Conductor, Christophe Rousset; Production, Andrea Breth; Scenery, Martin Zehetgruber; Costumes, Carla Teti; Lighting, Olaf Freese. Cast – Médée, Marina Rebeka; Jason, Stanislas De Barbeyrac; Créon, Peter Schöne; Dircé, Maria Kokareva; Néris, Natalia Skrycka
This was part of a ‘Barocktage’ season at the Staatsoper which includes Simon Rattle conducting the Charpentier version of Medea as well as this and Mozart’s Mitridate, Re di Ponto’. As neither the Cherubini nor the Mozart are in any sense Baroque maybe the term means something different in German! And maybe the clue to that is that the orchestra playing this opera wasn’t the Staatskapelle, or its opera equivalent, but the Akademie fur Alte Musik, Berlin. They made a super sound – vital strings, a wonderfully plangent bassoon sound, hard timpani thwacks and a very impressive thunder sheet. The house acoustics suited their sound very well, although occasionally with a bit too much echo. The house was full, notably younger looking even than ROHCG, and enthusiastic.
Before going to this performance I had had one of my most dismal train journeys ever, from London to Berlin, which should have taken, including Eurostar check-in, about 14 hours, but in fact took 29 hours…….the Eurostar train was 2 hours late leaving London, because of a fatality on the line near Ashford; then, getting to Brussels, I discovered (DB hadn’t bothered to tell me) that there was a one day rail strike on DB, and only about 20% of the trains were running. I got as far as Cologne by 5.30pm and then discovered there were no trains to Berlin till the following morning…..so I had to get a small hotel room for the night in Colgne…..sigh………Anyway I didn’t miss any music – just a chance to wander round more of Berlin on Friday. So I was not necessarily at my critical best for this performance, after two 4-5am starts…………….
This was a bit of a mixed bag as a production, though the singing and playing were excellent – and of course (at least in my view) the work itself is not exactly a blazing masterpiece: in the right hands it can be gripping but is not exactly core repertoire. The Met production I saw screened 18 months or so ago was in costume contemporary with its performance (1797), and resonated with the violence of that extraordinary period. This one had some clear 21st century resonances, though not crudely stated. The basic set picture to me looked like a vaguely Near or Middle Eastern set of buildings – sandy-grey in colour, certainly with an air conditioner on the walls, and with lots of packing cases strewn around (Jason’s spoils which he’s brought to Creon). It felt a bit like a market place in Cairo. There was also a metal grid that moved up and down in one of the rooms to open up or close down vistas into the building beyond, familiar everywhere but particularly common in the Near and Middle East. What didn’t look particularly Middle-Eastern was a couple of large bull statues in the rooms. Above the walls level there are three or so large objects which could be giant air conditioning ducts, or could be parts of an overarching temple. Critically both her servant, and to a lesser extent Medea herself (who has to have a lot of her face seen for emotional impact) were dressed in conservative Muslim fashion – heads covered, long black clothing reaching to the floor. Was there some intent here to create the rage of the dispossessed, the colonised, even, dare one say, the Palestinians, against a dominant culture – Creon, Jason were all in Western clothes, though Dircé seemed to have a strange costume for her wedding that looked vaguely Renaissance or Ancient Egyptian. Was Medea meant to be some sort of Ancient Greek suicide bomber? Possibly, but if this was one of the references it was not overdone and often the production seemed content to tell the story – which of course at its heart is about the Jason-Medea relationship, and not really about anything broader. The set revolved, sometimes after, sometimes during, each scene so that we saw variants of the same set of buildings, with inter-connected doors, and this was effective in moving the action along. Very good use was made of a screen on one wall on which shadows could be projected to enhance the drama – most effectively when Medea moves towards her children at the beginning of the last act, intent on killing them. The director handled the inter-reaction of characters well (including a very painful grip from Medea on Jason’s groin!). What was least effective was the last 10 minutes or so of the work; although there was one spectacular effect – a person completely ablaze running across the stage as the fire begins to take hold – the fire, centred in three or four tanks, seemed less than overwhelming as a representation of the temple on fire. More importantly, with the general darkness of the stage, to enhance the impact of the fire, it became very difficult to know what was happening – what happened to the children, for instance? The last encounter between Medea and Jason seemed oddly stilted. Right at the close, as the curtain falls and Medea seems about to fall on her dagger, she suddenly steps in front of the curtains, hesitates and then is swept away. The production doesn’t really give much emphasis to the milk of human kindness – Creon is scheming and seems to have a headless body amongst the booty from Jason; the latter is seen kissing and touching up Dirce’s sister before the wedding; Dirce seems forced into the wedding by her father; Medea is crazed by the desire for revenge. Only Medea’s maid seems in any degree normal (and is she contemplating suicide at the end in this production?).
So this was a production, occasionally a bit opaque but always thought-provoking and interesting. It was exactly something someone used to contemporary theatre would feel at home with if coming to an opera for the first time.
I’d not come across any of the singers before. There were no weak links, but of course the whole work stands or falls by the quality of its Medea, and I thought Marina Rebeka did very well. She occasionally relapses into stock melodrama moves (hand, palm outwards, on forehead indicating horror) but her voice was strong and she put across Medea’s anguish as a mother very well. Maybe the sung text wasn’t as nuanced as much as it could be, but it was still a very credible performance, and she definitely looked the part. Everyone else by contrast is a bit of a cypher dramatically, but all sung well. Rightly, the maid Natalia Skrycka probably got the biggest ovation after Medea.
(Photos courtesy of Staatsoper website)
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