Wozzeck

English National Opera

25 May 2013

Trailer from here.

Perhaps a little is lost in translation, but this English version is otherwise so good that it doesn’t matter. I hope a DVD recording is imminent.

Director Carrie Cracknell sets it in or around a contemporary army base, and makes indirect links to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This dilutes some of the class concerns of Buchner’s original drama, but it does at least provide a clear social context for Wozzeck’s distressed mental health.

Sara Jakubiak's Marie perhaps has too posh an accent, but could conceivably be an army brat. Otherwise, the production and performances are exemplary. In particular conductor Edward Gardner gives the finest account I have heard. His pacing screws the tension to unbearable levels, and the orchestral playing remains restrained until the key climaxes, when the sound swells to levels I have not experienced before in any theatre.

Among the singer-actors, Tom Randle and James Morris must be singled out for the secondary roles of the tormenting Captain and Doctor respectively, but the whole cast is amazing, somehow convincing us that these are real people.

An essay in the programme claims that a famous problem with the opera is how such a tightly constructed composition could be used to convey the title character’s descent into homicidal madness. But really this presents no greater problem than Verdi’s Otello ie none at all.

The more substantial problem with the work is that it so perfectly imposes a structure on Büchner's fragmentary collection of scenes. True, these fragments are probably intended to reflect growing madness, but more importantly they convey the vicious meaninglessness of life.

The original drama, then, can leave the spectator dispirited but questioning: how might our awful lives be improved? Berg’s music drama instead gives the overwhelming impression that its protagonists’ lives are predetermined towards misery and wretchedness.

Further, in a musical performance as good as this one, there is no alienation. None of the singers succumbed to caricature, despite the grotesqueness of their characters. The orchestral sound, at times shattering, nonetheless conveyed as much beauty as noise; the influence of Mahler was obvious, and nowadays opera audiences don’t find the music exceptionable.

Ironically, then, Berg could be accused of employing bourgeois means to defang what might otherwise be a devastating critique of capitalism. I left feeling utterly powerless to even consider options of preventing the tragedy onstage.

I want to be clear: from one perspective, Berg is more mature than, say Brecht or Shaw, to take examples of alienation and satire respectively. His drama presents us with an unbearable situation, and doesn’t allow us to flinch. In fact, that is precisely how I felt watching it – that I must focus all my attention on what was happening, when i would otherwise want to look away.

At the same time, however, this is a drama that provides no possibility for hope. For many of us, the music itself is no longer ‘difficult’ or unenjoyable; but the music drama most certainly is unenjoyable. It is not flawed, nor is it frivolous, and so is a masterpiece but so bleak that it can only be adequately confronted occasionally.

Medée

English National Opera, 6 March 2013

 

Audio-only recording of Act 3, under Emmanuelle Haïm. From youtube.

A triumph. Despite some jarring directorial campness, this long overdue UK premiere confirms the work as one of the greatest revenge dramas.

Seventeenth-century operas tend to be neglected, but even so, I was surprised to discover this was the first staged production of this work in the UK, as it usually described as the greatest French opera of the period.

Perhaps I am damning with faint praise, for the alternatives – the operas of Lully – are almost completely inert, as if drama were too coarse an idea to impose on music, or, more likely, due to an excessively ceremonial idea of what drama set entirely to music should be about.

It is good to report that this work is both stageable and a dramatic success, perhaps a masterpiece.

It is not perfect. The first two of its five acts contain the decorous music common to Lully, accurately described as bland in the programme. The prologue has been cut, which is a blessing, and it might have been sensible to cut more (even all) of the dance numbers. The creative team’s solution to these tedious interludes was mixed – a camp ballet is jarringly inappropriate, though I thought the choreography was inventive.

The human background to Medee’s plight is essential for creating sympathy for her during the next three acts of her blood-curdling revenge, so I can’t excessively criticise Charpentier or his librettist Corneille (Thomas, not Pierre) for boring us in the first act.

The last three acts, and especially the hinge third act, are intensely dramatic, but also, perhaps even moreso, intensely theatrical. I don’t recall experiencing the same impact from recordings of this piece.

This is a drama where the words and actions matter most, and the music enhances these words at key moments. Even the dance numbers can be integrated effectively, as here (from Act 3 onwards), if taken as expressions both of the title character’s magic and her desperate condition.

This brings me to the meaning of the drama, less urgent than its dramatic stageworthiness, but still important.

Medee only appears to take control of the situation. In fact, there is a terrible irony that with all the power she can employ in vengeance, she is unable to prevent the need for that vengeance. Surely this is how we should interpret her magic – as the purely destructive power of revenge.

Once unleashed, her revenge is outside of her control: she becomes its instrument. This is clear from Creon’s murder of Orontes at precisely the point when Creusa has submitted to Medee’s demand to marry him.

Given the potency of the central character, I’m astonished this piece isn’t in the UK repertoire, much less that it is unstaged. Sarah Connolly dominates the stage whenever she is present, singing both lyrically and dramatically, and acting up a storm.

She is helped by David McVicar’s direction. He has a lot of useful experience in keeping the acting plausible even during lengthy baroque irrelevances. The setting is the 1940s during the world war, though I don’t see it sheds any new light on this story. A near-modern setting is now the standard for mythic dramas, which is a bit odd, though inoffensive. 

The rest of the cast is excellent, with the important exception of Jeffrey Francis’ Jason, who acts and sings a sort of blustering heroism, but doesn’t provide a reason for why he should be so loved, as he boastfully reflects in an early scene.

The Mikado

English National Opera, 30 January 2013

As the production hs been around since 1986, it has been taped.

Here is the first scene, courtesy of youtube.

In presenting the operetta as 1930s screwball, this impressively musical production misses some of the edge in Gilbert.

Though The Mikado is a modest political satire, mostly on the law, it does parody cultural traits of the English, and one of those cultural traits now includes a passion for The Mikado. In this, it is a cousin of Wilde's contemporary The Importance of Being Earnest, which likewise considers Englishmen as children.

I don't think The Mikado operates at the same consistently high level as Wilde's masterpiece, but the comparison makes me think better of what can otherwise seem a trivial comic opera.

It's surely fair that unlike any other operatic collaboration, librettist Gilbert gets equal billing with composer Sullivan. For it's Gilbert that defines the partnership, with his groping for rhymes so that even Katisha's otherwise serious aria is comic through rhyming on I.

But Gilbert's humour also exhibits a peculiar form of bad faith, so that his parody of romance and opera in general seems bitter, rather than for example the balanced parody of Wilde. If Gilbert is sentimental, as often claimed, then it is a self-hating closeted sentiment.

While it's good to hear trained opera voices tackling Sullivan's music, Jonathan Miller's production (revived by Elaine Tyler-Hall) has flaws. By setting the action in England around 1930, the comedy is a little too obvious.

The actual Mikado should also seem genuinely powerful, which isn't the case here. I dislike Gilbert's respect-it subvert-it attitude to authority, but it is central to his work, and by reducing the visible threat levels, his drama loses some bite.

Intrusive peppy dancers and the occasional karate chop also seem to not quite capture the mood of the opera, and are distracting. The overall impression is that Miller doesn't really like the work, and I can't blame him, but presumably having some liking for the work is necessary to create an effective production.

My ambivalent feelings were not shared by many of my fellow audience members. The full house seemed to find everything worth appluading and laughing at, however feeble. I left feeling Gilbert's joke was on me somehow.

The Pilgrim's Progress

English National Opera, 20 November 2012

An aria from the Pilgrim's Progress, details here.

 

A magnificent but disturbing work, constructively subverted by the production.

 

Much as I love the music of Vaughan Williams, I wonder what drew him so obssessively to Bunyan's allegory, given that he avoids most of the more appealing human aspects of that work in his adaptation for the stage, and in one vital respect stresses its least appealing aspect for a liberal audience, its puritanism.

Having the Pilgrim (Christian in the book) centrestage requires us always to recall that this is a morality tale, and that we are meant to be judging the joys of Vanity Fair as harshly as Bunyan thought we ought to. But this is simply not how we read the book, with its vital characters who only incidentally happen to have a didactic purpose.

Things would be much better if the composer had been able to breath erotic life into the music of Vanity Fair, or satanic glory into Appolyon. As it is, we are left with piety and landscapes, a kind of self-parody. The Pilgrim's Progress is not undramatic, as some people seem to think, but it is poor theatre and needs a lot of help to work.

It gets it here. Yoshi Oïda sets the imprisoned Bunyan's dream within the prison itself, so that the journey from this life to the next amounts to preparation for a public execution.

The grotesque conclusion might seem to completely undermine Vaughan Williams' incredibly beautiful and spiritual music, but instead the music transfigures what we see on stage. I would be interested to learn how a US death-penalty supporting christian evangelical might experience this production. I suspect they might approve, so that this drama is a powerful reflection of views diametrically opposed to my own.

For when presenting the slow attainment of this dubious grace by the Pilgrim, the music is overwhelmingly powerful, a mixture of introspection and rhapsody, and fully justifying the composer's belief this was his masterpiece.

Conductor Martyn Brabbins deserves the credit here, maintaining momentum and managing transitions masterfully. Acting and singing reach a very high standard.

A drama that exhalts humility and the spiritual life over the pleasures of the flesh, or even of affable sociability is hard to take, especially when the exhalting is quite so wonderful and the pleasures so meagre. English National Opera have shown how it can be done.