Opera
From the House of the Dead; Simon Boccanegra (Welsh National Opera, Birmingham)
A spark of the divine
Michael Tanner
In the sedate setting of an underpopulat- ed Birmingham Hippodrome, Welsh National Opera's production of Janacek's last opera and most bizarre work, From the House of the Dead, blazed more powerfully than ever.
It has always been among the splendours of the company's repertoire, with its evoca- tive, claustrophobic set on which so many things can happen simultaneously, and David Pountney's tactfully near-naturalistic direction, which seems to be mindful at every point of Janacek's famous superscrip- tion on the score, that in every man there is a spark of the divine. Pountney, for once not seeking to impose himself on the work he's directing, manages to suggest both the vivid individuality of each of the prisoners and also to show how close they come to having it ironed out of them by the arbi- trary brutality of the authorities. It is the visitors to the Easter celebrations, compar- ative toffs, who are ruthlessly standardised, eating in strict time and moving as if on a wire. That may be taking things in the wrong direction — Janacek presumably meant that even provincial snobs should have that spark in them.
Often I have found House a worrying work, in that the music is not only wholly unlike anyone else's but often unlike any- thing that Janacek had written before, in its exuberance in Act II and its sustained ten- derness in Act III; while on stage events of seeming insignificance or narrations of ghastly cruelty are unfolding. It poses the question in the sharpest form: how much can music transfigure, and are we always to trust the music rather than the action or text? It's the same question that the con- temporaneous Berg leads us to raise in his operas, though where he drowns sordid events in his compassion, Janacek seems determined that they should be seen as contributions to some inscrutable cosmic celebration, of which the Glagolithic Mass is the crowning ritual, showing that by 'the divine' Janacek means something pantheis- tic rather than transcendental.
It still remains a mystery that the com- poser can expect us to share his view after we have heard the enormous final account by Shishkov of how he came to murder his wife. Maybe it is the irrepressibility of the characters that we are meant to take heart from, the sheer energy which enables them to survive — except that some of them don't. During Shishkov's story the dying Luka groans frequently, and no one takes any notice. Does that mean that, despite everything, we affirm with the music, any other course being pointless? When the score is played with such abandon as by the WNO orchestra under Richard Arm- strong's inspired leadership, that does seem to be the point. Whatever one concludes from this extremely troubling and exhila- rating work, it's unlikely ever to receive a finer all-round production than this, a mar- vellous contribution to the fortuitous festi- val of Janacek operas which is going on in Britain at the moment.
The following evening was the new pro- duction of Simon Boccanegra — which seems to be having a festival to itself, though it is the least festive of operas. It is tempting to make invidious comparisons with Covent Garden's revival, and there's no obvious reason to avoid the temptation. Another Pountney effort, this one is a bit more characteristic of its director than House, but almost as successful. I only wish the scenery wasn't restless rather than mobile. It's a good idea to have no break between the scenes of the individual acts, because the final minutes of most of them are so weak that moving straight into the next one distracts attention from Verdi's seeming lapses of interest after his big cli- maxes. But apparently marble walls swing- ing round every few minutes do create a strange effect. Since Pountney seems to see the work as somewhere between Chekhov and Beckett, not a bad idea at all and one which releases the audience from any unease about the arbitrariness of the char- acters' behaviour, the constant colliding of figures emerging from the fractured scenery is a potent image. The direction of every separate figure in the drama is strong, or at least as strong as Verdi's strangely indeterminate music for them permits. The score, with its eschewing of arias, its reticent fluidity, sounds as con- vincing in Carlo Rizzi's hands as it sounded merely loose in Solti's.
Rather than making pronouncements the singers come to a point where articulation is a cruel necessity: these are naturally taci- turn people, Simon most of all. I was pleas- antly surprised by Phillip Joll's performance in the title role, having expected him to be unfocused in the wrong way, as he always was in his Wagnerian days. His voice is woofy, but he uses it, and also his sparing gestures, intelligently. His placable foe Fiesco is Alastair Miles, a kind of tight-lipped martyr to vengefulness, and a chilling, painful portrayal. Nuccia Focile is a mettlesome Amelia, harder of tone than Kiri Te Kanawa, but caring about what happens and at moments propelling things along with a vocal and dramatic energy which makes her a more exciting artist than I had expected. The tinta, literal- ly and musically, was right. The final scene came as close to being profound as this set of rather blank figures permits.
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