Our resident critic Alastair Macaulay is spending most of his summer at the Royal Albert Hall:
by Alastair Macaulay
Let’s hear it for the term “semi-staged”! On Monday 1 September, English National Opera presented Shostakovich’s “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” at the Albert Hall Proms, with the help of a bed, and two court-room-type lecterns. On Wednesday 27 August, Glyndebourne had brought its “Nozze di Figaro” to the same hall (August 27) with the help of two doors and an armchair. The singers, in eighteenth-century costume for “Figaro” but in roughly twentieth-century attire for “Lady Macbeth”, acted out everything. Plenty was left to our imaginations on both occasions, but not more than happens in many modern productions anyway.
“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” is no longer a rarity in London – it was performed here a number of times by both English National Opera and the Royal Opera between 1987 and 2018 – but it’s been absent in London for seven years. (David Pountney’s 1987 translation was used on this occasion.) As with every opera by Janáćek, “Lady Macbeth” is just rare enough for every performance to feel an important event.
Shostakovich, completing the opera when he was twenty-seven, produced an opera unlike anything before it: a bleak, black comedy whose comedy fades away, leaving only its bitterly noir qualities. Shostakovich was dramatising Dmitri Leskov’s already startling 1865 novella. Imagine James Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1934) relocated to the Russian steppes.
You could spend time arguing about whether this is a feminist opera: Katerina Ismailova, the heroine, is an abused and neglected wife whose unhappiness is given sympathetic voice – but her murder of her father-in-law, her close involvement in the murder of her husband, and her murder of her rival change the nature of our sympathy: she remains understandable at all points.
The Albert Hall – with the orchestra in full view of the audience and with John Storgårds conducting – made it clearer than usual that Shostakovich planned this as a four-movement symphony: there are extended passages of sheerly orchestral writing in each act. Ruth Knight, directing, The American soprano Amanda Majeski – already known here as Janáček’s Kaťa Kabanová at Covent Garden and in concert at the Barbican – performed Katerina Ismailova with marvellous commitment: her quiet solos of anguish registered as memorably as her intense scenes of lust and murder. As Katerina’s monstrous father-in-law Boris, Brindley Sherratt sang with deliberately exaggerated sourness. Nicky Spence, an increasingly important tenor across a wide range of repertory both heroic and antiheroic, played the heroine’s lover: it was hard to recognise either his looks or his voice, but it was impossible to miss his impact. Another tenor, John Findon, delivered a firm punch as Katerina’s husband Zinovy. Willard White, as the Old Convict, raised the level of the final scene.
The Glyndebourne “Figaro” has been dividing viewers since its June 29 premiere: wonderfully detailed and vivid for some, far too cartoony and trivial for others. At that premiere, I was between the two poles; but the August 29 prom performance, with stage direction of Mariame Clément’s production by Talia Stern, showed that the cast had gained in experience rather than depth. Adèle Charvet’s Cherubino was more exaggerated in facial expressions; Louise Alder’s Countess was overdoing her physical reaction to the smelly bare feet of Antonio the gardener more than before. Even Huw Montague Rendall, mainly so good as the Count, stamped his right foot several times too often; while Riccardo Minasi, conducting, gesticulated for maximum Albert Hall visibility. I enjoyed the new Italian Figaro, Tommaso Barea; while Johanna Wallroth as Susanna and Madeleine Shaw as Cherubino were as good as I remembered them from two months before. In Susanna’s Act Four aria, Wallroth’s gossamer line cast true magic.
This is still “Figaro”. The interactions of all the characters to one another matter keenly. We care about these people even while we laugh at them. Or we understand them even while we object to them. Montague Rendall takes the Count’s sexual manhandlings of Susanna to the point that any modern-minded viewer will feel he’s going too far. But it’s remarkable that this excess of his deepens the opera, which has always addressed the reluctance of male aristocrats to relinquish the old droit du seigneur, in ways that here still register to #MeToo viewers.
Handel’s mind is so naturally dramatic that it’s no surprise many of his oratorios have now been staged. “Alexander’s Feast”, however, is an ode, and scarcely dramatic: its arrangement of John Dryden’s “Alexander’s Feast”. Its London premiere took place in 1736; in 1742, the year when he gave the premiere of “The Messiah” in Dublin, he also presented a new edition of “Alexander’s Feast” there, dividing it into three parts rather than two and replacing the bass role with an alto. This is the version with which the large Irish Baroque ensemble has been touring Britain, performing at the Proms on Saturday 30 August. Peter Whelan, conducting, brought the Irish Baroque orchestra and Irish Baroque Chorus to make their Proms debuts, along with soprano Hilary Cronin, counter-tenor Hugh Cutting, and tenor Stuart Jackson. Cutting
But Dryden’s poem has a story that Handel does not tell well: Dryden shows the power of music in Persia to inflame Alexander the Great to acts of vengeance and destruction, while Handel, removing the narrative sting, just concentrates on celebrating music itself. Handel is good company: it’s hard to object to anything here, but it’s also hard to find much suspense or drama.
For me, Cronin was the real discovery of this performance: the combination of accuracy and glow in her singing was reinforced by wonderfully mellow fullness in several parts of her voice. Hugh Cutting confirmed the impression he has made in other recent London concerts: he has daring, presence, mystery – and the ability to sustain a single soft note, drawing all the Albert Hall into his spell. Stuart Jackson, despite good fiction, was not quite in the same league: there’s a tightness to his voice that robs it of amplitude.
The concerts of composer-conductor Thomas Adès are always of interest because they show the wide span of his mind. On Tuesday 2 September he conducted a Sibelius sandwich, starting with “The Swan of Tuonela” and ending with Suite no 1 of music from his music for “The Tempest”, with two twentyfirst-century scores in between. In “The Swan”, Sibelius is addressing the outer world and the elements: which imaginatively paves the way to the U.K. premiere of American composer Gabriella Smith’s organ concerto “Breathing Forests”, a work more remarkable in its use of the main orchestra (no percussion) and in its evidently multi-layered idea of forests as places both of peace and of violence, of storms and of birds. At several points, the organ (James McVinnie) swamps everything with its vast power, like the various destructive forces now threatening forests worldwide.
Adès also had the courage to precede the Sibelius “Tempest” suite with an orchestral suite from his own opera, “The Tempest” (2004). This suite, “Five Spells from ‘The Tempest’” (2022), covers a generous spectrum of the characters and thought that make Shakespeare’s play compelling. I prefer this suite to Adès’s complete opera. (Although I often admire Adès the composer, I’ve never yet been persuaded he writes well for the voice, despite the committed performances several fine singers have given of his scores.) We hear here how Adès’s uses of different orchestral colours and rhythms, and how his music moves between orthodoxy and unorthodoxy.
Sibelius came to Shakespeare’s “Tempest” at the point when he, like the play’s protagonist Prospero, was surrendering his powers: he then ended his life with a long compositional silence. In this “Tempest” suite, there’s no doubt he’s still a master, in touch with larger elements as well as communing with humanity. The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky did stage this suite in a “Tempest” ballet; but, although the music registered beautifully in the theatre, the drama meandered.
On one hand, Adès’s use of Sibelius is a fascinating tribute from a modern composer to a dead one; on the other, it’s a modest tribute from a living musician to a one whose place in history is assured. Adès’s whole persona as conductor is modest. He has force, sweep, and variety; but, although he certainly compliments his players with pleasure, there’s never a moment when he shows ego in greeting his audience.
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