Handel, Agrippina, dir: David McVicar. Soloists, orchestra of the English National Opera, cond. Daniel Reuss. English National Opera at the London Coliseum, 05.02. 2007 (ME)

 

 

Christine Rice (Nerone) and Lucy Crowe (Poppea)

 

O f***, f***, f***, f****** - f***. I knew there’d be cocaine somewhere, of course – and wouldn’t you guess it, they saved it for my f****** favourite aria, ‘Come nube fugge dal vento’ – and it wasn’t just a teensy little line, but whole Ziplocs of the stuff, poured out over a sarcophagus/seat just to amuse us as Nerone sang his aria – because you know, of course, that audiences are simply too stupid to listen to an aria: they need to have relentless visual trickery to help all that weirdo music stuff go down, and most of all they absolutely must have any high note by a countertenor accompanied by a prolonged balls-squeeze. No doubt the esteemed director would say, ‘I’m f****** trying to do something f****** different here,’ to which my reply would be, ‘Well you’ve already f****** done it six times before, and this is just more of the f****** same.’ But of course, I don’t speak like that. 

 

This production is most emphatically not in the line of the wonderful ENO Xerxes and Semele: where those were witty and urbane, this is silly and adolescent; where those were updatings and trans-society equivalents which actually made sense and illuminated the works, this is yet more of the ‘whorish applause-seeking’ which we saw in the same director’s Giulio Cesare at Glyndebourne. One always has to defend oneself against accusations of being old-fashioned and curmudgeonly, but anyone who has read my reviews over the past seven years will know that I love updated productions such as the aforementioned ENO classics, but this one is just a rehash of things we’ve seen before, including dance routines, supposedly louche hangers-on, and of course the old trademark of a character doing something completely at odds with the music he is singing, Claudio’s golf practice during ‘Come to my arms’ being a case in point.

 

Lucy Crowe (Poppea) and Sarah Connolly (Aggripina)

 

The programme is full of photographs of powerful women such as Margaret Thatcher, Indira Ghandi and Hillary Clinton: we seem to be invited to draw parallels with Agrippina, but all these women, whether as Prime Minister or Senator, were powerful individuals on the same level as any man, which is quite different to the role Agrippina played in history and in the opera. At one and the same time in this production, we find the women presented as manipulative and yet hopelessly ditzy. In fact, the staging seems to me calculated to offend women and gays in equal measure. Firstly, it is an unpleasantly misogynistic view of women – the men can hold their booze, the women get embarrassingly drunk; the men are venial at worst, heroic at best; the women are hysterical, the men stoical, and so on. One’s heart sank yet again to see so many people swigging from bottles of Beck’s – does the director really imagine Hillary Clinton doing that? No, of course not – it’s just lazy shorthand, like the carrying of a mobile phone. As for gays, do we really need those mincing supernumeraries?

 

The singing, of course, redeems much. Sarah Connolly is not yet the ideal Agrippina: as so often with this singer, she needs time to sing the role into her voice. She gave a wonderful account of ‘Pensieri, voi mi tormentate’ and her brow-beating of her son and deceiving of Poppea were done with great conviction. If her soft-grained voice is not perfectly suited to some of the more dramatic outbursts, she still had enough histrionic power to enable you to imagine her saying, as the real Agrippina is reputed to have remarked, when she was told that Nero would eventually kill her – ‘Occidat, dum imperet!’ (Let him, as long as he is emperor!). Her husband, Claudio, was given an underpowered performance by Brindley Sherratt, who is simply not the Handelian Basso required in this role; his lower register sounded insecure, and his diction was woolly at times.

 

 

L-R Trevor Goldstein, Reno Troilus (Ottone) and Andrew Carter

 

The roles of Ottone and Nerone are, of course, often the subject of dispute – should they both be sung by countertenors, both by women or one of each? Handel wrote the part of Ottone for a woman and not a castrato, but the leading exponents of it today are countertenors. The director did not give Reno Troilus an easy task: got up to look like a cross between a drum major and a P&O steward, he came across as petulant rather than heroic, and the daft soft shoe shuffle routine did not help. His pleas of ‘Give me justice!’ did not wring the heart as they should: this is a small voice, artfully used but lacking in colour and definition – as this was his major house debut, one can hope for better things in the future. Nerone, on the other hand, is usually taken by a countertenor, but on this occasion we had the mezzo-soprano, Christine Rice, tricked out to look like a mixture of a grunger and a chav and given a whole repertoire of annoying teenage tics, in pretty much the same manner as Angelika Kirchschlager’s Sesto in Giulio Cesare. As always with this singer, she gave the director everything she had and more, singing with convincing passion and elegant phrasing: Nerone’s music is frequently higher than that of Agrippina, and Ms Rice rose to every challenge. It was a pity that her finest vocal moment ‘Come nube fugge dal vento’ was spoiled by all the silly antics she had to perform with the powder.

 

Poppea is presented as a sort of Princess Diana figure, capricious, vain and yet with a soft centre. Lucy Crowe might be said to have got her big break in this role, after Rebecca Evans withdrew from the production, and she certainly made her mark: from the first line of ‘Vaghe perle’ it was clear that this is a genuine Handel soprano, bright in tone, clear in diction and agile in ornamentation. What a shame that the lovely scene in which Ottone is supposed to find her amidst flowers, instead presented her as binge-drunk.

 

Henry Waddington’s Pallante and Steven Wallace’s Narciso were both strongly sung and characterized, although they sometimes risked being upstaged by Richard Suart’s Lesbo. The orchestra was in the safe hands of Daniel Reuss, the principal conductor of the RIAS Kammerchor: this was his ENO debut, and he opted for caution rather than daring – there was much fine playing to savour, not least from Stephen Higgins as the harpsichord soloist. Paule Constable once again provided evocative and atmospheric lighting: of course, I hated the choreography, but that was the fault of the concept rather than of Andrew George, who did his best with it. Amanda Holden’s translation was flip and glib.

 

According to John Mainwaring (Handel’s biographer), the audience at the first night of Agrippina had never known till then ‘all the powers of harmony and modulation so closely arrayed, so forcibly combined’ – this early work, by the then twenty-four year old composer, is far too infrequently performed, and the music and much of the singing make the long evening worthwhile despite the shallowness of the production.

 

Melanie Eskenazi

 

 

Pictures © English National Opera and Clive Barda