Le Nozze di Figaro, Opera Holland Park, OHP, July 2011

I’ve never seen this before — not Figaro, I mean, but such extensive choreography, and I don’t just mean movement among the performers. There were chainé turns as servants enter and exit the stage, along with the occasional pas-de-deux, all very well rehearsed and executed. The Crazy Day is the other title for Beaumarchais’ original play, and this production by Liam Steel, who also did the choreography, certainly gave full rein to the craziness. There was a great deal of busy movement and kissing between servants during the overture, and when two women got together — one dressed as a man — I took this to indicate the libidinous nature of the Count’s household, though in fact the servant en travesti later turned out to be Cherubino.

Near the end of Act II, all photos by Fritz Curzon

For a lively production of Figaro with minimal but effective sets, one could hardly do better. The performers moved and so did the furniture. A legless dining table, occasional table, chair and decapitated mirror join in the choreography, and when someone needed to be seated, the chair helpfully moved into place. It was all rather fun, and Matthew Willis did a fine job in the orchestra pit, giving plenty of zip to Mozart’s music.

Elizabeth Llewellyn and Jane Harrington as the Countess and Susanna

As to the singing, when Elizabeth Llewellyn came on as the Countess in Act II, with her cavatina Porgi, amor asking for love, the whole performance went up a couple of notches. She was terrific, and her Act III soliloquy Dove sono i bei momenti when she laments the apparent loss of her husband’s affections was beautifully done. Jane Harrington gave a lively and strongly sung performance of Figaro’s fiancée Susanna, and George von Bergen, whom I remember as an excellent Macbeth in Bloch’s opera of that name two years ago, was an admirably solid presence as the Count. Matthew Hargreaves, who was an excellent Leporello in Holland Park’s Don Giovanni last year, gave a similar performance here as Figaro, but I felt he lacked the vocal depth and bearing this senior servant of the Count’s household should have. Hannah Pedley clearly relished her role as Cherubino, and Barbarina was prettily sung and played by Jaimee Marshall, who was also a very effective partner in one of the pas-de-deux. Lynton Black was an amusing Dr. Bartolo, with a brilliant facial tick when he finds that Figaro is his own son, Sarah Pring was excellent as his wife Marcellina, and Andrew Glover was a fine Don Basilio and Don Curzio.

By the time we were in Act IV it was fully dark outside and Colin Grenfell’s lighting on stage worked beautifully. There were even fireworks heard from afar, giving an effective end to The Crazy Day.

Performances continue every other day until July 16 — for details click here.

Genoveva, University College Opera, UCL, Bloomsbury Theatre, March 2010

Genoveva and Golo, photo by Josh Blacker

This is the two hundredth anniversary of Robert Schumann’s birth, and the fact that this is his only opera reflects rather sadly on his desire to help create a new type of German opera, without conventional recitative. In fact it was Wagner, three years his junior, who had already accomplished this by the time Schumann composed Genoveva in 1848. They both lived in Dresden at the time, and while Wagner’s Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser had already premiered in that city in 1843 and 1845, Schumann was galled to find he could not obtain a production of his own opera. Its first performance was in Leipzig in 1850, the same year Wagner’s next opera Lohengrin appeared. The heroines of these three Wagner operas, Senta, Elisabeth and Elsa, appear as models of feminine faithfulness and sobriety, but in operas about men. Schumann’s Genoveva, by contrast, is about a woman, who wins through in the end. Where Senta and Elisabeth die, and Elsa is left bereft of her hero, Genoveva lives to claim back both her life and her husband Siegfried. But Wagner criticised Schumann’s libretto, and the opera failed to find a performance in Dresden.

Siegfried, photo by Josh Blacker

Its weak libretto has left it without a safe niche in the operatic repertoire, but the music is good and was well conducted here by Charles Peebles. The story is roughly as follows. The knights of Brabant are urged by the Bishop of Trier to join the army of that brilliant eighth century general Charles Martel against Muslim armies that had swept across the Pyrenees from Spain. Siegfried, the Count of Brabant, entrusts his new wife Genoveva to the care of his young servant Golo, but the wretched Golo makes advances to her, which she robustly repulses. As revenge he contrives to have the old retainer, Drago hide in her room, and thus be entrapped and exhibited as her lover. The servants then conveniently kill Drago. This is all done with the connivance of a sorceress named Margaretha, who later uses a magic mirror to show imagined scenes of Drago’s seduction to the wounded Siegfried, while she is attending him as his nurse. Siegfried breaks the mirror and with the loss of her magic, Margaretha has to face the ghost of Drago who predicts a fearful end for her unless she admits the truth. In the meantime, executioners have been dispatched to kill the innocent Genoveva, who clings to a crucifix and holds them off just long enough for Siegfried to rescue her.

Drago's ghost, photo by Josh Blacker

One can see why this opera doesn’t work, but the performance was wonderful. The tenor role of Golo was very strongly sung by Richard Rowe, and Bibi Heal looked delightful and had a lovely tone as Genoveva. Adam Green sang forcefully in the baritone role of Siegfried, Lynton Black sang an excellent bass as Drago, and Magdalen Ashman was a convincing Margaretha. The production was full of youthful energy, well directed by Emma Rivlin, with some very realistic fight sequences directed by Nicholas Hall. Sets by Christopher Giles and costumes by Ryszard Andrzejewski gave the right sense of period to this story, and the massed appearance of the chorus in the auditorium near the end was a nice touch, except that Siegfried did not join them, and his entrance on stage was entirely overshadowed by the confusion. The ‘sublime’ ending in which the assembled company enters church is all a bit much, but that’s Schumann’s doing, not the director’s. I would have loved to see the villains punished, but they simply disappear into ethereal obscurity, rather like this opera, despite its lyrical and dramatic music.

My criticism of its libretto notwithstanding, University College London have done a superb job of staging this work, continuing a tradition of putting on a relatively obscure opera every year for over half a century. Next year they plan to produce Weber’s unfinished opera Die drei Pintos (The three Pintos), completed by Mahler, which like Genoveva, was revived by the Bielefeld Opera in the 1990s.