Le Grand Macabre
English National Opera
Don Carlo
Royal Opera House
Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre has opened the season at ENO in a production of spectacular, amazing brilliance. Every aspect of the piece, visual, musical, dramatic, is dispatched with such panache that it seems a pity to enter any reservations at all, and for anyone in two minds about getting a ticket I’d unhesitatingly say ‘Go!’ The reservation is that the work itself is so feeble a piece, and by Ligeti’s standards shockingly thin, that one is forced to regret directorial and designer’s inventiveness amounting to genius for so unworthy a cause. Anarchy in art, as in life, is a wonderful concept but is a bitter disappointment when realised. Macabre is a genuinely anarchic work, making merry with many things we hold dearest or have a terror of, but it is a sign of its weakness that it ends by telling us to ‘live merrily in cheerfulness’, because you never know when you are going to die, though you know you will. Shouldn’t two hours of inverting every value end with something a bit more surprising than that? And shouldn’t the progress of the chaos that is the work have more striking musical and dramatic features, instead of rapidly lapsing into the dreary predictability of the utterly unpredictable?
Still, like the women of the first world war, I still say ‘Go!’ For you will witness — no thanks to the composer — a feast of advanced stage technology which will have you gaping at what the Catalan company La Fura dels Baus has devised. Almost the whole stage is occupied by a gigantic female figure, apparently made of fibreglass, which swivels, dissolves and reforms, has gaping eyes out of which people stare, and in the second half rewards us with a view of her posterior, out of which a male character steps. Later on still we see her tripes, out of which, before they collapse, people struggle. Obscenities, verbal and enacted, come so thick and fast that you’d have to see the show several times to notice them all. I wonder whether you would want to. There is not a plot, there are characters though they are pretty unstable, there is some attractive music, more in the second half than the first, but lots of shouting. Ligeti could write very funny music, as Aventures shows, and powerfully serious music too. Here there isn’t much of either. Even so, this is not one of those lethal ENO evenings when you have a vivid sense of what it would be for time to move backwards, and the brio of the cast is almost infectious.
The Royal Opera has revived the 2008 production of Verdi’s Don Carlo, and the performance was a considerable improvement on last year’s. That is almost entirely due to the presence of Jonas Kaufmann in the title role, the vastly improved form of Simon Keenlyside as Posa, and the broad, detailed conducting of Semyon Bychkov. The production itself needs to be written off as a dead loss. How can so gifted a director as Nicholas Hytner be responsible for so inert an affair as this, in which every dramatic punch is pulled, unnecessary and cheap effects are added, and Bob Crowley’s designs are tolerated, in all their unatmospheric ineptitude? The one thing that can be said for them is that one scene can follow another without a pause, and that is something to be relieved about. A grid is lowered as scenes end, suggesting that Spain is a prison or asylum, and when it rises one sees an assortment of unevocative sets pitched somewhere between the diagrammatic and the naturalistic. Ineptitudes abound, the worst being the scene where Carlos mistakes Eboli for Elisabetta, an awkward moment but one which I have only seen draw guffaws in this production. Yet against the odds, thanks to the overwhelming power of Verdi’s grandest, deepest operatic score, and the passionate participation of the male principals, and the sweep of the magnificent orchestra, one is left with a series of scenes of cumulative intensity, so that the last hour and a half draws the threads of the complex drama together, and the impact survives even the wretched ending, one of Verdi’s worst, and exacerbated here.
Jonas Kaufmann hasn’t endured the rigours of record-company hype, so his greatness as an artist needs no filtering: he identifies with each role he sings, and here he actually made Carlos into a rounded character, instead of the cipher at the centre that he usually is. He also, in the last scene in particular, treated us to some of the most sustained pianissimo tenor singing I have ever heard, live or on disc. Even the wayward Marina Poplavskaya, who had failed to deliver so many of Elisabetta’s crucial phrases, rose to the occasion here. Kaufmann is one of those performers who seem to inspire his colleagues to surpass themselves. Ferruccio Furlanetto has a rough voice, but his understanding of Philip II is deep, and in his scene with Posa in particular the drama came to electrifying life. Keenlyside delivered a noble, even exalted performance. All that’s needed now is a couple of female leads to match up to this impressive trio.
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