Die Fledermaus, Welsh National Opera, Cardiff

Iconic operetta returned from director-land to its true home

Those WNO regulars who remember the company’s last Fledermaus (directed nine years ago by Calixto Bieito) with a shiver of horror can rest assured that its replacement contradicts it at almost every point. John Copley, past-master of Texttreue (truth to the text, or at least its spirit), does not rummage around in Strauss’s frothy masterpiece for a critique of modern man, does not transplant it to Merthyr Tydfil or turn it into a rugger-club knees-up, does not coarsen the text or doublecross the music.
Instead, he accepts it as it is: a middle-class fantasy of the high life with Vienna as its simulacrum, an immaculate study in vapid, delicious pleasure, a joke at the expense of expensive jokes and, above all, a dazzling score that never lets up from first note to last.
Copley perhaps updates the setting a touch, though in a work whose dramatis personae are constantly in and out of costume, it’s hard to be sure. In any case the stars of the evening, in my book, are the designers, Tim Reed and Deirdre Clancy, and the lighting designer Howard Harrison, who provide a visual treat that never strays into the vulgarity modern stagings find so tempting in this piece. Bankers are (naturally) invoked in the Pountney/Hancock translation as Eisenstein’s likely fellow inmates in the local jail; but happily their tastes in décor are mostly left alone. The Eisensteins are parvenus, of course, and their suburban villa shows it. But the bored, fun-loving millionnaire Prince Orlofsky (vividly played and sung en travesti by Helen Lepalaan from Estonia) knows how to party in style; is no oligarch; won’t, one feels, be buying football clubs: his palace offers a restrained, semi-exterior setting for a range of genuinely exquisite costumes, subtly lit, and even the prison is the sort of establishment where one might not mind meeting one’s banker, at least if one could avoid the ghastly Frosch (Desmond Barrit).
The evening’s other main feature is the conducting of Thomas Rösner, a Viennese in a piece that can die without style. In his hands the music lilts and sparkles, and the orchestra dances brilliantly to his tune. For the singers, in translation, he could perhaps give a shade more time in the quicker numbers – Orlofsky’s champagne song, or Eisenstein’s initial Terzetto. Rösner, I guess, is used to Viennese singers who have this music in their pocket. But this will come, even in the Land of Song.
The WNO cast is clever, musicianly and highly watchable, thanks not least to Stuart Hopps’s neat choreography, which goes well beyond the regulation of formal dance. Joanne Boag shines as Adele, buxom but agile and clear-voiced in her laughing couplets; and while Nuccia Focile struggles to get Rosalinde’s Csárdás across in this big theatre, she is excellent elsewhere, including in her scenes with the spoof tenor Alfred (Paul Charles Clarke), who sings almost as much Verdi as Strauss and insists on her calling him Alfredo.
Opposite her, Mark Stone is a stylish Eisenstein, enough of a baritone, as Rösner points out in his programme-book interview, to project the rather wordy numbers Strauss gives him, but lyrically tenorish when required. Alan Opie is a witty Frank, a Hapsburg stuffed uniform who breaks into a two-step when instructed by the music. David Stout presides as a just sufficiently sinister Falke, spectacularly transformed into a bat for the finale, but warm enough in the Brüderlein ensemble, a number which typifies the essential pointlessness but irresistible charm of Viennese operetta.

Ariadne auf Naxos, Welsh National Opera

Hoffmansthal's libretto is all about fidelity. This updating is faithful, up to a point

Ariadne auf Naxos, according to its librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is all about fidelity: fidelity in love, fidelity in art, fidelity in spirit. Ariadne on her island, abandoned by Theseus, can give herself to Bacchus only by persuading herself that he’s a god. The actress Zerbinetta gives herself to every man in sight, including the Composer (played, incidentally, by a girl), who for a moment weakens in his lofty contempt for these comic actors who intrude on his high ideals with their vulgar songs and dubious humour.

Hofmannsthal could seldom be parted from his deep meanings. All the same the real interest of Strauss’s chamber opera – composed just after Der Rosenkavalier – lies in its theatrical method, which, pre-Pirandello, pre-Turandot, presents an earnest, heroic drama disrupted by irrelevant characters who offer advice to the heroine and do their best to turn the opera seria into street theatre. It’s an entertaining, suggestive idea, but problematic in performance, partly because Strauss couldn’t bring himself to abandon his epic conclusion, which tends to drag on and in the process rather spoils the irony. The finest music comes in the Prologue, backstage before the show, which has the performers popping in and out of their dressing rooms in the best Feydeau manner while the high-minded young Composer laments the looming wreckage of his magnum opus.

WNO_Ariadne_-_Gillian_Keith_Zerbinetta_Sarah_Connolly_Composer_-_Richard_H_Smith_2This is also much the most enjoyable part of Neil Armfield’s production in this WNO revival at the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff. True, he drops Hofmannstal’s beloved 18th century, and with it the whole idea of the grand Viennese palais (which survives nevertheless in the text). Still, Dale Ferguson’s modern theatre-backstage fizzes and crackles with comic vitality while allowing space for those moments where the music speaks, the comedy retreats, Zerbinetta looks into the Composer’s eyes and for about 30 seconds falls in love. Sarah Connolly, in the travesty role of the Composer, is wonderfully touching in these episodes, and Gillian Keith (pictured right with a suited Connolly) as Zerbinetta subtly colours her flirtatiousness with the sort of profundity that lurks in the eyes and voices of pretty girls but vanishes in an “Augenblick”, as she admits – the flash of a spider’s eye.

There are several other crisp performances in the prologue from singers who, like the Composer, are not required in the “opera” itself. Stephen Rooke’s Dancing Master is outstanding – a fine lyric tenor; but Robert Poulton’s shock-haired Music Master, and the just-not-too-overacted Major Domo of Eric Roberts (another disruptive element, as the part is spoken) are also both excellent. As for those who do reappear on Ariadne’s island, the four commedia masks (Owen Webb, Aled Hall, Julian Close and Wynne Evans) make a sprightly team, but as always they outstay their welcome, a problem that not all Armfield’s skilful management of slapstick cliché can solve. Strauss even made the mistake of continuing Zerbinetta’s great show-stopping aria "Grossmächtige Prinzessin"  for some minutes after it’s stopped the show – to my mind a fatal miscalculation. Keith dispatches the whole thing with coquettish brilliance. But one nevertheless tends to sympathise with Ariadne (Orla Boylan), who has had enough long before the end and makes a dignified exit.

After last month’s lamentable Fidelio, Lothar Koenigs and the WNO Orchestra are back on top form. They need to be

Would that she could manage her own music with quite such poise. She is, though, a wooden actress, and her musical phrasing is short-winded; there is bloom – of a silvery kind - on the voice, but rarely on the long musical line. She might take a tip from her three graces, Mary-Jean O’Doherty, Patricia Orr and Joanne Boag, who blend with irresistible sweetness in the march-trio they cheekily base on Harlequin’s “Lieben, Hassen, Hoffen, Zagen”. But Strauss did not make it easy for her, or indeed for her “new god”, Bacchus (Ricardo Tamura), who descends in this production on a superior builder’s cradle and acts, it must be said, like a superior builder. His singing, though, is better than that: sturdy, if one-toned. But the problems of this conclusion are mainly Strauss’s fault. Perhaps we should revert to the work’s earlier ending, which has the masks reappearing and M Jourdain falling asleep in his box.

Finally, I’m happy to report that, after last month’s lamentable Fidelio, Lothar Koenigs and the WNO Orchestra are back on top form. They need to be. Strauss’s chamber textures are exposed and the balance treacherous, but everything here is stylish, athletic and beautiful, in an opera that is almost worth hearing for its orchestration alone.

 

OVERLEAF: MORE RICHARD STRAUSS ON THEARTSDESK

Fidelio, Welsh National Opera, Cardiff

Unworthy, weary and poorly sung - what a contrast to the Meistersinger

I suppose it was inevitable after their magnificent high with Meistersinger in the summer that Welsh National Opera’s next production in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre would be a let-down. But one hardly expected a crash-landing quite as spectacular as their new Fidelio, which looks, sounds and feels like a show thrown together with a scratch cast, a weary orchestra, and a director who was shown the score for the first time last Tuesday.

I suppose it was inevitable after their magnificent high with Meistersinger in the summer that Welsh National Opera’s next production in Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre would be a let-down. But one hardly expected a crash-landing quite as spectacular as their new Fidelio, which looks, sounds and feels like a show thrown together with a scratch cast, a weary orchestra, and a director who was shown the score for the first time last Tuesday.

Rigoletto, Welsh National Opera, Cardiff

The Kennedy-era setting for this revival still doesn't quite make sense

Watching and hearing this revival of WNO’s now eight-year-old production of Verdi’s Rigoletto, it’s hard to remember he composed it only a year or two before La Traviata, that most psychologically believable of all his operas. In Rigoletto nothing makes sense: the hunchback’s pretty daughter, her apparently willing incarceration, Rigoletto’s hoodwinking (literally) into helping her abduction, her final self-sacrifice – all palpable nonsense. Yet the piece never seriously fails.

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