Samuel Barber - Vanessa
Glyndebourne, 2018
Jakub Hrůša, Keith Warner, Emma Bell, Virginie Verrez, Edgaras Montvidas, Rosalind Plowright, Donnie Ray Albert, William Thomas, Romanas Kudriašovas
Opus Arte - Blu-ray
I guess there are two ways of looking at Samuel Barber's Vanessa. On the one hand it's a rather reactionary, stuffy, old-fashioned romantic melodrama, that even in 1958 when it was composed was a backward look at a bygone age, a refusal to accept that music, drama and opera had moved on in a different direction. The other way to look at it is, well, that it's still all those things, but just to accept the work for what it is, an alternative approach that still embraces the traditional form, and respect it for the quality of its composition.
On a second viewing of this production however, I find myself similarly split on the quality and content of the work itself. On the one hand, a second closer listening does demonstrate that the work is not just a lush easy-listening composition in the style of a bygone age, but there are elements of dissonance within it hinting at darker elements that are not make explicit on the surface of the drama. The drama however doesn't stand up to close scrutiny on a second viewing and the observations it makes on love are really little more than banalities.
At its heart, that opera centres on a simple plot where Vanessa is expecting the return of Anatol, a former lover she has not seen in 20 years. It's not Anatol who turns up at their north country mansion however, but his son also called Anatol. Initially shocked, Vanessa however falls for the memory of her Anatol, not realising that the younger Anatol has already had an affair with Vanessa's niece Erika. Erika however has conflicted feelings for Anatol and doubts his love, but when she discovers she is pregnant by Anatol and that he and Vanessa are now engaged to be married, it causes a crisis and an attempted suicide.
What becomes clear is that if there is anything to be made of the suggestion of sinister undercurrents that Samuel Barber brings to Gian Carlo Menotti's libretto, it's all brought out by Keith Warner in his reworking of the drama and his impressive visual interpretation of things that are scarcely hinted at, never mind not explicitly brought out in the drama. Dressing it up as a Hitchcockian mystery really lends the work a lot more interest and intrigue than Vanessa seems to merit.
What prevents Hitchcock's films from appearing old-fashioned is the attention paid to the darker aspects of human nature. Barber and Menotti's characters have none of that depth, there's no insights other than those related to love, jealousy and unspoken, repressed passions. Warner seeks to use those vacancies of true personality and behaviour to hint at deeper mysteries and secrets. He wholly invents a mysterious and possibly taboo origin for Erika, he suggests another forbidden interracial romance affair in the past between the Old Baroness and the doctor as a young servant that is also regarded as taboo in the social order.
As much as Warner's production and reworking of the material works in favour of making Vanessa a little more interesting as a drama, from another point of view the period setting also works against it. The sheer elegance of the costume design, the period detail and the impressive technical approach are impressive, Warner using mirrors and projections to add layers, suggest hidden secrets, show reflections of the past and glimpses of forbidden passions behind the scenes. At the same time however, the period setting also serves to make it all feel horribly mannered and old-fashioned.
There's a scene early in the opera where Erika reads a passage from a romantic novel with little in the way of feeling. Vanessa snatches it and shows her how someone who has known love would express it. Barber appears to do the same with Menotti's libretto, ramping up the melodrama but never finding any true human feeling behind it. It appears that Keith Warner does much the same in this production for Glyndebourne, and makes the best possible case for what they believe is a neglected work. There is much to admire in the opera, but a second visit only reveals that it's all so much smoke and mirrors, and there's not really much depth to Vanessa at all.
The cast and the creative team would beg to differ and their belief in the work is evident not just from the performances and the high production values of this Glyndebourne 2018 recording, but they all make a strong case for it in the interviews included on the Blu-ray release. The opera also looks and sounds great in the High Definition presentation, with stereo and surround mixes that bring out that greater detail in Jakub Hrůša's conducting of Barber's score.
Links: Glyndebourne
Samuel Barber - Vanessa
Glyndebourne, 2018
Jakub
Hrůša, Keith Warner, Emma Bell, Virginie Verrez, Edgaras Montvidas,
Rosalind Plowright, Donnie Ray Albert, William Thomas, Romanas
Kudriašovas
Medici.tv - 14 August 2018
On
the surface, Samuel Barber's Vanessa is a simple domestic drama, but
inevitably there's much more going on beneath the surface. Written in
1958, Alfred Hitchcock was going something similar with repressed
passions around that same time in Vertigo, and Keith Warner has chosen
to stage the Glyndebourne production of Vanessa as a Hitchcock-like
drama of hidden passions leading to disintegrating minds, and it's not a
bad idea, even if it does have the consequence of making an unashamedly
old-fashioned work feel rather dated.
But is it really a dated work or, like Hitchcock, does it not actually address something that was
more than a little daring for its time in its subject matter and
perhaps even taboo? Certainly a more personal reading of the matter of
hidden passions and dark unspoken secrets can be detected in the
libretto of composer Gian Carlo Menotti, who wrote the original libretto
for his lover Samuel Barber, and it can be felt in the dark melancholic
tone of the music. Keith Warner's direction doesn't address that
directly at all in the Glyndebourne production, but he does delve a
little deeper in a way that brings the human element out of the somewhat
mannered and stuffy setting.
The sets, the moral
attitudes and the class issues in Vanessa are all very much of their time. Vanessa
lives with her mother and niece in an isolated mansion in the north of
the country. Abandoned 20 years ago by Anatol, Vanessa has remained in
Miss Haversham-like seclusion, with all the mirrors of the house
covered. She is however expecting Anatol's imminent return, but is
shocked to find that it is not Anatol who arrives, but his son, also
called Anatol. Unknown to Vanessa, Anatol and her niece Erika spend the
night together, but Erika refuses to marry Anatol and he turns his
attentions instead to Vanessa.
The drama and the romantic
triangle situation becomes rather more heated when it is revealed that
Erika is pregnant. Hearing the news of Vanessa's engagement to Anatol,
she attempts to throw herself in the lake late on a dark and snowy New
Year's Eve. While Barber's lushly romantic score underpins the drama,
it doesn't however allow it to tip over into melodrama, since while the
revelations are shocking to the audience, they remain mostly hidden,
repressed and covered up by the characters in denial; Erika about her
feelings for Anatol, Vanessa about her suspicions about Anatol's true
nature.
With much going on beneath the surface as above
it, Keith Warner's direction finds expression for the multiple levels by
highlighting the use of mirrors. Mirrors are referred to explicitly in
the libretto, Vanessa has covered them up for 20 years since Anatol's
absence, and they are covered up again at the end of the opera, and the
significance of covering up and hiding from oneself is obvious.
Warner's use of large mirrors that dominate the stage in Act I take on
another dimension however when they are uncovered, playing on what is
real and what is a reflection.
This is extended in Act
II, when more mirrors are added and doubles are used, sometimes showing
guests behind the scenes, other times showing younger idealised versions
of the protagonists. This is most effective in the scene where the
doctor, who has drunk a lot at the party, sees a ghostly younger, more
gallant and much more confident idealised version of himself asking a
lady to dance, that contrasts with the reality of the older, drunken
man. But these levels and contradictions between what is spoken and the
reality are all there in the music.
Aside from the
Hitchcock references (the period looks much older than Vertigo, going
back to Notorious or Suspicion), there are other film influences and
effects evident in Warner's production, from the use of mirrors
distorting reality and stretching to infinity like Orson Welles's The
Lady from Shanghai, to the use of projections and a twisting set that
almost replicates Hitchcock's reverse-zoom effect at the dramatic moment
of Erika hearing of Anatol and Vanessa's engagement from the top of the
stairs. All of the effects are merited and echoes in the score.
The
music for Vanessa is beautiful, the melodies and arias are lovely, and
even if there is a little too much talky recitative - which Menotti and
Barber tried to avoid not entirely successfully - it is always musically
expressive. The dark and moody 'goodbyes' conclusion is just
wonderful and all of it is marvellously sung by a good cast. Emma
Bell's conflicted and troubled Vanessa could easily have been upstaged
by her rather more impetuous dramatic niece Erika, but sung tremendously well by Virginie Verrez, but Bell's interiority
suggests more. Edgaras Montvidas is excellent as Anatol, singing the
role persuasively, never playing a blatant cad, but rather more subtle
than that.
With an elegant and expressive set, excellent
singing and dramatic performances, good direction that attempts to dig a
little deeper, this is an excellent performance of an entertaining and
superbly constructed opera. Unfortunately, despite Glyndebourne's
insistence that the time has come for accessible 20th century American
opera, Vanessa still feels unadventurous and stuffy. It's a
trend that is also becoming increasingly evident at Glyndebourne, but alongside ambitious productions like Barrie Kosky's production of Saul, Claus Guth on La Clemenza di Tito and Brett Dean's Hamlet, at the moment there's still a good balance in the festival and room for testing out lesser known American works like Vanessa.
Links: Glyndebourne, Medici.tv
Gian Carlo Menotti - The Telephone
Samuel Barber - A Hand of Bridge
Paul Hindemith - There and Back
Serbian National Theatre Novi Sad, 2016
Aleksandar Kojic, Ksenija Krnajski, Richard Rittelmann, Darija Olajos Cizmic, Zeljko R. Aandric, Jelena Koncar, Igor Ksionzik, Violeta Sreckovic, Sasa Stulic, Danijela Jovanovic
Armel Opera Festival/ARTE Concert - 1 July 2016
As well as being an advocate for the new media of radio and television as a means to promote opera and make it more accessible for a wide audience, Gian Carlo Menotti could also be critical of other forms of communication that he evidently felt didn't offer the same opportunities, such as the telephone. Somewhat ironically and quite inadvertently - it was just the most convenient option at the time - I watched this streamed recording of the Armel Opera Festival performance of Menotti's short one-act opera The Telephone on my smart phone. Perhaps since it is no lesser a medium for experiencing opera now than CD, TV or radio, Menotti might not be so quick to disparage the telephone today.
This kind of sums up both the vision of Menotti to look beyond the traditional role of opera, but also the limitations of his thinking - although he can hardly be criticised for not having foreseen the advent of the internet and smart phones 70 years ago when he composed The Telephone in 1947. Similarly, the themes in The Telephone are still universal and adaptable to the modern media - how much more of our lives are consumed with technological communication and less with physical contact with people? - but the nature of the work is also limited in its observations, which it has to be said are obvious and banal.
But essentially, that's the partly the purpose of The Telephone and also part of Menotti's observations on ordinary life as being worthy as subjects for opera. Menotti recognised in 1947 how much of a role the telephone would play in our lives, how impersonal it was as a means of communication and - depending on how we adapt to it - how it could be either a destructive force or a positive one. It might not seem all that original an observation but clearly it's still a problem that everyone continues to struggle to resolve in our ordinary daily lives.
As far as Ben is concerned in Menotti's short piece, the telephone is a great nuisance. He's going off on a trip and has decided to propose to his girlfriend Lucy before he goes. Unfortunately, he can't manage to pop the question as he is interrupted constantly by Lucy's friends calling her up on the phone, or by Lucy suddenly feeling the urge to exchange gossip or enquire about the health of her friend Margaret's cat and dog. Even a wrong number intrudes on this moment much to Ben's frustration. Eventually, showing that the phone can also serve a more useful function, Ben is finally able to propose to Lucy when he isn't even there by calling her up and proposing over the phone.
As a short 25 minute piece, The Telephone is by no means a terribly deep exploration of its subject, but it's still relevant and a universal concern that can be easily updated to a modern context. As it is evidently here in the Serbian National Theatre Novi Sad's production for the Armel opera festival, with Lucy using a mobile phone for her calls. The nature of the trivia discussed and even the comic nature of Ben trying to propose doesn't open it up to any greater purpose, and the only anachronism the production has to work around is that there is no cable that Ben threatens to cut. I'm not sure him producing a gun to shoot the thing - raising questions about Ben as a 'nice guy' - is entirely in keeping with the lighter nature of the work either.
It's a bright and colourful production however that motors along nicely, buoyed along by Menotti's jaunty chamber compositions with piano and flute, the rhythms playful in the manner of a lighter Puccini touch in something like Gianni Schicchi. The singing is mostly recitative-based - and sung in Serbian here - but that's tricky enough with the acting and movement required, not to mention bringing come character to the roles, which is done well here by Richard Rittelmann and Darija Olajos Cizmic. The work closes with a pleasant duet between one person on the stage and the other present only over the phone which perfectly illustrates the simple message of the opera that there is "you're never alone when you have a phone" but it's no substitute for real physical presence.
There are several connections that unite The Telephone with Samuel Barber's one-act opera A Hand of Bridge. The libretto was written by Gian Carlo Menotti, who was Barber's partner in life, and it also has the purpose of finding ordinary lives and everyday behaviour to be a suitable subject for accessible opera. Even playing a game of cards, there is evidently much more going on beneath the surface in the inner lives of the people gathered around the table. When you put two couples together, two men and two women each with their own personal concerns, you create a certain dynamic and a different kind of gameplay than just that of Bridge. But how much of that can you really express in a 10 minute opera?
In truth, not a lot, but - such is the nature of opera, staging and music composition - more than you might think. On face value, there's nothing surprising in the revelations of each of the couples as they each in turn set away from the table and tell us what is one their minds. Sally and Bill, David and Geraldine are concerned with trivial matters, Sally about buying a feather hat, David fantasising over wealth, power and sex; romantic notions, disillusionment and infidelity - there's nothing that is going to surprise anyone here, and despite some contemporary references in this updating to '50 Shades of Grey', there's less here that provides opportunities to make it feel more relevant.
Except, of course, that these trivialities, banal domestic matters and fantasies are still what preoccupy the minds of most people, and they can be dramatic, beautiful and funny in an opera, as Richard Strauss recognised and managed to orchestrate so well in Intermezzo (which as I recall, also has a game of Bridge in it). With only ten minutes to work with Samuel Barber obviously can't compete with that, but for all it is A Hand of Bridge can be brightly entertaining and imbued with character, and this production demonstrates that well.
As such a short piece it's also a work that obviously needs to be programmed with complementary works. Here, as part of the Armel Festival's 'Omnibus Opera' it comes between Menotti's The Telephone and Paul Hindemith's There and Back, the three combined barely adding up to 50 minutes in length. Hindemith's 10-minute piece is another little domestic incident, a scene between a husband and wife having a dispute over a letter he believes comes from her lover. Hindemith's twist however is a clever one, the scene ending with the husband shooting the wife, only for the entire scene to be straightaway played out again backwards on the intervention of a wise man with mystical powers.
Hindemith's palindrome structure for the short piece plays around with time to highlight the impact of cause and effect. If we knew an action might lead to an unhappy outcome, would we not modify our actions? Mainly however, the piece is just pure entertainment, a dramatic exercise that provides good opportunities for a small troupe of singers and musicians to run through their paces. The Novi Sad Theatre production doesn't attempt to do a lot with it, settling for a bold colourful cartoon version instead of the usual ordinary domestic setting. It takes its lead in this respect from the other two works, the letter of suspected infidelity in this case updated to a text message on a mobile phone, making it a familiar scene that will doubtless have been played out many times, although without the benefit of being able to take it all back. The musical performance is buoyant and playful, capturing the exuberance and richness of the piece.
Links: ARTE Concert, Armel Opera Festival
