ENO: The Tales of Hoffmann; OAE/Elder: Berlioz

The second performance of ENO’s Tales of Hoffmann on Thursday didn’t contradict much of what I’d read in the reviews after opening night. Richard Jones’s new production—hotfooting it over from Munich where before Christmas it had starred Rolando Villazón and Diana Damrau—is characteristically sharp, witty and, especially in the brilliant Olympia act, saturated with the director’s favourite sort of mid-twentieth-century kitsch.

Photo (c) Chris Christodoulou

I’m not especially well versed in the complicated editorial issues surrounding the work, but agree with what seems to be the general consensus: the material added in to the Kaye-Keck edition is not all top-drawer; and, as Tim Ashley notes, some of the Guiraud additions can be helpful to the overall structure. Either way, it’s a shame, though, that the ENO programme didn’t really address or properly clarify these issues, or even those regarding the broader questions the opera throws up—the mechanization of coloratura and Antonia’s self-undoing through the very act of singing are the sort of thing to get any musicologist’s juices flowing.

Photo (c) Chris Christodoulou

But while Hoffmann is a fascinating, flawed work, it’s not one that is necessarily that easy to like. And Jones, for all the smart theatricality of his production, didn’t really do much to make us identify with Hoffmann’s ‘affairs’ as anything more than coolly abstract experiments, with Olympia, Antonia and Giulietta as female archetypes chemically extracted from a whole and put, as it were, on an operatic petri dish. 

That's probably putting it a bit too strongly, but with even the locals at Luther’s pub appearing as part of Hoffmann’s booze-fuelled hallucinations, it was difficult to get really drawn in to the drama. It’s all brilliantly realized, but there’s not much to add warmth to what’s a rather cold evening’s opera.

The cast, however, are outstanding, led by an ardent Barry Banks as Hoffmann. If the voice doesn’t necessarily bloom as one might like, he’s a stylish singer entirely in control of the role. The same can be said for Georgia Jarman and Clive Bayley in their multiple roles. The soprano acts brilliantly as the automaton Olympia, the consumptive Antonia and the high-class hooker Giulietta, and her singing is marvellously accomplished; here’s one of what must be a small number of singers who can be convincing in all these roles (Damrau in Munich, by all accounts, is another). But, if you'll permit me a bit of canary fancying, I don't think even Damrau, who made her name in coloratura roles, can erase memories of Natalie Dessay as Olympia in 2000, before she had vocal problems, and when the voice apparently went onwards and upwards as far as the ear could hear. Here's Damrau in Munich in a clip that gives an idea of how brilliant Jones's direction is in this scene.

Here's Dessay in Vienna in 1996. She only, of course, does the one role; but does (did) anyone do it better?

Bayley’s knack for evil made him perfectly suited to the villains, even if ‘Scintille diamant’ might have been more elegantly phrased. Simon Butteriss was sharp as a tack as the servants and Christine Rice just about perfect as Nicklausse.

Another ‘problem’ work is Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette; at least it is usually seen as such. Part of the reason is the fact that it exists in characteristically Berliozian sui-generis limbo. Cast in seven sort-of movements, it mixes narrative from soloists and chorus with purely instrumental evocations, descriptions, transcriptions (call them what you will) of the key dramatic moments. David Cairns has written a nice little intro to it over on the Guardian, but this wonderful performance at the Royal Festival Hall, with Mark Elder conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (in repertoire that could hardly, however, be more Révolutionnaire et Romantique) did more to refute Tovey’s description of the work as ‘incoherent and unwieldy’ than any of Cairns’s arguments. It certainly made it seem coherent—necessarily so, since the OAE’s admirable idea to hand out free programmes was undone by a shortage of them. It still felt unwieldy, but gloriously so. The orchestra repeat bits of it at one of their Night Shifts this Friday, 24 February, at 9pm at the Camden Roundhouse, and microphones were on hand, presumably for radio broadcast. 

Hough, LPO/Alsop; Volodos, Philharmonia/Sokhiev; Silent Opera: La Bohème

There were another couple of treats for pianophiles last week: two brilliant but very different virtuosos—and I use the term advisedly—giving Festival Hall audiences a decent notes-for-their-buck ratio (And sorry to non-pianophiles [pianophobes?] for not covering the rest of these programmes in any detail). First came Stephen Hough’s bogof Liszt, where the ever-debonair pianist rattled his way through the Hungarian composer’s two concertos, one either side of the interval, as Marin Alsop and the LPO did their best to keep up (they were also very fine in a bookending pair of Czech symphonies—Martinu's Sixth and Dvorak's Eighth—that made this quite a long concert). The contrast between Hough’s nimble-fingered pianism and Arcadi Volodos’s more Herculean brand of piano-playing—in Brahms’ whopping B-flat concerto, with the Philharmonia—the next evening was fascinating.

First, it made me wonder whether our ears can sometimes be led astray by our eyes (the visual, after all, is the realm of the empirical; the aural is far more mysterious, requiring, as some theorists on the subject have argued, a quasi-religious act of dot-joining). Was I right to hear the slender Hough’s sound as less powerful than the bulkier Volodos’s? Did the delicacy of some of Volodos’s playing seem all the more astonishing given that it was produced by hands that look like they could shell a walnut? The answers are probably ‘yes’, followed by ‘maybe a little’. And would, on a slightly different tack, more people have flooded the RFH to hear Hough if he didn't seem so nice and, well, English?  

What Hough’s Liszt most certainly wasn’t, though, was unassuming or polite. Fuelled, apparently, more by Tokay than tea, it was daring, improvisatory and, in each concerto’s frantic run to the finish line, hair-raisingly exciting. There was a hint of the circus, as there had been when Hough played just the E-flat work with the Budapest Festival Orchestra about this time last year, and when I’d done the pianist a disservice by thinking it was the conductor Iván Fischer who’d driven the tempos on so furiously. Here Hough's spiky attack and hair-pin dynamics made the first concerto here sound more modern than ever, most surprisingly so, given the triangle’s less-than-entirely-serious reputation, in the famous Scherzando section where it features so prominently. Here we suddenly noticed the piano’s percussive writing against sparse string textures and delicate wind interjections. But while Hough’s playing in the lighter textures was brilliantly pointed, and his laconic way the more improvisatory stuff hypnotic, I did still have my doubts about the moments of altogether more outrageous rhetoric—the thundering double octaves and the beefy chords—which seemed splashy and hard-edged but underpowered. Maybe it’s something to do with the way his piano’s conditioned, but it’s a lean sound that could often do with a bit more beef.

No such complaints with Volodos’s Brahms, where the Russian’s sound was typically rich but controlled. He’s not quite worked out what he’s doing with all of this concerto, it seems, and the gargantuan first movement, although despatched with the most astonishing accuracy and facility, seemed occasionally over-interpreted. (Do its big chords demand a certain effort that dictates its own interpretative course? I wondered; and is one left scratching one’s head if they don’t pose those difficulties?) Either way, the final three movements were dazzling in their different ways. First, in matters of ‘mere’ technique it is difficult to imagine anyone matching Volodos’s dynamic range or dexterity: the ability to despatch octaves like single notes, for example, made for a final movement of mercurial brilliance (and rarely have those playful runs up the keyboard in thirds sounded so wispy and light), while the colours of the Andante were perfectly controlled. The encore—I admit not knowing what it was, but have been put out of my ignorant misery by the ever well-informed Classical Source’s review of the concert: Schubert's remarkable C# minor minuet D. 600—was entrancing, with Volodos controlling right-hand voices against a perfectly gauged pizzicato-like bass. The Philharmonia accompanied with some beautiful playing under Tugan Sokhiev, but occasionally risked coming unstuck. They were at their very best, though, in a coruscating account of Shostakovich's Symphony No.8, which stretches that form as Brahms stretched that of the concerto, but to very different, harrowing ends. 

Finally, a quick mention for Silent Opera, a brilliant new initiative whose La Bohème I caught at the Vault Festival at the Old Vic Tunnels. I’m writing it up in opera, but suffice to say here that it might be one way of fulfilling the requirement for cheap, accessible opera in an inclusive environment, where the relaxed atmosphere (and attendant drink-swigging and chatting) in no way impedes one’s enjoyment. It works, if you’re wondering, in a way that builds on the idea of 'silent' disco: each member of the audience has wireless headphones and the live singing is mixed directly onto a pre-recorded orchestral soundtrack, meaning that the singers (and audience) can move around a multi-room space like the Tunnels and keep up with the aural action. There are still a few performances left (follow the link above for details) and it is really worth trying to catch. There are plans later in the year for Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Keep an ear out and book early; Silent Opera might become very popular. 

Der Rosenkavalier at ENO; Philharmonia/Masur; BBC SO Jakobín

Amanda Roocroft as the Marschallin (c) Clive Barda

Towards the close of Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s character watches two actors rehearsing the end of his play, which in turn stages the happy ending that the film has failed to provide. ‘You know how you’re always trying to get things to turn out perfect in art’, he says, turning to the camera, ‘because it’s real difficult in life?' ENO’s revival of Der Rosenkavalier made me think of this clip (against which, incidentally and not inappropriately, we begin to hear Diane Keaton’s Annie start singing ‘Seems like old times…’), because rarely have I felt more aware of the different levels in Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s work: between broad comedy and deeply-felt tragedy on the one hand, and between exquisitely-crafted artifice and exquisitely-observed reality on the other.

The Marschallin’s awareness of the passage of time and the realization that, to borrow another phrase from Annie Hall, she and Octavian might soon have a dead shark on their hands, came across in Amanda Roocroft’s moving portrayal as all too realistic--the slight vulnerability of her voice above the stave and its weakness in the mid-to-low range only added to this impression. The heady love-at-first-sight of the Presentation of the Rose seemed all the more idealized in comparison. Hofmannsthal's brilliantly clever in underlining that artificiality, too, in having the Silver Rose laced with 'Persian rose-oil'. For Adorno this was evidence of 'Spontaneity produced by technique, [which] is the Straussian magic formula'. But here, in David McVicar's economical but cleverly detailed and observed production, such 'spontaneity produced by technique' put the more 'real' story of the Marschallin into relief. This was achieved nowhere better than in the final scene: the Trio was elucidated by little gestures and looks that made clear that the awkwardness of the moment cannot be expected to dissolve as Strauss's dominant 7th slips us gently into D-flat major; the subsequent cutesy duet, then, became an attempt exactly to get right in art what we'd just seen go so wrong in life.

Sarah Connolly as Octavian (c) Clive Barda

Alongside Roocroft's Marschallin, Sarah Connolly's Octavian was extremely good. Not only does the voice have all the glinting splendour of the blingy armour of the character's Act-2 entrance, but Connolly has mastered teenage ardour and stroppiness--not to mention the gangly walk of a lanky 17-year-old. Sophie Bevan's Sophie was outstanding, too: charming and disarming, and wonderfully secure in the vocal stratosphere. The rest of the cast, including a typically persuasive Faninal from Andrew Shore, put on a brilliant ENO team effort.

The distance that opened up between the comic elements of the opera--embodied by John Tomlinson's bawdy, boisterous and roughly-sung Baron Ochs--and the rest was perhaps less welcome. There's no doubting Tomlinson's charisma on the stage, or the clarity with which he can get a text across, but parts of this role are simply beyond him in vocal terms, and I felt myself wince in anticipation of every high note. This lack of vocal finesse, allied to the fact that Alfred Kalisch's workmanlike translation necessarily robbed Ochs of his verbal acuity, made for a distinctly unaristocratic portrayal. Surely, I thought, Ochs should be the incarnation of the same mixture of sophistication and lasciviousness that defines the Act-2 waltzes. 

Tomlinson and Connolly in Act 3 (c) Clive Barda

McVicar's one-set-fits-all production also came a bit unstuck at the start of Act 3, where we really missed having a properly booby-trapped Beis'l for Ochs's undoing. (There's also some rather tiresome stuff with the upgraded Leopold, particularly his learing attempts at getting involved in the Act-3 seduction). 

I'd not enjoyed Edward Gardner's conducting when the production was new--he drove the score hard and the orchestra played with little warmth. Here, however, he balanced sugar and thrust perfectly, and the ENO players demonstrated real command of the score. In fact, I'd not enjoyed much of the production as a whole when it was new (Connolly's Octavian excepted); but here it all clicked, and clicked brilliantly and powerfully. It's been getting universally great reviews--and deservedly so. Get a ticket if you can.

Many of the key moments in Der Rosenkavalier involve the stopping of time. The Marschallin, she tells us in her monologue, attempts literally to do so by stopping the clocks in her palace; Strauss seems to do so with the musical freeze-frames of the opera's great set pieces--the Presentation of the Rose and the Trio. Bruckner, particularly in his later symphonies, might not stop time but he certainly reconfigures it, stretching forms in a way that requires a special sort of interpretative skill. Kurt Masur, now in his mid-80s and looking very frail indeed, has been conducting these symphonies for god know's how long, and he brought all that experience to bear in the Seventh Symphony at the Royal Festival Hall on Thursday. There was nothing showy here, nor anything terribly revelatory, but rather an honest, expertly-paced account of this great work (although I'm still not sure about the finale). Similarly, Arabella Steinbacher's beautifully played account of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in the first half provided simple, straightforward pleasure. That's not to damn it with faint praise, however; impeccably musical and with every phrase sweetly sung, this was the sort of civilised, unshowy playing that often brings out the best in this composer. (And it's an approach that works pretty well in the slow movement from Beethoven's Violin Concerto, too, as below--none of her Mendelssohn seems to have made it on to YouTube).

Finally, there was a brilliantly enjoyable performance of Dvořák's Jakobín at the Barbican last night, courtesy of Jiří Bělohlávek, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Singers and a lovely Czech cast. The piece is jam-packed with some glorious music, even if it is fatally compromised by a dithery libretto that can't work out where to focus its attention. I was there for OPERA, so can't write too much here, but it's certainly well worth catching when broadcast on Radio 3 this coming Thursday at 2pm.

Barbican 2012-13 Season Announced

The Barbican's got in there early as the announcements season gets under way, setting out an enticing programme for its 2012-13 season. The announcement focuses around the arrival of a couple more Associate Ensembles: the Acadamy of Ancient Music and the Britten Sinfonia (including Angela Hewitt leading Beethoven concertos from the keyboard). There'll also be a residency from Gustavo Dudamel and his Los Angeles Philharmonic -- where the Wunder-not-quite-such-a-kind-any-more will have another job to counter the backlash of doubters. (I missed his Simon Bolivar Orchestra Mahler 'Resurrection' at the Proms this Summer, but that certainly came in for a certain amount of opprobrium). With the LA Phil, there will be new works by John Adams and Unsuk Chin.

The LSO programme boasts concert performances of The Turn of the Screw with Colin Davis, John Eliot Gardiner conducting Oedipus Rex and 'an authoritative guide' to music by Brahms and Szymanowski by Valery Gergiev -- not someone, it should be noted, usually regarded as an authority in Brahms, at least, but we'll have to see...

The Barbican's always good for providing opera in concert, and I'll particularly be looking forward to the BBC Symphony Orchestra's performances of two Ravel operas. The ever-stylish Jacques Imbrailo will lead the cast in L'Heure Espagnol -- I wonder, incidentally, whether Richard Jones's production will return to the Royal Opera, now that its coupling, Gianni Schicchi has been reunited with its Trittico partners -- and L'Enfant et les Sortilèges, in a 'specially-devised concert version using live film created by Jean-Baptiste Barrière' (am I the only one to be filled with a slight sense of dread by such phrases?). The Britten Sinfonia will play for Oliver Knussen's Where the Wild Things Are and Higglety Pigglety Pop!, while The English Concert will accompany a starry Radamisto. There'll be Lully from Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyrique, and more Handel from the AAM and Hogwood. And there'll also be a fair bit of excitement, no doubt, around a mini-residency from Juan Diego Florez -- including a concert that also features Joyce di Donato: those bel canto sparks will fly. 


Oh, and there's obviously a whole lot more: details and dates can be found here. The Southbank Centre announces its new season on Monday, too, so I'll try and say a few words on that. 

Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: The Royal Opera House, 19 December 2011

Photo: Clive Barda

‘Just what kind of a piece is Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg?’ asks one of the programme essays. Graham Vick’s production, first seen in 1993 and revived on this occasion by Elaine Kidd, suggests it is an out-and-out comedy, and not a great deal more. Yet, among the gaudily colourful costumes, gallivanting apprentices and comedy codpieces, we lose track of what makes Meistersinger one of the composer’s greatest achievements. Its jokes are clunky, often hammered home—sometimes literally—with workmanlike determination; it’s in the humanity, wisdom and the awareness of the troublingly fluid relationship between rule and rebellion, the fine line between rebel and ruler, that the work’s greatness and longevity lie.

But where was all that? When Antonio Pappano launched into a slow account of the act-three prelude, whose world-weary melancholy presages Hans Sachs’s famous Wahn monologue, it came as a shock. In the preceding couple of hours there had been little sense that anything on stage should be taken terribly seriously. Pappano’s conducting had a lively forward momentum to it, but his cast, with only one native German speaker among them in Wolfgang Koch’s mellow, underpowered Sachs, struggled to get a lot of Wagner’s wordy, punning libretto across. There was often a sense of rush and an attendant untidiness; too rarely did Wagner’s glorious score soar.

Matters did improve a little in the third act, but the great orchestral swoon as Walter arrives in his finery was undermined by the fact that that finery made Simon O’Neill look more like Liberace than the liberator of German art. The Quintet was marred by the slight flatness of Emma Bell’s Eva and the piercing quality of O’Neill’s unsubtle tenor. The gradual sense of excitement as we are led by trump and drum to the Festwiese, meanwhile, was undercut by the staging: as Wagner’s score opened up into grand public ceremony, everything remained encased with the same chunky green frame that had confined the model Nuremberg of Act Two. The various guilds marched ludicrously around in circles, smirking like Dad’s Army on manoeuvres. Perhaps it was all designed to take us away from other Nuremberg associations; if it was, then Vick’s is a production that seems even more inadequate to deal with this work. And while there were enough good things in purely musical terms to provide a stirring conclusion to the evening, it all seemed rather two-dimensional.

Perhaps the production’s shortcomings were emphasised by a cast that fell a little short of what one might expect from Covent Garden. A lot of it was made up of veterans of the Royal Opera stage, some of whom sounded fresher than others. John Tomlinson’s Veit Pogner bellowed and flailed in customary fashion, imbuing the character—a personification of bürgerlich propriety—with an inappropriately fiery-eyed earnestness. Donald Maxwell sounded woolly at the top as Fritz Kothner, and Robert Lloyd blasted out the Nightwatchman’s brief lines—for technical reasons, one imagined, rather than interpretative ones.

Photo: Clive Barda

Most damaging to the drama, though, was Peter Coleman-Wright’s Beckmesser. Not only was the character drawn in the most broad, cartoonish manner, mincing about ineffectually, but Coleman-Wright didn’t really have the notes under his control. His top A at the end of the first scene of Act Three was an unacceptable falsetto compromise, and there was a lack of accuracy and security elsewhere. Relegating this problematic character to the realm of Christmas panto, meanwhile, fatally skewed the dramatic balance: as Christopher Wintle’s essay reminded us, Sachs and Beckmesser should not be so very different.

O’Neill’s Walter was secure and reliable, but hardly endearing. The acting was wooden and the singing short on grace and warmth. He seemed so concerned with maintaining a legato line that most of the words counted for little. Emma Bell’s Eva was charming but underwhelming, even if here—particularly in conjunction with Heather Shipp’s feisty Magdalene—there was some unusually detailed and imaginative acting. Toby Spence’s David, by contrast, was almost too vibrant a stage presence. The voice is bigger than we’re used to for the role, something which brought advantages and disadvantages: the sound was bright and engaging; he struggled to bring the necessary pernickety cleanliness to the wordier sections of Act One. Koch’s Hans Sachs, meanwhile, was a size smaller than we’re used to, and, as an inevitable result, he struggled to assert himself, and his words were often lost under the orchestral blanket. He’s youthful and rather likeable as the character, but, while this was a high-economy Sachs that lasted the course pretty well, one often wished for it to move up a gear.

Musically I’m sure this revival will settle down and tighten up, but I feel a slight jealousy for those with tickets to hear it when the Royal Opera hit the road to head for a performance in Birmingham’s Symphony Hall on 11 January. The jury might be out on whether Bryn Terfel’s Sachs will improve on Koch’s, but the Welsh baritone can certainly command a stage. At that concert performance, though, the opera’s challenging ambiguity might be better able to shine through.

The European Union Baroque Orchestra at Spitalfields Music Winter Festival

Baroque music and the European Union, one might imagine, are not necessarily a match made in heaven. The idea of a battery of civil servants finding Beckmesserisch joy in the bureaucratic rules and regulations of baroque harmony and counterpoint is indeed a chilling one. But the European Union Baroque Orchestra is a marvellous band, and could not be further away from this, as I tried to communicate in this review of last Saturday's concert.

It was one of those concerts that just leaves you thinking the world is maybe not such a bad place after all. They're official EU Cultural Ambassadors, and an EU flag stood rather forlornly at the back of the stage--flags rarely flourish indoors--reminding us of this. I toyed with various topical references in my review, but they all seemed a bit contrived. Suffice to say, though, this orchestra, with its international personnel clearly enjoying themselves so much, did make one want to believe in the utopian ideal of a harmonious Europe.

Yuri Bashmet and the Moscow Soloists at Cadogan Hall

Here's my review of last Wednesday's concert at the Cadogan Hall, part of the Moscow Soloists' 20th-anniversary tour. It takes in dates in an astonishing 80 cities, and apparently mixes and matches the soloists. I was interested here to get a chance to hear the soprano Dinara Alieva. Her biography--which both describes her as 'combin[ing] a distinctive voice together with an extraordinary physical beauty' and refers to her as a 'modest person'--is hardly immediately endearing, but it's an interesting voice, and she has undoubted glamour (and, on the evidence of this concert, an impressive collection of sparkly high heels). Apparently she's becoming something of a fixture in Vienna, and I'd very much like to hear her in a role on stage.

Here she is in Tatyana's Letter Scene (forced, like Amanda Echalaz at ENO into a bit of lying on the back half way through--do people really do this in real life? But at least there is a bed. And quite a big one at that). It seems as though she has a bit of a tendency to over-act from this, but that might well be the production's fault; that bed is hardly conducive to intimacy.