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SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL OPERA REVIEW
Coproduction with Opéra de Lyon
Direction: Grzegorz Jarzyna
Sets: Magdalena Maria Maciejewska
Costumes: Anna Nykowska Duszynska
Lighting: Jacqueline Sobiszewski
Cast: L'Enfant
The Child: Tara Erraught
Mother / Tea Cup / Dragonfly: Okka von der Damerau
Bergère / Bat: Laura Tatulescu
Fire / Nightingale: Rachele Gilmore
Princess: Camilla Tilling
Cat / Squirrel: Angela Bower
Clock / Tomcat: Nikolay Borchev
Teapot / Old Man / Frog: Kevin Conners
et al.
Cast Der Zwerg
Donna Clara: Camilla Tilling
Ghita: Irmgard Vilsmaier
Don Estoban: Paul Gay
Der Zwerg: John Daszak
et al.
Production Picture - L'enfant et les sortilèges
A Midget, Frogs, and Broken Tea Cups
A wonderful -because rare and original
- double bill at the Bavarian State
Opera: Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortileges and Alexander
Zemlinsky's Der Zwerg. Ravel's 45-minute tale about the
unruly child, its nightmarish-fantastical visions, and eventual
repentance is an adorable and lyrical feast for the ears… at least
throughout part II, the dream scene in which the animals and pets come
to life. Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of the whole night are the
animal costumes that Anna Nykowska
Duzsynska created for Grzegorz Jarzyna's direction. When Kevin Conners'
Frog gets to give his Squirrel-love Angela Brower a peck, it's cute
enough to make hardened hearts melt -
amid very solid singing and a willing, enthusiastic orchestra
under Kent Nagano.
Grzegorz Jarzyna opens the opera as a film shown on a wide screen
above the set, where a Walter
Felsenstein-esque opera movie of "L'Enfant et les sortileges" is being
shot. That would make sense if it had a
child movie star gone wild ... an obnoxious
little brat (as they invariably are) with his tantrums thrown at the
stage-trailer, abusing the film crew and director around him. But
that's not the case; the child merely acts its role within the
film-within-the-opera. Is this a way
to present a realistic version of something unrealistic? Or is the
'acting' perhaps the excuse for the child's
behavior and the explanation for its 'repentance'? If the latter, it
would rob the opera of its entire, sole point… so perhaps this first
part - which is
also the musically less gratifying -
is better not pondered. The costumes are inventive but the
characterization of the Wedgewood teapot, for example, is insufferably
clownish; some of the voices -
the Fire (slightly better, later on, as the Nightingale) and
the Kid (Tara Erraught) -
were not impressive. But all that is
forgotten by the time the film
director and sound technician enter within the dream, metamorphosed as
ridiculously adorable fat prairie dogs or
some such creatures.
Camilla Tilling and John Daszak in Der Zwerg
I
love
the music of Alexander Zemlinsky (1871 - 1942). How superb to get
to hear (!) his third-last opera, "The Dwarf", (incompetently) adapted
from Oscar Wilde's short story
The Birthday of the Infanta. It's really, really too
bad that it's not a particularly good opera.
Or at least not a good enough opera to make a lasting impression on
stage - with a direction that had
spent its main ideas on Ravel's Enfant
and gave Zemlinsky an obviously very accomplished
and professional treatment, but certainly
not the most imaginative one. As a
stage work, Der Zwerg -
lacking that bit of added sophistication that the operas of
Zemlinsky's contemporary Franz
Schreker (1878 - 1934) contain -
can't quite get by on craftsmanship
alone. Fortunately
though, the music can.
Written between 1919 and 1921, there are musically analogous moments
to Richard Strauss (melodies for the voices and solo instruments),
Gustav Mahler (orchestral color, including the use of mandolin) and
Richard Wagner (harmonies). After some smug march music the lyrical,
sweet, wallowing, romantic gene of Zemlinsky inevitably breaks
through.
Zemlinsky adapts the story to whine on -for
a whole 90 minutes
- about how he, Zemlinsky, is
so ugly that Alma
Schindler (Mahler / Gropius / Werfel) couldn't possibly love him. The
uninspired finale drones on forever; the Dwarf's demise being chewed
back and forth like cud. As far as autobiographical whining is
concerned it's not as bad as Bernstein's insufferable
Kaddish Symphony, but it isn't
dramatically compelling, either. The text doesn't seem very naturally
set to the music, and the music is awfully tough for the voices. That
John Daszak navigated the uncomfortable part of the Dwarf as well as
he did was one of the marvels of the evening.
Camilla Tilling's naïve-yet-calculating infanta Donna Clara-Salome's
childish, but technically older,
stepsister-was a wholly pleasing performance
too. Paul Gay's Major Domo (Don Estoban) was undermined
by his character's getup; an obnoxiously cliché-drenched freak with a
'Garry-Oldman-is-Bram-Stoker's-Dracula' hairdo. That's part of the
production's aim of course: the
infanta's birthday party is the
actual freak-show and 'the dwarf'
is not only regular size but reasonably handsome. His
version of being 'ugly' is in fact
simply to be 'different'. But the grotesque
element of the party-folk is so mild that the contrast never really
works - Kriegenburg's
Wozzeck (also from the Bavarian State Opera) serves as an example
of how it can be done.
Jens F. Laurson is Critic-at-Large of Washington's
Public Radio station,
Classical WETA
90.9 FM.
All pictures © Wilfried Hösl, courtesy Bavarian State Opera