The Yeomen of the Guard by Gilbert and Sullivan

Wellington G & S Light Opera. Musical director: Hugh McMillan; stage director: Gillian Jerome

The Opera House, Friday 14 August 2009

The Yeomen of the Guard is often considered the one G & S comic opera that comes closest to being an ‘opera’; it is a case of a work in an essentially comic genre that ends sadly, with the jester losing his girl.

It becomes poignant because the jester, Jack Point, is sung with such feeling and conviction by Derek Miller; he has been the company’s stalwart character singer, pivotal in their productions, for many years. Again, all eyes were on him whenever he was on stage, with agile, expressive movement, characterful singing and great facility in delivering floods of witty words at high speed.

But there were several other fine performances, starting with Chris Whelan as the Head Jailer, Wilfred, with whom Miller duets brilliantly in Act II. Tall, oafish and a bit thick, Whelan’s voice and comic movements were inimitable, though perhaps his portrayal overlooked the fact that a Head Jailer may well be a pompous ass, but need not be quite as stupid as Whelan had him. Lindsay Groves as Sergeant Meryll and Chris Berentson as the quasi-hero Fairfax (the object of female efforts to rescue from imminent beheading) took their fairly big roles well.

Among the female singers, the sad clown’s partner and love, Elsie, who eventually falls for Fairfax, was sung with real style by the vocally accomplished Celia Falchi. She and Miller sang the quite moving duet that is undoubtedly one of Sullivan’s finest, a real trouvaille, ‘I have a song to sing’.

Not far behind were the Phoebe of Malinda Di Leva and the Dame Carruthers of Sharon Yearsley.

It’s an operetta where the story does count for something: for one thing, perhaps arguing for the sanctity of marriage regardless of insincere or fraudulent original motives. So it was a pity that the words from one or two singers were hard to understand, but not so as to make it hard to follow.

The set is simple – in a courtyard of the Tower of London, costumes conventional, of Tudor times. Movement on stage was fluid though the yeomen themselves overdid the military stiffness. Normal first night shortcomings were evident: a tentative orchestra in the overture and for some distance into the first act; so were some of the early choruses. But the show, full of great music, gained confidence during the first act and there were, particularly in the women’s chorus, some very poised and attractive singing in the second act.

The test of good theatre is whether you start to care about what happens to the characters on stage; I did, and the pathetic denouement quite had its way with me at the end.

(the full and edited version of the review that was abbreviated in The Dominion Post)

New Zealand School of Music: Handel’s Semele, conducted by Michael Vinten, directed by Sara Brodie

Adam Concert Room, Victoria University, Kelburn Campus. Thursday 23 July 2009

Back in 2001 the Victoria University School of Music staged Semele. It was not this opera however, now produced by the New Zealand School of Music, but the version by John Eccles, the composer for whom Congreve actually wrote the libretto. As the programme notes record, Eccles’s setting was never performed and was not heard till April 1972, at St John’s Smith Square in London; oddly, the notes failed to mention the 2001 Victoria University production, also in the Adam Concert Room.

A few years before, I heard a lecture by the late Professor Don McKenzie, a Victoria graduate of and later lecturer in the Department of English, who became Professor of bibliography and textual criticism at Oxford, and a specialist in 17th and 18th century English literature. He tutored a paper in literary criticism In my MA year; he was about the most engaging and brilliant lecturer I ever had, and I credit the best mark in my honours degree to his inspiration.

McKenzie was also a knowledgeable music lover and the subject of his lecture was English opera, a consideration of the reasons that opera in English did not take root around the beginning of the 18th century, as it had in France with Lully in the late 17th century. His lecture dealt with the case of Eccles’s Semele and its failure to be staged, because Congreve’s libretto was too late for the opening of the new Queen’s Theatre in 1702 and when it was finished and set by Eccles by 1707, a planned production at the Drury Lane Theatre fell through due to certain duplicitous activities by the impresario who opened his theatre with an Italian pasticcio. That was the beginning of the fashion of the nobility and upper middle class for opera in Italian.

McKenzie played recorded versions of both the Eccles and Handel versions, arguing that Eccles had found an idiomatic musical style much more idiomatically adapted to the English language than was Handel’s (it was his only opera in English); he even believed that Eccles version (recorded in 1989) was the more beautiful and successful rendering of Congreve’s text. New Grove Opera declares that the Eccles opera was the finest opera presented in London between the death of Purcell and Handel’s Rinaldo in 1711. If it had been performed in 1707 and a theatre had been ready to encourage English opera as a result, he argued there was a good chance that an indigenous opera in English might have taken root. For example, Handel would probably have written his works in English and his imitators would have ensured that an English tradition continued to flourish.

Handel’s Semele was a good choice in the 250th anniversary of his death; it is presumably considered a good piece for students because of the large number of roles; clearly not on account of ease of performance and interpretation. There are ten main roles and choruses of wedding guests and of Heavenly Deities, many of which are duplicated or even triplicated. There are 19 names in the cast list.

The Adam Concert Room is not an ideal place for staged productions, but it is at least flexible. This time the orchestra was placed in front of the organ, an attractive position (since it focused attention of the charming case and pipe-work of the instrument), while the audience was seated on the other three sides. It meant that those on the sides had an impeded view at times.

The stage was furnished very simply, with a large round bed in the centre, a door between the audience seated on the right and those facing the orchestra, and a stair on the right of the orchestra leading to the gallery (not used by audiences) which encircles the auditorium – it represented the home of the gods. The main prop was a huge white sheet used variously to cover some of the sexual activity that is often suggested and sometimes to suggest a distinction between earth and the realm of the gods.

The wedding guests’ costumes are modern; while deities both great and small were in a variety of seductive gear, hot pants were favoured by several of the female deities.

The orchestra of 24 players, in front of the organ, played with a certain vivacity though there was some rhythmic monotony and I did not find the kind of accuracy that I’m sure I’m right in recalling at many of the productions and concert performances by the school of music of a decade and more ago.

Principals were good, particularly conspicuous the two cellos which had much solo, quasi-continuo work to do. The harpsichord continuo was deftly contributed by Julie Coulson.

The chorus was rarely disposed as a group, a phalanx, as is the default position among less imaginative directors, but were often in an outward facing circle that allowed the audience to hear the three or four voices in front of them much more loudly than the rest. It was just one of the marks that distinguished the direction by the gifted Sara Brodie. The result was an assembly of solo voices rather than a normal chorus; the aural effect was interesting and far from objectionable. They behaved generally as individuals and throughout created visual diversion.

Most of the principals were a good deal less secure at the beginning than later, after the impact of the full house had given them confidence and dissolved some of the nerves.

The leading roles were more than adequately filled, mainly by advanced or graduate students. Michael Gray, as befitted an already fairly experienced performer, was well-cast as a lustful and arrogant Jupiter, though not without a little concern for the welfare of the girl he has identified as a likely target – and vice versa.

His somewhat cynical urge, ‘I must with speed amuse her’, as he realizes how desperate she is, not just for his sexual attentions, but also to be elevated to the ranks of the immortals, with some particularly turbulent orchestral playing, was tempered by a lovely ‘Where’er you walk’ which at least sounded genuine. Juno, like Fricka in The Ring, has the jealous spoiler’s role; that didn’t deny Rachel Day (Laura Dawson sang Juno at other performances) some good moments such as her urgent ‘Hence Iris, hence away!’. Ultimately, manipulated by Juno disguised as Ino, Jupiter accedes to Semele’s insistence; Jupiter has by then sworn to comply with Semele’s demands and is appalled when she asks for him to appear in his true, incendiary form: ‘Ah! take heed what you press’ he pleads uselessly; and she is incinerated.

Amelia Berry as Semele (Rose Blake, her alternate) had a big role, credibly oversexed, and she sang attractively too. Though her report from on high, ‘Endless pleasure, endless love’ was sung instead by Iris, Semele’s ‘Sleep, why dost thou leave me?’ and ‘Myself I shall adore’, exhibiting very different emotions, were heart-felt, and she delivered some rather thrilling, if abandoned, top notes in her aria ‘No, no, I’ll take no less’.

Eventually her insatiable appetite and her Olympian ambition are her undoing.

Her more sedate sister, Ino (Bryony Williams – at other sessions, Bianca Andrew), who was also in love with Athamus, rejoices to be awarded as a second prize to the dead Semele’s bride-groom, and turns out to have an aptitude for sex as eager as her sister’s. Keiran Rayner sang Athamus with some feeling, exhibiting impatience with Semele’s procrastination with his ‘Hymen, haste’; but he’s little more than a plaything of the gods.

Omnipresent was Olga Gryniewicz as Iris, which she sang and acted most vividly, a lively presence throughout the opera. She was given Semele’s aria, ‘Endless pleasure, endless love’ (Congreve had given it to Iris in his libretto but Handel changed it to Semele; this production goes back o the original) which she sang from on high with a gusto as if it was she herself was in the midst of it all. A medium-sized role was that of Somnus, the god of sleep, invoked for somewhat nefarious purposes, sung by Joshua Kidd; he sang his famous aria, ‘Leave me loathsome light’ admirably, with a voice ranging from the hushed to ardent pleading.

As I remarked above, the orchestra sounded a little under-rehearsed though there was much excellent individual playing; the staging was imaginative; the cast was excellently disposed and they moved meaningfully. And the singing, both by the many principals and the choruses, was the thing, a good demonstration of the school’s strength.

On the opening night there was a deserved full house; as the only Handel opera Wellington seems likely to see in his anniversary year, and for quite a while, I hope the rest of the season was well supported.

L’Italiana in Algeri by Rossini 

Conducted by Wyn Davies, director: Colin McColl, set and lighting design: Tony Rabbit, costumes: Nic Smillie, chorus master: Michael Vinten.

Singers; Wendy Dawn Thomson, Conal Coad, Christian Baumgärtel, Warwick Fyfe, Katherine Wiles, Richard Green, Kristen Darragh.

St James Theatre

Saturday 9 May 2009

The first of the two staged productions from New Zealand Opera in 2009 made a hit of an opera that is not really in the top twenty, even in Italy.

The Italian Girl has one of Rossini’s familiar, effervescent overtures, a couple of well-known arias and a lot of music that is infectious and witty, but a plot that is pretty thin.

It was last seen in New Zealand in 1983 in a production by Mercury Theatre in Auckland, the successor to the short-lived National Opera of New Zealand.

In the past 30 years, there has been a huge revival of interest in Rossini’s oeuvre of round 38 operas, most of which are not comedies. In his day he was more famous as a composer of dramatic opera. Among the comedies, one can think, after The Barber of Seville, only of La Cenerentola, this one and Il turco in Italia; there were several one act comedies – farces, burlesques – from his early years and in his last years in Paris – Il viaggio a Reims and Le comte Ory. All the other 30-odd operas are tragedies, dramas drawn from antiquity, medieval romances or from recent literature.

L’Italiana in Algeri

The secret of such comedy was fully understood by Conal Coad who took the part of Mustafa, the Bey of Algiers (Governor of the Ottoman province). He has shortcomings in western eyes, and these are mocked by presenting his character without the stock gestures of cheap farce. Coad knows that comedy depends on adopting an outwardly serious demeanour, with careful limits to stock comedic gestures, allowing pomposity and lack of self-awareness to be observed rather than drawn crassly to our attention.

Thus his every movement was pregnant with satire or self-evident foolishness; and his very presence on stage caused smiles: he was the essential focus of the comedy, and he triumphed.

The Italian Girl, Isabella, was sung by Wendy Dawn Thomson, a graduate of Victoria University and virtually runner-up in the 2005 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World. She has sung at Covent Garden, Opera Australia, Scottish Opera, Opera North, among others and at major festivals. She is a splendid actress with a voice that is rich in histrionic character, though it was not, on the first night, particularly large: not as I remembered her in The Death of Klinghoffer in Auckland in 2005.

Degrees of under-projection also affected other singers, something not evident when they were at the front of the stage. Thomson’s performance consisted, however, as an opera singer’s must, in far more than simply good singing; she threw herself round the stage, used her limbs and her face expressively, drew all eyes to her whenever she was on stage.

I assumed that Christian Baumgärtel, as her lover Lindoro, had vocal problems in the early stages, as his voice was strained, reedy in ‘Languir per una bella’. But in his duet with Mustafa, ‘Se inclinassi…’, the hilarious water-skiing coup de théâtre, all was forgotten. By the second act he seemed more comfortable, as both his acting and singing expressed confidence and greater ease, finally displaying the form that justified his journey from Germany.

The most striking aspect of the production was the staging. It was presented as an onlooker’s view of a filming of the opera as soap opera, with an amusing, showoff, sometimes obscene film director (Stephen Butterworth), gesturing and shouting unscripted instructions to performers and camera and lighting crew somewhere in the gallery.

Above and behind the stage was a screen on which was projected in real time, what a camera in the wings stage left was capturing on the stage below the screen. It puzzled and distracted to begin with, but one got the hang of it.

It could have been a mess, but director Colin McColl had developed his idea, with set and lighting designer Tony Rabbit, with such confidence and so convincingly, that it had its own logic and the audience totally accepted it; more, they loved and were enchanted by it.

However, it’s a pity that Colin McColl’s notes, seeking to justify the setting by likening Rossini to today’s soap-operas, both denigrates the greatness of Rossini and ridiculously elevates the contemptible squalor of most of today’s TV theatricals. And the character of the production might reinforce that unfortunate comparison in the minds of less aware audience members; that was the excuse for skimpy-clad, non-singing ‘beach babes’ (I’m not sure what the beaches are like around Algiers city). My feeling was rather, that it would have persuaded sceptics that opera is absolutely not a museum art, any more than Shakespeare or Michelangelo are.

But all the hilarious stage business would have meant nothing if not underpinned by Wyn Davies’s management of the musical shaping, its tempi, the Rossinian spirit and élan, the orchestral discipline as well as imposing the final degree of ensemble between soloists, orchestra and chorus. (I hope it will be noted that I do not refer to the conductor, as most reviewers do, as simply the conductor of the orchestra: he conducts the entire performance).

The chorus was one of the performance’s great ornaments; though not numerous, their polish, clarity and energy was a credit to the work of Michael Vinten as chorus master. (It’s all male, in spite of the opportunity for using soprano and alto castrati, seeing they are eunuchs).

I particularly enjoyed the patriotic chorus in Act II where a combination of the basic stage green, the red t-shirts and white of some costumes reflected the Italian flag as well as spelling Viva Italia: foreshadowing Verdi’s ‘Va pensiero’ in Nabucco.

The lesser characters can seem rather secondary in some productions, but here the strength of both Warwick Fyfe’s Taddeo and Richard Green’s Haly made their roles both significant and memorable. In his notable Act II aria ‘Ho un gran peso sulla testa’, Fyfe, corpulent in white, had both striking physical and impressive vocal presence. At each of Green’s entries, particularly his aria ‘Le femmine d’Italia’, his imposing bass demonstrated his wide experience at ENO in London and the medium-sized house at Bremerhaven.

The Bey’s wife, Elvira and her maid, Zulma – Katherine Wiles and Kristen Darragh, were both splendidly cast and there was some debate in the interval about whether their figures and legs, rivaling the three beach-babes, had recommended them for the roles as much as had their vocal gifts. Wiles’s interventions were particularly vivid – one would hardly have thought she needed Isabella’s guidance in assertiveness. Darragh was clearly distinguished in the several ensembles.

This production is a brilliant combination of a passable libretto and sparkling music, all viewed through a production that plants it vividly and consistently in the present day.

Post scriptum

I enjoyed the performance so much that I went along to the second one on Tuesday (11 May), got a seat high in the gods. But there, little blemishes that I had ignored on Saturday loomed a bit larger: the shrill piccolo in the overture which I’d put out of my mind, was more annoying as it recurred at other points in the performance. Likewise I’d left little misgivings about the orchestra’s playing unexpressed; but in the gallery, where the orchestra’s sound seemed amplified above the voices, occasional untidiness in ensemble and obtrusive volume, crowding the singers, was noticeable as it had not been centre stalls. But their playing was very much at the very decent level of the many German opera house orchestras that I’ve heard.

Again I found tenor Baumgärtel’s voice a bit thin, even pressured and unbeautiful, though his acting wholly compensated. And my pleasure was confirmed in the voices and histrionics of the other singers. Nor could I fault the treatment of the work, the business of the filming, the entr’actes enlivened with the dispatch of singers not needed in the next scene, marshalling the chorus and the singers for the next act, retouching makeup, quick reviews of the action and so on; but it became a little tiresome occasionally.

Though McColl’s treatment was risky, it worked, and a second viewing gave me no reason to fault it, as an acceptable, goofy version of an opera that you can do almost what you like with, such is its fundamental silliness. At my distance from the stage, the surtitles were hard to read, often not visible, and I gauged that they were probably too high on the screen for the dozen back rows: there seemed no reason for them not to be at the bottom of the screen, where they would have been visible to the whole house. The texts however, were pithy and well judged. Like Mozart’s Entführung aus dem Serail, it dealt with the then popular subject of the nature of the Muslim world, and contacts between Christians and Muslims. Strangely, though the Balkan conquests by the Ottoman Empire in the previous century had posed a serious danger to Christian Europe, and their armies were near the gates of Vienna just before 1700 – the Austrian Empire was saved only by the timely arrival of a Polish army – attitudes towards Muslims were far more tolerant and even amused than they are today in certain countries.  Then there were no human rights commissions to object to stereotyping and ridiculing of a religious community. And so a Muslim leader could be pilloried for behaviour considered not comme il faut by polite European society of the time.

The Cunning Little Vixen by Janáček: NIMBY Opera

Musical Director :Justus Rozemond; Director : Jacqueline Coats;  Kate Lineham, Matthew Landreth, Edmund Hintz, Daniel O’Connor, Barbara Paterson, Stuart Coats,
Chorus/Dancers: Barbara Graham, Felicity Smity, Megan Corby, Frances Moore, Rachel Day, Natalie Hona. Instrumentalists: Claire McFarlane, Margaret Guldborg, Tui Clark, Dillon Mayhew, Catherine Norton

Salvation Army Citadel, Vivian St., Wellington

Friday 27 March  2009

This was my first experience of NIMBY Opera, so I didn’t really know what to expect regarding the company’s capabilities. I’d read about their previous productions – Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti, and Lyell Cresswell’s Good Angel, Bad Angel, both of which had garnered some excellent reviews. Nevertheless, considering the size of the venue for Vixen it seemed as though a compromised operatic experience would be the order of the day, however skillfully presented and performed – no full orchestra, for one, no operatic stage, curtain or proscenium arch, in fact almost none of the things that one associates with ‘opera performance’ atmosphere, or at least with things on the normal scale of opera performance.

In the event, nearly all of these potential shortcomings were transformed into virtues, with their own valid operatic/theatrical qualities. It’s true that a stage, a curtain, and a dividing orchestra pit can help create a magical, far-away-land ‘happening-in-a-dream’ ambience if the performances are sufficiently involving – but one can also feel ‘distanced’ by those physical spaces, far removed from the characters and their world, the audience on the outside looking in, as it were. Here, there was no need to look in, because it was happening all around and close at hand. The dimensions of the Salvation Army Citadel auditorium gave the production an intimacy that couldn’t have been easily reproduced in a normal opera house. And of course the opera eminently suited this close-at-hand, intimate setting, with the use of English words enhancing our enjoyment (most of the time!).

In short, here was an operatic experience that I, for one, enjoyed to the full away from many of the normal operatic structures and conventions. I think it was partly this sense of performers ‘stepping out’ from conventional presentation scenarios which helped give the production some of its power and engagement.

I thought I would lament the substitution of a full band with a small ensemble, because Janáček writes so vividly and pungently for orchestra, vesting each scene with very specific ambiences and textures with the help of his orchestration. It’s a tribute to the skill of the music director, Justus Rozemond, that, once the first pricklings of getting used to a smaller scale of sound were over, I hardly missed the full orchestra – obviously something to do with the sounds matching the intimacy of the theatrical situation, but also suggesting that the arrangement managed to convey Janáček’s thematic and rhythmic essences, and sufficient colour to suggest the worlds of imagination the composer wanted us to enter. Again, there was a sense of something happening so closely at hand that one felt physically caught up with it – not exactly Wagner’s concept of the ‘womb of Gaia’, but something quite different, elemental in a completely different way.

The story of the opera is on an intimate rather than a grand scale – a mischievous young fox is kidnapped from her forest home as a cub and taken to the world of the humans. Vixen Sharp-ears, however, is not a fox to be trifled with – she escapes, and proceeds to turn both the local Forester’s life, and the rest of the woods upside-down. It’s a story with a lot of humour, a lot of action, and with some twists, some of which Janáček himself incorporated into the original source-story. This was from a novel by Rudolf Těsnohlídek that was serialized in a Brno daily newspaper, and was brought to Janáček’s attention, as legend would have it, by his housekeeper, whom he caught reading the paper and laughing to herself at the vixen’s adventures.

Janáček made several changes, the most radical of which was introducing into the story the death of the vixen, shot by a poacher. He justified the story-change by saying he wanted to emphasise the cyclical nature of things – ‘death follows life – life follows death’, a premise which of course changes the whole opera from a light-hearted children’s tale into a serious matter involving death. The production emphasizes the cyclical nature of things by depicting the original Vixen, played by Kate Lineham, entering at the end as one of her own cubs – so life is renewed in a heart-warming way.

One of the traditional truisms regarding opera is that performers are there to sing, not to act. There have been numerous instances in the past of famous operatic performers with stunning voices behaving like lumps of lead on stage – I’m sure that was largely because in earlier times the conductor ruled the roost in the opera houses, and the stage directors largely did what they were told and tried not to get in the way, so that everything became subservient to the music. We’ve seen the balance of power shift quite dramatically in those terms – some would say far too much, considering the wackiness and inappropriateness of some opera directors’ conceptions.

But one of the good things resulting from this emphasis on stage production is that singers are now expected to be able to act – and this was one of the great strengths of the present production. Everybody looked, moved and sang completely and utterly in character – a tribute to Jacqueline Coats, the director, Sacha Copland the choreographer, costume designer Rachel More, and of course to the performers themselves. And we were so close that if there had been any weaknesses or discrepancies they would have been uncomfortably obvious.

As the Vixen, Kate Lineham gave what I thought was an extraordinary performance, quite all-encompassing, with acting and movement that fully matched the quality of her vocal performance. She was a Vixen who, despite her sharpish temperament and occasionally deadly intent, warmed our hearts at other times with her sense of fun and her vulnerability. Her interaction with Fox Goldenstripe, portrayed with a fine show of gallantry by Barbara Paterson, was a highlight of the production, both singers playing into each others hands, or should one say, paws! The ‘teenage love’ antics of their first meeting delighted the audience, and was marred only by some over-loud instrumental playing, which circumstance I’ll return to later.

Matthew Landreth as the Forrester gave a strong and well-focused, entirely believable ‘character’ performance, bringing out both the robustness as well as the philosophical side of the character. It was a pity he wasn’t placed further forward for his final aria, so we could have ‘connected’ with his love of the natural world more readily at that point. On the other side of the same fence was the Poacher, played by Stuart Coats (he also took the smaller part of the Innkeeper), whose voice made, for me, the strongest impression of the evening amongst the men – in many ways the ‘alter ego’ of the Forrester, with both a rugged and a sentimental side to his character, singing his folksong-like serenades to his absent sweetheart. Another versatile performer was tenor Edmund Hintz, who bounced between the gravitas of the schoolteacher and the cartoonish machoism of the rooster with relish, his farmyard antics vividly choreographed, and complete with evocative animal noises.

The chorus were required to play a number of roles, from feathered cockerel-cohorts and their offspring, to their enemies, the foxes and their cubs, as well as a host of other animals and human beings. Thanks to on-the-spot choreography, vivid costuming and great singing and acting, they achieved wonders of characterisation with each scene, bringing out the earthiness and comedy of it all, especially during the Vixen’s wedding when there were cries of “Halleluiah!” from all parts of the auditorium.

As I’ve said, I thought the arrangement of the original score for five players by musical director Justus Rozemond was an outstanding piece of work, skillfully and sensitively done. Obviously it needed to be played well to work as it did, and by-and-large the work of the musicians was first-class, with only a tendency to play too loudly detracting from the effect of Janáček’s subtle colourings, and obscuring some of the vocal lines from the singers. The light and shade of the original score was missed at such times, as was the amplitude asked for by the composer at the beginning of Act Three, where the original’s harshness and power just doesn’t come across with a small ensemble.

Small caveats, these, set against one’s warm-hearted enjoyment of the whole. NIMBY Opera can be justly proud of what the Vixen was able to achieve, a welcome alternative view to set against one’s usual preconceptions concerning opera and its production.