United Kingdom Britten, Demise in Venice: Soloists, Refrain and Orchestra of Welsh Nationwide Opera / Leo Hussain (conductor), Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 7.3.2024. (GP)
After a considerably disappointing manufacturing of Cosi fan tutte (assessment right here), Welsh Nationwide Opera’s brief Spring season reached larger heights (each actually and metaphorically) with this exceptional interpretation of Benjamin Britten’s final and biggest opera. Whereas extremely imaginative it left house for (and required) its viewers’s creativeness. It was additionally emotionally efficient and included some tremendous particular person performances.
Probably the most distinctive and thrilling factor about this efficiency was that it was produced in collaboration with the Cardiff-based firm NoFit State Circus and the stage was regularly peopled with acrobats, aerialists and twine walkers from the corporate. Their presence was removed from being only a gimmick. Their presence and their spectacular actions prolonged that picture of Carnivalesque Venice which is already there within the libretto, as within the Strolling Gamers in Act II. The rope walkers felt like an externalised picture of von Aschenbach’s efforts to maintain varied components of his thoughts and feelings in some kind of steadiness, to keep away from a ‘fall’ as he tried to keep up his ‘steadiness’ whereas negotiating his means by his ethical and aesthetic dilemmas, balancing his self-image with the pull of need.
Just a few folks I’ve spoken too felt that the circus components have been finally a distraction, however for probably the most half I discovered in them an articulation of theme and character. They have been probably the most vivid emblem of the distinction between Venice and the Munich von Eschenbach had left behind. This dimension of the manufacturing made it altogether clear that Tadzio (Anthony César) belonged in a wholly totally different world to that inhabited by von Eschenbach. The precarious nature of a lot that the aerialists did additionally had a metaphorical relationship to the lethal fever spreading throughout the town.
Musically there was a lot to admire and relish. Leo Hussain’s dealing with of the improved orchestra required in Demise in Venice – with its tuned gongs and Chinese language drums, a marimba and far else – was glorious and he complemented the singers completely, whereas doing full justice to the non-Western components within the (gamelan-influenced) orchestral writing.
Mark LeBrocq’s interpretation of the position of Gustav von Eschenbach (a lot the most important within the opera) was commanding, whereas being shot by with the character’s self-doubt. He was totally assured within the passages of recitative and Sprechstimme and psychologically convincing always – producing a vocally lucid and emotionally coherent account of von Eschenbach’s unrelenting self-awareness and its related inhibitions; he offered von Eschenbach’s vainness and occasional pomposity with a level of sympathy, making a plausibly advanced human being.
Roderick Williams mastered his seven roles – all of them in varied methods ‘darkish’ and troubling; they have been sung and acted with precise and delicate discrimination; maybe it’s paradoxical to say so, nevertheless it was a measure of Williams’s success that one forgot that every one these characters have been sung by the identical performer. Williams’s Dionysian characters (all in black) have been counterpoised by Alexander Likelihood because the Voice of Apollo (a job his father, Michael Likelihood, sang earlier than him), clad in a golden swimsuit as a personification of the solar. Likelihood and Williams (as avatars of Apollo and Dionysus) struggle a sort of psychomachia over the thoughts and soul of von Eschenbach, most explicitly throughout his dream in Act II, Scene 13 – a battle between Dionysian ardour and dysfunction, and Apollonian concord and rational management.
It is likely to be argued that discovering a means of reconciling the Apollonian and the Dionysian is what a lot of the world’s nice artwork makes an attempt. We’re shut right here to the dramatic idiom of Britten’s Parables – one of many some ways during which Demise in Venice, written when Britten, with severe coronary heart issues, should inescapably have been conscious of the method of his personal loss of life, is a sort of summative retrospect of his personal profession as a composer. Certainly, Britten’s personal inventive previous is likely one of the driving forces on this exceptional work.
Demise in Venice can appear an excessive amount of like a philosophical discourse on aesthetics and ethics, on concepts about magnificence and need. It’s all of that, however it’s so a lot else as nicely – one thing extra absolutely human, wealthy in emotion and pleasure. For the methods during which it recognised all of this – its gorgeous use of the spectacular, its respectful, however not inhibited response to Myfanwy Piper’s glorious libretto and to the vary of Britten’s music, and for its fluid stagecraft (in what can appear a somewhat fragmentary work) I used to be delighted by this manufacturing. In each respect, visible, mental, emotional and musical, it was nearly every little thing an evening within the opera home ought to be.
Glyn Pursglove
Manufacturing:
Director – Olivia Fuchs
Designer – Nicola Turner
Circus designer and director – Firenza Guidi
Refrain grasp – Frederick Brown
Forged included:
Gustav von Aschenbach ‒ Mark Le Brocq
The Traveller / Aged Fop / Gondolier / Lodge Supervisor / Lodge Barber / Chief of the Gamers / Voice of Dionysus ‒ Roderick Williams
Voice of Apollo ‒ Alexander Likelihood
Tadzio ‒ Anthony César
Danish Woman – Carolyn Jackson
English Woman / Lace vendor – Meriel Andrew
Newspaper vendor – Angharad Morgan
Russian mom – Fiona Harrison-Wolfe
Nurse-governess – Helen Greenaway
Strawberry vendor – Emily Christina Loftus
German mom – Stella Woodman
Strolling participant – Claire Hampton
Glassmaker – Alun Rhys-Jenkins
Lodge porter – Peter Van Hulle
Strolling participant – Rhodri Prys-Jones
A information – Stephen Wells
English clerk – Gareth Brynmor John
Lodge waiter – Martin Lloyd
Russian father – Alastair Moore
Circus artist – Riccardo Saggese
