by Tom Mooney
A Village Romeo and Juliet
Antagonism to Delius’s opera from the very beginning rests on its suitability for the stage: detractors believed that his symphonic dexterity did not necessarily translate into good drama.
But when did it ever. Had I been around to review A Village Romeo and Juliet in 1907, I would have empathised with its detractors while assuming that history would be kinder to it
I would also have been wrong: history has been anything but, and the essential opposition to the opera – that it is the antithesis of drama – hasn’t altered much.
The dissection of A Village Romeo and Juliet into bits and pieces is to miss the point: Delius was hell bent on fashioning a symphonic canvas out of the traditional components of opera, and I bet the opera is a beauty to listen to in a dark room.
It has its faults: characterisation is frankly poor, some of the scenes don’t advance what passes for a plot, and there is much unsubtle padding to compensate for protracted pregnant pauses in which nothing of any significance happens.
But, Delius isn’t a non entity and he always had an originality of idiom in his compositions: Songs of Sunset and Summer Night on the Rivers are as fresh today as they were in 1912.
What saves A Village Romeo and Juliet and what justified its revisiting by Wexford is the evolution of the role of the orchestra as the series of scenes morph into each other.
Delius, and by extension, conductor Rory Macdonald, achieve this brilliantly: Delius inserts his leitmotifs early and, to my untutored ear, unsparingly – oboe and violin foreshadowing calamity – but once Sali and Vreli have decided on a certain course of action, the orchestra is no longer a series of tributaries, but a river.
And because the music becomes rich and profuse (The Walk to the ParadiseGarden), designer Jamie Vartan, who was behind the memorable Misterman at the Galway Arts Festival, creates tableaux after tableaux to accentuate the sensual.
Thankfully, there is an abundance of the sensual in both the music and the singing that lifts A Village Romeo and Juliet above the mundane, and John Bellemer and the terrific Jessica Muirhead convince as star crossed lovers, even if the feel of this production was more John B. Keane’s The Field than a tragedy set in Verona.
A Village Romeo and Juliet starts out as quintessentially a tragedie lyrique but the intention of Delius was a lyric drama in six scenes: it might seem that the dramatic – the lovers sinking to their deaths – is a slave to the music which, to augment the narrative, must often appear dream like, and it was.
It has been said that the opera has the audience appeal of La Boheme and the profundity of Tristan, but outside of the theatre it is forgettable. Harsh? Probably
With A Village Romeo and Juliet, Delius wanted to introduce us to a new way of listening to opera and whether we can or not depends on what we bring to the table. I certainly wouldn’t have minded seeing it again.
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Nikolay Khozyainov at
Wexford Opera House
This recital stood out among the Festival’s programming like the Colossus of Rhodes because Nikolay Khozyainov is a precocious genius.
Winner of umpteen international piano competitions, he played for over two hours, including a Jimi Hendrix-meets-Jackson Pollock encore, the rapid fire juxtaposition of chords and lightning rhythms.
By then, with an intelligent programme, in which he opened with a Beethoven sonata, Khozyainov had brought a captive and attentive audience on a formidable sojourn, at times light and at times dark.
Gaspard de la nuit by Ravel eclipsed the warmth of Opp. 109. one of Beethoven’s last three sonatas, as if, like Eurydice, we suddenly found ourselves in the underworld.
Ravel’s set himself an unambiguous task with Gaspard de la nuit: inspired by Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, he desired Ondine, Le gibet and Scarbo to be dark in tone and exceedingly challenging to play.
The three Bertrand poems chosen by Ravel are dissimilar, but they share the structure of a sonata: allegro, adagio and a finale.
Khozyainov, who studies opera scores in his spare time, would have relished Ravel’s provocation, although he handles formidable technical challenges with ease.
By the conclusion of Scarbo, it was as if we had been on a boat ride with Charon at the helm, and rarely has a trip among spirits and devils been as intoxicating.
But complexity courses through one of Ravel’s most recorded compositions, only to be met head-on by the coolest young pianist in the business.
The interval dawned and on what was a biting cold morning, the Festival had laid on free, piping hot, coffee and tea, a very thoughtful gesture. Equally commendable were the intelligent and well written precis in the programme (although the writer isn’t credited).
Ravel’s mood wasn’t entirely dispensed with in Chopin’s Op.60 Barcarolle and Op.57 Berceuse: Khozyainov, lauded as a fine interpreter of Chopin, seems to be drawn to any challenge that can define different degrees of separation for the musician.
The mellow arpeggi in the Barcarolle and the tension and release of the Berceuse are all the more compelling for Khozyainov because of the contrasting style, a cue for the occasional glimpses of ecstatic pleasure that often dawns on his young face, with showed real fire in the encore after Liszt’s Sonata in B minor, S. 178.
Nikolay Khozyainov performs the same programme at the NUI in Galway tomorrow.
Le Roi Malgre Lui
My countdown to an engagement with Chabrier’s opera comique in three acts, which translated into three hours and thirty minutes, was blighted by word of mouth, which was anything but favourable.
And in the improbable world of opera, knowing what fate has in store – for both the audience and the cast – can come in handy.
The brief synopsis of the plot in the programme wasn’t enlightening, but I can surmise it thus. Lecherous King of France is bored with his country but complications follow when he becomes involved in a love affair and then, in disguise, is asked by conspirators to arrange his own assassination.
Perhaps I got the ideal performance: the last night. I never thought that le Roi Malgre Lui, from reports, had the capacity or the ambition to impress, but it did.
The principal charge leveled against it, which is serious for the director, is that it was all over the place. At worse, I found the stage occasionally too busy, but at best, it was beguiling in its energy and engaging charm.
Thaddeus Strassberger’s direction did leave me scratching my head at times, but the madcap ebb and flow of chorus and cast, and stages within stages, took your mind off the ridiculous plot.
Strassberger, on this outing, could be become the Baz Luhrmann of opera. The cast didn’t need to be sharply characterised, so he didn’t bother. Set designer Kevin Knight embellished the stage with a confident grasp of movement, space and synchronicity.
He brought both imagination and verve to what must have seemed, from the libretto, a thankless task. Choreography predominated when the plot stalled, and when the dancers had space to move, and space is the first casualty of mayhem, they were visually pleasing (the fete polonaise and the chanson tzigane).
Opera can enlighten you through narrative, or keep you keen by humour, but without a good cast a director is impotent: Mercedes Arcuri was the surprise package. Small in stature, but big in voice, her singing is never at any moment less than vibrant or enriching. A duet with Nathalie Paulin was technically challenging so late into the opera but was delivered with aplomb
Arcuri also has an actor’s instinct, as does the charming and debonair Liam Bonner, who you can tell will have a bright career ahead of him because he is distinguished in his diversity, and also gifted with declamatory colour, which was evident in the barcarolle with Paulin.
For sure the libretto needs a stretcher and this was an opera that took an orbital path to get going, but it was worth it. The libretto, apparently, was written by several people, which might explain the existence of several popular recordings of Le Roi Malgre Lui minus the dialogue.
