Verdi La Forza del Destino - Chelsea Opera Group

For sixty years, the Chelsea Opera Group has adorned London opera life. It doesn't do mass market, but focuses on unusual and obscure repertoire. This audience comes for the music! This fuels Chelsea Opera Group productions with the kind of commitment you get from true devotees who love what they're doing. Founded by David Cairns, they produced  Berlioz Les Troyens and even Benevenuto Cellini in the 1960's, conducted by Colin Davis, closely associated with them since their inception. London would not be what it is without the Chelsea Opera Group ethos and its audiences.

Starting this year's season at London's South Bank, the Chelsea Opera Group presented Giuseppe Verdi's La forza del destino, in the 1862 St Petersburg version rather than the more familiar 1869 Milan version. They have produced La forza del destino before, in 1959, 1966 and 1986. Some patrons have heard them all. Last year, there was an excellent production in Paris, with Violeta Urmana, Marcelo Àlvarez and Kwangchul Youn. The Chelsea Opera budget can't scale such stellar heights but compensates with verve. Gweneth-Ann Jeffers, Peter Auty and Brindley Sherratt gave performances so passionate that they filled the Queen Elizabeth Hall so effectively there was no need for staging. Jeffers and Auty sang these roles at Opera Holland Park in 2010.

In La forza del destino, Jeffers is a force of nature, expressing levels of Leonora's personality hinted at in the score. Leonora is virginal but passionate. She's planning to elope to South America, sacrificng her status for an outsider whose ancestors are descended from the god of the Sun (ie Incas). Leonora's father is a bigot, and her brother equally rigid, but Leonora has greater strength and depth of personality. Jeffers smoulders, caressing the low tessitura, soaring to crescendi and extended high passages. Forceful voice, well applied technique. Jeffers is a born diva, but her powers come from within, fuelled by intelligence and understanding of how music shapes role. Leonora is resourceful - who would chose to be a hermit in a monastery? - but she can't escape Fate. If Fate can destroy someone as strong as Jeffers's Leonora, there's no hope for anyone else. Verdi's "Fate" motif flows throughout the music, sometimes seductive and subtle, but relentless. It surges in the big strings sections, weighted down by celli and basses. But when Jeffers sings Leonora the crucial aria "Pace, Pace", she's accompanied by harps, for she's alone with God. Dramatic sopranos like Gweneth-Ann Jeffers are rare - why don't we hear her more often in this country? She's a resource we should appreciate.

Don Alvaro is a long and taxing part, but without staging, the voice is more exposed and has to carry the drama. Peter Auty was more impressive than he was two years ago. In this performance there's an aria.cut from later editions, which commands, as the notes say, "high tessitura and neurotic tension". Auty threw himself into the spirit, singing with a heroism that captures Don Alvaro's personality. No matter how hard Don Alvaro tries, Fate will destroy him. Dying early is no escape. Pehaps Don Alvaro will suffer more if he has to find redemption. Certainly, Verdi's emphasis on spiritual rigour is blunted if Don Alvaro simply drops dead. The role isn't meant to be easy, and Auty understood the poignancy, rewarded by audience applause. Auty's young, by no means a  bland "English tenor" and has a lot of potential.

The plot pivots around Leonora and Don Alvaro but Verdi expands the idea of Fate in many ways. Don Carlo (Robert Poulton) doesn't think, or even feel much love for his sister. He's programmed like an automaton,  a manifestation of Fate as obsessive compulsive non-empathy. The part's against Poulton, though he sings well. But Don Carlo is killed because he doesn't even question things. Significantly, Verdi writes other characters to extend the concept of Fate. He didn't write Preziosilla (Antonia Sotgiu) simply for colour. She's not "gyspy slut" but represents something much more sinister. She is much more Mefistofele than Carmen, for she goads the soldiers on.  "Rataplan, Rataplan" can be macabre, a Dance of Death, but here it was genteel, the COG Chorus and The Imperial Male Voice Choir singing with enthusiasm, taken in by Fate in the guise of provocateur.

Significantly, Verdi develops the monastic roles. The peasants suffer poverty and war, yet do nothing to change their fate.  Fra Melitone (Donald Maxwell)  has some insight, but rails at the peasants for being poor because they have too many children. (Celibates don't understand). Melitone is also the gatekeeper and rule enforcer, a benign version of Don Carlo. Maxwell's too nice to be nasty, but creates the comic aspects of the part very well. Il Padre Guardiano (Brindley Sherratt) on the other hand is a figure as powerful as Leonora herself, with dispassionate objectivity.

"Charity" he keeps telling Fra Melitone, meaning charitable feelings not free food. This kind of charity is exactly what Don Carlo and his father don't understand. So they become tools of fate and die without having learned anything about life. Sherratt's Guardiano is magnificent, utterly authoritative. Perhaps he realizes that Padre Guardiano is the voice of God, or at least, some superior, all-merciful being who might have to the power to thwart Fate. Notice how Verdi writes the part for the same voice type as the the Marchese di Calatrava (Richard Wiegold). The two men are polar opposites. Sherratt sings with such resonance that you sense the character's emotional and spiritual depth. No wonder Leonora confides in him. Moreover, he breaks rules, letting her into the monastery. In the ending where Don Alvaro doesn't die, Padre Guardiano plays a pivotal role, implying that there are other values than revenge and pig headedness. Everyone dies in the end, but if you live properly, Fate doesn't win. Leonora has learned this, which is why she finds a kind of apotheosis in death. God has shown her mercy.

Minor roles add spark to any opera, but much depends on who is singing them.  I'm certainly looking forward to hearing Paul Curievici (Trabuco) again. He's so involved with the opera that his face expresses what's going on even when he's just listening. Intuitive expressiveness like this is a gift that can't be taught. This is the sign of someone who really acts, from his soul outwards. He's extremely young, so another talent to listen out for. I last heard him in the GSMD Poulenc Dialogues des Carmelites (more HERE)  In La forza del destino, he gets to sing a lot more, and does that well, too.

Robert Newton conducted the Chelsea Opera Orchestra and Deborah Miles-Johnson was chorus master. Three more Chelsea Opera Productions coming up this year - Donizetti Maria Padilla on 27/5, Massenet Don Quichotte on 25.11 conducted by ROH chorus master, Renato Balsadonna. More details on the COG website.
Full review and cast list in Opera Today.
photo of Gweneth-Ann Jeffers, courtesy Gilder & Co, photo of Brindley Sherratt, c. Sussie Ahlburg, Askonas Holt

Catalani La Wally Opera Holland Park -first thoughts

Preparing for Alfredo Catalani's La Wally at Opera Holland Park, I was struck by its potential. It's an Italianate Der Freischütz. The music may be good-natured Romantic, but the heroine, Wally is extraordinary. She's an elemental, part-woman, part nature spirit, lives alone, in the wilderness, surviving, one imagines, on sheer force of will. Compared with Wally, Carmen is a wimp. This story isn't set in the high Alps for nothing. The mountains loom upwards towards the stratosphere. Extraordinary heroine, extraordinary setting : mountain peaks, frozen glaciers, crevasses, snowstorms and an avalanche. And then the star herself, Gweneth-Ann Jeffers, who created a sensation in 2010's OHP La Forza del destino. Jeffers is unique.Her voice rises fearlessly to any challenge, and is capable of exquisite colour and sensitivity. And she has a personality to match and stage presence. This woman is a born diva and can act so well she can fill a stage on her own (which she does in Act IV). Potentially an ideal Wally.

But was the Opera Holland Park production team working from the same score? There's almost no way anyone could stage La Wally realistically, for a narrative like this demands suspension of disbelief. Landscape settings on this grand scale would have been technically impossible in Catalani's time. Realism in opera isn't "tradition" but aberration. This opera is surreal nature fantasy, but that doesn't mean banal. Designer Jamie Vartan sidesteps the issue altogether, using a painter's dropcloth, suspended by guy ropes that remain clearly visible throughout and threaten to trip the singers at several points. Only in the very end does the dropcloth make sense, when it's manipulated to look like mountains, but by then the opera's nearly over. Until that point, we're staring at the carved portico that remains of Holland Park House which completely  undercuts the idea of open horizons and wilderness. Since the opera itself comprises two distinct parts it might have been more effective to realise the difference with different settings, Perhaps filmed projections would work in the first part, contrasting the banality of village life with the turbulence of nature in the mountains? Even a good old fashioned painted backdrop of mountains and kitsch, so the singers can do their thing unburdened.. 

The staging is so awkward that if you didn't know the plot you'd be lost. Gellner (Stephen Gadd) chases Hagenbach (Adrian Dwyer) up to the peaks and pushes him into a crevasse in the glacier. Wally struggles up the slopes, and pulls him out. Danger, urgency, heroism. If this were a Leni Reifenstahl mountain movie, you'd see slippery ice-clad precipices, and bursts of snow as crampon digs into rockface. (I'll write about Riefenstahl's movie The Holy Mountain next week). Catalani's music describes the urgency and struggle. Whirling figures like wind, trudging staccato, tearing, screaming figures from the string section, alarums from the brass.  Instead what we get at OHP is a trestle table not three feet high, covered with cloth. Gadd scuffles with Dwyer who rolls onto the other side of the table.

And what of Wally, that extraordinary creation? Director Martin Lloyd-Evans keeps Jeffers busy doing things like change her clothes. .As Wally's music shows. It's passionate, throbbing with frustration. That's why Ebben? Ne andrò lontana is so poignant. Wally knows what leaving civilization means. Wally is a complex, confused personality who takes eveything to extremes. Which is why she overreacts to the silly game in the tavern. And why she has no qualms risking her life to save Hagenbach. Jeffers sings with great force and depth, but she's directed to move in an inhibited way, as if she's domesticated and gussied up. Pearls? By nature she's an Edelweisss. Maybe this direction is trying to show how Wally is trapped in the village, but it doesn't bring out the exceptional vividness in her character. I've been following Jeffers's career for about five years and am convinced from past form that she is capable of much more than this. Great potential, underutilized, a wasted resource.

If Jeffers isn't able to act much in this production, her singing makes up for it. Her Act II and Act IV arias are superb, emotionally nuanced, richly coloured.. Jeffers's Wally thinks and feels deeply, and you "hear" the role much more than the largely cardboard way it's shaped in this production. Jeffers sings abroad these days but she really should be groomed for greater things in this country. She's an asset British opera should nurture properly.(and yet another Oxford Lieder Festival graduate).

Generally strong cast.  Adrian Dwyer and Stephen Gadd sing Hagenbach and Gellner better than they are called on to act. Stephen Richardson's Stromminger is weighty - pity the character dies after Act 1. Alinka Kozari's Walther is bright and wittily characterized. Charles Johnston was Il Pedone and Heather Shipp a sparky Afra.

Peter Robinson conducted. Catalani's music isn't sophisticated, relying more on atmospheric effects to paint imagery. Horns on one side, trombones and trumpet on the other, "calling" to one another as villagers in the Alps might do. The sound of distant hunting horns, long booming alpenhorns (trombones), the sound of cowbells, bright sunny flute motifs, not-quite-Ländler dances, just bucolic enough to be humorous. Yet when the story develops into tragedy, Catalani's writing leaps into higher gear. Stormy passages, dread with foreboding, reinforcing Wally's arias. The avalanche roars through the orchestra. We see an acrobat hanging from a rope on stage but the music has already told us that Wally and Hagenbach have been so overwhelmingly engulfed that no trace of them remains.
 
Get to this Catalani La Wally at Opera Holland Park because it's unlikely that there'll be another production any time soon. Don't worry too much about the staging. Focus instead on the singing and the orchestra and enjoy. I'm probably going again Wednesday. A more formal  review is here in Opera Today.  My focus is on the opera and its potential, which is why I avoid doing shallow.

Photos : Gweneth-Ann Jeffers as Wally and Adrian Dwyer as Hagenbach. Photo Fritz Curzon.
Gweneth-Ann Jeffers as Wally and Stephen Richardson as Stromminger. Photo
Fritz Curzon.

Poèmes pour Mi - Gweneth Ann Jeffers Oxford

Who was "Mi" as in Poèmes pour Mi ? She was Claire Delbos, a talented violinist active in new music circles in Paris in the 1920's and 30's. Messiaen adored her. They were married in 1932. For her he wrote violin pieces and the immortal song cycle which bears her pet name. On Friday I heard Gweneth Ann Jeffers and Simon Lepper perform it in the ante-chapel at New College, Oxford. It's a beautiful cycle, though not as wild as Harawi. As Messiaen said, if you want to understand his work, study this cycle as it has all the elements of his later work in embryo.

Poèmes pour Mi starts with delicate moonlight tracery in the piano part which introduces L’Action de graces. The first words “Le ciel” suggest the vast panorama of feelings that will follow. The text repeats phrases starting with “Et…” like a chant in church. Then suddenly the song explodes in delirious joy “Et la Verité, et L’Esprit et la Grace avec son heritage de lumiere”. Then Messiaen challenges the singer with repeated Alléluias, with melismas within the word, stretching the syllables. The fourth song, Épouvante, introduces something strange and surreal, which shouldn’t really come as a surprise to those who know their Messiaen. Jeffers sings the tricky sequence of “ha ha ha ha ha” with the savage grace that is echt Messiaen, then suddenly switching a low “ho”. Vowels mean a lot for they curve round the barbaric imagery in this song which refers to things like “une vomissure triangulaire” (a triangular lump of vomit”. It’s almost like scat singing, or something from a primitive (to western ears) culture.

Then, typically Messiaen switches again to the serenely mystical L’Épouse, where Jeffers keeps her voice hovering, barely above the level of a whisper. Lepper’s piano entwines the vocal line, for this is a song about marital union. The balance is carefully judged. More contrasts with the songs Les Deux Guerriers, and Le Collier. The first is like a march, the lovers being “warriors”, in the sense that angels are sometimes depicted as warriors armed in a cosmic struggle between good and evil. Then suddenly domesticity returns, transfigured with tenderness. Jane Manning, Britain’s great Messiaen champion, wrote of this song, “One can’t help thinking of the mystical properties of crystals and prisms” for the sounds seem to refract in intricate patterns of light. The final song, Prière Exaucée, is demanding, combining guttural sounds like Frappe, tappe, choque with expansive cries, Donnez-moi votre Grace, marital love uniting with the love of God.

Excellent performance as you'd expect from Gweneth Ann Jeffers. easily the best Messiaen singer of her generation. Sadly, Claire Delbos developed some kind of mental illness after the birth of her son and ended up in a psych hospital, where she lived on for 30 years.

http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2008/Jul-Dec08/olf21710.htm

Gweneth-Ann Jeffers Harawi Messiaen

This was the Prom everyone will kick themselves for missing because it was way out in Sloane Square in the middle of the day. Messiaen's Harawi is very rarely heard because it demands technical virtuosity beyond the norm. More than in most vocal work, the voice becomes an instrument : yet even when the singer is singing made-up words or Peruvian, she has to convey several different levels of meaning, musically and emotionally. Gweneth-Ann Jeffers is still young by singer standards and this is not a cycle for the faint hearted. Full marks for ambition ! And she pulls it off. was spectacular. Her singing ranged from barely audible whispers, when describing the sleeping village and the transition to "colombe verte", symbol of erotic love. Then the explosive cosmic tourbillon of song 6 with its manic outbursts and the esctasy when the lovers become transfigured with the stars. Then the very complex rhythmic patterns and sudden changes of direction. Listen and you'll hear what "Doundou Tchil" is. This is a difficult piece because its deliberately elusive and emotionally contradictory. One of the lovers suggests decapitation (what an idea for a date) which implies it's more than a private love pact, and of course the incantation and chanting. The lines are formidably long and the singer has to judge her resources with extreme precision. Also the relationship between piano, voice and silence is intriguing.

There aren't many recordings : Dorothy Dorow/Carl-Axel Dominique is a safe bet. Jane Manning, the British Harawi doyenne, literally "wrote the book" with her detailed and perceptive commentary sadly now out of print. Her recording was made with such emphasis on the piano that she sounds way too distant but she knows what she's doing. So, listen to Gweneth Ann Jeffers and Simon Lepper on the repeat broadcasts. They could be the definitive champions of this work in our time.

Prom PCM4 Harawi Messiaen

If there's any way you can listen to the BBC lunchtime Prom tomorrow (live on BBC Radio 3 and available online on demand for a week), do it ! It's Messiaen's Harawi. Messiaen didn't write much for voice and this is his "big" vocal statement. Tomorrow's singer is Gweneth-Ann Jeffers who is making the piece her speciality. I heard her sing it last February at the South Bank, with the same pianist, Simon Lepper. She was magnificent, and I suspect the ultra high profile of the Proms will bring out even more from her. There's no recording of her, so the broadcast will be important.

Harawi is worth studying because it's Messiaen in miniature, so to speak. Just piano and soprano : but like Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus-Christ, it's homeopathic distllation, powerfully effective. Like so much of Messiaen's other work, it develops in progression, not narrative but impressionistic. Harawi shows that Messiaen's ideas of procession aren't just Christian, for the Gods here are decidedly pagan, not even exclusively Peruvian. Harawi unfolds like a ritual.

Note the strange rhythms, like incantation, like dancers entering mystical trances, hypnotised by repeated sound patterns. The singer sings onomatopaiec sounds, repeated over, interspersed with "real" words from time to time like signposts. Like birds in dense jungles, meaning is glimpsed in sudden flashes of colour. Exotica, for Messiaen, is a vibrant celebration of the richness and diversity of life. Here, though the lovers die, they are transfigured into stars, "Du temps, du ciel, de l'eau". The jungle, too, is a metaphor for intense passion, beyond the constraints of "civilization". So there's menace, too, a kind of exotic, exuberant savagery. Harawi
is often compared to Tristan und Isolde because of the love/death thing but it's much more "primitive" in the sense that these lovers are more than characters but part of the flora and fauna of the mystic jungle they inhabit.