Opera

20th-century blues

Rodney Milnes

Where the Wild Things Are (National: Lyttelton) Wozzeck (Covent Garden)

The undoubted success of Knussen's Wild Things was encouraging on a number of counts. How nice to see a new opera instantly selling out 17 performances to what looked like an unoperatic public, to see Glyndebourne returning to the NT (they should be lured from their Sussex closet as frequently as possible) and indeed to see a good — and short — new opera for chil- dren. It charmed our drama critic last week, though Mr Gordon found the actual music `vapid and unworthy'. I didn't. I thought it witty and derivative in the right sort of way, full of good operatic jokes and deserving hommages a any number of composers from Ravel to Tchaikovsky. Knussen's

voice remained, however, quite individual.

Yet this has to be an interim report. The Lyttelton pit — or rather under-stage area — cuts off the sound like a knife, as it did

in Don Giovanni seven years ago, and despite some discreet amplification I felt I

was hearing only half the score, and so look forward to seeing it in more sympathetic auditoria on the Glyndebourne tour later in the year, and then in Sussex in 1985.

Some commentators have felt that the climactic Wild Rumpus is a let-down. Even on half-evidence I suspect not. Here as elsewhere the one thing wrong with the show is lack of direction — odd in that on all available evidence Frank Corsaro is a

prodigious over-director (bruised memories of poor Prokofiev's Oranges linger still).

The technical expertise of the Things themselves and the beguiling ease with which Maurice Sendak's lovely cloths whizz up and down almost succeed in disguising the fact that the piece is scarcely directed at all. Max's destructive rampage at the begin- ning seemed embarrassingly random, and any possible failure of the Rumpus stems less from Knussen than from the director.

Perhaps too much energy had been expend- ed on the Things, too little on discipline and blocking. But there's plenty of time to get this sorted out before the autumn.

Otherwise, praise for the Max I heard, Rosemary Hardy, for his mother, Mary King, and for Jane Glover's energetic con- ducting of the London Sinfonietta.. As my companion remarked, the most frightening thing in the whole show was Dr Glover's disembodied arms emerging from a sea of dry ice to give cues. Should the opera be more frightening? Gamely suppressing my regrettable Herodian tendencies, I still felt that a child that hanged its teddy bear and then stabbed it and was foul to its mother into the bargain thoroughly deserved to be sent to bed without its supper and then frightened out of its wits on a Ravellian rather than a Sendakian scale. No, Giles Gordon has of course got it right: charm is the name of the game, dollops of it, and very nice too.

After a shaky couple of months, faith in the Royal Opera was swiftly restored by the

best revival of Wozzeck within living

memory, thanks in equal measure to Christoph von Dohnanyi's superb con- ducting, the responsive orchestral playing and Jose Van Dam's heroic interpretation of the title-role. Technically the perfor- mance was faultless: for all the articulate splendour of the playing, every word was audible. This involved no diminution of dramatic or musical impact, indeed quite the opposite. The clarity of the textures compelled the closest attention to what was going on musically and in the process

reminded one that for all the complexity of construction Wozzeck is a very, very

beautiful score as well as a terrifying one. Dohnanyi caught the balance perfectly in a masterly reading that could be described as angry; the final interlude was as much an accusation as a threnody.

Mr Van Dam's Wozzeck was more beau- tifully sung than any I have heard — there was nary a Teutonic bark from this fine bel- canto bass-baritone. His untraditional characterisation of a heroic figure, a giant surrounded by dwarves, a visionary ham- pered only by inarticulateness (cf. Grimes, Budd) carried total conviction. Anja Silja's Marie sounded a little wayward in the theatre, but a glance at the score reminds one how inhumanly demanding her music is, and one can only admire an inter- pretation on as grand a scale as Van Dam's. There was helpful supporting playing from James King (Drum Major), Kim Begley (Andres who, since he has no need to, should beware of over-singing), and Phyllis Cannan (Margret, busting out all over).

The revival was given in Caspar Neher's classic sets (1953), which needed to be more sympathetically lit, but with some nasty new costumes that didn't begin to work. It was newly produced by Willi Decker. Well, it was at least a production, and one shouldn't be ungrateful, but frequent out- bursts of heavy expressionism proved a fearful trial. The Doctor's scene, with five extra students miming away like lunatics, was a write-off (oh for Otakar Kraus frightening us all to death by doing absolutely nothing), the two Inn scenes went way over the top, and a dainty little freeze killed the last scene stone dead. Play- ing the Doctor and Captain (Hermann Winkler, musically outstanding) as grotes- ques is surely a mistake, in that it diminishes Wozzeck's tragedy. They are ordinary peo- ple, their evil is of the banal variety, and their grotesquerie is in the music. Berg's `htisten' was replaced by Buchner's `pissen' (on stage at one point, I fear), another mistake. As an asthmatic, Berg knew pre- cisely what he was doing — cf. Schigolch. Enough niggling: this is an exceptional revival and should not be missed.

Nor indeed should ENO's Screw. The score, very musically conducted by Lionel 'So you don't think the placebos I gave you are working.' Friend, sounds as good in the Coliseum as Lucretia did, and Jonathan Miller's pro- duction asks all the right questions without being so presumptuous as to answer any of them. But he does seem to be suggesting — or rather I am — that Britten's enigmatic masterpiece is not about ghosts but about the borderline between childhood and adolescence. It ends with two inadequate and neurotic adults mentally torturing a pubertal child to death. The child, I VI convinced, is the composer, and who knows what adolescent trauma made him write the opera as he did.

The way this Miles (Nicholas Sillitoe) screamed 'you devil' directly at the. Governess at his moment of death came as a nasty shock, and made one wonder if perhaps Jill Gomez, singing exquisitely in her ENO debut, had made her too sympathetic. There is a case for playing her as a brainless, interfering bitch, one who out of her own inadequacy mistakes all Miles's appeals for challenges. Anyway, at this performance there was no doubt as to the subject and object of her line 'together we have destroyed him'. Enough useless speculation. The cast is first-rate with, 01 addition to Miss Gomez, Philip Langridge (Quint) making as auspicious a house debut, Lois McDonall as a chilling Miss Jessel, and no weak links elsewhere.

We are always being told that opera is a dead art form. This fortnight of 20th- century works, none of them by Puccini or Strauss, suggested otherwise, even if as a reflection of our civilisation none was ex- actly flattering.