My first experience of Pappano’s conducting was a memorable and searing performance of Wozzeck at Covent Garden, and he returns for this new production by Deborah Warner with Christian Gerhaher in the lead. Plenty of tickets available. Anyone going?
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Deborah Warner’s new production (which I saw at a rehearsal during the week) can be seen as a companion piece to her Peter Grimes of last year in both look and tenor. Its protagonist is an outsider trying to exist in a brutal and contemporary society that is pretty base. The production is ‘stylised naturalistic’, and a model of clarity and accessibility for those seeing the opera for the first time. This contrasts with the previous production of Wozzeck at the ROH which took place in a foetid decaying laboratory and was symbolist in nature, requiring some prior knowledge to be wholly intelligible. Here we get all the myriad scenes, army barrack lavatories, squalid tenement block dwellings, back-alleys of a provincial town, morgue, a lake - stunningly realised by a mirrored stage revolve. During the cinematic scene-changes a translucent gauze drops through which we see silhouettes that change from the abstract to tangibly crystallising the next scene, imaginatively and beautifully lit. Marie’s appalling murder is drenched in the back-light of the blood red moon, reflected in the mist-shrouded lake. Following Wozzeck’s fate and during the cataclysmic orchestral postlude, the moon is eclipsed - just stunning.
It’s never struck me that Wozzeck is a role requiring beautiful singing. Rather, success depends on whether the performer can act convincingly, evoking sympathy without descending into hammy melodrama, and Christian Gerhaher succeeds in avoiding that pitfall. Marie’s music does contain beautiful sections when she is with her child - the beginning of Act 3, in total blackout with Marie and Boy illuminated with a single spot light, was so simple but so intimate and effective. Anna Kampe’s singing and acting was of high order. In many ways it was the gruesome twosome of Captain and Doctor who conveyed the most striking characterisation (and black humour). Peter Hoare was so highly strung as the Captain, one feared for his sanity even more than Wozzeck’s, and the ever excellent Brindley Sherratt is the Doctor from hell (the thought of these two as prototypes for Cols. Cathcart and Korn from Catch 22 sprang to mind).
Antonio Pappano’s renditions of Berg’s operatic scores are, to my mind, his finest achievements at the ROH, indeed his Berg is the finest live performances of these works I’ve experienced. He extracts the dangerous, alluring gorgeousness of the orchestral sound world, which can turn to savagery in an instant. He also draws our ear to the fleeting leitmotifs and their connections, making this still challenging music lucid and, when needs be, ravishingly beautiful; and this score can still astonish. Having a crack orchestra clearly helps in this regard, their playing was impeccable.
So yet another hit for the ROH. A fusion of superb music making and theatre. A return visit already booked. -
I’ll forbear from quoting in full from your vivid and insightful post, Belgrove, but it echoes exactly my own feelings having just returned from the penultimate performance of this lacerating musico-dramatic depiction of cruelty, madness and doomed love. I can’t imagine it better done. Singing & orchestral playing of the first rank, superbly paced by Antonio Pappano.Originally posted by Belgrove View PostComment
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