Jean Sibelius - The Maiden in the Tower, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov - Kashchei the Immortal

Jean Sibelius - The Maiden in the Tower
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov - Kashchei the Immortal

Buxton Festival, 2012 

Stuart Stratford, Stephen Lawless, Kate Ladner, Emma Selway, Richard Berkeley-Steele, Robert Poulton, Owen Gilhooly

Buxton Opera House - 12 July 2012

Even though they are both very different in style, approach and meaning, there is at least one very obvious common theme between the two exceptionally near-contemporaneous rare one-act operas brought together in Buxton’s “Festival Double Bill” - both clearly deal with young women held captive in a tower by an evil, oppressive figure of power. If Jean Sibelius’s The Maiden in the Tower (Jungfrun i tornet), the composer’s only opera work, is the slighter and more superficial of the two in its treatment of this theme - both in narrative and in musical terms - it’s contrasted nonetheless to good effect in this clever pairing with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsahov’s Kashchei the Immortal, which is characteristically a richer and more complex reading of fantasy fairytale elements for this composer, aligning its themes and concept towards making a very real statement about the political situation in the Russia of its time.

The Buxton Opera production smartly avoids making reference to any early Russian turn-of-the-20th-century social or political messages, which though interesting are far from relevant today and perhaps one of the reasons why the work is so rarely staged outside of Russia. Instead, Stephen Lawless’s direction cleverly links the two works through having the same singers play corresponding/contrasting roles in both works, allowing the characterisation of the earlier Sibelius work to influence the meaning of the Rimsky-Korsakov. Removing the original context of a work and replacing it with another artificial background is of course not an uncommon practice in opera productions, but usually it is achieved through an updating or reworking of the stage setting, period and location. It’s highly unusual to see a work given a different musical background as a basis in this manner but it’s cleverly and most successfully done here in a way that doesn’t distort the deeper meaning of the two works.

It’s probably the Sibelius work however that gains the most from this double-bill enhancement. The Maiden in the Tower has a very simple storyline set at a children’s birthday party, although one immediately thinks of Oscar Wilde’s fairytale ‘The Birthday of the Infanta‘ and how dark and twisted that can be. The Maiden in the Tower does indeed set out with just such an intent, emphasised during the short overture in this production where the bailiff’s son, at his birthday party, is seen cruelly twisting off a doll’s head and furtively peeking up its skirt before donning a demon mask, effectively summarising his character is a few brief stokes - as does Sibelius in the score. When the bailiff’s son’s advances are rebuffed by a young uninvited guest, the boy has her locked away in a tower intent on having his wicked way with her. The girl’s reputation is mocked by the other guests, but her young boyfriend discovers the truth and tries to rescue her, fighting the bailiff’s son. A governess intervenes and releases the girl and the party continues without the birthday boy.

As a version of the Britten-like theme of the corruption of innocence, The Maiden in the Tower is not a terribly complex or insightful affair, the dialogue straightforward and declarative, and it’s not scored in any particularly subtle way either by Sibelius. It does however sound ravishing, with a Tchaikovsky-like Romanticism in its symphonic and folk-tinged arrangements which give strong dramatic punctuation to the Cherevichki-like folk and fairytale elements, with some wonderful chorus work that strikes those moments home even further. The piece is however given a little more edge from the stage direction which plays on the awkward age of innocent children approaching sexual awareness and makes the most of the singers evidently looking older than the children they are playing. This takes on another layer of depth when placed alongside Kashchei the Immortal. Is the kind of childish devilment and humiliation that has been inflicted at an early age capable of developing into something rather more unsettling and dangerous in later life?

Kashchei the Immortal, despite its more obviously fantastical setting, does actually suggest that this could indeed be the case with its evil magician. Played by the same actor/singer who played the bailiff’s son in The Maiden in the Tower, Kashchei has not only imprisoned a princess in his tower (Kate Ladner again the unfortunate captive), but he has brought-up his daughter Kashcheyevna to seduce and kill men in order to avenge himself “for past humiliations”. Seeing in his magic glass (an old flickering TV set here) the threat of the Princess’s lover Ivan, he dispatches the Storm Wind to warn Kashcheyevna, but his daughter finds herself unable to carry out her evil deeds despite having Ivan at her mercy. The Storm Wind, who had been held captive by Kashchei, spirits Ivan to the castle to rescue the Princess. Realising that she is in love with Ivan, who rejects her, Kashcheyevna weeps, and in displaying such emotion she brings about the destruction of Kashchei.

As well as using the same singers for similar roles, the connection between the two works in this production is evident in the subtle transformation of the same set used in both pieces and the connecting element of the demon mask, but nothing else is over-emphasised to the extent that the shadow of Sibelius lingers over Rimsky-Korsakov’s work. It does however feel appropriate that the moral of goodness triumphing over the seemingly immortal power of evil and being rewarded as promised in childhood stories does indeed be seen to be true in later adult life. In an additional twist at the conclusion however, the production realistically considers that such experiences do not come without a human cost. It’s not just “happily ever after”. The Princess, released from her captivity, the cruel ruler destroyed, curls up beside the defeated Kashchei as if having endured the captivity, she is unable to recognise freedom or in some way her inherent goodness sympathises with his predicament. It’s a truthful touch that shows that the situation has been realistically considered just as thoughtfully as Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestration of the work itself with its underlying real-world meaning.

The performances in this production were simply marvellous across the board, the five main singers - Kate Ladner, Emma Selway, Richard Berkeley-Steele, Robert Poulton and Owen Gilhooly - equally strong, alive to the possibilities within these enhanced characters, giving them perfect expression in the singing and in the acting. The Northern Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Stuart Stratford also delivered a stirring performance that played to the strengths of these two very different musical works in a way that also made the most of their complementary contrasts.

Handel - Jephtha

George Friedrich Handel - Jephtha

Buxton Festival, 2012

Harry Christophers, Frederic Wake-Walker, James Gilchrist, Susan Bickley, Gillian Keith, Jonathan Best, William Purefoy, Elizabeth Karani

Buxton Opera House - 11 July 2012

Staging a Handel oratorio is an attractive proposition, since they often contain some of his most beautiful and stirring compositions in a much freer and more varied form outside of the restrictions and conventions of the Italian opera seria, but they inevitably present certain challenges when it comes to dramatising them for the stage. Works such as Theodora and Belshazzar are indeed semi-dramatic, their religious subject sometimes the only reason preventing them being staged as operas due to English censorship restrictions of the time on the staging of biblical subjects, and they have been successfully adapted as staged opera works, as even has Messiah. Categorised as a “dramatic oratorio in three acts”, Jephtha however doesn’t actually have all that much happening in the way of action, but the qualities of the music in Handel’s final oratorio, finished while partially blind and losing his sight completely soon after, mean that it’s certainly worth trying to find a way to present it to a modern audience.

The libretto by Dr Thomas Morell presents the biblical story of Jephtha from the Book of Judges in the oratorio style of repeated declamations and pronouncements, the devout sentiments expressed in a poetic fashion with only small sections of recitative to link them together. Not a lot actually happens in the relatively straightforward story, where Zabul asks his brother Jephtha to lead the Israelites into battle against the Ammonites. If successful, Jephtha will continue to rule and he vows that if God helps him, he will sacrifice the first thing he sees on his return. It’s his daughter Iphis however who he encounters, come to meet her father. Jephtha agonises over what has happened, but intends to carry out his promise, only to be prevented at the last moment by the intervention of an angel. The biblical story is filled out (and given a happy ending) by Morell by way of Euripides, with some scenes featuring Iphis’s beloved Hamor, and Jephtha’s wife Storge lamenting the premonitions she has had of what is to befall her family.

Like opera seria work from this period, it’s difficult to stage such scenes naturalistically, and particular so in a work that was created as an oratorio, where not only is there much expression of interiorised emotions, but those expressions are particularly ‘elevated’, by which I mean relating to religious convictions and conceptual ideas more so than simply reacting to circumstances. A conventional stage setting won’t work, and might even work against such a particular means of expression, so director Frederick Wake-Walker’s approach is appropriately conceptual. Initially, the staging seems to take a leaf from the book of Christof Loy, the stage bare but for five chairs, the singers dressed formally, taking their places as if for a rehearsal of a performance, walking forward to sing from the stand placed at the front of the stage, with some brief interaction between them. The idea of it being a performance remains throughout, coming through again at the presentation of flowers at the end, but there are other elements at play here that are more difficult to pin down.

It’s left to the chorus - an important element in Handel oratorios, and the principal attraction for staging such works - to take on the task of enhancing the meaning or deeper expression in this Buxton Festival production of Jephtha. Dressed in black robes, with ruffs around their neck, quite what their movements and placements on the stage mean can’t really be defined, but in many respects, they are the embodiment of the scenery, the sentiments and the whole mood of the piece. I know that sounds like grasping for meaning, but meaning is there for the individual to find in the work and its presentation, and if you are attempting to express dark thoughts and “scenes of horror”, then this approach is much more appropriate than setting it in a countryside location or some such naturalistic location. The measure of whether this approach works or not is in whether the full force of the work comes across without the need for literalism (which would be difficult to find in this work in any case), and there was no question that it served Handel and Morell’s work exceptionally well.

Just as vital, if not evidently more so, is the musical accompaniment and the singing, and in that respect, the staging supported what was being expressed here and didn’t detract from it. The playing from the Orchestra of the Sixteen in the pit conducted by Harry Christophers was marvellous, finding the drama in the music itself and working in accord with the singers. The role of Jephtha has the widest variety of emotions, from angry declamation and fervent passion though to complete dejection and soft humility, and James Gilchrist matched the tone and delivery for each sentiment perfectly. This is a wonderful work however for the variety of voices and in how they work together side-by-side in individual sections, but also in unison in duets and trios. Susan Bickley’s Storge, Gillian Keith’s Iphis and countertenor William Purefoy’s Hamor were all outstanding in this respect, each fully characterising their roles through the voice even more so than through the expression of somewhat obscure pronouncements. Jonathan Best and Elizabeth Karani in the smaller roles of Zebul and Angel fitted wonderfully into this arrangement, an arrangement of voices and expression that is amplified by Handel’s choral writing, delivered passionately by the Festival Chorus.

Vivaldi - L'Olimpiade

Antonio Vivaldi - L’Olimpiade

La Serenissima, 2012

Adrian Chandler & James Johnstone, Richard Williams, Stephen Gadd, Rachael Lloyd, Sally Bruce-Payne, Louise Poole, Marie Elliott, Mhairi Lawson, Jonathan Gunthorpe

Buxton Opera House - 11 July 2012

You might think that the Olympic games would be a perfect subject for a Vivaldi sprint, but the composer’s approach to this frequently covered libretto by Metastasio actually adopts a pace more akin to a marathon - which I suppose is an appropriate description for a lengthy opera seria. Thankfully, the directors for this Buxton Opera Festival production were better able to resist the predictable sporting cliches than myself with L’Olimpiade, all the more impressive since everyone else is tying cultural events with considerably less relevance into the London 2012 celebrations.

L’Olimpiade features the usual Metastasian setting of star-crossed lovers, unable to be with the one they love - usually on the dictate of a cruel and selfish king - their lives made even more unbearable by twists of chance, circumstance and no small amount of coincidence in work that has a convoluted backstory you need to be aware of before the opera even starts. Eventually however the king is persuaded to come to his senses and in his wisdom put everything back into the natural order, joining or reuniting the distressed lovers into the arms of their loved ones. It’s the setting of the Olympic games however that puts an interesting if somewhat notional spin on proceedings in L’Olimpiade, one of the most covered Metastasio librettos.

In the Buxton production, the set is staged as if for a wedding, but it looks like a gloomy affair that no amount of coloured balloons is going to enliven. The reluctant bride-to-be is Aristea, and the reason for her despair (despair is not too strong a word to describe the fevered outpourings expressed in typically overwrought da capo arias) is that her father, Clistene, the King of Sicione, has promised her to the winner of the Olympic games. She however is in love with the super athlete Megacle, but her father has a dislike for Atheneans, and has banished him from the kingdom. In the substantial backstory prior to the opera, Megacle has however been rescued during his exile from bandits by Licida, the son of the King of Crete. Owing his life to his new friend, Megacle agrees to enter the Olympic games under Licida’s name, unaware that the prize he is competing for on behalf of his friend is his lost love.

That’s just the simple outline, but being a Pietro Metastasio libretto, there are evidently other complications, not least of which is Argene’s despair (yes, yet more despair) that the man she loves, Licida, has abandoned her (again by regal decree, since she is not of noble birth) and now has his desires set on marrying Aristea. There’s also a situation in the past where Clistene had ordered the death of his own son - Aristea’s twin brother - after a fortune-teller warned that his son would one day attempt to kill him, but, as you can imagine, the only reason for introducing this element is to ensure a nice twist at the end when the son is revealed to be alive and actually turns out to be… well, you get the picture. Nothing remotely naturalistic, just a wonderful opera seria situation for opportunities to decry one’s woes at the cruel whims of fate in long elaborate repetitive arias.

Vivaldi’s approach to this once very popular libretto is not the typical energetic Vivaldian style, although those familiar fast-paced rhythms evidently have their place here, but the work - one of the composer’s later works from 1734 in the then fashionable Neapolitan style - is rather more varied in its efforts to suit the finer sentiments and the sorrow expressed throughout. The majority of those sentiments are delivered in solo arias or ariosos, with only a little chorus work, the variety being in the tempos and the fine melodies Vivaldi creates for them. There is one beautiful duet that stands out from this however, Act I’s ‘Ne’ giorni tuoi felice‘, between Megacle and Aristea, sung wonderfully here by Louise Poole in the castrato role of Megacle, and Rachel Lloyd as Aristea.

L’Olimpiade is a work that relies on the quality of the singers to give its improbable story some character and the singers here helped make that possible, Sally Bruce-Payne’s Argene and Stephen Gadd’s Clistene in particular standing out, but really, this was a concerted effort with the right range of voices to fit the roles. Richard Williams’ stage dressing was basic, but the choice of setting, notionally present-day, was perfect, the whole event looking like one of those wedding parties where everything kicks-off as old grievances are brought to light. Rare though they are, Vivaldi operas are notoriously difficult to stage and this set the tone perfectly and in a much more appropriate location than some sports stadium. With La Serenissima’s Adrian Chandler on violin and James Johnstone on harpsichord driving those Vivaldi rhythms on period instruments, the whole thing came together wonderfully, showing that there’s life in these old works yet.

Strauss - Arabella

Richard Strauss - Arabella

Opéra National de Paris, 2012

Philippe Jordan, Marco Arturo Marelli, Kurt Rydl, Doris Soffel, Renée Fleming, Genia Kühmeier, Michael Volle, Joseph Kaiser, Eric Huchet, Edwin Crossley-Mercer, Thomas Dear, Iride Martinez, Irene Friedli 

Opéra Bastille, Paris, 10 July 2012

You might detect a small note of annoyance in the tone of Hugo von Hofmannstahl’s letter of the 22nd December 1927 to Richard Strauss at one review of Der Rosenkavalier which criticised the failure to make the best use of the opera’s strongest character, the Marschallin. It’s tempting to think that, in this letter to Strauss discussing the composition of Arabella, Hoffmanstahl was indeed suggesting revisiting the 18th century world of old Vienna and addressing that criticism as well as improving the overall dramatic structure that was a little wayward in the earlier work. In many ways Arabella is indeed a more “perfect” version of Der Rosenkavalier, but it’s a work nonetheless that few would consider better than the earlier work, magnificent even with all its glorious imperfections. Given a sympathetic production, with the right kind of cast to draw out and linger over its elegance - such as the one assembled here for the Paris Opera - one would however have to seriously consider whether the latter isn’t worthy of comparison to its earlier incarnation.

Returning to the 18th century Viennese operetta setting, Arabella does indeed demonstrate the hand of a more experienced team capable of improving many of the elements that were slightly awkward and much too self-consciously clever in Der Rosenkavalier. The romantic Mozartian intrigue with identity problems and its cross-dressing farce fits better within the tone of the later work, the introduction of waltzes placed more naturalistically within the setting of a balls at a grand hotel. Everything runs smoothly along the narrative line laid out for the drama, with a musical continuity that effortlessly glides one right through the three acts. There’s always the danger of the music being a little too smooth with Strauss in this register, but there is an awareness of the darker side of the Vienna of Maria Theresia beneath the surface glamour.

This is one further significant difference between the conception of the two works. Der Rosenkavalier was composed in 1911 before the Great War, Arabella after it in 1933, and although both seem to wallow in a nostalgia for an idealised past, there are hints in the latter work - with its specific 1866 setting just after the war with Prussia - of a more meaningful reflection on the state of the post-war Austria of Hofmannshahl and Strauss’ time. There’s nothing too dark, just the hint that the world reflected in the monetary ruin and fall from grace of former military officer Count Waldner, is unable to sustain the illusion of living in the past much longer. What is wonderful about the work is how it manages to keep this within the spirit of what is essentially a comic melodrama, where one daughter Arabella will have to be married to a rich man, while the other daughter, Zdenka, must dress and act as a man, since the family cannot afford a marriage for two daughters, and Arabella is the better prospect.

Arabella moreover, despite the apparent light tone of the work, is indeed a more fully rounded human person that the Marschallin - who was more of a concept to embody the passing of time in the more philosophically-leaning Der Rosenkavalier, although fully and poetically developed in that respect - was never allowed to be. Arabella still has all the lush romanticism that Strauss and Hofmannstahl want to capture in this lost Viennese world for a time that, after the Great War, was ever more in need of it. Without denying that times can be difficult, that sacrifices need to be made, the opera offers up the hope that fairytales can happen, that goodness, fidelity and happiness have the chance to exist. With that kind of concept, Arabella can be played as too lushly romantic, too formally classical and over-elaborate in a manner that smothers the delicate balance that the music and the drama treads. Not so in this production at the Opéra Bastille in Paris, one of the final works of the current 2011-12 season.

The staging by Marco Arturo Marelli didn’t appear obviously special, but it worked wonderfully with the intended tone of the work. The whole purpose of Arabella is to create this world of 18th century Vienna in all its glamour - idealised though it may be - so there’s not a lot of point in changing the period or the setting. Marelli’s sets looked like the typical Opéra Bastille production, bright, with coloured lighting, filling the stage and making full use of the height of the stage, yet the luxury, smoothness and cleanness of the designs suited the tone of this particular work. The set was wonderfully designed also to match the flowing nature of the work, slipping elegantly from one scene to the next, although the actual stage direction for the characters within this was a little bit walk-on/walk-off. The cleverest touch was the fall of a blue silken curtain at the end of Act I, which managed to romantically set up the first wordless encounter between Arabella and Mandryka, to be taken up from the same position at the start of Act II.

With Philippe Jordan at the helm, there were some truly astonishing sounds coming out of the orchestra pit from the remarkable Orchestra of the Paris Opera. It seemed directed with a Wagnerian punch and heft that ought to be out of place with this light comic drama, yet it only served to underline the dramatic and romantic tone to its fullest extent. It was the intelligence of the wonderful singing performances however that really carried through the full beauty of the work and the complex depths that are suggested in Hofmannstahl’s libretto and Strauss’ music. Renée Fleming’s silken tones graced Strauss’ music with warmth, glamour and sensitivity, although her performance was certainly enhanced by Jordan’s direction and in her well-matched interaction with the other singers. Alongside Michael Volle, the pairing of Arabella and Mandryka felt every bit as perfect as it should, bringing the full romantic content out of the work, but Kurt Rydl as Waldner and Genia Kühmeier as Zdenka also impressed on every level, contributing to the overall richness of the piece and showing what it can be capable of in the hands of a strong team. It’s a long time since I’ve seen a spontaneous standing ovation for a production as a whole at the Paris Opera, but it was well-merited here.

Rameau - Hippolyte et Aricie

Jean-Philippe Rameau - Hippolyte et Aricie

Opéra National de Paris, 2012

Emmanuelle Haïm, Ivan Alexandre, Sarah Connolly, Anne-Catherine Gillet, Andrea Hill, Jaël Azzaretti, Salomé Haller, Aurélia Legay, Topi Lehtipuu, Stéphane Degout, François Lis, Marc Mauillon, Aimery Lefèvre, Manuel Nuñez Camelino, Nicholas Mulroy, Jérôme Varnier

Palais Garnier, Paris, 9 July 2012

This new production of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie comes at an interesting time in the recent revival of French Baroque opera. While William Christie has moved on to investigate further back through the works of Cavalli, Charpentier and Lully, the arrival - or so it seems - of Rameau’s first opera is freshly put into historical context. In some respects this works in its favour, allowing us to better understand the impact and the influence that Rameau would have on the world of French opera, but on the other hand, through Ivan Alexandre’s rather old-fashioned traditional production, the work suffers in comparison to the efforts that Christie and his collaborators have made towards making these works accessible and meaningful to a modern audience.

Mostly however, thanks to the musical direction of Emmanuelle Haïm, Hippolyte et Aricie does indeed show how much more modern a composer Rameau was in relation to his predecessors. The opera, the composer’s first and written late in his career, is perhaps still too mired in the conventions of the French tragédie lyrique, but coming after having published his Treatise on Harmony in 1722 and his New System of Music Theory in 1726 and having established his career as an accomplished composer of music for the harpsichord, technically Rameau’s music is much more advanced, breathing a freshness and sense of modernity into the ensemble arrangements, with the choral sections in particular sparking the work into life. In almost all other aspects however, but mainly in narrative or dramatic terms, Hippolyte et Aricie is a very dry, conventional baroque work that doesn’t hold up quite as well as some of the composer’s other great works, Castor et Pollux, Les Indes Galantes, Les Boreades or Zoroastre.

It might help if you are familiar with the background of the Greek tragedy Phaedra as told by Euripides, Seneca or Racine - certainly most of the audience in Rameau’s time would have been familiar with the mythology - but even then Pellegrin’s libretto puts its own particular spin on the subject, as making Hippolyte and Aricie the focus of the story might suggest. A lot of the reworking was undertaken in order to meet the demands of the lyric stage, and Rameau’s opera complies with all the conventions of the form, from the opening prologue in a pastoral setting where Diana and Cupid issue challenges to settle a dispute over who reigns over the hearts of men, with a love story then at the heart of the work and scenes set for spectacle and variety in storms and journeys to the Underworld, with Gods and mythological figures dropping in at every opportunity to show off the stage machinery.

The production, directed by Ivan Alexandre with set designs by Antoine Fontaine, does its best to replicate a sense of the original spectacle using period-style props, backdrops and stage effects, the Gods descending impressively on clouds, on top of huge deluges of waves and from the mouths of giant mythical sea monsters. It looks terrific, but none of it really does anything for a dramatic style that already feels dated, failing to find a way that makes a modern audience want to care about the figures in this ancient drama that flits from scene to scene without making a great deal of sense. The colour schemes and lighting used don’t help matters, pale green and sepia under subdued lighting make this look dusty, faded and murky.

There are however compensating factors that make this more than worthwhile. First, of course, is Rameau’s music. If it’s not greatly attuned to the emotional undercurrents, it at least has musical variety (enough for ten operas according to Campra) and is full of wonderful harmonies and melodies. In narrative terms it’s a hugely disjointed work, a series of standalone scenes with linking recitative, interrupted even further and with regularity for choruses and ballet sequences at the most inappropriate of times, all to give the original intended audience the variety and contrast they would have expected, but the leaps and lurches at least allow Rameau to vary the rhythm and tempo with that distinct freshness of character. Most impressive are the choruses, which came across quite stunningly as sung by the Choir of the Concert d’Astrée, as well as a trio of voices of the three Fates. Musically, all of this was directed with a great sense of verve and rhythm by Emmanuelle Haïm.

Also very much in favour of the production was the terrific cast assembled here at the Palais Garnier, even if not all of the roles came across equally as well. Topi Lehtipuu and Anne-Catherine Gillet sang the parts of Hippolyte and Aricie well, with beautiful tone, but caught up in the disjointed narrative, their roles never really came to life and they were as dull as the costumes they were dressed in, slipping into the background. They did have a lot of colourful characters and singers to contend with however, such as Sarah Connolly’s dominant Phèdre, Jaël Azzaretti’s sparkling Amour (Cupid) and Stéphane Degout’s brooding Thésée (Theseus).

Graun - Montezuma

Carl Heinrich Graun - Montezuma

Deutsche Oper, Markgräfflichen Opernhaus, Bayreuth 1982

Hans Hilsdorf, Herbert Wernicke, Alexandra Papadjiakou, Sophie Boulin, Gudrun Sieber, Catherine Gayer, Barbara Vogel, Walton Grönroos, Karl-Ernst Mercker

Arthaus Musik

Released as part of the Deutsche Oper Archive series, this 1982 recording of Carl Heinrich Graun’s Montezuma may not be the most authentic representation of a rare work of Baroque opera seria or the best quality in terms of video presentation, but it’s a performance that is well worth preserving for a number of reasons. Although there are have been some revivals and discoveries of the operas of J.A. Hasse and J.C. Bach in recent years, there are very few recordings available of any of Graun’s work, despite the fact that he was an important figure in German opera composition of the period, working as Kapellmeister to King Friedrich II of Prussia, Frederick the Great. It’s his relationship with the latter which is the most notable aspect of this particular work, Montezuma (1755) - aside from the fine musical qualities of the work itself - with the King himself even providing the libretto for the opera, and it’s this aspect that is considered in the actual production, recorded in the suitably regal venue of the Markgräfflichen Opernhaus at Bayreuth.

It’s not difficult to see what would have attracted Frederick the Great to the subject of Montezuma, as not only is the subject that considers the duty of a great ruler towards his people a popular subject for opera seria - they were written for royal courts - particularly compositions written or following the Metastasian model, but it’s one that evidently has political relevance here for the librettist himself. Montezuma accordingly is characterised as a benevolent ruler, who sees his duty to resolve human misery, not to rule over his subjects by force. Mexico under the Aztec ruler therefore is a kind of a Golden Age, the people happy and contented, secure in their love for their ruler and the peace his great reign promises against the threat of weaker neighbours. Convention would insist on a romantic aspect to the opera, and here, happiness eludes Montezuma until he finds someone worthy to share his throne with him. That person is Eupaforice, the Queen of Tlascála, who will also ally him with another empire and strengthen his position and the security of his people.

It’s a fairly conventional opera seria then in this respect. Montezuma sings of length of his devotion to his people and his duty, and of striving for personal happiness. The plot ties both aspects together rather well with the arrival of the Spanish, Montezuma’s general Plipatoè warning him that Cortes poses a serious threat, while Eupaforice intimates that she has premonitions of doom. In his goodness and with faith in human nature, Montezuma however invites Cortes and Narvès to his wedding, only to be betrayed. If the relevance to Friedrich II’s time isn’t obvious - the Seven Years’ War would commence a year later in 1756, plunging Prussia into conflict with Austria and then Sweden the year after that - the relevance of the work when viewed in the light of historical events is made apparent in the staging of this production by Herbert Wernicke. Clearly not set in any exotic location, but rather in a more European palatial setting and gardens, the Aztecs moreover wear the period costume of the courts of the 18th century with powdered wigs, ball gowns and military greatcoats. The production would also seem to end with a reading of Frederick the Great’s actual declaration of war, as if the preceding opera has just been a warning that kindness and wisdom in a ruler is admirable, but sometimes he needs to be wise enough to chose when to fight for those freedoms.

If there are some minor liberties taken with the setting to put the work into context (and considering the writer of the libretto, it’s certainly a valid approach), the approach taken with the actual performance would be less justifiable today than they were perhaps when this production was recorded back in 1982. The first clue is that the work only runs to 2 hours and 20 minutes in length, when you could expect an opera seria of this period to be between three to four hours long. Considerable cuts have been applied therefore, and - considering that most of the expository recitative would appear to have been left intact to carry the plot, much of those cuts would have been applied to the long repetitions of the aria da capo with some perhaps excised altogether. That’s understandable for a performance of a very rare Baroque opera, when the performance of any Baroque opera at all - even Handel - would have been very rare indeed. To make it a little easier on the audience, Montezuma is also sung here in German, rather than the original Italian (it was probably written in French by Friedrich II before being translated to the common Italian for opera seria). Although inauthentic, this however works in favour of the production’s parallel to the historical Prussian Empire.

Thirty years ago, part of the reason why Baroque opera was so rarely performed was that there simply weren’t musicians trained to play the period instruments. Accordingly, other than the use of the harpsichord, the music has been arranged to fit modern orchestra instruments, but the whole pace and rhythm of the performance nonetheless feels absolutely right. Back in 1982, there weren’t any countertenors who could specialise in taking on the castrato roles of the work, so they are taken up here by female sopranos and mezzo-sopranos, which actually has the impact of making all the Aztecs in this production of Montezuma female and the Spanish male. If the work is mostly fairly conventional and not terribly dramatic, with stately marching rhythms and expressions of noble sentiments, there are nonetheless some lovely arias and one particularly fine duet between Montezuma and Eupaforice in Act III (’Ach, nur für Dich’ in German). The singing is also exceptionally good, particularly mezzo-soprano Alexandra Papadjiakou as Montezuma, and the performance of the Deutsche orchestra is also strong, performed with an elegant brio.

Released on DVD only, the video quality isn’t up to the standards you would expect today, but certainly acceptable and even very good despite the limitations of the source material. Clearly shot on video 4:3 for television broadcast, there’s a certain amount of noise and shimmer in the background, a level of graininess, and chroma noise, but it has nonetheless clearly been fully restored, the colours well-defined, strongly contrasted and a surprising level of sharpness and detail evident. The transfer is also very stable, with no flicker or wobble. The audio track is PCM stereo only and it’s also fine, with decent clarity to the orchestration and singing, holding relatively firm on the sustained higher notes. There are no extra features, but there is an informative essay and a synopsis included in the DVD’s booklet. The dual layer DVD is region free, NTSC, with subtitles in German, English, French, Spanish and Italian.

NI Opera Shorts

Various - NI Opera Shorts

NI Opera, 2012

Fergus Sheil, Rachel O’Riordan, Giselle Allen, Alex Connolly, Doreen Curran, Paul Carey Jones, Mary McCabe, Eamonn Mulhall, Aaron O’Hare, Gemma Prince, Marcella Walsh

The MAC Belfast, 29 June 2012

Our Day by Conor Mitchell and Mark Ravenhill.
Jackie’s Taxi by Ed Bennett and Stacey Gregg.
The Girl Who Knew She Could Fly by Christopher Norby and Frank McGuinness.
Driven by Deirdre McKay and Richard Dormer.
May Contain Flash Photography by Brian Irvine and Owen McCafferty.

The most ambitious project undertaken yet by the recently formed NI Opera, following an award-winning season that wasn’t exactly short of innovation or experimentation - NI Opera Shorts is a bold venture into the risky territory of contemporary opera. Commissioned as part of the London 2012 Festival celebrations around the summer Olympics, NI Opera Shorts consists of five new short opera works - each running for no more than 15 to 20 minutes - showcasing the work of five local composers, written with local, UK and Irish playwrights. Despite the considerable differences between them in terms of approach, style and tone, there was however a remarkable consistency and coherency that arose out of bringing them together in this way, a fact undoubtedly due to a large extent to the creative team’s vision of the concept and the exceptional performances of the singers and the Ulster Orchestra.

Each of the five short works however has its own dramatic impact, particularly when condensed down into the highly-charged form of the opera short. Our Day by Conor Mitchell and Mark Ravenhill has perhaps the most intense experience in terms of its subject and how it relates most directly to the Troubles, but it’s also extraordinarily ambitious in how it concentrates all complex history and emotional content of that experience into one day and into 15-20 minutes of musical and vocal expression. Dealing with the reaction of one family to a British soldier found wounded on the street, the fear, suspicion, hatred and pain is felt on both sides, mixed in with deeper natural human feelings of grief, loss and compassion that have been suppressed or twisted beyond all recognition. Ravenhill sets this one moment of concentrated feeling moreover on one day in 1972 - at the height of the Troubles when, like that famous Christmas football match on the WWI trenches, all Northern Ireland stopped and came together to celebrate the Olympic gold medal win of Mary Peters, a positive moment of beauty, amazement and achievement that throws the twisted reality of what is happening on the streets into perspective.

The raw emotion of that moment is ratcheted up to an almost unbearable level of tension - I could feel myself clenched up in my seat - as guns are waved and shot, as voices are pitched against each other in hatred and fury almost to the level of a scream, with Conor Mitchell’s discordant and aggressively disturbing atonal accompaniment matching the extremity of all those complex, contradictory feelings compressed into such a small time-frame. It put me in mind of Strauss’ Elektra for the intensity of feeling, and dissection of moment-to-moment conflicting emotions, and I daresay you could even apply twisted family archetypes to the arrangement of the protagonists, so rich in allusion is the piece. A large part in putting this across relied on singers being pushed to their limits, and really, the work of Giselle Allen, Marcella Walsh and Eamonn Mulhall was extraordinarily powerful and genuinely chilling.

Ed Bennett and Stacey Gregg’s Jackie’s Taxi is, by contrast, much more up to the minute with the everyday reality on the streets of contemporary Belfast. It may throw in all the expected topical buzzwords of Facebook, blogs and references to Steve Jobs, but it does so in a way that is specific to present-day Belfast - or at least certain parts of it. I never thought I’d see the day when Belfast hoods, millies and spides would appear on an opera stage, but Jackie’s Taxi successfully manages to do that, and do it in a naturalistic way that doesn’t feel too forced or over-dramatised. The language is appropriately as colourful as the subject matter. Sung in English, in chanted lines with strong Belfast accents, it wasn’t always easy to follow the narrative context - something to do with a taxi driver who makes a few drug deliveries on the side complaining about the hazards of her profession and the standard of her clientele - but musically, with Ed Bennett’s Steve Reich-like percussive rhythms, Jackie’s Taxi captured the Belfast beat much better than any of the other pieces, without having to resort to evoking folk or traditional arrangements. In the music, you can sense the pulse of Belfast, the tension and aggression, the humour and the tendency to enjoy a good moan and it fitted perfectly with the use of language and the content, the staging and choreography ensuring that the piece functioned fully in operatic terms.

I felt that this comprehensive operatic dimension that was evident in the first two pieces, was missing from Christopher Norby and Frank McGuinness’s The Girl Who Knew She Could Fly. McGuinness is one of Ireland’s finest playwrights, and his evocation of two parents commemorating the death of their daughter at the site where she jumped to her death from a motorway bridge was beautiful in its concision as a short drama piece. The monologues of the two characters interweave without ever fully connecting, reflecting how each of them is caught up in the torment of their own shattered lives, caught up in a dance of death and despair that holds them together yet keeps them separate. Those sentiments are expressed just as lyrically in Christopher Norby’s Avro Pärt-like score, but it all felt too interiorised and the whole piece never came together in operatic or dramatic terms, the two singers - finely sung by Doreen Curran and Paul Carey Jones, the voices beautifully arranged for the score - looking out for the most part towards the audience over the motorway. The sound of passing cars and the daughter’s voice added additional textures and tone to the work, but if there was a wider dimension to the relating of the circumstances to the daughter’s death, it was difficult to grasp from this single performance.

Evidence however that a dramatic monologue can be operatically expressive (in the manner of Schoenberg’s monodrama Ewartung or Frid’s The Diary of Anne Frank) was provided here by Deirdre McKay and Richard Dormer’s Driven. Like Mitchell and Ravenhill’s Our Day, the success of the work lies in how it bridges the complex relationship between the interior and the external, between what drives one to unfathomable actions in response to a distorted view of nature that has been corrupted by war. Driven relates to the figure of Blair Mayne, a highly-decorated soldier who survived dangerous WWII operations and was named as a threat by Hitler, yet this man comes to meet his death driving a red Riley car at speed down a road in County Down. Entering into the mindset of Mayne, the inner conflict, the nightmarish visions that plague him, his attempts to come to terms with his experiences was powerfully expressed by Eamonn Mulhall and vividly put across through his pacing on the all-purpose staging through effective choreography and lighting. The whole piece was given a perfect musical expression in McKay’s driving Nyman-esque chugging cellos and blaring brass that blended the furious churning of memories and impressions with the momentum of the speeding car. An occasional lilt of traditional Irish arrangements could be detected underlying parts of the score - the only work to draw from such sources - but it was used meaningfully and lyrically in the context of the work. For a monodrama to work so well, it demands a compelling performance on the part of the singer and the orchestra and Driven was consummately dramatic, operatic and emotionally charged.

Drama was predominately to the fore in Brian Irvine and Owen McCafferty’s May Contain Flash Photography, but coming from the pen of one of Northern Ireland’s foremost and most successful contemporary playwrights, that’s not unexpected. The strength of McCafferty’s writing here is the same as in his regular dramas, finding an authentic tone and language for the province’s sense of humour and tying it into a peculiarly absurdist outlook that reflects the self-awareness of hopeless cases who would like to believe that somehow they can overcome the odds - as many have done - but somehow realise the dream itself can be more than enough. Here in May Contain Flash Photography, a family watch a curious alternate-reality lottery where the balls relate to emotions, colours and materials rather than to numbers, hoping that the winning combination will change their lives. The humour is a little hit and miss (and not always each to catch on a single run-through), but humour is difficult to achieve in an opera in any case, particularly in such a short piece. It’s fairly ambitious however to attempt this with a relatively large cast of six characters, all of whom have distinct dreams and expression, but the interaction was exceptionally good. Musically, I wouldn’t have thought a Britten-like style of scoring would have worked in such a context, but Brian Irvine fitted the musical arrangements to the drama very well, the composer particularly strong in bringing the whole range of voices, feelings and overlapping monologues together into a harmonious whole.

What was most memorable about the NI Opera Shorts however wasn’t the quality of the individual contributions, but the sheer variety and the broadness of the scope that they covered. It was thrilling to see the diverse range of ideas that these individual voices brought to the project - an impressive showcase of contemporary Northern Irish opera work that one would rarely have the opportunity to hear performed - but despite the wide spread of musical and dramatic approaches, there was actually a wonderfully complementary diversity to the project as a whole that reflected so many aspects of Northern Irish history, personality and culture. A lot of credit for allowing that to happen has to go to the NI Opera’s artistic director Oliver Mears for pulling this hugely ambitious work together and to the stage director Rachel O’Riordan, who met the considerable challenge of making one stage set suit five very different works, but also found the most effective means of putting each of them across in terms of mood and theatrical presentation.

The highest credit of all however must be given to Fergus Shiel and the Ulster Orchestra who brought these short intense works fully to life in all their rhythmic and lyrical complexity as well as their often difficult serial discordance, switching tone between one work and the next with scarcely a pause other than to adjust to the varied instrumental requirements of each piece. In the relatively small venue of the newly opened Belfast MAC, the audience were able to witness the intricacy of the orchestra’s performance of those arrangements, and it was impressive to behold. The intimacy of the venue (one hopes it will be used again for similarly smaller-scale and even local operatic works in the future) means that there is nowhere to hide any weaknesses, and in this respect the singing of such difficult works must also be judged to be of the highest order, with some fine new talent on display as well as the reliable strengths of Doreen Curran, Paul Carey Jones and Giselle Allen. I’ve yet to be disappointed by anything that the recently formed NI Opera have put on, but with the opening work of their second season, they continue to take on fresh new challenges. Their most ambitious project so far, NI Opera Shorts was another resounding success.