Category: Reviews – Opera and Ballet

Enthralling and disturbing – NZ Opera’s take on Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw”

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Opera presents:
BENJAMIN BRITTEN – The Turn of the Screw
(libretto by Myfawny Piper, after the novella by Henry James)

Conductor: Holly Mathieson
Director: Thomas de Mallet Burgess
Designer: Tracy Grant Lord
Lighting: Matthew Marshall
Assistant Director: Eleanor Bishop

Cast: Anna Leese (Governess)
Jared Holt (Prologue/Peter Quint)
Madeleine Pierard (Miss Jessel)
Patricia Wright (Mrs Grose)
Alexa Harwood (Flora)
Alexandros Swallow (Miles)

Members of Orchestra Wellington
Leader: Justine Cormack
Piano/celesta: David Kelly

The Opera House, Wellington

Thursday, October 3rd 2019
(Wellington: Saturday. 5th October

Auckland: 18th, 20th, 23rd October)

 

It’s difficult to think of another opera whose overall theme, story-line and characterisations are more interlaced by ambiguities as Britten’s The Turn of the Screw –  the story on which the opera is based, Henry James’ novella of the same name, carries its own versions of much the same kinds of imponderables, though the opera seems, if anything, to further complicate and intensify the issues. The story tells of a young woman securing a job as governess of two children in a remote setting, only to feel with increasing conviction that the ghosts of a former valet and governess in the house are attempting to “possess” the minds of her young charges for their own purposes.

A critic in 1898 called Henry James’ work “A deliberate, powerful and horribly successful study of the magic of evil”, a judgement that has since been channelled into various critical streams regarding both novella and opera – firstly, that the governess is protecting the children from evil as presented by the ghosts; secondly, that the governess is “imagining” the ghosts, and is thus herself a danger to the children; and thirdly, that the story is purposefully ambiguous in not allowing the reader to decide between these viewpoints. The opera seems to uphold the third course, by ultimately refusing to ascribe blame for the narrative’s ultimate tragedy of the ending to any one cause or party, and leaving us with James’s own dictum, “Make the reader think the evil, make him think it for himself, and (one is) released from weak specifications”.

Mfawny Piper’s libretto gives the ghosts (both mute presences in James’s story) their own voices, well-wrought inventions which enable some background to the past – in particular, these “flesh out” something of the housekeeper Mrs Gros’s knowledge and judgement of each of the characters. She expresses this to the governess, most damningly of the former valet Peter Quint who, in the housekeeper‘s words “made free” with everyone, including one of the children, the boy Miles. Productions of the opera have, since the premiere in 1954, not unexpectedly moved from presenting an out-and-out “ghost” story, and “gone with the times”, by turns reinterpreting the work with Freudian depictions of a frustrated spinster bringing a fevered imagination to bear upon the scenario, fresh awarenesses of issues such as sexual exploitation and corruption of children, and gay “subtexts”, one example of the latter citing the celebrated recitation of Latin nouns by one of the children to the governess, as a “schoolboy list of phallic expressions”.

To its credit, the current production avoids any gross representation of any of those standpoints (as some ego-ridden contemporary opera presentations of any of the standard repertoire mercilessly and deleteriously indulge themselves in), and instead hints at possibilities, leaving its audiences in a state of wonderment (a version of James’s “leaving it to the reader”), which personalises reactions to the details of the events and their outcomes, thus creating far more interesting theatrical situations for people to “take away” from and ponder what they’ve witnessed. An example of this was the scene in the second act where the governess (Anna Leese) sits with the half-undressed Miles (Alexandros Swallow) on his bed, the young woman bent on competing for the boy’s attentions with the marauding ghost of Peter Quint (Jared Holt). The governess’s obvious “longing” for the affections of the children’s guardian (as witness her demeanour when previously  reading aloud what she had written in a letter to him) has sublimated into a version of the same longing for affection from Miles  –  here the dialogue suggested more the talk of lovers who need something from one another than of adult-and-child interaction, yet with the physical boundaries between the two (just) maintained.

In this respect, Anna Leese’s portrayal of the emotionally constrained and psychologically besieged governess – in thrall to a man (her employer, the children’s guardian) she has never met but is bonded to by a sense of duty permeated with her own Molotov-cocktail mix of fantasies involving his approval and her own self-worth – was incredibly finely-crafted. Together with her director, Thomas de Mallet Burgess, she built with great subtlety and whole-heartedness a character with endless depths of longing and anxiety, her voice running the gamut of expressiveness as regards its different versions of beauty and presence. Her singing, though not always entirely clear in terms of diction, gave voice to a character whose sincerity we might not have doubted but whose capacity for self-knowledge and decisive action seemed difficult to fathom, right up to the work’s unnerving conclusion. We left the theatre still carrying a relationship with her that resonated in a somewhat disturbing and unresolved manner – and within our consciousness of what we’ve witnessed echoed most hauntingly that phrase of W.B. Yeats’ from his poem “The Second Coming”, here given by Mfawny Piper to the ghosts to sing separately and together, pertaining to the children, but ultimately to all of us  – “The ceremony of innocence is drowned”.

The governess’s dramatic foil was Patricia Wright’s sonorously-delivered assumption of Mrs Grose, the housekeeper, a long-time servant at the house – a plainly-spoken, simple woman, great of heart, but conscious of her position and lack of education in comparison to the governess. Both singers negotiated this governess/housekeeper relationship with great pliancy and spontaneity, conveying the fragility of things at the point near the story’s climax where the housekeeper took the girl Flora away as if losing faith in the governess’s ability to protect her. I thought Wright’s announcing to the latter (with what seemed like some strangely grim satisfaction) that her letter to the children’s guardian was not delivered, had all the portents of doom required, even if her character at that point  was only a messenger.

The ghosts, Jared Holt’s darkly dangerous Peter Quint, and Madeleine Pierard’s compelling, positively gothic Miss Jessel, were introduced as “presences” long before they actually appeared – their silhouetting on a diaphanous stage-curtain at first underlined their “in the mind” aspect, but their presence was soon made all too tangible at subsequent moments. Jared Holt’s melismatic calls of Miles’ name produced a “frisson” of compelling unease, while Madeleine Pierard’s relatively darker but still riveting tones summonsing Flora gave a more sinister impression of rising from below (perhaps from the lake waters in the house’s grounds).  Holt relished the quasi-heroic music of self-portrait, his words styling him as “ the riderless horse” or the “hero-highwayman”, images associated with unfettered action and feral freedom – Pierard’s darker, more piteous music tied in with her character’s equating with “wronged women” of earlier times. The two ghosts brought matters to a head between one another superbly in their evocation of a shared past, one in which Quint was the wrongdoer and Miss Jessel his victim, uniting only in their common purpose of seeking “a friend”, Quint desiring Miles and Miss Jessel wanting Flora.

No praise can be too high for the on-stage work of the young singers playing the roles of the opera’s two children here in Wellington – Alexa Harwood’s Flora and Alexandros Swallow’s Miles. Neither could be faulted regarding what seemed to me like their total identification with the characters, as if they had each stepped into their respective roles and filled them out from within. Musically, too, each sang like both the angels and the mischief-makers one knows children are capable of appearing to be, all the while. Alexa Harwood’s Flora most convincingly wove her stage movements into the fabric of her singing performance, while Alexandros Swallow, his Miles more often the follower than the leader, matched his stage-sister at every turn, both through gesture and voice, bringing also his considerable theatrical skills to precisely-honed fruition in miming complex piano-playing patterns most convincingly. Each in their different ways conveyed the effect of the drama’s potential for harm upon his or her own character, to profound effect – remarkable performances!

I feel compelled to make the point that, though the opera was sung in English, a good deal of the text I found hard to follow, almost always when the voices were under pressure or singing in ensemble – a number of people I spoke to afterwards confirmed that they would have appreciated surtitles to better serve their understanding of the plot’s finer detail. The clearest enunciation came from Jared Holt in a piano-accompanied Prologue (the opening of a “written account” of the governess’s story) which he delivered in the role of a narrator. In my experience this loss of clarity is a common phenomenon with higher solo voices singing in the vernacular in a large venue – so, in making the difference for listeners between (a) a merely-pleasant-sounding and (b) a “made-more- intelligible” utterance I feel this would be something that everybody would surely want – having said all of this, I find myself wondering how singers themselves feel (felt?) about it?

Initially I was disappointed that the chamber ensemble accompanying the singers was set so far back on stage, almost as a kind of “noises off” accompaniment, having enjoyed so much the vivid interactions between voices and prominently-placed instruments in various recordings I listened to – in the course of the opera’s action I modified this viewpoint to an enjoyment and appreciation of the atmospheric ebb and flow of Britten’s scoring throughout the work. There was certainly no real lessening of impact during the opera’s most forceful moments, once our ears had gotten “the pitch of the hall”, and the quieter, more distant moments had a tragic beauty whose irony gave even more of an edge to the story’s overall impact.

The instrumental playing (largely members of Orchestra Wellington, led by violinist Justine Cormack), and complemented by pianist David Kelly (whose stylish solo accompanying Jared Holt’s narration opened the work) was directed with precision, verve and enthralling atmosphere by New Zealand-born conductor Holly Mathieson, whose work I hope to hear again before too long. I did want to SEE the players play, but as I’ve said the scenario called for a different conception which worked powerfully in its own way.

I couldn’t fathom at first why Alexandros Swallow (who sang Miles) was the first to appear on stage at the work’s beginning UNTIL he sat down at the piano and APPEARED to begin to play the aforementioned solo that accompanied the tenor to begin the opera – and then I remembered he was to play the piano in one of the opera’s later scenes (Variation XIII)  – both sequences were superbly played by the ACTUAL pianist David Kelly (and brilliantly mimed on stage by the young singer!). There were various divergencies of movement and stage placement from what I was expecting, all of which I thought worked save for the appearance of a bed pushed in for no apparent reason at the beginning of Act Two. The rest flowed with irresistible momentum!

Finally, this was a production that looked good and convincing, and maintained a kind of unity throughout – perhaps the scene by the lake during which Flora encounters Miss Jessel didn’t have much “outdoor” ambience, being kept under the omnipresent pall of darkly-inclined variants of illumination that marked nearly all of the scenarios! Still, Matthew Marshall’s lighting generally held us in thrall, scene by scene, by turns revealing and concealing, reassuring and malevolent, warm and chill, delicate and laden, the ambiences working well with designer Tracy Grant Lord’s “framed” portals which gave the spaces at once telescopically-extended vistas with oddly claustrophobic effects – “black holes” of imaginary space in which the characters play out life’s illusions. Director Thomas de Mallet Burgess, together with his assistant Eleanor Bishop, presided over a lucid, if challengingly ambivalent scenario of interaction between the players in the drama, encouraging the essences and their contradictions as expressed in people’s motivations for doing what they do – for ostensible good or evil, or for ends that accord with Peter Quint’s desperate enjoiner to Miles  – “You must be free!” Like anything (and this is perhaps Britten’s (and James’) ultimate message – such freedom comes at a price.

 

 

 

Intense, heartfelt and involving – Verdi’s Rigoletto from Eternity Opera at the Hannah Playhouse

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Eternity Opera presents:
GIUSEPPE VERDI – Rigoletto (Opera in three Acts)

Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave (after Victor Hugo)
English translation by Ruth and Thomas Martin

CAST :
Rigoletto                James Clayton
Gilda                       Hannah Catrin-Jones
The Duke               Boyd Owen
Sparafucile            Robert Lindsay
Maddalena            Jess Segal
Monterone            Roger Wilson
Giovanna               Ruth Armishaw
Count Marullo      Orene Tiai
Count Ceprano     Minto Fung
Countess Ceprano  Karyn Andreassend
Matteo Borsa       Chris Berentson
Court Usher          Olivia Sheat
A Page                    Alexandra Woodhouse-Appleby
Gang Members     Chris Anderson,  Paul Bothwell, Nikita Crosby
Richard Dean, Jessica Mercer-Short, Garth Norman

Director:  Alex Galvin
Assistant Director:  Laura Loach
Music Director:  Matthew Ross
Producers:  Emma Beale & Minto Fung
Production/Stage Manager:  Joel Rudolf
Costume Designer:  Sally Gray
Lighting Designer:  Haami Hawkins

Eternity Orchestra
Leader:  Vivian Stephens
Repetiteur:  Catherine Norton

Hannah Playhouse, Wellington

Saturday, 23rd August, 2019 (until 31st August)

I can’t think of a better instance of a small opera company bringing forth by dint of its own efforts a production with the commitment and calibre of Eternity Opera’s production of “Rigoletto”, which we saw at Wellington’s Hannah Playhouse on Friday evening. I won’t go as far as proclaiming this “the best so far” of the company’s productions in this venue, as comparisons of that sort are odious for all kinds of reasons – but I certainly felt I’d witnessed nothing better overall than this from the company in the past.

Right from the orchestral prelude’s beginning we were riveted, held by the playing and conductor Matthew Ross’s control of the music’s tensions, the atmosphere dark and un-nerving, everything generated by the insistent motifs and their sharply-focused realisation – the brass were spot-on and unrelenting, the strings and winds coiled and uncoiled with sinister intent, like a snake preparing to strike, and the percussion startled with its force at the climax and its even more disturbing muted after-presence. Then came the stunning volte-face of the “party-music”, the Duke’s palace bursting with sounds of fantastic life and energy – a great beginning! On-stage, I thought the party looked somewhat tentative at the outset, with the chorus members (in modern dress) taking a while to “loosen up” movement-wise  – everybody needed to “hit the ground running” more confidently, and mirror the energies of the orchestral playing and the Duke’s free-wheeling licentiousness – however, to compensate, the singing (in English) was alive and dynamic, which helped it all grow most satisfactorily as the scene went on.

I thought Boyd Owen’s Duke looked and sounded totally convincing from his first entry, emanating self-confidence in all respects, his energies transcending the production’s somewhat bland non-hierarchical appearance – a playboy despot, in fact. His “Questo e quella” (“This or that girl”) had all the casual insouciance of the practised lecher to go with the exuberance of his freely-ringing tones. By contrast, James Clayton’s compelling Rigoletto cleverly “insinuated” his way onto the stage, his almost Dadaist garb mocking convention in accord with his character, and heightening the “edge” of his acerbic exchanges with the courtiers – the character at once provocative, volatile and reckless.

The appearance of Count Monterone (Roger Wilson) an aggrieved nobleman whose daughter had been seduced and abandoned by the Duke was a splendid moment, with the Count’s curse (a stumbling block for most modern adaptations of the opera) here made properly baleful and even frightening by a convincing combination of the singer’s commitment and his would-be victim Rigoletto’s terrified reaction. After a gripping chorus response to this, the voices generating incredible vehemence in their rebuttal of the Count’s maledictions, the Act’s second scene stole in, here cleverly integrating the characters of the killer-for-hire, Sparafucile, and his sister-accomplice Maddalena, among the party-guests, so that they seemed almost like “an enemy within”, rather than ostensibly sinister night-creatures. Robert Lindsay as Sparafucile kept his voice smooth and steady during his confrontation with the jester, allowing the disturbing accompaniment of solo strings and throbbing bass drum to underpin the horror of his glib-toned, but deadly message for Rigoletto, still distracted by Monterone’s curse, but interested despite himself – the scene all the more macabre here, in its manicured, almost genteel aspect!

Clayton superbly laid bare the jester’s character in his soliloquy which followed, reiterating the curse, railing against his deformity and execrating the courtiers who mocked him earlier, before giving himself over entirely to his daughter, Gilda, here sung by Hannah Catrin-Jones with a presence and intensity that ideally matched the vividly-wrought character of her besotted but fearful father.  How fortunate we were to have such a triumvirate of singers in this work’s leading roles! As she did in her portrayal of “Madama Butterfly” last year for the company, Catrin-Jones “owned” the character of Gilda with a vocal “presence” and dramatic totality of commitment that rightly put intensity of feeling before every other consideration, in places even beauty of tone – and in doing so she again won our hearts and sympathies.

The singing and playing during this scene did full justice to the composer’s remarkable combination of quicksilver movement and heartfelt emotion – Rigoletto’s tenderness and anxiety at odds with one another, Gilda’s concern for her father set against her interest in a young man she had seen at church, a secret she shared with the maid, Giovanna (sensitively and lyrically portrayed by Ruth Armishaw), and the young man’s sudden, covert entrance into the courtyard in pursuit of Gilda (the Duke in disguise, of course, astonished to learn that the girl is Rigoletto’s daughter, but unremitting in his efforts to “get the girl”!) – supporting the singers’ efforts all the way was Matthew Ross’s conducting, generating playing from his musicians by turns as thrustful and exciting or lyrical and atmospheric as required.

The “no-holds-barred” scene between the disguised Duke and Gilda was a tour de force of emotional outpouring on the part of both characters, vocal elegance mattering less than the raging flow of feeling, carrying us all along in its flow – what a mountain for singers to climb! – especially on the part of the tenor, with Boyd Owen’s voice seemingly at full stretch in most places in places but his character totally convincing dramatically! Gilda’s well-known “Caro nome” (Dearest name) in the wake of the Duke’s departure restored beauty and elegance to the proceedings, Catrin-Jones’s exquisite singing most sensitively supported by the orchestra, the winds in particular partners in fragrant evocation, despite a moment or two’s imprecision between singer and players towards the end.

Great work followed from the chorus, the nobles gathering, in disguise, to carry off whom they believed to be Rigoletto’s mistress, encountering him outside the house and deluding him into thinking they were playing a trick on someone else! The energy and thrust of the singing and playing carried us irresistibly along to the point where Rigoletto suddenly heard Gilda’s voice as she was “taken” by the intruders, thereupon tearing off his “mask” and discovering she was gone.

More full-bloodedly ardent singing from the Duke at the Second Act’s beginning – what a role this is! – (though I’ve often thought Verdi a little inconsistent in his characterisation, here  – was this genuine feeling for the missing Gilda he was expressing?) Boyd Owen was again unfailingly sonorous and romantic in vocal feeling, his anguish transformed to joy upon hearing of Gilda’s conveyance to his clutches. Rigoletto, by comparison, was all care and sorrow, turning to anger as he revealed to the courtiers that they had stolen his daughter, James Clayton’s vocal range and depth of emotion overwhelming, the flood of feeling generated, together with weeping strings and plangent cor anglais, breaking all hearts! Gilda’s sudden entrance from the Duke’s bedroom occasioned an oboe solo of equal poignancy, its phrases movingly matched by Catrin-Jones’ achingly lovely tones – as befitted one of opera’s most heartfelt scenes, this performance delivered the sorrow and anguish of it all in spadefuls!

Here, too, was amply-realised justification for the sparseness of the set – unobtrusive in earlier scenes, but absolutely perfect in this instance, with shadows as well as “substance” resonating on or in front of both walls so dramatically – as if there was nowhere, emotionally, to hide – incredibly moving, thanks also to the perfectly-judged lighting on those bare walls!

By general agreement, though, it’s the final Act that’s thought to be one of its composer’s greatest achievements – and here it certainly maintained the voltages from what had gone before, if channelling them into more overtly sinister and potentially murderous realms.  Perhaps it was the fault of what seemed an out-and-out marathon of vocal effort by Boyd Owen up to that point of the evening, but his “La donna e mobile” (Women are fickle), felt to me a shade sedate compared with the volatile energies of the First-Act’s “Questo e Quella”, and even the orchestral accompaniment seemed to lack the last amount of “fizz” – however, not so the magnificent Quartet, which followed soon after! –  here, the voices realised as heartfelt and wide-ranging an expression of both individual and concerted emotion as was one’s right to expect, Jess Segal’s Maddalena given her chance to shine alongside the three principals, which her voice managed with great aplomb.

Though everything from that moment onwards moved with the surety and inevitability of a Greek tragedy towards its brutal outcome, the performances had such here-and-now spontaneity, it was as if we were seeing something, however well-known, for the first time and willing against hope the impossible to happen and the guiltless be spared rather than sacrificed. So tense, so charged was the ambience when Rigoletto was left alone with the sack containing what he thought – in fact what he gleefully TOLD us – was the Duke’s body, that when we suddenly heard the latter’s voice singing his “signature tune” offstage, somebody in the audience audibly giggled – not through disrespect, I felt, but obviously out of either shock or sheer release of tension – I thought it a kind of tribute to the performance’s cathartic power, as well as to the production in general, AND to the composer and his librettist (not forgetting, of course, Victor Hugo!).

I’ve heard ample testimony from others since regarding the overwhelming effect of this production upon those who were ‘there”. The three principal singers, those in the supporting roles, both individual and chorus, the conductor, Matthew Ross and his musicians, director Alex Galvin and his assistant, Laura Loach, the producers and their various technicians, all contributed to what seemed to me like a fantastically interactive and ensembled effort, to produce something resoundingly memorable and eminently worthwhile. To hear, then, a whisper, as I did, of Eternity Opera facing the prospect of having to struggle to receive the necessary support in oncoming years for more productions such as these simply beggars belief. Though opinions differ as to the factors that contribute to a “civilised society”, my view inclines towards support for the arts being as necessary for the greater good of humanity as measures which provide for us air we can breathe and water we can drink – a truly humanising kind of sustenance. May Eternity Opera be assured of continuance, to furnish for us more of such sustenance!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two out of three from Puccini’s Il Trittico boldly and confidently presented by the NZSM

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music presents:
PUCCINI – Suor Angelica / Gianni Schicchi (from “Il Trittico”)

Cast(s):  Suor Angelica

Suor Angelica………………..Michaela Cadwgan
The Princess………………….Margaret Medlyn
The Abbess……………………Teresa Shields
The Monitress……………….Jennifer Huckle
Sister Genovieffa……………Olivia Stewart
Sister Osmina………………..Lydia Joyce
Sister Dolcina………………..Ruby McKnight
Sister Lucilla………………….Sinéad Keane
Alms sisters…………………..Shaunagh Chambers / Simon Hernyak
Novices and lay sisters……Nikita Aranga / Caitlin Roberts
Ruobing Wang / Emily Yeap
Boy……………………………….Edward Usher

Gianni Schicchi

Gianni Schicchi………………Robert Tucker
Lauretta…………………………Jessie Rosewarne
Zita………………………………..Grace Burt
Rinuccio…………………………LJ Crichton
Gheraldo………………………..Jeffrey Dick
Gheraldino……………………..Edward Usher
Nella………………………………Cheyney Biddlecombe
Betto di Signa………………….Morgan Andrew-King
Simone……………………………Samuel McKeever
Marco……………………………..Masunu Tuua
La Ciesca…………………………Nina Gurau
Maestro Spinelloccio (a doctor)………..Zane Berghuis
Ser Amantio di Nicolao (a lawyer)…….Matt Barris
Pinellino (a cobbler)………………………..Elian Pagalilawan
Guccio (a dyer)………………………………..Tomairangi  Henare
Buoso Donati…………………………………..Gabriel Wee

Director: Jon Hunter
Designer: Sean Coyle
Lighting: Glenn Ashworth
Costumes: Sarah Carswell

Conductor: Kenneth Young
The New Zealand School of Music Orchestra

Hannah Playhouse, Wellington,

Friday 19th July, 2019

(until Sunday, 21st July)

When Giacomo Puccini first penned his Il Trittico (Triptych), consisting of three short operas designed to fill a single evening (premiered as such in New York in December 1918), various considerations combined to elevate the third of these works, the rollickingly comic Gianni Schicchi, to pride of place in the public’s affections, leaving the other two, the violent, bloody Il Tabarro (The Cloak) and the somewhat sanctimonious Suor Angelica (Sister Angelica), to fend for themselves, often elsewhere and in isolation. It would certainly be a tall order to perform all three in a single evening, the time-frames alone creating a certain awkwardness (either with two intervals, or one very long first or second half!). Even then, resources would be fully stretched in terms of casting and of staging, leaving opera houses far more likely to opt for a “double” bill at the most, à la the famous verismo twins, “Cav” and “Pag”.  Of late, there’s been revived interest in going thus far towards Puccini’s original intentions (usually with “Schicchi” as the “drawcard” along with either of the other two).

Here, from Victoria University of Wellington’s Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music we had a classic pairing of tragedy (Suor Angelica) and comedy (Gianni Schicchi) whose contrasts, I thought, worked brilliantly, each to the other’s advantage. Partly I think  due to a welcome circumspection of presentation in both cases, here, neither work was made into a caricature of itself – Suor Angelica’s overtly Catholic ethos wore its religiosity lightly, as did the knockabout comedy of Gianni Schicchi maintain a stylishness that never descended into coarse buffoonery – and this deftness of touch on the part of Jon Hunter’s direction for the most part gave each story the theatricality it needed to work, the climax of Suor Angelica here giving rise to my only reservations in this regard, more of which below.

In keeping with the intimate nature of the performing venue and the corresponding space available, conductor, chorusmaster and musicologist Michael Vinten undertook the task of making a “reduction” of the composer’s orchestral scores which preserved the essential spirit and sound of the originals, and which, if not delivering as much “physical” impact as the full opera orchestra does in places (such as the climax of Suor Angelica), amply suggested a comparable kind of emotional impact. Of course the physical immediacy of the instrumental detailings coupled with the players’ confidence and elan throughout made for stunning orchestral results under conductor Ken Young’s inspirational leadership.

What a vehicle for soprano and mezzo voices is Suor Angelica! The leading role especially runs the gamut of emotion and “fills out” the character in such a short space of time – she goes from being “just another nun” at the opera’s beginning, to a figure of the utmost tragedy within minutes, as another character, one who proves to be her “nemesis”, turns up in the story and whose “hatchet job” on the hapless Angelica is remorseless. As Suor Angelica, Michaela Cadwgan poured herself into the role up to the brim, fearlessly attacking a vocal line which required her in places to push her voice to what seemed almost past its limits in places, readily conveying the character’s intensity and depth of sorrow. Her acting paid full regard to the added tension of maintaining her dignity and bearing as a member of a religious order, while expressing her tragedy of having had to give up what was her greatest worldly joy, her son, before discovering, through the agency of her “nemesis” that her son had actually died without her knowing – the anguish was all too palpable in places, while  in context making total emotional sense.

With her surely-felt dramatic instinct brought fully into play, Margaret Medlyn’s troubled but   still unforgiving Princess made the perfect foil for her unfortunate niece’s desperately-enacted sorrows. We were made to “feel” something of the subtext behind the character’s cruelty and remorseless response to Angelica – a “wicked-stepmother”-like figure but with complex demons of her own. Amongst the other nuns the voice of Jennifer Huckle  resonated steadily and sweetly as the Monitress, while  Olivia Stewart ‘s shining tones enlivened her entreaties to the sisters to observe the rays of sunlight setting the image of Our Lady glowing in the courtyard. All the voices contributed to an essential sense of the ensemble, their surety of “belonging” and contributing to that feeling contrasting all the more with Suor Angelica’s growing desperation to be reunited with her dead son.

Expertly though the production conveyed the ambivalence of the “cloistered” atmosphere with its security/imprisonment dichotomies, and the oppressive ambiences surrounding the visit of the Princess to her virtually incarcerated niece, its staging at the very end didn’t for me catch enough of the transcendence of the story’s climax – the dead boy’s sudden appearance, the “vision from heaven” which draws Angelica towards and up into a numinous web of acceptance and forgiveness. I wanted him to directly “materialise” from the  blinding light which flooded the stage, and be the unequovical focus of things just for a telling instant – but his entrance from the side didn’t for me sufficiently turn into any kind of front-on, fully-focused engagement, missing an overwhelming sense of “revelation” which the music (and the lighting) was doing its best to evoke. It certainly deserved, I felt, at that point,  a surer moment of consummation, which, up to then, had been most whole-heartedly prepared for by all concerned.

Confidence was restored after the interval by the beginning of the opera which followed – Gianni Schicchi – an amusing and ironic vignette involving a photograph of the Donati clan closest to the recently deceased (?) Buoso Donati “freeze-framing” the setting, one which then clicked immediately into the business of the story. This is one of opera’s greatest “ensemble” works, and the give-and-take between all of the “living” characters made for thoroughly convincing and characterful results. All kinds of voices and personalities were registered throughout the interactions, each one conveying its character’s attitude and intent in tandem with engaging physical presence.

Crucial to the action was the information quickly given us by a young man in the group of relatives, Rinuccio, who tells everybody he is in love with and wants to marry Lauretta, the daughter of the well-known “wheeler-and-dealer” Gianni Schicchi, a plan which scandalises his snobbish Aunt, Zita. We were treated to a splendidly open-hearted and ringing-voiced portrayal of the character by LJ Crichton, his tones warm, open and ardent, almost to the very top of his register. If the other voices in the group didn’t match such freedom and amplitude, each still carried sufficient weight and colour to tellingly advance the drama – and the physical interactions were most splendidly choreographed, photo opportunities included!

Of course the attitudes of the relatives to the “upstart Schicchi” change considerable when they find Buoso’s actual will and realise they have been disinherited, and that something needs to be done, quickly. Schicchi’s help is sought, but he is disinclined to help the Donatis when Zita refuses point-blank to allow Rinuccio to marry Lauretta “without a dowry” – which, of course, leads to the opera’s most famous single moment, the girl’s pleading with her father to help, or else she will throw herself into the river Arno (“O mio babbino caro”). Jessie Rosewarne’s direct, simply expressed plea as Lauretta (her singing very much on the trajectory of the dramatic action, rather than self-consciously proclaiming a “great opera moment”) does the trick and wins her father over to the cause, turning the story’s action on a fresh course.

As Schicchi, Robert Tucker rightly dominated the scenario from his first entry, holding everybody in thrall with the workings of his scheming mind, and even convincing us to suspend disbelief at the unlikelihood of the penalty of dismemberment and banishment from the city imposed on people who forge a will having any credence in the 1970s throughout the Western world. Like the “curse” in Verdi’s Rigoletto, this is the stumbling block for me in accepting any “modernising” of the opera’s action unaccountably beloved of present-day productions, however nonsensical the result! Still, here, everything went hilariously and hair-raisingly according to plan, with  both doctor and notary, along with witnesses, convinced that the disguised Schicchi was in fact “dear Buoso”, the deception then deliciously running away from the astonished relatives when Schicchi again turned the story around, proclaiming himself as the heir to the dead man’s house and most valuable assets! – pandemonium!

A great success, then, and an extraordinary achievement on the part of all concerned with both productions, powerfully evoking worlds as different as chalk from cheese! I’ve already mentioned conductor Ken Young’s surety of direction and the dazzling instrumental detailing by the players throughout both works, working hand-in-glove with the onstage action, and  positively oozing atmosphere in both scenarios, aided and abetted by the set, lighting and costumes. Its overall impact, to my mind, worked surely towards director Jon Hunter’s intention that the production express “the enduring power of music”, the raison d’etre of all opera here for all present to enjoy.

 

 

 

A joyful, exhilarating Barber of Seville, New Zealand Opera’s first offering of the year

Posted on by Steven Sedley

New Zealand Opera
The Barber of Seville by Rossini

Orchestra Wellington and Freemasons New Zealand Opera Chorus
Conductor: Wyn Davies; Director: Lindy Hume; Designer: Tracy Grant Lloyd; Assistant director: Jacqueline Coats; Lighting designer: Matthew Marshall

Cast

Count Almaviva: John Tessier
Rosina: Sandra Piques Eddy
Figaro: Morgan Pearse
Dr Bartolo: Andrew Collis
Don Basilio: Ashraf Sewailam
Berta: Morag Atchison
Fiorello/Officer;: Joel Amosa
Ambrogio: Jesse Wikiriwhi

The Opera House, Wellington

Saturday 29 July 2019, 7:30 pm

Colourful, joyful, exhilarating are the words to describe this production of the Barber of Seville. From the very beginning of the Overture, taken at a moderate steady tempo that let every phrase be clearly articulated, we know that we are in for a treat. When the action starts with the chorus, the serenaders, horsing around it is clear that this will be an entertaining show. Almaviva, John Tessier enters and sings his serenade. He is a powerful yet sensitive tenor and sets a high benchmark for the other singers. Figaro joins him and we are at home, this is Figaro the Barber whom everybody knows. Everyone is familiar with the tongue twister ‘Largo al factotum’. Morgan Pearse sang the role with energy and clarity, and with a good deal of comic touch.

We get to know Rosina, Sandra Piques Eddy, as she sings her aria, ‘Una voce poco’ fa’. She has an amazing mezzo-soprano voice, well controlled. Her deep notes were particularly noteworthy for their glorious dark timbre. She sang with meticulous attention to the text and the musical phrasing, while subjecting her aria to the demands of the dramatic action.

Dr. Bartolo, has the least rewarding role, he is a bumbling, comic character whose every endeavour ends in failure. Andrew Collis sang the part with the appropriate rich baritone, while maintaining the sense of comedy of the ridiculous personality of the doctor. Ashraf Sewailam sang the role of Don Basilio, the cunning music teacher and fair weather friend, with a rare resonant bass and an organ like quality of the low notes. Berta, Morag Atchinson had one solo song, that she sang delightfully. She was a striking presence every time she appeared on the stage. The standard of singing was universally outstanding, and this was matched by fine comic acting. If I had any reservation, it was that there was too much unnecessary clowning, situations that were already ridiculous didn’t need to be further highlighted, but the audience obviously greatly enjoyed this.

The staging and production was imaginative, vivid and colourful. There was excellent use of the stage with its many doors, which at various times was a street scene outside Dr, Bartolo’s residence and then the interior of his house. There was ingenious use of strobe lighting highlighting the action. The foils dropping in the last scene just underlined the madcap comedy.

The Barber of Seville dates from 1816, the year after Napoleon was defeated and the normality of the Ancient regime returned to Europe. Beaumarchais on whose play the opera was based had died many years before, but some of the issues explored by the play were very much alive: the power of the aristocracy, the role of the middle class and that of the rising entrepreneur. When soldiers come to arrest Count Almaviva he only had to reveal his name and rank and the soldiers withdrew. Dr. Bartolo, the middle class doctor is a mere figure of fun, wanting to marry his ward for her money. He is also nostalgic for a bygone era, the music of which he much preferred to the new-fangled modern music that Rosina chose to sing. Figaro was the entrepreneur with an eye on money, an obsession shared by Basilio and the singers who were paid to serenade Rosina. Although for Rossini, aged 24 when he wrote this opera, these social considerations were not in the forefront of his mind, the audience that took the opera to heart were probably very aware of these subtle underlying themes.

Nevertheless, the opera was great, rollicking fun. Overheard at the end of the opera, someone said that this was the most enjoyable opera he had ever seen. This impression was endorsed by the enthusiastic applause, the catcalls, the stomping and the whistles coming from the audience the like of which I had never heard before.

 

 

A triumphant culmination of Pinchgut Opera’s work in Sydney: Hasse’s Artaserse

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Pinchgut Opera, Sydney

Johann Adolf Hasse’s Artaserse

Conducted by Erin Helyard with the Orchestra of the Antipodes
Stage director: Chas Rader-Shieber; designer: Charles Davis

Cast: Andrew Goodwin (Artaserse, son of Serse (Xerxes), king of Persia), Vivica Genaux (Mandane, Serse’s daughter), David Hansen (Arbace), Carlo Vistoli (Artabano, Arbace’s father), Emily Edmonds (Semira), Russell Harcourt (Megabise)

City Recital Hall, Sydney

Wednesday 5 December, 7 pm

Though exposure to pre-Mozart opera, even of Gluck, has been infrequent in New Zealand, a great deal of 17th and 18th century opera has become main-stream in the Northern Hemisphere. There is hardly a composer of that period, acclaimed in his (or her) lifetime and then forgotten for 200 years, whose music has not been brushed off in recent years and played in a way that echoes the way it probably sounded at the time. Music by composers whose names appeared nowhere but in music history books is now widely played, and can probably be watched on YouTube. In Europe, especially, much can be heard in concert halls and opera houses, as part of the normal repertoire.

It is revelatory to look at an opera guide of the early 20th century, such as early editions of Kobbé’s Complete Opera Book, to find not a single reference to Handel, let alone Monteverdi, Lully or Rameau, Vivaldi, Jommelli, etc.

The re-emergence of Hasse and Metastasio
Hasse was 14 years Handel’s junior and 14 years older than Gluck; but till 20 years ago the name Hasse was known only to scholars.

However, the name is not unknown in New Zealand. I first encountered him through a friendship with Massey University’s Professor Donald Bewley who was an authority on the great 18th century librettist, Metastasio (born in 1698, the year before Hasse), who wrote the libretto of Artaserse. Hasse in fact set almost all his libretti, some two or three times. Metastasio was the most prolific and most frequently set librettist of the century, and perhaps throughout opera history. Mozart cut his teeth, in fact, on Metastasio’s libretti: Il re pastore, Il betulia liberate, Lucia Silla and his penultimate opera, La clemenza di Tito.

Wikipedia writes that over 90 settings of the piece are known, and it names, as well as Hasse: Vinci, Graun, Chiarini, Gluck, Galuppi, J C Bach, Terradellas, Mysliveček, and it was translated into English for Thomas Arne. It was the only surviving opera by the most gifted English composer in the 18th century, holding the stage well into the 19th century, and it too has been successfully revived recently.

The January/February 1998 issue of New Zealand Opera News, which I edited for 16 years, carried an article by Bewley about Metastasio, to mark his 300th anniversary, referring to his researches (‘Metastasio – 300th anniversary’). Bewley’s publications include a discography, an index of the addressees of Metastasio’s correspondence, including many to his friend Hasse.

Hasse’s Tercentenary marked in New Zealand
More to the point, I wrote an article in the May 1999 issue of New Zealand Opera News entitled ‘An Important tercentenary’, marking the 300th anniversary of Hasse’s birth. It remarked that Hasse’s was undoubtedly the biggest opera name of the baroque age ‘remaining to be disinterred after the Handels, Rameaus, Charpentiers, Caldaras and Campras’. (I might have added Alessandro Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Vinci, Galuppi and Jommelli among many others).

Even more surprising: in November 1999, Otago University’s Department of Music produced Hasse’s one-act opera L’Artigiano Gentiluomo or Larinda e Vanesio, the libretto directly related to Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme which became Lully’s comédie-ballet of the same name, later incorporated into Strauss’s curious but delightful concoction Ariadne auf Naxos.

(No one mentions the fact that ‘Hasse’ is close to the German verb Hassen – to hate, and Der Hass – hate. If that was a personal characteristic it was clearly as asset for a highly productive and successful career, mainly as court opera composer in the Saxon court at Dresden, till it and the court library were destroyed by Frederick the Great’s bombardment in the Seven Year War in 1760.)

Hasse wrote about 70 operas and was regarded as one of the best opera composers of the time though, like almost all his contemporaries, he had disappeared from the stage by the end of the century.

Bach occasionally visited Dresden to attend the opera, no doubt often works by Hasse.

Artaserse: the story
The story is set in ancient Persia, apparently during the reigns of Xerxes (Serse in Italian) and Darius.

Some writers seem to assume the Persian kings are those who led the wars against Athens: Darius I, who was defeated at Marathon in 490 BCE and Xerxes who was defeated at the battle of Salamis in 480 BCE.  But the names are chronologically the other way round in the opera, and I wonder if the Metastasio story is based on events a century and a half later. Darius III ruled Persia from 336 to 330. His two predecessors, Artaxerxes and Arses, were poisoned by a eunuch at the court; and Darius III lived to be defeated by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE. Elements conform somewhat to the Metastasio account. Whatever the provenance, Metastasio’s genius has created a fascinating psychological study of human responses to devious and evil machinations by powerful people.

The opera story begins when King Xerxes (Serse) of Persia banishes Arbace, for being in love with his daughter, Mandane. Arbace’s father, the ambitious and ruthless Artabano (costumed as an army officer), responds by assassinating the king and convinces his heir, Artaserse (in formal evening dress, often sporting a wide blue sash) that his brother Darius was responsible (neither kings Serse nor Darius appear in the opera). So Artabano disposes of Darius too, and gives the murder weapon to Arbace to hide, but Arbace is found with the bloody sword before he can do so.  Arbace’s dilemma is to avoid execution for a murder committed by his father, and both try to evade the consequences; the father actually advocates his son’s death! Interesting times.  Mandane (costumed with stunning elegance) is torn between loyalty to her family and her beloved.

There’s a subplot whose omission, one feels, might not damage the story, though it presents a sort of parallel situation in which Arbace’s sister Semira is promised to an unscrupulous general, Megabise, to ensure his loyalty. That one is solved by Megabise’s murder near the end.

Suspense lasts till the very end: it hangs on whether or not a poisoned drink is shared between Artaserse and Arbace. Artabano confesses the truth at the last minute and the goodies survive.

The performance and the cast
As so often, the strengths of this production lay with the excellence of singing and orchestral playing – exquisite with the Orchestra of the Antipodes, conducted with conspicuous elan and Baroque feeling by Erin Helyard at the harpsichord with colourful, even sparkling, use of Baroque instruments, energetic and virtuosic.  He created a constant sense of total commitment to every aspect of the music and its interpretation. Now my fifth encounter with Helyard’s musical direction in Pinchgut productions, I am increasingly overwhelmed by his total involvement in the performance.

One is not attracted by Baroque opera on account of realistic or probable stories. What you do get, and this rediscovery of Hasse and the Dresden Court and its opera is an excellent case, is an opera furnished with lively, attractive music and, thanks to Metastasio and other writers whose stories might look improbable to us, but which held the stage by portraying larger-than-life human emotions that are theatrically arresting. In the same way that unbelievable tales such as Verdi’s Il Trovatore and La forza del destino, clothed in great music and vividly portrayed emotions, do work.

Though there were certain oddities in movement and behaviour between characters, the effect was of scrupulous attention to visual detail and, for the most part, interaction between characters. For the clarity, general coherence and credibility of the activities on stage, credit rests with stage director Chas Rader-Shieber.

One extraordinary feature of the work is the use of three counter-tenors: both father and son, Artabano (Carlo Vistoli) and Arbace (David Hanson), and the crooked general Megabise (Russell Harcourt). (But that’s nothing: Leonardo Vinci’s Artaserse was recorded by Concerto Köln for Virgin Classics and then staged by Opéra Nancy in 2013, employing five countertenors and one tenor!). Though at first it’s not easy to distinguish one from another, it was interesting that their individuality of tone and colour increased as the story unfolded.

Both female roles are mezzos: Vivica Genaux sings Mandane and Emily Edmonds, Semira. Only the title role, Artaserse, is sung by a normal tenor, Andrew Goodwin.

Distinguished American mezzo Vivica Genaux (described by one critic as “by far the greatest sensation that Pinchgut Opera has brought to Australia”) was cast with great success as Mandane. Her many-coloured voice is full of variety and her singing was rich in genuine emotion; she was a true centre of attention. David Hanson sang Arbace, the role that Farinelli famously commanded, with impressive virtuosity along with lifelike acting and stage presence that almost matched that of Genaux.

Carlo Vistoli sang his father, Artabano, with sometimes chilling force but also enough tonal beauty to depict the character as somewhat more than a mere ruthless brute.

Though it could be considered inappropriate casting, Russell Harcourt as the scheming Megabise, revealed a voice of tonal flexibility and beauty.

The title role is not exactly central in the opera. As the only normal tenor, Andrew Goodwin commanded the stage as Artaserse with elegant, flexible singing and regal distinction. Emily Edmonds as Semira, though second to Genaux, was well cast in a role that demanded, not great strength, but expressiveness and sensitivity.

The Staging 
The stage design by Charles Davis was ‘interesting’, not attempting any sort of historical authenticity. It was an elegant palace chamber, with plum coloured damask wall coverings, dominated by a huge painting of King Serse. But there’s a fallen chandelier on the floor, that suggested a decaying empire.

Costumes mixed opulent elegance for the women, with a variety of formal aristocratic dress and military uniforms carefully defined as to rank, for the men.

I have to quote and agree with a reviewer who described this production as “a major milestone in the Pinchgut story, not just entertaining but, to some extent at least, educating their audience and, it is to be hoped, bringing them further into an understanding of Baroque opera”.

 

Eternity Opera sings triumphantly once again at Wellington’s Hannah Playhouse – Puccini’s Madam Butterfly

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Eternity Opera presents:
PUCCINI – Madam Butterfly (Opera in Three Acts)
(libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa – sung in English)

Cast:  Butterfly (Cio-Cio-San) – Hannah Catrin Jones
Pinkerton – Boyd Owen
Sharpless – Kieran Rayner
Suzuki – Laura Loach
Goro – Declan Cudd
The Bonze – Roger Wilson
Kate Pinkerton – Jess Segal
Mother – Ruth Armishaw
Cousin – Tania Dreaver
Aunt – Sally Haywood
Imperial Commissioner – Minto Fung
The Registrar – Chris Berentson
Yakuside – Garth Norman
Bridesmaids – Milla Dickens / Beatrix Poblacion Cariño
Butterfly’s son – Leo McKenzie

Orchestra:  Claudia Tarrant-Matthews (leader), Vivian Stephens, Emma Colligan, Sofia Tarrant-Matthews (violins),  David Pucher (viola), Brenton Veitch (‘cello), Jessica Reese (double-bass),  Tjaša Dykes (flute/piccolo), Merran Cooke (oboe/cor anglais), Mark Cookson (clarinet), Leni Hoischen (bassoon), Shadley van Wyk (horn), Bruce Roberts (trumpet), Madeleine Crump (harp), Natoko Segawa (timpani/percussion)

Conductor: Matthew Ross
Director: Alex Galvin
Producers: Emma Beale and Minto Fung
Designer: Jennifer Eccles
Costumes: Sally Gray
Lighting: Haami Hawkins
Repetiteur: Bruce Greenfield

Hannah Playhouse, Wellington

Friday 16th November 2018

Eternity Opera’s presentation at Wellington‘s Hannah Playhouse of one of the most famous of all grand operas, Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, used a reduced orchestral accompaniment, a “rhyming” English translation of the Italian, and cut one of the more colourful episodes in the work’s Second Act, albeit involving the brief appearance of a “lesser”character. And yet, despite these diminutions of the original, the piece worked its usual theatrical and musical magic, thanks to a production which incorporated the visceral energies and sharply-etched focus of the orchestral playing under conductor Matthew Ross’s clear-headed direction, and the direct, openhearted involvement of all the singers, principals and chorus. Director Alex Galvin’s clear and unobtrusive shaping of both detail and completed picture ensured that the singers gave us the essentials of the piece and consistently and powerfully brought their characters to life, musically and theatrically.

From the outset we got incisive, involving playing from the musicians, conveying these essences as much through sheer will and imaginative purpose in the absence of the usual “weight of numbers” which give the piece such power at the climaxes. In fact I can’t recall a moment during the performance when I found myself longing for the thrill of a full Puccini orchestra doing its “thing”, so involving was the presentation of the fabric of sounds in its more intimate context here.

When it came to the arrival of the characters on stage I was struck by the vivid quality of each of the voices, the opening exchanges between Goro, the Marriage-broker, and Pinkerton, the U.S.naval officer putting across their phrases easily and distinctly. Boyd Owen’s Pinkerton had instant surface-engaging “well-met, fellow” quality of utterance, while Declan Cudd’s Goro was as much “real-estate agent” in his characterisation as anything else (reflecting the production’s 1950s setting), his tones having the suavity one associates with that profession, but less of the spiky, Goro-like busy-bodyness we usually enjoy from the character. Laura Loach as Suzuki, Butterfly’s handmaid, vocalised beautifully at the outset, nicely mingling the character’s awkwardness and deference with a singer’s clarity and warmly-expressed tones.

It took me a while to register that the English translation was a ”rhyming”one, so readily did the words seem to flow without any overtly self-concious “striving for effect” that renderings in English of opera libretti often have – the discourse between Pinkerton and his friend Sharpless, the American Consul (played and sung sensitively and sonorously by Kieran Rayner), flowed easily and naturally throughout, and led up to Pinkerton’s jingoistic “America forever” declaration with irresistible exuberance. Both Owen and Rayner differentiated their characterisations with many a telling remark, response and gesture, even if the “full-on” aspects of their singing tended to emphasise at cardinal points the somewhat “cheek-by-jowl” nature of our listening-space!

This lack of spaciousness in the acoustic made for a slighty different problem in regard to off-stage voices“, notably the entry of Butterfly’s retinue (“heard from the path outside”, says the direction in my libretto) which to me sounded much too close at their first entry, reflecting the lack of backstage space – though I thought using the stairs leading up from the lower level in the foyer might have done the trick, instead….we lost that initial sense of fragility in Butterfly’s character, having her voice so immediate from the beginning. However, despite such strictures, the scene then unfolded beautifully and touchingly, with the “ordinariness” of Butterfly and her cohorts underlined by the modest 1950s  garb worn by the various relatives, all at that point in history, presumably, trying to be “Western”.

As Cio-Cio-San (Butterfly), Hannah Catrin Jones looked and sounded the part, the fragility of the instrumental accompaniment serving to underline her self-effacing quality, though her vocal personality was extremely well-focused throughout. Only when the voice was put under any kind of pressure did I register a vibrato which she soon managed to incorporate for me into her “sound”. I thought her portrayal believable and sympathetic, her rapport with whomever she was on stage warm and wholehearted, and her solo scenes stamped with a touching amalgam of vulnerability and strength that enabled the listener to take on a sense of her life-blood coursing the whole time through her being.

The Bonze’s startling entry (Roger Wilson wondrously menacing of voice and manner, almost Commendatore-like, in fact, as Butterfly’s uncle), come to condemn her for renouncing her “true religion”, effectively tore Cio-Cio-San’s world apart, alienating her from her family and placing her almost completely in the hands of Pinkerton, who, despite the intensity of feeling generated between him and Butterfly during the ensuing “love-scene”, subsequently abandons her. Cio-Cio-San’s isolation was here underscored in a different way, of course, by the excision of that aforementioned Second-Act scene in which she is wooed by Yamadori, a rich Japanese Prince, eager to add her to his coterie of wives, and which offer she rejects, remaining faithful to Pinkerton, despite his callous behaviour.

In a similar fashion to that in Verdi’s “La Traviata”, the opera’s core is found in the exchange between the heroine and a friend or associate of her lover, in this case, Sharpless, the American Consul (Kieran Rayner), who’s sceptical of Pinkerton’s intentions towards Cio-Cio-San from the beginning. The scene of his interaction with Butterfly came almost in the wake of the latter’s magnificently-realised “Un bel di” (sorry, I mean, “One fine day”!), Catrin Jones giving her all in thrilling fashion, with again, the relatively lightweight orchestral support delivering oceans of intensity in support of the singer. One would think that whatever followed would be something of an anti-climax, but Catrin Jones and Rayner exhibited such warmth and flow of feeling towards one another’s characters, that we were soon caught up in the interchanges and “moved on”, more than ready for the next stage of the drama.

This came, of course, with Butterfly’s fear and anxiety at the thought of being abandoned, mingled with the hope that hers and Pinkerton’s child (born and raised in secret) would bring them together again. The sudden arrival of an American warship, denoted by a cannon-shot, sent everything into a state of frenzied suspension, Butterfly commanding Suzuki to strew every flower about the house “as close as stars about the heavens”, and bringing the child to wait with her for Pinkerton’s arrival. I thought Catrin Jones’ interaction with the young Leo McKenzie as Butterfly’s little son simply charming and warmly whole-hearted on both sides, the heroine in the process excitedly and determinedly setting up her “welcome” to her long-absent husband, and preparing to wait for “as long as it takes”.

My one disappointment of the evening was the staging of the beautiful “Humming Chorus” which followed – I thought its enchanting, if bitter-sweet effect underdone by uncharacteristically fulsome stage-lighting. It seemed to me the waiting figures were “transfixed” in a strained and uncomfortable state of rigidity at odds with the music’s organic presentation of  an overnight vigil spent amid a mass of conflicting impulses shaped in the direction of somebody’s long-awaited arrival. In the context of the production’s whole, the sequence was something that for me didn’t knit music and stage together with the same sure-footed focus as the rest did.

Still, the final act was, in a word, terrific! – though at times for us in the audience almost claustrophobically so in that small space! Pinkerton’s arrival, with Sharpless, and with Suzuki as Butterfly’s would-be “protector” created enormous tensions and outpourings of emotion, Boyd Owen’s remorse as Pinkerton pushing against the threshold of pain, albeit expressing HIS anguish rather than any real concern for the hapless Butterfly, leaving Sharpless and Suzuki to do what they could for Butterfly instead – the somewhat thankless part of Pinkerton’s American wife, Kate, who accompanied him to the house, was expressed in dignified and graceful fashion by Jess Segal, her presence adding to the almost palpable psychological torture inflicted on Butterfly as she realised, upon entering the room and encountering her visitor, the truth of her situation.

Again, though wanting in sheer tonal heft, the playing of the orchestra in support of Butterfly’s final scene was properly overwhelming in its capacity for generating tension, helped immeasurably by the singer’s fearlessness in addressing the writing’s full-throated outpourings of unmitigated despair. These were the moments where nothing needed to be held back, and Catrin Jones certainly carried our sensibilities along with her towards the inevitability of that moment when she plunged her character’s life into existence’s oblivion.

Altogether, I thought the production a remarkable demonstration of the power of heartfelt and concentrated focus from limited resources to conjure up whole worlds of feeling and imagination. Very great credit to Eternity Opera and all associated with the production, for making opera’s star shine so very brightly once more at Wellington’s Hannah Playhouse.

(Until 24th November)

 

 

Puccini’s La Boheme in Wellington – ineffably human and heartfelt

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Opera presents:
GIACOMO PUCCINI – La Boheme (libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, after Henri Murger)

Cast:   Thomas Atkins (Rodolfo)
Marlena Devoe (Mimi)
Nicholas Lester (Marcello)
Amelia Berry (Musetta)
Julien Van Mellaerts  (Schaunard)
Timothy Newton (Colline)
Barry Mora (Benoit / Alcindoro)
Manase Latu  (Parpignol)

Freemasons New Zealand Opera Chorus
Michael Vinten (Chorus Director)

Orchestra Wellington
Tobias Ringborg (conductor)

Director – Jacqueline Coats
Assistant Director – Jesse Wikiriwhi
Set Designer – Rachael Walker
Costume Designer – Elizabeth Whiting
Lighting Designer – Jennifer Lal

Wellington State Opera House

Thursday 4th October, 2018 (until Oct.13th)

It may seem a strange entry point for a review’s beginning – but at the opening night of New Zealand Opera’s 2018 season of “La Boheme” in the Wellington Opera House on Thursday last, there was for me, near the Second Act’s conclusion, a “great moment”, whose incredible lyrical surge and explosion of sheer theatrical energy seemed at once to overshadow and enhance the significance of everything that had gone before – this, in a production that had already stretched out before us up to this point a connected array of jewel-like moments, glowing like gorgeously-appointed lights. I’m referring to the climax of the famous Waltz-song sung by the flirtatious Musetta,  with all the opera’s characters at the street-café watching and joining in with her in aiding and abetting her reunitement with her jealous, yet still utterly besotted ex-lover Marcello, every singer holding and thrillingly intensifying their singing-lines right up to the point where Musetta falls once again into Marcello’s arms, and the orchestra thunders its approval! – a moment even experienced opera-goers would die for and at which newcomers to the goings-on would be literally transported!

It was, of course, a moment in which the expressive capabilities of every principal character on stage seemed thrown open – there had already been instances with similar “charge” that had swept things along in the story, though not to quite the same concerted extent. But for me it fulfilled the promise set up by the production right from the curtain’s opening – we were engaged, from the very first strains of the orchestra’s excited, rumbustious ascending phrases, and the bohemian Marcello’s shivering disavowal of his painting of the “Red Sea”, countered by his equally frozen companion Rodolfo’s judgement concerning the cold, idle stove! Each of the voices “sounded” the character so beautifully  – Nicholas Lester’s Marcello muscular and virile, and Thomas Atkins’ Rodolfo lighter-toned but strongly-focused in his upper registers, both characters ENJOYING the text’s wry humour and quicksilver exchanges.

The other two bohemians variously and characteristically made their entrances, the gentle, soft-spoken Colline of Timothy Newton a perfect foil for the vigorous, raconteur-like Schaunard of Julien Van Mellaerts, the four together making a boisterous and engaging quartet, combining sharp-etched individuality with string-quartet-like collaboration, their stage horseplay delightfully choreographed. The four’s concerted treatment of the intruding landlord, Benoit, desirous of his overdue rent (a deliciously self-indulgent cameo by Barry Mora) summed up a whole life-stage of youthful, “devil-take-the-hindmost”abandonment!

Left alone then, to finish an article he’s writing, Rodolfo then, of course, unexpectedly encountered Mimi, a neighbour of his wanting a light for her candle, the character shyly at first, then more impulsively portrayed by Marlena Devoe, her voice having both sweetness and energy enough to convey the often conflicting inclinations which can colour a first meeting. Each singer then “put their cards on the table” with successive arias, both shaping their various outpourings with great artistry, Atkins’ soft-grained utterances at the beginning of “Che gelida manina” gathering increasing heft as he described how his “empty place was filled with hope” (…poiche v’ha preso stanza la speranza….) with confidently ringing tones and a true command of line.

In reply, Marlena Devoe’s Mimi began simply and demurely with “Mi chiamano Mimi”, shyly inflecting her approaches to soaring passages like “that talk of love, of spring” (che parlando d’amor, di primavera…), before building up to her song-bird-like “April’s first kiss is mine….” (Il primo bacio dell’aprile e mio!…) and melting our hearts with her spontaneous-sounding nuances of line and tone. Throughout, the orchestra accompanied with the utmost sensitivity, Thomas Ringborg and his players completely at one with the onstage ebb-and-flow of incident and emotion, and making the most of even incidental-sounding sequences, such as the beautiful colourings from the wind and brass in the passage immediately following the bohemians’ teasing calls to their recalcitrant colleague, about to declare his love to his new-found companion.

Act Two exploded around and about our sensibilities, the stage and its occupants cleverly silhouetted at first then flooded with energy-inducing illumination (a marvellously incandescent effect by lighting designer Jennifer Lal), straightaway depicting a fantastical evocation of a generic nineteenth-century urban scene, which just happened to be Paris.  Director Jacqueline Coats had said she wanted to evoke a kind of timelessness about the story, paying ample attention to the story’s specified time and place, without giving her audience a “too tied up in period” kind of distraction – no small thanks due, of course, to designer Elizabeth Whiting’s unerring sense of character and appropriate costuming. What was paramount here, and something which I strongly connected with amid the colour and energy of the café and its environs, was what Coats called “the way the world is transformed when (people are) in love”. Throughout much of the scene this was poetically and idyllically expressed by Rodolfo and Mimi’s interaction, and, by contrast, tempestuously and abrasively by Marcello and his on-again, off-again sweetheart Musetta (winningly and coquettishly played by Amelia Berry), whose aforementioned “Waltz Song” built up to that overwhelming climax of emotion at the end of the act.

Here, though, as nowhere else in the opera, the chorus was a major player in the action, beginning the action before the bohemians appeared – street-vendors, shoppers, policemen, children, and the waiters and waitresses of the café – with both singing and movement whose energies seemed to fuse with the musical line and sweep everything along in a tide of festive euphoria – a tribute to the expert work of chorusmaster, Michael Vinten.  Occasionally galvanising the action were the antics of one of the vendors, a figure called Parpignol (sung and acted with great flair by Manase Latu), whose presence drew from the crowd, Pied-Piper-like, a stream of children, all following him around in excitement, each child anxious to gain possession one of the bunch of balloons he carried.

Into this plethora of activity strode Musetta, with her unfortunate “sugar-daddy” in tow, an elderly gentleman, Alcindoro (Barry Mora once again nailing” a cameo to perfection). I thought Amelia Berry’s choreographing of her song beautifully done, with the long, sinuous melodic lines accompanying her flirtatious interactions with various partners by way of teasing Marcello and annoying her companion, but also drawing from Devoe’s Mimi an affecting, empathetic vocal counterpoint. As a ruse she finally sent off her elderly swain to the shoemakers to buy a more comfortable pair of shoes, thus freeing herself up to “connect” with the (by now) all-too-willing Marcello. What a scene, and (as outlined above) what a triumph!

Alas, downhill it all went from here, of course (I mean the story-line, not the performance!), as do most “serious” operatic love-stories, firstly into a scene whose bleak, unremitting aspect of emptiness candidly expressed the narrative’s emotional contourings (director Coats paid tribute in a programme interview to designer Rachael Walker’s sense of the work’s overall feeling and her stage representations of it, deservedly so, in my opinion). The characters performed their sad charades by turns, firstly Mimi, made desperate by Rodolfo’s jealousy, and then Rodolfo, equally desperate due to Mimi’s sickness, before they became aware of one another’s presence. Eventually forgetting recriminations, and in the most affecting manner, they sang of their happy times, before agreeing to part “in the spring”, Mimi’s farewell given the most touching of performances by Devoe, voice and “presence” in focused accord. Ironically, their agreement was counterpointed by a furious argument between Musetta and Marcello, one whose resonances spilled over into the final act, as did the more poetic but no less profoundly affecting of Mimi’s and Rodolfo’s.

The reverse parallels between the opera’s opening and that of the final Act were duly and affectingly brushed in, with Marcello and Rodolfo once again alone, each trying to work, but heavily distracted this time round by memories rather than future possibilities. Schaunard’s and Colline’s arrival again occasioned horseplay, but of a more sardonic, even desperate kind, the whole being interrupted by Musetta, announcing Mimi’s arrival and then bringing her in, seriously ill. Though diametrically opposed in feeling and incident, it was here that the resonances of that overwhelming conclusion to the Second-Act came back, in the form of what it had all led to – the same characterful voices (with Devoe and Atkins, as the lovers, particularly affecting), magnificent orchestral detailing and “shaping” of the music, settings of stage and lighting, and costumings that looked so “right”. It all seemed to me at this moment a kind of natural outcome of (as well as a contrast to) that earlier outpouring of frisson during which something ineffably human and heartfelt became transcendent for a few precious seconds!

So, no sentimentality at the end, but instead a heartrending  and truly cathartic conclusion with Mimi’s inevitable, but still shocking death. A memorable and satisfying production, then, with everything in focus, and seemingly “knowing” what it was there for.  I think the production’s success came down to that sense of everything belonging, everything “told” what to do by Puccini’s music. Director Jacqueline Coats knew this when she remarked in the aforementioned programme interview “That’s the power of the music. As a director, it’s your best friend – it tells you everything you need to know”. Well done, NZ Opera!

 

NZ Opera’s trans-Tasman “The Elixir of Love ” a corker!

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Opera presents:
THE ELIXIR OF LOVE  (L’Elisir d’amore)
– an opera by Gaetano Donizetti (Italian libretto by Felice Romani)

Cast: Adina – Amina Edris
Nemorino – Pene Pati
Belcore – Morgan Pearse
Dr. Dulcamara – Conal Coad
Giannetta – Natasha Wilson

Director: Simon Phillips
Restage Director: Matthew Barclay
Assistant Director: Jacqueline Coats
Designer: Michael Scott-Mitchell
Lighting Designer: Nick Schlieper
Costume Designer: Gabriela Tylesova

Freemasons New Zealand Opera Chorus
Chorusmaster – Michael Vinten

Orchestra Wellington
Conductor: Wyn Davies

Opera House, Wellington
Saturday, 23rd June 2018

(until Saturday 30th June)

Y’ know wot I reckon, mate? I reckon yer need ter get yerself inter town bloody pronto, if yer ain’t a city slicker (I know a few o’ those geezers as well and they’re not bad blokes, considering…..) and grab a cuppla seats for yusself an’ yer missus or yer sheila or whomever, so youse won’t miss out on the show at the Opera House (she’s actually a cracker of an old place, really) – I took the missus, and we bloody  ‘ad a whale of a time! – – yeah, mate, opera! – bloke called Donny…..Donny, er….Donny  Zetty, or whatever, wrote it! – what? – boring? – no fear, mate – well,  yeah,  I ‘ad me doubts when me missus said “We’re goin!” – but stone the crows, mate, we went in an’ sat down, and it got all dark, and the curtains opened and the music started – tell yer wot, mate, I wuz knocked sideways! – I wuz ‘ooked! Bee-YOU-derful! An’ cripes,  could they play! –  loud an’ clear as a bunch of tuis!  – Wot’s that? – Sing?  Like birds in the bush, mate! – Rosellas? – nah! – not those geezers! – real songbirds, I reckon! Yeah!…….just beaut!

I thought I’d begin my review of the evening’s entertainment in keeping with some of the more colloquial surtitle renderings in, er, “Antipodean English” of the production’s sung Italian – but having thrown myself holus bolus into the idioms, I feared I might start to enjoy the process, to the detriment of the actual content! So I shall desist from any further self-indulgence by tearing myself away from these unfettered subversions, these totally un-PC modes of expression, all of which hearken back to a still-remembered time when air was clean and sex was dirty! However, the above sentiments serve to express a basic amazement and exhilaration which relate (in cleaned-up contemporaneous terms) to the bubbling enthusiasms I met with afterwards from all and sundry concerning this joyous presentation!

I must admit to regard attempts at “updating” productions of opera with some scepticism – the motivation for these efforts in many cases (all too apparent in the result) seems to come not out of any deep-seated artistic conviction backed by skill and talent, but from strangely wrought and in my view politically suspect reasonings from certain quarters that modern audiences are unwilling or unable to “connect” with any theatrical experience in a setting more than a century old. The fact that both Greek and Elizabethan drama have triumphantly survived centuries of existence on the strength of their originally-conceived guises (give or take a few degrees of occasional discreetly-applied contemporaneous refraction) seems not to have occurred to the pedlars of default-setting “movement with the times” productions. It’s actually an indictment of the post-modern age, a kind of malaise that seems to have gripped certain strands of activity in the performing arts in general of late – one expressed most succinctly by the Australian cartoonist Leunig, in a famous “Love in the Milky Way” essay, calling it the “dumbing down and pumping up process”, where entertainment and titillation rather than provocation and true engagement are the goals.

So, I’m thrilled to report that director Simon Phillips’ resetting of Donizetti’s and Romani’s original in the early part if the twentieth century in the Australian outback works brilliantly, principally because of Phillips’ ability to “think into and through” the original opera’s raison d’etre. How surely he’s able to maintain the original’s theme of a simple fellow’s naivety in believing in a kind of “love potion” pedalled by a con-man revolves around his adroit use of what he terms “ imperialist” forces at work in Australia around the time of the new setting. These are personified by the English army officer marshalling his recruited forces as part of the war effort, and the travelling “Rawleigh’s Man” from the United States, whose activities are here augmented by a kind of piece de resistance – what Phillips calls in his “director’s message” printed in the programme “the ultimate symbol of capitalist colonisation” – enough said at this point, except that it does its work as THE elixir to resounding effect!

Whether in this particular case God or the Devil was in the detail, any number of small but important features played their part in enhancing Phillips’ vision, while keeping alive the essential spirit of the original which the “update” had happily preserved.  The stage settings and atmospheric lighting evoked the vastness of the Outback (“a lyricism of line and colour” as Phillips put it), the rustic surroundings suggested with as much point as the attendant isolation and hint of psychological claustrophobia. Heightening these salient characteristics were the travellers, soldiers and salesmen, whose distant approaches were charmingly and amusingly portrayed in something akin to an early cinematographic technique, again reinforcing time and place so very effectively and disarmingly. The animal effigies, from cattle and sheep (the latter “shorn” to great and amusing effect) and a telegraph line dotted with birds, to the soldiers’ horses and a dog (who featured in a lovely “summonsed” vignette) contributed to the presentation’s general atmosphere and good-humoured theatricality. And, the con-man Dulcamara’s array of goods was winningly displayed, before being trumped (I use the word advisedly) by the subsequent hyped-up presentation of the elixir itself!

Variously pirouetting, stumbling, strutting, and swanking through the situations played out in this scenario were the principal characters in the story – and firstly came the two would-be “lovers”, Adina, played by Amina Edris, and Nemorino, by Pene Pati (the two singers incidentally, wife and husband respectively, in real life!). Both characters were here beautifully contrived and warmly “fleshed out”, with a winning naturalness of manner underpinning their respective assumptions, and avoiding any suggestion of cliché. Each had their own “agent provocateur” in a wider theatrical sense, Adina her “military man” suitor, the dashing Belcore (a “tour de force” realisation by Morgan Pearse) and Nemorino his “saviour” with a magic elixir, Dr. Dulcamara (a similarly “larger then life” characterisation by Conal Coad). Perhaps Morgan Pearse’s patronisingly pompous portrayal (sorry – those three Ps just slipped out!) of a British Army Officer tipped over into occasional caricature, but the silliness of some of his antics didn’t entirely mask the galvanising effect of his intent upon the opera’s real business, which was the eventual unmasking of love’s TRUE elixir.

Amina Edris, as Adina, splendidly conveyed her character’s charm, flirtatiousness and essential goodness with a stage presence that conveyed both allure and a wholesome “girl-next-door” quality, managing to straightaway convey her ambivalence regarding the story she is reading from a book, the legend of Tristan and Isolde – regarding it as a “bizarra l’avventura”, yet allowing herself a degree of wishful thinking regarding the potion’s capabilities. Her easeful and unselfconscious vocal inflections and detailings consistently brought the text to life, enabling her character to vividly come “full circle” from cocquettish tease to committed sweetheart over the course of the opera. I particularly enjoyed her teasing exposé  with Dulcamara of the source of the “true” elixir (at the bogus doctor’s expense, and in the face of which he gallantly admits defeat), though it was all of a piece with her “testing” her lover Nemorino with his army regiment contract in the final scene, flooding her utterances with emotion when he convinces her it is she that he loves.

Though Nemorino is often portrayed on stage as something of a rustic simpleton, Pene Pati instead put his own great-hearted brand of unswerving single-mindedness into the character’s direct and honest makeup. His unrequited intent towards Adina shone through with a disarmingly simple and sometimes even poetic effect, as with his response to her playfully-avowed kinship with the “fickle breeze”, poignantly coming back at her with his idea of a steadfast river seeking its end in the ocean’s embrace. Always vocally elegant, by turns sensitive and forthright in expression, his portrayal also had moments of droll humour, such as his quick-witted consultation of one of Dulcamara’s surtitles, during an exchange when the latter tried to sing with his mouth full! – a moment which further rounded out his character! His big piece, of course, was “Una furtiva lagrima”, a rendition whose spontaneous-sounding utterance and natural shaping was in complete accord with his efforts and eventual success in winning Adina’s heart.

Director Simon Phillips made the point that the opera’s scenario is ultimately about the psychology of want and need, what he terms the “gullibility of humankind and the perverse complexity of emotional manipulation”. Both Belcore, the dashing sergeant in charge of a troop of recruits on their route march, and Dr.Dulcamara, the purveyor of his “elixir of love” are the catalysts for Adina and Nemorino, in their respective processes of  “working-through” these human conditions to discover their real feelings for one another. Each of their “agents” are caricatures of a kind, Belcore, the Sergeant, the embodiment of a military man, dashing and confident, and regarding himself as “God’s gift to women”, waging a “campaign” of sorts to secure Adina’s affections replete with overweening posturing and bravado. Morgan Pearse relished his opportunities, both physical and vocal,  demonstrating considerable physical dexterity in his swashbuckling attempts to render all female hearts a-flutter (with at least one swooning beauty in evidence) – the soldiers’ arrival with Belcore at their head on splendidly-detailed horse effigies was in itself a spectacle!

As for Conal Coad, a familiar figure for all opera-goers in this country, his was a typically sonorous and well-rounded piece of characterisation as Dr. Dulcamara, plying his wares with all the fervour and theatricality of an old-time preacher, dispensing joy and relief to all, and keeping one step ahead of the law in the process – though he obviously relished his updated Antipodean status as having “establishment” connections with big business and its accompanying status! Although he was able to profit, not unkindly, from Nemorino’s desperation, he met his match in Adina, almost running away with his own imagination at one point in describing the power of her elixir-like charms! – “Questa bocca cosi bella e d’amor la spezieria – Si, hai lambicco ed hai fornello….” – (That pretty mouth is love’s apocathery – yes, you have a crucible and a furnace, you little rogue…). Sly, venal and with an instinct for making easy money, Coad’s Dulcamara depicted a loveable rogue, one whose spontaneous “party-piece” with Adina as a rich senator propositioning a boat-girl, translated amusingly as “You are young and I am rich / Wouldn’t you like to get hitched?” – or words to that effect, added fuel to the flames of fun!

As the village girl Giannetta, in the forefront of the chorus, Natasha Wilson sparkled with fun, along with her female cohorts, delightfully flirtatious firstly with Belcore, and later, with Nemorino, upon hearing news of the latter’s inheritance, via a lately-deceased uncle. Under Michael Vinten’s expert guidance, the voices of the Freemasons NZ Opera Chorus delivered poised and sonorous lines of characterful, detailed tones, bringing to life the more communal moments of the story in a seamless dramatic flow. The Picnic at Hanging Rock-like costumes worked a cracker (sorry!), and contributed most effectively to the evocative “look” of the production.

It all sparkled right from the word go, with conductor Wyn Davies drawing from the Orchestra Wellington players bright and vigorous tones which sang out unimpeded throughout the Wellington Opera House’s grateful acoustic. Whether sensitive lyricism, sparkling effervescence or good-natured buffoonery was called for, Davies and the Orchestra were there as the steadfast and often brilliant consignors of the composer’s magically-wrought score, for our on-going pleasure and delight. All-in-all, I thought this “The Elixir of Love” a most entertaining and richly satisfying production – you might say, if you were so inclined, “a corker!”

NZ Opera’s Kátya Kabanová packs a punch at the St.James in Wellington

Posted on by Peter Mechen

New Zealand Opera presents:
KÁTYA KABANOVÁ
Opera in Three Acts by Leoš Janáček

Cast: Kátya Kabanová – Dina Kuznetsova
Boris – Angus Wood
Dikój – Conal Coad
Kabanicha – Margaret Medlyn
Tichon – Andrew Glover
Kudrjas – James Benjamin Rodgers
Varvara – Hayley Sugars
Kuligin – Robert Tucker
Glasha – Emma Sloman
Feklusha – Linden Loader

Conductor: Wyn Davies
Director: Patrick Nolan
Assistant Director : Jacqueline Coats
Designer: Genevieve Blanchett
Lighting: Mark Howett
Chorus Director: Michael Vinten

Freemasons Chorus
New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

St.James Theatre, Wellington
Saturday 7th October, 2017

(from Thursday 12th to Saturday 14th October)

Janáček wrote to his long-time, would-be amour Kamila Stösslova about his leading character in the new opera he was planning, in 1920 – “The main character there is a woman, so gentle by nature…..a breeze would carry her away, let alone the storm that breaks over her….” This was Kátya Kabanová, or Káťa Kabanová as the Czech spelling has it, the first of three operas whereby the composer sublimated his passion for Stösslova, a young married woman thirty-eight years his junior, portraying her in different idealised ways in each work. Here as Kátya, she was a woman possessed by “great measureless love”, while in The Cunning Little Vixen, the heroine was a resourceful and self-sacrificing wife and mother – and lastly, in The Makropoulos Affair she was a glamorous 300 year-old woman in the grip of an enchantment which had brought her many lovers, but whose spell was about to lose its power and bring her life to its end, resigning her to her fate.

Kátya was based on a play by the Russian Alexander Ostrovsky, The Thunderstorm, which Janáček himself had not seen performed, but being an ardent Russophile was an admirer of writers such as Gogol and Tolstoy (and had already used the work of each of these as inspiration for his own compositions). He was particularly attracted to the character of Katerina in the play, a woman who embodied exceptional goodness of spirit and sensitivity, but was locked into loveless circumstances from which she struggled to escape, a conflict which eventually claimed her own life through guilt and remorse resulting from her own actions. Powerful stuff!

Though not highlighted as such by Janáček, the storm scene that gave Ostrovsky’s play its name was suitably apocalyptic in the opera as well – here, it marked Kátya ‘s breakdown as, overwhelmed by her sense of having irrevocably sinned, she despairingly confesses to her adultery in front of her husband and family and the townspeople, at the thunderstorm’s height. Kátya does have allies, Varvara, her younger sister-in-law (though a foster-child), and the latter’s lover, Kudrjas, a neighbour, though both are simply too preoccupied with one another to give her proper support. But while the domineering Kabanicha (her mother-in-law) is unkindly disposed towards Kátya, and both Tichon her husband and Boris her lover are weak, vacillating men (Tichon subservient to his mother and Boris to his uncle, the merchant Dikój), Kátya’s ultimate undoing is her own sensibility and its fatal interaction with religion-induced guilt and small-town hypocrisies – a world that a contemporary critic had called, in Ostrovsky’s original work, the “realm of darkness”.

At the outset I thought this NZ Opera production’s setting, in rural America (this was a production imported from Seattle Opera), somewhat incongruous in tandem with the sounds of the Czech language being sung, and found the prominently-displayed “stars-and-stripes” and the stage-dominating archetypal white picket fence almost crude and repellent (was the former a none-too-subliminal “Make NZ Opera great again!” message?) – but, in view of those recent populist-driven events in the United States, all too indicative of the upsurge of a contemporary “realm of darkness” as dangerous as any in the past, it all began to make sense as the net began to tighten its inexorable grip on the heroine, putting her salvation beyond earthly reach.

With the opera’s advancement the production seemed to me to shed its parochial blatancies and take us more undistractedly into universal human behaviours, though of the characters only Kátya seemed to grow as a human being – even Kurdrjas’s and Varvara’s decision to elope, made at the height of Kátya’s torment is treated lightly by the couple, more like a holiday than a radical change of direction – “Here’s to a new life, then – and fun!” sings Varvara (and I’m almost certain I heard Kudrjas sing “V Moskvu matičku?” (To Moscow, then?) – though to be fair, it might have been the name of a similar-sounding American city, sung with a Czech accent!).

For the rest, life goes on – Kátya’s husband Tichon remains in thrall to his unrepentant mother, the Kabanicha; and her lover, Boris, having abandoned Kátya to her fate, is sent out of sight and out of mind by his tyrannical, God-fearing uncle, Dikój, (in Janáček’s libretto, to work in Siberia! – though I wasn’t paying enough attention to the surtitles to pick up any further geographical incongruity!). Only Kátya is truly affected, in fact transfigured – but at the cost of her own life. For her, a happy release, perhaps – but for we in the audience, a disturbing human tragedy.

As Kátya, Russian-American soprano Dina Kuznetsova grew on me – at the very beginning she seemed disconcertingly middle-aged, even matronly in appearance, an impression which confused my expectation of her being as a “young wife” to Tichon, her husband. However, as the scenes unfolded, Kuznetsova’s portrayal gathered more and more youthful energy – her impulsive fancies, which she at first expressed to Varvara as wanting freedom to “fly like a bird”, were skilfully metamorphosed into candid revelations of suppressed sexual desires – her descriptions of someone whispering to her at night in her dreams, “like a dove cooing” were very beautifully and tremulously released, conveying desire and guilt at one and the same time with a convincing amalgam of confusion, ecstasy and compulsiveness.

With her husband, Tichon, about to leave on a business trip, her pleas for assurance and strength of response from him were pitiful in their desperation, accentuated by Tichon’s bewilderment at her emotional display, and his dismissive, ineffectual responses, to the point where Kátya’s “goodbye” to him had the air of a kind of death-knell to their marriage. By this time, Kuznetsova had fully “brought us in” to the heroine’s desperate state of being, so that we were practically “willing” her to take up the equally impulsive Varvara’s “setting up” of Dikój’s nephew Boris, by her giving Katya a spare key to the house, allowing her free access to her would-be swain!

Janáček’s music in the subsequent scene for two sets of lovers beautifully contrasted Kátya’s depth of emotion in the throes of her desperation with that written for Kudrjas and Varvara, the younger pair’s exchanges more “folksy” and carefree (echoes of Puccini’s “La Boheme” in places!). For me, this was, as well, the scene where the production “threw open” the opera’s vistas, with backdrops of stars and naturalistic ambiences giving the human interactions a universality all the more telling for its delayed release.

Act Three featured the thunderstorm and Kátya’s subsequent confession, transfiguration and death – throughout, Dina Kunetsova demonstrated just why her performance was a must-see, in every way imbuing the repressed character presented in the opera’s opening scene with desperate, recklessly courageous and open-hearted honesty of expression. The grim, tight-lipped responses of everybody else to the situation and its outcomes were thus exposed as caricatures of human behaviour, and the characters themselves also as casualties of existence, in a completely different way.

Kátya’s allies, Kudrjas and Varvara, were splendidly brought to life by James Benjamin Rodgers and Hayley Sugars, each capturing a distinctive interpretative quality in voice and manner, Kudrjas both a nature-poet, marvelling at the beauties of the passing river, and a man of science, explaining to the bullish merchant Dikój about lightning-rods during the storm – and then Varvara, the Kabanov’s “foster-child” (Ostrovsky’s play had her as Tichon’s sister), and therefore a kind of “outsider”who’s obviously something of a “free” spirit, judging by her encouragement of Kátya to pursue her affair with Boris, and her ready acquiescence with Kudrjas’s “elopement” plan!

Angus Wood as the attractive but self-absorbed Boris conveyed just the right mix of bravado and self-pity regarding his situation to his friend Kudrjas at the work’s beginning, leaving us ambivalent regarding how “true” and “constant” his feelings for Kátya might prove. An ardent lover of Kátya during their garden scene, his protestations were nullified by his subsequent passive, weak-willed reactions to her overwhelming distress, his farewell words to her “What sorrow parting is! – What sorrow for me!” underlining his self-centredness.

On the face of things, the ghoulish pair of the Kabanicha (Kátya’s mother-in-law, played by Margaret Medlyn), and her weak, hen-pecked son, Tichon (Andrew Glover) was largely responsible for Kátya’s life being such a misery, the Kabanicha demanding absolute loyalty and affection from her son at her daughter-in-law’s expense, while expecting the latter to know her place and be subservient to her husband and family. Margaret Medlyn continued her success with the composer’s operatic characters begun in Jenufa with the role of the Kostelnicka, and continued here with the still more odious Kabanicha (a good thing she has in other repertoire undertaken more likeable characters!). Here she epitomised utter ruthlessness, as exemplified by her final cynical dismissal of the onlookers after Kátya’s body is recovered from the river. Her near-complete absorbtion of her son Tichon’s affections is grotesquely echoed in her holding in thrall the otherwise dominating bully Dikój, like a duchess exercising control over her fiefdom!

Where Andrew Glover’s Tichon brilliantly epitomised emasculation with uncomfortable veracity, Conal Coad’s convincingly larger-than-life Dikój was all outward macho aggressiveness (except in the presence of the Kabanicha, who became like his “confessor”). Each of these three characters made up a chilling component of that “realm of darkness” previously referred to, which Kátya sacrificed her life in trying to escape. The other players in the drama, Glasha (Emma Sloman), Kuligin (Robert Tucker), and Felushka (Linden Loader) nicely characterised their brief pre-ordained roles as pieces in this same rigorously-wrought social structure, as did the various members of the Freemasons’ Chorus with their on-the-spot presence in the drama’s framing scenes.

It’s Janáček’s music as much as the dramatic action and the stage characterisations which make the opera such a vivid experience, though – and Music Director Wyn Davies and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra demonstrated with great skill and sure dramatic instinct the score’s powerfully-wrought amalgam of lyricism and dramatic force. From the opera’s Prelude it was Kátya’s music that dominated, all the other characters to an extent drawn into her phrases and themes in a way that reflected their interaction. Whether impulsive (Kátya’s confession to Varvara of sexual longings), repressive (the Kabanicha’s bullying of Kátya via her son Tichon), or despairing (Kátya’s confessing of her “sins” to the whole company), the character of the music held sway, the composer managing to encompass both voices and instruments in a full-blooded panoply of intensities that wrung out the emotions in no uncertain terms – and the players of the NZSO were more than up to the task of rendering their part in the whole with distinction.

As I’ve previously indicated, it was a production that, to me, made increasing sense and gathered weight and pace as it progressed – from Act Two’s Garden scene, and right throughout Act Three, with its thunderstorm, Kátya’s final meeting with Boris, and her suicide, the atmosphere seemed at once to throw open the vistas while tightening the dramatic grip almost to breaking-point – those starlit skies of Kátya’s vision alternated with images of the river’s brooding menace in the wake of the frightening thunderstorm served the drama well, and paid tribute to the abilities of the creative team, director Patrick Nolan and his assistant, Jacqueline Coats, along with designer Genevieve Blanchett and the skilfully-applied lighting of Mark Howett.

Kátya Kabanová has but two days to run at Wellington’s St.James Theatre at the time of my writing this review – it’s great music and theatre, which this production delivers with compelling force and surety.

Compressed, alternative version of Mozart’s Figaro treated with wit and flair

Posted on by Rosemary Collier

Mozart: The (other!) Marriage of Figaro, libretto by Georgia Jamieson Emms

Wanderlust Opera
Alicia Cadwgan (Susannah), Stuart Coats (Figaro), Megan Corby (Marcellina), Georgina Jamieson Emms (Countess), Barbara Paterson (Cherubino), Orene Tiai (Count), Fiona McCabe (accompanist)

St. Andrew’s on The Terrace

Wednesday, 30 August 2017, 12:15

Although only a few weeks ago Eternity Opera put on Mozart’s famous opera at the Hannah Playhouse, this was something very different.  Georgia Jamieson Emms’s group are to perform a fully-staged production of their show on 20 and 22 October at St. Matthew’s Collegiate, Masterton, then next summer take it on tour.  A good-sized audience was present for the concert, despite Houstoun and Hristova performing Beethoven at the other end of town.

It was both hilarious and very well performed.  Jamieson Emms knows how to use microphone, which was a great advantage when delivering her linking narrative.  She also knows how to write funny lines to well-known melodies.  On the whole, but not exclusively, arias stuck to English translations of the original words, while recitatives let fly with topical New Zealand references and colloquial language – not to mention music that Mozart never knew.  What about a bit of Evita thrown in?  And the old American song with words ‘Oh Susannah!’?

There were deviations to the text alluding to the performance being in St. Andrew’s Church.  Throughout, there was clear diction, superb timing, and lively acting, the latter admittedly somewhat limited by a small platform.

The show started with Susanna and Figaro literally measuring up their room.  They were both full of life and sang splendidly.  Throughout the performance the singers lived their characters.  The only partial exception was Orene Tiai as the Count, but this was thoroughly excusable; it was explained that he had come in at short notice when Craig Beardsworth was not able to perform.

Stuart Coats continued with ‘Se vuol ballare’, translated as ‘Come to my party’.  Most of his arias and ensembles he sang from memory, with panache and enthusiasm. The duet between Marcellina and Susanna was a most amusing narrative.  It was interesting to seem them using iPods instead of paper scores to read their parts.  However, they knew their scores well, and did not refer to the aids frequently.  Others in the cast used these tools occasionally later, too.  Up till now I had only seen pianists use these devices.

Next was a very lively and active Cherubino, in the form of Barbara Paterson.  This part suited her superbly, and I found her singing thoroughly engaging, compared with some recent occasions, where obviously the music did not suit her so well.  Her interactions with Susanna were entertaining and believable.

In the following trio the Count was added to the two we had just heard; Orene Tiai was very good in the role.  He was inevitably outshone by Figaro, though.  Stuart Coats  (who sang without score) was very strong, and always humorous.

For a complete change, Georgia Jamieson Emms gave us a very demure, gentle and understated Countess.  The contrast was most effective, coming before a lively Susanna/Cherubino duet, in which the latter proved her athleticism – her jumping out of the window was rendered by her jumping off the platform.

In the sextet of all the characters, all sang with full voice – it became a little overpowering in the excellent acoustics of St. Andrew’s.  Fiona McCabe’s accompaniments were always absolutely with the singers, and immaculate.

In the Letter Duet, the Countess’s and Susanna’s voices were absolutely lovely together, and their timing was perfect.

Another hilarious solo from Figaro brought us to the Finale, in which all sing.  It started from the point at which the Count realises that it is the Countess who is dressed as Susanna.  The voices were all outstanding, the ensemble was achieved fabulously well, and the acting was animated.

All in all, a delightful hour-long show.  I hope that Wellington audiences will get a chance to see the opera complete, with sets and costumes.  All praise to the participants, but especially to Georgia Jamieson Emms.