Intermezzo

L'Heure espagnole and Gianni Schicchi at the Royal Opera House

L'Heure espagnole / Gianni Schicchi - Royal Opera House, 20 October 2009

This Richard Jones double-bill blew me away on its debut a couple of years back. I'm surprised to see it has faltered at the box office on this first revival (see here for half price tickets offer). I can only assume it’s the lack of star names and well-known titles that are keeping people away, because it’s one of the finest things in the current ROH repertoire.

Richard Jones is always at his best when he's showing human nature at its worst. Here he gets to play with lust, greed and deception - all shot through with wicked humour. Garish wallpaper and charity shop kitsch frame a pair of frenzied sitcoms. Ravel's has a certain French charm with its macaroon colours and gentle farce. A crudely-painted pair of Beryl Cook bewbs in a polka dot bra is spread across the curtain as the opening image. It sets the tone immaculately. For the darker humour of Gianni Schicchi, the wallpaper's stained and the opening shot is a plate of writhing spaghetti. Secks for the French, food for the Italians. Perfect.

Revivals can be shoddy affairs bearing little relation to the original - perhaps that's why Jones likes to direct his own. But this time he was gettin’ roped up and shot down elsewhere, so the task fell to staff director Elaine Kidd. A brilliant job she's done too. It looks better rehearsed than some revivals, and with most of the previous cast returning characterisations are rounded and performances assured.

Comic opera often isn't really that funny, however much we will it to be, but in the clock-stuffed L’Heure espagnole the timing is so acutely finessed the laughs are genuine. Ruxandra Donose is perfect as the frustrated housewife who baits her unsuitable suitors with barmaid bewbs and the sort of simmering allure I wish Elina Garanca had been able to muster up for Carmen. Yann Beuron as the self-obsessed poet she wants, Andrew Shore as the clapped-out banker she doesn't, and Bonaventura Bottone as her unsuspecting husband are all superb. But it was the happiest of endings when she went for Christopher Maltman, a golden-voiced revelation in a vest.

OK, it sags here and there, but that’s down to the composer not the production. Ravel’s strengths are more pictorial than dramatic. The inventiveness of the score is enhanced by Pappano’s delicately evocative interpretation, but the dramatic pacing, or lack of it, is something even he can do nothing about.

Gianni Schicchi is a different matter. There’s as much action as a full opera, but it’s telescoped down to a fat-free sixty minutes. The music is trimmed to the bone and supports the text without cliche. If story telling is what matters, it’s Puccini’s finest creation. The misanthropy which sometimes strikes a sour note in his work is turned to advantage in darkening a cynical portrayal of the family who'll stoop to anything to get their hands on their recently-deceased relative's fortune.

Thomas Allen sings the title role as though born to it. Looking like he’s stepped out of a round of Super Mario Bros, he favours rude over beauty of tone – and his quivering impersonation of the dying man is a bonus. The young lovers weren't quite as perfect. Stephen Costello (Rinuccio) has a fine voice, but it's not consistently focussed. And he ran out of wind at a couple of critical moments, notably the final bar of Avete torto. On this showing, he's still a work in progress. Maria Bengtsson sang prettily though tentatively, and undermilked the big tune, Lauretta's O mio babbino caro. But this really is the quintessential ensemble piece, and all the cast (especially Gwynne Howell and Elena Zilio) revelled in the sheer awfulness of the grasping family.

OK, so it doesn't pack the emotional punch of Loy's remarkable Tristan und Isolde, and Richard Jones's ironic appraisal takes us even further away from empathising. But a little light relief is always welcome.

*****  more photos 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........