Roméo et Juliette

Royal Festival Hall

26 September 2013

The great love scene under Salonen, this time with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms in 2007. 

From here.

Beautiful playing from the Philharmonia misses some of the work's passion in favour of establishing symphonic credentials.

Although you can see why Berlioz called this masterpiece – one of music's pinnacles – a dramatic symphony, it’s a misleading and indeed oxymoronic title: a symphony is already a form of drama in music.

It is because he took things rather further, and linked his work closely to Shakespeare’s drama, adding arias and choruses, but although I feel this is an important attempt to ‘realise’ Shakespeare’s tragedy in music, that isn’t the central achievement here. This is firstly a symphony, albeit a strange one.

For one thing, the work doesn’t end in tragedy, but rather in reconciliation and hope, more related to Beethoven’s ninth than anything in Shakespeare (except The Tempest). Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen was especially good here, expertly pacing the final movement’s transition from conflict to peace, itself reminiscent of the last few minutes of the ninth.

The finale is less important than in other major post-Beethoven symphonies because its composer sidesteps the problem of how to craft a finale that will sounds effective after a profoundly searching slow or tragic movement.

Berlioz’ slow movements are an ecstatic love scene and a Gluck-inspired funereal chorus, both extremely moving though the love music carries off the palm by virtue of being some of the most beautiful music we have (as Toscanini claimed).

The last movement instead contrasts with and follows the jarring, forceful music of the movement titled ‘Romeo at the Capulet’s tomb’. Salonen’s pacing and dynamics were excellent in both of these tricky movements.

Berlioz isn't self-evidently successful in creating a symphony out of these disparate movements, though the sense of being jolted around is much less prevalent here than in his other characteristic works, and there is less of the sense of frantically running without moving.

I have some sympathy with those critics, starting with Wagner, who adore parts but find the whole tiring. This may be because the aria-and-chorus concerted bookends can seem problematic. The first movement is described as a prologue even by champions like David Cairns, and the symphony does seem to be launched twice. The ending, as described above, counterbalances sudden and shuddering violent death rather than overwhelming grief, which comes earlier and is in any case classically restrained.

So it’s to Salonen’s credit that he imparts full gravity to these outer movements and makes them work.

It is a pity his approach was less successful elsewhere. Partly this was due to lack of ferocity or crudeness, common among conductors wanting to place Berlioz within the pantheon of sober symphonists. Partly it was also due to insufficient romance, either in the first movement or more seriously in the love scene.

But this is actually a small quibble. Is a more magical experience possible than when the offstage voices fade away and the love scene properly starts? And wasn’t Toscanini right? This is the kind of experience that transforms the way we feel, at least for some decent time afterwards.

An Enemy of the People

Albany theatre, Deptford

25 September 2013

One of the most unlikely attempts at Stockmann's great anti-people speech, from Steve McQueen. 

Community pettiness and NGO arrogance equally lampooned in this updated production... almost.

Rebecca Manson Jones’ loose adaptation of Ibsen’s drama retains the spirit rather than the letter of the original, except in the final scene. She sensibly suggests this supposed comedy could be better called ‘the do-gooder’ in English.

The upright Dr Stockmann is here a former NGO campaigner, bringing ethically sourced palm oil to a Cornish village. The up-to-the-minute text, larded with references to tweeting and crowd sourcing, requires some barely plausible contortions to remain close to the original – the Stockmann siblings want to create a rival to Brighton in Cornwall, the local newspaper becomes a symbol of the end of the print age, and so on.

This updating doesn’t significantly alter the work, though I’m not sure Sarah Malin’s convincingly professional campaigner, working late on a media release, would genuinely encounter a ‘lightbulb moment’ in the great community hall speech scene.

If there is humour in this comedy, it is bitter, and at the expense of the idealistic Stockmann, whose family suffer as a consequence of his (in this case her) stand for the future, which achieves nothing in the present and indeed climaxes in a shocking denunciation of the rest of us.

Though right, at least in the beginning, during her great anti-democratic speech she sets herself against almost everyone, rather as Brand did in an earlier drama, and an audience that is paying attention should certainly question its sympathy with her.

This production brilliantly recreated the atmosphere of a community meeting, and asked the audience to vote on whether Stockmann was indeed a public enemy.

The majority sided with her, which is itself quite disturbing. Presumably we voted for her earlier self, the one Ibsen and Manson Jones succeed in making sympathetic, heroic. But are we really agreeing with her that we are upsided cockroaches with our legs twitching?

Ibsen surely knew better when he had his community reject Stockmann. Here, the final scene was a skilful piece of montage conveying an overall sense of hope. Only here did the adaptation differ from Ibsen in spirit, and I think for the worse. His version, with Stockmann confident but ruined, is more challenging.

Unlike many other great dramatists, Ibsen’s endings are important, for he drives us towards them with all the mechanical skill of the nineteenth century well-made play. So changing the tone of his endings is a serious mutilation; nor was the risk one worth taking here.

Aside from this limitation, everything else in this production worked wonderfully well. The Stockmann family was presented so naturalistically I thought the actors must be related. Elizabeth Elvin, in the role of the representative of the town’s small businesses, stole every scene she was in, but every cast member seemed to embody their role.

If only his ending could be preserved, I can’t imagine a better updating of Ibsen’s work: this should be seen.

In the Jungle of Cities

Arcola theatre

24 September 2013

A trailer that tells you absolutely nothing about the work. From here.

Unfamiliar uncompromising early Brecht that deserves more performances, on the strength of this production. But it could be clearer.

A self-consciously difficult drama from the young Brecht, this sequence of scenes is made even less easy to understand through some of the choices of director Peter Sturm.

It is not easy to follow the various choices and outcomes in this non-naturalistic and existential fight between the rich Schlink and the poor Garga, whom the weary Schlink appears to select as a challenge, given the young man’s strong sense of dignity and self-worth.

In the programme Sturm claims his version is a psychodrama, with the events taking place in Garga’s imagination, but that isn’t clear from this production, nor, I think, would such a conception do justice to the author.

Brecht was aiming for a poetic depiction of cities, and ended up with whores and gangsters, families tearing themselves apart due to poverty and other premonitions of the Threepenny Opera, though the vein of black humour in the later work is missing here.

He is fascinated by our capacity to endure beyond what our sense of dignity or self-respect allows. The grotesques are taken from the expressionist zoo, and he shares the expressionist interest in degradation, but doesn’t delight in it. Brutally unsentimental, it is still certain that he disapproves, and wants us to share this disapproval. A political theory would later be developed to provide justification, but this early works shows that he always felt it, whatever he thought about (other?) bourgeois morality.

Another aspect of the playwright is apparent in this production, perhaps one he would also vigorously deny: an attraction to imaginative, forceful characters.

Schlick, the Malay who starts the fight, is undeniably sympathetic, at least as embodied here by Jeffery Kissoon. He rises to romantic heights during his suicide, and has already won our admiration for his strange courage in destroying his own financial security in order to challenge Garga’s sense of self-worth.

Of the two, Schlick seems the most understandable, despite his peculiar risk-taking. I suspect Brecht intended him to seem more inscrutable, in a racist way, but that wouldn’t work now so Sturm and Kissoon open him to us. Though rarely dignified in a conventional sense, he is never wretched, suggesting that  irreducible dignity is found elsewhere.

Schlick, then, contradicts a view that poverty is incompatible with dignity, though the dignity that can be kept in poverty is not our usual sense of it but something deeper. I suspect Brecht would object to this view, and undoubtedly it is problematic, but it keeps this dramas alive.

In contrast, Garga is confusing, probably only worsened in this production, which has him peculiarly dragged up after he has become rich, to suggest links with his equally degraded ex-lover Jane.

But it would also be possible to see Garga, who after all is the central character, as a poetic description of the compromises that someone in the city must make in order to survive, much less thrive, though his thriving has little to do with his own efforts and more to do with random chance. It isn’t surprising that the character is confused and confusing, and Joseph Arkley conveys this in a very physical performance.

The three women actors deserve special credit for turning Brecht’s one dimensional proto-whores into living creations.

And the Arcola deserves credit for tackling this intriguing, maddening work.

American Lulu

Young Vic theatre

23 September 2013

The original production in Berlin last year was significantly different to the Young Vic production.

A challenging and absorbing variation on the Lulu myth.

What attracts us to the Lulu story? I asked this as a steady trickle of audience members left during what is after all a very short opera – just 100 minutes. Were they bored, offended by the music, offended by the subject?

More specifically, what drew composer Olga Neuwirth to effectively recompose the first two acts of Berg’s original work, and compose an entirely new final act?

Perhaps a desire to give Lulu’s side of her myth, as the composer suggests in an informative programme essay. But we only learn things that Berg, Pabst or Wedekind could have provided, if so inclined: that our heroine suffered a history of abuse, or that she was a hardened criminal age twelve.

Lulu has no true inner life, and this is central to her appeal, which may also be the appeal of her story. As her lovers point out, she combines fatally irresistible physical charm with a disarming lack of self-awareness, or even interest in herself. She is no scheming femme fatal.

Berg surrounded her with a rogues gallery of expressionist stereotypes, which Neuwirth sensibly maintains, with one unfortunate exception. Still, nobody steals the limelight from the central character.

Changing the setting to the US straddling the civil rights and blaxploitation eras, and making Lulu herself African-American, is a mixed blessing.

Textually, it is a mistake. We first hear Martin Luther King describe the kind of person who engages in conspicuous consumption rather than in political action, and recognise he is describing the Lulu we see on stage. Can Neuwirth really be attempting to lecture African-Americans in this way?

Musically, it works. Neuwirth’s reorchestration, or full-on rewriting of Berg results in a sound-world that has echoes of blues, jazz, hot buttered soul and so on, all presented in a thrillingly ‘make it new’ modernist idiom. Berg would surely have approved.

The composer is right to criticise Berg’s perfunctory conclusion, but her own solution is no better. Lulu, it seems, must die violently. But worse than this, something goes terribly wrong with her lesbian lover Geschwitz. The most sympathetic character in Berg’s work becomes a mess here.

Part of the fault may lie with the director, John Fulljames, who may have violated Neuwirth’s intentions by suggesting that Lulu is freed by the Athlete, rather than Eleanor (Geschwitz). Certainly Eleanor’s brutal rape is even more unpleasant if we feel it is pointless. Certainly glimpses of the original Berlin production (above) suggest a different approach is possible.

But as Neuwirth explains in her essay, she contrasts Eleanor’s painful self-determination favourably with Lulu’s supposed lack of the same, as the latter appears content with being a lust object. In practice, this is a peculiar misstep, and I felt very little for the smug, preachy Eleanor, whereas Berg’s hopelessly infatuated Geschwitz is extremely moving.

Here the composer momentarily lapses, by passing judgement on the amoral Lulu. Berg doesn't quite make that mistake, though his Geschwitz gets more of our sympathy.

I’m not sure Berg’s opera is a masterpiece, and this doubt applies moreso for Neuwirth’s new work. But both seem very powerful, and for the most part gripping.

In any performance of any Lulu, the lead actress must somehow compete with the iconic Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box. Angel Blue’s acting and singing were impressive, even if she seemed too self-aware for this role.

Other parts were well-taken, with Robert Winslade Anderson’s Clarence as scene stealing a performance as it should be. The London Sinfonietta under Gerry Cornelius gave a confident performance of what must be a very difficult work.

Private Lives

Gielgud Theatre

20 September 2013

Tame violence in the climax to the second act in the 1976 BBC TV production.

To the extent Coward is 'modern' this potentially upsetting scene is the touchstone.

Although the marital violence is thankfully not underplayed in this production, this comedy has less to say about romantic love than self-love.

Coward’s biographer Philip Hoare, in the programme, claims his subject imbued this drama with tragedy, and that he is the descendent of Wilde and precursor to Beckett. All this is ridiculous, and not simply because the Irish dramatists are on a different order of achievement.

The physical violence in this comedy would be unthinkable in Wilde’s equivalent, and is far too easy compared to Beckett, who after all lived through a terrible war. Coward’s surrogate Elyot is that type of overcompensating sissy that Gore Vidal memorably identified in many of the warmongers of our age.

Nor, in this drama at least, does Shakespeare seem to be a strong presence, and this is probably a good thing for its survival. Though superficially about the battle of the sexes, in fact the bickering lovers are almost identical narcissists, as if the same character were duplicated on stage.

This may be a consequence of Coward’s closeted nature, but in any case, as he said about this work, it lacks a complete psychology. Elyot and Amanda are the same person, and I was struck with the thought that the real precursor here was Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, except that this really is the unintentional satire on romantic love that some critics bizarrely find in Wagner, presumably because they are deaf to his transfiguring music.

The core of the work, indeed it’s only interesting scene, is the second act, where the principles are together on stage. The first act is exposition, and the third act is a weak farce with an unsatisfying conclusion: we simply don’t care enough about the underdeveloped secondary characters, again something Coward acknowledged.

The central act remains effective in showing how self absorption can be self destructive, especially if you are as basically childish as Elyot/Amanda. Perhaps they are child-like, which would be much more charming and interesting, but this production nudges these precariously balanced characters towards the annoying.

Coward may have intended to make points about how intense romantic love operates in the real world, that such lovers neither cope together nor apart. But lovers are usually different people, indeed sometimes opposites in personality – I can’t believe Elyot and Amanda are different at all, except that Amanda is slightly sharper than her entirely tedious first husband.

Jonathan Kent’s production is too reverential. Some dated lines should have been cut (the audience knows what brioche is) and some crude aspects should have been subdued (an angry servant is not funny simply because she speaks only French). At least the set looked gorgeous.

Toby Stephens is miscast as Elyot: he doesn’t do camp very well, approaches hysteria at points, and is too muscular to make his fights with Amanda seem plausible. Anna Chancellor is an excellent Amanda, and if she gurned excessively, I suspect she had no choice given the script.

Rigoletto

Barbican

15 September 2013

A new star tenor? An example of his Duke of Mantua, if you are into that. From here.

An inspired concert performance of this dark-tinted drama.

Rigoletto not only announced Verdi's maturity as a dramatic artist, it is also better than most of his subsequent works. Perhaps Victor Hugo's source drama contributes but it is an uncomfortable, wholly Verdian idea to make the audience fall in love with the Duke, quite as much as Gilda does.

The second act is nearly perfect, though so distressing I can only assume applauding interrupting audiences aren't paying sufficient attention. The Duke sympathises with the abducted Gilda, swears vengeance, proclaims a new leaf, and is entirely convinced of it himself, according to the music. When he learns the girl was abducted for his benefit, he quickly forgets about her distress and focuses on his upcoming pleasure. When we finally see Gilda the tense duet with her father makes it clear she has been raped. Rigoletto gets bitter pleasure from the thought of vengeance, but the suddenly banal music shows it is a weak compensation.

Admittedly Gilda is a pathetic figure, of a type the composer avoided using again until his Desdemona, who is much more spirited. What might properly be her tragedy is transferred instead to her father, a more complex and unlikeable figure, even compared to the Duke.

It may be a flaw that we are manipulated into caring more for the two most unpleasant characters – the Duke and his jester – than for the person who sacrifices herself at the end. The drama’s verdict is damning. Both the fortunate sybarite and the wretched waspish Rigoletto survive, indeed thrive in some form, while the innocent lover sacrifices herself without meaning.

Given the bleak situation throughout the work, in direct contrast to at least the singing of the Duke and Gilda, this is much more of a conductor’s opera than is typically supposed. Recordings by Giulini and Sinopoli should have established that, and the recent Covent Garden performances with Eliot Gardiner confirm it.

I didn’t find Gianandrea Noseda quite as convincing as Eliot Gardiner, but my memory may be faulty, for it was still a very impressive performance with the LSO, even if they were reduced to ‘opera pit’ size. Only a few times did the prominence of the on-stage orchestra threaten to overwhelm the singing, but Noseda maintained the necessary momentum and when needed obtained suitably vigorous climaxes.

The cast were excellent, with some genuinely impressive acting, despite this being a concert performance. A highlight was when Rigoletto turns his back on his newly disgraced daughter: a response both understandable and horrific.

Dmitri Platanias was open-throated in the title role, and this is surely the only way to do it, much as it might wreak havoc with the voice. Desirée Rancatore was a limpid, girlish Gilda, though hers is a lyric not dramatic soprano voice. Saimir Pirgu’s Duke was appealing in both voice and appearance. Smaller roles were taken well.

Brahms, Mozart, Mahler: concert

 St Alfege's church, Greenwich

14 September 2013

First movement of Brahms' clarinet trio, in a classic performance by Kell, Pini and Kentner. 

From here.

Ambitious and interesting free concerts showing that even the largest scale works can be given revealing performances in more intimate surroundings.

My heart sank when I learned that instead of Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, the Kantati Ensemble were going to play a chamber version of Mahler’s First Symphony complete their free concert in Hawksmoor’s relatively intimate St Alfege’s Greenwich.

My fears proved mistaken. Undoubtedly some weight was lost, but the cramped acoustics ensured that conductor Lee Reynolds carefully worked up to the climaxes. And this helped strengthen the performance: I think Mahler benefits from a measured, rather than rhapsodic or excitable approach.

As this quixotic programme selection indicates, his rise in popularity and esteem continues. Perhaps his musical anxiety and neurosis reflects our present condition, but I don’t believe this is what we feel when while we listen. Surely his success is due to his sheer sound, the remarkable lyricism and orchestral colour combined with resounding climaxes.

Mahler’s makes famously original use of the different sections of the orchestra, so that a chamber version really highlights that variety.

The first is his most straightforwardly enjoyable work, also relatively unambitious, so didn’t lose as much with reduced forces. Chamber orchestras rarely get to make so much noise, but on the evidence of this performance they can produce revealing performances of these orchestral monsters.

Before the interval, Mozart’s fifth violin concerto made an interesting, perhaps unintentional comparison. Ideas are thrown around with a similar profligacy, but the effect is different. Mozart certainly didn’t intend to throw his audience around, as Mahler did.

Soloist Beatrice Philips gave a sweet-sounding, quasi-romantic account of the violin part, though this is not an inspired work: I assume the composer wanted to write it for piano instead.

A desultory performance of the same composer’s Figaro overture opened the concert, but in fact this industrious ensemble had already provided a more effective opening an hour before, as three of its members played Brahm’s masterful Clarinet Trio in the same church.

Here the comparison with Mahler was explicit. The programme pointed out that both composers used a ländler in the works we heard, and handled them very differently. And the finale of the chamber piece prefigures later rhythmic developments. Brahms the progressive, indeed.

This is a subdued work, far removed from the exertions of Mahler (the programme notes plausibly suggest the latter was attempting to blow Brahms out of the water with his first). It was given a committed performance, though given the venue I would have liked softer playing.