ENO's Fidelio

Fidelio - Coliseum, 1 October 2013

A current Twitter meme invites you to #AddaWordRuinanOpera.  At this stage of the season it seems that prefacing any title with the word ENO's would work.

I first saw this Calixto Bieito production a couple of years ago in Munich, where it debuted, with a starry Kaufmann-led cast and sterling conducting from Adam Fischer.

ENO's revival is lower-division. Their budget stretches to fewer prisoners, and I don't think they managed to squeeze the exact Munich set and lighting on to the Coliseum stage - the effect at any rate is less Cube and more climbing frame.

Bieito himself was largely absent while he masterminded his brand-new Die Soldaten in Zurich, leaving the ENO work mostly to assistants.  ENO's past claim that they never contracted him is perhaps not so odd as it first seemed. His absence manifests itself in a sort of general energy shortage and a tendency to fall back on conventional interpretations.

With nothing more provocative than a capacious pair of underpants on show, Bieito's vandalism is largely verbal. He removes some of the clumsy original dialogue and interpolates elegant and fitting poetry in its place. A crime according to some - but hardly more transgressive than singing the whole thing in English. We get the third Leonore overture at the start, and its regular place towards the end, a string quartet. It's one of those updates that doesn't mesh entirely with the libretto, and as in Munich, I was puzzled from time to time. But Bieito's central message - we are all prisoners - is crystal clear.

This wasn't the first night, so I didn't get to see Stuart Skelton's Florestan, the main attraction according to most reports. Taking his place was Bryan Register, an American tenor whose wide vibrato detracts from a big, ringing voice. Emma Bell sings with an intensity that suits Bieito's production, and a slight unsteadiness lent her Leonore an edge. James Creswell made a solid Rocco.

It's often said that Fidelio is impossible to get right - but it's also impossible to get totally wrong. The music is too resilient for that. Ed Gardner came as close as I've heard to disaster. He deserves some credit I suppose for attempting a 'classical' style, but neither he nor the orchestra were up to it. Clipped phrasing exposed shoddy playing. Tempi were all over the place, the galloped-through overture being the worst example. Worst, there was no sense of any overriding vision of the work as a whole. When the Heath Quartet descended in cages from the flies playing the beautiful Adagio from Op.132, my tears were due as much to relief as anything else.  

production photos (above) Tristram Kenton

curtain call photos (below) intermezzo.typepad.com

 

Comments

[Gtgtgt]

I saw it on Tuesday and left at half time - couldn't take anymore. From the distracting pointless clambering up and down the set to poor singing and no voice projection I thought it was horrible. I assumed Emma Bell was having an off night as the upper register was shaky and the rest almost atonal. Didn't get to hear the American tenor as a result but heard him murdering Siegmund with atrocious German on you tube. Hated the sing song English libretto too which gave the whole thing a dire West End musical feel.

[Feldmarschallin]

At the Premiere Gatti conducted not Fischer.

[Lunchalot]

Saw this on Thursday with my wife, a huge Fidelio fan. We both thought the music excellent - although the cuts jarred, and the insertion of the Leonore 3 overture and (utterly pointless) string quartet we could have done without. I too had always thought it impossible to ruin Fidelio, but this director made a pretty good fist of it, from the pointless set and irrelevant 'poetry' to turning Don Fernando into a Pantomime Dame. Why do ENO persist in employing directors who seem to think it their role to 'revinvent' the piece in their own way, rather than as the composer and librettist wrote it, and who give every impression of never having read the libretto ? My recommendation - go, but keep your eyes shut !

[inter mezzo]

There were no cuts to the music, and Bieito is not the first to reposition the Leonore 3: Barenboim has done it, amongst others.

[John Marston]

I/M, you write 'there were no cuts to the music'. Only 4 movements of the quartet opus 132! I'm astonished that the Munich Opera should sanction the dismemberment of this great work. Less surprised that the hapless ENO should approve.

[Nikolaus Vogel]

Cutting almost all of the spoken text is pretty radical, though again not unheard of. Lehnhoff's Salzburg production did that, even to the point of dropping the wonderful Melodram in the prison, where Leonore and Rocco speak with an orchestral accompaniment, like recitative without notes. I think IM is spot on - this really isn't a Bieito show and ENO is mis-selling it as such. It's the operatic equivalent of microwaving yesterdays leftovers. Shame you missed Skelton, IM. Did you go to the LPO Grimes?
*********
Intermezzo replies - No unfortunately, out of the country.