Intermezzo

Die Dreigroschenoper at the Barbican

Die Dreigroschenoper - Barbican, 13 June 2009


Ian Bostridge and Cora Burggraaf

The original performers of Weill and Brecht's Die Dreigroschenoper were singing actors, not trained opera singers. And a seven-man band rather than an orchestra supplied the music. The name of course suggests it's an opera, but it has elements that owe more to musical theatre. Lengthy spoken sections (here replaced by a spoken narration that Brecht wrote specifically for concert performances) largely drive the action. And the vocal line is often simply doubled by an instrument.

It's not surprising a variety of performing traditions have arisen, with a mannered cabaret style at one end, a traditional operatic rendition at the other, and the more successful attempts generally falling somewhere in the middle.

Some time ago conductor HK Gruber recorded a version which approaches the spirit if not the specific textures of the original, incorporating his own chansonnier vocals, nostalgia singer Max Raabe, the frankly shouty punk legend Nina Hagen and the crack contemporary music ensemble Klangforum Wien. He brought them to the Barbican, and he again played Peachum in his own inimitable style, but this time he roped in opera stars for the rest.

Dorothea Röschmann, Angelika Kirchschlager and Hannah Schwarz

Some took to it better than others. Angelika Kirchschlager for one. She threw out the rulebook and played Jenny with her tongue in her cheek and a dollop of sauce. Polly Peachum's essential vulgarity was subdued beneath Dorothea Röschmann's elegant lieder technique but she displayed wit and superb comic timing in her spat with Cora Burggraaf's equally sophisticated Lucy Brown.

Ian Bostridge's Macheath was simply bizarre. London's most ruthless, dangerous criminal?  More like Basil Fawlty finding a fly in his soup. Angelika Kirchschlager looked as if she could eat him for breakfast, and in an encore of the Tango Ballad, proved she could.

Other parts were well taken. Hannah Schwarz's powerful Wagnerian mezzo gave her Mrs Peachum some heft, and Florian Boesch's Tiger Brown was idiomatic without being over the top.

HK Gruber himself was the least technically accomplished singer by far, but the one who seemed most at home in his role. He even managed to conduct Klangforum Wien after a fashion while he sang. I'm not sure I'd want to hear the whole thing sung HK style, but with the bandoneon, banjo and saxophones behind him, it made perfect sense.

 

 

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Edinburgh Festival opener Mahagonny fails to rise to the occasion

Edinburgh Festival: The Rise And Fall Of The City Of Mahagonny - Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 8 August 2008

Many operas can withstand a concert performance. Some are even improved by it. But it's hard to appreciate Weill's The Rise And Fall Of The City Of Mahagonny fully without some sort of staging.

Discussions about whether Mahagonny is really an opera tend to revolve around the music, where jazz-inflected songs take the place of classically-constructed arias. But the issue really revolves around the way it was written. Brecht was so much more than a librettist. The detailed stage directions he prepared are not mere garnish, but an essential part of the drama, not replicated in music or text, where foundations are laid and loose ends tied up. When you need to check your programme to follow the action, something's missing. Not that tonight's conductor, HK Gruber, would agree.

He's not a staged opera fan -- "I never could understand what the singers were singing". So he thinks the concert approach benefits the work - in fact his explicit aim, his very own Verfremdungseffekt, is to reproduce the experience of listening to a record at home. In fact it was more like watching a movie with your back to the screen - how much you get out of the experience depends on how many times you've seen it before.

The evening began on a sour note with an interminable pre-concert speech by Festival director Jonathan Mills, rambling defensively about the ongoing building work at the Usher Hall. Enough already! We saw the scaffolding! Get an editor!

And the first act did little to lift the spirits.  American tenor Anthony Dean Griffey - not coincidentally the only singer here with full-stage experience of the opera - made a spirited Jimmy Mahoney. But other performances, though technically competent, spanned that definitively British range from tentative to apologetic. Despite a fabulous, idiomatic translation (by Michael Feingold) there was little to be gripped by.

But after the interval Susan Bickley's brothel keeper Begbick moved from Home Counties to, well, not quite Deep South, but at least East End. Alan Opie, always a performer of subtle gifts, brought a sly wit to bear on his Trinity Moses. Peter Hoare livened things up with what limited acting he could manage in the space between his chair and his music stand. No one except Griffey really managed a rounded characterisation, but at least the action was conveyed. The strife-strewn Edinburgh Festival Chorus sang for their lives (perhaps literally). The orchestra arose from its slumber and began to mirror HK Gruber's effervescent podium style. It was the start of a terrific performance. But it began more than halfway through.

The applause was massive, but was it largely just for the presence of Edinburgh favourite HK Gruber? His enthusiasm was beyond doubt, but the format and the performance itself won't have won the work many new friends.

HK Gruber with Chorus Master Christopher Bell: