IDOMENEO

25/6/10, ENO

3 hrs 25 mins. Katie Mitchell's latest take on two of her favourite themes. One is the old "Dad promises to sacrifice the first living thing he sees to win the gods'/God's favour, then discovers in horror it's his firstborn" story. She did it with Iphigenia at the National, the girlish heroine eagerly embracing her martyrdom; she did it with Handel's Jephtha at ENO (about which I remember little except for its length and generally static quality, though I suspect it was rather moving at the time); and now she's done it with Mozart. The other is the legacy of Troy, explored in the Trojan Women at the National and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas at the Young Vic.

A production full of Mitchell tropes. There was the wide, flat set, with lots of movement laterally across the stage but little depth, which gives the impression of viewing everything through some great picture window but makes handling the chorus a challenge. There were the dancing couples (appropriate on this occasion, during the scenes of celebration after Idomeneo's return). There was the video (limited on this occasion to shots of flowers and trees on what looked like 16mm film, projected onto a screen in a sort of conference room while Ilia sang of pastoral beauties; and to a wonderful seascape seen through the [picture] window of the family villa). There was the modern dress, which made them look like a family of wealthy Greek shipping owners surrounded by servants and staff and well-dressed hangers-on. There were the witty updatings: the scene in which Electra and Idamante prepare to set sail from Crete took place in a ferry departure lounge, bright sunlight streaming in from the door to the quay at one side, the posh folks secluded in an airport-style business lounge on the other; Ideomeno returned from the wars looking like a US soldier in desert combats. There were the Trojans, in distressed party frocks and ballgowns.

And there was the very busy business: in the first scene Ilia and Idamante come across as a pair of spoilt brats singing of love and sipping drinks brought in by black-aproned bistro-style waiters while people in business suits scurry across the stage, opening and closing doors self-importantly. The waiters were a constant, as were the business suits, as was the scurrying: there was much to-ing and fro-ing during the climactic scene on the beach as people brought on arc-lights to illuminate the sacrifice and a bodybag. Some might have found it distracting: I thought it was all justified, partly because it created a convincing milieu which helped make the emotional journey of the characters convincing; partly because it's a long piece and some of the arias are very long and, agreeable though the music is, it helps to have something to look at.

Tellingly though, there was relatively little business in the high points, which included a spectacular and pain-wracked solo for Paul Nilon as Idomeneo during the party scene which deservedly brought the house to a halt. Nilon was generally the key to the evening's success because he was absolutely convincing in his anguish at every stage.

Sarah Tynan sang prettily as Ilia and looked the part. Robert Murray was a rather too beefy Idamante. Emma Bell was Electra, wittily portraying her as a spoilt and scheming little rich girl well on the way to becoming an alcoholic lush. This made her mad scene and suicide at the end entirely convincing; and she did a witty drunk turn during the party; but in the very next scene this pantomime villain sang a beautiful song of departure which was difficult to take as seriously as was perhaps intended.

The text I think was subtly massaged. No mention of a sea monster rampaging across the island, only of a disastrous and destructive storm.

It was a very hot night and there were empty seats all around the auditorium, including immediately in front of us. A price break? People who couldn't face the Coliseum on such a steamy night? Dr T very cross with someone sneezing loudly in the row behind us. I very distracted by a young girl of about eight or ten just in front who fanned herself vigorously with her programme throughout: heaven knows what she made of it all but (apart from the fan) she sat very quietly.

THE PEARL FISHERS

4/6/10, Coliseum

The reviews were only lukewarm, but we couldn't see why. We enjoyed it hugely, even though both Hanan Alattar (who sang Leila, the virgin priestess) and Alfie Boe (who sang Nadir, the lover) were suffering from throat infections (we couldn't really tell).

The plot is a nonsense, culminating in an awful moment when Zurga the village chief, who discovers that leila loves not him but his bosom buddy Nadir, sets fire to the village (full of sleeping children) so that the lovers can escape execution for breaking her vow of veiled chastity. A morally deeply troubling notion.

The set was fantastic: a contemporary Asian beachfront village on stilts in Act 1, a temple surrounded by concrete posts and barbed wire (standing in for the high cliffs of the libretto) in Act 2, another part of the village put together from oil drums and rubbish in Act 3. Getting the chorus on and off in these somewhat cramped spaces was challenging, but reasonably well-handled and worth it for the initial visual impact.

Updating the Oriental exoticism of the original to the ramshackle, barely sustainable community of today, somewhere in Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, always in danger of inundation in an era of climate change, seemed to make sense.

Quinn Kelsey, who played Zurga, is a big feller, but had a musically and dramatically compelling Act 2 confrontation with Leila which was almost as powerful as the famous Act 2 duet for Zurga and Nadir: that has a beautiful tune, which the Leila-Zurga exchanges didn't have. But the duet as customarily sung (and as sung here) was not as Bizet wrote it apparently: the big tune in his version made only one appearance and its reprise was a modern modification. Penny Woolcock, the director, likened the original to a Teutonic drinking song and said, although they'd otherwise tried to stick to the original, they felt the better-known version of the duet was preferable. My new Penguin Guide to Opera is however very rude about the popular version, reckoning it makes no dramatic sense.

Perhaps the contemporary updating was as patronising in its way as the 19th century original (there were even a couple of camera-toting western tourists in Act 1). But it seemed to work.

RIDERS TO THE SEA

28/11/08, ENO
50 mins (including a “prologue” consisting of a piece by Sibelius, Luonnotar, a tone poem for soprano and orchestra, first performed 1913). Riders itself around 40 mins; music Vaughan Williams, words Synge, first performed 1936; this production directed by Fiona Shaw

Ger-loo-my. The Aran Islands and death by drowning. At the start mother and daughters fear the missing Michael has been drowned at sea. Confirmation comes in the form of a fragment of his shirt and one of his socks. His brother Bartley sets off to take the red mare and the grey pony to the mainland to market, amid much foreboding. Towards the end he is delivered back to the women, drowned, when the mother (Patricia Bardon, excellent as she was in Partenope) welcomes the death of this, the last of her six sons: now she need fear the sea no more.

Music in a minor key and frankly monotonous throughout, the most effective moments those when grief is at its most overwhelming… and the music stops.

Great set – sloping stage, rugged cliffs stage L, upturned black boats the shape of discarded banana skins (but rather more beautiful, as D points out) descending from the flies during the mother’s lament. (The programme says: “Curraghs by Padraig O’Dunnin and the lads at Meitheal Mara”.)

Spectacular video – on the back wall (one minute the sea, the next minute the sky) and on the floor, where the rectangle representing the women’s cottage at the start apparently filled with water like the real Worm Hole on the Aran Islands’ coast.

Fiona Shaw’s first stab at directing. Can’t fault the lighting or the design, with the daughters in full red skirts, brown blouses and black shawls, but there was too much (rather aimless) rushing about and too many realistic props (kettle, mugs, darning mushrooms) which were rather at odds with the non-naturalistic representation of the house and the boats, and rather got in the way.

J (deputising for A) said she had trouble with the cod Irish. Except it was by Synge so presumably wasn’t cod. I said it was typical of the early 20th century passion for taking folk tales, folk music and folk motifs and cleaning them up for the salon and the polite theatre. S said she’d prefer more Handel.

Most effective was the prelude, a bit of Finnish nonsense about a nymph who became the sea for 700 years and destroyed the nest of a duck which laid its eggs on her knee. But the duck’s broken eggs became the sky, the moon and the stars. (I told you it was nonsense.)

Sung by a pregnant (or pretend pregnant?) soprano standing on the thwart of one of the black boats, suspended vertically. She had an immensely long dress which she discarded as she sang – while behind her one saw video projections of jellyfish in water, a woman with red hair floating in water, a white horse swimming in water. The music by Sibelius had real heft when compared to the Vaughan Williams. Ruined only by the woman who sneezed loudly just behind us during the last, long, diminuendo. Despite the note in the programme which reads: “Silence sponsored by Sela-Cough lozenges, which are available free of charge from the bars and in the foyer”.

PARTENOPE

12/11/08, ENO
3 hrs incl 2 x intervals. Robert Fox, Peter Taylor and Stephen Thingummy who used to be the controller of editorial policy in the Upper Circle audience. Why this affinity between Handel and middle-aged male employees of the BBC?

(Popbitch, the following week: "David Attenborough spotted nodded-off at Handel's opera Partenope, at the Coliseum." Bet he wasn't in the Upper Circle.)

A Handel comedy with a plot even more implausible and convoluted than usual. The princess Partenope (Rosemary Joshua, soprano, a bit shrill but lots of very showy arias) is loved by Armindo (A1, counter-tenor, with unexpected vocal power and expressiveness) but loves Arsace (A2, another soprano) who used to be in love with Rosmira (Patricia Bardon, mezzo, marvellous – you could hear every word). R has returned, disguised as a man, reveals herself to A2 but swears him/her to secrecy. Much confusion and unhappiness ensue. There’s also a bass in a dodgy red beard and the tenor John-Mark Ainsley camping it up as an invading prince who also fancies Partenope and must be defeated in battle. The usual succession of de capo arias (except for one, late on, which doesn’t repeat – unexpected and unsettling). We applauded virtually every aria, deservedly.

The directorial masterstroke was to relocate the whole thing to the 1930s and the Paris of the surrealists. The “battle” becomes a series of encounters during a party. The defeated prince is incarcerated in the loo. When A2 sings “How long must this go on, how long?” he/she sits unravelling a roll of lavatory paper. Later the door opens to reveal him/her almost completely buried in the stuff. P is the party hostess, dressed in a succession of elegant little numbers; the men (or “men”) all wear baggy 1930s suits, helpfully colour-coded. Most problematic, but most entertainingly, the invading prince is an Andre Breton/Man Ray character, with electric hair and a splendid camera-plus-flash-gun, who spends much of the last act up a ladder, pinning photographic prints on the wall: they gradually resolve themselves into a giant still of a nude woman’s torso (a genuine Man Ray). There was a very silly moment when a duel is about to be fought and the bass with the bushy red beard comes on in a lurid pink tutu. Earlier, R undresses to prove her gender to the Ainsley character. She is wearing sock suspenders. (She opens her shirt to prove she’s a woman, but Ms Bardon modestly kept her back to us). At the very end R appears dressed as a woman in flapper dress and far too much make-up: she looked much prettier as a man, notwithstanding a pair of substantial moustaches.

Beneath the silliness and the cross-dressing you might find a serious point about the delusions and illusions of love, not to mention its fickleness. Or you might not. At the end of this “comedy”, A2 is obliged to shack up with R, who apparently accepts the outcome joyfully despite his/her earlier betrayal; P, having lost A2 (the one she really fancies) is obliged to accept the drippy A1, in what looks like the beginning of a distinctly sado-masochistic relationship. Scarcely a promising start to a life of married bliss in either case. Surprisingly, some of the music is downright touching. Shivers down the spine more than once.