First off on this side of the Pennines are the classic pair
of Italian ‘verismo’ tragedies, Mascagni’s Cavalleria
Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci,
only in this case Pagliacci comes
first. On the Thursday it’s Ravel’s L’Enfant
et les Sortilèges, followed by a rarity from Janáček - Osud (meaning Destiny). On the Friday two lighter, shorter works
take the stage with Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble
in Tahiti and Trial by Jury by
Gilbert & Sullivan, and on the Saturday L’Enfant
et les Sortilèges is repeated in the afternoon, and then Pagliacci and Cavalleria Rusticana recur in the evening.
Pagliacci, L’Enfant et les Sortilèges and Osud were all originally slated to be
conducted by Aleksandar Markovic when he was the company’s music director. He
left somewhat abruptly in the summer, and Tobias Ringborg, already part of the
season’s conducting team, has stepped up to the rostrum for Pagliacci (he was already down for Cavalleria Rusticana and Trouble in Tahiti) and Martin André has
taken over L’Enfant and Osud. Oliver Rundell conducts Trial by Jury.
In the event, the entire enterprise is a great example of Opera
North’s ensemble philosophy, with principal singers in one production popping up
in support roles in another and chorus members frequently stepping into the
limelight, and it seems only natural that set and lighting design for all six
productions is by Charles Edwards, and there’s a common front cloth showing the
assembled team – directors, performers, chorus and all – in a group photograph.
Edwards directs Pagliacci,
and his reinterpretation of the ‘strolling players’ story uses the idea of an
opera company in rehearsal. So the performers are themselves – concept photos
of the other operas are visible on the rehearsal room walls, and the chorus are
first heard sitting down practising their notes. Props that will recur in other
Little Greats shows are simply lying around.
It’s not so much ‘On with the motley’ as off with it, most
of the time – though Peter Auty, as Canio the tragic clown, gets to wear his
face-paint and wig for the ‘final run-through’. Nedda (Elin Pritchard) is
having an affair with the conductor, Silvio (Phillip Rhodes).
It all begins with Tonio (Richard Burkhard) giving the
prologue, suitably adapted, in English (‘You’ll see a company rehearsing an
opera’), though the story itself is sung in Italian – until in the final line
Tonio reverts to English to shout that ‘The performance is over’. It’s almost a
motto piece for the entire series (though I hope this verismo does not extend to real stabbings behind the scenes at
Opera North).
Cavalleria Rusticana
is a masterpiece that sprang full formed from its creator Mascagni’s youth and
which, arguably, he never excelled. It’s been popular for excerpting from the
day it was written (Charles Hallé conducted the much-loved Intermezzo in
concert in his later years), and that, the Easter Hymn and the Brindisi
(drinking song) pop up everywhere.
It has the reputation of being the first ‘verismo’ opera,
with a degree of truth to real life that the art form had never created until
then. It is true to its title of ‘melodrama’, and, if any opera deserves the
reputation of being a shabby little shocker, this is surely it.
Karolina Sofulak’s production shifts it in both space and
time from 19th century Sicily to Poland in the 1970s – Catholicism
is still the background, but it’s in the ‘greyness’ and scarcities of a
subjugated society, as well as the treatment of young women, that she sees
parallels. The only clear locale is a shop, and there is no visual equivalent
of a church, just a wooden panel with a cross on it – for some reason, the
scorned Santuzza’s former lover Turiddù (who is ultimately to die for his
seduction of Alfio’s wife, Lola) climbs on to it with arms outstretched like a
crucifix at one point, though I couldn’t see why.
The great virtue of this offering is that it has the same
two outstanding women principals as does Osud: Giselle Allen is Santuzza, and
Rosalind Plowright is Lucia (Turiddù’s mother). Turiddù is Jonathan Stoughton,
a young British tenor with a big voice making his only contribution to The
Little Greats with this role, and Phillip Rhodes is a highly convincing Alfio –
we see him as a decent bloke and possessor of the only decent little car in
town, driven to vengeful murder as he realizes his marriage is utterly
adulterated.
Annabel Arden directs L’Enfant
et les Sortilèges in a manner that, like her other best work for Opera
North, is faithful to the score and the book but full of imaginative touches. The
Child (Wallis Giunta) has his hand-held electronic device to engage his
attention at the outset, rather than listen to his Mother (Ann Taylor): what
youngster today wouldn’t? Fflur Wyn, Quirijn de Lang, Katie Bray, John Graham
Hall, John Savournin, Lorna James, Kathryn Walker, Victoria Sharp and Rachel J
Mosley complete the cast – the sort of team only an ensemble enterprise of this
kind could provide for Ravel’s 45-minute fantasy.
It’s definitely on with the motley in the costume department,
as chairs, teapot, fire, wallpaper figures, cats, squirrel, storybook princess
and the rest all come to life, following Colette’s delicious libretto. The
story, with its hints at adolescent awakenings alongside dawning awareness of
the need to help one’s fellow-creatures as a child grows up, in Annabel Arden’s
version retains an innocence that’s wholly appropriate.
Osud is an early
work by Janáček but requires considerable resources: there are 26 named roles,
it’s in three acts and takes an hour and a half – in short, a compact opera in
its own right.
It gives a fascinating insight to its composer’s own psyche,
as it’s a tale he concocted himself about a composer writing an opera in which
his own life and love are the inspiration. So it’s a story within a story (almost
a leitmotiv of the Little Greats season), and another aspect of the Janáček
characteristic of writing about emotions he’s acutely felt already.
Annabel Arden is again director, and she presents the
scenario pretty straight. She’s borrowed an idea from those who have staged
this rare piece in recent years in the Czech Republic, which is to begin in the
present day. She shows Živný, the composer (John Graham-Hall), supervising an
exam in his music conservatory, and then runs the first Act as a 20-years-ago
flashback in his mind, followed by the second Act as a 15-years-ago flashback,
returning to the present for Act Three, where the exam ends and the students
ask him about his opera. But she doesn’t change the order of the notes.
The opera is sung in English, but with surtitles also, which
with Janáček’s orchestrations helps.
There is a particularly strong cast. John Graham-Hall
brilliantly sang the title role in Opera North’s The Adventures of Mr Brouček a
few years ago; Giselle Allen (who’s done wonderful work for Opera North in the
past) is Míla, the object of Živný’s passions; and Rosalind Plowright is her mother.
Peter Auty, Richard Burkhard, Dean Robinson and Ann Taylor are there, too, and
the other roles are supplied from Opera North’s multi-talented chorus.
Trouble in Tahiti
and Trial by Jury contrast with the
bigger emotions of some of the other ‘Greats’. They come from different eras –
Leonard Bernstein’s from his early years as a composer in the 1950s, well
before West Side Story, but clearly showing some of the knacks that would go to
make that later masterpiece – Gilbert & Sullivan’s first extant collaboration
from the late-ish 19th century but before the polished gems of HMS
Pinafore and it successors.
Each has a claim to attention, though, not just because some
of their creators’ skills were embryonic when they were written, but because
some were already fully formed. (Bernstein, in particular, was already a master
of the ‘ear-worm’ of a simple melodic motif that can tug at your heart-strings
as it returns and is quoted from one number to another). Both works carry a
degree of social satire of their times – and in these productions both get
treatments which connect, albeit tangentially, to the ‘behind the scenes’ or
‘story within the story’ themes of Pagliacci in its new guise.
In Matthew Eberhardt’s production of Trouble
in Tahiti we are in a radio studio, as the Trio who act is a kind of Greek
chorus in the score do it to make the links and jingles of the format. The
scenes unfolded are of a husband and wife who are growing apart and a child who
suffers as a result – catching the unease the fifties brought about growing
post-war affluence and soullessness.
In John Savournin’s Trial
by Jury it’s a more thoroughgoing modernization of the G&S original,
which may not be to everyone’s taste, though the audience I was part of loved
it. The period seems to be the 1930s, and the overture is obliterated by a
supposed flouncy TV showbiz reporter (borrowing the idea from Singing’ in the
Rain) outside the courtroom, establishing the re-interpretation of the plot as
that of a jilted film star suing for her offended feelings but really just
hyping up the publicity for her latest picture. Women were rare on juries in
the Thirties, but Savournin has several of them, and a woman as the Plaintiff’s
Counsel, rather than the baritone Sullivan wrote for, so the whole thing is
even more topsy-turvy than usual.
Apart from that, it’s much as G&S wrote it, with the
dotty old judge (Jeremy Peaker) the centre of most amusement. Glamorous (and
RNCM-trained) Amy Freston is The Plaintiff. This showbizzy kind of style is her
ideal milieu, and I’m happy to recall that I first heard her lovely voice
singing another work by Sullivan, back when she was still at ballet school in
London.
Pagliacci - Peter Auty as Canio and Elin Pritchard as Nedda (Credit Tristram Kenton)
Cavalleria rusticana - Katie Bray as Lola,
Phillip Rhodes as Alfio and Giselle Allen as Santuzza with the Chorus of Opera
North (Credit Robert Workman)
L'enfant et les sortilèges
- Quirijn de Lang as
Grandfather Clock and Wallis Giunta as the Child (Credit Tristram Kenton)
Trial
by Jury - Amy Freston as The Plaintiff and Jeremy
Peaker as The Learned Judge (Credit Robert Workman)
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