14/11/09, ENO
1hr 55 mins (Bluebeard 55 mins; Rite 35 mins).
What a difference a director makes (for good or ill). We saw a concert performance of these two earlier in the year. Willard White sang Bluebeard with a glamorous Russian as Judith. It was musically challenging and I wasn't sure I cared for it, but it was undeniably impressive and Sir Willard made a fine Bluebeard (WW only does "noble", I suspect) while Judith came across as rather foolish and skittish.
One of the problems with opera is that it often transforms the mundane or the petty or the violent or the downright disturbing into something striking or noble. It's a function of the music, the grand stagings and the fact that those who can sing aren't always very convincing actors. Many opera enthusiasts, I suspect, rather like this other-worldly quality.
But Daniel Kramer, who directed this with Clive Bayley as Bluebeard and Michaela Martin as Judith, was having none of it. He dug down to reveal what Bluebeard is really about, and pretty unsavoury it was: sadism, violence, murder, the exploitation of women. It packed a considerable punch.
It started slowly and I was drifting: a black drop with only a single domestic door and a street lamp above it. Once Bluebeard and Judith were through the door a panel in the drop lit up to reveal them walking along a moving belt, as she pestered him.
When we got to the first of the door/key scenes the drop lifted and we saw Bluebeard's armoury (a toy tank on wheels whose barrel jutted out obscenely between B's legs as he sat on it), the blood (everything J touched seemed to be bloody; she continually wiped her hands on her dress), the treasury (two mannequins dressed in hussar's uniform and rich dark-blue velvet woman's dress) etc etc.
The production really took off with the scene showing Bluebeard's domains, when B pushed aside the back wall to reveal nine curtained bunk beds in the another wall behind, from which clambered nine children in descending order, dressed in recognisably Austrian fashion (blond little boys, girls in pigtails) and with the eldest girl holding a baby in her arms. All very Josef Fritzl. They remained on stage for the rest of the opera, and truly disturbing they were too.
The wives were the children's mothers, three large ladies in flowing robes, who lay down on a matress at the work's end and spread their legs for their master, now dressed in the hussar's kit and wielding a bloody sword. Judith (now in the mannequin's blue robe) made a fourth. Creepy, and rightly so.
Bayley overacted rather, telegraphing too obviously in the early scenes that he was a wrong 'un (why on earth, in that case, did J fall for him?) but singing with great force and clarity: you could hear virtually every word. The Physicist took A's ticket: he turns out to have some musical expertise as a former trumpeter in the Arts Theatre Cambridge pit band, and suggested Bayley was underpowered.
Michaela Martin was a little chunky for my taste and I couldn't hear most of her words; but the chunkiness made sense when you saw B's other wives.
The Rite was a bit of an anti-climax, though interestingly many of the critics preferred the dance to the opera.
We'd been looking forward to it because we've seen as lot of Fabulous Beast's work, choreographed by Michael Keegan-Dolan, at the Barbican and generally think highly of it.
Only three women, in floral frocks, plus an older woman, Cailleach (the Cailleach?) who didn't dance but seemed a kind of shaman and mistress of ceremonies. There were a dozen or 15 men in the tweeds, car coats, flat caps and boots of rural Ireland, plus a white bearded fellow on a chair on a table, who was at one point carried bodily around the stage.
At the start the men all sat down one side of the stage on institutional stacking chairs, as if in some small town community hall, with large cardboard boxes on their laps. They took the boxes onto the stage and danced around them, impressively, leaping and turning on both feet in unison.
Then the women put on hare masks and danced. Then they took the hare masks off. Then the men took dog masks out of the boxes and danced. The men gathered around the women in threatening fashion. The men took the masks off, and all their clothes, and put on women's dresses. Then the Chosen One danced centre stage in her bra and knickers while the men stood around and made some rudimentary moves.
There was too much dressing and undressing and preparation, and not nearly enough dancing. What dancing there was did not impress. The atmosphere of some communal Irish ritual was right; but there was no excitement, no fear, little tension.
While the directorial interventions in the Bluebeard were entirely clear and evidently justified, Keegan-Dolan's seemed rather arbitrary. Why were the men in dresses anyway?
Showing posts with label rite of spring. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rite of spring. Show all posts
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Tuesday, 3 February 2009
LSO, GERGIEV, WILLARD WHITE
7/1/09, Barbican.
2hrs 20min. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring; Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle with Willard White and a young Russian mezzo, Elena Zhidkova, deputising for the advertised Katarina Dalayman. London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev.
The orchestra (as well as Gergiev and White) were in full fig, white tie and tails. Inappropriate for the Stravinsky -- a product of the 20th century machine age; much more appropriate for the Bartok, with its melodrama and voluptuous orchestrations and its aristocratic milieu. The Stravinsky needs a big band: I counted 106, including six percussion (two sets of kettle drums, two big bass drums -- which made some very loud noises) and 40 woodwind and brass. It shrank to 86 for the Bartok, though that included two harps and a celesta and at one point eight more brass sidled on from the side door to provide additional welly in what for me was the high point of the Bartok.
Ms Zhidkova almost looked the part in that she was young, attractive, had masses of hair cascading down her back and wore a very tight slinky pink number. As she sashayed from the stage at the end both A and D said they thought she looked like a mermaid. She kept flicking her hair clear of her face, which was distracting; and the text calls for a pale raven-haired beauty, and she was spectacularly blonde. Otherwise I have few complaints. She was required to play a woman who is both sensual and innocent and rather arrogant -- and whose combination of innocence and arrogance eventually proves her downfall.
Sir Willard was an even better piece of casting. He has immense presence, is the right age to play a man with three former wives trying to repress the memory of a lifetime drenched in blood, and convincingly embodied the mixture of hope and wariness -- developing into despair -- of a man who believes his new bride may help him put his tortured past behind him. He doesn't in fact have a lot to do (or to sing) for much of the opera but play a straight bat to Judith's constant demands to open another of the shut doors in his castle (otherwise his psyche).
White also turns out to have a sonorous speaking voice: he delivered the spoken prologue which establishes that what we are about to see is in reality happening inside the protagonist's head, presumably a necessary explanation for an audience in 1911 who might be unfamiliar with psychoanalysis. (The prologue is in English -- the opera was sung in Hungarian with surtitles borrowed from Covent Garden.)
Those surtitles were handy, because the singers were sometimes drowned by the orchestra. Would a younger Willard White have held his own better?
Is this the first psychoanatical opera? The doors open to reveal aspects of Bluebeard's life... his torture chamber, his garden and so on, all stained in some way with blood. The musical high point is the glorious triumphant music which accompanies the opening of the door revealing his "vast and beautiful domains".
After that it's downhill for poor Judith, who insists almost petulantly, certainly self-destructively, and against Bluebeard's passionate urgings not to, on opening two further, darker doors, which reveal first a lake of tears and then Bluebeard's three mute former wives, who she duly joins in some sort of captive not-life.
A bag of laughs it ain't, but certainly stirring.
Of the music itself I can remember virtually nothing, thanks to a failure to write down impressions within a couple of hours. I can tell you that the Stravinsky was driving, noisy, energetic and exciting -- but not if it was any good, though I was disappointed by the opening bassoon solo. It seemed insufficiently sinuous. But there was much grimacing and putting in and taking out of reeds on the soloist's part, so perhaps all was not well.
I can tell you that the Bartok was surprisingly accessible and that the "vast and beautiful domains" section was glorious. But again, how good or bad the performance was I have no idea. Compare this, by a blogger who clearly thinks he does know enough about music to make a judgement:
http://boulezian.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html
Contrast this, however:
http://jessicamusic.blogspot.com/2009/01/elena-zhidkova-as-judit-bride-of.html
The reality is that, ignorant as I am of music and unable to remember anything but the most familiar tunes, I treat concerts as a form of theatre. My enjoyment is greatly enhanced if the presentation is visually interesting, the performers look the part and everyone involved gives an impression of involvement and interest rather than just going through the motions.
How many others, I wonder, go to concerts in the same frame of mind?
2hrs 20min. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring; Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle with Willard White and a young Russian mezzo, Elena Zhidkova, deputising for the advertised Katarina Dalayman. London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Valery Gergiev.
The orchestra (as well as Gergiev and White) were in full fig, white tie and tails. Inappropriate for the Stravinsky -- a product of the 20th century machine age; much more appropriate for the Bartok, with its melodrama and voluptuous orchestrations and its aristocratic milieu. The Stravinsky needs a big band: I counted 106, including six percussion (two sets of kettle drums, two big bass drums -- which made some very loud noises) and 40 woodwind and brass. It shrank to 86 for the Bartok, though that included two harps and a celesta and at one point eight more brass sidled on from the side door to provide additional welly in what for me was the high point of the Bartok.
Ms Zhidkova almost looked the part in that she was young, attractive, had masses of hair cascading down her back and wore a very tight slinky pink number. As she sashayed from the stage at the end both A and D said they thought she looked like a mermaid. She kept flicking her hair clear of her face, which was distracting; and the text calls for a pale raven-haired beauty, and she was spectacularly blonde. Otherwise I have few complaints. She was required to play a woman who is both sensual and innocent and rather arrogant -- and whose combination of innocence and arrogance eventually proves her downfall.
Sir Willard was an even better piece of casting. He has immense presence, is the right age to play a man with three former wives trying to repress the memory of a lifetime drenched in blood, and convincingly embodied the mixture of hope and wariness -- developing into despair -- of a man who believes his new bride may help him put his tortured past behind him. He doesn't in fact have a lot to do (or to sing) for much of the opera but play a straight bat to Judith's constant demands to open another of the shut doors in his castle (otherwise his psyche).
White also turns out to have a sonorous speaking voice: he delivered the spoken prologue which establishes that what we are about to see is in reality happening inside the protagonist's head, presumably a necessary explanation for an audience in 1911 who might be unfamiliar with psychoanalysis. (The prologue is in English -- the opera was sung in Hungarian with surtitles borrowed from Covent Garden.)
Those surtitles were handy, because the singers were sometimes drowned by the orchestra. Would a younger Willard White have held his own better?
Is this the first psychoanatical opera? The doors open to reveal aspects of Bluebeard's life... his torture chamber, his garden and so on, all stained in some way with blood. The musical high point is the glorious triumphant music which accompanies the opening of the door revealing his "vast and beautiful domains".
After that it's downhill for poor Judith, who insists almost petulantly, certainly self-destructively, and against Bluebeard's passionate urgings not to, on opening two further, darker doors, which reveal first a lake of tears and then Bluebeard's three mute former wives, who she duly joins in some sort of captive not-life.
A bag of laughs it ain't, but certainly stirring.
Of the music itself I can remember virtually nothing, thanks to a failure to write down impressions within a couple of hours. I can tell you that the Stravinsky was driving, noisy, energetic and exciting -- but not if it was any good, though I was disappointed by the opening bassoon solo. It seemed insufficiently sinuous. But there was much grimacing and putting in and taking out of reeds on the soloist's part, so perhaps all was not well.
I can tell you that the Bartok was surprisingly accessible and that the "vast and beautiful domains" section was glorious. But again, how good or bad the performance was I have no idea. Compare this, by a blogger who clearly thinks he does know enough about music to make a judgement:
http://boulezian.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html
Contrast this, however:
http://jessicamusic.blogspot.com/2009/01/elena-zhidkova-as-judit-bride-of.html
The reality is that, ignorant as I am of music and unable to remember anything but the most familiar tunes, I treat concerts as a form of theatre. My enjoyment is greatly enhanced if the presentation is visually interesting, the performers look the part and everyone involved gives an impression of involvement and interest rather than just going through the motions.
How many others, I wonder, go to concerts in the same frame of mind?
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