Scottish Opera’s new production of The Flying Dutchman, performed in German but advertised in English, is almost a triumph, and very well worth going to see. I reflected, as I travelled by train back from Glasgow to Cambridge, changing only at Edinburgh, York, Peterborough and Ely, that this raw and in some ways crude opera, Wagner’s first to remain in the canon, benefits from the restrictions imposed by a budget as tight as Scottish Opera’s, though I can imagine the participants not entirely agreeing with me. The production, by Harry Fehr with designs by Tom Scutt, is simple and clear. The opera is relocated to Scotland, where Wagner originally set it, as the home of Gothick, and Daland becomes Donald, Erik becomes George; and the time is mid-20th century. So the Dutchman arrives in a tanker, and the girls in Act II work at sewing machines. The atmosphere is largely created by powerful projections, for which Dutchman is a prime candidate; but not too many of them.
The conductor is Francesco Corti, the company’s music director, and he begins as he means to go on, with savagely rasping strings and rearing brass, and he doesn’t make the mistake of slowing down for the Senta theme to the point where it sounds mawkish. Urgency characterises his reading throughout, and it would be still — much — better if there were no interval before the brief final act. Fehr’s aim seems to be, remarkably, to render the action straightforwardly, the only serious departure being at the very end. Wagner himself wasn’t sure what to do with it, and offered alternatives, all of which Fehr rejects. The precise way in which Senta redeems the Dutchman is unclear, but what seems certain is that she would not, Butterfly-like, get a knife and drive it into her stomach, immediately after which George, here listed as ‘a minister’, appears at the other side of the stage and shoots the Dutchman dead with a rifle.
The central character in this production is, as it has tended to become in recent decades, Senta. She is more obviously a ‘case’ than the Dutchman. He merely wants someone to do something for him, and knows what it is, even if not how it works. Senta is frustratedly looking for a mission, and Rachel Nicholls, the thrilling Brünnhilde of Longborough’s Götterdämmerung last year, gives a mesmerising account, vocally, of the role, launching off into her fantasies with a tone that is secure, powerful, and as seamless and legato as one would expect from a student of Anne Evans. Her acting is wayward, consisting largely of curious gallops round the stage, and some semaphoring. The Dutchman of Peteris Eglitis has the right intentions, but lacks enough voice to realise them. Both his opening monologue and the beginning of the great duet have the right quality of metaphysical moaning, but when he tries pulling out the stops they tend not to be there. In the concerted passages in the duet he is almost drowned out by Nicholls, who is only doing what she should. The other singers are all satisfactory, and Jeff Gwaltney’s Erik/George is much more than that. What is often thought of as some of Wagner’s most conventional music has feeling and suspense breathed into every note.
Extremely hard to know what to make of ENO’s latest excursion, this time to the Barbican Theatre for the world première of Michel van der Aa’s Sunken Garden, conceived in close collaboration with the librettist, novelist David Mitchell. It lasts for two hours, without interval, and there is no chance whatever of being bored, since there is so much going on, mainly visually. For the second half we wore wraparound 3D glasses, and the sunken garden, with plants, huge insects and showers reaching out to us, effortlessly took my attention away from a plot or a series of overlapping plots that I had already almost given up on. There are no surtitles, and they are desperately needed. While the male voices, notably the superb Roderick Williams, are readily intelligible, the female ones, usually through no fault of the singers, are — at least for me — 90 per cent not. I wrestled with the long synopsis of the plot provided by Mitchell first, but just couldn’t remember much of it, so I took the opera in minute by minute, apart from the passages where Williams, playing a wannabe video-artist, shows excerpts from a docudrama he is working on. Those parts are spoken.
There’s no doubt that the performance, given the number of ingredients of different kinds, was ideal, apart from the intelligibility issue, which was none of the executants’ fault. I don’t know any of van der Aa’s other work, but this score struck me as in large measure superfluous, since many of the lines that the characters have to sing are so merely informative or factual that there was no purpose for the music to serve. And what with the various narratives, presented non-narratively of course, and the spectacle, Sunken Garden suffers from information overload. It may use, as the press handout states, ‘cutting-edge technology to create an entirely immersive audience experience’, but it is a work in which the technology is too intricate to permit immersion, even partially.
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