This was commissioned by La Monnaie, both (relying on which article you learn) on the suggestion of Ingmar Bergman’s son, or together with his blessing. As ordinary with a brand new work, I’ll embrace one thing in regards to the plot and one thing in regards to the rating, so this submit will probably be comparatively lengthy. But when the movie, you may skip the plot; for those who’re largely occupied with singers, you may hop on to them; and so forth.
Ingmar Bergman’s movie Fanny och Alexander is outwardly one thing of a nationwide monument in Sweden. Although it’s a far cry from Residence Alone and Elf, Swedish associates inform me it’s an indispensable characteristic of TV schedules there over Christmas. It’s additionally monumental in size: from about three to 5 hours, so I learn, relying on the model. Because it ‘lends itself to a number of readings’, as they are saying, it’s arduous to sum up in a couple of phrases. As a substitute of attempting, I requested ChatGPT to have a go, and the next is the outcome.
‘Fanny och Alexander is a semi-autobiographical drama by Ingmar Bergman that follows the lives of siblings Fanny and Alexander Ekdahl in early Twentieth-century Sweden. After their father’s sudden loss of life, their mom, Emilie, marries the austere Bishop Edvard Vergérus, bringing them right into a repressive and abusive family. Alexander’s vivid creativeness clashes with the bishop’s strict authoritarianism, resulting in a collection of supernatural and dramatic occasions. The Ekdahls, a vibrant and loving theatrical household, finally rescue the kids, restoring their freedom and creativity. The movie explores themes of household, religion, artwork, and the intersection of the non secular and the mundane.’
Condensing it into an opera – even an opera almost three hours lengthy – should have been fairly a process, however I’ve but seen no complaints about Vavrek’s libretto, even when it sometimes struck me as higher suited to speech than singing. Ivo Van Hove’s manufacturing is visually robust and dramatically highly effective: the most effective of his I’ve seen. His stage has mirrored sides, a display throughout the again, and an occasional scrim. This makes it attainable to alternate between infinite open areas and the oppressive closeness of the Bishop’s home. Big projections permit for some strikingly spectacular results. The manufacturing opens with a small forest of firs on stage, expanded in video and reflection by extra firs beneath gently falling snow. Grandmother Ekdhal wanders via the timber, singing dreamily, a cappella. Servants wheel in a desk, two chandeliers descend above, the kids arrange their puppet theatre, and the stage is ready for Christmas. Relations breeze in, laden with presents, although seasonal barbs quickly crop up within the discuss. They dance gaily around the ‘room’ with the workers and as leisure, uncle Carl units his farts alight, a kind of intriguing bits of enterprise the place you surprise the way it’s carried out.
The timber glide out, the video fades and because the chandeliers disappear, they’re changed by myriad, single-bulb industrial lights that sway gently however menacingly, all of the whereas. The rehearsal house within the Ekdahls’s theatre is all black. When, after rehearsing Hamlet, Oscar, the children’ father, dies, he’s laid out on a stark white fabric and swathed in black velvet brocade. This enshrouding is projected reside, from a digicam positioned above his chest, in gigantic close-up on the rear — a kind of strikingly spectacular pictures I simply talked about. One other, later, is the grim face of Emilie’s sadistic second husband, Edvard (right here, in reality, the grim face of Thomas Hampson) engulfed in flames as fireplace erupts magically from a desk center-stage. I point out it now, as a result of this equally gigantic imaginative and prescient of the Bishop’s loss of life appears intentionally to recall Oscar’s, however rather a lot has occurred in between.
Edvard’s home is spartan, darkish and oppressive. It and every thing in it, together with everybody’s garments, is a single shade of gray. The youngsters are confined to just a little, bare-bones house-within-the-house, and Alexander’s beating, for telling the story of Edvard’s lifeless daughters (helped by projections of them trying one thing like Millais’s drowned Ophelia, however in smeary black and white) is vicious. After the kids have been smuggled out, extra projections, now colourfully variegated, kaleidoscopically conjure up the Jacobis’s magical previous curiosity store. That is the setting for Alexander’s ambiguous encounter with mad, dangerous, and dangerous-to-know Ismael, the place he learns that fantasies – even fantasies of the bishop’s loss of life – can come true. Cue Hampson’s head, aflame like a Christmas pudding.
On the finish – I admit I’ve skipped lots of carefully-directed element – the household comes collectively once more across the desk, this time bearing christening presents. No Christmassy firs, however every thing is bathed in golden mild as Emilie inherits the theatre to placed on Strindberg’s A Dream Play.
Van Hove’s directing all through is, as I stated, the most effective I’ve witnessed from him. Regardless of the complexity of the condensed work, the staging manages to remain easy and legible. It’s visually coherent, neatly and niftily carried out (the servants place props with pinprick precision), convincing and fascinating. The performing is properly managed, evoking the household’s straightforward heat and the tensions and stresses underlying it: the Bishop’s sanctimonious sadism, his housekeeper Justina’s strait-laced Lutheran strictness, Alexander’s multipolar, dreamy nature, and Ismael’s outright weirdness, all with out extra. The manufacturing made, I’d say, a serious contribution to the opera’s success with the general public. My one reservation can be that Van Hove didn’t reach endowing every of the characters with a definite character; nonetheless, there are sixteen roles, a few of them very transient. Bieito pulled it off in The Exterminating Angel, however he had Thomas Adès to assist him.
Transient roles or not, having commissioned the piece and had it directed by a neighborhood hero, La Monnaie clearly determined to forged it proud. The voices have been, nonetheless, amplified (maybe to totally different levels, or maybe not; some, even amplified, remained barely audible, and at instances I used to be glued to the supertitles). I’m undecided why. I’ve learn it was in order that they might be heard over the electronics, however certainly electronics might be turned up and down at will. No matter; you needed to peer intently on the stage to see who was singing, which was annoying, and a few voices transcend (if that’s the phrase) the microphones higher than others. Susan Bullock, whom I first noticed as Elektra in the identical home over 20 years in the past, is now, at 66, the right grandmother determine, bodily and vocally. Sasha Cooke, new to me, has a heat, expressive voice, and was one of many few, together with Bullock, given time to develop her character.
Alexander Sprague, additionally new to me, is a hanging, highly effective English tenor within the Robert Tear vein, one to look out for in future. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen, whom I used to be listening to for the primary time, was actually extraordinary, conjuring up the unsettling eeriness of James Bowman as Apollo in Loss of life in Venice. Thomas Hampson and Ann Sofis von Otter stay immediately recognizable and as expressive as ever. It’s good to see they’re nonetheless sport for taking up brand-new works. Hampson’s acquainted unctuousness suited the half, although it may have been performed extra menacingly, extra violently even. In locations his voice is now worn right down to a thread, one thing amplification sadly makes extra apparent. Von Otter was characteristically nuanced, her dynamic vary unchanged, although after all her voice has matured and darkened.
I used to be glad to have an opportunity to listen to US bass-baritone Justin Hopkins once more, having been impressed by his agency, heat, chocolatey timbre and upright presence as one of many Gralritter in a live performance Parsifal a few years again. Peter Tanstis’s voice was much less suitable with the amplification, sounding boxy and congested, as if he had a chilly. However I sympathized together with his having to emote and agonise for minutes on finish in that massive deathbed close-up. And eventually, if I depart the title roles, Fanny and Alexander until final, it’s as a result of, at the very least from the place I used to be seated, they didn’t make a lot of a mark. Within the opera, Fanny is virtually non-existent; and whereas younger Jay Weiner was an engaged and fascinating actor, even amplified he was barely audible.
It’s arduous to say how a lot management the conductor, Ariane Matiakh, sporting headphones to maintain consistent with the electronics, may have over the proceedings, however she stored issues collectively, although it appeared to me La Monnaie’s orchestra struggled to play the complicated, taxing rating with precision.
Truly describing new music is all the time a problem. You find yourself sounding like a wine blurb: ‘Perfumed nostril with hints of deep, leesy yellow fruit, minerals, honeycomb, smoked meat and flowers, and Asian spices increasing within the glass.’ However right here goes: Fanny and Alexander is scored for a full orchestra (with the assistance of an orchestrator, Michael P. Atkinson) and electronics. The corridor is provided for encompass sound, as in a cinema, however the composer insists that the orchestra has precedence, and the artificial sounds are designed to mix seamlessly with it. In this system notes, he explains that the model of his music modifications to suit the successive settings. We start with one thing like Adams, chugging and chuntering alongside, embellished with lots of string and wind fluttering and rippling that have to be tiring to play. Modulations and harmonies generally recall probably the most magical moments in Nixon in China.
However this isn’t hardcore minimalism: at instances you hear echoes of John Williams, even Canteloube. Early on, the piano evokes, deliberately or not, the ghost scenes in The Flip of the Screw; later it can trace at Messiaen’s birdsong. Karlsson likes deep, loud, sampled organ pedals. When the Bishop turns nasty, our ideas flip to Verdi and his Grand Inquisitor. Because the model modifications to go well with the scenes, the chugging offers method to airier, extra lyrical writing, and when the electronics are given free vary, we edge nearer and nearer to movie scores, TV collection, and ultimately Disneyland. I personally discovered the prelude after the interval verged on Kitsch, and Emilie’s ensuing solo lamenting the destiny of her youngsters beneath the Bishop’s regime, which must be an emotional pinnacle within the rating, fell flat. By the point we have been all enveloped in ghostly digital results, as Ismael beguiled Alexander, I used to be switching off. The top, to me, sounded plain corny. The concept of adjusting kinds because the story progressed might have appeared a great one, however finally, the rating – by no means really unpleasant to listen to – got here throughout as extra episodic than natural, and merely illustrative, slightly than proactively impelling the drama.
So – a great, chewy story, first rate libretto, highly effective manufacturing, robust forged, and (nonetheless ambivalent my very own ideas have been) cheers on the finish, a rarity in Brussels. Maybe Karlsson’s immersive rating actually did reside as much as his purpose of adapting opera to the expertise and expectations of latest audiences. Different composers have made profitable operas out of well-known movies. He was little question courageous to have a stab at one variously described as Sweden’s best ever, the most effective movie of the 80s, one of many cinema historical past’s high hundred, and so forth. The query, to me, in nice, (and I used to be not alone on this, as interval chats confirmed), was whether or not his rating actually added something to Bergman’s monument.
These interested by this opera can hear it reside over the radio this afternoon at 2:30 PM EST. It can even be out there on La Monnaie’s web site beginning December 24.
Photographs: Matthias Baus
