Julietta, English National Opera, ENO, London Coliseum, September 2012

Dreams or Reality? For Michel, a bookseller from Paris, there is something addictive about dreams, but in the first two acts the auditorium lights slowly come on at the end, as if he is waking up. When the third act nears its conclusion the lighting shows some promise of doing the same again, but it suddenly goes dark and Michel is trapped for ever. This clever idea is just part of Richard Jones’s excellent new production of Martinů’s opera.

All images ENO/ Richard Hubert Smith

Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů left his homeland for Paris in 1923 and during his many years there he found Georges Neveux’s recent play Juliette, ou La clé des songes (the key of dreams) a fine subject for opera. He wrote the libretto himself, initially in French then in Czech, and it was first performed in Prague in 1938.

Michel and Julietta

The main protagonist Michel yearns to find a girl named Julietta, and he revisits the small coastal town where he once heard her singing at an open window. The inhabitants seem to live only in the present without memory of the past, and when Michel encounters a fortune teller he finds she doesn’t read the future, only the past … and can also read dreams. Nothing however is quite as it seems, and though Michel shoots Julietta it turns out later she is still alive and there is not a drop of blood.

Surreal it certainly is, and the music is intriguing. Severely spare at times, yet suddenly swelling into glorious melody, particularly in Act II, which is nearly as long as the other two half-hour acts combined. We are swayed and seduced by the harmonies, taken away into dreams, memories and hallucinations, and Edward Gardner in the orchestra pit succeeds brilliantly in bringing out the mystery and charm of this music.

Peter Hoare was outstanding as Michel, with Julia Sporsén giving a fine portrayal of Julietta. Andrew Shore was excellent as the man in a helmet, plus two other roles, and the other soloists, such as Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts and Susan Bickley, all did well and took on multiple roles. An abundance of roles helps advance the action by exchanges between a constantly changing sequence of individuals, avoiding the need for extended vocal solos or big arias, despite the lyrical nature of the music.

The Central Bureau of Dreams

Huge designs by Antony McDonald, helped by Matthew Richardson’s excellent lighting, give a sense of irreality to Michel and the strange people he encounters, and the staging and wonderful conducting make this a compelling evening. Edward Gardner and director Richard Jones have scored another great success for the ENO.

Performances continue until October 3 — for details click here.

Triple Bill — Agon, Sphinx, and Limen, Royal Ballet, November 2009

Melissa Hamilton and Carlos Acosta in Agon, photo by Bill Cooper

Agon is a Greek word meaning ‘contest’, and this 1957 Balanchine ballet is for twelve dancers who perform in twos, threes, etc. without any story. The music by Stravinsky is interestingly varied, some parts strongly represented by wind instruments, and others very quiet. The main pas-de-deux towards the end was brilliantly performed by Carlos Acosta and Melissa Hamilton, who continues to impress as a rising star in the company. In the two pas-de-trois we had Johan Kobborg with Yuhui Choe and Hikaru Kobayashi, and Mara Galeazzi with Valeri Hristov and Brian Maloney. The dancers all performed beautifully, and Daniel Capps did an excellent job conducting the orchestra.

Sphinx is a ballet by Glen Tetley to music of Martinů, originally choreographed for American Ballet Theatre in 1977. It’s based on Jean Cocteau’s La machine infernale, a reworking of the Oedipus myth, exploring the conflict between free will and fate. There are three dancers, the Sphinx, Oedipus and Anubis, the jackal-headed god who shepherds the dead into the Egyptian underworld. The choreography for the two men is intensely physical and both Edward Watson as Anubis, and Rupert Pennefather as Oedipus, danced like gods, while Marianela Nuñez was an attractively seductive sphinx. This was the first performance of the work by the Royal Ballet, and it used the original designs by the late Rouben Ter-Arutunian, with costumes by Willa Kim and lighting by John B. Read. The costumes were very effective, making the men look as if they were dancing naked, but with painted bodies.

Limen is a new ballet by Wayne McGregor. The title refers to the threshold of some physiological or psychological response, and we were presented at the beginning with dancers behind a transparent bluish screen. On the screen were projected single digit numbers of various sizes — like those on an LED display — that moved and changed value. The costumes by Moritz Junge were colourful tops with shorts, well set off by Lucy Carter’s lighting, which at one point showed thick bright coloured stripes from one side of the stage to the other. The choreography combined strong physicality alternating with moments of calm, but towards the end I found the production distracted me from watching the dancers. A screen with a matrix of small blue lights at the back of the stage moved very slowly forward, and as it did so some lights went out, while others came on. I’ve seen mysterious on-off lighting on stage before, but the trouble is that I’m always trying to work out the pattern and this distracts me from the dancing or singing that is the main point of the work. Obviously the lights were meant to recall the screen at the start, because as they came closer I could see that each light was a small single digit number. Presumably one has now gone over the threshold to a new level of reality.

The choreography fitted very well with the lovely music by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, conducted by Barry Wordsworth, who was also the conductor of the previous ballet Sphinx. Since this ballet was brand new, it was danced by a very strong cast of fifteen, including Edward Watson, Steven McRae and Eric Underwood among the men, and Leanne Benjamin and Marianela Nuñez among the women. It works well, but Wayne McGregor seems to have too strong a predilection for screens that distract from his choreography.