There’s an old Bugs Bunny cartoon with the punchline, “What’d ya expect in a opera – a happy ending?” It’s a fair point. Opera does of course do comedy, but tends to misery/pain/anguish as default positions. And they were defaulting to excess at the start of the year when London’s two main lyric companies – at Covent Garden and the Coliseum – offered, side by side, two of the darkest, most disturbing works in the whole repertoire.
The Covent Garden show was Strauss’s brutally abrasive take on Ancient Greek mythology, Elektra: two hours of emotional assault and battery that must have traumatised the opera’s early Austro-German audiences in the 1900s. You can understand why Sigmund Freud had such a busy workload.
Understandably neurotic after witnessing her father murdered by his wife, Elektra fantasises about retribution. It arrives on bloodbath terms as part of a relentless eyes-for-eyes and teeth-for-teeth cycle of violence that supplies a lesson for our own times. And at Covent Garden, staged by Christof Loy, it played out in something like our own times, driving home the point.
The first night wasn’t vocally ideal, with Nina Semme struggling in the title role and Karita Mattila failing to project as Klytämnestra, but they both had presence, and there was a radiant Chrysothemis from Sara Jakubiak. The epic weight of the piece was magnificently delivered by the Royal Opera’s orchestra under Antonio Pappano, who’s going out with all guns blazing in his final new production as musical director.
Meanwhile, at the Coliseum, ENO’s arrestingly grim The Handmaid’s Tale – an operatic adaptation of the Margaret Atwood novel by composer Poul Ruders – returned to the stage, as devastating as before. You’ll know the story, if only from the TV series: its dystopian narrative of fundamentalist religious bigotry delivers a still greater gut punch with the help of music, churning menacingly, unrelieved and unresolved. As nightmares go, it’s masterful. And like the nightmares of Greek drama, you could call its end result cathartic: a purging of the soul from which we all emerge somehow the better. Maybe.
Mendelssohn did not, I think, set out to purge souls when he wrote his oratorio Elijah. The intention was to comfort them, with music that confirmed his status as an icon of the Protestant Victorian middle-classes. The mid-19th century was a time of uncertainty for English Protestants as they saw themselves threatened on one side by the forward march of science, and on the other by the lure of Catholicism. But Mendelssohn’s oratorios, drawing as they did on solid Lutheran models, provided a sense of orthodoxy and assurance that made them hugely popular. The minor complication that Mendelssohn was born a German Jew – albeit baptised in childhood – barely registered.
It’s there, though, in Elijah where the classic conflicts of a Jew-turned-Christian feed into the way the tale is told. The chosen texts release the prophet from his role as vengeful heir to Moses into a happier one as herald of Jesus, taking care to highlight incidents where the lives of Elijah and Jesus are mirrored in things like the performance of miracles. All this was food for thought at the Barbican last month when the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus gave a supercharged Elijah under Antonio Pappano, who turns up everywhere these days.
Like his Elektra, it blazed with stunning soloists, including Gerald Finley who gave due weight to Elijah’s fire-and-brimstone rants but tempered them with human warmth. He almost made the old man likeable. And as he partnered the young treble who announces that the drought of God’s punishment will end, it was both touching and impressive, with the treble – Ewan Christian, head chorister at Westminster Cathedral – managing his solos like a true pro.
When it comes to being the complete professional, though, there are few in the league of violinist Maxim Vengerov. He’s had career dips in the past but lives to tell the tale. And he was telling it with easy virtuosity in January with a performance of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre with the Oxford Philharmonic.
Vengerov’s rich, full-fat tone makes other violinists sound anaemic, and it dazzled here. Under its proprietor-conductor Marios Papadopoulos, the Oxford Philharmonic gets a mixed press. But it pulls in freelance players of distinction, and attracts the starriest of soloists – among them Lang Lang, Martha Argerich and Anne-Sophie Mutter. That such big names want to work alongside Papadopoulos is telling, and on nights like this with Vengerov, he pulls rabbits out of hats.
My only gripe was with the horribly hard seats of the Sheldonian. Next year, a brand-new symphony-sized concert hall is scheduled to open in the city. It can’t arrive too soon.
This article first appeared in the March 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.
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