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the indian queen
‘An outstanding cast’: Julia Bullock, Noah Stewart and Anthony Roth Costanzo in ENO’s The Indian Queen. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
‘An outstanding cast’: Julia Bullock, Noah Stewart and Anthony Roth Costanzo in ENO’s The Indian Queen. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

The Indian Queen; Lisa Batiashvili and Paul Lewis – review

This article is more than 9 years old
Coliseum; Wigmore Hall, London
Peter Sellars spins unfinished Purcell into a Mayan extravaganza that delights and irks

Brutality and the quest for gold. Love in times of war. Race and religion in a conquered land. The American director Peter Sellars rushes headlong towards the precipices of life without fear of heights. No question is too large. No boundary holds him back. The global scrapbook he brings to his work, a seething gallimaufry of cultural experience, has no catalogue or index. Connections are all. If you cannot see how khaki and kabuki, ancient ritual or the electronic cheepings of the jungle link to one another, let alone to the music of Henry Purcell and the English Restoration, you must sort it out for yourself.

Many cannot or will not. Mention of Sellars prompts mockery in some quarters, always the lot of those who stamp an indelible mark on what they do, especially when there’s a whiff of new-age flakery. His staging of The Indian Queen marks the end of Sellars’s five-month residency at ENO, during which he also directed The Gospel According to the Other Mary by John Adams, his long-time collaborator.

Given the rarity of this semi-opera, you would think Purcell should merit top billing here. Without question he does, each sublime note or grief-laden chorus part of the anatomy of melancholy that is Purcell’s hallmark. “Remember not, Lord, our offences” exhorts the penitential anthem, condensing all mankind’s sins into a few squeezed, tugging harmonies.

The whole singing-dancing-talking-waving event, however, is a Sellars extravaganza, reworked, remade and enlarged beyond recognition from its slender original. It stirs, moves and delights. It annoys, baffles and sometimes bores. I was glad when it ended. I was pleased to have gone. Make of those paradoxes what you like. Art is complicated and arouses mixed feelings, though it’s hardly permissible to say as much.

Unfinished at the time of his death in 1695, less than an hour of Purcell’s score survives, including the mysterious aria By the Croaking of the Toad. The original Dryden play has been replaced by a narration (spoken by Maritxell Carrero) from The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma by the Nicaraguan author Rosario Aguilar. It is an account of the confrontation between the Europeans and Mayans from a female perspective: less about massacre, more about consequence. Visuals are by the LA-based Chicano artist Gronk. Splashy canvases are lowered and raised into a black space, a nice enough visual distraction but with only blurred echoes of the voluptuous cruelty of Mayan imagery.

Sopranos Lucy Crowe (left) and Julia Bullock in The Indian Queen. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Songs and anthems by Purcell have been added to make a full evening’s drama, supremely well conducted by Laurence Cummings. The ENO orchestra, in a raised pit and with additional continuo players (unnamed, but they took a well-deserved bow), were strong in force and volume but played with period instrument sensibility: a difficult task given the delicacy of the music and the size of the theatre. All praise to ENO chorus too, dressed in bright, Age of Aquarius cottons and denim, who can somehow sing Wagner’s Mastersingers one night and baroque counterpoint the next with equal authority.

Four dancers joined an outstanding cast led by the American soprano Julia Bullock and the British soprano Lucy Crowe, whose intense O Solitude was a high point. Two countertenors, the light, luminous-voiced Vince Yi and the more mellow Anthony Roth Costanzo, were beautifully paired. For this co-production with Perm State Opera and the Teatro Real, Madrid, Sellars has summoned an international cast, from South Korea and South African as well as the States and the UK. Applause was warm. An hour shorter and the cheers would have been louder and longer.

Lisa Batiashvili. Photograph: Anja Frers / Deutsche Grammophon.

Sellars is big on gesture, a man of the theatre, a man who hugs. The degree to which musicians on the concert platform acknowledge each other may have little impact on the quality of their teamwork. In partnership, singers and pianists tend to nod and gesture, but instrumentalists can appear downright cool. The Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili and the British pianist Paul Lewis, two world-class soloists, formed a duo in 2013. It is hard to see how they communicate. She looks out, at music stand and audience; sideways on, he looks at keyboard and wall. Yet their partnership is musically explosive, as well as immaculately precise. After two Schubert works they played Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No 10 in G, Op 96, his last in the medium. The work unfurls slowly, from first tentative trill to exuberant, to lyrical andante, to eccentric variations finale. Their delivery was unadorned but visceral. Whether on stage or in the audience, these musicians seemed to remind us, the chief task is to listen.

Star ratings (out of 5)
The Indian Queen ***
Lisa Batiashvili and Paul Lewis *****

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