|
THE TIMES May 26, 2007 Britten's Death in Venice Richard Morrison at the London ColiseumYou won’t see a more haunting production of Benjamin Britten’s swansong opera than Deborah Warner’s new staging for English National Opera. It’s as shimmeringly beautiful as Venice itself, and as redolent of life slipping gently under the waves. In Tom Pye’s sets, nothing seems substantial. Buildings, gondoliers, the boys on the beach – all are mostly silhouettes, mistily glimpsed through shifting screens and translucent curtains, and continually dappled by watery reflections of sunlight (a gloriously fiery setting sun at the end). It’s the perfect setting – seductive, illusory, enervating and impermanent – for Ian Bostridge’s stunning portrayal of Aschenbach, the emotionally buttoned-up novelist whose fatal attraction to Tadzio, the gorgeous Polish boy he spies on the beach, causes his veneer of prim objectivity to crack for the first time in his career. Even with an Enoch-Powell tash, Bostridge looks perilously young to be having a late-life crisis, and indeed death. Yet in every other respect he is superbly convincing. His voice has never sounded stronger, darker, more boldly expressive. His diction is excellent, which is not the case with everyone in a show where ENO has ditched its controversial surtitles for operas in English. And his stage presence is mesmerising. Gawky, stiff and standoffish at first, he starts to disintegrate physically – imperceptibly at first, then to devastating effect as he claws at his deckchair like a drowning man clutching flotsam – as the taunts of Peter Coleman-Wright’s brilliant succession of sinister creeps begins to prey on his mind, and his obsession with Tadzio (danced with loose-limbed grace by Benjamin Paul Griffiths) grows all consuming. Of course, the problem with Thomas Mann’s novella, and even more with Britten’s treatment of it (given the composer’s own attraction to a string of pubescent boys) is the nature of that obsession. It seems not just homoerotic but blatantly paedophiliac. And that has hindered, to put it mildly, many people’s enjoyment of this complex fin-de-siècle masterpiece, which seems eerily to preecho the destructive decadence that would shortly shatter European civilisation itself. But in Warner’s hands, the issue seems almost irrelevant. Kim Brandstrup’s playfully gymnastic choreography, full of laddish wrestling and racing, is much more a celebration of youthful energy and joyous physicality (the very qualities that the desiccated Aschenbach belatedly craves) than of pubescent sexuality. And the atmosphere of the "Greek games" is immensely enhanced by Iestyn Davies’s vibrant countertenor as the Voice of Apollo. Making a highly auspicious debut as ENO’s music director, Edward Gardner conducts Britten’s magical score – jangling with percussion and alluring harp ripples, but also underpinned by ominously bittersweet harmonies – with admirable deftness. The orchestra, especially the strings, sound as if they are playing a bit safe in Act I. But after the interval there’s much more passion coming from this pit than I have heard in a long while. Let’s hope that poor old Aschenbach’s death is another step towards ENO’s rebirth. |
|
Evening Standard Bewitching decadence By Fiona Maddocks 
Beauty and decay inhabit Britten's last opera, Death in Venice, premiered in 1973 when the composer was already a sick man. English National Opera's first ever staging is a typically thoughtful treatment by Deborah Warner, exquisitely designed by Tom Pye and starring Ian Bostridge as a superb Aschenbach. Based on Thomas Mann's novella about an ageing writer transfixed by the beauty of a young boy, Britten's work is at once a bold step into new artistic territory and a retreat into valedictory self-reference. It can seem both his masterpiece, especially when heard in concert, and a ponderous, dramatically cumbersome failure. This chameleon nature makes it a challenge to stage. Warner and Pye have done an impeccable job, recreating a constantly shifting silhouette of Venice peopled by pleasure-loving Edwardians. Potted palms and billowing drapes capture the grand decadence of the Lido's Hôtel des Bains. The city's mystery and allure become curdled by the sulphurous air of disease. In every detail, the production casts a visual spell. Bostridge, singing the role for the first time, has never sounded better. His vocal control and diction are outstanding. He has spoken of his hesitancy in singing so elderly a part, written for Britten's partner Peter Pears, who was 62 at the time. Bostridge need not have worried. His more youthful account, hair swept back, with moustache and chapeau d'artiste looking like Wyndham Lewis, has its own poignancy. The ensemble cast and dancers, with Benjamin Paul Griffiths as a balletic Tadzio, were generally well drilled. Peter Coleman-Wright showed his versatility in the multiple baritone roles (hotel manager, fop, barber) and the chorus sounded strong even if their words were inaudible. Iestyn Davies, in the countertenor role of Apollo, had bell-like clarity and Anna Dennis was haunting as the Strawberry-seller. Yet there was something missing in an evening which came within a hair's breadth of excelling. Mostly the problems lie in the work itself. Britten's inspired writing for gamelan, harps and terrifying low woodwind cannot quite compensate for the lapses into his own musical past, now an echo of Grimes, now of Billy Budd or Gloriana. The orchestra played deftly but there was a certain lassitude in the conducting of ENO's new music director, Edward Gardner. More ebb and flow, more sweep and vibrancy at climactic moments and this Death in Venice could fulfil its considerable promise. Fiona Maddocks's rating *** **English National Opera, London Coliseum: Death In Venice English National Opera, Edward Gardner (cond) Deborah Warner (dir), Tom Pye (des). |
|
FINANCIAL TIMES This glitzy production of Britten's farewell to life is a triumph By Andrew Clark For most culturally literate people the words "Death in Venice" conjure a vision of the prematurely aged Dirk Bogarde peering along one of Venice's dank canals in search of the beautiful boy who has captured his imagination. Even if you hadn't read the Thomas Mann novella, Luchino Visconti's film, with Bogarde as Aschenbach, gave you a fair idea of why the city known as La Serenissima has haunted the imagination of so many creative artists. But an equally powerful, though less celebrated, dramatisation exists in the form of Benjamin Britten's last opera - and it is this Death in Venice that now faces the spotlight. Next month the Aldeburgh festival will mount its first staging of the opera since the premiere there in 1973, and on Thursday, English National Opera unveiled a glitzy new production at the London Coliseum, with the leading English tenor Ian Bostridge making his role-debut as Aschenbach. An opera about a boy-fixated man was a risky project for Britten, a homosexual living in a country where homosexuality was still frowned on, if not illegal. What is so clever about the opera, like the book and film, is that it takes on board our disgust with Aschenbach's apparently paedophile fantasies and revels in it. It is a knowing portrait of sickness: it makes no attempt to soften or disguise it. As soon as you realise this, you begin to understand that Death in Venice is about much more than a lecherous old writer. It may speak the language of repressed sexual desire, but the real theme is fading creativity and the search for inspiration - an autobiographical preoccupation for the increasingly infirm Britten, who died within three years of its completion. Death in Venice is Britten's farewell to life. It succeeds because it reveals all too clearly the flickering, fading light of his own creative powers, filtered through Aschenbach's relationship with a city that simultaneously represents beauty and ugliness, intellectual res-traint and sensual abandonment, life and death. The triumph of ENO's production is that it keeps the sexual element firmly under wraps and interprets Death in Venice as a deep and highly complex drama of the psyche: everything we see on stage, and hear in the diaphanous sounds welling up from the pit, comes to us through the filter of Aschenbach's imagination, sometimes idealised by it (Tadzio, the beach games, the voice of Apollo, the visions of light), but just as often distorted by it (the hairdresser's gossip, the misdirected luggage, the rancid strawberries, the very notion of plague). The triumph is wholly predicated on Bostridge's acutely sympathetic and vividly enacted Aschenbach - a reading of the part that, brings out the best in him. Britten puts far too much weight on his central character - the opera is really a three-hour monodrama, half sung, half-recited - but Bostridge holds our attention, especially in the later stages where Aschenbach's physical decline is touchingly achieved. Bostridge's Aschenbach is not a fey old queen but a tall, moustachioed gent who dresses and behaves with dignity, a bit like an upmarket George Orwell. And he sings with unflinching beauty, intelligence and stamina. It's left to Peter Coleman-Wright, in the multiple baritone roles, to play up the camp, sinister side of the work. Edward Gardner makes an impressive debut as ENO's music director, although I am not convinced by his slow tempi, which may underscore the chill beauty of Britten's orchestral music but make the performance unnecessarily drawn-out. Deborah Warner's period staging, designed by Tom Pye (sets) and Chloe Obolensky (costumes), is typically English in its text-based view of the work. Unlike Warner's previous operatic ventures, her Death in Venice is aware of the music's shape and eloquence, but it is tame and naturalistic, and it is left to Jean Kalman's lighting, much of it thrust off the back of the stage, to seduce us visually, so even Ashenbach's nightmares take on a ravishingly poetic hue. |
|
The Observer Opera Death in Venice serves up dodgy eroticism Anthony Holden It is not my idea of a good night out, nor indeed a vacation in Venice, to watch an ageing male novelist with writer's block get an erotic charge out of ogling a pretty young boy on the beach of the Lido. I have seen Peter Pears, Robert Tear and Philip Langridge play Gustav von Aschenbach in Benjamin Britten's opera of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and of course Dirk Bogarde in Visconti's film of the same complex novella; but never before have I felt such uneasy feelings of voyeurism as assailed me while watching Ian Bostridge take on the role in Deborah Warner's new staging for English National Opera. Can this be a compliment to Britten? Or Bostridge? I think not. The heterosexual aesthete in Aschenbach feels compelled to tell us that, since the death of his wife and the marriage of his only daughter, he has nothing left but his work to console him. This comes, of course, from Mann; from Britten, however, the gradual triumph of the erotic over the aesthetic is always in danger of carrying an unsettling undertow of self-deception about his own, supposedly innocent, attraction to pretty boys. In other productions of this musical masterpiece, such agonised self-analysis can provoke redemptive pathos. In this one it smacks uneasily, indeed creepily, of an apologia for paedophilia. Why? What is it about this lavish production, handsomely (if fussily) designed by Tom Pye and lit by Jean Kalman, with sumptuous costumes by Chloe Obolensky, that sickens more than saddens? The answer, I fear, is Bostridge's acting. Or rather his severe limitations as an actor. For all his serial stage failures to date, from his gauche Vasek in The Bartered Bride to his limp Jupiter in ENO's Semele, this was Bostridge's chance to redeem himself. If ever a part might have been written for him, to accommodate his passive stage presence, it is surely Aschenbach. But this dedicated, highly intelligent artist cannot muster the subtlety or conviction to wring our hearts. He sings the role tenderly, as you can hear when it is broadcast by Radio 3 on 30 June. He is ably supported by Peter Coleman-Wright in the multiple roles for baritone. Britten's quirky, astringent score is expertly conducted by Edward Gardner in a propitious debut as ENO's music director. Yet this artful work, supposedly a dialogue between Apollo and Dionysus, comes across as lurid fodder for the red-tops. Even Aschenbach's death scene, for once, does not move. From Bostridge's first entrance, so self-effacing that the first-night audience continued to yatter, he seems almost afraid to take command of the stage, to show us a man so haunted by self-pity as to evoke our own. Instead, as he winds up hiding the cholera threat from the boy's family to avoid being deprived of the object of his obsession, he manages to make this usually sympathetic character little more than repulsive. If that was his intention, bravissimo. If not, as I suspect, he would be well advised henceforth to confine himself to recitals and recordings. Death in Venice |
|
Death in Venice, English National Opera, London By Anna Picard Lulled by the wash of Jean Kalman's gold-grey lighting and the low horizons of Tom Pye's sets, impressed by the unswerving control of Edward Gardner's conducting, half-beguiled, half-repulsed by the glow of the vibraphone and the tidal pull of the lower strings, dazzled by the immaculate traffic of tourists, beggars, waiters, and playing children, and disturbed by Peter Coleman Wright's grotesque parade of supporting characters, you might believe Ian Bostridge is the star of Deborah Warner's production of Death in Venice. Instead, it is Thomas Mann. Though Bostridge has done little more than bring a lieder recital to the Lido, Warner uses his limitations to great effect. His denial that there is paedophilia in Mann's novella - an absurd claim given the real Tadzio, Wladyslaw Moes, was only 10 when when the 36-year-old writer became obsessed with him - has lent a rapt sincerity to his expression of Aschenbach's self-aggrandising infatuation. This, and his physical hesitancy, his tight, emaciated tone, and the lack of character development, fundamentally alters the emphasis of Britten's too-sympathetic adaptation. Bostridge's Egyptian cotton enunciation of Myfanwy Piper's banal libretto reinforces Mann's portrait of an aesthete whose originality is illusory. Suspended in a state of misanthropic agitation, clichés spill from his lips like coins from a fruit-machine: the gondola as a coffin, the gondolier as Charon, the oft-rehearsed debate over whether a beautiful life has more value than a plain one. By 1912, the notion of Venice as a place of ineffable ambiguity, of seductive danger, of funereal eroticism, was already tired. Mann, of course, knew this. Britten and Piper either did not, or did not care, and celebrated in the "Games of Apollo" (flawlessly choreographed by Kim Brandstrup), what Mann satirised. Warner's subversive genius is further apparent in her direction of Peter Coleman-Wright, a strong and subtle performer who has identified the similarities and differences between the seven roles he takes as the harbinger of Aschenbach's demise. Gardner maintains a subdued yet sharply focused tension throughout, not squandering the lush sound of the full orchestra on the conclusion of Act I. With the exception of the shambolic madrigalian choruses, this is an extraordinary success for ENO, with excellent cameos from Anna Dennis, Peter Van Hulle, Jonathan Gunthorpe, Lee Bisset and Iestyn Davies. To have found a moral compass in this horribly compromised yet ravishingly scored work is a magnificent achievement. |
|
THE SUNDAY TIMES A Venetian blinder HUGH CANNING Venice, as designed by Tom Pye and lit by Jean Kalman in Deborah Warner’s immaculate ENO staging of Britten’s valedictory opera, is a symphony of gauzy impressions conjured out of next to nothing. A few drapes and strategically placed pieces of furniture and potted plants are all that these consummate theatre-makers need to evoke the majestic turn-of-the-century splendour of the Hotel des Bains. Kalman’s stunning lighting plot mirrors the moods and colours of Britten’s beguiling score, pervaded with sickly harmonies, glittering tuned percussion for the dance sequences and expressionist, postBergian orchestral interludes. At the moment when the Hotel Manager points out the view from the hotel room, Kalman produces a breath-catching coup de lumière that exactly mirrors Britten’s sunlit triads. Death in Venice is Britten’s summation of his operatic art, with backward glances at Peter Grimes (1945), Billy Budd (1951), The Turn of the Screw (1954) and Owen Wingrave (1970) and, in the dance music, to his Royal Ballet commission The Prince of the Pagodas, inspired by his encounter with the gamelan bands of Bali. He looks backward even further, to Monteverdi’s Venetian operas, in the "recitar cantando" (literally, singing recitation) that he devised for his leading interpreter and life companion, Peter Pears, in the climactic and most demanding part of his operatic career. Thomas Mann’s semi-autobiographical novelist, Gustav von Aschenbach, is suffering from writer’s block and finds inspiration when he spies a beautiful young Polish boy on holiday in Venice. Aschenbach’s infatuation undoubtedly had resonances for Britten, who, even as an adult, formed several close attachments to prepubescent boys, but to suggest, as some have done, that Death in Venice glorifies paedophilia – none of the boys befriended by the composer complained of sexual advances – is wide of the mark. It is Warner’s supreme achievement that she understands this and steers well clear of tabloid speculation and righteous indignation in the most exquisitely beautiful opera production by either of London’s main companies for many a season. In the novella, Aschenbach is 53, but Pears was 10 years older in 1973, when he created the part in the opera. Warner chooses a protagonist 10 years younger than Mann’s, her regular collaborator Ian Bostridge, who looks even more youthful than he is (in his celebrated film, Visconti was closest with a 49-year-old Dirk Bogarde). Bostridge is, however, the most questionable aspect of ENO’s production. Never the most natural of actors, and a singer of limited colour and range (the role lies, as yet, a bit low for him), he will, as Aschenbach, undoubtedly divide Brittenites. Warner uses his strange body language and tortured expressions to evoke the discomfort and anguish of a widower and father who finds himself in the unfamiliar emotional state of falling in love with a young man. Aschenbach's intellectuallisation of his dilemma as a struggle between conflicting Apollonian (aesthetic) and Dionysian (sensual) tendencies suits Bostridge, a singer as idiosyncratic and self-regarding as Pears was in his own, different way, and, with Warner's help, he makes the part his own. He triumphs, with the audience at least, thanks to his tireless singing and superlative diction, which project into the troublesome Coliseum auditorium so effortlessly that surtitles are dispensed with. For a first attempt at Britten's most demanding tenor role, this is a considerable achievement. He earned his ovations. Sharing the honours with Bostridge and Warner was Edward Gardner, making the most auspicious debut imaginable as ENO’s music director and drawing playing of glittery brilliance and expressive intensity from the orchestra in the interludes and ballet sequences. I don’t think I have seen the dance element better handled than by Warner and her choreographer, Kim Brandstrup, whose routines of organised athleticism in the Games of Apollo seem to emerge organically out of the youthful playfulness of Tadzio (Benjamin Paul Griffiths, the antithesis of the knowing, effeminate Narcissus of Mann’s novella and Visconti’s film) and friends. On a lengthy playbill, some of the smaller, cameo parts are undercast with chorus members, but several ENO Young Singers – Lee Bisset and Dwayne Jones as the strolling players, William Berger as the waiter, and Madeleine Shaw – get noticed, and Peter Coleman-Wright, in the multiple symbolic roles of Aschenbach’s nemesis, and Iestyn Davies, as the Voice of Apollo, are both first class. This is one of the must-see shows of the London opera season, and one of ENO’s most compelling in years. |
|
Droning `Death in Venice' By Warwick Thompson May 25 (Bloomberg) -- If you've ever been trapped at a party by a self-obsessed bore, you'll recognize the character of Gustav von Aschenbach in Benjamin Britten's opera ``Death in Venice,'' now at the English National Opera in London. On and on he drones about beauty, art, death, self-restraint and fame. Monologue after monologue. Unlike with most party bores, you don't have to keep looking for an escape route. He's accompanied by music of the most ravishing and haunting gorgeousness. Britten's final opera, written in 1973, might not be his most dramatic, yet it is one of his most bewitching. Based on Thomas Mann's novella, it tells the story of writer Aschenbach (Ian Bostridge) who goes on holiday to Venice in 1911. He falls in love, from a distance, with a beautiful Polish boy whom he never actually meets. He encounters various symbolic characters such as the Elderly Fop, the Old Gondolier and the god Dionysus (all sung by baritone Peter Coleman-Wright). He catches cholera. He dies. There's a dearth of conflict and tension, though the gap is filled by musical invention of prodigal richness. Britten accompanies the appearances of the Polish boy Tadzio (a dance role performed by Benjamin Paul Griffiths), with otherworldly gamelan bells and sparkling percussion. He evokes the decay and decadence of Venice with rich, slithery string sounds. He employs two simple piano discords to suggest the torment of poor Aschenbach's soul. Edwardian Suits Director Deborah Warner dresses the story in handsome Edwardian costumes, and uses a series of efficient sliding panels and curtains (sets by Tom Pye) to suggest a hotel, a beach, St. Mark's and other places. With a few bold strokes and good use of the chorus, she creates recognizable and realistic locations. It's not enough. Britten's score is far from realistic. If you didn't know that the ordinary young man in white chinos was the god Apollo, you'd never guess in a million years. The grim- reaper baritone character in his multiple guises also needs more mystery and theatrical help to realize his symbolic presence. Jean Kalman's lighting doesn't help. She uses lots of back- lighting to create silhouettes, but it leaves whole chunks of the stage obscure and throws irritating reflections onto unlikely surfaces. The massive role of Aschenbach is a vocal tour de force for Bostridge, and he brings a natural lieder singer's intensity to the delivery of the text. Such a demanding and long part also shows his limitations as an actor. Sometimes his twitchy gestures suit the role of the awkward Aschenbach, but there's a crucial difference between acting awkwardly and being awkward. It's a difference Bostridge doesn't always negotiate. Lively Baritone Coleman-Wright is a more enjoyable stage creature, and relishes the opportunities that each of the baritone roles offers him. His firm, rounded sound is impressive and he brings a much needed vitality to the proceedings despite the director's hazy conception of what he represents. The real star of the show is conductor Edward Gardner, making his debut as ENO's new music director. He controls the different sound worlds of the opera with masterly skill, and draws taut yet flexible playing from the orchestra. His excellent marshaling of the large stage forces bodes well for the new productions of ``Carmen,'' ``Aida'' and ``Der Rosenkavalier'' that he'll be conducting next season. ``Death in Venice'' is in repertory at the London Coliseum through June 13. (Warwick Thompson is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.) |
|
Opera Review Benjamin Britten Death in Venice 'I’ve written something this morning which I hope you’ll like singing: I can hear you doing it most beautifully. I’m getting rather attached to Aschenbach, not surprisingly.’ Thus Britten to Pears in 1972, the year before the Aldeburgh premiere of Death in Venice – the composer knew it was to be his last opera and his last chance to create a major role for Pears, as well as a kind of testament to his view of artistic creation and his celebration of the life-affirming power of love – he told Donald Mitchell that the opera was ‘everything that Peter and I have stood for.’ Deborah Warner’s new version, in co-production with La Monnaie in Brussels, is the work’s first staging at the ENO, and it’s a visually enchanting, vocally solid but ultimately rather bloodless evening.The big attraction of this production was Bostridge’s Aschenbach: of course he is too young for the part, but then that kind of thing has never held him back before – he has the wrong kind of voice for roles like Orfeo and Idomeneo, but he did them anyway, and got mostly rave reviews, bien sur. There’s no doubt that he is a great Britten singer, though, so I had been expecting rather more than we got: the make-up department as well as the director had done a fabulous job of getting him to look like a cross between Thomas Mann and James Joyce, he agonized with his customary picturesque contortions – dramatically, this was quite a tour de force. In vocal terms, however, I found him disengaged at heart, and Aschenbach’s artistic struggles and tortured obsessions failed to move me. Of course, Aschenbach is one of opera’s three greatest bores (sharing that dubious honour with Hans Sachs and the Marschallin) but it’s still possible to be engaged and moved by him, as I can clearly remember being in the case of Anthony Rolfe Johnson’s searing portrayal – on the present occasion, it was just Ian strutting his usual stuff, intellectually interesting and with wonderfully crisp diction at such moments as ‘I, Aschenbach, famous as a master-writer, successful, honoured…’ but with no real sense of poignancy.
Deborah Warner has a reputation for recasting familiar works anew but she seemed to be playing safe with this water-colourish, picture-postcard production. The scene transitions are beautifully managed and the whole is wonderfully lit (Jean Kalman) but it’s all rather irritatingly pretty, making you think of Southwold rather than the Lido. In the first scene the black bench coverings seemed to be an attempt to evoke what Thomas Mann wrote about the experience of stepping into a gondola – ‘…so characteristically black, the way no other thing is black except a coffin… and still more strongly evoking death itself, the bier, the dark obsequies, the last silent journey!’, but most of the rest was rather generalised Grand Hotel and beachfront. Needless to say there were plenty of supernumeraries cavorting about (my, how proud all the Mummies must have been) and the choreography was easy on the eye, but there was little sense of the magical, incomparable place falling prey to a dreadful epidemic. ENO has now established a fine tradition of Britten production, and that’s as it should be: last season’s Billy Budd was a tough act to follow, and although I found this Death in Venice difficult to warm to, it will surely enhance the company’s reputation; and the UK premiere of the co-production with the Mariinsky Theatre of The Turn of the Screw should be the highlight of next season. Melanie Eskenazi Britten Death in Venice Picture © Neil Libbert 2007 |
|
The Musical pointer Seeing and hearing Britten's Death in Venice at ENO and on DVD
There is great instrumental subtlety to enjoy from the orchestra, but no memorable vocal music, and Bostridge does not prevent Aschenbach's self-regarding monologues from palling; we never felt ouselves emotionally identified with his plight. For us it was less than a great evening. The scene aboard what looked like a large cruise liner left my Swiss wife puzzled about voyaging from Munich to Venice by ship? Deborah Warner's direction was deft, and yes, Tom Pye's settings (eminently shareable with Brussels without inordinate expense - c.p. those heavy sets from New York's Fidelio) were beautiful - all too beautiful? - with the lighting magical. The movements about, and on and off stage, by the large cast (Warner and Kim Brandstrup) was smoothly managed, and there are many fine stage pictures to remember. But, from ostensibly good press seats (stalls, central towards back) neither of us could see central stage, blocked by heads, and hampered by the very shallow rake. And despite knowing Death in Venice fairly well (one of us didn't) neither of us could hear near-enough of the words; nor should the singers be blamed. It took long to win the protracted battle for surtitles * , long championed by the writer in various publications, and won first for operas in foreign languages, before it then became clear that they were equally necessary for opera in English, and too for English operas, many of which, like Britten's, have a high literary content - all of which goes for nothing if one struggles to make sentences out of words caught by the ear. By what whim did Deborah Warner undermine all that at a stroke? Is the opera director still the one to rule against democtratically audience-led collective wisdom? A moment's decision, endorsed nem con by a few without discussion, and the Company's policy was overturned? It was back to the bad old elitist times, taking no account of today's changed and very mixed opera audiences. My veteran opera-goer neighbour said, reassuringly, "you always have to do your homework to go to the opera". That had indeed been indeed so in my younger days. Production teams delude themselves; they know the words so assume everyone else can hear and understand them. They might at least have tested audibility and preferences with the dress rehearsal audience (more knowledgeable, of course, than later ones) in different parts of the house. Solutions are easy to suggest, and not too late for a production which runs till mid-June. Why not have voting boxes at exit about the missing surtitles, for a simple yes or no? Better without them or were they sorely missed? For a more urgent and less indulgent presentation of Death in Venice I would urge everyone to see Glyndebourne Touring Opera's version on DVD with Robert Tear and Alan Opie, reviewed six years ago, and fresh as ever on re-viewing. (Subtitles only in foreign languages, but words as recorded of exemplary clarity.) Peter Grahame Woolf |
|
Britten Death in Venice
ENO’s new music director Edward Gardner makes a welcome arrival at the Coliseum for this production of Britten’s final opera. His reading combines finesse and nuance with dynamism, and makes for a magical performance of the score. How the company will be heartened by his advent. One of his tasks must be to address diction, which has yet another mixed night. But the company’s ongoing Britten series is strengthened by Deborah Warner’s powerfully atmospheric and articulate production, which shows her on superb form. The narrative comes over strongly, the individual acting performances are distinguished, and the varied moods of the piece and its Venetian ambience wonderfully suggested in Tom Pye’s superb sets, Chloe Obolensky’s immaculate period costumes, and Jean Kalman’s endlessly evocative lighting. Ian Bostridge suggests Gustav von Aschenbach’s isolation and gradual loss of control with skill - if only he had more colour in the tone. Peter Coleman-Wright pulls off the feat of creating the seven characters who push Aschenbach along his fatal path with enormous aplomb. Iestyn Davies brings an unearthly quality to the Voice of Apollo, made palpable by his appearance on stage (the role is usually sung offstage), though his deity needs some kind of visual representation. The dancers define another mode of existence that Aschenbach longs to share, with Kim Brandstrup’s choreography matching Britten’s oriental sound world perfectly. All in all a great night for ENO, and for Britten. |
Peter Coleman-Wright is one of those reliable baritones who can take on most things, although here he was more successful as the Hotel Manager and the Barber than as the Traveller and the Elderly Fop, the latter part looking a bit over-directed even for this rôle. Iestyn Davies did not make the impact which the voice of Apollo should: this was not the fault of his fluent singing but the result of making the God just another of the gilded youths. Tadzio was beautifully danced by Benjamin Paul Griffiths, and the small parts were finely taken, with Anna Dennis’ Strawberry-seller and Jonathan Gunthorpe’s English Clerk making particularly strong impressions. Edward Gardner takes up his appointment as ENO’s music director with this production, and he gave a lucid account of the score, although it’s arguable that the orchestra was too large for this intimate work.
This has ever been a problematic opera, here dominated by a young-looking Aschenbach lusting after the teen-age boy. A couple of decades on, with any word against homosexuality now deemed politically incorrect, Britten might not have felt the need to put his all into this opera; it has become already the most dated of his, and suffers from its chief emphasis, as well as from the slow overall pacing. 
