UK Edition
Review
Royal Opera's Oedipe is yet another revived gem to thank Kasper Holten for - review
Those who deplore the current vogue for shock-horror productions may be rejoicing at the early departure next year of the Royal Opera’s Director Kasper Holten, but there are several things to thank him for – notable among them being his commitment to programming fully staged performances of significant but unjustly neglected repertory of the 20th century.
Last year saw a very fine version of Szymanowski’s magnificent Król Roger in this category; now comes George Enescu’s not dissimilar Oedipe, a cradle–to-grave version of the Oedipus myth with a French text in four acts, written intermittently between 1910 and 1931 while this Romanian-born composer, violinist and conductor was based in Paris.
The musical idiom is eclectic: perhaps best characterised as romantic post-Wagnerian, although Enescu’s aim of presenting a “single flow of ideas” makes Debussy’s impressionist aesthetic the closer influence. There are hints of Mahler’s symphonies, Strauss’ tone poems, and modal Romanian folk-music in the rich mix too: the orchestra glows and heaves, the voices chant and declaim.
The result is intense and rhapso1dic, an earnest exercise in the mystical sublime, stately in its overall pace, short of instant theatricality and contrasts of mood, sometimes over-inflated with hot air – as much a symphonic poem or an oratorio as an opera in character.
The second and fourth acts enthrall with their strange and intoxicating beauty; the more hieratic first and third drag in comparison. Overall, in other words, the effect is vastly impressive rather than instantly enjoyable.
Leo Hussain proves a wonderfully resourceful and commanding conductor of this epic score. Under a baton less confident than his, such music could turn into gloop, but he sculpts it firmly into shape and relishes its more sinuously graceful passages as well as its grandly extended climaxes. The orchestral playing is virtuosic.
After a stunning opening tableau, there’s something a little formulaic and predictable about Alex Ollé and Valentina Carrasco’s staging, designed by Alfons Flores around the idea of a four-tiered catacomb studded with terracotta warriors.
Costuming moves from the barbaric to the mid 20th century, with the Nazi occupation of France and nuclear accidents evoked. Shrouding everything in soporific darkness does nothing to sharpen one’s attention at the end of a long working day.
Singing with the same forceful clarity he brought to Berg’s Wozzeck Birtwistle’s The Minotaur, Johan Reuter is a muscular and forthright presence as the fated Oedipus. Given almost nothing to do, talents of the calibre of Sarah Connolly (Jocasta) and Sophie Bevan (Antigone) are wasted.
John Tomlinson recycles his crazy old hobo shtick as the blind seer Tiresias; Samuel Dale Johnson (Thesée), Stefan Kocan (Watchman) and In Sung Sum (Phorbas) also contribute notable cameos. More challenged than the soloists, the chorus trained by Genevieve Ellis sounds impassioned.
But the outstanding performance comes from the remarkable Canadian contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux as a fearsome Sphinx inexplicably presented here in the guise of a Spitfire pilot. Her emotionally charged, musically angular encounter with Oedipus forms the dramatic highlight of a long, gruelling but genuinely worthy evening.
This is the sort of serious artistic enterprise that government subsidy protects and enables: we should be grateful for it.
Until 8 June roh.org.uk, 0207 304 4000