Welsh National Opera |
| WNO- La Traviata /Wozzeck , Wales Millennium Centre , February 26, 2005 |
| IT began with a snort of cocaine and a raucous cackle as the curtain rose on Traviata and ended with a stunned silence as it dropped at the end of Wozzeck. While I am no expert on mind bending drugs (maybe LSD would work better) it might well have been more appropriate had it been the other way round. First the good news concerning La Traviata. Carlo Rizzi conducting the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera in the pit and auditorium he helped design acoustically has never sounded finer. As the evening progressed you could feel the orchestra growing into their new home. Reprising the role of Violetta Nuccia Focile again brought an exciting characterization to the role of the doomed courtesan who sacrifices all for love – and the expectations of a moralistic middle class society. Similarly Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser production is consistent with its extremely recent first showing in Cardiff last autumn. The bad news is this production remains consistently poor. Updated from stifling Victorian times with all its hypocrisy, class convention, religious straight jacketing, sexual role stereotyping to the world of a contemporary top fashion mode this interpretation just doesn’t cut the mustard. Or cocaine for that matter that the poor unfortunate chorus members have to sniff in the opening scene. Alfredo sings his Act 2 aria into a mobile phone, Violetta watches the carnival on a hospital TV from her death bed. Our model swaps her flashy dressing room mirrored wall in a chic Act One apartment with a dull hospital light and sink in her hospital room in Act 4. All clever, clever stuff but ultimately a distraction from the opera’s questioning of THAT society’s values and flawed principles and in turn the effect that has on individual’s lives. Of course the story is valid for today but this is not the way to do it. Peter Wedd returns as Alfredo and while there is a little more oomph he remains a lovely voice but annoyingly wimpish character who you just wish both Violetta and his father, sung powerfully by Jonathan Summers, would just put over their knees and give a good spanking. The chorus also did not sound at their most impressive but this may also be part of the learning curve of the on-stage acoustics. A pity as the night belonged as much, if not more, to people like chorus members such as John King, Michael Clifton-Davies, Sian Meinir, George Newton-Fitzgerald, Philip Lloyd Holtam, Gareth Rhys-Davies, David Soar, who fortunately had named roles in Traviata, and their colleagues than the big name principals. The acoustics are state of the art but I found the voices oddly small and at times almost swamped. Would this be the case with Wozzeck? Fortunately not a bit of it. Christopher Purves has sung Alfredo’s father Giorgio Germont in this La Traviata. But at the weekend he was in a different opera and a different world – the world of director Richard Jones – singing the title role in Wozzeck. And while comparisons are odious what a difference. This was ninety minutes of the most gripping, disturbing and powerful musical theatre you will sit- and at times - squirm through. Musically the conductor Vladimir Jurowski takes the orchestra on a breathtaking journey. If any justification was needed for building the Wales Millennium Centre auditorium this is it. How this will fare in the smaller theatres on WNO’s touring schedule will be truly fascinating. At the vast WMC auditorium the quality and effect was exhilarating, inspiring and wonderfully shocking. A superb Christopher Purves plays our brutalised and alienated hero/anti-hero as a human cog on a production line checking cans on a conveyor belt and living on the diet of beans, eaten with a spoon hung around his neck, as prescribed by the Doctor, chillingly sung and portrayed by Clive Bayley. The vindictive Captain is sung by Peter Hoare as, yes, a vindictive character but, like the Doctor, also a disturbingly madcap character. The Drum Major who dazzles Wozzeck’s mistress Marie with jewels – both seen in reality and on a TV screen – is a corporate executive sung by Peter Svensson, hitting golf balls into an empty can in his office that Marie cleans and where they have sex behind a leather sofa. Peter The look is immediately evocative of the presidential palace in Saigon as it has been preserved since the fall of the American-propped up capitalist regime but that is probably coincidental. The tragedy unfolds in the home Wozzeck shares with Marie, vividly and passionately performed by Gun-Brit Barkmin, and their illegitimate son, the dehumanised canning factory where shiny tins move along conveyor belts and a bar where the cast similarly dance and move around in a uniform, controlled conveyor-belt fashion. The show opens with a stage curtain with a barcode which falls between each of the 15 scenes created by Jones and his designer Paul Steinberg. Each of these scenes has a skip which grows in size and significance until it towers over the now deranged Wozzeck as he slashes Marie’s throat with the lid of one of those empty cans. The final unforgettable scenes are Wozzeck “drowning” as he sinks into the skip filled with empty cans and the dreadful ending where there is a small skip at the child’s birthday party. The now orphaned boy opens a birthday present – his own spoon to hang around his neck. Someone asked me before the show started did I know Jones’ staging of the ending scenes – which I did as this a co-production with Komische Opera in Berlins – and that it didn’t make sense – which I didn’t. They were right in so far as Jones has brought his own hallucinatory psychoanalytical take to the piece. But they were wrong in that it does make sense, a horribly depressing sense. La Traviata, Wales Millennium Centre, February 6, 9, 11 Wozzeck, Wales Millennium Centre, February 25, March 12 |
Reviewed by: Mike Smith |
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