Acante et Céphise, University College Opera, UCL, Bloomsbury Theatre, March 2012

Each year University College Opera produces a little-performed opera from the past, and this year it was by the pre-eminent composer of eighteenth century French opera, Jean-Philippe Rameau. This particular opera was originally commissioned for the royal household to celebrate the birth of an heir to the heir to the throne, incongruously tacked on to the end of a story about two lovers, Acante and Céphise, a jealous genie Oroès and a good fairy Zirphile who protects the lovers by forming a telepathic bond between them. If Oroès hurts Acante he does the same to his desired Cephise, placing him in a quandary. In this production the royal birth is turned into several births and swaddled babies are literally thrown onto the stage at the end, one for each of the many couples in the chorus.

Acante and Céphise

There are several problems with performing Rameau. Of course UCL cannot be expected to play it on original instruments, but Charles Peebles in the orchestra pit produced fine music from the orchestra after a wobbly start in the overture, and he gave huge rhythmic bounce to the dance interludes. A second problem is what to do with the dance interludes and a third problem is the lack of good librettos — Rameau does not seem to have had very successful collaborations with his librettists. To deal with the second and third problems, UCL brought in Christopher Cowell to direct and to choreograph, aided by Scarlett Perdereau and Bella Eacott, but while the programme notes highlight his international work and his directing of Rolando Villazon in a revival of Contes d’Hoffmann at the Royal Opera House, an amateur production is a very different matter.

Zirphile

While some of the dancers did well with the choreography, that was not uniformly the case, but my main complaint was the acting. Zirphile looked as if she was in great pain after several of her Act I arias, and she and some of the dancers over-acted with their facial expressions. Less can be more, and this is surely the responsibility of the director, but Lawrence Olsworth-Peter as Acante, Katherine Blumenthal as Céphise, and Kevin Greenlaw as Oroès all showed fine stage presence. Greenlaw also sang very strongly, with excellent French diction, Ms. Blumenthal sang beautifully, and Anna-Louise Costello managed well in the relatively high pitched role of Zirphile. Among the UCL students who had solo roles, Rebecca Rothwell sang with fine pitch and a lovely tone, and the chorus were magnificent.

As Rameau lovers will know, the English National Opera produced their first Rameau opera, Castor and Pollux last November, and this may well be the first staging of Acante et Céphise anywhere since the 1760s, so catch it while you can.

Performances continue until March 24 — 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.

Macbeth, by Ernest Bloch, University College Opera, March 2009

Bloch was a Swiss musician who later moved to the west coast of America, and this is his only opera. It was first performed in Paris in 1910, to a libretto in French by Edmond Fleg, but forty years later Bloch set it to an English text using some of Shakespeare’s original words. This is its first staging in Britain, though there was a concert performance at the Festival Hall in 1975, heavily cut and sung in French! The melodious and atmospheric music was well conducted by Charles Peebles, and some of the singing was excellent. George van Bergen was terrific as Macbeth, as was Katherine Rohrer as Lady Macbeth. Hal Brindley did very well as Malcolm, and Richard Rowe and Carl Gombrich did well as Banquo and Macduff, with Louise Kemeny as a strong Lady Macduff. The only really weak performance was by Ryland Davies as Duncan, yet oddly enough he was the only principal announced on the title page of the programme. The relatively simple staging by John Ramster worked well, with atmospheric lighting by Jake Wiltshire, and excellent designs and modern costumes by Bridget Kimak that placed most of the men in army uniforms. Altogether this was well worth seeing, and I applaud University College Opera for putting it on.