Production Reviews

The 100th Wagner festival in Bayreuth begins as it now always must: with a hailstorm of booing. It’s an odd pact, but an efficient one. The current festival directors, Wagner’s great-grand-daughters Katharina and Eva, must be seen to be radical. The bargain is that their glammed-up but aged audience (including on first night an impassive Chancellor Angela Merkel) prove them right by greeting what they see with boorish dismay.

There’s certainly a loud conversation between stage and audience going on in this new Tannhäuser. Its director, Sebastian Baumgarten, likes shouty slogans, many of which are beamed on to a video screen throughout his production: “punish me”, “we are all sick”, or, on one occasion, a concise blurt of “metabolism”.

We are certainly nowhere near the medieval Wartburg castle, in which the knight Tannhäuser usually wrestles between his love for the sinful Venus and the saintly Elisabeth. This Wartburg® is a dystopian factory (pre-fab sets by Joep van Lieshout), whose residents are fed from an array of clinical vats. The most important one is ethanol, huge mugs of which most of the protagonists repeatedly swig from. Tannhäuser is a lab rat, whose dalliance with Venus takes place in a lurid zoo cage populated by humping ape-men with terrible wigs and some mutant tadpoles.

Subtle this ain’t. And much of it is simply cack-handed: gestural dumb-shows rather than meaningful stagecraft. It’s as if having decided that his setting is simply a laboratory, Baumgarten feels happy to conduct a series of experiments rather than come up with a coherent vision.

And yet the big picture made up by this jumbled collage intermittently grips: Tannhäuser’s poetic spirit, trapped between competing visions of blind clinical science and blind animal sex. Both are gruesomely unappealing; it’s our tragedy as human beings to have to negotiate between them.

The performances are patchy. Lars Cleveman is a strenuously effortful Tannhäuser, who can pipe out the big climaxes but lacks fluency and impact. Stephanie Friede, dressed in a terrible array of lamé all-in-ones, is a squally, unseductive Venus. But although she struggled with pitch problems and sounded stressed in more dramatic passages, Camilla Nylund’s pure-voiced and angelic-looking Elisabeth has undeniable presence as Wagner’s most wet-blanket heroine. And there are noble contributions from Michael Nagy’s touching Wolfram von Eschenbach and Günther Groissböck’s imposing Hermann.

The audience saved some rude noises for the conductor, Thomas Hengelbrock. In his defence, this was a refreshingly intimate reading of a sprawling score. In fairness to the Bayreuth bearpit, what it lacked was theatrical éclat. If Hengelbrock returns with this curious show next year, that may yet come.

Having already inhaled the fumes of Sebastian Baumgarten’s laboratory Tannhäuser, the first sight of Hans Neuenfels’s 2010 Lohengrin production at Bayreuth had me wondering if The Times ought to have sent a science correspondent rather than a music critic. For we are back in the lab, and if Baumgarten gave us humans as lab rats, Neuenfels goes farther and gives us actual rats wishing that they were humans. These are the furry denizens of the troubled court of Brabant: red eyes, bony tails, twitchy paws. But is Lohengrin, the Swan Knight, their ticket out of the rat race?

It sounds repulsive and irrelevant. Certainly as you watch the rodents scurrying around the stage you want to dial Rentokil more than once, but the show — blindingly choreographed, beautifully designed (painterly sets by Reinhard von der Thannen) and performed with ferocious commitment — hits the bulls-eye. This Lohengrin looks under our skins and finds, well, that we are more likely rats than swans.

This is a deeply political production, about power and how it is wielded, but it also operates on an instinctive, biological level, culminating in Lohengrin’s departure and the unveiling of the “lost” Gottfried, heir to Brabant, here a grotesque alien foetus that hatches out of a swan’s egg. Change and metamorphosis; yet the story is ultimately one of human intransigence.

The notable triumph in this revival is Klaus Florian Vogt in the title role: a star is born, or perhaps hatched. Vogt sings with such otherworldly languor that you are both seduced and unsettled — exactly how Wagner must have wanted it. Petra Lang is a venomous Ortrud, well matched by Tómas Tómasson’s Telramund, and there are punchy performances from Georg Zeppenfeld’s neurotic King Heinrich and Samuel Youn’s Herald. Annette Dasch’s moving Elsa falls just short of the mark: too many technical blips. Andris Nelsons conducts a boilingly dramatic yet beautifully sustained reading, and the chorus is unbeatable. It’s out on DVD next year.

And so to Wagner’s “stage consecration festival play”, Parsifal, devised for this house and still its holiest of holies. Which is the starting point for Stefan Herheim’s much- praised 2008 staging, a glitteringly opulent feast of allusions, most of which centre around Wagner himself, his family cult and the destruction — and final salvation — of German culture. To reveal too much would undercut what is an astonishing theatrical romp, though its optimistic conclusion seems too easily won.

A good, though not vintage cast brought purpose, even if Kwangchul Youn’s Gurnemanz struggled with his welterweight bass under Daniele Gatti’s ponderous tempi. Susan Maclean was a sensitive, occasionally shrieky Kundry, Simon O’Neill a stalwart Parsifal. The baritones, Detlef Roth’s fervent Amfortas and Thomas Jesatko’s gleeful Klingsor, took the honours.

Suggestive of exotic booze and heady thrills, OperaShots is the name chosen by the Royal Opera for its excursions into opera-lite: shortish new pieces by quirkily matched-up writers and musicians. Last night we had Edgar Allan Poe liaising from beyond the grave (something the master of the macabre surely relished) with Stewart Copeland, who merely came from a former life as drummer with The Police; while Terry Jones, once of Monty Python, collaborated with the film and pop composer Anne Dudley.

Copeland takes Poe’s wonderfully grisly short story The Tell-Tale Heart and hurls it on the stage (in Jonathan Moore’s exuberantly frantic production) as a pastiche Victorian melodrama. Barely half an hour long, it has not a dull, or indeed a sane, moment.

Richard Suart gleefully plays the mad murderer, discarding his straitjacket to narrate his dismembering of a fellow lodger as a quick-fire recitation, like a deranged Rex Harrison. Meanwhile, footlights flicker, ghostly apparitions shine through the walls of Soutra Gilmour’s deceptively nondescript set, and of course a booming bass drum portrays the tell-tale heart itself (though the gory organ makes a late but show-stealing appearance too).

Drums apart, the rest of Copeland’s score won’t win prizes for musical sophistication, but it is perfectly effective. This murderer really does hear voices in his head — singing in harmony too. And his Jekyll-like split personality is cleverly conveyed by musical means. The final ensemble is too shouty and too long, but the freewheeling riffs before that are fun, and suitably spliced with macabre instrumental squeals.

Though twice as long, the Dudley/Jones offering (directed by Jones) wasn’t half as effective. It’s called The Doctor’s Tale, but for tale read tail, because this quack has a bark. Being a dog doesn’t stop the doctor from being loved by his patients and prescribing dollops of love in return. “It matters not what sex you are, he is the best by far,” one besotted patient sings.

But the General Medical Council is unimpressed and tries to ban him. He’s also shot and goes to dog-heaven, though it turns out he isn’t dead after all. It also transpires that he saved his vet’s life in Peru, or maybe Chile (I lost the thread at this point). Anyway the GMC relents, and that’s how the opera ends.

I came out wondering whether I’d missed some profound symbolic subtext in this whimsical nonsense, maybe about the persecution of minorities or blinkered attitudes in the medical world. But I don’t think I did. It really is the story of a dog who’s a doctor. There are some funny lines, and strong performances on stage: Darren Abrahams endearing as the canine GP; Carolyn Dobbin touching as his supportive secretary, Susan Gorton stealing the show as the long-dead mum he meets in heaven.

Admirers of Pythonesque absurdity may find echoes of past hilarity here, but they are faint.

Still, Dudley’s score, like her film and TV work, is suavely crafted: full of deft instrumental touches and neat dabs of pastiche, even if it never quite grabs the ear with something truly original. The 12-strong Chroma ensemble, conducted by Robert Ziegler and Tim Murray, provides immaculate accompaniment to both operas.

It doesn’t take the prima donna to break a leg to find something to talk about in Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s production of Il barbiere di Siviglia for the Royal Opera. When it was last seen at Covent Garden in July 2009, Joyce DiDonato sang Rosina in plaster from a wheelchair. That was certainly a hard act to follow. But then there is always that huge crescent moon, the pop-up orchestral players, and the Ruritanian police force to keep an audience’s fancy tickled.

What any production of Rossini’s melodrama buffa really does need, though, especially in its second revival (Justin Way directs), and with a somewhat less starry cast, is a sense of pacing and pizzazz to match the vibrant colours of both Christian Fenouillat’s designs and the composer’s score. “Was that slower than usual?” asked one punter after the overture had failed to fizz. “I thought it would be funnier, darling,” wailed another in the interval. Who needs critics?

This Barbiere was certainly slow to catch fire. Rory Macdonald, conducting, made the overture a gently nuanced piece of lavender and lace. And Count Almaviva’s initial attempts at serenading, from halfway up a wonky old olive tree, would hardly have stirred me to open the window. The American tenor John Osborn has all the notes; but only as the evening progressed did he drive them with anything like real ardour.

When Levente Molnár’s Figaro appeared in the right aisle, bursting with an almost Terfel-like charisma, and leapt on stage and into the heart of every bounding note, the audience sat up. And Rosina’s first murmurings, behind her caged window, expressed all the fervour that was lacking in her suitor. Indeed, Aleksandra Kurzak’s first Covent Garden Rosina does not disappoint. Both musky in her lower register and confident in coloratura, she expresses every second of sensuous joy, despair and frustration within her body and her vocal pyrotechnics.

But the first hour dragged. Pacing was pedestrian, and Macdonald failed to ratchet up the tension at each tempo change. It was left to the sheer mechanics of the finale — the entire stage rises, and undergoes a series of seismic shocks — to elicit really enthusiastic applause.

After the interval the temperature rose, with the production providing plenty of distraction, and with Bruno Praticò’s superbly rotund and robust Dr Bartolo all but acting everyone else off stage. The Russian bass Ildar Abdrazakov is a sinister, spidery Don Basilio, Jennifer Rhys-Davies gives her all to Berta’s aria of indignation — and, given eight more performances, there may just be time for the true Rossinian spirit to be awakened.

My heartfelt admiration goes to those of you who are planning on spending Saturday evening listening to BBC Radio 3’s broadcast of Wagner’s ludicrous opera Tannhäuser from the Royal Opera House. You are made of stern stuff. Yours is not a Christmas of half-hearted festivity and wrenched compromises. You are serious and committed in your engagement with culture. Part of me envies you. Most of me runs a mile.

Regular readers of this column will know of my tortured relationship with the composer – whose music I find irredeemably pompous, yet whose appeal still fascinates me, to the extent that I keep making visits to the opera houses of the world hoping, one day, to understand the appeal. But I am inevitably disappointed on these stressful outings. I once queued, in the early 1980s, for four hours to stand at a crush barrier to see Lohengrin at Vienna’s Staatsoper. My most vivid memory of the evening as a whole is that the barrier was covered in red velvet. There was some shimmering music, and some mighty sore feet.

My heroic travels in search of transcendence (a theme, dare I say it, with a Wagnerian ring to it) have, so far, proved equally fruitless. I haven’t caught Tannhäuser for a while, but it sticks in my mind as a particularly noxious piece of work, the usual ravishing overture followed by some sanctimonious rambling about a man who dares to admit to sexual urges, and is struck down by some monstrous blasts of brass and assorted weird characters brandishing crosses.

I have classed Tannhäuser as the second most ridiculous Wagner opera, after Parsifal, which I have seen three times (including the Nikolaus Lehnhoff production shortly to be revived at English National Opera) in increasingly desperate attempts to understand what was going on. It seems to be about a wound and the best way to dress it, although there are some potent metaphysical themes hovering there somewhere. There is also a special place in my heart for The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, a rare Wagner comedy, which is about singing your way to National Socialism.

A few weeks ago, against all my better judgement, I watched a programme on television that I hoped would cast new light on the composer. Stephen Fry’s Wagner and Me was a personal and intelligent essay, which openly wondered if the composer’s music could be salvaged from the sinister associations that it acquired in the Nazi era.

The trouble was, there was another programme I was keen to watch on the other side. Not a very worthy programme, but one that hooked me because I wanted to see how it ended. The Nation’s Favourite Abba Song was a trite countdown of the Swedish group’s most popular singles, yet it proved irritatingly compelling. I am no great fan of the group, yet those zesty tunes kept distracting me from the serious business of the evening.

So I started zapping between the two programmes. They were in counterpoint. Every time I came to an especially silly Abba song (“I Do I Do I Do I Do I Do”, for example), I turned over to Fry and Wagner, who could be guaranteed to be nobly wrestling with the grand themes of the human condition. But every time Fry agonised in some monstrous location – there were intense reflections on Nuremberg and Auschwitz – I lost patience and yearned for the benign simplicity on offer on the other side.

Members of Abba recalled, mostly with broad smiles on their faces, the genesis of some of their greatest hits. There was archive footage from an age, the mid-1970s onwards, that already seems uncomplicated in its devotion to innocent pleasure. “So when you’re near me darling can’t you hear me SOS?” is not one of the great lyrics of our time, but, in combination with the clear, direct melody of the song’s hook, it struck me as decisively making its point.

Fry, meanwhile, was analysing the Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde with a man at a piano. It has been described as one of the loveliest pieces of music ever composed. But it felt weighty and over-wrought here, and not at all what it feels like to be in love. Fry arched his back as the pianist hammered the chords of the melody’s resolution. It was not one of television’s most erotic moments.

Back on ITV, the nation’s favourite Abba song turned out to be, surprisingly, “The Winner Takes It All”. I found it difficult to concur. It’s a song about the end of a relationship. It reflects some of the romantic tensions within the group. But it is banal. “I don’t wanna talk, about the things we’ve gone through. Though it’s hurting me, now it’s history.” That’s a shocker of a couplet, and the song merely descends further into maudlin sentimentality.

It was a funny old evening. I am not making serious comparisons between Abba and Wagner. People talk of the Swedish group’s pop “genius” but I realise that Wagner’s genius is of a different dimension. But all that flipping was instructive, and here is what I learned.

Some art tries to convey the simplest things in life in a complicated way, and misses their point. The Liebestod fails in my mind as a life-enhancing piece of music because it makes a lofty abstraction of the earthiest of human pleasures. Other types of art are brilliant in their sunny simplicity, yet their creators insist on trying to make deeper points. They fail too – just because you are talented enough to be able to capture the evanescent moment, that doesn’t make you a philosopher.

The X Factor wasn’t the only singing contest in town this weekend. The one in Tannhäuser is much more fun, with Wagner’s hot-headed hero interrupting the other contestants so rudely that they are on the verge of murdering him before he’s packed off to be condemned to eternal damnation by the Pope. As putdowns go, a sneering comment from Simon Cowell doesn’t begin to compare.
     That contest, and much else, is thrillingly staged in Tim Albery’s new Royal Opera production. Albery and his designer, Michael Levine, wittily set the opening Venusberg scene within a replica of Covent Garden’s proscenium arch. The implication is clearly that Tannhäuser’s craving for fleshly pleasures is an evasion of real life in a world of illusion; but also perhaps that Wagner was projecting his own divided psyche — silk-clad hedonist versus restlessly protean genius — into this opera.
     But in Act II this stage-within-a-stage lies in ruins, like Ozymandias’s empire, and we are plunged into what appears to be a modern-day Balkan war. The singing contest thus becomes a lovingly preserved cultural ritual for a battle-weary tribe. In this context Tannhäuser’s mocking interjections seem hopelessly insensitive alongside Wolfram’s steadfast hymn to idealised love.
     However, the strength of Albery’s production is that it is suggestive but not dogmatic. And this thoughtful approach is matched by outstandingly sensitive musical values. Semyon Bychkov’s hearse-like pacing of the more desolate passages may take us dangerously close to Parsifal territory, but he’s a conductor alert not only to minute fluctuations of mood but also to the extraordinary stylistic variety of a score that harks back to Mendelssohn and Weber as much as it pre-echoes the Ring. There’s some dodgy wind intonation when fatigue sets in, but otherwise the orchestra sounds terrific.
     So do the principals. Johan Botha’s Tannhäuser is stunning: as incisive, fired-up and sweetly tuned in his final rant as when he first breaks free from Venus’s charms. Ideally the Venus, Michaela Schuster, could have displayed a few more seductive vocal colours; she is supposed to be the goddess of sensuality. But Eva-Maria Westbroek’s Elisabeth is mesmerisingly ardent then touchingly heartbroken; Christof Fischesser’s guerrilla-leader Landgrave sings with an effective grainy edge; and there’s a striking Wolfram from Christian Gerhaher, who opts for a daringly halting delivery in his hymn to the evening star.
As for Jasmin Vardimon’s choreography of Venusberg, the word sensational doesn’t begin to describe the daredevil whirl of tumbling bodies, acrobatic leaps, flailing limbs and seething eroticism she conjures. I was exhausted just watching.