Tag: opera

Dramatic and innovative Haydn in the Church from Camerata with soprano Carleen Ebbs

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Camerata – Haydn in the Church

HANDEL – Overture Berenice
HAYDN –  Scena di Berenice (from Metastatio’s “Antigono”)*
HAYDN – Symphony No. 14 in A Hob 1:14

*Carleen Ebbs (soprano)
Camerata
Anne Loeser (leader)

St.Peter’s-on-Willis-St
Wellington

Friday, 5th November 2021

At the end of a busy and distracted Friday I found myself headed for St.Peter’s-on-Willis-St Church for Camerata’s latest “Haydn in the Church” concert series, which I’d been looking forward to ever since attending and enjoying the last one, though on this occasion I’d not been as assiduous in my preparation for the evening’s music as per usual – I had seen the programme on-line a couple of days previously, and was, of course expecting the accustomed delight of an early Haydn symphony to match that readily afforded by others in the series thus far, but I found myself scratching all about my memory-banks to recall what else I’d glimpsed on the  items “list”. I definitely recalled a soprano’s name, and an operatic scene to do with “Berenice”, which I had always thought was a work by Handel! – so I think at that point I gave up the conscious struggle, and consoled myself at the thought of everything being “revealed” once I’d gotten into the church.

Even then I didn’t get my hands on an actual programme, but  did talk briefly with Greg Hill, who was sitting next to me in a socially-distanced sense, and who actually had written the programme notes for the concert – at the interval he was able to confirm that there had been both a Handel and a Haydn work, each with the name Berenice, on the items list! So I had been on the right track after all.

I knew the Menuetto from Handel’s “Berenice” as my parents had owned a 78rpm disc of the work which I’d often heard when a child, and still remembered. This was, however, the whole of the Overture, a sprightly beginning, with the dotted rhythms beautifully “sprung”, leading to an Allegro whose trajectory had a joyous kind of enlivening energy, the oboe attractively colouring the string textures. The Menuetto featured the oboe-and-string sound prominently at first, before the strings repeated the material, playing the concluding lines of the second part with a beautiful and graceful legato. A lively Gigue rounded off the Overture in suitably festive fashion.

The name of the soprano Carleen Ebbs was one to conjure with, as she had made a richly favourable impression on the one occasion I’d previously seen and heard her, as the nymph Calisto in Cavalli’s eponymous opera, performed in 2015 by Days Bay Opera – on that occasion I was moved to voice the opinion that “Ebbs’ is a voice to listen out for”. She’s now returned to New Zealand after being based in London for 15 years, training at the Guildhall in London and at the Cardiff International Voice Academy, and working with a variety of prestigious coaches and at the great UK Opera Houses.

On the strength of her performance this evening of Haydn’s 1795 Scena di  Berenice, that promise, evident in the Days Bay La Calisto, has been more than fulfilled – Ebbs took us right inside the character of Berenice’s plethora of moods from the outset, capturing our sympathies from the very opening recitative Berenice che fai?, in which she first bemoans her own fear and weakness at the prospect of her lover Demetrio’s death, then expresses a longing to die alongside her beloved, through to the first impassioned aria in which the singer begs to be allowed to “cross that river” with him; and, finally, in some kind of delirium, raging against the cruelty of the gods with a fiery vocal brilliance throughout a second recitative and aria, the music storming to a passionate (and virtuosic) conclusion – tremendous stuff!

It seems from her website information that Ebbs has commitments in the UK regarding ongoing tutelage, and has already made the most of freelancing opportunities with various UK companies, activities which would have established her as a “sought-after” performer, particularly with her avowed enthusiasm for Baroque and early classical repertoire – whatever the uncertainties of the present situation world-wide regarding opportunities for performing musicians, one hopes for her continued successes, including, wherever possible, more appearances back here in New Zealand.

While all eyes (and ears) were on the singer during the drama of Haydn’s “scena”, the ensemble again became the centre of focus for the performance of Haydn’s Symphony No. 14, the latest in Camerata’s exploration of the composer’s early symphonies. I note that, in a diverting on-line Classic FM post which featured a music critic asked to numerically “rank” the qualities of ALL of these  works, the hapless commentator gave this Symphony No.14 a high rating, after according some of the other “early” works what I thought were some unduly harsh verdicts regarding their “quality” – this A  Major work Hob 1:14 was actually placed 35th, ahead of many other “tried-and-true” works such as the “Military”, the “Farewell” and the “Surprise” symphonies – doubtless a case of “chacun a son goût” with the choices, as much as any other considerations!

This work’s high-spirited opening featured a repeated octave descent, followed afterwards by an even more vertiginous downward leap of a 10th (I think!), giving the music an attractively energetic character underpinned by the unrelenting bass line – I loved the horns’ ascents into high-wire material,  the oboes providing a less strenuous “echo” effect with their material, joining forces with the horns to great effect in the development, before the energetic rhythms marshalled their forces, the splendid playing driving the music to a part festive, part rustic conclusion.

The Andante moves a dignified but characterful processional along its course, the striding aspect of the melody augmented with graceful decorative notes upon repetition, the strings alone supplying the melodic interest. More fun was to be had from the Minuet (Menuetto)  with its ceremonial horns and chuckling winds, though the oboe introduced a sombre note with its minor-key melody in the trio – all very pastoral, with its hunting-horn ambiences and touches of out-of-doors melancholy!

The finale builds its material almost entirely on a descending figure (the reason for the aforementioned “critic” rating the work’s cleverness and innovation so highly), giving the whole movement a festive, bell-like atmosphere. Here the playing imparted a real sense of “schwung”, the musicians seeming to make their instruments dance to the joyous strains of the figurations, alternating delicacy with delight, and grace with energy. As is often the case with delectable pleasures, it all seemed over in a trice – so it was a good thing that Anne Loeser bade us remain for an “encore”, one which happened to continue the concert’s connection with the story from which Haydn’s scena had been taken. This was an excerpt from Gluck’s Overture to his opera seria Antigono, one which again featured the character of Berenice, the Egyptian princess in love with Demetrio, son of the King of Macedonia, to which monarch Berenice had been “promised” in marriage. Being Gluck, the music had a lyrical “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” quality, the two flutes adding to the ethereal character of the string-writing, and the sensitive accompaniments similarly transported, the whole given a resonant “music of the spheres” kind of sonority, which continued to enchant the senses long after the sounds had ceased.

 

 

 

Mozart’s Don Giovanni from the new Wellington Opera Company – a promising beginning

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Wellington Opera presents
MOZART – DON GIOVANNI (dramma giocoso)
(libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte)

Cast:   Christian Thurston  (Don Giovanni)
James Ioelu  (Leoporello)
Amelia Berry  (Donna Anna)
Paul Whelan  (The Commendatore)
Oliver Sewell  (Don Ottavio)
Amanda Atlas (Donna Elvira)
Natasha Wilson  (Zerlina)
Joel Amosa  (Masetto)

Wellington Opera Chorus and Orchestra
Music Director –  Matthew Ross
Director – Sara Brodie
Assistant Director – Matthew Kereama
Production Designer – Meg Rollandi
Lighting Designer – Jo Kilgour

Wellington Opera House
Tuesday 20th April, 2021

(to Saturday 24th April 2021 7:30pm)

How refreshing to read in the programme accompanying Wellington Opera’s “Don Giovanni” an appreciation of Mozart’s and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte’s opera from the Governor-General, Dame Patsy Reddy, thus: “Quite apart from the exquisite pleasures of Mozart’s score, it (the opera) offers a timeless plot line that will resonate with audiences in the “Me Too” era.” For me, that sums up in a nutshell the potential for a classic work born in this case of what historians have termed “The Enlightenment” to express a viewpoint relating to sexual mores in society whose judgement is unequivocally delivered – the condemnation and downfall of a sexual predator.

After I’d read the original “Stuff” article that appeared, one purporting to be a review of the Company’s opening night’s performance, but morphing into a “woke-rant” condemning any age-old artistic portrayals of what’s seen as interaction of male dominance and female submission, my first reaction was along the disturbed lines of “Look out, Classics! – THEY’RE coming for you!” One doesn’t wish to demonise any feminist viewpoint thus – but to gratuitously offload coals of fire upon the heads of the world’s classics holus-bolus is to beg the question of why things are portrayed the way they are in the first place in these works, and how “workings-out” of what people do in human interactive terms can counter and triumph over many such exploitative attitudes. Mozart and da Ponte obviously understood human nature and its resultant behaviours, and in this case responded to the excesses of the opera’s eponymous miscreant in delivering an archetypal “come-uppance” to him at the end.

I once saw a production of “The Don” where the ghostly avenging “Statue” of the man Giovanni had earlier killed in a duel turned out actually to be the peasant lad Masetto in disguise, wanting revenge for Giovanni’s attempted seduction of his girlfriend. After reducing Giovanni to submission, the “stone” figure threw off his disguise and summarily despatched him. It all became something in the manner of a “shabby little shocker” involving nothing more than rough justice, with no overtones of the archetypal or supernatural or any kind of higher moral force at work.  I felt suitably cheated on that occasion, the “rustic revenge” conclusion having nothing uplifting or awe-inspiring about it, no “outward sign of inner expiation”, change or cleansing. Interestingly, Mozart’s “epilogue”, in which the characters whose lives were so intertwined with the Don’s tell one another their plans and deliver a vocal “coup de grace” to the departed libertine, was performed at the premiere in Prague, but omitted when the opera was restaged by the composer in Vienna, and not reintroduced until the early part of the 20thCentury – so the opera’s ending, with Giovanni dragged down to Hell, as depicted in the film “Amadeus”, was the standard for many years!

That “resonance” which Dame Patsy Reddy mentioned regarding recent “Me Too” revelations has already coloured a number of manifestations of this opera worldwide, among them the subject of an in-depth review of a UK production in North London from 2017 which I chanced upon, one staged by an all-female creative team, with modern dress and up-dated surtitles, giving a definite contemporary feel to the goings-on. The characterisations seemed to ring true with the women Giovanni tried to seduce in the opera, with the noblewoman Donna Anna and (eventually) the peasant girl Zerlina portrayed as strong and independent, while the once-abandoned Donna Elvira remaining seriously conflicted to the end by her ex-lover. And there were echoes of Hollywood impresario Harvey Weinstein’s recently-exposed crimes and the initial disbelief at the allegations made by various women concerning his sexual abuse of them, in Donna Anna’s fiancée Don Ottavio’s similar doubts uttered upon first hearing of Giovanni’s transgressions.

Fast forward to 2021 and a girdle about the earth’s distance to Wellington Opera, a recently-formed Trust here in the capital, and presently making the most of the Covid travel restrictions resulting in the availability of so many able home-grown singers for this, the Trust’s first production.  Having enjoyed a number of director Sara Brodie’s productions in the past, I was brimful with expectation, firstly all ears for the Overture, here occasioning a “sneak preview” of the opera’s inaugural crime, the Don’s invasion of the beautiful Donna Anna’s bedroom via a ladder. I thought Matthew Ross’s direction of the music a shade short-breathed with the very opening chords, terse and contained, not conveying to me the sheer drama of those opening sounds, and being too intent with forward movement. smart and snappy, which mode of course does come into its own with the allegro – no qualms about Ross’s urgency and the terrific orchestral response, there!

As the curtain opened again, there was Leoporello, waiting for his master – with an un-nervingly spectral figure gazing at him from further away for a few seconds, before leaving just as mysteriously as he had come. James Ioelu’s Leoporello had the common touch, the voice a roughish edge, the body language casual and footloose. His master, the Don, was all elegance by comparison, Christian Thurston laid-back and casual with his movements, almost an insouciance, but one masking an underlying focus of pursuit and would-be capture. My companion for the evening being of a younger generation, afterwards compared the Don’s “manner” to a Swedish singer she knew of, one Günther, having, she said, a similar kind of euro-trash party energy, complete with pout, open shirt and eye-liner! (on the strength of that, I think Middle C will keep her on……..)

Paul Whelan seemed luxury casting as the Commendatore, Donna Anna’s father, though I actually found him more effective in the “Stone Guest” Scene than here, where I thought his characterisation was, like so many I’ve seen in this opera, a tad too elderly and lacking in real energy in the fight (the ensemble also got a bit “out” necessitating some “catch-up” singing) – surely the Commendatore would be only in his forties and therefore still a dangerous adversary, hence Giovanni’s killing of him to save his own skin! The fight certainly didn’t take enough cues from the slashing, whirling music Mozart provided, though the Commendatore’s actual despatch, by both the Don and Leoporello with a knife, was convincing enough.

Donna Anna’s discovery of her father’s body gave Amelia Berry’s voice the chance to shine – both she and her fiancée, Don Ottavio (a vocally steadfast Oliver Sewell) characterised the confused jumble of emotions beautifully, moving, separately and together, from despair to tenderness to vengeful attack – though their interaction was more static in movement than I would have expected, things like the oath sworn together on the Commendatore’s sword gave the scene both great gravitas and high drama.

After Giovanni affably dismissed Leoporello’s “character references” of his master as of little consequence, the sudden ”scent of a woman” heralded the arrival on the scene of Donna Elvira and her maid (the latter a non-singing role). I couldn’t help but enjoy Amanda Atlas’s extremely gutsy (if in places squally) A Chi mi dice mai, as it captured the character’s agitated,  unfettered feelings, something which carried right through her exchanges for the rest of the evening with the hapless Don, who lost no time here in volunteering Leoporello as a source of further information for her before making himself scarce!

James Ioelu made the most of his opportunities with the notorious “Catalogue Aria”, in which Leoporello presents a list to Elvira of the Don’s female conquests – the most interesting reaction I’ve seen to this from any Elvira (not here) was one during which the latter ridiculed the “list”, thus consigning the activity’s significance to the realms of adolescent train-spotting, or teenaged autograph-collecting!  Here it began as something almost voyeuristic on Leoporello’s part, before burgeoning into the public realm with an enlarged version of the list lowered from above as a banner for all the world to “tut-tut” over, presumably accompanied by some local (though not recent!) conjecture and embarrassment on the part of certain individuals (including, perhaps, a pregnant young woman who appeared from nowhere straight afterwards and disappeared as quickly as she had come, amongst the others….. earlier Leoporello had gotten “carried away” with some mock-gratuitous characterisations  pertaining to “the tall ones” on the list (È la grande maestosa!), before being “snapped out of it” by Elvira in no uncertain terms!

Came the “peasant wedding” scene, and the chance for us to be introduced to the “common folk” couple Zerlina (Natasha Wilson), and Masetto (Joel Amosa), each endowed with engaging voices and winning stage presences, establishing their characters with great elan! I thought the Don’s laid-back manoeuverings regarding  Masetto didn’t sufficiently generate menace and tension between them to motivate the latter’s reaction as per his Ho capito, Signor si aria, though with his fiancée Zerlina, the sparks certainly flew, giving the couple’s subsequent reconciliation scenes plenty of dramatic (and in places suggestive) interest.

From that point, with the dramatis personae introduced, the story’s often vertiginous events whirled us along, with the Don entirely failing here to live up to his reputation as a seducer, being countered by the desperate actions of Donna Elvira (rescuing Zerlina from the seducer’s clutches and sparking off Donna Anna’s recognition of Giovanni as her would-be seducer at the opera’s beginning) and the eventual confrontation at the “Masker’s Ball” scene between the adversaries. The latter scene was, I thought, superbly staged by Sara Brodie’s creative team of Matthew Kereama, Meg Rollandi and Jo Kilgour, particularly its introduction, the sinister, “avenging angels” aspect of Elvira, Anna and the latter’s fiancée, Don Ottavio well-caught by their emergence from the street’s darkness, their appearance illumed from within by the loveliness of their singing at “Protegga il giusto cielo” – “May the just heavens protect us”, and their energies when denouncing Giovanni galvanising the latter into evasive action!

The Second Act afforded numerous delights – the spirited interaction between Giovanni and Leoporello at the beginning, Amanda Atlas’s touching, unforced  Ah taci, ingiusto core – “Ah, be quiet unjust heart”, and in response, Christian Thurston’s loveliest singing of the evening with Giovanni’s entreaty to Elvira, Discendi, o gioia bella – “Come down here, my lovely”, (Leoporello, disguised as the Don, amusingly “miming” the latter’s gesturings throughout). We then enjoyed the sequence involving Giovanni deceiving and then beating the unfortunate Masetto, leaving it to Zerlina to find her beset fiancée and comfort him with some age-old remedies, Natasha Wilson delightfully suggestive during her Vedrai, carino, se sei buonino, – “If you are good, my darling”. And the confusion generated by the trio of Anna, Elvira and Ottavio’s discovery of Leoporello disguised as the Don convincingly drove the action forward through the latter’s escape and to the welcome reflectiveness of Oliver Sewell’s (slightly shortened) Il mio Tesoro – “meanwhile, my treasure” (he had, as Ottavio, already contributed a lyrical, in places beautifully-floated first-Act Dalla sua pace – “Upon her peace of mind”), the second aria contrasting with Elvira’s impassioned Mi tradi quell’alma ingrata – “That ungrateful wretch betrayed me” soon after.

Of course, the overall focus of flight in the opera’s Second Act is towards the denoument of the Final Scene, though a “tipping-point” is the graveyard scene, where the Don, with a casual libidinous remark too many, activates his impending doom. I liked the eeriness of the opening scenario, strange lights and mist and statuesque figures, but wanted it to ambiently change in some way when the statue spoke. I could have imagined an even bigger and blacker voice, but as the statue Paul Whelan was much more in his element, though the impact of his “coming alive” was lessened for me through the figure being veiled, concealing both the moving lips and the nodding head. Then, allowing that scene’s culmination some stand-alone space, was the interim episode where Donna Anna again refused to marry Don Ottavio until a year had elapsed in the wake of her father’s death, Amelia Berry expressing the character’s angst and grief in beautifully fetching tones with Non mi dir, “Do not tell me” though like everybody else I’ve heard in this role, she had to work hard at the coloratura conclusion – what amazing singers Mozart must have had at his disposal to write for them like that!

So to one of opera’s greatest scenes, one which begins with what seem like more of the same from the Don, empty carousings and mindless debaucheries in the company of wrung-out revellers (the Don appearing to feast upon the “spent bodies” of his fellow-carousers as Leoporello helped himself to real food) when suddenly, with Donna Elvira’s scream came a rending asunder of the fabric of the work’s universe accompanied by a reckoning! Again, I thought the great orchestral chords (which we had heard in the Overture) missed an elemental quality, though Paul Whelan’s “Stone Guest” sounded suitably remorseless and sepulchral. As with so many assumptions I’ve seen of this role, I thought it just that bit too unrelievedly static in places to suggest the music’s inexorable advance – and while the hooded Goya-esque figure that bore down on and enfolded the Don at the end made an imposing impression I imagined it could have been altogether darker, even more sinister and elemental,  appearing to have been awakened from the void by the statue’s baleful summons.

However anticlimactic the epilogue after such a profound consignment of the guilty party to the nether regions, it did have the effect of returning the rest of us to our lives, laden with both a plethora of wind-born sound-memories and considerable food for thought. All in all, I’ve reflected since that for a new opera company to bring off such a production and performance first up was a stellar achievement due to committed effort by all concerned. The Wellington Opera Trust would, as well, have been heartened by the public response to this venture – may the company go from strength to strength after such a promising beginning!

 

 

Sleep-walking as Rhona Fraser’s Days Bay Opera returns with a delightful Bellini masterpiece

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Opera in a Days Bay Garden

La Sonnambula (Bellini)

Conductor: Mark Carter; producer and director: Rhona Fraser

Cast: Natasha Wilson (Lisa), Morgan-Andrew King (Alessio), Rhona Fraser (Teresa), Elizabeth Mandeno (Amina), Lila Crichton (Notary), Andrew Grenon (Elvino), James Ioelu (Count Rodolfo).
Chorus: Jemma Chester, Emily Yeap, Sinéad Keane, Olivia Stewart, Simon Hernyak, Samuel McKeever, Patrick Shanahan, Alica Carter

Canna House, Days Bay, Wellington

Friday 12 February, 5:30 pm

In common with most of the world, Bellini is no longer a famous composer in New Zealand; his operas are now rarely performed. Of Bellini’s operas only Norma gets much attention. I’m only aware of Canterbury Opera’s production of it in 2002, since its last professional production by a touring company in 1928.

However, in 2016 Rhona Fraser’s Opera in a Days Bay Garden was responsible for a somewhat rarer Bellini opera – the story that Shakespeare had used in Romeo and Juliet –I Capuleti e i Montecchi; which was staged by Auckland Studio Opera in 2018.

After two productions in 2017 – Handel’s Theodora and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin – Rhona and her husband have been away for two years, in Germany. They returned last year and Rhona seems determined to resume the professional production of interesting operas. Her enterprise has been very missed.

Hers is just one of the small opera groups around the country which, very unevenly, offer opportunities for the public to discover opera and for advanced, mainly young singers, to gain first-class experience. None of these small companies, some, like Days Bay, fully professional, has attracted financial or other significant help from central or local government and few have lasted more than a couple of years.

If anything, there is less amateur or small-scale professional opera in New Zealand than there was 20 years ago, when, for example, both the Victoria University School of Music and the then Wellington Polytechnic Conservatorium produced an opera every year; now Victoria alone produces an opera every other year.

La sonnambula’s history 
Now, Days Bay Opera has brought one of Bellini’s most popular operas, La sonnambula, back to life, though this time, Auckland Opera Studio has been first with it, in 2011, The last previous production was in 1881. More interesting still is the fact that Sonnambula was just the second opera, after Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment, to be performed in New Zealand: in 1862. Adrienne Simpson’s splendid history of opera in New Zealand (Opera’s farthest Frontier) records these and a couple of now forgotten English operas in the amateurish English Opera Troupe’s historic productions in the make-shift Royal Princess Theatre in Dunedin.

And the book records that in 1863 the company brought Sonnambula to Wellington: absolutely the first opera in Wellington.

Fine, warm weather offered a delightful environment for the first (and the other two) performances on the lawn below the house and narrow terraces on which the audience sat, The tree-filled garden surrounded by beech forest create what might be the most unique opera setting in the world.

The opera’s staging, created by Rhona Fraser, was contemporary, with a limited number of seats and other props, and with costumes that spoke more of the attitudes and situations of the characters than of their period. The orchestra comprised thirteen players, led by Anne Loeser and conducted by Mark Carter, was somewhat behind and to the left of the audienec; inevitably, it was  bit remote for some of the audience.

During the brief prelude an ill-tempered Lisa (Natasha Wilson) is tidying and cleaning impatiently, though her vivid singing and acting showed a more charming character. But that was not in relation to any member of the chorus; especially, she flaunted contempt for the heedless Alessio, rich-voiced baritone Morgan-Andrew King, who gained attention at the recent Whanganui Opera School. She rejects his love: any qualms about his beard or rude appearance must be set aside in our age of unorthodoxy.

The coming marriage between Amina and Elvino is heralded by the arrival of the Notary (the impressive Samoan bass Lila Crichton).

The opera really took off with the arrival of Amina (Elizabeth Mandeno), and her first big aria, “Come per me sereno” and the cabaletta “Sovra il sen la man” rejoicing in her expected marriage to Elvino. His voice, with his moving greeting “Perdona, o mia diletta”, picking up later with “Prendi: a’nel ti dono”, was agreeable though his demeanour might have fallen short of his propertied standing; however, he portrayed a credibly decent chap. Though one might wonder, as the story evolves, how someone so improbably sensitive could have gained his reputation in the village.

Rodolfo, the Count (James Ioelu), arrives, presenting an imposing demeanour and vocal confidence, all the signs of small-time nobility which he shows through fundamental decency.

The ensemble of villagers has its significant role throughout. In an interesting later episode the villagers in an effective evocation tell Rodolfo of the phantom that locals see at midnight, “Udite, a fosca cielo”,

Elvino and misplaced jealousy
Scene I of Act I ends with Elvino, prompted by the Count making flattering gestures to Amina, confessing to Amina his uncontrollable jealousy, his “Son geloso del zefiro errante” was a curious revelation.

Even though Amina convinces Elvino that his jealousy is misplaced and peace reigns, in scene ii she sleep-walks into Rodolfo’s room at Lisa’s inn (here an AirBNB), and there’s a tentative attraction between them. Amina’s entry, sleep-walking, changes everything; she sees Rodolfo as Elvino and throws herself at him but he gets out before Elvino and the villagers arrive. However, there is Amina, now in Rodolfo’s bed, and no sleep-walking excuse (they’ve never heard of somnambulism) persuades any of the villagers that things are different from what they seem.

It was a splendid scene. Even if suspended at a very high level of improbability and absurdity, it was both dramatic and funny. Throughout, Amina’s foster-mother Teresa (Rhona Fraser), exhibiting calm sanity and in excellent voice in all her several episodes, remains faithful to her, even, one supposes, if Amina were guilty.

At the beginning of the second scene of Act II, Natasha Wilson, as Lisa, plays a vividly stylish part, now seeing herself as the likely winner, able to capture Elvino for herself, and her short, tight white dress illuminated her expectations; she adorns it with a white veil.

The suspense, awaiting Rodolfo’s explanation to the villagers and specifically to Elvino about the nature of somnambulism is protracted. It’s clinched by Amina’s walking along a riskless board between rows of audience (instead of on a fragile plank above the mill-wheels on the river).   The last scene eventually brings an understanding of “sleep-walking” and Amina’s singing at the end is plaintive and moving.

Though sung in Italian, the notes in the programme were sufficient for those new to the work to understand – in any case, the Italian from all singers was admirably clear. Accepting the limitations fundamental to the out-doors setting and various sound and production constraints, the entire performance was admirable and completely enjoyable. Rhona Fraser is warmly welcome back in New Zealand.

If you missed this one, don’t hesitate to book early for the next.

For the record, these are the operas Days Bay has produced so far:

2010   The Marriage of Figaro
2010   The Journey to Rheims  (Rossini)
2012   Alcina (Handel)
2012   Maria Stuarda  (Donizetti)
2013   Cosi fan tutte
2013   L’oca del Cairo (Mozart)
2014   Der Rosenkavalier
2015   Calisto (Cavalli)
2016   Agrippina (Handel)
2016   I Capuleti e i Montecchi (Bellini)
2017   Theodora (Handel)
2017   Eugene Onegin
2021   La sonnambula

Camus’s La Peste … our Covid-19 … the sterility of opera … and …

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Camus’s novel La Peste: the production in Oran, Algeria, of Gluck’s Orphée. A metaphor for the static, morbid condition of opera … and of our civilisation?

I subscribe to Opera News, the magazine published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild, New York. It is the United States’ principal opera magazine.

The August 2020 issue is, unsurprisingly, short on articles on forthcoming operas and reviews of new productions across the States and elsewhere. But there is a number of articles on people and issues connected with opera which make the current issue a very good read.

One of the unusually interesting articles, inspired in various ways by the pandemic, is by David J Baker.

Here is the article:

‘It may surprise people to learn that Albert Camus once wrote about opera – in his definitive novel about a twentieth century epidemic. La Peste (The Plague) includes a bizarre, disturbing scene in an opera house. Seventy-five years after its publication, the novel can still speak to us about such a plague, and even more about opera.

‘Yet Camus describes a very different epidemic from ours. Social distancing, let alone the use of masks or a shut-down of stores and other public places, is never mentioned or practised in the novel; instead, the Algerian city of Oran, where the novel takes place, is ‘distanced’ – cut off entirely from the outside world for almost a year.

‘A touring opera troupe, trapped in Oran by the quarantine, has decided to continue to perform Gluck’s Orphée, which makes up its entire touring repertoire. They have presented it every Friday evening for the duration of the plague. The opera is always the same; yet the house is sold out each time. Like the overcrowded restaurants, bars and cinemas described in the novel – such a contrast to our recently vacant cities – the plague city’s municipal opera house has helped to satisfy the citizens craze for distraction from the mortal threat they face.

‘An anomaly in Camus’s plague is that people are satisfied with watching, over and over again, the same film or play or opera, because no new material is coming into the city. In Camus’s hands, this restricted repertoire, and audiences’ acceptance of it, becomes an especially apt way to typify one effect of the epidemic – limited choices, repetitive behaviour, numbing distractions, the sense, familiar today as well, of living on a treadmill, in a closed circle.

‘But why select Gluck’s Orphée as the one opera played weekly throughout the long months of the Oran plague? Orpheus is one of the most symbolic of all mythological figures: in Western aesthetics and consciousness; he epitomises the power of art (specifically music), a power stronger than death. In operas by Monteverdi, Gluck and others, his lyre and his voice work the miracle of rescuing his wife from Hades – from death itself.

‘Attending one of Oran’s weekly performances, Jean Tarrou (one of the narrators) is intrigued by the posh audience as couples begin to file in ostentatiously, well-dressed, mingling and clearly regaining some of their habitual (pre-plague) assurance. During the performance, Tarrou begins to notice something unusual on stage. The Act I ‘ariettes’, we are told, are sing by principals and chorus with “facility” and “grace”. Then, almost imperceptibly, the Orphée (a male singer, as was traditionally more common with French performances) “inserted tremolos” that were not part of his Act II aria and, “with a slight excess of pathos, beseeched the master of Hell to heed his pleas. Certain jerky gestures escaping him seemed, to the more savvy spectators, a stylistic effect that added appreciably to the singer’s interpretation”.

‘Only during the duet in Act III, “the point where Eurydice escaped Orphée” does the audience begin to react. And, “as if these noises from the audience confirmed the singer in what he was feeling, at the moment he advanced to the footlights, Grotesquely, stretching his arms and legs in his antiquarian costume, and collapsed,” overturning scenery in his fall. The orchestra falls silent, and the audience begins to leave the theatre “at first discreetly (as they would leave a church, or a funeral) and then in a desperate, disorderly rush”.

‘The narrator and his companion are left alone, confronted with an image “of what their life had become: the plague onstage in the form of a contorted tragedian and, in the hall, signs of luxury now useless … forgotten opera glasses, and lace garments discarded against the crimson upholstered seats”. Art – like its more frivolous accessories among the elite audience – falls prey to the ravages of the epidemic.

‘Opera audiences in 2020 are being spared such dreadful scenes, thanks to the precautions taken during “our” pandemic. We are also deprived of live opera altogether. How significant is this aesthetic and social loss in the greater scheme of the pandemic? Should we complain about the plight of the opera world when we appreciate the mortal risk of the coronavirus – which, in a small distortion of a word used by Sartre and Camus, we can call an “existential threat”?

‘At the end, when normal life returns, one minor character says: “What does the plague really matter? It’s life, that’s all”. Afflicted for years with tuberculosis, and starting this novel during the war, Camus saw life as struggle and resistance, a response to our “absurd” condition. In a less momentous sense, this philosopher, novelist and playwright may have seen opera, too, as not without absurdity. Perhaps, in presenting a company and a theatre with a repertoire of just one opera, he was presciently suggesting one of the weaknesses of this art form as it is practised  and marketed today; the opera scene in La peste could be taken as parody, as a metaphor for opera’s basically fixed, unchanging repertoire. Few new works keep the repertoire alive and growing; what we see on stage, as in Camus’s scene, is a form of death.

‘When the curtain goes up again – on our cities, and in our opera houses – we can hope that it’s not just a return to business as usual. Our pandemic has brought painful reminders of social disparities, prompting calls for reform. What remains to be seen is how our plague will affect arts institutions. Will we return to the opera marketplace as Camus depicted it so starkly, in his exaggerated dramatization – as a shrinking repertoire, a moribund institution, a privilege for the few?’

The author is identified thus: David J Baker, whose translations of the Camus excerpts appear here, taught La Peste and other novels to undergraduates while preparing his PhD in French.

Opera News is a relatively low-priced opera magazine. New Zealanders can subscribe for US$69.99 per annum, for 12 issues. It was the price that first attracted me about 30 years ago and I have been a subscriber ever since.
Opera News has for many years been much more than simply a newsletter for well-healed ‘Friends’; it offers a fair view of the surprising extent of opera in the United States and Canada (there are about 150 professional opera companies, members of Opera America), as well as some news and reviews from elsewhere.

Apart from the injury currently being inflicted on the performing arts world-wide, opera is flourishing in terms of the numbers of opera companies. The wretched condition of opera in New Zealand is not typical of its extent elsewhere. 

Lindis Taylor

The composer of Kopernikus, Claude Vivier: interview with conductor Vladimir Jurowski

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Why Quebec composer Claude Vivier was ahead of his time

In the absence of real concerts that Middle C can review, why not publish things of musical interest that might in small part make up for the deprivations we all suffer at present? 

Here is an article that appeared in 2018 in the Montreal Globe and Mail that might interest those who saw Claude Vivier’s opera, Kopernikus, at the recent festival in Wellington. I came across a reference to Vivier in the French magazine, Opéra Magazine: a concert performance of Vivier’s Hiérophanie, scheduled for performance at the Paris Philharmonie (the city’s brilliant new concert hall) in September last.

See Middle C review at https://middle-c.org/2020/03/festival-stages-remarkable-eccentric-opera-by-canadian-claude-vivier/)

In seeking information about Hiérophanie, I found this interview/article. 

Article by Catherine Kustanczy

Special to The Globe and Mail

Published April 13, 2018

This article was published more than 1 year ago. Some information in it may no longer be current.

Many things can be said about the music of Claude Vivier, but one thing is certain: No one who hears it is quite the same afterward. Vivier, who would have turned 70 on April 14th, is a unique figure in music. Orphaned as a baby, he attended Catholic boarding school and later the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal, before studying composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne. A boisterous figure known for his distinct laugh and an omnipresent sheepskin coat, Vivier’s works, largely biographical, were, as British musicologist Bob Gilmore has written, a way of “confronting loneliness, darkness, terror; of negotiating a relationship with God; of voicing an insatiable longing for acceptance and for love.”

His music combines voice, rhythm and instrumental textures, in French, German, and even imaginary languages. Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (Do you believe in the immortality of the soul), his final, unfinished work, concerns a narrator (named Claude) meeting a young man and being fatally stabbed; Vivier would perish in this exact way on March 8, 1983.

An interview with conductor Vladimir Jurowski: his views about Vivier

There have been numerous tributes to Vivier over the past year, with Canadian outlets Soundstreams, Against the Grain Theatre and Esprit Orchestra (the latter being long-time supporters) presenting work. But if the old Canadian trope holds true about foreign recognition being a litmus test for success, then Vivier passes, with flying colors.

One notable tribute unfolded in Berlin in late February. Presented by contemporary classical group ensemble unitedberlin (who have previously explored Vivier’s work), the concert saw Russian conductor and artistic adviser Vladimir Jurowski exercising his music talents and theatrical instincts with equal zeal, particularly during Hiérophanie (1970-71), in which he played a stern priest/judge, directing members of the ensemble through shouts, shuffles and prostrations, in a performance faithful to Vivier’s animated instructions.

Days later, Jurowski led the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester (Radio Symphony Orchestra) Berlin, where he is chief conductor and artistic director, in a harrowing performance of works by Berg, Shostakovich and contemporary Australian composer Brett Dean, whose operatic adaptation of Hamlet was given its world premiere at the Glyndebourne opera festival last summer, with Jurowski on the podium.

As well as being principal conductor of the London Philharmonic, he holds a directorship in Moscow and keeps a busy schedule of dates across Europe. Building creative programs, especially ones featuring 20th-century work, is his specialty, and in the case of Vivier, he notes that “the further away we’re getting from him physically, the more important he becomes spiritually and artistically.”

In 2021, Jurowski begins duties as general music director of the Bavarian State Opera and has indicated that Munich audiences can anticipate lesser-known works alongside opera hits. Will that include Vivier’s 1980 opera Kopernikus? Only Jurowski knows for sure.

Why Vivier in 2018?

He was, in many ways, ahead of his time, and he was beyond time and space. Some people who were very much in their time, like [Karlheinz] Stockhausen or [Pierre] Boulez, made their time, made it an epoch – an era – and in some of their aspects, remain timeless, but in other aspects sound extremely dated. For instance, Stockhausen, who Vivier studied with, a lot of his work sounds incredibly dated today. Vivier, because he was creating his style from scratch, precreated something which came into full effect only after he departed. So now, of course, we can only imagine what he could have developed had he lived any longer.

When did you first hear the work of Vivier?

My personal route was via [French composer] Gérard Grisey . I discovered his last piece, which he also tragically left unfinished, because he died – Four Songs for Crossing the Threshold – and that piece was, in its initial stages, connected to Vivier’s death. So Grisey was trying to pay tribute to his friend, and they were near-contemporaries. I somehow instinctively felt that in the case of Vivier, we have one of those rare, highly romantic cases where the life of a composer and the work of a composer become one thing. In my head, Vivier is sitting up there with people like Gustav Mahler and Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Franz Schubert, those people for whom an artistic expression became an existentialist act which could be life-changing, life-saving or life-annihilating. So without having any facts at hand to prove the case, I am convinced, more than I am convinced about anything else, that Vivier had initiated and planned and nearly, could say, staged, his departure.

You think so?

I’m convinced. Having composed this imaginary death, he felt he had to oblige his own artistic imagination, and go. It’s like one of the traditional Japanese beliefs, that if you cannot change the world and strongly dislike it, you’re supposed to leave the world to its karma and leave. For someone like Vivier, who’d been strongly connected to all sorts of Oriental spiritual beliefs and practices, that was the most natural thing to do. The unnatural aspect of course is the form of death.

So his passing was his final artistic act?

That’s exactly what I feel about it.

What’s it been like to be so involved with a work that demands more as a conductor?

I think that’s to do with me generally being some kind of, I call it bat syndrome, a bat in the sense of it being an animal which has left the world of mammals but hasn’t quite reached the world of birds. I am flying between the worlds.

So you don’t want to be a traditional conductor?

No, it’s boring. There’s a whole new generation, people like Teodor Currentzis – he also goes over borders stylistically – we are very different, but still I think it’s a genuine interest for not just one direction in the music. For me, the predominant points of my artistic being are symphonic music, early music, contemporary music and music theatre. And sometimes I’m even allowed to combine all of them in one.

 

NZ Opera’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King” a brilliant, Janus-faced experience

Posted on by Peter Mechen

NZ Opera presents
EIGHT SONGS FOR A MAD KING

Music by Peter Maxwell Davies
Texts by Randolph Stow and George III

The King: Robert Tucker

The Musicians: Stroma New Music Ensemble
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Rachel Fuller (keyboard/s)
Luca Manghi (flute)
Mark Cookson/Patrick Barry (clarinets)
Yuka Eguchi (violin)
Heather Lewis/Robert Ibell (‘cellos)
Jeremy Fitzsimons (percussion)

Director – Thomas de Mallet Burgess
Production Designer – Robin Rawstorne
Assistant Conductor – Timothy Carpenter
Repetiteur – Rachel Fuller

RNZB Dance Centre, Wellington

Monday 2nd March 2020

Firstly, some background for the curious – the “King” of this concert’s title is King George III of England, who suffered from mental illness throughout his adult life, eventually being removed from his throne and kept under lock and key in Windsor Castle. Over his final decade he lost his eyesight and hearing, and fell prey to frequent manic episodes, by all accounts babbling endlessly as he slid into dementia, and eventually dying in 1820 at the age of eighty-one. The King owned a number of caged bullfinches, and during his confinement became obsessed with teaching his birds how to sing tunes played by a mechanical organ or music-box. This instrument, along with a note identifying its provenance as owned and used by the unfortunate Monarch, came to the notice, almost two hundred years afterwards, of Australian author and poet Randolph Stow, who was inspired to create a series of poems, parts of which were drawn from recollections of witnesses to the King’s outpourings, and directly illustrated his pitiable condition. British avant-garde composer Peter Maxwell Davies set these poems to music, writing with the vocal talents of one Roy Hart in mind, a virtuoso South African singer who had become interested in exploring the range and limits of the human voice.

At the time of the work’s premiere, in April 1969, Davies fully expected “Eight Songs” to remain a “one-off” for Hart, never imagining anybody else being able or even wanting to perform the piece. He was therefore surprised and delighted at how the work soon took on a life of its own, becoming a classic example of a new “music-theatre” genre, which redeployed (and often subverted) existing performance conventions. Davies himself recorded the work with his own virtuoso avant-garde music-group, “The Fires of London”, though sadly for posterity, not with Roy Hart, the creator of the  role – fortunately the soloist on the 1971 Unicorn recording, Julius Eastman, was a worthy successor.

In his notes accompanying the recording, the composer stated that his intention was “to leave open the question – is the persecuted protagonist “Mad George III” or someone who thinks he is George?”. Naturally the work will forever be associated with the monarch in question, given that the song texts contain numerous actual quotations of the King’s words – the novelist Frances (Fanny) Burney was Queen Charlotte’s lady-in-waiting for five years, and during that time she recorded both events and utterances in which the King was central (as an example, the whole of the text of the sixth song, “The Counterfeit” is transcribed by Randolph Stow from Burney’s diary). But the suggestion that the character of the King might also represent any such deluded individual straightaway lifts the work out of its singular and historical confines and into the realm of general human experience, of which mental illness seems in our time to be an increasingly common affliction. Davies reminded us in his notes that until relatively recent times, “madness” was something to ridicule, and in more severe cases isolate, often in the most inhumane and nightmarish conditions; and while treatments and care-environments are nowadays less primitive, the stresses and inbalances that, if ignored, can lead to mental illness are still very much with us.

New Zealand Opera’s innovative production of the work gives audiences not one but two separate and different views of the terrain in all senses of the word – the mindscape of an extremely disturbed individual, firstly (as happened in my particular case) from the “outside” 0f the performance space, visible from the outside through windows, and audible by means of headsets for each audience member. So, first time round, we were seated in the open air, cannily underneath a tarpaulin in a space next to the building in which the opera was being performed – and through the windows we could glimpse the singer performing his on-stage peregrinations, and via the excellent headphones we clearly heard his cocktail mix of song, sprechgesang and random, wide-ranging vocalisings, along with the constant instrumental collaborations from the ensemble – the whole thing was an “outsider’s view”, a process that was observed, but without direct involvement, something that one could easily distance oneself from at a moment’s notice if one felt so inclined.

What a difference after one was ushered inside for the second performance (each took about thirty minutes), to sit right next to the stage (which was a kind of “catwalk” extending the whole width of the audience-space, and with seating on both sides)! Here, we straightaway felt “drawn in” by the immediacies, the sometimes startling proximities , and the “sharing-the-space” phenomenon that can make great theatre (and music-making, of course!). Singer Robert Tucker, looking none the worse for wear after having already given one performance of the piece appeared in close-up somewhat disconcertingly (a) youthful, and (b) dapper, not quite in accordance with my preconceived “image” of a deranged George III, but nevertheless exuding a kind of “authority” from the outset, entering quietly but portentously, and sitting at one end of the catwalk activating a “Newton’s Cradle”, waiting for the first of the instrumental explosions whose force and violence punctuate the music-drama.

In some performances the instrumentalists are positioned in separate giant birdcages, each player representing one of the King’s bullfinches he attempted to teach to sing – here the players weren’t thus confined, but sat as an ensemble at one end of the platform, the singer alternating his attentions between them, his audience(s) and wherever his mind’s fancy took him. And the “double audience” added a dimension to the singer’s confusions, his awareness of interiors and exteriors pathetically expressed amidst his tirades by glances through the windows at an “outside world”. Despite the close physical proximities, the venue’s largely empty spaces behind where we sat and its ample acoustic seemed to me to underline the essential solitude of the King’s existence. His interactions with his musicians and the audience, despite their sometimes startlingly visceral nature seemed all fantasy. “I am weary of this fate – I am alone” sang the character at the conclusion of one of the songs.

The performance in every way was astonishing – Robert Tucker as the King “owned” his character in a way that explored a gamut of human emotion, engaging our sympathies at his “plight” as readily as activating our discomfiture with his volatility. The demands of the role pushed the concept of “singing” into realms of expression which transcended the idea of the voice as a musical instrument as we might generally accept it through what the composer aptly termed “terrifying virtuosity”. But in appearing not as any kind of caricatured asylum-bound lunatic, whose tirades were neither extreme, nor “onslaught-like” as were some of the performers in the role I’ve witnessed on film, Tucker’s delineation of the character always seemed intensely human, in places touchingly bringing out the tendernesses of some of his utterances (as observed by Fanny Burney in her diary), if at times squeamish-inducing (as throughout his “close-up-and-personal” interactions with a hapless flutist, during “The Lady-in-Waiting”, brilliantly carried off by both singer and player). His anger, too, spectacularly vented at one infamous moment in the piece, mirrored a kind of reality of frustration, an impulse in tragic accord with human behaviour gone awry. This “one-of-us” aspect suggested  by the production brought home , to my mind, the “for whom the bell tolls” aspect of our human existence, so that our “relief” at the King’s eventual departure was singed with spots of pity and sorrow and even horror at the finality of the concluding percussive juggernaut, which consigned his heart-rending cries to oblivion.

Conductor Hamish McKeich led the Stroma Ensemble unerringly through a veritable thicket of coruscations, appearing to never miss a beat, shirk an uproar, or delineate a disorder! – and in parallel to these subversions the players sounded the lyrical moments, the dance-tunes and the whimsical parodies (a gorgeous two-step take-off of Handel’s music at one point) with delicious elan, as well as bringing to bear their array of bird-song devices in a veritable “chaos of delight” (alas, Charles Darwin’s words, not mine!). The accordance of theatrical movement with the music was exemplary throughout, the jaunty introduction to “To be sung on the Water” followed by beautiful ‘cello solos evoking a boat-ride down the river, one of a number of enduring memories of the performance.

Director Thomas de Mallet Burgess would have been well-pleased with both the powerful overall impact and the finely-crafted detailed focus his musicians brought to this production. Its dual-performance aspect gives it a singular kind of appeal, no matter in what order one experiences the “outside/inside” presentation, be it a savouring of expectation beforehand, or food for thought afterwards! – It plays again tonight (Wednesday 4th March) at 8:30pm, and then at the same time on both the 5th and 7th later this week at the RNZB Dance Centre next to the MFC in Wakefield St., Wellington.

 

 

 

 

Festival stages remarkable, eccentric opera by Canadian, Claude Vivier

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

New Zealand Festival of the Arts
Kopernikus: Opéra – rituel de mort by Claude Vivier

Directed by Peter Sellars and curated by Lemi Ponifasio
Singers: Roomful of Teeth
Instrumentalists: Ensemble l’instant donné

Opera House, Wellington

Sunday 1 March, 7 pm

It hasn’t been hard to have missed references in the international musical press to a very unusual opera by an unorthodox, fairly obscure composer.

Think again if you imagined you would be presented with a kind of operatic biography of the great astronomer, for he is merely one of a number of disparate historical and fictional figures that feature in Canadian composer Claude Vivier’s work. A work that that is dominated by the contemplation of death, subtitled: the Ritual of Death.

It was composed in 1978/79 and premiered on 9 May 1980 at the University of Montreal where it has had several subsequent productions. Vivier was killed, apparently in a homosexual encounter in Paris in 1983.

Peter Sellars directed its first United States production in 2016 at the Ojay Music Festival in California, in the production that has since been seen in various places including Bilbao, New York, Paris … and finally in Wellington. The work seems not to have been much revived, if at all, through the 1990s apart from in Canada, but has more recently seen several productions, which I enlarge on in an Appendix. One of the co-production names, apart from the Paris Autumn Festival at the Théâtre de la ville, is the KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, in Hanover.

The richest variety of reactions have emerged from critics and the general audience, about Kopernikus. It’s been described as a transition from life to death, transcendental, mystical, disorientating, atmospheric, ethereally beautiful, immersive, stirring, mesmerizing, evocative.

Were he alive, Vivier would claim that complaints about the obscurity and the disorientating impact of the work miss the point. It is not perhaps incoherent; but to take a sympathetic view of it, very unusual in its context, its style and language. Its subject matter which can be felt as philosophically and intellectually pretentious, suggest the sort of creation that a gifted undergraduate might produce to show a wide-ranging though recent familiarity with disparate eras and aspects of philosophical, religious notions; a juxtaposition of science, orthodox philosophical ideas laced with varieties of mysticism such as in the role of Agni, the Vedic god of fire.

The words and the music 
One unusual, though plain element arises with Copernicus whose then-revolutionary findings about the movement of the planets and the sun is delivered in normal speech. Vivier suggests that “as he transformed understanding of the universe, death changes our understanding of our lives”.

Similarly pertinent, are later brief references to major philosophers, from Thales and Plato, through Averroes in the 12th century, to Copernicus himself.

We are not confronted however, by music that is problematic. There is nothing wildly dissonant and incoherent such as was favoured by the avant-garde through the latter years of the century. The character of the vocal and instrumental music is unusual, original, even bizarre, yet it has an emotional impact that marks it as genuinely imaginative. It arouses curiosity and much of it can be listened to with simple pleasure. Harmonies are usually conventional though employed in strange ways.

One review from Canada described it as ‘…a surreal experience for the audience’. And continued: ‘The work’s intimate power, manifest weirdness, sublimely sonic harmonies, meditative incandescence and above all, ritualistic remembrance of all universes past and future’.
Yes.

The ‘staging’ was a curious matter; need it really have been in an opera house? For it didn’t use the pit, and the disposition of players and singers was simply functional, influenced by whoever was performing from time to time. Players mingled with singers, and they all moved about, not in a way that suggested a plot or actual events, but simply to position themselves for their next individual offering. That casualness contributed to the agreeable impression that the entire performance generated.

And there’s a dead man lying on a slab in the centre of the stage; at one point he is spoken to directly, “Eternity comes to speak to us and we must listen; sublime revelation is the voice of time…”    He rises miraculously at the beginning of the second part. It wasn’t clear to me whether he then took a particular part or even spoke or sang at all.

Singers and instrumentalists
Both singers and instrumentalists have worked with Sellars elsewhere. All are dressed in white and are together on a partially raised stage with no sets other than chairs and a bed on which a dead man lies.

The seven singers, Roomful of Teeth, cover the full range from coloratura soprano to bass; they each have conspicuous roles and displayed remarkable sympathy with the music, both its coherence and its incoherence. For the most part they sing individually, but there are occasional ensembles that reveal interesting, engaging harmonies, which might technically be dissonances, but they are so beautifully used that they are heard as good examples of intelligent dissonance with genuine artistic purpose. The singers take roles: Copernicus himself and his mother, Lewis Carroll, Merlin, a witch, Mozart and the Queen of the Night, Tristan and Isolde, and a central character: Agni. But the programme notes spell out a great number of subsidiary roles taken by each singer, drawn from Vivier.

Much of the singing is in Vivier’s made-up language and most of the rest is in French and surtitles covered the latter. But it was rarely possible in a single hearing, to identify singers of individual roles, nor is there a story line to create any semblance of a normal opera.

The seven orchestral players the Ensemble l’instant donné comprise a violin, 3 clarinets – – one doubled on a bass clarinet, an oboe, trumpet – not usually visible, and trombone, and there’s a collection of percussion. It was a lively, always energising performance by these seven musicians, conspiring brilliantly with the singers throughout.

Also included in a well balanced programme book, is an excellent, short essay by Clarissa Dunn (of ‘Concert FM’, at least for the moment).

A New York Times review commented: “The best Vivier performances capture his delirious, jewelled grandeur but also his modesty — the earnest intensity of his desire to communicate, even through nonsense syllables.”

 

Appendix
Earlier productions
After its initial performances in Montreal it has been revived there in 1985, 1986, 1988 and 1989; in London in 1985 at the Almeida Festival, in Paris in 1989, and in Vancouver in 1990.

It’s remarkable that it had taken 41 years for it to be heard in New York, and 38 years for the United States generally (at the Ojai Music Festival in California in 2016); but does that say something about relations between the US and Canada, and even more with Quebec: not least about the cultural condition of a country where opera, and classical music generally, are in the hands of the private sector rather than of enlightened state institutions.

It’s fared better in Europe. In Amsterdam in 2014; in 2018 it was performed in the Théâtre du Capitole in Toulouse; at the Staatsoper unter den Linden in Berlin, in January 2019. And as remarked above, this production was shared with KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, in Hanover. While it’s now, perhaps as a result of its espousal by a director as famous as Sellars, being seen more widely, it has clearly not been eagerly taken up by any of the major opera houses. Its first appearance in New York, last year, was at a minor Brooklyn theatre, the production have been premiered in a planetarium in Buenos Aires; in Paris it was at the normally non-music Théâtre de la ville, which is opposite the major operatic, Châtelet theatre.

A review of a 2001 performance in Montreal in London’s Opera magazine commented that Kopernikus had become Canada’s most frequently performed opera. And it remarked that the performance seen in Montreal came at the end of a cross-country run of performances by Toronto’s Autumn Leaf Productions.

It was that production that ran in Huddersfield in 2000, and was reviewed by Opera magazine’s editor John Allison in February 2001. His very measured review included this observation: “It could easily irritate even the mildest of sceptics, and the compelling grip of this performance was thanks in part to the simple and poetic staging by the Toronto-based Autumn Leaf Performance company”.

It was the simplicity and unpretentiousness of the Sellars’ production in Wellington that moderated the degree of scepticism that I too felt about the ‘story’ aspect of the work.

And I found myself somewhat, by no means entirely, in sympathy with critic Robert Markow’s remark in Opera magazine about the Toronto performance:
“Kopernikus is rich in potential, yet the opera is maddeningly unfulfilling. Beyond the score’s obviously imaginative and original instrumental sound-world, a giant leap of faith is required to connect with Vivier’s autobiographical display of self-indulgence masquerading as a universal initiation myth.”

And I do not share a peremptory dismissal such as this: “Yet within three minutes of the 70-minute ‘opera-ritual of death’, it was evident that Mr. Vivier’s inspiration came from a senseless jumble of eclectic paraphernalia.”

By the way, the name has become an EU issue. There has been a move to change the spelling of the name to the German version, which is as spelt in Vivier’s opera (though in French it’s Copernic). Poland has protested; it is Kopernik in Polish. Copernicus was born Torun which is now in Poland but which over the centuries has been in either Poland or Prussia. One Polish authority has recommended a compromise using the Latin spelling which is Copernicus, which if course has long been the international name.

 

Barbara Paterson’s moving operatic portrayal of love in crisis in Poulenc’s monodrama

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

The Human Voice (La voix humaine) by Françis Poulenc based on the play by Jean Cocteau. Translated by Johana Arnold and Barbara Paterson

Barbara Paterson (soprano) with Gabriela Glapska (piano)
Tabitha Arthur – director; Meredith Dooley – costumier; Isadora Lao – lighting designer and operator

Gallery of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, Queen’s Wharf

Friday 27 February 6 pm

My colleague Peter Mechen reviewed what might have been considered the preview performance of Poulenc’s monodrama La voix humaine, on 31 January.

But being a huge fan of Poulenc I felt that Paterson’s performance in the Festival itself deserved attention.

La voix humaine is one of the most remarkable operatic pieces: not merely of the 20th century; not merely on account of the music which is a tremblingly vivid evocation of Elle’s mental fragility; but also in the way it deals so illuminatingly with her behaviour, her dependence on and interaction with a lover who has evidently decided to quit.

Sometimes the substitution of an orchestra by a piano seems to be a serious loss, with its more limited ability to interpret emotions and to provide rewarding support. Here the piano, with the shrill ringing of the telephone right at the beginning, hurled us straight into her emotional turmoil; it seemed just as chilling as the original score’s xylophone.

In addition, I am usually a strong advocate for the use of the original language in song and opera, but here, the singer’s total immersion in Elle’s mind and emotional state overcame any such feelings, even any feeling that English was not the original language. Johana Arnold’s translation was a perfect fit, though I couldn’t prevent a certain curiosity about how a performance in French might have intensified the impact in certain ways. (I have heard it, not live I think, in the original).

The performance opened with what sounded like a rifle shot: I wasn’t sure whether it was an external coincidence or a hint of the ultimate possibility of suicide.

The phone rings chillingly on the piano, and she picks it up but there’s no connection; it rings again, but now it’s a call for someone else, and there are several further rings before finally, it’s her lover. And now Paterson’s virtuosic performance immediately finds expression for her desperation and panic, alternating with attempts to sound rational, with the knowledge or at least fear that he wants to break it up, or even that he has done that.

Not all words were clear, smothered often by her uncontrolled outbursts, but her condition and her behaviour remained so conspicuous to the audience that we didn’t need to catch every word.

She grasps at straws: “You are so sweet … I am calm!” And the piano comments on or reveals the constant, overwhelming state of despair and grief that the break-up inflicts on her. It’s common to remark on the fact that an orchestral or other accompaniment is playing a major role in the drama, but there have been few occasions when I’ve felt as strongly about the vital role of the piano as I did here.

The telephone’s role
The drama continues with a succession of broken connections, whether by her former lover or through an operator’s mistake, we don’t know. The telephone itself and the omnipresent operator are significant players. I can remember in my childhood the sometimes obtrusive operator and the common ‘party line’ (my family had one), shared with three or four other subscribers, all of which the operator could listen to: the operator was thus privy to most of the scandal in the community. But this was a dimension that was not likely to have been in Poulenc’s mind, when local calls were not monitored by the operator, though Cocteau’s original play was written in 1928, 30 years before Poulenc’s setting.

Often it’s intentionally unclear whether the ‘disconnection’ is by the operator or the lover or whether it’s just something in Elle’s mind that brings about panic, a scream or mad laugh.

Paterson’s repertory of voices and screams allowed what was an overwhelming emotional condition to express to her lover her attempts to appear rational and in control, but exposing herself with the almost terrifying laugh, half-way to wild panic.

About half-way, she uttered a particularly wild scream, quickly suppressed, which led to one of the few beautiful lyrical episodes.

Gabriela Glapska’s piano was almost always the perfect partner, but very occasionally it became so passionately involved that it almost got in the way. Though that could well be attributed to the fact that the piano, like the telephone itself, was an important player.

Patterson’s performance was so comprehensively satisfying, so perfectly attuned to the words and the emotions and the music at every point that one could well have imagined that no histrionic direction was needed, But that becomes the crowning achievement of a sensitive director, merely to refine and enhance a singer’s own instincts so that the result seems to flow entirely from the performer’s own impulses. That was Tabitha Arthur’s achievement, that had her climbing one of two step-ladders at various times; symbolic of Elle’s compulsion to achieve security in an essentially insecure world. And in the lighting, Isadora Lao was similarly unobtrusive but, given the entirely natural feel of the atmosphere, was another case or art concealing art. And Meredith Dooley created Peterson’s wispy, pastel-shaded costume that also spoke of her fragility and insecurity.

There was a smallish audience; but here was a moving, very credible performance that deserved a much larger crowd.

 

Poulenc’s “La Vox Humaine” given a stunning performance

Posted on by Peter Mechen

Francis POULENC – The Human Voice (“La voix humaine”)
Words by Jean Cocteau (English translation by Johana Arnold and Barbara Paterson)

Barbara Paterson (soprano)
Gabriela Glapska (piano)

Tabitha Arthur (director)
Meredith Dooley (costumier)
Isadora Lao (lighting designer and operator)

{Suite} Gallery, 241 Cuba St., Te Aro, Wellington

Friday 31st January 2020

As we took our seats in the confined spaces of Cuba St.’s Suite gallery, pianist Gabriela Glapska was playing the music of Satie, beautifully coalescing the sounds of the composer’s Gymnopedies, the dance figurations wrought by the pianist almost as “held” as if depicted on a Grecian urn and the tones as “imagined” as they were real – “heard melodies are sweet, but…..” – here, time seemed to be slowed down, every note taking on a suspenseful, becalmed feeling, so much so that I thought Debussy’s Clair de lune which followed broke the spell that had been created (perhaps one of the Gnossiennes may have carried us further along, and into the ensuing silence more appropriately) …………. however, after the piano fell silent I was drawn into  the breathless poise of the stage setting’s opening, with singer Barbara Paterson (as “Elle”, the show’s only on-stage performer) having entered, the character tremulously waiting for what must have been a prearranged telephone call, the silences deliciously redolent with expectation and anxiety, impatience and foreboding.

Our viewing space’s angular intimacy was augmented by asymmetrically-placed ladders and a structural pillar for a centrepiece to boot, besides the art displayed on the gallery walls, Megan Archer’s depictions of what looked like entwined, almost convoluted limbs in various “clinches” underpinning the claustrophobia of the surroundings. The lighting seemed at first impersonal a la a hotel suite or utilitarian meeting-space, but as the interactive play between Elle and her telephone began to take shape, the hues and intensities of the lights responded to certain influences, reflecting the passing of time, the changing of the day and Elle’s state of mind as she struggled to make sense of her interaction with the person (her ex-lover) who had called her.

This was the scenario for a performance of Francis Poulenc’s setting of fellow-countryman Jean Cocteau’s monodrama, La vox humaine, the opera following the original play after a gap of 30 years. In each case a woman is onstage alone throughout, speaking on a telephone with her “ex” from whom she has not long parted. Poulenc worked with the role’s creator, soprano Denise Duval, in adapting Jean Cocteau’s work to operatic form, the composer reducing the original to a more malleable length, and writing for an orchestra as the accompaniment, and, in fact stating at one point that “the work should bathe in the greatest orchestral sensuality”. Duval was the composer’s favourite singer, and the pair seemed ideally matched to tackle what Poulenc described as “a musical confession” – in fact the composer was to describe later how the pair wept together “page-by-page, bar-by-bar” in what he called “a diary of our suffering” – both composer and singer had recently undergone emotional crises, obviously bringing their experiences to bear on these outpourings. Despite Poulenc’s remark concerning orchestral sensuality (I have listened to several performances with orchestral accompaniment) I thought Gabriela Glapska’s piano-playing here beautifully abstracted the colour in the orchestral score and gave us an immediacy of interaction between Elle and her “ex” whose direct quality had a definite and focused impact of their own – and singer and piano could and did, in those intimate spaces of Cuba St’s Suite venue, run a gamut of radiant, searing, euphoric and despairing emotion which made a proper foil for the myriads of more lyrical and intimate moments.

Though the opera was given in English on this occasion, I’m going to briefly revert to the work’s original language in describing this performance by singer and pianist as a veritable tour de force! (incidentally, this was a translation made, and previously performed, by an American soprano, Johana Arnold, who is in fact the mother of THIS performance’s “Elle”!) The opening “charged” silences during which Barbara Paterson compellingly held our attention while waiting for her telephone to ring were nothing short of riveting, her aspect conveying to us both her vulnerability and her determination, with movements affecting a measure of command and confidence but all too readily revealing tension and uncertainty when put under pressure, responding with bird-like rapidity to the telephone’s ringing and various unwanted external interruptions.  Both her face and form displayed remarkable aspects of grace and fluidity throughout (such as her almost coquettish teasing of her “ex” in places, as if either forgetting or choosing to ignore their actual disfunctionality) when contrasted with her rapid, almost furtive reactions to moments of shock or conflict, often succeeded by sequences of deflation and despair as if she suddenly felt drained of energy and will. Incidentally, I was pleased there was a “proper” telephone, and thought the interactions of the singer with the medium totally in keeping with telephonic use at the time – the interruptions of the singer’s conversation with her “ex” by somebody using a “party line”, though outside present-day telephonic experience, are nevertheless significant here, as they underline and indeed symbolise the overall breakdown of the relationship and its presently fraught concourse.

Always Paterson’s movements and expressions synchronised beautifully with both the words and the unheard voices of the people who talked with her, the telephone operator at the very beginning, the party-line neighbour, and, of course, her “ex”, whose status as such we didn’t really “pick up” on until that lump-in-the-throat moment where Elle plaintively responded to a request from him for a “bag” of what she called “your letters and mine” with the submissive words “You can send for it when you like”, conveying the “hurt” of the request all the more poignantly with the phrase “I had no idea you wanted them so quickly” , and of course when contrasted with the playful sensuality and kittenish aspect that entered her description for him (all a fabrication) of what she was wearing at that time.

The singer’s own arresting looks and engaging stage personality couldn’t help but sharpen the focus of our conjecture generated by her character’s relationship’s obvious dissolution – and throughout all of the possible scenarios were adroitly “brushed into” the opera’s action by the production, momentarily reflecting the attitudes and behaviours of both characters and as quickly superseded by other possibilities. Volatilities were suggested on both sides, with Elle in places abruptly and passionately responding to both her own realisations of her conflicted state and her ex’s “anger” in places as a result of things she had said, her more agitated irruptions sometimes ending in tears.  She’s shown as a romantic dreamer, whether by nature or by artifice or both – at one point the mood created by some exquisite pianissimo singing was broken by her own realisation that she was in a dream of denial, while the world pursued its own course, leaving her stranded. Her attempts to preserve the vestiges of an old intimacy was given a wonderful sensuality in places, no more so when she used the piano as if it were her lover’s body, stretching out upon it at one point as if reimagining her words “when we were in bed and I had my head in that small place against your chest”, making the intrusion of the loud music from the ‘phone all the more symptomatic. The subsequent “confession” to him that “what is really hard to bear is the second night, and the third….” is the most enduring impression of all, the mood evoked by singer and pianist readily bringing pathos as we empathise with her predicament, the empty despair of “and getting up and going out, and to go – where?” unequivocally laying all of our emotions bare…….

Very great credit to all concerned regarding this production, the performers’ sterling efforts backed up steadfastedly by Tabitha Arthur’s fluid, naturalistic and unobtrusive direction and Isadora Lao’s sensitively-wrought illuminations. Such finely-crafted and deeply-committed presentations deserve the widest possible currency, as well as the heartfelt thanks of those of us fortunate enough to enjoy what was, for this audience member, a profoundly moving experience

Further performances –
NZ Academy of Fine Arts, 1 Queens Wharf, Wellington
27 – 29 February 2020
6pm
BUY TICKETS

 

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.