Intermezzo

Orphee et Euridice in Stuttgart

Orphée et Euridice - Staatsoper Stuttgart, 29 December 2009

With a world-famous ballet company on their doorstep, you might think Stuttgart Opera would be gagging to work with them but, no, Orphée et Euridice (sic) is their first ever co-production, and it premiered this summer to a generally positive reaction. There's enough of each to satisfy both opera and ballet fans, instantly doubling the potential audience, always a bonus in these difficult times. It looked sold out or thereabouts on the night I visited, with interval snacks plucked from a steaming cauldron of d1ldo sized boiled sausages in the first floor salon perhaps an additional temptation for some.

Choreographer/director Christian Spuck selected Gluck's longer, later and now rarely performed 1774 Paris version (though I think with some of the original orchestration retained) because there are more ballets in between the singing. But rather than than alternating the two, he's joined the ballet sequences to the musical drama and the singers to the dancers, creating a seamless sung/danced drama. The ballets accompany, expand and comment on the simple, direct narrative rather than interrupting it. The singers are choregraphed too - it took a while to tell corps and chorus apart until I clocked that the dancers have muscles where the singers have breath support. 

One of the difficulties of staging the Paris version is that Gluck's story ends conclusively with Eurydice revived and married to Orpheus - but then there's a 15 minute ballet to finish with. How to handle this? Spuck uses it to puncture Gluck's happy ending. His final ballet mirrors his opening one. In the middle of the wedding celebrations, Eurydice falls writhing to the floor - and once more Orpheus is mourning his lost love. It becomes clear the whole story was a dream, a journey of the mind, perhaps a way of coming to terms with grief. Unfortunately for Spuck, Gluck's relentlessly jolly music undermines a potentially interesting and structurally satisfying idea.

A spare, effective design sets all the action in a decrepit ballroom. Orpheus is surrounded by a mass of mourners in dark sparkling evening wear. They transform into furies for a spectacular whirling ballet, recostume in all-white for the Elysian scenes, then return to their party gear for the end. It looks beautiful but often cluttered, diffusing what should be the most emotionally penetrating moments by turning them into crowd scenes. The journey out of the underworld, where Orpheus is accompanied only by eight lookalike Eurydices, is the most simply staged scene and perhaps because of that is the most poignant and memorable. On the other hand, Amor's appearance as a burlesque queen surrounded by blindfolded ballet boys in sequinned hotpants is arresting for all the wrong reasons.

The standard of singing was very much what you'd expect from a German regional opera company, not exactly world-class but more than competent and often surprisingly good. This performance's Orpheus was Kenneth Tarver (though Luciano Botelho is the tenor shown in the production photos). His secure, even tone and superb breath control were ideally suited to the slow, wrenching music, less so to the single coloratura aria with its demands on quickfire accuracy.  Alla Kravchuk and Catriona Smith doubled as Eurydice, which as they sound and in costume even look very alike seemed inexplicably redundant. A few harsh notes didn't detract from the charm of Yuko Kakuta's bubbly Amor. The chorus looked good, moved well, and hit all the right notes, but I couldn't identify one single word they sang all night.

Nicholas Kok performed the remarkable task of keeping orchestra, dancers and singers together at a lively pace, though the number of intonation problems, phrasing variations and plain simple errors from the violins made me wonder if the regular orchestra was bolstered with unseasoned seasonal stand-ins.

*****   more photos plus video and audio on next page   *****

What the Gluck - Calixto Bieito's Armida

Armida - Komische Oper Berlin, 5 April 2009

Gluck said that an opera's overture ought to indicate the subject and prepare the spectators for the character of the piece they are to see.

Advice that Calixto Bieito must have taken to heart for his Armida. There were more bare botties on stage in the first five minutes than you'd see in a whole season at the Royal Opera House, a trusty indication of the oddly unsecksy flesh-fest which was to follow. All male, apart from one bewildered-looking granny, their function was to service the desires of Armida and her lady friends, a bunch of corporate dragonesses in ohso-passé Ally McBeal suits.

Welcome to the Komische Oper, Berlin's racier version of the ENO, where seats are cheap, audiences are young and open-minded, operas are sung in the local language, and producers are given free rein.

Bieito's Armida has no interest in the joyless parade of flesh, and I do see her point. Was it even intended to shock? However outrageous the photos may look (scroll down for more), a sort of Benny Hill daftness soon sets in.

So Armida's target is the fully-clothed Rinaldo. But he's not that interested. Torn between fascination and rage she swears to kill him, but she can't make herself follow through, even with the help of the Marlene Dietrich-like figure of 'Hate'.  So they fall in love, but then his mates burst through the walls of the stalls like G20 rioters (an amazing bit of theatre) to try and winkle him out of her clutches. They don't succeed, and the whole thing ends with a triumphant murder-suicide. Along the way there's a bit of lipstick lesbianism, a raped nun, a guy dancing with a ten foot python and the granny gets it on with a hunk while swinging in a chair ten foot above the stage. Classic Bieito.

This deconstructionist approach can be revelatory in more familiar works. I loved his Don Giovanni for example. Here I wasn't so sure. Though the snatched moments between the lovers were rendered truly tenderly (if only by contrast), a lot of the action seemed superfluous and merely decorative. 

On a more technical level, I was impressed all round - by the blocking, the personenregie, the clarity of expression, and particularly the seamlessness of the production. Even though this is a 'number' opera, the action continued intelligently in a single narrative flow through the often lengthy ballets and interludes. Bieito truly is one of the great craftsmen of the operatic stage, and the massive applause he received at the end (very few boos) recognised his achievement.

Maria Bengtsson doesn't have the largest of voices, but it's the right sort of silvery soprano for the demanding central role and she was convincing throughout. The lush mezzo of Maria Gortsevskaya as Hate was even more impressive, her malevolent presence never slipping into caricature. Some of the other voices weren't quite 'baroque' enough and some simply weren't loud enough. But it was generally sung well, though the clunky German translation (from the original French) did it no favours, and some sloppy diction (no surtitles here) often rendered the action mystifying.

The baroque specialist Konrad Junghänel conducted the Komische Oper orchestra and their modern instruments sensitively if rather conservatively. Textures were light and the pace snappy, and if some of the detail remained obscured, thankfully there was no more than a gentle nod towards 'authentic' period practice. Last month I heard these same musicians perform Weill's Mahagonny - the polar opposite of Armida - no less convincingly. A truly versatile ensemble.

Below is a pre-production video with interviews and some explicit content:

Go here for some (warning!) explicit production photos, and find more photos over the page........

Iphigénie en noir - Royal Opera House opens season with a few zzzzzzzzz's

Iphigenie en Tauride - Royal Opera House, 13 September 2007

Whatever its other flaws, at least this is an eco-friendly production. Director Robert Carsen minimises the carbon footprint by opting for a dimly-lit and empty charcoal box of a set and clothing everyone in plain and simple black. The principals' movement is limited, characterisation restrained, physical contact near-absent.

But this isn't polished minimalism. It's more of a cash-strapped regional theatre look, with chalked-up walls, buckets of water substituting for buckets of blood, and countless dancers flapping around the stage. The choreography is muddled and untidily executed, and often simply obscures the principals.

It's superficially coherent (black always goes with black), but insubstantial and generic. You could legitimately produce any opera from Orfeo to Peter Grimes like this, and it wouldn't make any less sense.

Carsen came to the initial Chicago production fresh from directing Brecht's Madre Coraggio (Mother Courage) in Milan, maybe carting some Brechtian presentational tropes with him. Parallels between Mother Courage and Iphigénie are tempting and have been drawn before, but are they enough to justify a production in this style?

The production leaves the music a lot of work to do to keep the audience engaged. Unfortunately, the small forces of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Ivor Bolton never quite measure up. Though I was sitting fairly close to the pit, they were so subdued I found myself straining to hear them at times. And the drama lacking on the stage is not to be found in the pit - Bolton conducts with an elegance and restraint which is immaculate, but fails to enliven proceedings.

Placing the chorus in the orchestra pit isn't much of a loss visually - the busy dancers fill the stage - but the remoteness of their sound was odd and jarring.

The cast is first-rate, but all the singers seemed weighed down by the grey confines of the production. Susan Graham as Iphigénie has a rich and beautiful voice, but rarely managed to transmit any of Iphigénie's internal conflict. Paul Groves was a noble but rather static Pylade who sang with a lyrical grace. Simon Keenlyside as Oreste went rather the other way, peaking so early with his inner tortures that he resorted to barking his most agonised lines. In the end though, it was the singers who held this most underwhelming of productions together as they rose above the dullness around them.

Fellow audience member Tony Pappano applauded politely at the end like everyone else, though I wonder how strongly he'll be campaigning for an early revival of this elegant but curiously damp squib.