Felsenreitschule
Gawain – Christopher Maltman
Green Knight/Bertiak de
Hautdesert – Sir John Tomlinson
Morgan le Fay – Laura Aikin
Lady de Hautdesert – Jennifer
Johnston
King Arthur – Jeffrey
Lloyd-Roberts
Bishop Baldwin – Andrew Watts
A Fool – Brian Galliford
Guinevere – Gun-Brit Barkmin
Agravain – Ivan Ludlow
Ywain – Alexander Sprague
Alvis Hermanis (director, set
designs)
Eva Dessecker (costumes)
Gleb Filshtinsky (lighting)
Multimedia Design Studio ‘Raketamedia’,
Moscow (video)
Ronny Dietrich (dramaturgy)
Salzburg Bach Choir (chorus master: Alois Glassner)
ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra
Ingo Meztmacher (conductor)
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| Images: © Ruth Walz |
If it has taken Salzburg a
while to produce an opera by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, then it has likewise
taken an unconscionable while for Gawain
to receive its second staging; the Salzburg Festival thus deserves a great vote
of thanks for having done so, as a highly imaginative replacement for the
postponed premiere of György Kurtág’s new Beckett opera. Kurtág’s Endgame, should that be the opera’s name,
will, we are informed, be shown next year instead.
Which brings me to Alvis
Hermanis’s rather puzzling production of Gawain.
I could not help but wonder whether his post-apocalyptic vision, a few years in
the ‘science fiction’ future, had started life as a response, if you can
imagine this, to a version of Endgame
with hordes of characters. Shifting the action from Arthurian times, and indeed
from the thirteenth-century world in which Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight was written, does not trouble me, and one might argue
for parallels between post-Roman Britain and a world following some unspecified
future apocalypse, but it was unclear to me that the vagrant setting really
works, or rather that it does anything much beyond providing an alternative ‘setting’.
Hermanis makes a case for ecological issues: the ‘green’ of the ‘Green’ Knight,
Nature taking its revenge in a scenario apparently inspired by Joseph Beuys,
and a strangely glowing ‘magic’ green belt as the sash Lady Hautdesert gives to
Gawain. But it is difficult either to understand such issues as central to the
opera or to credit the director with an entirely plausible commentary or
reinterpretation. Hermanis’s interest in Beuys, for instance, simply seems
transplanted upon an existing work, to the benefit of neither.
That said, I was made to
think – and the production deserves praise for that. It does not close down
avenues of response, eccentric though its own chosen terms may be. It
tantalises – and I do not think this is entirely my own reading, though it may
be – with a dialectic between parallelism and difference; that is, we both
appreciate that the new setting has things in common with the ‘original’ yet
also how utterly different it is, thereby being compelled to place work,
staging, and ourselves. The need for ritual, so much a preoccupation of both
poem and opera, shines through, almost despite the dubious talk (in Hermanis’s
programme note) of ‘science fiction’. And whatever one thinks of the ‘movement’,
whether from a host of actors or, most astonishingly, from the best trained dog
I have ever seen, it is accomplished with excellence. At a time when one often
endures productions in which the director seems apparently unable to direct,
there is succour to be gained from such professionalism.
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| Laura Aikin (Morgan le Fay), Christopher Maltman (Gawain) |
Nor, most importantly, did
the staging get in the way of what was an outstanding musical performance of a
modern operatic masterpiece, scandalously neglected by houses that prefer endlessly
to churn out the profundities of Donizetti. Ingo Metzmacher’s performance with
the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra perhaps placed Birtwistle in a more international,
or better cosmopolitan, context than Elgar Howarth’s Covent Garden
performances. Although I missed a sense of that ineffably ‘English’ quality
that haunts Birtwistle’s music just as strongly as it does, say, that of
Vaughan Williams, there were gains to be had too, especially for an ‘international’
audience in Salzburg. The performance was perhaps less primæval in its violence
than Howarth’s – how vividly I still remember what was only my second evening
at Covent Garden! – yet pacing, flow, and both the sheer array of colours and,
where necessary, weight and incision of orchestral attack were second to none.
It would certainly have been well-nigh impossible to over-praise the ORF
orchestra. Birtwistle’s formal ritualistic preoccupations came to the fore
through the medium that matters above all else, the music. It is, moreover, not
entirely appropriate to the dramaturgical precepts of either the composer or
his librettist, David Harsent, that there be some degree of disconnection
between ‘dramatic’ and ‘orchestral’ action. Busoni’s influence perhaps extends
further into the twentieth and even the twenty-first century than many of us
appreciate.
So, of course, does Wagner’s.
And with the Proms Ring so fresh in
my memory, Birtwistle’s portrayal of flawed ‘heroism’, accomplished via
different narrative standpoints, I was bound to think of Siegfried in Gawain.
Christopher Maltman swaggered as a cowboy, his singing still more than his
bathing offering ample reason for Gawain’s charismatic following. His journey
towards ‘Why do you ask for someone who isn’t here? Who do you want me to be? I’m
not a hero’ was not merely plausible, but immensely moving, and increasingly
so. John Tomlinson is the Green
Knight, of course, yet, despite a highly committed performance, it now takes an
uncritical ‘fan’ not to be disturbed by the vocal problems at the top of his
range. Laura Aikin and Jennifer Johnston were excellent Morgan le Fay and Lady
Hautdesert. The eroticism of the former’s performance grew as she and Johnston’s
character grew apart, indeed transformed themselves from commentators into
participants. Hermanis’s direction assisted with that, but the depths of vocal
characterisation upon which both singers drew were undeniably their own.
Jeffery Lloyd-Roberts proved a steadfastly engaging King Arthur, the singer in
infinitely superior vocal form to the last time I had heard him; I especially
liked the directorial touch at the end of having him step up from his chair and
make his first tentative steps towards an uncertain – heroic or non-heroic? –
future. If Brian Galliford’s Fool sometimes lacked vocal lustre, his was a
typically observant performance, using his words to highly dramatic advantage.
Gun-Brit Barkmin, Andrew Watts, Ivan Ludlow, and Alexander Sprague all
acquitted themselves very well indeed in their smaller roles. Special mention,
however, must be accorded to the stunning offstage choral contribution, the
Salzburg Bach Choir fully worthy of comparison with the illustrious orchestra
in the pit. Alois Glassner clearly deserves great credit for his choral
training.
‘Then with a single step your
journey starts,’ sings Morgan le Fay – repeatedly. Let us hope that Gawain’s journey has (re-)started with
this fascinating second step.
