Fagerlund - Autumn Sonata (Helsinki, 2017)

Sebastian Fagerlund - Höstsonaten (Autumn Sonata)

Finnish National Opera and Ballet, Helsinki - 2017

John Storgårds, Stéphane Braunschweig, Anne Sofie von Otter, Erika Sunnegårdh, Tommi Hakala, Helena Juntunen, Nicholas Söderlund

Opera Platform - 23 September 2017

Ingmar Bergman's films manage to strike such a fine balance between realism and heightened drama that it's hard to imagine that they would gain anything from being adapted into an opera. Bergman however was always a director keen to experiment in film expression and indeed even a creative opera director himself, his filmed version of The Magic Flute in particular showing that perfect balance between dealing with the practicalities of the dramatic stage and sparking the imagination.

Adapting Bergman to the stage is particularly challenging in the case of working with one of Bergman's intense late works of family drama and personal crisis from the late seventies onwards. Autumn Sonata, like Scenes from a Marriage, Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander and Saraband, are all characterised not only by fraught situations of lives in pain with brutal exchanges that cut to the bone, but there is also often a less tangible element in them dealing with death and ghosts, or ghosts of the past.

Both elements weigh heavily on Autumn Sonata, and Sebastian Fagerlund addresses them immediately from the start of his new opera Höstsonaten, setting the dramatic and musical tone for what is to follow. There's an anguished exchange between Eva and her husband Viktor while they are expecting the arrival of Eva's mother who is visiting them. She hasn't seen her mother in seven years, Charlotte having largely neglected her family for the demands of her career as a famous international concert pianist.

There are issues on both sides that suggest that tensions are likely to arise. In the seven years of her absence, Charlotte has not only missed the birth of Eva and Viktor's son Erik, but she didn't even return when the boy died, drowned a day before his 4th birthday. Charlotte herself has recently lost her husband Leonardo, also a musician, who has died a slow, agonising death. To add to the tensions Eva has been looking after her mentally disabled sister Helena, and Charlotte is still reluctant about dealing first-hand with her child, and would have preferred to have her out of the way in a nursing home where she had been committed.

Those however are only the most recent and present issues that are likely to be the source of tension between mother and daughter; the latent animosity between them goes back further and deeper than that. Eva has a lifetime of hurt, pain, disappointment, lack of affection and validation left unspoken that she holds against her mother. It's been building up in her and it's time she had her say. She doesn't hold back, airing all her grievances, reproaches and recriminations in wild outbursts like "I love you" and "You hate me".

Some might expect a little more from an opera than self-absorbed people involved in a full-blown domestic dispute, and there's no doubt it's all more than a little overstated, but that's the point. Bergman's attempt to lay bare the stark reality of mother/daughter relationships is incisive and beautifully crafted, and essentially, the parent/daughter melodrama is no lesser a theme and treatment of the subject than many of Verdi's operas (Simon Boccanegra or Rigoletto). Still, the challenge remains for Sebastian Fagerlund to justify Autumn Sonata's translation from cinema screen to opera stage, and he does that well.

As the title indicates, there is an implicit musical dimension to Autumn Sonata that connects creativity to artistic inspiration. "Where do you draw it from? The brilliance, the pain" the chorus ask, Charlotte's public always with her and in the back of her mind. The question is not just where the artist draws their inspiration from but the hard price they often have to pay for it in the failure of their personal lives is also realistically considered here. Charlotte's career has left her in severe physical pain, and her taking of sleeping pills and painkillers compound her failure to be a good and understanding mother. Above all however, her public comes first.

Fagerlund interweaves all these elements well, pitching the music towards the emotional tenor of the work without letting it add to the high melodrama that is being expressed on all sides. The scoring for the voices is particularly good in this respect, permitting arias of reflection, duet duels and competitive trios of overlapping sentiments spilling over one another as they vie for attention. Fagerlund even permits the rarely lucid Helena her moment of vocal expression. With a chorus always ready to well up also in the background, temperatures are raised in intensity as Charlotte's visit descends into increasingly violent verbal blows.

The other critical factors contributing to Autumn Sonata working as an opera are of course the singing performances and the staging. All the roles are well sung and all the different voices here play a significant part in the work as a whole, but the principal roles are very much tied into the mother/daughter relationship of Eva and Charlotte. Erika Sunnegårdh is compelling and credible in her expression of Eva, and Anne Sofie von Otter shows none of the weakening that has been detected in other traditional roles, but is actually in superb voice in her creation of the role of Charlotte. The only fragility she shows here is her character's inability to continue to deny the damage she has done to her family.

With expression of personality and interaction of characters of primary importance, it's all very well directed by Stéphane Braunschweig, who also designs a set that helps express the multiplicity of views and sentiments. The stage is broken down into rooms and compartments, with backgrounds that open and close in response to the various levels that the libretto and characterisation operate on, showing parallel scenes, flashbacks, ghosts and even expressions of inner-life in the case of Helena. Without question, Bergman proves to be well suited to opera, and Fagerlund serves Autumn Sonata well.

Links: Opera Platform

Janáček - Jenůfa

Leoš Janáček - Jenůfa

Teatro Real, Madrid, 2009

Ivor Bolton, Stéphane Braunschweig, Amanda Roocroft, Miroslav Dvorský, Nikolai Schukoff, Deborah Polaski, Mette Ejsing, Marta Ubieta, Károly Szemerédy, Miguel Sola, Marta Mathéu, María José Suárez

Opus Arte

One of the composer’s earliest works, from 1904, Janáček’s Jenůfa is a wonderful piece of work with a melodramatic but gritty story that has its roots in realism and traditional popular folklore, and it has music to match with a lush sweep of Wagnerian Romanticism, the punch of Slavic dance arrangements and a modern Strauss-like sensibility that ties the nature of the characters and their actions to identifiable but complex modern musical and speech tone patterns developed by Janácek. Unfortunately, this particular performance, recorded at the Teatro Real de Madrid in 2009, is for the most part not the most impressive means of experiencing one of the greatest operas of the early twentieth century.

It’s difficult from this production to grasp any sense of time, location or community sensibility that is so important in identifying the nature of Jenůfa’s dilemma. Jenůfa is in love with Števa and engaged to be married to him, despite his half-brother Laca being more devoted to the young woman, and perhaps a better match. When her stepmother Kostelnička publically delays the marriage until Števa gets his act together, she is unaware that Jenůfa is pregnant. The secret birth of a baby outside wedlock makes the marriage to Števa and the fate of Jenůfa more complicated to arrange, as does the scar on the young woman’s face accidentally left there by the jealous Laca, and despair over the turn of events drives Kostelnička to take matters into her own hands.

Although it does seem to improve considerably by the time we reach the powerful and climactic third act, the whole sense of fluidity and rhythm of the work and the all-important speech tones seem to be lost in the uneven tempo of Ivor Bolton’s conducting. It seems to limp from one scene to the next somewhat disjointedly, and it’s not until quite late in the performance that the conductor manages to bring the precision and dramatic tone required out of the orchestra. The staging by Stéphane Braunschweig is also inadequate and it’s not so much that the set is minimalist – each scene consisting of bare walls and one significant object in a spotlight to indicate location – as that there is little here to support mood or the dramatic action. Up until the final act, it’s a fairly anonymous staging, dark, with stark lighting on the characters, that doesn’t have the requisite impact and fails to draw the viewer into what is very much a story related to the community, as well as an interior journey.

The singing is good in all the principal roles, if not outstanding. There’s nothing here, for example, to create the kind of impression or investment in the roles that Elisabeth Söderström and Eva Randová achieve in their incredibly passionate and chilling renditions of Jenůfa and Kostelnička for the classic Charles Mackerras recording of this opera (although it is perhaps unfair to expect any live performance to match this). Amanda Roocroft however is a fine Jenůfa and Deborah Polaski an excellent Kostelnička, both of them growing into the roles (or perhaps it just took me a while to acclimatise to them), gathering intensity as the opera reaches the third act. Nikolai Schukoff and Miroslav Dvorský as rival half-brothers Števa and Laca, also give fine performances. None of them however are helped by the inadequacy of the staging or by the mediocre playing of the orchestra.

Something close to the real impact of the work is achieved by the time we get to the remarkably beautiful and poignant duet at the conclusion of the opera, but otherwise, this production succeeds only as far as making Jenůfa sound like an ordinary opera, when it’s really a work that has so much more to offer and deserves a lot better than this in terms of staging and performance. It’s not helped at all by the inadequate video transfer on the Blu-ray. The extremely dark stage (as is often the case in Teatro Real productions in my experience) scarcely looks better than standard-definition, with little detail and a highly contrasted image that exhibits lighting fluctuation and exposure variations. The image is somewhat juddery, and this isn’t helped by jerky camera work. The disc contains only a Cast and Synopsis, but there is a more detailed examination of how the music works alongside the drama in the accompanying booklet.