The overture to The Flying Dutchman opens at gale force. There’s nothing like it; Mendelssohn and Berlioz both painted orchestral seascapes but no one before Wagner had flung open the sluices and let the ocean roar into the opera house with quite such elemental power. Garry Walker and the orchestra of Opera North dived into it headfirst, while images of waves were projected on the curtain. If you believe that opera audiences can’t handle an overture without visual distraction (and most opera directors do appear to think this) it’s as good a solution as any. A strong start for a new production.
Then the curtain rose and we were in the Home Office. No trace of the sea: in director Annabel Arden’s conception it looked like a cross between The Matrix and the war room from Dr Strangelove. Daland’s crew were salarymen in lanyards and the storm they’d just weathered was the latest bureaucratic omnishambles. In Wagner’s music, the last squalls eddied and swirled; on stage we saw black costumes, monochrome video projections and designer furniture. Regular operagoers will be able to guess the rest – the affectless lovers, the freaky dancing, the mandatory trench coats. If you were playing cliché bingo you’d have scored a full house.
Arden has taken a drama with a wholly distinctive atmosphere and made it resemble every other recent opera staging. No one’s demanding horned helmets but surely there are colours that aren’t black, and more settings available than Hotel Lounge or Undefined Industrial Space? Her basic idea relates to immigration: we knew this because it said so in the programme and because a member of Opera North’s staff made a pre-curtain announcement. For Arden, the Dutchman is essentially an asylum seeker, which sort of works until you get to the specifics (his exile is self-willed, and when he lands in Norway he is welcomed with open arms).
But there was very little in the actual drama to support this interpretation, barring some scraps of recorded speech before each act (the first two acts were played without a break, lasting almost two hours) and the closing gesture, where Arden replaces Wagner’s final redemption with some business involving a child-sized lifejacket. Yes, seriously, she went there, and it might not have felt so manipulative if anything in the preceding three hours had made it seem earned. Discount that, and Arden’s entire concept hangs on a single weak metaphor (that Act One storm). It isn’t remotely enough.
This is an excellent realisation of a generic, half-baked concept
Still there were some arresting touches, such as the choreography in Act Three where the chorus (who sang ferociously) end up piled about the stage as human wreckage. The individual performances were very fine – Clive Bayley’s bluff, vigorous Daland, Edgaras Montvidas’s lyrical anguish as Erik, and Walker’s thrillingly physical conducting, which by Act Three deserved a Met Office red warning. On the first night, Layla Claire (indisposed) walked the role of Senta while Mari Wyn Williams sang from the side of the stage, and despite everything it worked remarkably well. Claire’s pale Goth-girl otherness matched Williams’s plaintive, increasingly ardent singing surprisingly closely.
As for Robert Hayward (the Dutchman): well, you expect him to be good and he was – a tormented presence, whose voice started to bloom and open out as the evening progressed, providing a ringing, charcoal-hued counterpoint to Williams’s luminous soprano in their Act Two love scene. In truth, nothing in this production is poorly performed or realised. Quite the opposite – this is an excellent realisation of a generic, half-baked concept. I’ve seen worse, far worse. The depressing thing is that it’s quite rare to see better.
In London, Sakari Oramo conducted the UK première of the final work by the late Kaija Saariaho – a trumpet concerto called HUSH, written for the Finnish jazz trumpeter Verneri Pohjola. Saariaho’s programme note, with its dedication to the medics who treated her final illness and her frank acknowledgment that this would be her last concerto, was moving enough. But perhaps only Saariaho could have made the piece itself so communicative, and yet so entirely unsentimental. The BBC Symphony Orchestra (which had sounded distinctly rough before the interval) was suddenly playing with supreme subtlety and concentration.
Pohjola’s technique is unconventional – he bends some notes, and allows others to shrivel or falter. Occasionally (as directed by Saariaho) he shouted. On paper, that sounds contrived; in performance it felt as if the instrument had a human voice, pleading and almost unbearably vulnerable. Then Saariaho, Prospero-like, would weave some new sonic enchantment – an echoing, spiralling scherzo, or a section whose pulse (according to the composer) was suggested by an MRI machine – and make it sound as natural and as miraculous as light or breath. ‘Music is life,’ said Carl Nielsen. Saariaho, even at the last, knew that art is mightiest when it speaks on no terms but its own.
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