Tag Archives: Britten

Midsummer Night’s Dream

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Theatre Royal, Glasgow

It’s been two years in coming, but Dominic Hill’s new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Scottish Opera – an early casualty of the 2020 Covid lockdown – has been well worth the wait. What’s more, it’s a stimulatingly fresh take on an opera known more usually for its woodland magic and picture book characters. Yet in this version, set in a devastated landscape in the wake of the Second World War, Hill offers a darker reality.

What remains is a world divided between the ruling court elite and its underlings, the so-called mechanicals; but nonetheless one in which they have to co-exist, and do so under the protective cloak of the opera’s fantasy dreamworld. Tom Piper’s designs play a key role in this, an illusive world in which beds take flight and the action barely stops for breath.

The darkness persists, though, in such symbolic quirks as the sinister puppet replacement for the mute Indian boy, and the stark greyness of the children’s chorus, crowded together like monochrome urchins in a scene by Hogarth. They act and sing with chilling definition.

Hill’s approach may seek to expand the notion of universality in the opera’s message, but it successfully avoids corrupting the integrity of the individual characters and their combined dynamic. 

Oberon, sung by counter tenor Lawrence Zazzo in this his Scottish Opera debut, is still a creepy specimen, but the emphasis is on his powers of persuasion, with the carelessly mischievous Puck (played with capricious energy by actor Michael Guest) to do his dirty work. Don’t be fooled by the visual greyness of his wife Tytania, as Catriona Hewitson’s keen soprano gives lustre and conviction to her queenly role. 

Even with Theseus, dressed for his final act entrance as a military dictator, an overriding air of benevolence is warmly maintained, expressed through Jonathan Lemalu’s rich-seamed bass. 

This is not a production in danger of suffocating under a weightily imposed message. Between them, the four young lovers and the irrepressible antics of the mechanicals preserve the opera’s infectious effervescence. Tenor Elgan Llÿr Thomas shines as the irrepressible Lysander, American mezzo soprano Lea Shaw as the head-strong Hermia, Jonathan McGovern cuts a suitably stoical Demetrius, and soprano Charlie Drummond the sadder, lovesick Helena.

When it comes to the mechanicals, this crazed gang of misfits really put on a show. As a team, their comic choreography had the opening night audience in stitches, not least David Shipley’s deftly hilarious, deliciously rude, portrayal as Bottom. 

Great credit to Hill, too, that he allows this production to completely serve and illuminate Britten’s music. The calibrated transition from stillness to action at the very start is a masterstroke, paralleling the orchestra’s slithering glissandi. Beyond that magical moment, conductor Stuart Stratford and his Scottish Opera Orchestra continue to express the kaleidoscopic subtleties, and occasional irreverent parodies, that are the opera’s engine room.

Ken Walton

Further performances at the Theatre Royal Glasgow (24 & 26 February) and Edinburgh Festival Theatre (1,3 & 5 March). Full booking information at www.scottishopera.org.uk

SCO / Clyne & Britten

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Perth Concert Hall

What a welcome sight. Thursday’s filmed concert by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, introduced by cellist Su-a Lee, returned this week to Perth Concert Hall, its stage floor area extended over the front stalls to accommodate the fuller string complement required for Benjamin’s Serenade for tenor, horn and strings. 

The setting also inspired the theatrical positioning of tenor Allan Clayton and horn soloist Alec Frank-Gemmill as spotlit protagonists out front, looking inward to the ensemble, which the camerawork in Mark Parkin’s film direction inventively captured.

Directing from the leader’s chair was Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, who confessed to not ever having encountered Britten’s 1943 wartime song cycle while growing up in Finland. Evidence of that emerged in a performance entirely in tune with its movingly refined ecstasy, but much more interestingly coloured by a fresh-faced objectivity.

In all but a very few moments, it worked. There was a dryness in the string tone and articulation that underpinned Blake’s Elegy, for instance, robbing us of its blanket warmth and forward momentum. But in every other sense this was a truly compelling performance, set magically in motion by Frank-Gemmill’s pitch-perfect playing (even the jarring natural horn harmonics) of the solo Prologue, and sung throughout with candescent poise by Clayton.

Clayton – whose wild beard and distressed hair make him look as if he’d just walked off the final scene of Peter Grimes – is no vocal clone of Peter Pears, for whom the work was written. Nor does he ever pretend to be, allowing instead the more rounded purity of his tenor voice to express its own persuasive response to Britten’s masterpiece. 

His partnership with Frank-Gemmill was compatible in every sense, generating musical dialogues capable of capturing the serene and thoughtful and the demonic and triumphant with equal conviction. The inexorability of the Dirge, unleashing those cascading horn counterpoints at its height, marked a thrilling moment, just as Ben Jonson’s Hymn elicited infinite expressive colours. And finally the horn Epilogue bringing the whole work full circle, this time offstage, its final dying note echoed by the emotive dimming of the lights.

Before the Britten, a smaller string contingent performed SCO associate composer Anna Clyne’s Within Her Arms, a heartfelt tribute to her late mother, written for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2009.

The caressing Perth acoustics served to amplify its tenderness and unhurried quiescence, and from the strings a glowing warmth inhabited every gentle, keening bar, whether expressed through the gradually intertwining sighs of the opening lament, the ensuing glassy Tippett-like washes of polyphony, or the exhaustive bass drones that reset the opening calm.
Ken Walton

See this concert free at www.sco.org.uk

Image: SCO at Perth Concert Hall, credit Ryan Buchanan

BBC SSO / Brabbins

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City Halls, Glasgow 

As Martyn Brabbins rightly observed during his interval thoughts on Benjamin Britten’s last opera Death in Venice, there is a disturbing undercurrent that haunts its pungent score. We weren’t about to hear the whole opera, but rather a masterfully crafted concert suite, prepared eight years after Britten’s death by the conductor and Britten collaborator Steuart Bedford.

It was the final piece in a brooding all-Britten programme broadcast live on Radio 3 by the BBC SSO, the common factor throughout being that anxious underswell described by Brabbins, whether in the sombre strains of Russian Funeral, the searing mystical delights of the song cycle Nocturne, the ghostly references of John Dowland cutting through the ruminative Lachrymae for viola and string orchestra, or the constant reminders within the Death in Venice score of the opera’s hovering fear – rumours of a cholera pandemic. How topical!

Russian Funeral, scored for brass only, is understandably powerful and morose, written in the run up to the Second World War when Britten’s anti-war sensibilities were fully wakening. But it’s not just about his pacifist ideals. Structured around a Russian proletarian song, it’s a paean to the victims of the 1905 Winter Palace insurrection, its lugubrious but hot-blooded sentiment roundly embraced by the SSO brass, underpinned by the menace of militaristic drums.

Britten’s final song cycle, Nocturne, took us to a dreamier world. These settings of Shelley, Tennyson, Owen, Keats and Shakespeare, among others, explore rich and varied images of sleep and darkness, from the hypnotic density of Shelley’s On a Poet’s Lips I Slept, the catchy “ting, ting, ting” of Middleton’s Midnight Bell, to the powerful contradictions in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43.

Tenor Mark Padmore’s performance hit the magic button, in one sense capturing that piercing objectivity we so associate with the work’s original exponent Peter Pears, but in another sense finding a range of expression fluid enough to amplify the music’s shifting moods and dramatic surprises. 

He owed much, of course, to the supporting piquant flavourings of the SSO ensemble, notably the thrill of the duetting flute and clarinet in Keats’ Sleep and Poetry, the entrancing harp in Coleridge’s Encintured with a Twine of Leaves, and that gorgeous blanket of strings throughout – a defining, unifying presence.

Where Nocturne looks to English poetry, Lachrymae for solo viola and strings (Britten’s 1976 orchestration) turns to old English song for its inspiration. Almost like a reverse set of variations, John Dowland’s theme, on which it is based, emerges in full at the end rather than the beginning. It’s a transformative moment, and one that seemed especially profound as the inevitable resolution to a captivating solo performance by SSO principal viola Scott Dickinson. The subtle references to Dowland previously were like phantom apparitions, the full string complement equal in capturing such magical moments.

All of which found the perfect destination in the Death in Venice Suite. Bedford’s slick continuous distillation maintains the opera’s narrative flow, but equally it allows us to appreciate the score on its own merit. Yes, the gnawing nuances that reflect the ageing writer Aschenbach’s obsession with the boy Tadzio are intrinsic to Britten’s expressive language, and are hard to discard if you know the opera. Yet this steely, sinewy, often sublime performance illustrated, too, the composer’s own emotional struggles. Disturbing yes, but wonderfully enriching.
Ken Walton

Image: Martyn Brabbins ©Ben Ealovega

Bergen Philharmonic/Gardner

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Britten: Peter Grimes

(Chandos)

Three years ago, Edward Gardner brought his Bergen International Festival concert version of Britten’s seminal opera Peter Grimes to the Edinburgh International Festival. A splendid cast led by Stuart Skelton in the title role, supported by Gardner’s Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, and augmented by singers from the Edward Grieg Kor, Collegium Musicum and Royal Northern College of Music Chorus, presented a memorably gripping performance in the Usher Hall.

With minimal changes – notably Roderick Williams replacing Christopher Purves as Captain Balstrode – nothing is lost in this equally exceptional Chandos recording. In fact, so powerfully theatrical is Gardner’s pacing, so perceptive of the music’s complex inexorable logic, that the absence of the visual dimension subtracts nothing from its meaningful enjoyment. Rather it concentrates the mind on the internalised intensity of the score.

At the heart is the pitiable Grimes, a social outcast, suspected of serial child abuse, whose fate is firmly sealed by his obstinate belligerence against the sanctimonious prejudices of “The Borough” folk, who are out to get him, guilty or not. 

Skelton gets to the heart of the antihero’s anguish and ostracisation, though in a vein that is miles removed from the role’s original creator, Peter Pears. There is a mellower humanity to Skelton’s probing portrayal that captures in its own powerful way the fragility of Grimes’ fondness for Ellen (virtuously and compassionately embraced by soprano Erin Wall), and the venomous torment unleashed as madness exercises its final stranglehold. 

But this is a veritable team triumph with not a single weak link. A host of differentiating characters make their indelible mark, including Williams as a warmly benevolent Balstrode, and Catherine Wyn-Rogers as the prim busybody Mrs Sedley alongside Susan Bickley’s heartily charismatic Auntie. The chorus is both a physical and psychological centrepiece, the mouthpiece of the collective conscience.

All of which sits perfectly within Gardner’s pellucid musical vision, and a vital orchestral performance that shimmers iridescently in the Sea Interludes, and illuminates every bar with precise, pulsating excellence. 
Ken Walton

Image: Britten’s Peter Grimes at the 2017 Edinburgh International Festival, Usher Hall ©Beth Chalmers