Past Production Reviews
4The story is told quickly. Marylou Macintosh, the daughter of film producer Sam Macintosh, is supposed to marry a talented film producer who knows the business, his biggest competitor, since her father's company is no longer thriving. Daughter Marylou refuses and wants to prove to her father that she is capable of producing an extremely successful film. She shoots this in the Grand Hotel on the Rivera with real actors, Isabella, the Infanta of Spain, Grand Duke Paul, Prince Andreas Stephan, Countess Inez de Ramirez, all representatives of the impoverished nobility, and the hotel owner President Chamoix, the hotel manager Matard and the supposed Room waiter, actually the son of the hotel owner, Albert, as a representative of the up-and-coming bourgeoisie. Among these, - nobility and nouveau riche commoners -, a comedy of mistaken identity unfolds on a grand scale, which seems hopeless, but ultimately leads to a happy ending. The room waiter, who is actually the son of the hotel owner, becomes an adopted nobleman and can thus marry his sweetheart Isabella. Marylou Macintosh has managed a raging blockbuster.
Eötvös states, “My music is theatre music”. It is no wonder that the melodies the 77-year-old composer puts on paper are always dramatic, rich in imagery, vivid and, indeed, theatrical. He achieves this with normal orchestration plus a few additional percussion instruments. His music always remains harmonious, no strident discordancies here. As a conductor, he kept the fine-sounding Staatskapelle under gentle control, right down to the last, fading solo violin note. The singers were well cast in this multifaceted work, with astonishingly good English diction. Soprano Victoria Randem sang Alida with lush equanimity and beautiful shadings. Her characterisation of the young mother and her concern for her newborn, to the extent of shutting all extraneous events around her, is remarkable. The very bright, high tenor of Linard Vrielink was a good fit for the desperate but loving Asle, the future father turned nervous murderer.
Eötvös is undoubtedly the master of his craft. Sleepless is beguilingly beautiful, deftly orchestrated, full of consonant octaves and scales and spiced with judiciously placed dissonances, vividly pictorial throughout. The vocal writing is skilful and slick. Eötvös also conducts, and the outcome is both precise and sumptuous. The score is helped along by a superlative cast. As the ill-fated young lovers, Linard Vrielink and Victoria Randem are exquisite — Vrielink all youthful lyricism with an undertone of seething violence, Randem with an ethereal beauty and meltingly lovely top notes. Katharina Kammerloher is a chameleon as both drunken mother and judgmental midwife; Hanna Schwarz makes a formidable Old Woman; Siyabonga Maqungo brings an edgy, creepy tone to his burnished tenor voice as Jeweler. The entire cast, including the offstage women, deliver vocal performances as close to perfection as anyone could wish.
