The Spectator - 29.02.2020

40 the spectator | 29 february 2020 | http://www.spectator.co.uk

BOOKS & ARTS

Opera

Eurotrash Verdi

Richard Bratby

Luisa Miller

Coliseum, in rep until 6 March

Les vêpres siciliennes

Wales Millennium Centre, and touring

until 9 May

Verdi’s Luisa Miller is set in the Tyrol in

the early 17th century, and for some opera

directors that’s a problem. After all, they’re

busy people. They probably never had time

to read Wolf Hall, or to speak to any of the

100 million people worldwide who watched

Game of Thrones. It’s self-evident to them

that modern audiences will be unable to

empathise with anything involving swords,

castles or feudal hierarchies. Which is why

they work hard to imagine new contexts

that can make these hopelessly dated dra-

mas address contemporary life as we live it,

right here, right now. Counts, village maid-

ens and men in ruffs? Baffling. But a clown

strapped to a gyrating crucifix being stabbed

with arrows by a group of dancers in flesh-

coloured swimming caps and black fetish

wear? Now that’s relatable.

In fairness, not everything in Barbora

Horakova’s new production for ENO is

quite so Eurotrash. The stark white sets, the

presence of children to evoke the charac-

ters’ lost innocence and the final image of

a trickling, encroaching blackness as Luisa

and Rodolfo face death — there were ideas

here that sort of worked, if intermittently.

Let’s be clear: there’s nothing intrinsically

wrong with abstraction, relocation or out-

right surrealism in opera. What intelligent

opera-lover wouldn’t rather engage with

a production by, say, Katie Mitchell or Netia

Jones, than yawn through some overcooked

Zeffirelli revival? What matters, in the end,

is whether a director opens up an opera’s

dramatic possibilities, or whether they shut

them down.

Throughout Horakova’s Luisa Miller, you

felt the drama being stunted or obscured;

being made less than it could be, and cer-

tainly a lot more simplistic than it might

have been with musical performances as tre-

mendous as these. Yes, it looks cool to have

Wurm (admittedly not Verdi’s subtlest char-

acter name) tailed by writhing, gurning danc-

ers. Wouldn’t it have been more interesting,

though, to let Soloman Howard’s bitumen-

like bass and towering, magnetic physicali-

ty suggest that there’s more to the character

than generic evil? Some of this stuff was just

A clown strapped to a crucifix is

stabbed by dancers in swimming

caps and black fetish wear

the listener

Grimes: Miss Anthropocene

Grade: B

The old axiom no longer applies.

In modern popular music, it is

possible not only to gild a turd,

but to gild it so copiously that

consumers scarcely catch a whiff of

the ordure underneath. The studio

is everything: you no longer need

to be able to sing, write a tune or

play an instrument — with enough

electronic manipulation your

turd can still become an epic and

convince the perpetually gullible

rock and pop press that something

Important is taking place. In a sense,

then, the other old axiom is also

redundant: in pop music today, you

can fool all of the people all of

the time.

The Canadian musician Grimes is

not quite at turd level: there is some

talent there, although I’m not sure

quite what it is. Not writing songs,

not singing, not playing anything —

maybe a sonic imagination and a cer-

tain winningly grim froideur. And for

this she is very generously lauded.

This album occasionally grabs

the attention — in the faux-industri-

al motorik basslines of ‘My Name Is

Dark’ and the keening falsetto that

begins the track ‘Violence’: both of

these tracks kind of coalesce into what

you might call a ‘song’, if you were

being kind. And there is a propulsion

and energy to them.

For the rest it is the studio very

cleverly at work, her voice soused in

grandiose echo or elevated, like that of

Pinky and Perky, into the stratosphere

— vocals as just another instrument,

endlessly manipulated. Fragments

of melody come and go, swathed in

deeply meaningful effects designed to

imply gravitas — where there is, frank-

ly, very little. Occasionally interesting,

rarely arresting.

— Rod Liddle

embarrassing. The malevolence of Verdi’s

Count Walter (James Creswell, giving an

aristocratic swagger to his rolling, black-and

bronze phrases) has credible human motiva-

tions. But no, Horakova has him dressed as

a tycoon and rolling a barrel of oil, which he

smears over a brutalised, semi-naked youth

because, hey: capitalism, right?

Meanwhile the cast sang and Alexan-

der Joel conducted like this was the Luisa

Miller of their dreams. The original play was

by Schiller; this is Verdi’s German Roman-

tic opera and Joel made it feel as urgent

and ominous as Freischütz, with velvet-dark

basses, sulphurous trombones and plaintive,

languishing clarinets. David Junghoon Kim,

as Rodolfo, launched his high notes fear-

lessly into the depths of the Coliseum, and

Elizabeth Llewellyn, as Luisa, accompanied

singing of luminous, fluid richness and ach-

ing expression with a physical performance

that suggested a hyperactive infant. Horako-

va wouldn’t leave her alone; characters deliv-

ered intimate messages while standing yards

apart with their backs turned, and at any

point the chorus (who also sounded magnifi-

cent) might prance on in some new combina-

tion of facepaint and bloomers. Apparently

the director was booed on the first night.

There were only cheers when I attended;

and rightly, because performers this good

deserve better.

It doesn’t need to be this hard. In Car-

diff, David Pountney has taken another mid-

period Verdi shocker, Les vêpres siciliennes,

and given it an updated semi-abstract stag-

ing that clarifies the action where Horakova

obscured it, looks striking where Luisa Mill-

er looked cluttered, and amplifies rather

than diminishes the believable human rela-

tionships and emotions that are the main

claim of this, or any opera, on a modern

audience. The oppressed Sicilians get black

20th-century workwear; the French oppres-

sors have colourful, vaguely ancien régime

finery. Raimund Bauer’s atmospheric,

frame-like sets glide around to imply great

halls, corridors for conspiracies, and private

spaces that focus the drama right in on the

central performances. Even the ballet makes

narrative sense.

This isn’t as high-powered a cast as

ENO’s but the storytelling is so taut, and

Carlo Rizzi’s sleek, volatile conducting is

so pacey, that the result is entirely compel-

ling, with Giorgio Caoduro’s warm-voiced,

intensely human performance present-

ing the tyrant Montfort as a figure of such

sympathetic complexity that the obvious

parallel was with Philip II in Don Carlo.

In Verdian terms, that’s as good as it gets.

Anush Hovhannisyan as Hélène and Jung

Soo Yun as Henri crowned ardent vocal

performances with a tremulous, controlled

pianissimo as they looked into the other’s

eyes. You didn’t have to know that this

was supposed to be 13th-century Italy to

feel that this mattered. The tension even

18 – 24 March 2020

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