by One of his short stories inspired Tchaikovsky to write his ballet The nutcrackerbut ETA Hoffmann – German romantic writer, polymath, bon vivant – was also a science fiction pioneer. He tried to build his own automatons and invented stories about artificially created creatures even before Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. The wind-up mechanical doll Olympia from his story “The Sandman” (1816) plays a central role in the work of the composer Jacques Offenbach Hoffmann’s storieswhich opened at the Royal Opera in a highly imaginative new production conducted by Antonello Manacorda and directed by Damiano Michieletto. No gag opportunity is missed, no surprise is suppressed. The whole event is a riot carried out with utmost seriousness.
Offenbach died in 1880 before the work could be performed. Had he not done so, he might have left a definitive edition of his strange, twisted, but touching creation. The Royal Opera presents a new edition in a co-production with Opera Australia, Opéra National de Lyon and Teatro La Fenice, Venice. For an opera that is performed regularly but infrequently, changes should hardly be distracting: it creates a level of chronological certainty that the Italian production team is responsible for, among other things, the Royal Opera’s victory Cavalleria Rusticana And Pagliacci last year – free to pursue her wildest fantasies.
And that’s what they do. Industrial amounts of glitter, a pea-green corps de ballet dancing with chairs, extreme wigs, carnival masks, a smashed cello, adorable child ballerinas, parrots and doppelgangers, stilts, drums, hula hoops: all – relatively – standard opera fare. Add to that the shrinking brain, the enlarged eyeball, and the mathematical equations in which whole numbers end up as a choreographed chorus (you had to be there), and a bizarre new Hoffmann-esque world emerges. There are no limits to skill and imagination in Paolo Fantin’s cheerful sets, an extravagance of greens, pinks and purples, with costumes by Carla Teti, lighting by Alessandro Carletti and choreography by Chiara Vecchi.
All of this would be worthless without the excellent soloists, choir and orchestra that deliver Offenbach’s melodic, expansive score. In short, old man Hoffmann remembers his failed childhood loves: Olympia (Olga Pudova), who is just a doll; Antonia (Ermonela Jaho), who will die if she sings – her talent is shown here through the metaphor of dance; and Giulietta (Marina Costa-Jackson), a courtesan. Pudova’s coloratura, chiseled and icy, and her stiff, clockwork gestures stole the show, but Jaho, as always, felt the heartbreak of the work. Costa-Jackson made the most of the less well-rounded character of the glamorous Giulietta.
Hoffmann himself is a curiosity, difficult to understand but elegantly sung by Juan Diego Flórez, the intonation always assured, although his top notes sometimes lingered a little too long. His arch-enemies – various devilish characters played with uncanny brilliance and sublime vocal finesse by Alex Esposito – fascinated us. With excellent support from Julie Boulianne, Christine Rice, Jeremy White, Alastair Miles and others, and a committed choir who had to perform unusually complex sequences including lying on their backs and wiggling their feet, the Royal Ballet and Opera were at their best .
The orchestra delivered this long score with endless vigor and attention to detail. Manacorda had a good and idiomatic pace in the performance, although the stop-start intervals were too large for applause. After so many exuberant operettas, Offenbach wanted to be taken seriously. This production celebrates his strange and idiosyncratic genius.
Composers of one generation can cast both shadow and light on the next. The Romantics of the 19th century fought under Beethoven’s tonnage. For a generation, Sibelius dominated Finland. The composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen (born 1958) said in a recent interview: “When I was growing up. I decided to go to Italy to study because I wanted to be away from Sibelius – he was everywhere.” Now based in Los Angeles but back in London as a conductor and laureate of the Philharmonia OrchestraSalonen praises Sibelius as the greatest artist in Finnish history. Accordingly, a deep understanding informed his interpretation of Sibelius’ Symphony No. 1 and characterized the orchestra’s fearless, well-rehearsed playing.
The centerpiece of this all-Finnish concert, after the short, jubilant flounce by Lotta Wennäkoski (born 1970), first heard at the Proms in 2017, was the British premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Viola Concerto. As a friend and exact contemporary of Salonen, Lindberg more likely absorbed the influence of Sibelius and created pieces that captured similar expanses of the Nordic landscape, whether musical or actual. He wrote the viola concerto for Lawrence Power, one of the instrument’s most imaginative exponents and currently a guest artist at the Southbank Centre.
The three movements flow into one another and are interrupted by exhilarating brass fanfares. The soloist employs every string technique: pizzicato (plucking), quadruple touch (striking four strings at once), harmony (lightly touching the string to create ghostly, ethereal high notes), and in an extended cadence, playing the viola as…banjo and singing along , as if searching for notes in the ether. All this, and the long, lyrical lines that characterize this middle-voiced instrument, made this a captivating work that immediately deserves a place in the repertoire if anyone other than Power is able to play it (Timothy Ridout or Tabea Zimmermann ). should be fine with it).
Another world-class string player, the Norwegian Vilde Frang, made a convincing argument for Erich Korngold’s Violin Concerto, which draws on melodies from his own Hollywood film scores and which provoked inevitable scorn in some circles at the time when it premiered in 1947. In a concert with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Led by the orchestra’s principal conductor, Kirill Petrenko, Frang captured the mood of bittersweet melancholy and longing, galloping to an elfin, catch-me-if-you-can finale as lush horns announced the lush main theme in the final section. The orchestra also played Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 as if this familiar score had been torn to pieces – Petrenko analyzing every note, every measure in depth – and reconstructed with fresh, rebellious, carefree energy.
The other work was Rachmaninov’s tone poem The island of the deadinspired by Arnold Böcklin’s spooky painting. A mysterious rock melody builds to a wild climax that is often compared to Charon bringing the dead to Hades. The Berliners united in a mighty roar. The River Styx was in full flood. The return to a perfectly muted pianissimo was balm for the soul.
