Why this is the future of opera
Rupert Christiansen goes to see Monteverdi 450 at Usher Hall in Edinburgh
Lightning has struck twice in Edinburgh where a shattering International Festival performance of Britten’s Peter Grimes was followed 24 hours later by an exquisite version of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. Scarcely less wonderful were Monteverdi’s two other surviving operas, Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria and L’Incoronazione di Poppea, which followed later in the week.
All these occasions justly drew wildly enthusiastic ovations and rave reviews. But what gives them broader importance is that they all took place in a concert venue, the Usher Hall, not a theatre or opera house, and that they embody a form of opera production that perhaps points a way forward for an art form chronically strapped for cash and dangerously addicted to shallow visual gimmickry. I’d like to call this approach “concert staging” – the more common term of description “semi-staging” seems to sell it short and make it sound more compromised than it actually is.
This is a style of production that spreads itself across a concert hall’s platform, choir stalls, organ loft and auditorium, dispensing with all of the formal scenery and making use of a few lighting effects and basic props instead.
Direction of the singers is light-touch, almost a superior form of stage management: the point is not to imprison the opera in a concept but to liberate the audience’s imaginations and allow the singers a high degree of freedom to interpret the music, without stripping off or standing on their heads in Nazi Germany or downtown Los Angeles, according to the whims of the dominant school of intellectualising opera directors on a quest for scandalous headlines.
There are obvious financial advantages to the practice. Full opera stagings can cost more than £1million, and many of them will receive only a handful of performances. The amount of money frittered by the Royal Opera on its leadenly pretentious stagings of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Otello is enough to make one grimly rejoice that the Arts Council is cutting its grant by 3per cent – this sort of extravagance is simply unacceptable in the current straitened climate.
Of course, I wouldn’t want to argue that concert staging is invariably the answer, or that “full” stagings have no value. Visual realisation was essential to the impact of such recent productions as Katie Mitchell’s Written on Skin and William Kentridge’s Wozzeck. But as we have seen in Edinburgh this week – and as Opera North’s superb realisations of Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Puccini’s Turandot in Leeds Town Hall have also shown – concert stagings can generate an authentic intensity in which the drama is communicated through the fundamental energies of the music rather than superficial decorative imagery.
The Monteverdi operas were conducted and co-directed (with Elsa Rooke) by John Eliot Gardiner. Their Edinburgh residency is part of a larger enterprise that will tour throughout Europe this year on a schedule that no opera company could afford, and the absence of scenery means that stagings can swiftly be adapted to suit the topography of different venues.
The English Baroque Soloists are divided on either side of the platform, with the action moving in front of, alongside and behind them. Vegan early music purists will probably not approve of the relatively large instrumental forces Gardiner uses, but who cares? This is living opera, projecting thrillingly into a large space without ever losing focus or energy.
Of the trio, L’Orfeo makes the greatest impact, simply because it is a perfectly achieved masterpiece; however, Gardiner conducts all three with absolute authority, and his players and singers, cross-cast, work as a seamless team.
There are remarkable individual contributions from Krystian Adam, the Polish tenor, as the gentlest and sweetest of Orfeos, and Kangmin Justin Kim, the astonishing Korean counter-tenor, whose chilling hissy fits as Nerone in Poppea could give Kim Jong-un a run for his money. The variety of nationalities in the cast is another exhilarating aspect of a marvellous achievement.
It seems that opera as a big, fat art form is learning the virtues of slimming down.