Two original productions from the Royal Opera House, performed live before small audiences and viewable on the company’s website, offer a stirring reconnection to opera as it was.
By Heidi Waleson
Nov. 4, 2020 1:58 pm ET
Listen to this article7 minutes00:00 / 07:051x
Since government money subsidizes much of their activity, some opera houses in Europe were able to offer live performances this fall, with in-theater audiences small enough to conform to safety protocols. London’s Royal Opera House devised a series of programs that use minimal stage forces to protect the artists and crew. The series opened with two ingenious original productions. Each was performed once in the opera house for a live audience, filmed, and is now available to stream for a fee on the company’s website.
“4/4,” curated by Oliver Mears, ROH’s director of opera, juxtaposed four short dramatic vocal works of dizzying variety in a two-hour, intermission-free program designed by Antony McDonald (available through Nov. 16). The opener, Adele Thomas’s staging of Handel’s “Apollo and Daphne,” did not hold back in depicting the cantata’s scenario of attempted rape, pitting Jonathan McGovern’s aggressive Apollo (sporting a bright red codpiece and gloves) against Alexandra Lowe’s resistant Daphne. Christian Curnyn’s astute conducting traced the characters’ development and kept raising the threat level. It only subsided as Apollo sang his final trancelike aria of regret while sifting through a pile of laurel leaves. Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” is a far gentler piece. With her voluptuous soprano, Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha brought urgency and dreamy sorrow to this recollection of a happier past. She wore a proper Southern matron’s attire with white gloves and pushed a baby carriage; when she arranged four towel dolls on a bench to enact a backyard family gathering, the moment felt especially sad. (Mr. McDonald directed; Patrick Milne conducted.)
Directed by Deborah Warner and conducted by Richard Hetherington, Benjamin Britten’s “Phaedra,” a 20th-century interpretation of the baroque solo cantata, kicked the evening into high dramatic gear. Mezzo Christine Rice, wearing a blue work shirt on a starkly lighted stage, ferociously plumbed the character’s adulterous passion for her stepson through paroxysms of guilt, lust and despair, and the slow, chilly denouément of her suicide. Then HK Gruber’s antic “Frankenstein!!” brought the evening to a demented conclusion. Tenor Allan Clayton, dressed like an aging rocker with chest-length hair and a T-shirt reading “End of Bedlam: The New Abnormal,” snarled, cooed and growled his way through a collection of sardonic children’s stories and comics (H.C. Artmann’s German rhymes were done in English translation). “Frankenstein!!,” featuring characters from John Wayne to assorted monsters, evokes Arnold Schoenberg crossed with Kurt Weill, and includes instruments like whirly tubes, kazoos, a penny whistle and a comb. Conducted by Edmund Whitehead and directed by Richard Jones, the show was played in front of a curtain with actor Dawn Woolongong scurrying to provide props. It was savage and hilarious.
The second two-hour show, “New Dark Age,” is a double bill of contemporary works by female composers (available through Nov. 23). Hannah Kendall’s “The Knife of Dawn” (2016) depicts the Guyanese poet Martin Carter at the end of a month-long hunger strike during his political imprisonment in 1953. Tessa McWatt’s libretto incorporates several of Carter’s poems. The protagonist—starving and hallucinating the voices of his wife, his unborn child, and his political allies (performed by three unseen female singers)—wrestles over whether continuing to write would contribute more to the struggle for freedom than his death would. Directed by Ola Ince, baritone Peter Brathwaite gave a forceful, passionate performance; Vicki Mortimer’s prison set, Adam Silverman’s lighting, and Akhila Krishnan’s video (including a solar eclipse) created an appropriately gloomy environment. However, Ms. Kendall’s stentorian, unvaried vocal writing seemed devised to deliver text rather than speak for itself. The accompaniment, a string trio and a harp, provided a bit of contrast, but at nearly an hour in length, the piece felt relentless and endless. Jonathon Heyward conducted.
The companion work, “A New Dark Age,” was much more successful. A 10-movement cycle, it artfully combined songs from Missy Mazzoli’s “Vespers for a New Dark Age” (2014) with pieces by Anna Thorvaldsdottir (2005 and 2016) and Anna Meredith (2004, 2010 and 2016). Featuring two sopranos, Nadine Benjamin and Anna Dennis; mezzo Susan Bickley; an eight-voice, unseen chorus; and a chamber orchestra—all conducted by Natalie Murray Beale—the three composers’ music meshed seamlessly. The themes, enhanced by Grant Gee’s video and Katie Mitchell’s direction, created a persuasive narrative about the soul’s survival in the time of Covid.
The tight, sometimes jittery vocal harmonies and propulsive rhythms of Ms. Mazzoli’s songs speak of uncertainty and determination and match Matthew Zapruder’s texts—“Come on, come on, all you ghosts,” cries one. The centerpiece of “A New Dark Age” is Ms. Thorvaldsdottir’s astonishing “Ad Genua” (To the Knees), written as a modern response to Dieterich Buxtehude’s 1680 oratorio, “Membra Jesu Nostri.” Its ecstatic text by Gudrún Eva Mínervudóttir begins “I fall to my knees and ask forgiveness for lazy thoughts, unseemly hunger, and the wild, beautiful stampede of my fear”; the eight-voice SATB choir seems to envelop the pleading soprano soloist (Ms. Dennis) in a comforting haze. Ms. Meredith’s “Heal You,” with text by Philip Ridley, takes a simpler path; it is a plaintive, consoling trio.
The three excellent soloists sat in distanced chairs; they faced the audience and wore masks when not singing. Mr. Gee’s video, projected above them, showed their journeys from their homes, through city streets and suburban neighborhoods, past signs about masks and social distancing, to the Covent Garden stage. Images were sometimes superimposed on each other: As one singer took a train and watched the landscape go by, another’s face grew huge outside its window and then pixelated into nothingness. Anxiety thus overlaid the ordinariness of daily life. In the final section, the filmed women took their seats, and to Ms. Meredith’s spare “Low Light,” for harpsichord and strings, melted away into the darkness. The artists had made it to the theater and performed. Would it happen again?
That anxiety remains. England, Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria have now closed their theaters again in response to the recent surge in virus cases. The Bavarian State Opera managed to transmit the livestream of its new production of Walter Braunfels’s “The Birds” just under the wire; it is available on demand on the company’s website starting Nov. 5.
—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).
Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
RECOMMENDED VIDEOS
- ‘Stay Home’ Robocalls Target Voters on Election Day
- Biden Focuses on Pennsylvania, Trump Hits Five Battleground States
- Joe Biden Speaks on Election Night as Vote Count Continues
- Biden Ahead 10% Nationally, but Lead Narrows in Key States, Poll Shows
- 2016 vs. 2020: The Evolution of Russian Meddling in U.S. Elections
WSJ MEMBER MESSAGE
100 Most Sustainably Managed Companies
Grow your capital for the greater good. Our 2020 rankings make it easy for you to find investments that align with your values.DISCOVERhttps://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html
AndyManshel.nyc 