English National Opera’s line-up from January has been, on paper, one of the strongest in the company’s history. Press night for Jonathan Miller’s new production of Puccini’s La bohème was cancelled because London lay under eight inches of snow; that cranked up the tension on this show’s two big questions: would Miller’s production justify the unusual hype, and would crossover-dabbling Alfie Boe cut the mustard as the piece’s star tenor?
The short answers are no and no. But perhaps not quite and not quite would be a little fairer. The production’s biggest success was its Act II, suavely played against a busy restaurant scene in which Puccini’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink crescendo somehow achieved focus and clarity whilst building with patient momentum. In the opera’s opening and closing scenes the action was confined to a small and distant-seeming loft; it might have worked well for Sky TV’s live relay, but it was a strain for much of the live audience sat in London’s biggest theatre. It drew some clichéd backslapping from the bohemians in the opening scene, too, but – if you watched very carefully – it effectively framed the still, aching drama of the opera’s final moments.
Alfie Boe’s Rodolfo was decently crafted, but his voice appeared forced as some of Puccini’s melodic arcs reached their apex. Sometimes it attractively reflected the struggle of daily life for the bohemians, the rest of the time it just felt awkward. Melody Moore was a decent if less dramatically convincing Mimi; Hanan Alattar was a vivid and stylish Musetta and Pauls Putnins was a rather wooden Colline. Roland Wood as Marcello offered the most rounded and moving individual performance of all, whilst the sometimes ropy ENO orchestra played with rich, languid warmth under Miguel Harth-Bedoya.
Some weeks later John Adams was in town to witness the first UK performance of his 2005 opera about the testing of the atomic bomb, Doctor Atomic. After The Death of Klinghoffer and The Flowering Tree, this piece is something of a return to the news-reel style of Adams’s first opera Nixon in China – in terms of both dramatic architecture and musical language. Based on true events, the opera’s simply narrative unfolds straightforwardly while individual characters indulge in periods of reflective analysis, personal revelation or blissful romance.
Like Nixon, the music is difficult to play and sing well, and the ENO orchestra and chorus struggled a little in the works striking opening number – a classic post-minimalist preface, moving through Adamsian modulations in a steady pulse and occasionally attractively irregular metre. Making this music sound clean and organic is hard. As it progressed, though, the score was well shaped by the orchestra and chorus under conductor Lawrence Renes. The storm interlude – with echoes of that from Britten’s Peter Grimes – was riveting; the musical performance expunged even the trigger-happy poking of a button marked ‘lightning’ somewhere in the Coliseum’s technical box.
In the title role, Gerald Finley gave one of the most observed and beautiful performances to have graced ENO’s stage in recent years. His movement was minimal: Oppenheimer, the artistically sensitive, morally troubled but scientifically driven project director, came alive in Finley’s eyes, his feet, the slight movements of his neck, his changing grip on a cigarette. The now-famous monologue Batter my heart, a cascading D-minor setting of John Donne’s sonnet, was immensely powerful: Finley hardly moved, but flooded the stage with conviction. His rounded but edgy baritone – powerful and malleable – was full of earnest, and flecked with an effective American twang.
Adams’s shapely and clear vocal writing seems a touch more at ease with the idiom than that of Nixon; his orchestration has more bite and purposefully less sheen, his harmonic range is wider, and his composer’s eye demonstrates, perhaps, a keener sense of dramatic architecture. As a piece of drama Doctor Atomic feels concise, effective and stamped through with the Adams-Sellars hallmark. Penny Woolcock’s production addresses all the piece’s major observations, chief amongst them the obvious dichotomy of inspired human teamwork dedicated to destroying human life. The only let-down, then, is the work’s ending. It seemed simply to fizzle out – rained off by a sense of confusion and the mal-handling of the dramatic apex. The watchful gaze of the entire cast from the front of the stage was effective, but the ghostly voices that flood the auditorium at the opera’s dying moments debase the previous three hours of music and sound like a crass cop out.
What total contrast, then, to the devastating final moments of David Alden’s moving production of Janáček’s Jenůfa – but we largely knew that would be the case since the production first appeared in 2006 (and bagged two Oliviers). Despite this, the performance on 12 March wasn’t without its problems. Janáček’s orchestra is the major non-human protagonist of this piece, and the two electrifying, timpani-battered orchestral outbursts that end Acts I and II didn’t ignite as they could have. Amanda Roocroft in the title role gave her all in capturing Jenůfa’s tempting innocence in the opera’s first half, her isolated desperation (bordering on madness) in the second and her emotionally fatigued acceptance at the end, but her voice sometimes felt bloated and uncontrolled. All in all, this was a vocally uneven Jenůfa.
Robert Brubaker and Tom Randle as Laca and Steva, however, were vocally sound and dramatically superb. The former’s attractive but occasionally strained voice in this case only reflected his character’s inadequacies: here was a man who could never be where he wanted to be. Against Alden’s vision of a deprived but traditional industrial Eastern European community, his predicament gained a tearing loneliness. Acute and moving touches and details in choreography and design threw the work’s despair and pain into even sharper focus.
Detail is what you get, too, from the same director’s production of Britten’s Peter Grimes, which opened on 9 May. Much anticipated was this production, and with good reason. In it Alden invests huge thought in each of the Borough’s sometimes extraneous characters. The landlady Auntie becomes a Stephen King style mistress of ceremonies with masochist undertones; the apothecary Ned Keene is a sex-obsessed creep; the preacher Bob Boles is a crank dragged up from an age whose values have long been abandoned; the two nieces are deeply disturbed human beings whose mental programming is rapidly unravelling – heads lopsided, eyes glazed, cut off from the world by a repertoire of bizarre, unsettling physical gestures. Welcome to the seaside village of the damned: you know from the off that Grimes isn’t going to get out of this place alive, and for that, you’ll forgive him almost anything.
Individual performances have extreme conviction whilst the orchestral playing and chorus singing under Edward Gardner surpasses anything heard at the Coliseum this season. The strength of Alden’s vision, though, has its downsides. The quartet at the end of the Second Act’s first scene feels emotionally bankrupt – we know the nieces incapable of sincere rational thought, and it’s hard to imagine Alden’s sinister Auntie having any empathy with Ellen. Grimes’s haymaking thwack on Ellen upon her proclamation that ‘we’ve failed’ suggests an angry, forceful man; Stuart Skelton’s portrayal of a cowardly, twitching descent into mad paranoia in the closing minutes belongs to a different Grimes. The Australian tenor is, though, vocally excellent.
It was Captain Balstrode whose individual presence is felt most keenly in this Grimes. Gerald Finley’s portrayal is full of nuance and suggestion; he appears not afraid or overly critical of the Borough’s unsettling blindness and ineptitude, but simply weary of its incessant delusion. He feels like a sidelined moral compass, hopelessly attempting to reason with the unreasonable. His baritone’s bluesy edge and his tired, lolling stance conjure a character of great depth and decency (there was even a suggested romance with Ellen). Yet still he’s controlling; he forms the pivot of the three roles – with Grimes and Ellen – that Alden appears to play ‘straight’. If there is any philosophical doubt in Alden’s vision, perhaps it’s here. The Borough’s array of freaks and deviants are so far removed that it's hard to imagine yourself as one of them; there isn’t the probing self-questioning and moral crisis of individuality that this opera often prompts – it’s simply the con-artists versus the normal folk. But in the conviction of its delivery, Britten’s work doesn’t come over any less moving.
Peter Grimes is in repertory until 30 May.
Andrew Mellor
