Wozzeck – review

Simon Keenlyside follows Matthias Goerne and Johan Reuter, in the title role of Keith Warner's Covent Garden production of Wozzeck, first seen in 2002. Warner has revived it himself this time, with a strong cast and Mark Elder conducting, and those who admire Berg's masterpiece will need no further encouragement to experience it once again.

Details have changed, but Warner's approach remains fundamentally a psychological rather than a political or sociological one. Set within the clinical white tiles and specimen jars of Stefanos Lazaridis's set, it sees Wozzeck himself as a case study, his instability endogenous and his disintegration inevitable, rather than a product of the grinding poverty and exploitation from which escape is impossible. The sense of Wir arme Leut, the wretched folk like us, as Wozzeck identifies himself and his class in the opening scene, is very much underplayed; there's no such thing as society here.

Though this may give us only part of what this opera and Büchner's source play before it are about, on its own terms it's impressively successful, the images vivid, the music powerfully wrought. What humanity there is comes from Elder's reading of the score, full of wonderfully realised fine detail – does any other opera score contain such remarkable tuba writing? This all sits alongside moments of real tenderness; the way the strings wrap themselves around Marie's voice in the Bible-reading scene, and the tragic remorselessness of the final interlude are heart-wrenching.

Keenlyside's performance is impressively contained; helpless rather than histrionic, he's at the mercy of Gerhard Siegel's Captain and John Tomlinson's Doctor, both gruesomely compelling caricatures. His relationship with Karita Mattila's matronly Marie is hard to credit, while her attraction to Endrik Wottrich's Drum Major, another caricature, seems implausible, too. Perhaps we are meant to see them through Wozzeck's paranoid eyes; psychopathology is everything here.