4/4, Royal Opera House, review: one of the more bizarre spectacles ever seen at Covent Garden
My hunch is that there are two ways forward for opera in the difficult coming months. The short-term fix is to find ways to stage no-nonsense versions of box-office certs such as La Traviata, La Bohème and Carmen at popular prices; the more challenging and inspiring possibility is that of exploring less familiar repertory that can be performed on a small-scale using raw imagination and limited resources.
After some rather timid online concerts over the summer, Covent Garden has now taken a bolder plunge and plumped for the second option. For this one-off occasion (streamed online for the next month), the Royal Opera’s Director Oliver Mears has programmed four cantatas, selected from different eras and traditions. Although there is no discernible over-arching connection between the quartet, the result is a rich and strange experience.
It’s only a pity that the first and longest item is so musically dull: Handel’s Apollo e Dafne, conceived in 1709 during his pre-London sojourn in Italy, is workaday stuff, at least until Apollo’s touching final lament, and even the admirably stylish singing of Covent Garden debutants Jonathan McGovern and Alexandra Lowe cannot make it sound anything other than formulaic. The staging doesn’t help: instead of trying to embrace the essentially static nature of its formality, the director Adele Thomas attempts to animate it with almost frenetic running around and ends up compounding the tedium.
What a relief to turn to the quiet stillness of Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 - an elegy of childhood recollection, written in 1948 for the sumptuously beautiful voice of Eleanor Steber and memorably sung subsequently by the likes of Leontyne Price and Renée Fleming. Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha (a young South African soprano who, like Lowe, is a member of the Royal Opera’s apprentice scheme) is potentially in their class: she sings here with fresh-faced sincerity and infinite sweetness, avoiding the temptation to wallow in Barber’s rhapsodic lyricism at the expense of James Agee’s nuanced text. Antony McDonald provides a simple mise-en-scène of a park bench and a pram that doesn’t over-egg the emotional implications.
But the temperature rises sharply for Britten’s Phaedra - one of his final works, addressing yet again the theme of repressed and destructive sexual desire that haunts so many of his operas. Using text taken from Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine’s play, it follows baroque form to present Phaedra’s guilty infatuation with her stepson Hippolytus in contrasting moods and tempi.
In lesser hands, it can sound drily declamatory, but here, without any excess histrionics, director Deborah Warner and mezzo-soprano Christine Rice make something electrifyingly vivid and unsettling of Phaedra’s erotic frustration – a mad scene of chilling intensity in which a whole life seems to unravel.
Finally, to the powder bomb that is HK Gruber’s Frankenstein!! (1979) – an anarchically subversive cabaret in which a solo chanteur sings and enacts a succession of vaguely sinister miniature nursery rhymes, some with a vampiric theme, to a delicately orchestrated accompaniment lit up by all manner of weird instruments and sonorities (all praise to conductor Edmund Whitehead and his superb masked band). Masterfully directed by Richard Jones, Allan Clayton assumes an alarming resemblance to Ozzy Osborne and gives a performance of subtle comic brilliance and vocal virtuosity, ably assisted by Sarah Fahie as his silent cringing accomplice.
It may rank as one of the more bizarre spectacles ever seen at Covent Garden, and many in the audience were palpably flabbergasted by its oddity. I loved every second of its nuttiness: it’s not opera as you know it, but all the better for that.
Available to stream via www.roh.org.uk
