In contrast to the ‘single-shaming’ advertisement - “To the 12,750 people who ordered a single takeaway on Valentine’s Day. You ok, hun?” - for which the financial services company, Revolut, were taken to task, this Temple Music recital programme on 14th February put the emphasis firmly on partnerships: intimate, impassioned and impetuous.
There is a famous story that when Philip Glass first met Nadia Boulanger she pointed to a single bar of one of his early pieces and said: “There, that was written by a real composer”. Glass recalls that it was the only positive thing she ever said about him
Cardboard buds flaming into magic orchids. The frenzied whizz of a Catherine Wheel as it pushes forth its fiery petals. A harvest sky threshed and glittering with golden grain.
This famed murderess worked her magic on Toulouse’s Théâtre du Capitole stage, six dead including her beloved long lost son. It was Victor Hugo’s carefully crafted 1833 thriller recrafted by Italian librettist Felice Romano that became Donizetti’s fragile Lucrezia Borgia.
How important is ‘context’, in opera? Or, ‘symbol’? How does one balance the realism of a broad social milieu with the expressionistic intensity of an individual’s psychological torment and fracture?
The Cardinall’s Musick invited us for a second time to join them in ‘the company of heaven’ at Wigmore Hall, in a recital that was framed by musical devotions to St Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary.
Listening to these two concerts - largely devoted to the music of Richard Strauss, and given by the soprano Diana Damrau, and the superlative Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in the second - I was reminded of Wilhelm Furtwängler’s observation that German music would be unthinkable without him.
The obsessive Russian Dostoevsky’s novel cruelly objectified into music by Czech composer Leos Janacek brutalized into action by Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski beatified by Argentine conductor Alejo Pérez.
Perhaps it was the ‘Blue Monday’ effect, but the first Act of this revival of Richard Eyre’s 1994 production of La Traviata seemed strangely ‘consumptive’, its energy dissipating, its ‘breathing’ rather laboured.
“Why should I spend good money on tables when I have men standing idle?” asks a Regency country squire in the British sitcom Blackadder the Third. The Marquise de Merteuil in OPERA2DAY’s Dangerous Liaisons would agree with him. Her servants support her dinner table, groaning with gateaux, on their backs.
Thanks to the phenomenon of international co-productions, Dutch National Opera’s first-ever Porgy and Bess is an energizing, heart-stirring show with a wow-factor cast. Last year in London, co-producer English National Opera hosted it to glowing reviews. Its third parent, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, will present it at a later date. In the meantime, in Amsterdam the singers are the crowing glory in George Gershwin’s 1935 masterpiece.
After a series of productions somehow skewed, perverse, and/or pallid, the first Seattle Opera production of the new year comes like a powerful gust of invigorating fresh air: a show squarely, single-mindedly focused on presenting the work of art at hand as vividly and idiomatically as possible.
‘Playing music is for a woman a vain and frivolous thing. And I would wish you to be the most serious and chaste woman alive. Beyond this, if you do not play well your playing will give you little pleasure and not a little embarrassment. Therefore, set aside thoughts of this frivolity and work to be humble and good and wise and obedient. Don’t let yourself be carried away by these desires, indeed resist them with a strong will.’
This programme of seventeenth-century duets, odes and instrumental works was meticulously and finely delivered by countertenors Iestyn Davies and James Hall, with The King’s Consort, but despite the beauty of the singing and the sensitivity of the playing, somehow it didn’t quite prove as affecting as I had anticipated.
My last visit of the year to Wigmore Hall also proved to be one of the best of 2018. American soprano Brenda Rae has been lauded for her superb performances in the lyric coloratura repertory, in the US and in Europe, and her interpretation of the title role in ENO’s 2016 production of Berg’s Lulu had the UK critics reaching for their superlatives.
Pacific Opera Project is in its fourth annual, sold out run of Puccini’s La bohème: AKA 'The Hipsters', and it may seem at first blush that nothing succeeds like success.
L’Enfance du Christ is not an Advent work, but since most of this country’s musical institutions shut down over Christmas, Advent is probably the only chance we shall have to hear it - and even then, only on occasion. But then Messiah is a Lenten work, and yet
Having been privileged already to see in little over two months two great productions of Die Meistersinger, one in Paris (Stefan Herheim) and one in Munich (David Bösch), I was unable to resist the prospect of a third staging, at Glyndebourne.
Alas, David McVicar’s production — for the moment,
I am considering solely the staging, for there was much to admire in the
musical performance — proved by far the weakest. Alas, we see here the
continuation of the sad decline of a once accomplished director — his
ENO Turn of the Screw remains the finest I have seen — into
the Franco Zeffirelli de nos jours. McVicar’s Glyndebourne
Entführung seemed like a caricature of something from an alleged
‘golden age’, which of course never was and never could have been,
before the alleged invention of big, bad ‘Regietheater’.
As I discuss in my recent book, After Wagner, that would take us back at least before
Wagner’s own opera stagings. Indeed, it would take us back,
paradoxically, to a time of opera staging prior to the origins of opera.
Such an approach, if one may call it that,
disdaining, with more than a hint of Teutonophobia, any hint of the directorial
Konzept , could hardly find a composer less suited to it than
Wagner. And yet, there seems, to start with, as though there might actually be
a Konzept: well, an updating, at least. For the action does not take
place in sixteenth-century Nuremberg, but rather in the earlier nineteenth
century, presumably at around the time Wagner was growing up. There is much to
be said for such an idea, looking at the societal influences upon the young
Wagner, which certainly helped shape his world-view (from a more hostile
standpoint, his ideology). Moreover, the guilds and corporations came under
sustained post-Enlightenment attack at this time, the Stein-Hardenberg reforms
in Prussia, for instance, offering more or less the only instance in that
reforming programme of a policy vehemently opposed by Hegel (as an attack on
partial association, on civil society). The guild in Nuremberg, then, might be
portrayed as under attack; that, after all, is partly the meaning of
Walther’s intrusion, a typical Wagnerian move of introducing a
charismatic leader from outside. And so we might go on. There is,
unfortunately, no attempt to do anything with the updating. Indeed, as with the
aforementioned Entführung, or as with
McVicar’s Marriage of Figaro for the Royal Opera , one is
left with the nasty suspicion that the principal point, or at least principal
result, of the updating is simply to present us with a host of
‘pretty’ designs. Vicki Mortimer’s handsome designs might
have done so much more — or even just a little more.
Moreover, the typical McVicar trait of reducing drama to mere
‘entertainment’ is much in evidence here. There is nothing wrong
with art being entertaining, of course; much of it would be failing if, in at
least some sense, it were not. However, here the playing to the gallery —
and not in some metatheatrical sense, imitating or leading the relationship
between the Masters and the populace — becomes especially wearying.
‘Amusing’ interpolations, which serve little or no purpose other
than to make those who have partaken of a few too many erupt into apparently
helpless laughter, are too often the order of the day. (Quite what led someone
to the verge of hysteria during Sachs’s Wahn monologue, I have
no idea; on that occasion, the responsibility does not seem to have lain with
the production.) And since every McVicar production now seems to have
compulsory choreography by Andrew George, we have silly, irrelevant dances,
especially painful at the opening of the second act. Beckmesser, for some
reason best known to the director, becomes a preening figure of high camp.
Fortunately, the score was in better hands. The London Philharmonic
Orchestra was on excellent form throughout. Clearly well rehearsed, the
orchestra offered as satisfying a German tone — the strings, to my ears,
more typically Brahmsian than one often hears in Wagner, but certainly, in this
of all Wagner’s dramas, none the worse for that — as one is likely
to hear in this country. There were, moreover, many elements of exquisite
wind-playing, doubtless having their roots, at least in part, in the
LPO’s long experience of performing Mozart here at Glyndebourne. Michael
Güttler’s conducting never drew attention to itself; in the first
and second acts, it perhaps lacked the sense of life with which the greatest
Wagner conductors will bring the melos into dramatic reality, but
there was sure structural understanding. In the third act, which, perhaps not
coincidentally, offers a more satisfying, if defiantly conservative, experience
in McVicar’s staging too, Güttler seemed relatively liberated. His
was never an ‘interventionist’ account, but there was a greater
willingness to play, and to let the singers, play with the ebb and flow.
What made this Meistersinger compulsory viewing (and listening) for
me, however, was Gerald Finley’s Hans Sachs. Finley had also played the
role in Herheim’s Paris production. Perhaps because of the lack of
anything here to say from the staging, he sounded, if anything, finer still. At
any rate, the distinction of his performance fell into greater relief, for I
have never heard a finer rendition, more anguished and yet, ultimately, more
imbued with relative hope, of the Wahn monologue than here.
In ‘purely’ musical and in verbal terms, this was a Sachs whose
role emerged from lengthy experience and understanding of Lieder. The
size of the house probably helped too, the Bastille perhaps not the ideal venue
for Finley, excellent though his Paris performance undoubtedly was.
Hans Sachs (Gerald Finley) and Walther (Michael Schade)
Michael Schade seemed miscast, I am afraid, as Walther. If he made a better
job of the role than I should have suspected, he too often sounded strained.
Little of the ‘natural’ — whatever that might mean —
ease with which Walther should pour forth his artistry was present. However,
his Eva, Amanda Majeski, offered a beautifully sung performance, drawing, as
does the character, upon greater reserves of feeling as the work progressed.
There was nothing of Bösch’s radical (feminist) reappraisal here, of
course, but Sajeski did a good deal with what she had. Jochen Kupfer did a
sterling job with McVicar’s jarring understanding of Beckmesser; indeed,
he managed almost to convince us that this was an illuminating standpoint. If
he could not quite do so, that was not the fault of this fine actor, whose
darkly attractive vocal portrayal proved equally impressive; I hope to see him
play the role in another staging. David Portillo’s lyric tenor was just
the thing for David: his was an eager, diligent, attractively sung performance
very much in the traditional mode. Hanna Hipp’s Magdalene complemented
him with similar qualities and great warmth of tone. Alastair Miles’s
Pogner sounded somewhat elderly at times, but that is hardly inappropriate
here. Last but far from least, the singing of the Glyndebourne Chorus,
well-prepared indeed by Jeremy Bines, was something to savour from beginning to
end. In a house of this size, it sounded just right: words and music in
excellent balance, warmth and clarity anything but antithetical. If only the
staging had given them something more interesting to do.
Mark Berry
Cast and production details:
Walther: Michael Schade; Eva: Amanda Majeski; Magdalene: Hanna Hipp;
David: David Portillo; Hans Sachs: Gerald Finley; Sixtus Beckmesser: Jochen
Kupfer; Veit Pogner: Alastair Miles; Fritz Kothner: Darren Jeffery; Kunz
Vogelgesang: Colin Judson; Konrad Nachtigall: Andrew Slater; Ulrich Eisslinger:
Adrian Thompson; Hermann Ortel: Nicholas Folwell; Balthasar Zorn: Alasdair
Elliott; Augustin Moser: Daniel Norman; Hans Foltz: Henry Waddington; Hans
Schwarz: Sion Goronwy; Night Watchman: Patrick Guetti. Director: David McVicar;
Designs: Vicki Mortimer; Lighting: Paule Constable; Coreography: Andrew George.
The Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus master: Jeremy Bines)/London Philharmonic
Orchestra/Michael Güttler (conductor). Glyndebourne Opera House, Sussex,
25 May 2016.