Spinning in its own orbit, as it seems on every fresh encounter, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1925) resembles no other opera. Voices sing, speak, shout in myriad ways, exactingly specified by the composer. The score flickers through every style, a lurching waltz or honky-tonk piano parachuting in to save you when Berg’s atonal harmonies have left you stranded. Based on Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck, the plot is blunt and brutal. A soldier murders the mother of his child, then drowns himself.
Bad stagings of the opera are rare, but some reach different levels of expression. The new production at the Royal Opera House, conducted by Antonio Pappano, directed by Deborah Warner, is in that category. On first night cast, chorus, orchestra, sounded faultless. From onstage bands to section solos to the voluptuous interludes that shape the work, every aspect was compulsive, shadowy, glinting.
In the title role, the German baritone Christian Gerhaher is formidable and affecting. Not the most natural of actors, this magnificent singer comes into his own, moving with a bewildering rigidity, painful to witness. At the start, as he mops the latrines, we understand the level of his degradation. (We know what lavatories are for, but here, lest we had forgotten, the act of excretion, in all its variety, was spelled out.) Anja Kampe, a thrilling and serious Marie, Peter Hoare and Brindley Sherratt in droll, icy partnership as the Captain and the Doctor, led an expert ensemble cast and chorus, all pulling their weight.
Warner has built on her 2022 Royal Opera production of Peter Grimes – written two decades later but influenced by Wozzeck – in this exploration of Berg’s outsider. Like Grimes, Wozzeck has the sensibility of a poet but none of the language. Both are crushed by poverty. Every aspect of the story is clearly told. The designs by Hyemi Shin (costumes by Nicky Gillibrand, lighting by Adam Silverman, choreography by Kim Brandstrup) shift between drab interiors and a sick-looking forest against a sulphur-orange sky. At the point of crisis, a crimson moon is eclipsed, to spectacular effect, as the orchestra sounds its roaring, unison note in a terrifying crescendo. Direction and music are forged as one. You can’t ask more of opera.
The 2023 Glyndebourne festival opened with Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in a new staging by the French director Mariame Clément, conducted by the American-German Evan Rogister in his house debut. On the evidence of past work there (Il turco in Italia and Don Pasquale), Clément guarantees style and perception. Both were in plentiful evidence, but the staging, at times overbusy, has yet to take root. Of greater concern was the coordination problem between singers and orchestra. (I was there on second night.) Rogister’s speeds were fast, but felt untethered. Mozart’s score is second nature to the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. All the notes were in place, the detail sharp, but on this occasion it was the imaginative continuo playing that gave the performance energy and definition.
A previous staging of Don Giovanni, directed by the ever radical Graham Vick, featured a horse’s severed head and a dung heap. Ahead of its time in pointing up the Don’s odiousness, Clément’s approach is almost hygienic in comparison. Set in the atrium of a wood-panelled hotel, the designs (by Julia Hansen) are modern, with nods towards the work’s 18th century origins: a cloak, a wig when disguise is required. Otherwise the look is stag-night satin blazers or hen-weekend pink sparkle or, briefly, black balaclava masks to suggest that all men are or could be rapists.
Virtue, through the figure of Don Ottavio (Oleksiy Palchykov, ardent and pure-toned), gets an equal hearing. It’s all there in Lorenzo da Ponte’s text, but a recent directorial trend has been to cast Ottavio as the wimp, and his betrothed, Donna Anna, as susceptible to the Don who rapes her. This is not a feasible reading post-#MeToo. Unlike Mozart’s audience of 1787, we cannot laugh at the Don’s sexual deviancy and comeuppance. For some directors, staging Don Giovanni at all is a problem. Clément unknots the challenges intelligently, but with the work’s flamboyant extremes reined in, it feels short on mojo.
The high point, and really worth celebrating, is the cast: deftly chosen, youthful and predominantly east European. The Moldovan baritone Andrey Zhilikhovsky – shirt open to his chest, cuban heels, tight jeans and a hip swagger – is a natural in the title role, musicality and restraint winning out over caricature. Michael Mofidian and Victoria Randem delight as Masetto and Zerlina, raunchy and exuberant. The wronged women, Ruzan Mantashyan’s Donna Elvira and Venera Gimadieva’s Donna Anna, compensate for neutral characterisation with high-class singing. A new name to watch is the young Russian bass-baritone Mikhail Timoshenko as Don Giovanni’s sidekick, Leporello, got up as a seedy, middle-aged Reginald Perrin. He might not steal the girls with his tweedy appearance, but with that voice – lyrical, rich, full of beauty – he could have anyone he fancies.
Star ratings (out of five)
Wozzeck ★★★★★
Don Giovanni ★★★
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