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Xerxes (Serse) by Georg Frideric Handel [1738], anon libretto (adapted from Sivlio Stampiglia’s libretto for Bononcini’s opera of 1694), translated into English by Nicholas Hytner.
Touring Production by Opera Theatre Company, given at the O’Reilly Theatre, Dublin on 14 February 2009.
Cast: Imelda Drumm (Xerxes), Mark Chambers (Arsamenes), Natasha Jouhl (Romilda), Rebekah Coffey (Atalanta), Alison Cook (Amastris), Giles Davies (Ariodates) & Brendan Collins (Elviro).
Ensemble (led by Anita Vedres) conducted from the harpsichord by Andrew Synnott. Directed by Michael Moxham.
Feature in The Irish Times (including cast photos)
Hats off to OTC for an excellent production of Xerxes, which is now on a national tour. Do see this if you can – everything is good!
Using the translation that Nicholas Hytner made for ENO in 1985, I actually preferred this to Hytner’s production (available on DVD) with all its chair-moving and so on. Befitting our lean times, here OTC dispenses with the chorus, and the action is accompanied by just a string quartet + harpsichord, much as would have been the case in smaller theatres of the time. Keeping the action focused on the seven characters (who only appear on stage together for the final scene) reminds you of how concentrated Handel’s dramaturgy can be, hinting not so much at a return back to classical unities as instead a look forward to something else entirely. Having read somewhere of how Handel himself probably re-drafted some of the libretto to Rodelinda, it’d be interesting to see how his Serse libretto differs from Stampiglia’s original of 40 years earlier. I think there’s still a lot to be learned about 18th century theatre.
One area they didn’t skimp on was costuming and an interesting artistic decision on the director’s part was to set Xerxes in the Napoleonic era (a great time for men’s fashion). I didn’t get around to reading the director’s note until the interval, so I instead thought that they’d set it in the 1770s/1780s, just a generation after Handel, which got me thinking, perversely enough, of Rosenkavalier, of all things….
For those interested, and indeed well reported elsewhere, the NY Metropolitan Opera has released the listing of next year’s season of Live in HD simulcast productions, as follows:
Tosca [Puccini], October 10 – Levine (c); Mattila, M. Álvarez, Uusitalo, Plishka
Aida [Verdi], October 24 – Gatti (c); Urmana, Zajick, Botha, Guelfi, Scandiuzzi, Kocán
Turandot [Puccini], November 7 – Nelsons (c); Guleghina, Poplavskaya, Giordani, Ramey
Les Contes d’Hoffmann [Offenbach], December 19 – Levine (c); Kim, Netrebko, Gubanova, Garanča, Villazón, Pape
Der Rosenkavalier [R. Strauss], January 9 – Levine (c); Fleming, Graham, Schäfer, Cutler, Allen, Sigmundsson
Carmen [Bizet], January 16 – Nézet-Séguin (c); Frittoli, Gheorghiu, Alagna, Kwiecien
Simon Boccanegra [Verdi], February 6 – Levine (c); Pieczonka, Giordani, Domingo, Morris
Hamlet [Thomas], March 27 – Langrée (c); Dessay, Larmore, Spence, Keenlyside, Morris
Armida [Rossini], May 1 – Frizza (c); Fleming, Brownlee, Ford, Zapata, Banks, van Rensburg
Even by the Met’s standards, there’s some real luxury casting here, and if anything it seems a stronger season than this year’s, so there’d be no hesitation in recommending any of these. It’s particularly nice to see the rarely-performed Armida of Rossini included, in what will also be the work’s Met premiere – with Renée Fleming as the eponymous sorceress, up against no less than six tenors…
More on opera and new media, this time from the man himself, Norman Lebrecht…
As a postscript to The Earl of Kildare, I neglected to include contact details for the production company, Living Opera, which can be found through its website here. If you managed to see last Friday’s workshop and wish to give any feedback, it is possible to send an email directly via the site.
Contemporary woodcut of Silken Thomas laying siege to Dublin Castle in 1534
Workshop production of The Earl of Kildare
Composed by Fergus Johnston, with libretto by Celia de Fréine
Presented by Opera Ireland/Living Opera in Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co. Wicklow, on 6 February 2009
Cast: Nyle Wolfe (Thomas Fitzgerald); Joan O’Malley (Frances Fitzgerald); John Owen Miley-Read (Leonard Gray); Eugene Ginty (Christopher Paris/De Nealan); Deboragh Abbott (Janet Eustace); Jeffrey Ledwidge (Conor O’Brien); Martin Briody (Archbishop Alen/Fr Travers); Ross Scanlon (Lord Lieutenant/Master of the Rolls/Skeffington); Simon Morgan (Montague/James Delahide); Seán Bean (Gerald Fitzgerald)
Conducted by Fergus Sheil, with pianist Miles Lallemant. Directed by John McKeown.
Fergus Johnston’s opera about Silken Thomas (Thomas Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare) was given what you might call a preliminary outing at the Mermaid last night, with a staged realisation of what was openly couched as a ‘first draft’. So, the books were down and the singers were moving about the stage, with some basic costuming, but some text was unset (which explained some awkward shifts in action) and the accompanying ensemble consisted of Miles Lallemant at the piano – doing a great job – occasionally supplemented in some of the scene changes with a computer simulation of the full score. Being a young cast the performances were inevitably mixed and a bit sketchy at times, though some performances stood out – Nyle Wolfe as Fitzgerald especially – and most of the singers acquitted themselves perfectly well, considering that they’d had to learn some hard music within a very narrow timeframe.
In the (brief) post-show discussion, director John McKeown reflected on experiences he’d had working on new works (notably Sally Beamish’s Monster for Scottish Opera) where the ‘first’ performance had led those involved to wish that there’d been more of a phased process of development, and so this had been the idea here. On those terms, this workshop was a success and it was a great performance overall, though the discussion afterwards was unfortunately truncated, which left one wondering what the point of a ‘public workshop’ had been, as only three questions from the audience were actually taken. There are broader issues worth exploring that a longer discussion might have been able to open up. As it was, we were able to at least broach the stuctural limitation of the piece, in that its reliance on following historical narrative makes it highly episodic, with a lot of scene changes, some of which had music, some in stark silence (not that that’s necessarily a bad thing). The brief discussion on this that followed only touched on the musical implications of this, whereas to me the episodic nature of the piece is quite possibly the main problem in itself.
Personally, I’d rather they expand some of the scenes, maybe let others go altogether, find some way of injecting a counter-narrative device, and to explore the story rather than simply tell it. It would be nice to see some symbolic thread running through, apart from the inevitable onrush of history. As it stands, the theatrical orientation of the opera – the dramaturgy – is too obviously cinematic and needs to be disturbed, so as to push the expressive potential that only occasionally comes through. The strongest scene, musically and theatrically, occurred near the middle, when Fitzgerald hears of his father’s death in the Tower of London, and the exercise of grief allowed for a broader sense of how this could work as an opera, with Fitzgerald’s solo lament and the ensemble that followed. On the other hand, the scene where Fr Travers persuades Fitzgerald and O’Brien to appeal for the support of the Papacy is almost comically perfunctory in its present state.
As theatre, this Earl was largely conventional and naturalistic, and I would have loved to heave heard what Fergus Johnston’s theatrical vision for this piece actually was, and whether he had thought about the possibilities of non-vocal music theatre, such as dance or mime. Also, given the inevitable lack of any stage design, it would have been interesting to know if anyone had any visual concept for the piece, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. With Celia de Fréine’s clear libretto, Johnston was at least freed from the nightmare of setting banal or dead prose, which so often dogs modern opera.
If anyone is interested in hearing some of Fergus Johnston’s music for ths opera played instrumentally, a suite (‘Scenes and Interludes from The Earl of Kildare‘) will be played by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by James MacMillan, at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on February 27, and transmitted live (and online) by RTÉ Lyric fm.
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