Conductor, Robert Jindra; Production; Barrie Kosky; Set Design, Michael Levine; Costume Design, Victoria Behr; Lighting, Franck Evin. Forester, Wolfgang Koch; Forester’s Wife, Lindsay Ammann; The Schoolmaster, Jonas Hacker; The Priest, Martin Snell; Haraschta, Milan Siljanov, Pasek, Caspar Singh; The Vixen, Elena Tsallagova; Fox, Angela Brower.
As I think I have mentioned before in this blog, I have seen a number of excellent, very different, productions of this work over the past 5 years – at Glyndebourne, Holland Park, ENO and at the Barbican (semi-staged by Peter Sellars). I was excited to see this production on offer in Munich because of Barrie Kosky as director., When originally first performed in this production earlier this year, Mirga was conducting but she is now, or is about to be, a new mum, so though she was originally scheduled to conduct, Robert Jindra took over relatively late on. The cast looked good, including Wolfgang Koch (a Wotan, Sachs and Barak) as the Forester and some of the ‘company’ singers who were also in Les Troyens.
I was intrigued to see whether the audience numbers and type would be different for this production from Les Troyens the previous evening. Whereas the Trojans audience was a (bit) sparser and older, the Janacek was both fuller and younger – I guess much like London where Covent Garden attracts more young people than you’d ever see at Opera North or WNO
Anyway, to the performance…..and, after the previous evening’s directoral vagaries, this was a masterclass in how a director should shape and lead a production with a clear overarching vision. The vision in this case was about mortality, which made it a darker reading of the piece than I’ve seen elsewhere – the Glyndebourne version in particular was full of greens and yellow and golds. This Munich production was for the most part held within a background of darkness. The opening shows a huge black stage, with a funeral service being held. We see the grave being dug, and the Forester is one of the mourners. And the ending of the opera too has the Forester, after the radiant celebration of nature, walking off to the back of that great black stage as light fails. But the rest of the opera has as its basic set, in front of that darkness, a series of curtains, ropes and banners which have a reflective metallic glint – they can be forests, stars, snowy, spring-like – which produces some wonderful effects. Within, therefore, that mortality, there is wonderful energy and beauty and life. The climax of that sense of energy is the uproarious wedding scene, where we don’t – as per other productions – see festive animals having a good time, but lots of human legs and arms bouncing around in obviously sexually suggestive ways. It’s very funny, and entirely in accord with the music and the intent of the work, and concludes with three huge firework bangs which sends showers of silver sparks all over the stage. The disadvantage of the set is that it can’t easily be used to represent human housing. The other major directoral decision here is to get away from any partial or full animal representation but have the animals as normally human. That’s the first time I’ve seen this done and it takes a bit of getting used to, but I thought it worked well. Both humans and animals seem to pop up from holes in the ground and the only difference between them is in the former’s lighter colours. Curiously, the decision to do this seemed in this production to diminish the sexual tension between the Vixen and the Forester, which was much more prominent in all the other productions I’ve seen., and minimises the sense of strangeness and inappropriateness of the young Vixen inside the human house Here the relationship seems cooler, and there is more of an emphasis on the freedom the Vixen wants for herself. The production in some way perhaps foregrounds the animals more and minimises the human doings, which is perhaps a fault but if it is so it is entirely within the scope and meaning of text and music. So this production was funny – the hen sequence was the best I’ve seen – and beautiful, and at the end I was very moved indeed. I did wonder – though it’s not a problem I had – how this production would appear to someone to whom the work was new. You’d have to be very clued up to work out to whom the Vixen was talking in the Forester’s house (the dog) or that it was a badger who found himself summarily evicted from his home. A very good thing, though, was that the work was played without a break – director’s vision coming before profits at the bar…….
This is one of those works that requires a company spirit, and members, and Munich still seems to have such a company – whether that’s so contractually I’m not sure, but there were small parts taken by singers who had sung in Les Troyens, as I’ve said. The Staatsoper youth choral group need a special mention! Altogether it felt like a company effort. The stand out performances were by:
- the Vixen, Elena Tsallagova, who was energetic, sung beautifully in the love scene and had a huge stage presence (all she needs to do now is cartwheels as per Alagna);
- the Fox, played by Angela Brower which was very well done – she is a big presence with a big voice and is clearly going places
- and the Forester, with Wolfgang Koch projecting a sadness and weariness worthy of Hans Sachs.
So I thought this was a marvellous and, despite the sadness, an uplifting performance, and maybe a more clear-headed approach – without fake pantheism – is all for the best with this great work. If I had one further cavil it would be that the orchestra – sounding so wonderful last night in Les Troyens -seemed less comfortable in this music. It was almost as though, when the music moves into lyrical, occasionally almost Straussian, territory, they knew what they had to do and the strings soared; at other times they sounded a bit uneasy with some of the cross-rhythms and asperities of the score, which I remember Rattle doing so well with the LSO about 3 years ago
But all in all, though the recent ENO production runs it a close second, probably the finest I have seen of this wonderful work, and as with the Kosky Meistersinger at Bayreuth I so admired, the detail of the crafting of the production is awe-inspiring
POST SCRIPT: because I had planned nothing for the following Saturday (16/7) I bought a cheap ‘stehplatz’ in the third ‘range’ for this same production. I think I did the orchestra a disservice in the above – they played wonderfully. on the Saturday The sound even standing at the back, and the sightlines, in this position in this house are much preferable to standing at Covent Garden. The performance was also being relayed to a big screen and speakers outside in the square where there was a large audience under the (free) ‘Opera for All’ scheme. I got the extra thrill, coming out from the performance through the main foyer, of seeing the cast close up returning back from being cheered by the crowds outside – they all seemed fired up and elated, as they should have been!
John's musical journey 