Wrainwright - Prima Donna (Armel, 2017)

Rufus Wrainwright - Prima Donna

Armel Opera Festiival, Budapest - 2017

Gergely Vajda, Róbert Alföldi, Je Ni Kim, Mária Farkasréti, Máté Sólyom-Nagy, Botond Ódor

ARTE Concert - 19 July 2017

There are certain risks associated with writing an opera about opera, unless you are Richard Strauss and have Hugo von Hofmannsthal as a librettist. Which, as that obviously implies, means that you have a lot to live up to. Somewhat in the thrall to Romanticism then and in complete contrast to most contemporary opera composition Rufus Wrainwright's first opera Prima Donna is, to say the least, a little florid if not actually musically and dramatically overwritten. On the other hand, as an opera that is essentially about the great opera tradition, you can excuse its excesses to some extent, particularly when it's done as well as this.

Dealing with a great opera singer living in seclusion and fear of her decline in a Paris apartment, Prima Donna is clearly inspired by the fate of Maria Callas. In a Paris apartment, Régine Saint-Laurent, a former great opera singer is looking back over her career. She hasn't sung in public since the acclaimed premiere of 'Aliénor d'Aquitaine' six years ago, singing a role one that was written for her, one she believes was the greatest role of her career and indeed one of the greatest parts in any opera. But the opera was in some way cursed, and the great diva's voice failed her on the night of the second performance. She hasn't sung it or any opera in the six years since, even though the press still show considerable interest in speculating at her making a comeback.

The success of Wrainwright's opera lies in it being more than just a loving tribute to an opera diva, and it even extends beyond the belief (and successful demonstration) of the power of opera to permit one to dream. There's also an essential human side to the story that it is essential to tell, and that's more than just the tragedy of the loss of greatness, the acceptance of the failing powers, the diminution of talent and genius, or the ending of a dream. In many ways it's also about acceptance that change is inevitable and that all things come to an end.

Prima Donna has a small cast, but none of them are supporting roles. In their own way each has singing challenges as great as those given to someone playing a grand diva, but they also support the wider implications of the work. Philippe, Madame Saint-Laurent's majordomo, is perhaps the one with the greatest delusions, and the one who has the hardest time accepting the fate of his mistress. He is someone who believes he has powers, managing (invisible?) servants around, arranging for a journalist to help give Régine the confidence to return to the stage.

For a while Philippe, Marie the maid, Régine and the journalist all fall into the thrall of this dream. The journalist, professing great love for the legend of her last great performance, encourages Régine to momentarily relive the experience, singing pieces from 'Aliénor d'Aquitaine', and Wainwright scores and sets the scene admirably. The rather Saint-Saëns-like opera within an opera does indeed seem to aspire to a greater place, to transport the participants and the listener to another world, only for the reality to come crashing back in.

The musical reference points are what you might expect; hints of Wagnerian Romanticism; lush Puccini-like orchestration, numbers and sentiments; even some Janáček rhythms and structuring, with Emilia Marty of the Makropulos Case an evident reference point, but there's also an element of Jenůfa and The Cunning Little Vixen in those deeper themes of dreams giving way to the acceptance of the harsh but undeniable realities of life. Conductor Gergely Vajda handles this without any suggestion of pastiche or irony as Wainwright's music has its own character and is closely related to the subject itself.

Whether the work touches on a deeper human element or remains lost in its own little world of opera could depend very much on how it is presented in any given production. The staging created by Róbert Alföldi specifically for the Armel Opera Festival competition in Budapest is simple but effective. It relies on the fact that the opera has a single physical location and a small cast of singers, and makes the most of them to transport the work into those other essential areas. The main transformation takes place in the appearance of Régine, between when she is over-dressed as the diva and shuffling around the apartment without her wig in a bathrobe. There are other little tricks of lighting and a 'spot-lit' platform that can transform the location and mood in a second, which this opera often does.

It shouldn't be underestimated however just how challenging the singing is for all four roles here. The female roles are really in the Richard Strauss register, dramatically and technically challenging for Mária Farkasréti's Madame Saint-Laurent, who also has to show an edge of vulnerability for the role of a great singer losing her voice to be credible. The high tessitura for Marie the maid calls for a light agile voice and Je Ni Kim (in competition) reaches those stratospheric heights impressively while retaining a sense of musicality. The journalist is also at the high end of the tenor voice, and Botond Ódor shows just how lyrical and beautiful that can be. Máté Sólyom-Nagy sings the baritone role of Philippe authoritatively and with sensitivity. The Armel production of Prima Donna is a very fine showcase for Wainwright's abilities as an adventurous and capable composer.

Links: Armel Opera Festival, ARTE Concert

Eötvös - Senza Sangue/Bartók - Bluebeard’s Castle (Armel, 2016)

Péter Eötvös - Senza Sangue/Béla Bartók - Duke Bluebeard’s Castle 

Opéra Grand Avignon, 2016

Péter Eötvös, Róbert Alföldi, Nadine Duffaut, Romain Bockler, Albane Carrére, Adrienn Miksch, Károly Szemerédy

Armel Opera Festival/ARTE Concert

Based on a psychological revenge thriller by Alessandro Baricco, Péter Eötvös' short one-act opera Senza Sangue might not seem to have much in common with Bartók's Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, but the pairing of the works by the two Hungarian composers proves to be complementary. The connections and commonalities between the two works are further emphasised by the conducting of both by Péter Eötvös in this Opéra Grand Avignon production for the Armel Opera Festival.

Effectively, Eötvös has reduced Baricco's novel down to its final confrontation, bringing the intensity of what has gone before entirely into a conclusion that is short on drama but filled with tension and intriguing implications. Nina has tracked down a man she has been looking for, a 72 year old lottery ticket seller called Tito who formerly went under the name of Pedro Cantos. 52 years ago he was one of three men who killed her father and he is now the only one left alive. Nina invites the man for a coffee where she reveals that she was present when her father was killed, and she believes it was Pedro who fired the first shot.

From the conversation that takes place between the man and the woman - the dramatic action of the opera not really consisting of much more than that - we are led to believe that Nina has spent her whole life tracking down the three men, and may have been responsible for their deaths, but reduced down to the conclusion alone Senza Sangue becomes much more than a revenge story. It's about a young life that has been destroyed by war, condemned to live in hatred for the rest of one's life, shaped by this one terrible event. "Even if life has no meaning, we go through it with one desire", Nina tells the man, "To return to the hell that created us".

If there's not much in the way of drama, the accompanying music by Péter Eötvös delves much deeper into this troubled soul. The music is tonal, but dark, slow, twisting and stripped down of ornamentation. Not surprisingly, considering the subject, it reminds the listener of Strauss's Elektra, moods fluctuating and rising to the surface in surges, always with ominous undercurrents. The music doesn't just take in the woman's view however, but contrasts it with the man's perspective. There's hesitancy in its flitting, dancing, confusion but with a thread of acceptance underpinning the fear that this day would eventually come. But there's also a measure of challenge to the woman's viewpoint.

The story is evidently not as simple as it seems, and Eötvös's music and the setting probe this further. The man does not attempt to condone his killing of Nina's father, but he does make the point that it was done in a time of war. He was a soldier, he was fighting to build a better society. Vengeance runs both ways. Moreover, he was aware of the young child in the room, saw her hiding and let her live. The tone between the man and the woman gradually changes the more they discuss and come to understand each other. For all the lack of drama and the 'talky' nature of the treatment, Senza Sangue is a subject as operatic as they come, all the more intense for being played out between two people. Péter Eötvös has room to explore these characters in this situation for all the complexity and nuance of their positions and does so brilliantly in this fascinating work.

Senza Sangue is well paired here with Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle. Seen together, the commonalities are obvious, both short one-act operas, both detailing a situation between a man and a woman where there is much more going on beneath the surface than the obvious, the music of both works highly attuned to the psychological or the symbolic underpinnings. Perhaps most significantly - although Senza Sangue is in the Italian language of its source novel - both works are by Hungarian composers.

Conducting his own work as well as Bartók's, Eötvös emphasises the musical connections between the works, or perhaps it might be more a case that he adapts Bluebeard to make it a little more complementary to the tone and the intent that has been established in Senza Sangue. This is not the harsh, jagged, disturbing inner-world of Bartók's dark score, but rather a more sensitive reading that likewise strives to find a neutral position between Judith's troubling inquisitiveness and Bluebeard's admonition to "look but don't question". Like the lesson in Senza Sangue, you won't always find the answers that you want, or worse, you can risk creating the hell you are trying to escape.

Directed by Róbert Alföldi (Senza Sangue) and Nadine Duffaut (Duke Bluebeard's Castle) for the Armel festival, the stage production for both works is clean, simple and neutral, reflecting the neutral position of the musical treatment of the subjects. Other than a gun being shown in the hands of the woman at the start, there is little in the way of props in Senza Sangue, the real drama taking place on an inner psychological level. It's much the same with Duke Bluebeard's Castle, with only sinister figures in the background and semi-abstract projections for each of the rooms adding to the disquieting, sinister undercurrents that come with the peeling back of the psychological layers. The imagery remains, surprisingly but appropriately for the purpose of this production, rather bloodless - senza sangue.

The singing is excellent throughout, noninflected, expressive of character without over-emphasis, allowing those ambiguities and uncertainties within the personalities and the subject to remain. Romain Bockler as Pedro in Senza Sangue was the only competition singer and held all the dramatic tension well alongside Albane Carrére's Nina. Adrienn Miksch and Károly Szemerédy took those personalities a stage further in Duke Bluebeard's Castle, the careful dance between probing and wariness leading to a fraught situation that demands a resolution, although not necessarily lead to the desired outcome.


Links: ARTE Concert, Armel Opera Festival

Mayer - A Death in the Family

William Mayer - A Death in the Family

Armel Opera Festival, Sgezed, Hungary 2012

Róbert Alföldi, Sara Jobin, Philippe Brocard, Adrienn Miksch, Vira Slywotsky, Gabriel Manro, Todd Wilander, Nora Graham-Smith, Sarah Belle Miller, David Neal, Joshua Jeremiah, Brooke Larimer, Ashley Kerr, Judith Skinner, David Gordon, Aaron Theno

Internet streaming - ARTE Live Web, 8 October 2012

Based on a novel by James Agee - the work unpublished at the time of the author’s death - A Death in the Family was created for New York’s Center for Contemporary Opera in 1983, the composer William Mayer, drawing also from Ted Mosel’s play ‘All the Way Home’ in the writing of the libretto. It’s a work that is seeped in the local colour of the deep American south and the period, set in Knoxville Tennessee in 1915, the score and libretto drawing music and imagery from gospel music and the blues to capture the tone of melancholy and sorrow that pervades the opera.

Evidently, Death is the big subject at the heart of the work and the one that contributes to establishing the overall tone, but as the title indicates, the idea of the family also has a significant role to play in drawing people together and providing some kind of buffer and protection from the harsh realities of the outside world. That sounds like a simple enough concept, but the work - not necessarily pessimistic, but certainly agnostic about the idea - also questions whether the gulfs of personality, social background, religious beliefs and simply individuality don’t make that connection impossible to really achieve, and whether gathering together as a family unit to deal with the trials of everyday life isn’t anything more than “tramps drawing around a fire in the cruellest winter“.

Those divisions are highlighted in the Follet family, in the experience of Jay and his wife Mary and their young son Rufus. Mary is pregnant and, religiously inclined, takes the advice and guidance of their local preacher Fr. Jackson on how best to break the news to her young son that he is due to have another brother or sister, telling him that the family is soon to have “a joyful surprise from heaven“. Her husband Jay - who is closer to the boy, enjoying Chaplin movies with Rufus that Mary disapproves of - doesn’t buy into religious “mumbo-jumbo” and would rather Mary be more direct with the boy, who has enough trouble understanding the workings of the world and is often taunted by older boys. Jay sets out one night to respond to a family emergency, his father having suffered a heart attack, and is killed in a car accident. The death in the family brings them together, but still no closer, Mary praying to God, her brother Andrew railing against God, Rufus wondering how this could be a “joyful surprise from heaven”, while rumours circulate that Jay might have been drunk while driving.

Despite the rather heavy nature of the subject dealing with big topics like Death, Family, Race and Religion, and the evocation of those themes through gospel music imagery with a great deal of emphasis on the sorrow and loneliness that form a significant part of the human condition, the work approaches its themes from a surprisingly wide and varied number of angles through the extended members of the Follet family. The things that give people a sense of personal identity and belonging are the same things that keep them apart, and time, distance, age, generational differences, the past give different meanings and values to different people. Yet despite the seemingly insurmountable differences between them, and the sense that they are growing apart from one another, Mary and Jay do seem to reaffirm their bond at the beginning of Act II, just before events cruelly take Jay away from them, leaving the other members of the family hurt and confused.

Considering the variety of threads that and the almost contradictory nature of how they serve to separate as well as draw together, Mayer’s construction and writing do well to bring them together into a cohesive drama. Keeping arrangements simple, using solitary notes sustained by strings and woodwind, as well as little piano interjections, the score sustains a sense of melancholy and tension, incorporating gospel and blues tones to provide that necessary sense of colour. As well as providing genuine melodies and singing that goes beyond mere spoken recitative that is common in modern English-language opera, this also allows A Death in the Family to deal with such big themes without melodrama or overstatement, showing how they relate to ordinary people, dealing with the nature of life and death, and with nature itself - and music is very much a part of that.

The staging, directed for the Armel Opera Festival by Róbert Alföldi, also strives for the same simplicity, using nothing more than a large box to represent the idea of home, of family togetherness, with panels that open out to embrace the wider world, or close up within itself. A balcony above the stage allows for further extension and separation beyond this world - such as when Jay and Rufus go to the cinema. It’s the arrangements of the people within this setting however that really establishes the connections and separations between them, grouping together, singing together, or - by the end of the opera - singing together individually within their own worlds. One other notable device, which works wonderfully, is the use of a ventriloquist dummy for Rufus, the dummy replaced at significant points by a real boy.

Apart from highlighting and premiering many contemporary opera works, the Armel Opera Festival also aims to support and develop new singing talent through competition that allows the finalists to be judged in the context of a full opera performance. The contest competitor in A Death in the Family was Philippe Brocard playing Jay, a role which has considerable challenges for a non-native English speaker, and Brocard coped with them admirably, delivering an sympathetic and well-sung performance. Mary was exceptionally well sung by Adrienn Miksch, but the performances were strong from all the singers, who worked well with each other to really bring out the qualities of an interesting work presented in a fine staging here in Szeged.

The Armel Opera Festival production of A Death in the Family is currently available to view on-line from the ARTE Live Web site.