The Flying Dutchman, English National Opera, ENO, London Coliseum, April 2012

Sudden darkness in the auditorium … the orchestra struck up, and we were treated to great power and sensitivity from the baton of Edward Gardner. The silences were silent, the quiet passages quiet, and the loud passages with the chorus came over with huge force.

All images by Robert Workman

This new production by Jonathan Kent starts in the overture with a little girl being put to bed by her father Daland the sea captain. She dreams of the sea … the wild, windy sea, shown in video projections designed by Nina Dunn. Then as the opera gets underway we see huge designs by Paul Brown filling the stage from top to bottom, with lighting by Mark Henderson embracing the video effects and giving beautiful colour changes during Daland’s lyrical dialogue with his daughter, when salvation beckons.

Clive Bayley as Daland

In the end when the Dutchman chides his would-be saviour, Senta for her apparent unfaithfulness he silently vanishes from the party throng, she smashes a bottle . . . and it’s all over. She dies and he is redeemed.

Entrance of the Dutchman

James Creswell as the Dutchman exhibited superb restraint and nobility, both in voice and stage presence, and with Clive Bayley portraying Daland as an engagingly earnest father to Senta, this was a cast rich in wonderful bass tones. At the higher register, Stuart Skelton was a brilliant Erik, the young man in love with Senta. He is a star in the ENO firmament. As Senta herself, Orla Boylan gave a somewhat uneven vocal performance with some strong moments but a flaccid stage-presence.

Senta at the party

The Dutchman has been wandering the planet for countless years, and in Jonathan Kent’s production we see him dressed in a costume from two hundred years ago, contrasting with the girls working in a modern assembly shop where a costume party turns wild, threatening a gang rape of Senta . . . but suddenly the Dutchman’s ghostly crew sing powerfully from off-stage, scaring the living daylights out of the revellers. This is the same director who has produced Sweeney Todd now playing in the West End, so perhaps a bit of the Sweeney darkness has invaded Wagner, but that’s no bad thing, and the chorus carried it off superbly. They were wonderful.

The Flying Dutchman is the first of Wagner’s operas in the regular canon of ten, and this was the first time Edward Gardner has conducted any of them. I look forward to more!

Performances continue until May 23 — for details click here.

Queen of Spades, Opera North, Barbican, November 2011

Three, Seven, Ace — that’s the secret the old Countess tells Herman in her brief return from beyond the grave. She did it beautifully, Josephine Barstow singing this role in an utterly compelling way. A perfect Countess, well backed up by Jonathan Summers as Tomsky, who gave a gripping Act I account of the Countess’s young life in Paris, and William Dazeley as a noble Prince Yeletsky.

The Card Game in Act III, all images Bill Cooper

The staging by Neil Bartlett was simple but effective, and I liked the small lights around the edge of the stage, giving a nice late eighteenth century touch. This is after all set in the reign of Catherine the Great, who attends the ball in Act II appearing on the audience side of the auditorium, if the performers on stage were to be believed. And indeed they were entirely believable, except for the main pair, Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts as Herman, and Orla Boylan as Lisa. Both had their good moments, their vocal performances were uneven, and their stage presentations left much to be desired. He looked like the Act III version of Baron Ochs from Rosenkavalier with his wig missing, and evinced little of the desperately obsessive passion that Tchaikovsky invested in this role. Her matronly appearance carried no conviction as the sheltered girl who falls for this nutcase and gives up her fiancé, Prince Yeletsky. Admittedly Tchaikovsky’s opera, with its libretto by his brother Modest, along with Pyotr Ilyich’s own emendations, is a far cry from Pushkin’s original novella, and the roles of Herman and Lisa are difficult ones to inhabit, but these were not convincing portrayals.

The Countess at the ball

The orchestra gave a good rendering of the score under the direction of Richard Farnes, not helped by the very dry acoustic of the Barbican Theatre. Better is the Barbican Concert Hall, and far better would have been Sadler’s Wells. This is not a good venue for opera, as it gives little feeling of ensemble to the orchestra. Moreover the orchestra pit was too small, so the trombones and trumpets were on stage right, with percussion and harp on stage left, and though the players did well to handle the situation, it is not ideal. I imagine this came over much better in Leeds.

Lisa and Herman at the ball

One small point about the production is that the card game of faro in Act III seemed too abstract, with no money on the table. Herman thinks he has drawn the player’s card, an ace, while the dealer’s card is a queen. In fact he holds the queen of spades — the killer that destroys him, just as his obsession led directly to the death of the Countess, and indirectly to the death of Lisa. Tchaikovsky found himself very much in sympathy with Herman’s obsessions in this opera and wrote the music in little more than six weeks. If you haven’t seen it before, performances continue until November 24 — for details click here.