Rusalka at the Royal Opera House - Intermezzo

February 29, 2012

Rusalka at the Royal Opera House

Rusalka - Royal Opera House, 27 February 2012 (ROH work premiere)

Despite the Daily Telegraph's best efforts to whip up controversy about its supposedly "anti-semitic" and "terrorist" content, the first night of ENO's The Death of Klinghoffer apparently passed with barely a hint of protest. Audience slowly lulled into torpor would be my guess.

Yet over at the Royal Opera House, Dvorak's Rusalka, an opera about - let's face it - a bunch of fairies in a pond, excited a response more suited to a state visit by Robert Mugabe.

First off there was a political protest. "Vive le Québec libre !" yelled some twat at the back of the darkened auditorium as Québécois maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin raised his baton for the last act. Let me remind you we were 3,000 miles distant from anyone who might give a toss. Poor YN-S bent double with embarrassment before gathering himself together for the final push.

Then there was the curtain call. There wasn't "a chorus of boos" at the end, as another Daily Telegraph entrant for the Bad Journalism awards puts it. (Are they all pitching for a job at The Sun on Sunday?) But when the production team took their bows, there were enough boos - all seeming to emanate from top price stalls seats, wouldn't you know - to match the hearty applause. Perhaps our nation's critics were the guilty parties. Most of the reviews I've seen so far froth with a degree of rage better targeted towards paedos and politicians than an evening's entertainment. And there enough factual errors in some of the critiques to suggest large swathes were 'watched' through closed eyes.

I know we don't all like the same things, but what can have made people so angry? OK, so this show does not look like an Arthur Rackham drawing. But then I bet God doesn't look like Father Christmas either. There are none of the classic button-pushers - nudity, lavatories, guns, Bob Wilson, and so on, so that can't be it. And in any case, nobody who saw Monday night's show can claim they didn't know what they were letting themselves in for. Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito's production began life at the 2008 Salzburg Festival. This is documented in copious reviews, clips and photos, plenty of which can be found on the ROH website and in the programme.

What's more, although it's in modern dress, the production is at heart conventional and straightforward. Like many before them, Wieler and Morabito explore the duality of the human and spirit worlds in terms of parallels and contradictions, viewing the story of the mermaid who loses her tail as a parable of sexual initiation and the loss of innocence.

I wouldn't say it's a truly great production - Stefan Herheim tackles the same theme more effectively - but it's a decent enough one. Wieler and Morabito respect music and text, channeling their interpretation to match both. Only rarely is there a disjunct. The most noticeable fault is a tendency to lay the symbolism on with a trowel (though it clearly still wasn't enough for some to geddit). But the mere fact that this production invites a variety of interpretations is a pleasing rarity for Covent Garden. Is the obligation to think really that much of an imposition?

Both worlds are located in a single revolving set, a red velvet-draped room on one side, a pine-panelled wall on the other. (Like a few other design touches, this would have had greater cultural resonance in Salzburg than WC2). A Little Mermaid statue sits on a table with nymph-shaped legs. Angela Gheorghiu's prompt box becomes a portal to the underwater world.

Rusalka begins the story as a child, rolling around the floor in a sparkly fish tail and playing with her stuffed cat toy. Projections of marine life scud across the wall in a SpongeBob SquarePants sort of a way. A huge ghostly jellyfish is the strangely appropriate background for Rusalka's Song to the Moon.

A shoe cabinet full of glamorous heels evokes Rusalka's dream, but Jezibaba's crippled leg suggests a darker reality. To turn Rusalka into a human, Jezibaba's tomcat claws off her mermaid tail and rapes her as the orchestra pound out savage folk rhythms. Any shock value is diluted by casting a dancer in a panto costume as the cat - the violent assault becomes disturbingly funny.

As Rusalka enters the Prince's palace, the Kitchen Boy disembowels a white doe - a forewarning of Rusalka's fate. The Prince's entourage in their Jankers and dirndls (Salzburg again) are shown as a hypocritical bunch of bible bashers.

The final act finds the ruined Rusalka back home. But home has been transformed into a tawdry brothel. The Wood Nymphs are barely-clothed prostitutes and Jezibaba is the Madam, sprawled on a shrink-wrapped sofa with a (live) black cat commandeering audience attention for its five minutes of onstage fame.

Rusalka stabs herself and dies, but rises zombie-like to exact the Prince's final doom. You won't find this in any standard synopsis. It's generally assumed (though, importantly, never said) that Rusalka is 'undead' throughout. But Wieler and Morabito's version fits so precisely with both music and text, especially Rusalka's chilling final words, that it seems more natural than the usual reading.

Musical values were exceptionally high thanks mostly to Nézet-Séguin's command of score and orchestra. His attention to detail paid off in a fabulously homogenous string sound and superb balance. I have doubts about the cogency of his symphonic interpretations (like his meandering Bruckner 9 with the LPO a couple of weeks back) but he seems psychically attuned to the ebb and flow of dramatic narrative. Orchestra and singers occasionally drifted apart but there was never any let-up in the pulse and energy.

Camilla Nylund's bleached silvery soprano was ideally suited to the title role, though she sometimes struggled against Nézet-Séguin's no-holds-barred dynamics. Bryan Hymel gave the best performance I've ever heard from him, unvaried in colour perhaps, but not lacking in passion and commitment. Alan Held was a suitably dolorous Vodnik, and the trio of Anna Devin, Madeleine Pierard and Justina Gringyte impressed as the scantily-clad Wood Nymphs. Agnes Zwierko's Jezibaba struck a fine balance between comedy and menace, and it was simply a luxury to have the eminent Wagnerian Petra Lang as the Foreign Princess.

*Warning* if you're going - the performance is nearly 3 and half hours long, which is about 30 minutes longer than the ROH advance publicity suggested. Nézet-Séguin doesn't dawdle, so my guess is he may have cancelled some initially-planned cuts.

UPDATE - check out Jessica Duchen's in-depth interview with co-director Sergio Morabito.

production photos (above) - Clive Barda for Royal Opera House

curtain call photos (below) - intermezzo.typepad.com

Rusalka at the Royal Opera House - Intermezzo

Boulezian: Rusalka, Royal Opera, 27 February 2012

Rusalka, Royal Opera, 27 February 2012

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Nymphs and Rusalka (Camilla Nylund)
Images: Royal Opera/Clive Barda

Rusalka – Camilla Nylund
Foreign Princess – Petra Lang
Prince – Bryan Hymel
Ježibaba – Agnes Zwierko
Vodník – Alan Held
Huntsman – Daniel Grice
Gamekeeper – Gyula Orendt
Kitchen Boy – Ilse Eerens
Wood Nymphs – Anna Devin, Justina Gringyte, Madeleine Pierard
Mourek – Claire Talbot

Jossi Wieler, Sergio Morabito (directors)
Samantha Seymour (revival director)
Barbara Ehnes (set designs)
Anja Rabes (costumes)
Olaf Freese (lighting)
Chris Kondek (video designs)
Altea Garrido (choreography)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Yannick Nézet-Seguin (conductor)


It is a truth universally acknowledged that an interesting opera production will be met with incomprehension and lazy, philistine hostility by vast swathes of the audience in many, perhaps most, of the world’s ‘major’ houses, a truth that renders one all the more grateful for the Royal Opera showing the courage to stage this new – to London – production of Rusalka. That is not to say that any production meeting with hostility qualifies as interesting; some, of course, are simply not very good, or worse. Yet, it seems that only the most vapid, unchallenging – and yes, I realise that the word ‘challenging’ is a red rag to self-appointed ‘traditionalist’ bulls – of productions will garner approval from the ranks of the petite bourgeoisie. The boorish behaviour of those who booed this Rusalka equates more or less precisely to the sort of antics they would condemn if they occurred on the street – the work of ‘hoodlums’, the ‘lower classes’, the ‘uneducated’, ‘rioters’, ‘immigrants’, et al. – yet somehow unwillingness or inability to think, the fascistic refusal to consider an alternative point of view, the threat of mob violence, becomes perfectly acceptable when one has paid the asking price for what they consider to be their rightful ‘entertainment’. They would no more bother to understand, to explore, to question, Rusalka were it depicted in the most ’traditional’ of fashions, of course, but they explode at the mere suggestion that a work and a performance might ask something of them. For, as John Stuart Mill famously noted, ‘Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.’ Wagner’s ‘emotionalisation of the intellect’ – ‘emotionalisation’, not abdication! – remains as foreign a country to them as it did to the Jockey Club thugs who prevented Tannhäuser from being performed in Paris; at least one might claim that the latter were having to deal with challenging ‘new music’, Zukunftsmuik, even. Here they were faced with an opera by Dvořák, first performed in 1901, in a staging that would barely raise an eyebrow in most German house or festivals. (The production, by Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, hails initially from the Salzburg Festival.) It would be interesting to know how many of those booing had selfishly, uncomprehendingly disrupted a recent Marriage of Figaro in the same house by erupting into laughter at the very moment Count Almaviva sought forgiveness from the Countess. (There was also, bizarrely, to be heard at the opening of the third act a shouted call from a member of the audience for a ‘free’ Quebec.)

Rusalka, Prince (Bryan Hymel), and Foreign Princess (Petra Lang)

What, then, was it that incurred the wrath of the Tunbridge Wells beau monde? I can only assume that it was for the most part Barbara Ehnes’s sets, since the stage direction (presumably a good part of it from revival director, Samantha Seymour) was more often that not quite in harmony with the urgings and suggestions of Dvořák’s score. (The hostile rarely if ever listen to the music; at best, they follow the surtitles and bridle at deviations from what they imagine the stage directions might have been.) Even modern dress is mixed with a sense of the magical, the environment of Ježibaba the witch a case in point. There is even a cat, played both in giant form by Claire Talbot, and in real form, by – a cat, ‘Girlie’. What is real, and what is not? Collision between spirit and human worlds is compellingly brought to life, the devils and demons of a heathen past, including Slavonic river spirits (rusalki) come to tempt, to question, to lay bare the delusions of moralistic, bigoted modernity. Just as modern ‘love’ and marriage’ quickly boil down to money and power, so Vodník the water goblin finds his tawdry place of temptation whilst issuing his moralistic warnings. (Did the audience see itself reflected in the mirror? Perhaps, though I doubt that it even bothered to think that far.) Our ideas of Nature having been hopelessly compromised by what we have become, we ‘naturally’ see the world of rusalki from within the comforts of our hypocritical bordello. Who is exploiting whom, and who is ‘impure’? The souls of women who have committed suicide and of stillborn children – there are various accounts of who the rusalki actually are – or those who shun them in life and in death? Wieler and Morabito do not offer agitprop; rather they allow us to ask these questions of the work, and of ourselves. But equally importantly, they permit a sense of wonder to suffuse what remains very much a fairy tale, realism coexisting with, being corrected by, something older, more mysterious, more dangerous, and perhaps ultimately liberating. Chris Kondek’s video designs, not unlike the hydroelectric dam of Patrice Chéreau’s ‘Centenary’ Ring, both suggest Nature and through their necessary technological apparatus remind us of our distance from any supposed ‘Golden Age’, just as the opening scene will inevitably suggest to us Alberich, the Rhinemaidens, and the power of the erotic. (Wagner used the term liebesgelüste.)

Musical performances were equally strong, in many respects signalling a triumph for Covent Garden. First and foremost should be mentioned Yannick Nézet-Séguin, making his Royal Opera debut. The orchestra played for him as if for an old friend, offering a luscious, long-breathed Romanticism that made it sound a match – as, on its best days, it is – for any orchestra in the world. Magic was certainly to be heard: the sound of Dvořák’s harps again took me back to Das Rheingold – and to Bernard Haitink’s tenure at the house. Ominous fate was brought into being with similar conviction and communicative skill. Above all, Nézet-Séguin conveyed both a necessary sense of direction and a love for the score’s particular glories. If there are times when Dvořák might benefit from a little more, at least, of Janáček’s extraordinary dramatic concision, it would take a harder heart than mine to eschew the luxuriance on offer both in score and performance. Crucially, staging and performance interacted so that the contrast between worlds on stage intensified that in the pit, and vice versa.

Ježibaba (Agnes Zwierko)
and her cat, Mourek (Claire Talbot)

Camilla Nylund shone in the title role. At times, especially during the first act, one might have wondered whether her voice would prove to have the necessary heft, but it did, and Nylund proved herself an accomplished actress into the bargain. Bryan Hymel may not be the most exciting of singers; the voice is not especially variegated. However, he proved dependable, and often a great deal more, the final duet as moving as one could reasonably expect. Alan Held was everything a Vodník should be: baleful, threatening, sincere, and yet perhaps not quite. The Spirit of the Lake may well have his own agenda – and certainly did here. Agnes Zwierko played the witch Ježibaba with wit, menace, and a fine sense of hypocrisy that brought the closed environments of Janáček’s dramas to mind. The four Jette Parker Young Artists participating, nymphs Anna Devin, Madeleine Perard, and Justina Gringyte, and Huntsman Daniel Grice all acquitted themselves with glowing colours. Indeed, Grice’s solo, enveloped by miraculous Freischütz-like horns from the orchestra, movingly evoked a world of lost or never-existent woodland innocence. Last but not least, Petra Lang’s Foreign Princess emerged, like Wagner’s Ortrud, as in some respects the most truthful, as well as the most devious, character of all. Splendidly sung and acted, Lang’s was a performance truly to savour. But then, this was a performance as a whole that was far more than the sum of its parts, a triumphant return to form for Covent Garden with its first ever staging of the work.
Boulezian: Rusalka, Royal Opera, 27 February 2012

Pectacular Don - Intermezzo

Pectacular Don

Don Giovanni - Royal Opera House, 21 February 2012

Francesca Zambello's witless, charmless, tasteless production hasn't improved with age. But great performers can redeem even the most idiotic of stagings - and frequently have to in these parts. If Erwin Schrott isn't the finest Don Giovanni around right now I'll eat my pants. Yours too.

Untrammeled by Zambello's vaguely 18th century 'look', his Don is a timeless archetype, fuelled by the sense of entitlement and complete lack of self-doubt seen in masters of the universe from Genghis Khan to Rupert Murdoch. His every appetite must be satisfied immediately. He leaps on Donna Elvira and Zerlina almost before he's even said hello. You just know that if he fancied a steak he'd go bite a cow.

Why Schrott is giving up the role is a mystery. He claims he doesn't like the character, but nothing in his performance betrays that fact. He sang with variety and taste, floating a seductive Deh vieni, exploding into a full voiced roar for the final flames.

Pavol Breslik was pretty impressive too. Too often Don Ottavio is an irritating drip, but Breslik makes him a chivalrous counterpart to Don Giovanni, embodying the nobility and civic responsibility which characterises the other side of the ruling class. He delivered his arias with impeccable Mozartian style and such superb control that not a breath was perceptible.

The rest of the cast, while perfectly decent, struggled to escape the bounds of the production. I felt particularly sorry for Ruxandra Donose, quite probably a decent Donna Elvira anywhere else, but trapped here in one-note hysterics as a jilted bride, forever gathering the skirts of her ragged and worn wedding dress.

I lucked out with a side view so restricted I couldn't see the set (a revolving wall tricked out like an '80s Madonna video with dry ice and crucifixes, if memory serves). Fortunately, the functional blocking parks the singers right at the front of the stage for most of the time, so I didn't miss too much action.

I also missed out on the scheduled conductor, Constantinos Carydis, replaced at short notice by Christopher Willis from the ROH music staff. Some initial coordination and balance problems aside, he did a sterling job in the pit. Crucially, his tempos were spot-on. Not quite Colin Davis, but then who is?

Production photos (above) - Mike Hoban for Royal Opera House

Curtain call photos (below) - intermezzo.typepad.com

Pectacular Don - Intermezzo