SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD CONCERT REVIEW
 

Prom 61 - Humperdinck, Hansel und Gretel: Soloists, Glyndebourne Festival Opera Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Robin Ticciati. Royal Albert Hall, London 31.8.2010 (JPr)

 

Who’s kidding who(m)? Nobody lives ‘Happily Ever After’. The idea itself fails to address life’s ambiguities but still manages to remain the basis of all the great fairytales. In general, the Grimm Brothers’ version of an older story tells of Hansel and Gretel’s successful struggle for survival in a tempting but dangerous world. To win through, they must overcome hunger and their abusive parents who are on the verge of infanticide because there is no food on the table. Then there is the matter of a kidnapping, followed by cannibalism and the burning of the wicked witch. So this is more than just a mere fairy story, often put on as a pantomime and here, famously, as Humperdinck’s finest opera. But it’s surely a wonder that it’s plot doesn’t get it banned - or deemed an adult-only entertainment - for fear of damaging young minds. Come to think of it, the current production at Covent Garden is not reckoned suitable for children under 8.

After the first performance in 1893 Humperdinck became a victim of his own success and nothing else he wrote matched this opera’s popularity. Now 117 years later - and with a version of Lauren Pelly’s Glyndebourne production, this performance came as close to a first fully-staged Proms performance as the platform restrictions at the Royal Albert Hall allow. Not having seen it at Glyndebourne this summer I cannot comment on the two experiences but I understand that Pelly’s original uses cardboard boxes to underline the greedy, consumerist age that the ‘better-off’ can enjoy. How appropriate it was then to hear the loudmouthed audience member behind me regaling an entire section of the Stalls with her delight in being able to pay £100 for a limousine to take her back from the concert ‘because she could’ : and to add how the experience would mean more than ‘any cashmere sweater she could have’. Meanwhile, her companions discussed the horrors of travelling second-class on a train with ‘the great unwashed’! Had they only seen the full Hansel and Gretel production this summer at Glyndebourne, I doubt strongly that they would have appreciated its irony in comparison to their so publicly announced lifestyles!

Sadly squeezed onto a limited performing area just below the organ, not much of Pelly’s vision or Barbara de Limburg Stirum’s set designs can have survived in Stéphane Marlot’s semi-staging. There was some pastel shaded lighting judiciously used right from the beginning to evoke moonlight or a forest glade. Act I was fairly traditional with a bed and a few other pieces of furniture; then to give an impression of the forest in Act II there were some brooms and broomsticks standing upright and finally in Act III, a substantial number of cardboard boxes finally appeared. It was in this last Act that the performance really took off with a wonderful visual gag of showing the Witch’s house as a mini-Royal Albert Hall made from brightly colour packages of what appeared to be junk food.

The young British conductor Robin Ticciati, led a subtly-detailed, exuberant account of the score. It all seemed more Wagnerian than ever with its pastiches of some of ‘The Master’s’ non-operatic marches and swathes of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Parsifal and Siegfried. Ticciati – a dead-ringer for his mentor Simon Rattle when he was his age – will have a great future once he moves on from Hansel and Gretel: he has conducted it work at Covent Garden already and will debut at The Met with it too.

Mahler considered this opera ‘a masterpiece’. When he conducted it, he must have learnt a great deal from Humperdinck’s evocative use of folk song and all the other ravishing melodies in a score played here with exquisite phrasing and ravishing beauty by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, responding to every nuanced colour and texture with sublime virtuosity.

At the end of a run of recent performances, all the singers were high in confidence but not enough of them were capable of overcoming the orchestra and the vastness of the Royal Albert Hall. To be fair to both audience and performers there is an argument to say that some form of amplification should be used in these circumstances. Can the audience in the upper reaches of the Circle hear enough – but then, does anyone actually care?

Irmgard Vilsmaier's Fricka-like Mother was the only voice that could slice through the orchestral accompaniment. Ideally, Father needs a darker voice than William Dazeley has but it was a great idea to have him come on from the back of the arena with plastic bags that he eventually gave to one of the percussionists to hold for him. As he struggled up and over rails to get ‘home’, all the pauses, twists and turns in his song were perfectly timed with Ticciati and the orchestra - words cannot do this any justice! As often happens, Alice Coote's Hansel and Lydia Teuscher's Gretel over-played their roles as the children although Teuscher’s charmingly girlish Gretel was sung with a smallish, sweet soprano and Coote’s very dark mezzo gave us a typically rambunctious portrait of Hansel. It was only the Wagnerian potential at the top to her voice however that rang out through the vastness of the auditorium.

The best overall performance of the evening was from character tenor Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke as the Witch, who the children first encountered dressed in a pink twinset and with a shocking ginger wig. The wig soon found itself adorning the head of Sir Henry Wood’s bust! And while mentioning ‘bust’ … Ablinger-Sperrhacke later returned to the stage revealing an over-full bra and a prosthetic hairy stomach. The Witch’s wheedling deceit and knife-wielding cackling enthusiasm for baking children comes out best when, as here, this character is played ‘in drag’ because it points up how much the Witch’s motivations owe to Mime in Siegfried.

I suspect that Glyndebourne did better than a cardboard cut-out oven and the demise of the Witch here was rather botched, although it left the platform to the hapless lost children’s return to life after the Witch had previously turned into gingerbread. They had been in white for earlier appearances, such as the Dream Pantomime, but they returned clumsy and obese. The audience always laughs with embarrassment at seeing this perhaps because it’s a little too close to home and they know that some similar children will certainly not live ‘Happily Ever After. ’ Food-for-thought indeed!

Jim Pritchard  

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