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La Forza del Destino

Welsh National Opera, Cardiff and touring until April 21
Giuseppe Verdi

Producer: Welsh National Opera and Theater Bonn
Cast includes: Mary Elizabeth Williams, Gwyn Hughes Jones, Luis Cansino, Miklos Sebestyen, Justina Gringyte, Donald Maxwell, Wyn Pencarreg, Alun Rhys-Jenkins, Julian Boyce
Director: David Pountney
Running time: approximately three hours, including interval

La Forza del Destino was first performed in 1862.  Not satisfied, Verdi carried on revising it for years, adding in 1869 the famous sinfonia overture that announces so many of the work’s overwhelming musical themes.

The Welsh National Opera’s new version, directed by David Pountney, is based on a critical reassessment and settles on a combination in line, the programme tells us, with the “endless self-questioning” and complex creative process that informed Verdi’s work.

This does not pretend to be the definitive production because there isn’t one.  Instead, it allows us to appreciate the work’s ambition, massive scale and difficulty.

The absurdities of the plot become something we tolerate as the vehicle to explore our relationship with destiny and the enormous strength of character required to defy it.

Above all, it is the inspiration for the richest of music, conducted with flair by Carlo Rizzi, and visually articulated by Raimund Bauer’s stark design that projects images of a giant revolver spinning like the wheel of fate and a massive bullet soaring through the air.

Against the clinical white of a set that evokes the austerity of the monastery and the bleak, bullet-ridden face of war, a bleeding wound reminds us of the ongoing vendetta.

As the sinfonia begins, the most flamboyant and agile of the performers Justina Gringyte as Preziosilla, cast as fortune, makes her first appearance, banging her staff on the stage while the music delivers the blows of fate.  She is then a recurrent presence, alternating between an emcee and a fortune teller with an undercurrent of the grim reaper and the witch, as she cavorts with glee on the gun turret of a tank.

In a production in which the parallels between the wider war of the Austrian Succession and the personal feud are writ large, she goads a mighty chorus of troops into battle just as she heartlessly nudges the protagonists towards their fatal choices.

In Verdi’s ultimate version, as well as in this one, the too-bleak possibility of eternal perdition following Alvaro’s suicide is scrapped in favour of a redemption that amounts to his triumph over destiny, but the effort required is superhuman and the cost devastating.

Gwyn Hughes Jones as Don Alvaro gives it his mellifluous all in a struggle that reaches its climax in passionate, rousing tenor-baritone duets with his nemesis Leonora’s brother Don Carlo (Luis Cansino).

For a leading lady, Mary Elizabeth Williams as Leonora has a lonely time, singing solo in a voice with great nuance, as able to convey an outcry as a whisper as she bids her earthly fate adieu.

The problem for a modern audience, which this sprawling production can do little to address, is that in a post-religious society there is very little that can outwit the destiny of death – with the possible exception of art.

Barbara Lewis © 2018.

Tosca,

Welsh National Opera, Cardiff and touring until April 20
Co-production: WNO and State Opera of South Australia
Original director: Michael Blakemore
Revival director: Benjamin Davis
Composer: Giacomo Puccini
Cast includes: Claire Rutter, Hector Sandoval, Mark S Doss, Daniel Grice, Donald Maxwell, Michael Clifton-Thompson, George Newton-Fitzgerald, Jack O’Kelly, Rosie Hay.
Running time: Two hours, 40 minutes, including two intervals.

Human relationships boil down to trust and betrayal; power and powerlessness.  It’s the story of Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein and it’s the gruelling plot of Tosca.

This version, first performed in 1992, is firmly set in the times of Napoleon’s invasion of Italy and its style is classic to the point of fatalistic.

Rather than drawing out the timelessness or the depressing topicality, the focus is on delivering the innate drama, undiluted by sub-plot or light relief, as we race through from Tosca’s innocent, loving jealousy to Scarpia’s calculating manipulation and compulsive betrayals, bolstered by the fabulously bold sound of the orchestra, conducted by Carlo Rizzi.

Ashley Martin-Davis’ design gives us three clearly-defined settings that make the most of the stage’s height to dwarf the lovers and emphasise Scarpia’s stature.

For the first act, we feel the chill of a huge church where the protagonists huddle at the feet of a giant Crucifix and in front of a grill through which the escaped prisoner Angelotti, a fine-voiced Daniel Grice, continues his flight.

It’s also the backdrop for Rutter as Tosca to play out the jealousy core to her loving nature and child-like, vulnerable need to hear constantly from Mario (Sandoval) that no other woman’s eyes are finer.

The tension swiftly builds and the tragic ironies start to pile up.  The sinister climax is a papal procession, reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan, again magnified by the rich, orchestral sound that only Mark S Doss, as the towering Scarpia, can match.  Rutter and Sandoval as Tosca and Mario, by comparison, lack power, which is fitting on the level of plot but undermines their charisma as lovers.

For the next act, Scarpia’s supremacy is at its height as he dines in his splendid cold rooms and manipulates the lovers.  He is a truly modern villain, with the self-knowledge that his appetites are depraved and cynical and an emotionally-detached determination to exercise his power to satisfy them.

His performance draws out the humanity and passion of Rutter’s Tosca, whose performance of the exquisite “Vissi d’Arte” trembles with emotion.

She turns to steel to deliver “Tosca’s kiss” and stab Scarpia before piously laying a crucifix on his corpse in a gesture in keeping with past productions, but possibly overstated for modern taste.

For the final act, we’re on mighty battlements that plant us firmly in Napoleonic times for the emotional crescendo of Tosca and Mario, imagining, with crashing dramatic irony, a life of love and freedom before them.  As the lovers, Rutter and Sandoval are at their most moving but they never attain the effortless power of Scarpia.

Barbara Lewis © 2018.

Eugene Onegin

Arcola Theatre, London
Producer: OperaUpClose
Director: Lucy Bradley
Author: new English version by Robin Norton-Hale
Cast: Lucy Hall/Josephine Thorpe, Felix Kemp/Tom Stoddart, Anthony Flaum/Lawrence Thackeray/Cliff Zammit Stevens, Felicity Buckland, Flora McIntosh, Kathryn Hannah, Julian Debreuil, Michael Bradley/Edmund Hastings, Alexandra Stenson, Caroline Daggett
Dates of run: Arcola until Dec 23, then touring
Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes, including interval

Tchaikovsky said his aim in creating an opera from Pushkin’s supremely Russian yet universal drama of ill-fated love was to relay “ordinary, simple human feelings” as opposed to lavishly theatrical action.

It’s an aspiration perfectly in keeping with the production values of OperaUpClose and the talents of librettist Robin Norton-Hale, whose wit, crystal-clear English translation and transposition of the action from 19^th-century Russia to London and its suburbs means whatever we lose by way of high-flown poetry, and, for purists, authenticity, we gain in immediacy.

Under the direction of Lucy Bradley, the production also drives home the feminism of a heroine who dares to try to shape her own destiny by setting the action in the years that saw a shift from the vestiges of 1950s home-making to the liberation of the 1960s.

We begin with an emphasis on female domesticity. While Tatyana (a perfectly-cast Lucy Hall on the night I attended) switches between reverie and reading, a chorus of women of the older generation are gossiping and gardening, with Marigold gloves, shears and a decorously pink lawn-mower. They have all loved, lost and moved on with laudable practicality.

The pared down OperaUpClose format allows for maximum heterosexual impact as not a man appears until Lensky (Cliff Zammit Stevens) bursts on to the scene with Onegin (Tom Stoddart). Just in case we miss the contrast between the earnest Lensky and the caddish Onegin, Zammit Stevens wears comedy glasses, while Onegin is too smooth in a sharp suit and suspiciously shiny shoes.

The chemistry between the lovers is instant and only a fool would deny it, but then Onegin emotionally is a fool however beguiling Stoddart’s baritone is as a complement to Hall’s soaring soprano.

The question is whether any of this emotion is real. Certainly it is to Tatyana, whose decision to write a destiny-shaping letter is at once a student all-night essay crisis, which strews her suburban bedroom with screwed up paper, and one of the most challenging, sustained and powerful operatic arias of them all.

The tragedy of Onegin is his inability to confront what he has inspired. It’s somehow easier to fight a dual with his best friend Lensky.

First we have a birthday party, as opposed to the grand name-day ball of Tchaikovsky’s original Russian version, which ends in powerful harmonic confusion, forcefully conveyed even by a bijou cast and orchestra, as the run-up to Lensky’s long, lonely wait in the snow for his duelling partner.

Poignant and vulnerable, Lensky is now without his glasses and at first locked almost in a lover’s embrace with the friend he is too proud to pardon.

Emotionally, it’s an almost exact precursor of the bitter end when Tatyana refuses to forgive Onegin even though it would be so emotionally fulfilling to do so.

Unlike the Tatyana of Pushkin and of Tchaikovsky who is married to an elderly prince, this Tatyana is a successful writer and worldly sophisticate, signing copies of her newly-published book, who can actively choose to live without Onegin.

It’s a triumph for Tatyana, but what jars is that it makes this production only a tragedy for Onegin.

Feminists may rejoice, but the victory is hollow when we are probably no closer to cracking the secret of mutual happiness than in 19^th-century Russia.

Barbara Lewis © 2017.