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Gender studies

London
Coliseum
04/03/2003 -  03 and 5, 9, 11, 14, 25 April, 2 May 2003

Poul Ruders The Handmaid's Tale

Will Keen (Professor Pieixoto), Stephanie Marshall (Offred), Helen Field (Aunt Lydia), Alison Roddy (Moira), Mary Nelson (Janine/Ofwarren), Catherine Wyn-Rogers (Serena Joy), Ethan Robinson (Rita), Stephen Richardson (The Commander), Richard Coxon (Nick), Rebecca de Pont Davies (Ofglen), Jacqueline Varsey (New Ofglen), Heather Shipp (Offred's double), Andrew Rees (Luke), Liane Keegan (Offred's mother), John Graham-Hall (Doctor)

Elgar Howarth (conductor), Phyllida Lloyd (director)

ENO chorus and orchestra

Royal Festival Hall

03/30/03

Richard Wagner: Tannhäuser

Solveig Kringelborn (Elisabeth), Peter Seiffert (Tannhäuser), Thomas Hampson (Wolfram von Eschenbach), Liuba Chuchrova (Venus), Martina Jankov´ (Young shepherd), Alfred Muff (Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia), Christoph Strehl (Walther von der Vogelweide), Rolf Haunstein (Biterolf), Martin Zysset (Heinrich der Schreiber), Pavel Czekala (Reinmar von Zweter)

Franz Welser-Möst (conductor)

Orchestra and choruses of Zurich Opera

Wagner's Tannhäuser merges Gretchen and Helen from Faust and de Sade's Justine and Juliette, spins them into a mediaeval tale of the redemption of paganism and turns out as a ripe early Victorian expression of the Madonna-and-whore syndrome. The troubadour Tannhäuser is kept from the world by Venus, the goddess of love, but, helped by the Virgin Mary, returns in spring to discover not only his old mates, but also the saintly Elisabeth. But he can't get Venus out of his system and blows the song contest where the prize is Elisabeth. He goes off to Rome to ask the Pope for absolution, she dies of despair (abetted by the Blessed Virgin) and he dies of despair when he returns and finds her dead. It might not be a coincidence that Wagner's unreliable wife was called Minna, the German equivalent of Venus and muse of the Minnesingers, poets of courtly love. In both political and personal terms it's pretty unpleasant, although perhaps not as sado-masochistic as Parsifal (from an original idea by Wolfram von Eschenbach, one of Tannhäuser's fellow bards and the voice of resilient purity in the opera). The music, also identifiably of its (1845) time, shows the first signs of Wagner's symphonic shaping, but works well enough as a high Romantic opera, related to Weber's Euryanthe and to contemporary French work, and is about as enjoyable as Wagner gets for non-devotees.

The Zurich Opera at the Festival Hall had an audience mainly of devotees. Thoroughly rehearsed, musically coherent and utterly conventional, it was ideally pitched for those who already know without question that Tannhäuser is a great work. The orchestra fell foul of the hall's famously dry acoustic, which took much of the allure from the Venusburg music, desiccating the shimmer of the violins, but rose to the grandeur of the pilgrim music. Liuba Chuchrova as Venus (in revealing black) was dark and beautiful, but sounded like a bit of a harridan, while Solveig Kringelborn as Elisabeth (in powder blue with wrap) was wussy in the extreme. Peter Seiffert sang relentlessly, but his Tannhäuser was a Heldentenor, not a force-of-nature mediaeval poet. He strongly resembled the pre-crisis Ben Heppner in voice and person, even down to the fuddy-duddy buttoned-to-the-neck waistcoat. You wondered why Elisabeth didn't just accept Thomas Hampson's glorious Wolfram.

Poul Ruders' The Handmaid's Tale, which had its UK premiere at the Coliseum on Thursday, also deals with matters of sex, gender and ritual purity, but from the point of view of 1986. Margaret Atwood's novel gave powerful expression both to the experience of oppression of many women, across the world, and to the historical and ideological insights of feminism. Her text was both typical and seminal in the way it restored a voice to the silenced, a voice whose poignancy gives the text its operatic potential. The novel is the first-person narrative of a "handmaid", a woman kept only for breeding in a post-cataclysmic theocracy called Gilead. The narrator, Offred, is named as the property of her owner, the Commander (who nobody ever calls Fred), who is trying to get her pregnant because his wife is "barren". She recalls her life with her previously divorced husband and daughter in "the time before" and her induction into complete subservience at the hands of the sinister Aunts, and narrates her discovery of the utterly predictable hypocrisy of the puritanical state and of a network of resisters.

Ruders had the advantage of a good librettist, unlike Wagner, who wrote his own libretto. Paul Bentley shaped the often dream-like novel into a more explicit and rigorously symmetrical dramatic shape, which seems skeletal but leaves space most of the time for the music and performances to deliver the emotional punch. He moves the date from an indeterminate near future of 1986 to the specific 2009, and uses the novel's concluding historical conference as a frame that detaches the audience slightly from the events depicted, although the smug professor who introduces the narrative, and the immediacy of the opening newsreel that depicts the events leading to the fundamentalist takeover, seems to force us to question our detachment.

The contrast with Nicholas Maw's Sophie's Choice is striking, not only because the The Handmaid's Tale seems to have been trimmed after the libretto was printed while Maw added music to Sophie's Choice during the final rehearsals, extending it beyond four hours in length. Ruders and Maw, though, are both characteristically late twentieth-century symphonists, and the music of both operas could be described as neo-Romantic, not inherently dramatic but emotionally rich. The operas themselves deal with a similar situation, a mezzo heroine who becomes sexually engaged with her totalitarian master and who has to consider how far she can compromise herself for survival. But Ruders' opera has a visceral, nightmarish impact because the music works with the libretto, often subliminally, like film music, with themes and styles emerging at crucial points, "Amazing grace" as Offred and the Commander have sex, Lutheran chorales during scenes of state violence. The easily irritated might object to some minimalist techniques, and although the singers have plenty to work with there is no "proper" operatic vocal writing, except the excruciating coloratura of the doctrinaire Aunt Lydia, so The Handmaid's Tale will probably not work for mainstream opera audiences as The silver tassie and Dead man walking do, and the rather academic diagnosis of authoritarian puritanism in the United States probably rules out a production there in the near future, sadly. But it is certainly a substantial achievement of music theatre.

Phyllida Lloyd's production, revived from the world premiere at the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen, makes a major contribution to the overall effect. The atmosphere of oppression is created by the calmly mechanical pairs of handmaids and the presence of the entire household throughout all the scenes in the Commander's home; the colour schemes, carried over from the novel, are depressing but beautiful; and the flashbacks (often very brief) are achieved by changes of lighting and musical style, and the use of a double for Offred, again in striking contrast to Sophie's Choice, which relied on lightening set and costume changes.

Stephanie Marshall, a young Canadian mezzo, was very moving as Offred, permanently terrified but with moments of sparky charm, and particularly heart-rending in the duet with Heather Shipp, her former self. Helen Field was scary as Aunt Lydia. It may have been a blessing that her words were inaudible, probably the fault of the music as much as of the singer. Of the large and impeccably characterised ensemble, Catherine Wyn-Rogers was suffocatingly smug and mellifluous as Serena Joy, the Commander's former television singing-star wife, Rebecca de Pont Davies was strikingly tough as Ofglen, Offred's walking partner and introduction to the network of resistance, Liane Keegan was very moving, at least to women of a certain age, as Offred's mother, a toughly realistic but old-school feminist who initially rejoices in the abolition of pornography, and John Graham-Hall was uncomfortably ambivalent and slimy as the doctor who offers to get Offred pregnant during her monthly check-up in a scene that could have been an academic checking off of one of the institutions that oppress women. The ENO chorus provided a considerable number of smaller roles, and were on their current outstanding form, and Elgar Howarth and the orchestra delivered the score with superb lucidity.


HE Elsom

 

 

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