Pole apart

Alas, poor André Tchaikowsky. A survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, with an assumed name that probably did his musical career as much harm as good (he was born Robert Andrzej Krauthammer), he died of cancer in 1982 shortly after his only opera, The Merchant of Venice, was rejected by ENO. He’s remembered today principally for bequeathing his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use as a prop, in which capacity he starred alongside David Tennant in Hamlet in 2008.

That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once. Welsh National Opera’s programme book doesn’t credit the skull that’s removed from Portia’s casket in Keith Warner’s UK première production of The Merchant of Venice, but it’s tempting to imagine it as Tchaikowsky’s — not least because it was at that point (for me anyway) that his music really started to assert its character. The first instinct with an unfamiliar score is to play spot-the-influence, and in Act One Berg and Shostakovich jumped out amid the general mid-century modern bustle. Act Two, dealing with Portia and her suitors, is a sort of scherzo, with luminous flutes, and a bassoon squawking out sardonic quotations from Beethoven, Wagner and that other Tchaikovsky (the Russian one). Warner gave us a divertissement: a 1920s garden party under a heat haze of louche sexuality. A Marlene Dietrich figure in top hat and tails sang ‘Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred’, recorders warbled and an onstage harpsichord threw a glittering phrase to the harp in the pit.

Warner and his designer Ashley Martin-Davis set Act Two’s slightly queasy lightness against outer acts shrouded in darkness, and walled in by bank vaults. This is a Venice in which commerce is both a rampart and a trap, and Tchaikowsky emphasises the distance between Antonio and Shylock by writing them as a countertenor (an underpowered Martin Wölfel) and a baritone (Lester Lynch) respectively.