Alternative view

Robin Holloway

Wednesday, 24th June 2009

Robin Holloway offers a different take on Lulu at Covent Garden

With diffidence, I differ from my esteemed opera colleague. But I think Michael Tanner has got the new Covent Garden Lulu (Arts, 13 June) upside down. Catching it by chance a few nights ago, I’ll take the opportunity for an alternative opinion.

First, for where we don’t differ. Singing is always adequate, sometimes outstanding, and the orchestral playing and direction quite marvellous. MT had bad luck with Agneta Eichenholz’s heroine: I found her in the entire range between coquetry and anguish fully up to the role’s exorbitant demands. From her succession of admirers, lovers, husbands, clients, Jennifer Larmore’s Countess Geschwitz stood out for touching presence and beauty of voice, Michael Volle’s Dr Schön/Jack the Ripper for lethal power.

But a strong Schön is no rarity. New to me is a compelling portrayal of his son; an Alwa with the lyricism and freedom to permit the iridescent love-music its full bloom. Usually, the part produces tight dryness: Klaus Florian Vogt unloosed this marvellous skein of music as one has always imagined but never actually heard it.

Nor do MT and I disagree substantially over the orchestra under Antonio Pappano, though I would praise them more highly. It’s their achievement to transcend, at last, the difficult score’s strain and tension. Expressionist rendering of thick emotion yields to lightness and ease; the fearsome constructivistic grind of how it’s made, to limpid spontaneity; above all, everything is lyricised, with a floating/gliding delicacy of sonority and momentum that places deliciousness over Angst. The dark stains remain, for sure, in this saga of depravity and exploitation. But the genius of Berg’s maturity (so cruelly truncated) poises music of metallic facture and translucent loveliness upon the horrors moral and physical of his subject, as subtle perfumes arise from a crushed mess of decaying vegetable matter. Lulu is not Wozzeck cubed: ‘a superlative has no future’. It enters a strange new world of abstraction and chic.

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