Opera
Hansel and Gretel (Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera) Carmen (Opera North)
Haunting charm
Michael Tanner
Hansel and Gretel in Cardiff was so delightful that it may have been unfair to go to it again three evenings later in Glas- gow, in the production by Mark Tinkler, first seen in 1996 but new to me. The pro- gramme book contains an article by A Witch, but since she is a nice one it is irrel- evant. The interview with Tinkler is con- cerned with the deeper meanings of the piece, though he is refreshingly insistent that the surfaces should be what we actual- ly see, inferring depths if we want to — but he clearly thinks we should want to. He is very taken with Jung and alchemy, and especially with the ubiquity of the number seven, which can of course be found all over the place in Hansel, as no doubt in many other operas, if you look hard and selectively enough. It all reminds me of Ronald Knox's spoof proof that Queen Victoria wrote In Memoriam, a brilliant piece of nonsense which urgently needs re- issuing. Tinkler takes Hansel to be a fable of growing up, or what is more often nowa- days called a rites of passage work. In this process we naturally get involved in alche- my, since the turning of base metal into gold 'was really [sic] a metaphor for the growth of the human spirit'. And Hansel and Gretel embody the male and female side of the human personality (they'd bet- ter), which is best symbolised by an egg. That means that tumescent egg-shapes, sometimes glowing, spring up in the forest — seven of them, of course. When the angels descend for the pantomime at the sublime end of Act II, they represent the seven ages of man, if rather vaguely.
If this all sounds on the heavy-handed side, it is. Yet the sets are more naturalistic than Welsh Opera's, and more grateful to look at. The forest in particular manages to give an impression, while being quite small, of a place you could get lost in. The last act is less impressive, with a diminutive oven and none of the sickening preparations for cooking Hansel that we had in Cardiff. The Witch, sung by Anne-Marie Owens, resem- bles Mother and is meant to, without tak- ing things as far as Pountney does at the ENO, where they are performed by the same artist. No more of her or anyone else's words were audible in Glasgow, unfortunately. Is it a failure of this particu- lar translation, or are singers just not being encouraged to enunciate as they used to?
Something of both, I suspect, especially after a spell of listening to old recordings of singers, which are eloquent without sounding like dictation lessons. It isn't merely a matter of not singing through, or as some critics say, off the words. It is a whole different style of singing, in which one has the impression that contemporary singers are taught their vocal lines and then fit words (often, of course, in a language foreign to them, and which they don't understand) to them. Anyway, something needs to be done.
Musically, the performance was decent though less characterful than the Welsh one. The orchestra was very much the accompanist to the singers, while in Wales the conductor made sure that the voices were threads in the richly contrapuntal tex- ture. The two children sang less appealing- ly in Glasgow — or maybe it was the fact that they were so evidently being played by women of a certain age, while in Cardiff Hansel in particular was a clumsy adoles- cent boy to the life. Yet, despite all reser- vations, the work survives if it is even mediocrely performed, such is its haunting charm. I don't for one moment believe it 'I'm queuing for the January sales.' has more than that to offer: it is a kind of emphatically non-Wagnerian work written in a brilliantly misleading idiom, suggestive all the time of Wagner's depth but in fact entirely a matter of enchanting surface.
Carmen in Leeds brought a welcome dose of unseasonal This production, by Phyllida Lloyd, needs to settle down, but when it does it promises to be thoroughly worthwhile, if not on a level with ENO's of two years ago, which was that rarest kind of achievement that permanently affects one's understanding of an extremely familiar opera. Opera North's production is in English, of a strange kind; the time is now, the setting anywhere, the language more or less standard English, delivered mainly in middle-class accents. That makes for a curiously alienating effect, at least to begin with. I certainly found I was much happier with the performance as the evening pro- gressed, and the final scene, gleefully acclaimed by the audience, who clearly rel- ish a good strangling after a prolonged, savage fight, harrowed me. That despite the manifest weakness of the Don Jose, a seasoned performer in Carmen Jones, which this production, with two coloured leads, sometimes looked as if it was slip- ping into — I'd have been very happy if it had. It was hard to tell at the start whether Antoni Garfield Henry was nervous or just doing a tense psychopath; but when he sang his voice tended to be strained and tentative. The Carmen, Ruby Philogene, belongs broadly to the gargling school, and quite a lot of her role was mere routine. Given that the producer was so keen on breaking down traditional preconceptions, the neutral portrayal of Carmen was a dis- appointment, but Philogene is clearly a ver- satile, as well as alfirmingly physical performer, and the production period, from what one gathers, has been so exten- sively concerned with 'outreach' and involv- ing local youth, etc., that there remains a lot of work to do on the central characters. The secondary ones — Dancairo, Frasqui- ta, and so on, the stuff of opera quizzes are individuated to a unique extent. And Escamillo, performed with every kind of dazzling élan by Mark Stone, emerges as almost an interesting character.
It's just that Jose and Carmen seem stuck, apart from their throwaway style of talking, in another, orthodox production. This one takes place mainly inside a huge cylinder, with lots of ladders; after Act II the top half collapses to reveal the sky, and the rest, apart from the final scene, bril- liantly managed, almost seems to take place on board a vessel, there's so much climbing and looking out. Andras Ligeti's conducting is lavish in gesture, distractingly so, broad in effect; but the tinta of the orchestra was agreeably harsh and dry. As Nietzsche claimed, this is music that doesn't sweat, even if the principals were prone to. After a few more performances this could be a sig- nificant addition to the valuable produc- tions of this stunning masterwork.
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