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18The conductor, Markus Stenz, allows the score to unfold with a measured inexorability that becomes truly overwhelming. See it, if you think your nerves can take it.
Beethoven was none too sure about his only opera, Fidelio. When librettist Friedrich Treitschke set about revising the first versions of the opera, originally titled Leonore, oder Der Triumph der ehelichen Liebe (Leonore, or the triumph of marital love), Beethoven wrote to Treitschke, in March 1814, praising him for salvaging ‘a few good bits of a ship that was wrecked and stranded’ and thus inspiring the composer to ‘rebuild the desolate ruins of an old castle’. Just one month later, he was declaring his anxieties once more, describing the work as ‘scattered in all directions’. Wishing that he could compose something new rather than patch up the old, he concluded, ‘In short, I assure you, my dear T[reitschke], that this opera will win for me a martyr’s crown.’ The composer’s own uncertainties have led to two centuries of musicological debate about the relative merits of the different versions of what became Fidelio, and endless directorial experimentation with the opera’s many knotty issues – such as the imbalance and dramatic incongruity of the two acts, and how to fuse the seriousness of the subject matter with a singspiel form designed for light entertainment – specifically, what to do with the spoken dialogue? In this new production for Glyndebourne – first mooted in 2016, scheduled for the 2020 festival, postponed because of the pandemic, and now arriving at the House to open the 2021 Tour (though not actually one of the season’s three touring productions) – director Frederic Wake-Walker presents his own efforts to save Beethoven’s opera from its dramatic and generic flaws and to reveal its musical magnificence. Thanks to a terrific cast, several making their Glyndebourne debuts, and conductor Ben Glassberg’s fine appreciation of the ‘symphonic’ greatness of Beethoven’s score, this ‘rescue mission’ more than succeeds in the latter aim, but, dramatically, Wake-Walker’s visual and narrative interventions too often remind one of Beethoven’s ‘sinking ship’ metaphor. In order to plug what he describes as the ‘many holes in the backstory’, Wake-Walker has excised the ‘clunky’ spoken dialogue, written a new spoken text in collaboration with Peter Cant and Gertrude Thoma, and created a new character, Estella (performed by Thoma) – a school teacher turned political activist and co-founder of an underground organisation, Prometheus, which aims to bring down Pizzaro’s oppressive regime. ‘Nelson Mandela could have written the mission statement’, Wake-Walker explained in a recent interview. A ‘sister’ of Orwell’s Winston Smith, in seeking to fight back against telescreen surveillance and totalitarian brutality, Estella reflects not upon doctored news reports from the Ministry of Truth, but pours over a letter from Leonore to Florestan, written prior to her rescue mission – a letter which has at its heart a poem written specially for the production by Zoë Palmer. Winston has his diary, Estella her laptop. Seated front stage-right, in Act 1 she guides us through the action, a Brechtian narrator distancing us from the events on stage. She shares Winston’s fate, however, trampled upon by a stampede of iron-shod boots and truncheons, and dragged off to prison where, beaten but not broken, she encourages Leonore in her mission. Designer Anna Jones’ prison is a panopticon – though probably not of the sort imagined by the eighteenth-century philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in his vision of the sort of constant surveillance that would reform morals and preserve health. Instead, Jones’ constructs a Foucaultian ‘cruel, ingenious cage’, a tiered, metal-mesh circle which occupies almost the entirety of the stage. In Act 1 it’s lit in shades of grey by lighting Designer Peter Mumford, then flooded with the glare of the golden sun in Act 2, and it serves as a cine-screen for Adam Fray’s video projects which present the action ‘in the round’, offering the audience multi-perspectives and aerial views, outsize close-ups of the events that are semi-concealed within the prison walls. It’s an impressive sight, but in practical terms it’s too often a hinderance, at least in Act 1 where the set occludes both the audience’s sightlines and, more importantly, the singers’ voices. Perhaps this is part of the reason, and not just first-night teething issues, that the stage-pit synchronicity was at times less than perfect, with the singers – in both arias and ensembles – struggling to keep up with Glassberg’s appropriately spirited beat. Wake-Walker’s intention seems to be that the metal grille through which the stage action is half-espied should distance audiences from the protagonists, while the video projections serve to reconnect. At times, a hyperbolic enlargement, or a revealing angle, or an unflinching encounter with a character’s direct stare enhances the emotional intensity of a given moment. But, the montages of juxtaposed faces and perspectives during the ensembles often bring together, and overlay, personae who are in fact isolated within their own emotional experiences, hopes and fears. Elsewhere there’s simply a surfeit of visual suggestion, the images flickering in a kinetic visual display which is distracting and destabilising, deflecting attention from the music itself. It’s difficult to know where one should direct one’s gaze. And, pity the poor punter who doesn’t know the plot and needs to read the surtitles too – “If only I knew what was going on …” reads an unintentionally ironic title at the close of Act 1.The characters, good and bad, are dressed in black uniformity, as hostile figures move among them operating hand-held cameras. It’s like being back at the National Theatre in the 1990s – I half expected a helicopter to arrive on stage. The prisoners’ chorus is shrouded in shadow, the white-smocked inmates’ brief moment in the light denied them. Their removal of their black eye-masks seemed more a gesture of disillusionment than of hope. The music projects most clearly when the characters step beyond the cage-bars and sing from the forestage: if the narrow strip allows for little more than ‘stand and sing’ delivery, then at least we can enjoy, and be moved or uplifted by, these human voices and the feelings they convey. The panopticon walls are less intrusive in Act 2, pulled back to open up the stage, yet the interpretative overload continues, with freeze-frames, time-loop replays, and a fragmentation of the dramatic progression towards liberation. Don Fernando’s trumpets are heard, and the auditorium is bathed in light as voices from the heights sing promises of redemption; Leonore and Florestan, re-united, sing of their love and joy in ‘O namenlose Freude’ while barely acknowledging each other; Estella makes a reappearance. The trumpet call should have brought release and promised a new dawn, but when Don Fernando does eventually arrive, it feels rather an anti-climax – even though hyperbolic swathes of gold lamé are draped over everything and everyone, bathing all in hypothetical sunlight and liberty. Thank goodness for the terrific singing and musicianship. Both German soprano Dorothea Herbert and English tenor Adam Smith are making House debuts and do so with impressive vocal composure and emotional impact. When Herbert stands alone in front of the prison walls and began to sing ‘Komm Hoffnung’, for the first time in the evening the audience are united in their focus – drawn into Fidelio’s conviction that she can rescue her husband. Herbert’s beautiful, shining soprano is captivating, and that beauty is allied with strength which sees her rise to the top of Beethoven’s sometimes discomforting vocal lines with flexibility and ease. Smith is asked to sing ‘Gott! Welch Dunkel hier!’ on his knees, his hand-cuffed arms tugged this way and that by the rope that descends from the flies, and which denies him rest, but any physical discomforts did not impede Smith’s incredible lyric power and the vocal peaks blazed and burned with full-bodied richness as Florestan overcomes his knowledge of death’s approach as imagines his future life, transfigured in paradise. Despite the ravages inflicted upon Florestan, the youthful vigour of Smith’s tenor outshines the lingering presence of mortality. Also making his Glyndebourne debut is Dingle Yandell, whose stentorian bass-baritone conveys Don Pizarro’s biting, self-consuming viciousness in ‘Ha! welch’ ein Augenblick’, as he anticipates his revenge and confirms Yandell’s compelling stage presence.
With no weak links in the cast and the effervescent musical direction of Jonathan Cohen, this revival of Michael Grandage’s 2012 production is a delight
The advantage of Glyndebourne Opera’s performances at the BBC Proms is that they give us a chance to concentrate on the music making. And there was plenty of high-quality music-making on offer at the Royal Albert Hall on Monday 28 August 2017 when Glyndebourne Opera performed Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito.
The set looks airy and minimal, Káťa’s sense of imprisonment and desire for freedom achieved by Alessandro Carletti’s intense use of lighting and high white walls that shut out the world. Three standard visual motifs, drawn from references in the libretto, are brought into play: bird, cage and angel. Magritte’s disturbing birdcage paintings, one of which he pointedly called The Therapist, come to mind. By the end, these symbols have multiplied to the point of distraction. This might irritate more had musical standards not been so outstanding in every quarter, steered by Glyndebourne’s music director, Robin Ticciati.
Michieletto’s production is symbolic and psychological first and foremost. The white set designs by Paolo Fantin suggest an abstract dream space – there is no village or river, only the interior of Kat’a’s mind. Their acute angles are redolent of the kinds of vitrine-like structures that so fascinated Francis Bacon in his paintings; these walls close in on Kat’a at the end of Act one, trapping her in the room with Kabanicha, which then ingeniously segues uninterrupted into the beginning of Act two.
The whole cast sing, act and dance with great skill and hilarity, Italian conductor Sesto Quatrini gets into the spirit of the fun, and it all adds up to exactly what we need at the end to mark the end of Covid.
In this new production of “Il turco in Italia,” Mariame Clément makes it a story about storytelling, overlaying a totally original supplementary story created by Lucy Wadham. Poet Prosdocimo is a famous novelist, who is signing copies of his book “Motherland,” before beginning work, years later, on his comedy, to be titled “The Turk.” The other characters emanate from his creative consciousness, where he tries on different styles and moods, his thoughts projected on a big notepad that sits upstage. “19th Century (“not sexy”), he muses, before moving the action into the 1950s (“neorealism”), in a delicatessen that could be straight out of Fellini, designed beautifully and colorfully by Julia Hansen.
It was left to Hera Hyesang Park’s charming, no-nonsense Despina to add a little sparkle and spirit. Brightly dismissing the sisters’ credulous faith in their lovers’, and all men’s fidelity, Park was deft and discerning in ‘In uomini, in soldati, sperare fedelta?’. She’s evidently a natural singing actor and – as her neat turns as the doctor and notary confirmed – able to judge the dramatic temperature to a tee. And, after she’d delivered such a perfect masterclass on feminine wiles to the naïve sisters, no wonder this Despina looked somewhat fed-up at the close when, they so swiftly forgot the wise homily of ‘Una donna a quindici anni’ in the hasty amorous re-assembling of the opera’s final moments.
Julie Boulianne is a slyly sensual, ideal Dorabella, and Hera Hyesang Park, as Despina, almost steals the show in a virtuoso turn that is both comedic and slightly sinister, the maid’s inflated ego driving the action only to realise she has been used when amusement veers towards tragedy.
Seeing Isolde sing her Verklärung (Transfiguration – ‘Mild und leise’) standing, centre stage and spotlit, was certainly in line with the production’s aesthetic: it is, of course, all her world then, as the human world recedes, and she ecstatically misreads Tristan’s post-mortem muscle stiffening as a ‘laugh’ (‘… wie er lächelt’). Tristan found himself recumbent for much of the final act on what looked like sheepskin until the delirium became too much for stasis. Memorable takes, both.
Along with that colour, soul and unflagging energy, he knows how to manipulate Wagner’s immense canvas, when to drive the music on through high moments and manage gradual transitions, while his heart-warming rapport with the London Philharmonic bodes well for the future.
Mariam Battistelli as Norina demands attention with her racy soprano - she is the perfect mixture of alluring feminine charm, devilish mischief and fiery temper.
And Battistelli, where do you start? I, along with everyone else, was blown away by her vocal fireworks and exquisite trills. Throw in some fantastic comic timing and she’s a stage diva I’d watch again and again.
As Figaro, meanwhile, Derek Welton showed he is the possessor of a major voice—a bass-baritone of easy power and robust, pleasing timbre
