
20 Jul 2017
Leoncavallo's Zazà at Investec Opera Holland Park
The make-up is slapped on thickly in this new production of Leoncavallo’s Zazà by director Marie Lambert and designer Alyson Cummings at Investec Opera Holland Park.
Gian Carlo Menotti’s holiday classic, Amahl and the Night Visitors, was the first recorded opera I ever heard. Each Christmas Eve, while decorating the tree, our family sang along with the (still unmatched) original cast version. We knew the recording by heart, right down to the nicks in the LP. Ever since, no matter what the setting or the quality of a performance, I cannot get through it without tearing up.
It is perhaps not surprising that the Hamburg-born composer Detlev Glanert should count Hans Werner Henze as one of the formative influences on his work - he did, after all, study with him between 1984 to 1988.
This death in Venice is not the end, but the beginning.
There were eighteen rather than sixteen singers. And, though the concert was entitled Saint Cecilia the repertoire paid homage more emphatically to Mary, Mother of Jesus, and to the spirit of Christmas.
An ambitious new series focusing on the songs of Franz Liszt, starting with all three versions of the Tre Sonetti del Petrarca, (Petrarca Sonnets), S.270a, S.270b and S.161 with Andrè Schuen and Daniel Heide for Avi-music.de.
At the Wigmore Hall, Andrè Schuen and Daniel Heide in a recital of Schubert and Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and Rückert-Lieder. Schuen has most definitely arrived, at least among the long-term cognoscenti at the Wigmore Hall who appreciate the intelligence and sensitivity that marks true Lieder interpretation.
It’s an opera by Vicentino composer Domenico Freschi that premiered in 1681 at the country home of the son of the doge of Venice. Villa Contarini is a couple of hours on horseback from Vicenza, and a few hours by gondola from Venice).
It would be an extraordinary, even an unimaginable Wozzeck that failed to move, to chill one to the bone. This was certainly no such Wozzeck; Marie’s reading from the Bible, Wozzeck’s demise, the final scene with their son and the other children: all brought that particular Wozzeck combination of tears and horror.
Une soirée chez Berlioz – an evening with Berlioz, songs for voice, piano and guitar, with Stéphanie D’Oustrac, Thibaut Roussel (guitar), and Tanguy de Williencourt (piano).
I approached this evening as something of a sceptic regarding work and director. My sole prior encounter with Simon Stone’s work had not been, to put it mildly, a happy one. Nor do I count myself a subscriber or even affiliate to the Korngold fan club, considerable in number and still more considerable in fervency.
Thanks to the enterprise and vision of Lynton Atkinson - Artistic Director of Dorset-based Hurn Court Opera - two promising young singers on the threshold of glittering careers gave an outstanding recital at Salisbury’s prestigious Art Centre.
An exceptional Lohengrin, this. I had better explain. Yes, it was exceptional in the quality of much of the singing, especially the two principal female roles, yet also in luxury casting such as Martin Gantner as the King’s Herald.
This Grimm’s fairytale in its operatic version found its way onto the War Memorial stage in the guise of a new “family friendly” production first seen last holiday season at London’s Royal Opera House.
Spot-lit in the prevailing darkness, Gustav von Aschenbach frowns restively as he picks up an hour-glass from a desk strewn with literary paraphernalia, objects d’art, time-pieces and a pair of tall candles in silver holders - by the light of which, so Thomas Mann tells us in his novella Death in Venice, the elderly writer ‘would offer up to art, for two or three ardently conscientious morning hours, the strength he had garnered during sleep’.
A baroque Christmas from Harmonia Mundi, this year’s offering in their acclaimed Christmas series. Great value for money - four CDs of music so good that it shouldn’t be saved just for Christmas. The prize here, though is the Pastorale de Noël by Marc-Antoine Charpentier with Ensemble Correspondances, with Sébastien Daucé, highly acclaimed on its first release just a few years ago.
Jean Cocteau’s 1950 Orphée - and Philip Glass’s chamber opera based on the film - are so closely intertwined it should not be a surprise that this new production for English National Opera often seems unable to distinguish the two. There is never a shred of ambiguity that cinema and theatre are like mirrors, a recurring feature of this production; and nor is there much doubt that this is as opera noir it gets.
“Don’t miss this final chance – ever! – to see Die Walküre”, urges the Dutch National Opera website.
Christmas at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, with the Choir of St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, James Vivian, organist and conductor. New from Hyperion, this continues their series of previous recordings with this Choir. The College of St George, founded in 1348, is unusual in that it is a Royal Peculiar, a parish under the direct jurisdiction of the monarch, rather than the diocese.
A little under a month ago, I reflected on Vladimir Jurowski’s tempi in Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’. That willingness to range between extremes, often within the same work, was a very striking feature of this second concert, which also fielded a Mahler symphony - this time the Fifth. But we also had a Wagner prelude and Strauss songs to leave some of us scratching our heads.
Of the San Francisco Opera Manon Lescauts (in past seasons Leontyne Price, Mirella Freni, Karita Mattila among others, all in their full maturity) the latest is Armenian born Parisian finished soprano Lianna Haroutounian in her role debut. And Mme. Haroutounian is surely the finest of them all.
The make-up is slapped on thickly in this new production of Leoncavallo’s Zazà by director Marie Lambert and designer Alyson Cummings at Investec Opera Holland Park.
And, fittingly so. For, in 1900, eight years after Leoncavallo had drawn back the curtain on the tawdrier side of theatre life in Pagliacci , and at the time when audiences were lapping up the self-sacrifice of Tosca - a well-known singer, adored by her public, redeemed by the beauty of her voice from a life of poverty or religious devotion - Zazà confirms the contemporary fascination (on-going?) with back-stage lives which combined luxury and glamour with lurid domestic soap-opera.
Indeed, the parade of performers with which Lambert opens the opera - stage-hands, Pierrots, cloaked magicians, drag artists, tutu-ed ballerinas, cabaret divas, acrobats, aerial artistes, a theatre troupe decked in full Renaissance garb - have their verismo roots in the itinerant comedians of Pagliacci, the traveling performers of Mascagni'sIris, and the professional actors in Cilèa’s Adriana Lecouvreur.
Lambert makes clear that this is an all-singing/all-dancing, show-must-go-on world, whose glitzy frontage is stained by a grittier reality. Ironically, it was a world with which Leoncavallo himself would later become familiar as, to supplement the royalties from Pagliacci, in his later years the composer toured Europe and North America, conducting condensed versions of his own opera. When he arrived in London in September 1911, a music-hall arrangement Pagliacci at the Hippodrome was announced as ‘The Sensation of the Century’: ‘Signor Leoncavallo’s appearance in person to conduct his own condensed version of his own Pagliacci, and bringing his own company with him, is an event of a unique character in the history of variety theatres.’ A media circus, indeed.
Reviewing Opera Rara’s superb concert performance of Zazà at the Barbican in 2015, I remarked that, ‘Perhaps a fully staged production is necessary to do justice to Zazà’s melodramatic excesses’. (My review contained a stage history and synopsis, to which readers might be directed.)
Lambert certainly holds nothing back scenographically in the first Act, making use of the whole span of the OHP stage to offer us a revue performance (-within the performance), a stage-crew at their labours, a working-class café-chantant, Zazà’s dressing-room-cum-bedroom, and an external staircase and platform where thespians and dancers gather to practise their art.
If that sounds a lot to take in, it is. I appreciate that it’s a milieu that we are intended to absorb, not a landscape whose every detail we should laboriously note; but, it seems a pity when dancers are practising at the barre, or show-girls are fanning bubbles, or Long John Silver is strutting his stuff, to ignore these details. Particularly so when central and peripheral events intertwine: when the protagonists’ music provides the rhythm and form for those performing in the stage’s marginal arenas; or where Zazà’s seductive flirtations are mirrored by erotic couplings at the fringe. But, without mimicking a Centre Court audience watching a thrilling rally swing back and forth, it’s impossible to take in and link up everything, and ultimately the hyperactivity - all wonderfully detailed and authentic - distracts from the central focus.
Act 2 puts the spotlight on Zazà’s dressing-room itself, all powder puffs, pillows and strewn underwear, while Act 3 transports us to the caddish Dufresne’s Parisian dwelling, which the family are preparing to leave. Trunks and cases are piled high, making the apartment appropriately spiritless but also making a nonsense of some of the text: as when Dufresne complains that his little desk, like his heart, is covered with clutter, when there isn’t a bureau in sight as all the furniture is swathed in white sheets. But, the bareness effectively complements the tightening of the dramatic intensity and focus in this Act.
Anne Sophie Duprels excels in the title role, demonstrating a dramatic range that matches her vocal commitment. Geraldine Farrar, the Met’s biggest star in 1920, and for whom the company staged Zazà, said that the role depended ‘altogether on the true, convincing interpretation of the heroine by the singer ... The singer who can make her audience feel that the emotions she is portraying are real, can make the figure live in voice and action, must always carry the part to success.’ (cited in Frederick H. Martens, The Art of the Prima Donna and Concert Singer). And, Duprels certainly lived up to this high threshold.
The ‘heroine’ does not have formal arias as such, rather long musical monologues that hit peaks of passion and pique though which Duprels swelled gloriously. She has warmth in the middle range, and if occasionally her soprano becomes a little harsh as the voice climbs, the singer makes Leoncavallo’s somewhat indistinctive melodies speak. They take on a declamatory quality in the sense of an on-going conversation: Zazà’s voice will be heard - indeed, it is only quietened by the ‘angelic’ calm of Defresne’s daughter Totò, charmingly played by Aida Ippolito, whose spoken words alternate with Zazà’s plaintive sung reflections on the injustice of life and recognition that she must give up hopes of a future with Dufresne.
Duprels captured all of Zazà’s precariousness - her brassiness, her wit, her volatility, her vulnerability - and did not allow the drama to lapse into melodramatic sentimentality. In fact, she seemed at times to emphasise Zazà’s self-preserving flintiness. She smeared on red lipstick as she dismissively reminded her inebriate mother - whose idiosyncrasies were richly mined by Louise Winter - that living by the matriarch’s rules led to ruinous poverty, an accusation rendered sharper by Anaide’s obvious concern for her daughter, as she picked up her stockings from the floor and laid them carefully on the bed.
There was humour too, though, as Zazà donned Brünnhilde’s helmet to ‘rescue’ the furious peg-legged pirate she’d left stranded on stage, when missing her cue as Dufresne swept her off her feet. Duprels also conveyed a strong relationship with her long-suffering dresser, Natalya, a role sung with sensitivity and acted with nuance by Ellie Edmonds. Edmonds conveyed Natalya’s genuine love for her mistress, just as Duprels’ dependence on her employee-friend was plain to see.
Some of the best singing of the night came from Richard Burkhard’s Cascart; ‘Zaza, piccola zingara’ was tender, firm of tone and carefully phrased. If only Zazà had heard the loyalty and affection in her former lover’s voice then she might have heeded his warnings and spared herself suffering
The minor roles - the starry revue artiste, Floriana (Johane Ansell), James Cleverton’s Bussy, a writer, impresario Courtois (Charne Rochford), stage manager Duclou (Eddie Wade), and Michael Bradley’s Augusto, a waiter - were persuasively sung and though their contributions were often quite brief, the direction was detailed and lively.
As Zazà’s weak-willed, selfish deceiver, Milio Dufresne, Joel Montero seemed out of sorts. Though he produced a stirring tone at times, there were a lot of rough edges and the intonation was hit-and-miss and wavering.
Peter Robinson and the City of London Sinfonia made much of the brash colours and popular-song rhythms of Act 1, and brought out the more nuanced instrumental detail of the latter acts. This was disciplined, stylish playing.
When Farrar - who had a large following of idolising young women, nicknamed ‘Gerry-flappers’ - bid farewell to the stage in the title role of Leoncavallo’s opera, she was festooned with balloons and flowers, hailed with banners, ‘Hurrah, Farrar! Farrar Hurrah!’, eulogised in speeches of devotion, and paraded up Broadway in an open top car (as reported in Music Journal, October 1965).
Dream and reality, art and life: Zazà struggles to recognise the distinction between a world that can be created on a theatre stage and a life that must be lived. Perhaps it is ever thus. But, as Tosca learned that integrity is more than important than life, by the close Zazà has learned that integrity is more important than love.
Claire Seymour
Leoncavallo: Zazà
Zazà - Anne Sophie Duprels, Milio - Joel Montero, Anaide - Louise Winter, Cascart - Richard Burkhard, Bussy - James Cleverton, Floriana - Johane Ansell, Natalia - Ellie Edmonds, Courtois - Charne Rochford, Duclou - Eddie Wade, La Signora Dufresne - Joanna Marie Skillett, Marco - Oliver Brignall, Augusto - Michael Bradley, Totò Dufresne - Aida Ippolito, Claretta - Alexandra Stenson, Simona - Charlotte Hewett; Director - Marie Lambert, Conductor - Peter Robinson, Designer - Alyson Cummins, Costume Designer - Camille Assaf, Lighting Director - Mark Jonathan, Choreographer - Danilo Rubeca, City of London Sinfonia, Opera Holland Park Chorus.
Investec Opera Holland Park; Tuesday 18th July 2017.