Heart of Darkness, Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, November 2011

Wow! This was a remarkable achievement by 33 year old composer Tarik O’Regan, along with a libretto by artist Tom Phillips.

The crew on the boat

They have packed Joseph Conrad’s novella into 75 minutes of gripping musical narrative, starting in London with the old sea captain, Marlow — beautifully sung by Alan Oke — in a moment of recollection, “He was a remarkable man”. This is repeated in different forms, and although nothing is hurried, everything is accomplished. Marlow goes into the heart of Africa, upstream with his crew.

Edward Dick and Robert Innes Hopkins have come up with a wonderful design. The deck of the boat moves up and down on water that seeps through, and the effect is that we are there with them as they move up river. It is all helped by Rick Fisher’s lighting, which is mostly dark, but sometimes brilliantly lit with the crew is in the midday sun, and when the witch-doctor appears later we see a strangely magical projection roiling the air.

Alan Oke as Marlow

The sets and lighting help, but the atmosphere is created by the music and libretto. The tension, the frustrations, “What I really need are rivets”, and when the rivets eventually arrive the crew dance for joy. Bright interludes there may be, but the percussion, strings and woodwind create a sense of the jungle, and the crew pull out their guns, “The jungle has eyes in it”. They survive an attack, instigated by Kurtz, that mysterious man whom we eventually meet, strongly sung by young Danish bass Morten Lassenius Kramp. He looks the part in spades, lying on a table, yet supremely fit and slim when he stands up. A man of vision, or is it obsession — Kurtz and his ivory, “They will try to claim it as theirs. It’s my ivory. I want nothing more than justice”. But as Marlow later sings, “His intelligence was perfectly clear, but his soul was mad”.

Marlow and Kurtz

The opera ends as it starts, on the river Thames in London. Kurtz’s fiancée, sung by Gweneth-Ann Jeffers, reappears and we are back to Marlow’s conversation with her at the beginning. He muses about the ‘remarkable man’, impossible to know him and not admire him. She wants to know what were his last words, and Marlow is stuck. “The last word he announced was . . . your name”. It is almost the end, and as the tide of the music goes out and in, we are left to ponder on the eternal insanity of acquisitive obsession.

The music was played by CHROMA conducted by Oliver Gooch, and I would gladly hear and see it all again. This is the first time I remember seeing surtitles in the Linbury Studio, and they worked very well. Performances continue until November 5 — for details click here.

La Wally, Opera Holland Park, OHP, August 2011

Act I of this opera is super, ending with Wally’s famous aria Ebben! Ne andrò lontana (Well then! I shall go far away) sung with great dramatic purpose by Gweneth-Ann Jeffers.

Wally and Stromminger, all photos Fritz Curzon

Rather than sing this as a set piece aria, she alternated beautifully between pensive moments and real power. Her stubbornly narcissistic father Stromminger, well-portrayed by Stephen Richardson, has thrown her out after making a fool of himself, throwing a punch at a young man named Hagenbach and landing flat on his back. Realising his daughter cares for Hagenbach, he stupidly insists she marry his mate Gellner, for whom she feels nothing. She has her father’s stubbornness, refuses point blank and leaves their Austrian village to live in the mountains.

That’s the end of Act I, dramatically staged by Opera Holland Park, with a wonderful shooting incident where someone holds a beer glass at arm’s length while a shot is fired shattering the glass.

Hagenbach and Wally

In Act II a year has passed and Wally’s father, a wealthy farmer, is now dead. All might be well for a marriage between Wally and Hagenbach, but things go badly wrong, and Act II loses momentum. The fact that it’s a bit confusing is illustrated by reading various synopses, which don’t agree on whether Hagenbach is now betrothed to a tavern owner named Afra. Gellner tells Wally he is, but Gellner’s a 24-carat prat whose idiotic machinations lead to Wally’s decision to marry him if he’ll kill Hagenbach, which he tries to do and fails. In the end in Act IV — yes there are four acts — Hagenbach comes into the mountains to find Wally and shouts up to her. This starts an avalanche that kills him, and Wally leaps to her death.

The libretto is based on Wilhelmine von Hillern’s tale from the Tyrolean Alps: Die Geyer-Wally (The Vulture-Wally). The rather odd name Wally is short for Wallburga, which was also the name of an English missionary, canonised on May 1, who gave her name to the term Walpurgis Nacht for the spring festival on that day. There may also have been a young woman Wallburga Stromminger, whose legend led to von Hillern’s story.

Gellner and Stromminger in Act I

The libretto is by Luigi Illica, before he started collaborating with Puccini whose theatrical sense would not have tolerated such unsympathetic characters, nor the unnecessary complexities of Act II. This is where Wally insults Afra, so Hagenbach insults Wally (but the relationship between Hagenbach and Afra is not clear, nor the extent to which the insult to Wally is fully intentional). She feels slighted so she decides to marry Gellner and have Hagenbach killed. Odd. Momentum is never quite restored after Act I, and the opera has not entered the standard repertoire despite a successful first night at La Scala in 1892. The composer, Catalani (1854–93) came from the same town as Puccini who was four and half years his junior. He was a fine musician who took over as professor of composition at the Milan conservatory after Ponchielli’s death. Greatly influenced by Wagner, he tried to match music to words, but the vocal line in this opera keeps changing and the effect is not memorable. The music is sophisticated, but perhaps unnecessarily so. For example, in Act I Wally’s friend Walter (a high soprano part, nicely sung by Alinka Kozari) launches into a song of the Edelweiss, which one might expect to be given a folk melody, but it isn’t and it’s over dramatised. Perhaps Catalani might have achieved more later, but he suffered ill health and died of TB before he was forty.

Hagenbach looked charming and was well sung by Adrian Dwyer, with Stephen Gadd performing strongly as Gellner, along with Heather Shipp as in the thankless role of Afra. Peter Robinson’s conducting was first rate, and Martin Lloyd-Evans’s production showed huge energy and commitment from everyone. I’m delighted that Holland Park has put this on, and while there are good reasons it’s not in the standard repertoire, they do a terrific job of bringing these little known operas to the public. Mascagni’s L’amico Fritz was another case in point this season, and in 2012 they will do his one-act Zanetto as part of a double bill.

See this while you can. Performances continue until August 12 — for details click here.

La Forza del Destino, Holland Park Opera, OHP, August 2010

“Vengeance is mine”, saith the Lord, but the quest for revenge by the Calatrava family, personified by its son, Don Carlo, leads to deaths only in the family itself. In his dying throes, Carlo manages to kill his sister Leonora as she comforts him, but the person he most wanted to kill, namely his sister’s beloved Don Alvaro, lives on. Such is Alvaro’s fate, the power of fate being the theme of this opera, whose driving force is Verdi’s music.

The backdrop to Act III, all images OHP/ Fritz Curzon

I’ve always found it terrific stuff, and was delighted with the excellent musical direction by Stuart Stratford, whom I remember doing an equally fine job at Holland Park last summer with Katya Kabanova. Peter Auty was powerfully lyrical as Alvaro, and his soliloquy in Act III, when he pleads with an absent Leonora to pity his suffering, was superb. Mark Stone was a very strong Carlo, and the two of them together in Act III were wonderful. Gweneth-Ann Jeffers as Leonora was remarkable — she modulated her voice seamlessly from quiet passages to loud ones, and gave this role a powerful undertow of emotion. Among the other parts in this opera, Donald Maxwell was delightful as Fra Melitone, amusing, with perfect comic timing and a gloriously strong voice. No wonder I found him so good as the Major-Domo in Fille du Régiment at Covent Garden three months ago. Mikhail Svetlov sang well as Padre Guardiano, as did Carole Wilson as the gypsy Preziosilla, reminding me of her analogous role in Ballo last summer.

Alvaro holds the dying Leonora

The production by Martin Duncan works very well, with wonderful designs by Alison Chitty, whom I recall doing magical work for Birtwistle’s Minotaur at Covent Garden in April 2008. Here she did another piece of magic. Act III had a black cloth backdrop with chairs hanging in front, along with red cords stretching from floor to rafters at various angles. Lampshades hanging from the rafters were lit blue, and the chairs were projected onto the backdrop. Mark Jonathan’s dark lighting on this set produced the effect of a Kandinsky painting, which I thought entirely appropriate to the time in which the opera was set, namely early-mid twentieth century. Altogether this was a superbly designed production using little more than chairs as props — brilliant.

Congratulations to Opera Holland Park, a fitting production for this, the last night of their season.