Category: Opera

Opera North  

The Lowry, Salford Saturday 16 November 2019 

A visually striking production of a topical drama 

**** 

‘The poor are always with us’. So are refugees, and Martinů’s message in his opera the Greek Passion is both topical and timeless. The refugees who are at the centre of the story make a simple request of the villagers from whom they seek help, 

Give us what you have too much of 

One of the most striking moments of the Greek Passion comes at the start of Act IV when the wedding feast of the villagers Lenio and Nikolio is interrupted by the loud cry of the refugees’ priest Fotis looking down from high above. The wedding celebrations had seemed out of place in such an austere production. The rustic wedding feast could have been part of a comic opera but we are brutally reminded of the poverty of the refugees who have been forced to live up on the mountain above the village. 

The Passion of the title is the Passion Play for which parts are handed out to the villagers in the Greek village of Lycovrissi. Martinů again subverts our expectations. There is no ‘play within a play’ in which the villagers enact the story of The Passion of Christ; instead they slowly take on the characteristics of the Biblical characters they have been chosen to play.

The most striking transformation is that of Manolios who becomes increasingly inward-looking as he transforms himself into the character of Jesus, eventually becoming a public preacher and meeting his death at the hands of a baying crowd just as Jesus did. And there’s a powerful visual contrast between those who have been chosen to take the parts of Jesus, his disciples and Mary Magdalene, and the rest of the cast. They wear richly coloured garments that drop down from heaven, and are seen in stylised tableaux that could come from an Italian Renaissance painting. 

Martinů damns Organised Religion in the form of the Grigoris, preist of the villagers. He blames cholera for the death of one of the refugees, rather than starvation so that his flock have a reason to reject the refugees. He and other village elders condemn Manolios for preaching the truth and excommunicate him. The visual contrast between him and the refugees’ priest Fotis is striking. Grigoris wears the traditional costume, echoing Sean Ryder’s lyric in his song The Reverend Black Grape, ‘There’s nothing more sinister/As ministers in dresses’.

Fotis is stripped to the waist for most of the opera; shaven-headed and wearing round glasses he looks like an ascetic, cerebral Buddhist monk. 

The final, and most obvious visual contrast is between the two Choruses. In the original opera, Martinů writes for two separate Choruses – Villagers, and Refugees. In this production the same Opera North Chorus becomes both, but signifies that it’s the chorus of refugees by each singer holding a life-size white effigy of a human being. The refugees become vulnerable, ghostly, fragile figures. 

All of this would be for nothing if it the production were simply an abstract essay in morality. It isn’t. It’s populated by passionate human characters, superbly acted and sung to create a compelling and moving drama. 

CAST 

MANOLIOS …….. Nicky Spence (tenor) 
KATERINA ……Magdalena Molendowska (soprano) 
YANNAKOS ……Paul Nilon (tenor) 
PANAIT……Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts (tenor) 
PRIEST GRIGORIS……Stephen Gadd (baritone) 
PRIEST FOTIS……John Savournin (bass-baritone) 
KOSTANDIS……Richard Mosley-Evans (baritone) 
LENIO……Lorna James (soprano) 
CAPTAIN……Steven Page (baritone) 
ARCHON……Jonathan Best (bass-baritone) 
MICHELIS……Alexander Robin Baker (tenor) 
NIKOLIO…….Alex Banfield (tenor) 
SCHOOLMASTER……Ivan Sharpe (tenor) 
FATHER LADAS……Jeremy Peaker (baritone) 

Opera North Chorus 
Opera North Orchestra conducted by Garry Walker 

Available to listen for the next 22 days on BBC Radio 3’s Opera on 3: 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000b6pr

RNCM soloists, chorus and orchestra

RNCM Manchester

Saturday 14 December 2019

A stunning staging of Poulenc’s emotional opera

****

This was the final performance of the RNCM’s staging of Poulenc’s opera, Dialogues des Carmélites, set in a Carmelite monastery during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. It’s a deeply religious work appearing towards the end of his life in the 1950s, a couple of decades after the sparkling frivolity of his early works was wrenched in a new direction by the violent death of a close friend and a visit to the sanctuary at Rocamadour,

A few days earlier I’d just heard of the tragic death of my colleague … As I meditated on the fragility of our human frame, I was drawn once more to the life of the spirit. Rocamadour had the effect of restoring me to the faith of my childhood.

The staging was superb, beautifully designed and evocatively lit. The main set was split into two levels, both painted a pristine white, the lower level sometimes looking like a Dutch painting drained of all colour by the stark white light. This was desecrated in Act III by the brief incursion of the Revolutionaries who had ripped the religious symbols off the walls, sprayed the lower walls with the slogan “god is dead”, the staircase with the word ‘liars’, and the upper wall with an anarchist symbol.

RNCM’s Dialogues des Carmélites (c) Robert Workman

And in Act III the stark, timeless simplicity of the nuns’ costumes contrasted shockingly with the brutal black leather of the riot police with their plastic shields and the garish colour of the revolutionaries’ costumes. The nuns remained at the still centre of the violently turning world.

But impressive and dramatic as the staging is, the opera is about the inner drama of the characters and the terrible beauty of the decision to nuns sacrifice themselves to the guillotine at the end of the opera. This was effectively staged, each nun throwing her head back and dropping her cloak to the floor to represent her execution, the human soul then leaving the body as each nun slowly left the stage. Poulenc’s music does most of the emotional work, the chorus of nuns becoming smaller and smaller as each nun disappears with the swift metallic sound of the guillotine. There were some tears in the audience.

The Soprano Yuliya Shkvarko was fresh-voiced and impressive as Blanche, youthful and convincing as Blanche de la Force courageously facing her moral dilemmas. A moment of horror was well-expressed when she dropped a figurine of the Christ Child from the upper part of the set and it smashed. Her young companion, the soprano Pasquale Orchard was equally good as Sister Constance. The older women impressed too – Molly Barker was moving as Madame de Croissy, sitting in anguished pain writhing in her wheelchair before she fell to the floor in a bathetic death that was too small for her, like an ill-fitting coat as the libretto says. Georgia Ellis as Mother Marie and Mariya Sevdanska as Madam Lidoine led the Sisters impressively, contrasting well with Blanche and Constance.

There were a couple of minor problems – the surtitles failed to fire up during the first Act, making it a little hard to follow, and there were some early tuning issues in the orchestra which gradually blossomed under Andrew Greenwood.

RNCM’s Dialogues des Carmélites (c) Robert Workman

But the final word belonged to Blanche, joining Constance at the very last minute to be guillotined, with a beatific smile.