescaut

Royal Opera House, London - 2014

Antonio Pappano, Jonathan Kent, Kristīne Opolais, Christopher Maltman, Jonas Kaufmann, Maurizio Muraro, Benjamin Hulett, Robert Burt, Nadezhda Karyazina, Luis Gomes, Jeremy White, Jihoon Kim, Nigel Cliffe

Royal Opera House Cinema Live - 24 June 2014

While there isn't much hope for Le Villi and Edgar, there has at least been a concerted effort in recent years to bring another of Puccini's earliest works into the mainstream opera repertoire with numerous productions worldwide of Manon Lescaut. Puccini's first major success, the reasons for Manon Lescaut's neglect are a bit of a mystery. Antonio Pappano makes a strong case for the dramatic quality of the opera, the power of its dramatic score and the beauty of its melodies. The director of the Royal Opera House Kasper Holten suggests that it could be because it needs at least two world-class singers in the main roles, but that's also the case for La Bohème and Tosca. With Pappano conducting then and two major stars - Jonas Kaufmann and Kristine Opolais - in place and on fire for the Royal Opera House's season-closing live cinema broadcast, you would think that this new production would be a revelatory affirmation of the worth of Manon Lescaut, yet by the end of the evening, doubts about the work remain.

It seems obvious then to point the finger of blame - as many critics have been quick to do - at director Jonathan Kent, but while it is indeed difficult to follow where exactly the director is taking the story in the sets for Acts III and IV, the tone and line of the production is firmly on the side of the drama and the emotional journey of the two lovers. It's too easy to blame the production just for being modern - if the opera can't stand up to being placed in a modern context then it might well indeed be an old-fashioned work that has little to offer a modern audience and its relative obscurity is probably merited. Mariuz Treliński had a fair go at it in La Monnaie's 2013 production, so that doesn't seem to be the whole story with Manon Lescaut.

There are certain elements of L'Abbé Prévost’s original novel 'L’Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut' that are perhaps a little out of place. You'd have a bit of trouble trying to force your sister into a convent nowadays, as Lescaut intends to do here with Manon. Accepting instead an offer to selling her off to a old rich man and then into prostitution is a bit of a change of heart for Lescaut and perhaps not that a common experience that many will identify with either. The way that that this separates the young woman from the ability to make her own choices however and love the young man she chooses - the Chevalier des Grieux - has timeless resonance and, most importantly, real conflicts between the heart and material desires. Certainly none of these issues have prevented the subject from reaching modern audiences in Massenet's popular and enduring Manon.

None of it has been any obstacle either for Puccini doing much the same thing in making Mimi's dilemma - again, one that remains tied very much to the times and morals of the period - the successful and heartbreaking heroine of the romantic tragedy of La Bohème. It's clear then that this is not the issue with Manon Lescaut, or at least not the main issue. There are however certain leaps and gaps in Puccini's version of Manon Lescaut that flow less well dramatically than Massenet's version, leaving out a lot of important details. Most critically, Massenet's choice to end the work with the death of Manon at the boarding of her ship as she is being deported to America spares us what amounts to an extended death scene that lasts the entirety of Act IV in Puccini's version where Manon and Des Grieux find themselves for some unexplained reason dying of thirst and starvation in the Utah desert.

There's not an awful lot that a stage director can do to make that fit with the rest of the work. The earlier scenes may take a rather sleazy modern approach to Manon's downfall - the young woman becoming a porn-star performing for a live audience rather than a dancer - but this gives exactly the right impression of how sordid the enterprise is. Glamour is of course part of Manon's ambitions, part of the unresolved conflict that keeps the young woman from simply following her heart, but you ought to make you feel uncomfortable at how she is being exploited and that is done well. The stylised deportation of Manon and the prostitutes along a gaming table and through a poster inscribed 'Naïveté' in Act III, coming out on a crumbling road that twists towards the upper heights of the stage in Act IV (the other side of the poster forming a desert backdrop) is however as baffling as the dramatic development itself, but it at least looks great. It doesn't however in any way undermine or reduce the emotional impact of how the scene is written or how Puccini scores it.

But yet it's hard to imagine that any of this provoking a single wet eye in the house. With Kristine Opolais and Jonas Kaufmann both in superb form throughout belting out the agony of their character's dilemma, Manon coming to regret the path that has left her "sola, perduta, abbandonata"; with Antonio Pappano sensitively wringing every ounce of drama and emotion out Puccini's exquisitely beautiful and heart wrenching score; with the on-screen film direction taking us into cinematic extreme close-up in a way that both Opolais and Kaufmann can sustain dramatically as well as aesthetically; you really ought to be a quivering wreck at the end of Manon Lescaut. If that much effort is put into it however and it fails to make the necessary impact, something is very wrong. Perhaps it's all just too much.

It's not too much on the part of the singers, the director or the conductor - they are just performing what Puccini has written the way he intends it to be played - it's just that it's musically overwrought without there being enough genuine character and dramatic development put into making the audience really care for the characters. It's not necessarily that Manon is a bit of a gold-digger - Mimi is fairly mercenary in her attachments in La Bohème and we care infinitely more about her sad and lonely death - but Puccini and his numerous librettists haven't put the necessary work into establishing the romance between Manon and Des Grieux as something credible. It's significant to note that Puccini has no equivalent for the second act in Massenet's Manon showing their humble but happy home in Paris with its little table, albeit a short-lived happiness where the relationship is already in trouble. We don't really get much of an opportunity to see Manon and Des Grieux together in Manon Lescaut, and when we do in Act IV, it's too much too late.

Britten - The Rape of Lucretia

Benjamin Britten - The Rape of Lucretia

English National Opera, Aldeburgh Festival 2001

Paul Daniels, David McVicar, John Mark Ainsley, Orla Boylan, Clive Bayley, Leigh Melrose, Christopher Maltman, Sarah Connolly, Catherine Wyn-Rogers, Mary Nelson

Opus Arte - Blu-ray

Although it's come late in the year that also celebrated the work of Verdi and Wagner, the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten has done much to consolidate and even raise the reputation of Britain's greatest composer, and in the process highlight some unjustly neglected works. If Richard Jones was unable to salvage the reputation of Gloriana however, it must be hoped that this belated release of David McVicar's 2001 production of The Rape of Lucretia for the English National Opera, recorded by the BBC at the Aldeburgh Festival, will bring this more deserving work to the attention of a wider audience. The Rape of Lucretia is a work of extraordinary intensity and depth that sees Britten at his most distinctive and inspired.

Following the full orchestration of Britten's first opera Peter Grimes, The Rape of Lucretia marks something of a rethinking of approach to opera that would have a significant impact on the style of much of the composer's later dramatic works. There appears to be a more overt religious Christian element here that one sees echoes of in the Canticles and in the Church Parables, but Britten's interest in the subjects of these works would appear to go beyond Christian parable towards less clearly defined and somewhat more ambiguous moral issues. What is most interesting in The Rape of Lucretia however is Britten's approach to the scoring of the work, not only reducing the orchestration to allow the instruments greater individual voices, but also striving to find a unique expression in them that doesn't always adhere to expected conventional dramatic writing.

The subject of The Rape of Lucretia then is a powerful one which, when combined with Britten's musical scoring of it, is almost harrowing in its intensity. All the more so when it's given a strong interpretation and that is certainly the case in this production. On the surface, the plot and the sequence of events that lead up to the event seem to be as direct and straightforward as the title of the work itself. A group of Roman generals have made a drunken bet over the fidelity of their wives and unadvisedly tested it as far as to confirm their own unenlightened views. Junius in particular is bitter about the outcome, remarking to Tarquinius that "Women are all whores by nature" that "Virtue in women is a lack of opportunity" and that they are only chaste when they aren't tempted. He's not beyond recognising the hypocrisy of his position either, noting that "men defend a woman's honour when they would lay siege to it themselves".

There is however one exception to the rule it seems - Lucretia, the virtuous wife of Collatinus. Tarquinius, the "Prince of Rome" however refuses to accept that she is any different from the rest and goes out of his way to prove it. He invites himself into her home, visits her bedroom at night and forces himself upon her. As harrowing an ordeal as this is for Lucretia, what proves to be more despairing and leads to her taking her own life is the reaction of her husband when he learns of what has occurred and the shame of what other people will say about her. On the surface then, the story seems a familiar operatic one - the defilement of the chastity of an innocent woman that one finds throughout bel canto and opera semiseria works (Donizetti's Linda di Chamounix or Rossini's Sigismondo) with the added piety of Schumann's only opera work, the magnificent Genoveva.

Having already written Peter Grimes however, it's not difficult to see in The Rape of Lucretia themes that preoccupy Britten throughout his musical career and even in his personal life relating to the corruption of innocence. Lucretia, for Britten however is about much more than just the defilement of a woman's saintly virtue, but touches on the nature of society and the values that it assigns to men and women. And at the heart of it, there's the question of violence, how it can be seen as acceptable in certain circumstances - the Roman-Etruscan war forms more than a backdrop for the work - or at least excused in the case of it being part of the nature of man. War is a subject of great importance to Britten and The Rape of Lucretia would seem to question whether this is necessarily the case, or whether pacifism isn't truer to the better nature of mankind.

It's commented on specifically by the 'Male Chorus', a single singer who represents one of the more interesting means of expression that Britten makes use of in this opera. The Male Chorus and the Female Chorus are omniscient overseers who are witness to the events, but who exist outside of time and the period in a way that allows them to consider the events from a later 'Christian' perspective. The Male Chorus observes that "For violence is the fear within us all / And tragedy the measurement of man / And hope his brief view of God". It's an important device that allows the composer a wider perspective and a contemporary relevance, and not insignificantly, it's a device that has been used recently in a very similar way by Martin Crimp and George Benjamin in their very contemporary view of the medieval storyline of Written on Skin.

It's Britten's musical arrangements however that are just as innovative, distinctive, modern and relevant. The reduced orchestration highlights the expression of individual instruments and heightens the dramatic tone and tension of the subject. Rarely does the music rely on any conventional signposting that tells you how to react to the drama, but instead it fulfils the primary function of music in opera by exploring below the surface and revealing other depths. It's beautiful and haunting, underpinning the drama in Britten's own developing idiomatic language, but it also expresses convictions that are important to the composer in relation to his own life, views that were out of place with the accepted conventions of prevailing social attitudes of the time.

How much David McVicar's direction contributes to the sheer power and intensity that comes across in this production is hard to judge. The set itself is relatively straightforward, unadorned and more or less period. One directorial choice that goes against the original specifications is in how McVicar involves the Male and Female Chorus more in the action. Not quite interacting with it, but certainly having more of a presence, and this works well, as it is an important feature of the opera. If it's difficult to point to any specific directorial choice that evidently has an impact on the performance, what is clear nonetheless is the McVicar gets the mood exactly right and his direction of the singers and the acting is what ultimately makes this a truly great production.

Which of course means that you need fine singers who can also act in order to do it justice. The cast here is great, although not all of them are in their prime. Sarah Connolly is still terrifically good, it's just that she's an even better singer now. Christopher Maltman too has also matured into a better singer, but he has always been a good actor is performance here is, if anything, just a little too creepy and disturbing. In this work however, that isn't a bad thing at all. John Mark Ainsley is at his best here as the Male Chorus and with Orla Boylan good as his counterpart, the Female Chorus. All the roles really are just terrific and the measure of the success of the production is that it's about as intense, well-sung, painfully well-acted performance of The Rape of Lucretia as you could wish for, a perfect match for Britten's remarkable score, which is revealed in all its brilliance here by Paul Daniels.

Mozart - Don Giovanni

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Don Giovanni

Haus für Mozart, Salzburg Festspiele, 2008

Wiener Philharmoniker, Bertrand de Billy, Claus Guth, Christopher Maltman, Erwin Schrott, Anatoly Kocherga, Annette Dasch, Matthew Polenzani 

Euroarts

Of all Mozart’s operas, Don Giovanni seems to be the one with themes that make it more open to modern day re-envisioning and reinterpretation. And it’s not so much the subject of the amorous activities of a philandering nobleman that make the opera so timeless as much as the underlying themes of passion, revenge, power and conquest, or - as in this particular production for the 2008 Salzburg Festval - the question of honour.

Accordingly, there’s something of a Godfather feel to the tempestuous Latin passions of love and revenge here that feels perfectly appropriate, the production approaching the opera from a different angle while remaining perfectly true to the strengths of Mozart’s score and the themes of Da Ponte’s wonderful libretto, full of wit and wisdom. It’s certainly more complex and nuanced on the subject of relationships between male and female than their rather more buffa treatment of the subject in Così Fan Tutte. To cite just one example, look at Donna Elvira’s complex feelings for Don Giovanni, expressing hatred, contempt and frustration for Giovanni, but at the same time her actions are fuelled by a deep love and an irrational but no less sincere hope for his redemption.

The staging here is limited entirely to a dark woods setting, but imaginatively deployed on a revolving stage which gives a wonderful three-dimensional quality to the production (well directed for the screen, as ever, by Brian Large). As well observed as the references and updating are - the staging never compromising the integrity of a truly great opera - the performances here are just as nuanced, powerful and dramatic, Christopher Maltman’s near-deranged, wild-eyed obsessive Don Giovanni brilliantly balanced and vocally matched with Erwin Schrott’s amusingly twitchy Leporello. The score is magnificently interpreted, drawing the full darkness and energy out of the opera, as well as bringing out its underlying tenderness and tragedy. In this respect, in addition to strong singing you would expect from all the major roles, Matthew Polenzani gives one of the most sensitive and sympathetic readings of Don Ottavio that I’ve seen for this opera.

The image quality on the Blu-ray - once it takes its time to actually load-up onto the player - is fine, while the orchestration is given a fine presentation in the DTS HD-Master Audio 5.1 mix, centrally located and unshowy on the surrounds, and beautifully toned. The singing initially seems a little echoing in this mix, occasionally overwhelmed by the music, but it’s generally good and seems to improve by the end of the first Act. The PCM Stereo mix gives the singing a better stage, but at the cost of the fine separation of the orchestration.

This is not the most traditional production of Don Giovanni, and it certainly isn’t the best I’ve seen or heard, the limitations of the woods setting losing some of the familiar elements that usually make it work so well as a drama (traditionalists will be disappointed by a bus timetable in place of a register of the Don’s conquests, no masks on the wedding guests, a Burger King take-away for a dinner-party, twigs for the Commendatore’s statue and certainly no flames at the finale), but that’s balanced with a reasonably fresh take on the themes, some strong singing and fine acting that is more naturalistic than the usual operatic gesturing, and a fascinating visual presentation in terms of its design and conceptualisation.