Vivaldi - Bajazet (Dún Laoghaire, 2022)

Antonio Vivaldi - Bajazet

Irish National Opera, 2022

Peter Whelan, Adele Thomas, James Laing, Gianluca Margheri, Niamh O’Sullivan, Eric Jurenas, Claire Booth, Aoife Miskelly

The Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire - 29 January 2022

The fact that Vivaldi's 1735 opera Bajazet has made it through to us intact through the centuries feels like something of a miracle. That's obviously partly through chance but it's also partly through design. It's by chance that this opera has survived where many, including many by Vivaldi, have not, but it's also by the fact that Vivaldi created Bajazet as a kind of greatest hits, a pasticcio where he would create recitatives to string together famous arias by other composers and add a few of its own - so yes it's bound to be good. What is also great by design as far as claiming it to be something miraculous is that it communicates its brilliance through to today, and that is by design of the director, cast and orchestra of this Irish National Opera production.

Reading the synopsis beforehand for a refresher, even knowing how the plot of baroque operas usually play out and even having seen several productions of Handel's Tamerlano, I despaired of getting my head around the characters and the typically complicated struggle for power and love between each of them. Maybe it was just the long journey down to Dún Laoghaire. Surely there must be a simpler way of getting the plot and characterisation across? Well of course there is, and after abandoning taking in more than the events of Act I, I trusted that it would all become clear in the delivery in the performance. Making the complicated simple is no easy matter of course and it's down to how good the director and the cast are, and well, this was just thrillingly put across.

Baroque opera can be dry, with not much in the way of dramatic action. There are passages of recitative and a lot of arias with flowery metaphors that have little lyrical relation to the drama. Even more so in a pasticcio, where the arias have been lifted almost wholesale from other works and dropped into a new, usually generic, plot. That is true to some extent with Bajazet, including one aria where Idaspe sings of a boat in a storm at sea, despite their being no naval scene in the opera, although evidently you can take that as a metaphor for emotional turmoil. Writing his own linking recitative for Bajazet however, Vivaldi clearly manages to tie things together very well into a tense dramatic situation.

That however is still only as tense and dramatic as it is allowed to be. The underlying sentiments, rather than being just generic expressions of love, anger, revenge and despair need to be wholly and convincingly played without operatic or period mannerisms. Here Adele Thomas has clearly worked hard to ensure that the performances are robust and related realistically to the situation, with the added bonus that every singer here manages to bring individual life and personality to the characters. It's rare that you see the drama of a baroque opera enacted as if it really mattered.

Molly O'Cathain's impressive gold box set design is also robust and it needs to be because Bajazet and Tamerlano fairly bounce off the walls in aggression and there is much slamming and bursting open of side doors. No walk-on-walk-off scenes here. The other performers wisely give the two principal figures a wide berth and when they aren't able to get out of the way, they get caught up in some rough and tumble that is more than just boisterous. There is anger and violence here that is commensurate with the nature of the figures involved and the implications of the historical drama. It's a tense situation, life or death, and you can feel it. We know what Tamerlano's fate will be, but we can't be sure in this production that his will be the only death.

That's another element of danger and unpredictability that Adele Thomas has introduced into the already tense drama. Anyone familiar with Tamerlano or many similarly themed baroque operas like this can usually expect the insensitive, misguided, proud and cruel ruler to eventually come to his senses and resolve matters, at least as far as affairs of the heart are concerned. Not so here, which is fitting as this Tamerlano is particularly cruel and irredeemable. So, while Bajazet nobly sacrifices himself to be spared the humiliation of his daughter Asteria as is traditional, the lame Tamerlano also meets a just fate through a means that has been hinted at throughout but which also feels in keeping with the amount of pent up anger that has built up.

Where do you start with a cast like this who all have significant roles to play? Probably with the two roles that have the most impact in terms of drama and singing. Stalking the stage with menace James Laing made this Tamerlano really a figure to be feared, his countertenor only adding a sinister quality. He's the only person you could imagine capable of subduing this Bajazet and even then he must have employed some dirty tricks to do it, as Gianluca Margheri's muscular bass-baritone Bajazet was only matched by his physique, straining at the bonds like a rabid dog. He practically shook the walls with every fiery utterance. 

We didn't get to hear Claire Booth's Irene until the close of the first Act, but she more than made up for the late appearance with high-flown coloratura expressing her fury - and like Bajazet you could feel that very real fury of a woman scorned and hurt. Niamh O'Sullivan's Asteria was also an impressive ball of coiled anger, spitting imprecations against her faithless lover Andronico as much as against her captor Tamerlano. The conflicted and inconstant Andronico was brilliantly characterised and sung by countertenor Eric Jurenas, skulking and diving from the formidable forces, no match for any of the forces on the stage around him. Aoife Miskelly's Idaspe also had a vital role to play here dramatically and in the delivery of challenging arias. Vital also is the role of the ensemble of voices, the six creating a stunning array of complementary and contrasting timbres and voices. All close together on the stage too, playing off on another, even when they weren't singing, all adding to the hothouse atmosphere.

I had forgotten how powerful it can be to hear live baroque opera played on period instruments. I can't blame Covid entirely for this, although it certainly delayed this production to the extent that it was almost cancelled entirely and was only allowed to play to a full house this week with the lifting of most restrictions in Ireland, but it's just rare enough to get the opportunity to hear rare works like this close up. In fact my last time might indeed have been at the Pavilion in Dún Laoghaire in 2019 when Peter Whelan led the Irish Baroque Orchestra through Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice. Once again, they provided a thrilling and revelatory experience, Vivaldi's music (and that of others) just pinging around the hall with crystal clear precision and put to good dramatic use.

This is Irish National Opera doing what it does best, taking on a challenging and wide ranging repertoire. Whether working with familiar standards, new contemporary opera or reviving rare baroque repertoire, they are equally good at bringing opera to life. That's a team effort and when that combines in actual live performance that is ultimately what makes something like Bajazet miraculous, magic or whatever you want to call it. Just 'opera' says it all, I suppose. It's about finding a way to make notes on a page written centuries ago come back to life and this Bajazet makes it into the 21st century alive and kicking.

Links: Irish National Opera

Neuwirth - Orlando (Vienna, 2019)

Olga Neuwirth - Orlando

Wiener Staatsoper, 2019

Matthias Pintscher, Polly Graham, Kate Lindsey, Anna Clementi, Eric Jurenas, Constance Hauman, Agneta Eichenholz, Leigh Melrose, Justin Vivian Bond

Staatsoper Live - 18 December 2019

The subject and content of Olga Neuwirth's new opera Orlando is very much related to the fact that she is the first woman composer not only to write an opera for the Vienna State Opera, but is the first woman composer to ever even have an opera performed there. Neuwirth's choice of Virginia Woolf's influential and highly regarded 1928 novel 'Orlando', which follows the course of a young nobleman who lives through the political changes of the centuries, experiencing it from the viewpoint of a man and then changing sex to become a woman, is clearly a pointed commentary on this fact.

Following in the footsteps of Luigi Nono, a composer that she worked with as an assistant, Austrian born Neuwirth is likewise viewed as a 'political' composer, but rather than just seek to make a well-meaning gesture against the injustice of gender inequality in the world of opera, or even take the route of a superficial commentary on current affairs in the world today, in Orlando Neuwirth extends on Woolf's vision to seek to address a deeper problem that could be seen as having an underlying impact on how the nature of the world we live continually changes, but those changes have been shaped by gender inequality throughout the ages, women reduced to a footnote in history, if considered at all.

It's also notable, if purely coincidental, that the period covered in Orlando aligns very closely with the history of opera, which has also evolved and changed over the years. Even baroque opera however has until relatively recently also been a rarity at the Vienna State opera - a 50 year gap only broken in 2011 coincidentally (isn't it strange how much that word comes up, you'd almost think it telling) with a production of Handel's Alcina, a tale of another Orlando - so the history of change in opera is perhaps not something that many of the more conservative element of the audience in Vienna would recognise. I don't think Olga Neuwirth is going to convince them with her Orlando.

Being a well-educated man from a noble family in 1598, Orlando is well placed to be destined for greatness. He determines to be a poet and a great writer, but although he wins the favour of Queen Elizabeth, his ambitious work 'The Oak Tree' doesn't win favour with critics like Mr Greene. Disappointed in love, when he is betrayed by Sasha, a Russian princess, jaded by the politics of the land and war, Orlando falls into a deep coma and reawakens as a woman in a new age. Her experiences as a woman however bring her to recognise the fact that history is made by men and certainly written by them, meaning much the same thing.

Women don't get a whole lot of a look in and Orlando, now a woman, expected to do little more than make tea and marry, finds it unfair that someone can be rejected solely on the basis of the sex they were born into. Worse comes in the Victorian era, where Orlando encounters women and young girls who are victims of sexual abuse and destined for a life of abject misery. She decides to write and record their experiences from the perspective of woman, but finding a publisher continues to prove elusive, even in the age of eBook publishing.

What is interesting, and perhaps something I failed to appreciate in Woolf or in Sally Potter's filmed version of 'Orlando', is that living now in an era where gender reassignment and gender fluidity is relatively common (if not yet wholly accepted and viewed with suspicion in some quarters), it's now possible to see that Woolf was very much ahead of the game in terms of questions of sexual politics. This of course has a more contemporary application later in Neuwirth's updating of 'Orlando' beyond Woolf's time of 1928 up to the present day, Neuwirth thereby highlighting for a modern audiences how society and attitudes change over time. Significantly however, while that change is brought clearly to the forefront, it also makes evident just how far behind attitudes remain in relation to gender inequality.

It's inevitably a huge task to get all that across in a three hour opera and avoid sounding preachy, particularly when Neuwirth's musical approach to the subject is just as complex and all-encompassing, and modernist and dissonant in the most difficult way for an audience to engage with. Neuwirth doesn't entirely succeed in terms of making the case persuasive from the musical viewpoint, embracing early Tudor music, references to Purcell, religious choral pieces with live electronic layering and use of unconventional instruments in the total opera manner of Stockhausen with its spiritual leanings or Nono's direct political engagement, the conclusion featuring a cabaret band and a transgender singer - Orlando's child - does tend to push towards preachiness.

While it can be difficult to listen to - although I'm certain that it would come across with more detail and much more effectively in a live context rather than via the Wiener Staatsoper's streaming service - it's not hard to appreciate what Neuwirth is trying to do and admire how Matthias Pintscher conducts it, but over an extended period it does head towards sensory overload and cacophony. Certainly for the purposes of how it relates to and reflects the subject of embracing change and diversity however it's essential to employ the richness of musical options open to a composer. It's music that, like Orlando, recognises no distinction between past and present, is male and female all rolled into one, pushing beyond restrictive boundaries of convention.

The musical complexity and what it attempts to bring out only makes the challenges of mixing and blending all the historical scene changes even more difficult for director Polly Graham. Forced into a more linear narrative approach, with the passing years displayed in the background, the production design is perhaps a little more theatrically conventional in how it meets those challenges of keeping up, using moving screens and projections, but unless you employ La Fura dels Baus or Stefan Herheim, it would be near impossible to visually match the textural richness of the music, much less add another level of complexity to the work that in an ideal world the theatrical element should equally contribute.

Neuwirth and co-librettist Catherine Filloux succeed to a large extend in their aims of making Orlando relevant to the modern age, addressing the legacy of the male-dominated, war-hawking, money-making agenda that suppresses any possibility of true change in the world, raising again the spectre of fascism. As persuasive as the central performance of Kate Lindsey's Orlando is to standing up against the ways of the past, whether Neuwirth's Orlando aligned with and updating Virginia Woolf's vision makes an equal or greater historical impression seems unlikely, but it's certainly of the moment, another marker along the way to show that we've still a long way to go.

Links: Wiener Staatsoper, Wiener Staatsoper Live at Home

Reimann - Medea (Berlin, 2017)

Aribert Reimann - Medea

Komische Oper, Berlin - 2017

Steven Sloane, Benedict Andrews, Nicole Chevalier, Anna Bernacka, Nadine Weissmann, Ivan Turšić, Günter Papendell, Eric Jurenas

Opera Platform - 21 May 2017

Revived for this new production at the Komische Oper in Berlin, Aribert Reimann's Medea still sounds as wildly demented as it did when it received its world premiere in Vienna in 2010. Its harsh dissonance hasn't become any easier to listen to over the last seven years, but the purpose of the composer's choice of this particular classical Greek myth has certainly become clearer in how it reflects certain vital aspects of our modern society and how people behave when pushed to their limits.

For good reason then, Reimann's work is one that pushes well beyond the boundaries of tonality. It opens quietly, but it doesn't stay that way for long, building into a tumultuous cacophony that reflects Medea's utter desperation and anger by the end of Act I. The second half of Medea sounds like something has been broken, the music limping along with occasional blasts of brass and squealing strings, the voice of Medea straining to hold herself together, struggling between anger and supplication, between love and the desire for revenge.

It's not easy listening, but then it's not easy watching someone's life collapse in front of you. Medea's life might just fall apart within the framework of a Greek myth or an opera, but the challenge is to make this feel real, relevant and important in the world today. Somehow though, even though the musical force of the work made a striking impression on its own terms, it was hard to see how it could be applied to real life when it received its premiere in 2010. The composer, if I recall, made some remarks about Jason's social climbing ambitions and about the work being about wanting to make a better life for yourself, but it hardly seemed like a matter of pressing social relevance.

In 2017 however that has changed completely and, regardless of what Reimann's intentions might have been and whether or not there was an element of Delphic prophesy in his vision, the refugee crisis and its handling by our governments in the years in-between throws a different light on the work. The fear and mistrust of foreign ways that has been generated and the growing danger of terrorism surely couldn't be more obvious and relevant to the German public at the Komische Opera in Berlin, or indeed to any European or American audience. Whether prophetic or not, it's the undoubted acuity of Reimann's adaptation of Franz Grillparzer's version of the Euripides' tragedy and the intense musical accompaniment that underlines the human nature of Medea's dilemma and treatment with a terrible degree of truth and conviction.

Medea and Jason are indeed refugees, fleeing their homeland of Colchis, bringing fear and suspicion along with them to Corinth. Creon is already wary, having heard of Medea's reputation as a practitioner of the dark arts. When a messenger from the Amphictyonic League appears and adds further fuel to the fire by describing how Medea used spells and potions to murder King Pelias, he is painting her as a terrorist and warning that it would be unwise to let these refugees into the country. With a difficult choice to make, since Jason and Medea have children, Creon agrees to give Jason shelter, but banishes Medea and offers his daughter Creusa as a new mother for them.

Well, we've also seen the fate of the children of refugees caught up in the political disputes and war-mongering of governments, and with that in mind it's hard not to feel on an intensely visceral level Medea's desperation and how this leads to the death of her children. Reimann's Medea is not a political statement or overtly anti-war treatment of the Greek tragedy, but as someone who lived through the allied destruction of Germany during the Second World War (and who has summoned up the forces of Armageddon in his scoring for his opera Lear), the composer unquestionably characterises the nature of an individual human being - and specifically a mother - caught up in such a terrible event.

It's a deeply troubled interiorised world that Reimann scores, one that evidently bears some comparison with how Strauss psychologically probed Elektra in that Greek tragedy, but evidently Reimann takes the atonal dissonance even further. There is scarcely a note in Medea that isn't mangled or pitched at a level that assaults the ears of the audience; there's no flow or melody, just a fractured structure that makes Medea seem like she is in the middle of a nightmare, an edgy sense of her trying to hold it together and lashing out in explosive outbursts, the music clashing with singing that rises towards a scream.

Benedict Andrews's direction and the production design for the Komische Medea adopt a similar reflection of devastation of mood and mindset that could be seen in the rocky cratered landscapes of Marco Arturo Marelli's Vienna premiere production. If anything - and it may be very much to do with sudden realisation of real-world context - this production seems to strike an even darker tone. There is at least greater emphasis placed upon measuring the weight of the words of the libretto and their meaning. In the black ash of the landscape, Medea literally tries to bury her past, her potions, her memories, even the Golden Fleece. When the future seems to hold nothing for her, she eventually buries that as well, with devastating consequences.

There is no question that Reimann's score delivers every ounce of impact that is implicit in Medea's actions, and Steven Sloane's conducting of the Komische orchestra brings that out forcefully. It also has to be brought out in the intensely demanding vocal score that Reimann has composed for the role of Medea, and that is fully undertaken by Nicole Chevalier, who gives a fearsome performance that matches the singing challenges, and at the same time achieves some measure of sympathy for her predicament. There are excellent performances elsewhere that manage to rise beyond the individual and the mythological to a more universal application of the themes. Ivan Turšić's Creon embodies the difficult position of applying the rule of law, while Günter Papendell's Jason and Anna Bernacka's Creusa try to adopt a caring but practical approach to the problem that they face. None of it however will be enough to appease the rage of the abused and mistreated Medea or prevent the disaster that is about to be unleashed.

Links: Komische Oper, Opera Platform