If you don't go to opera for pretty tunes ...

Michael Berkeley's name seems to recur On An Overgrown Path. He is the son of Lennox Berkeley, presents one of the best programmes on the radio, is Benjamin Britten's godson, and most importantly is a major composing talent in his own right. The Opera Theatre of St. Louis have just given the US premiere of his new opera Jane Eyre, and here is the review from STLtoday.

The story is compressed beyond mere telescoping. The score is musically and dramatically intense. But if you don't go to opera primarily for pretty tunes and costumes, Michael Berkeley's "Jane Eyre" might just prove to be your cup of tea. Seen at its U.S. premiere Sunday night at Opera Theatre of St. Louis, "Jane Eyre" doesn't pull any punches. At 80 minutes, it may be too tightly written for the drama it explores. David Malouf's libretto, from Charlotte Bronte's classic novel, jettisons all of Jane's early story and most details of her time at Thornfield. If it's been a few years since you read the book (or saw a movie treatment), be sure to read the synopsis before the lights go down.

Berkeley's score, however, effectively conveys Thornfield's menace, its hidden mistress' madness, Mr. Rochester's anguish and Jane's evolving emotions. It opens effectively with the low wind instruments and builds spikily to the climax. Berkeley quotes briefly from Britten's "The Turn of the Screw" and frequently from Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor." He and Malouf have drawn a not-altogether-convincing connection between criminally insane Bertha Rochester and unstable Lucy Ashton, who went mad when forced to marry the wrong tenor and murdered her groom on their wedding night. I'm not sure a close reading of Bronte supports that conclusion, but it makes Bertha a far more interesting and sympathetic character than the raging beast who's usually portrayed.

Opera Theatre artistic director Colin Graham has staged "Jane" for the maximum dramatic impact. He is ably assisted by Erhard Rom's simple sets and atmospheric projections in bringing out the story's claustrophobic nature and the house's Gothic gloom. The excellent cast is headed by soprano Kelly Kaduce in the title role. She captured both Jane's matter-of-factness and her anguish at the discovery of Rochester's proposed bigamy. Singing with a large, clear, well-produced voice, she brought the character to life.Production shots sow Kelly Kaduce (Jane Eyre), Scott Hendricks (Mr Rochester, and Elizabeth Batton (Mrs Rochester)

Baritone Scott Hendricks brooded nicely and sang strongly and with presence. Mezzo-soprano Elizabeth Batton as Bertha Rochester made the role her own, with a rich, dark voice and edgy air of madness. As Mrs. Fairfax, mezzo-soprano Robynne Redmon made clear both the housekeeper's essential decency and her role in Rochester's deception. Soprano Adele Reiter sang sweetly as Adele and made a convincing child. Jane Greenwood's costumes were perfectly in period, and perfect for these characters. In the pit, conductor Andreas Mitisek and members of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra handled the difficult, complicated score with aplomb.

* St Louis Symphony blog via this link.

Image credits: Michael Berkeley - BBC, St Louis production shots © 2006 Cory Weaver from theoperacritic.com. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath atdot co dot uk hotmail
If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to Primetime TV for new opera

Comments

Pliable said…
The review from the Dallas Morning News is more perceptive, particularly in its Britten references:

The new opera's compact scale, musical language and even its story suggest comparisons with Benjamin Britten, who was Mr. Berkeley's godfather. Mr. Berkeley's father was another eminent British composer, Sir Lenox Berkeley.

One is especially reminded of Britten's The Turn of the Screw: gloomy manor house, often-absentee landlord, naive young governess, earnest housekeeper, high-spirited young girl, malign ghostly presence. And Mr. Berkeley's score suggests a richer, more complex updating of Britten's manner, with more intricate wreathings of multiple musical strands.

The opera opens with dark growls and grumblings from double bass, contrabassoon and bass clarinet, later answered with sinister high keenings. Woozy string slides evoke the otherworldly scenes of Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream. A couple of not-quite-right dances heighten the sense of disequilibrium.

Mr. Malouf and Mr. Berkeley seem to have imagined Mrs. Rochester, the psychotic wife locked away in the attic, as a real presence. But Colin Graham's staging, with designer Erhard Rom's higgledy-piggledy big panels and fuzzy projections, made her more ambiguous, like the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw. Mezzo Elizabeth Batton admirably captured her confused obsession and "dark as molasses" voice.

Kelly Kaduce was the very personification of Jane's decency, her soprano gleaming and glowing. Scott Hendricks brought a pleasantly burly baritone, and a presence balancing the rough-hewn and the tragic, to the role of Edward Rochester. Elizabeth Reiter was a bright, perky Adèle, but with an apt strangeness. Robynne Redmon was the sturdy housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax.

Conductor Andreas Mitisek got capable, responsive playing from members of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, but one could imagine a tauter, more finely honed performance. The blurry projections looked amateurish, and the first few minutes of the June 16 performance were marred by supertitle malfunctions.

There's about 90 percent of a very good opera here, with a strong tale and well-wrought, richly evocative music. But the happy ending, with Mr. Rochester and Jane reunited, comes out of the clear blue, without adequate preparation or transition. An extra five or 10 minutes might help a lot.

With thanks to Bronteblog for the link.
9:53 pm
Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

David Munrow - more than early music

Image
'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities. ...
Read more

Classical music must be doing something wrong

Image
Classical music's website of choice Slipped Disc  today runs a story on the latest RAJAR UK radio listening figures . This story states that a "...record number of individual hours was spent listening to [BBC Radio 3]. They must be doing something right". Which is good news; but only for those who believe that facts should never stand in the way of a good story. Because simple arithmetic shows that BBC Radio 3 is not doing very much right, while UK classical radio in its entirety is doing something wrong.   In the quarter ended September 2024, BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM audiences were 2.039m and 4.416m respectively. Which gives a total audience for the two classical stations of 6.455m. For the same quarter in September 2023 the audiences were 2.002m and 4.467m, giving a total classical radio audience 12 months previously of 6.469m.  So BBC Radio 3's "something right" turns out to be a fractional increase in its audience year on year, and a contribution ...
Read more

Soundtrack for a porn movie

Image
"No, you have not landed on Slipped Disc by mistake. Respected electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze tells the story himself.  The origins of " Body Love " are quite funny. I received a call from a movie producer named Manfred Menz and I wound up becoming his principal composer for a period of time. Amongst others, I composed the "Barracuda" soundtrack for him [1978, previously unreleased on album]. This led to a friendship which lasts till today. Menz now lives in Malibu, California where I visited him a couple of years ago. Anyway, this guy calls me and asks if I would compose the score to a porn movie. I said: "Porn? Nah, I don't do that kind of thing".  As it turned out, the director of the movie, Lasse Braun, had already shot it and had used my albums " Timewind " [1975] and " Moondawn " [1976] as a kind of "working soundtrack". This was obvious because the couples in the film were moving in time to my gro...
Read more

The act of killing from 20,000 feet

Image
Today's Guardian reports the attempted suicide bombings at UK airports under the headline ' A plot to commit murder on an unimaginable scale' . Any attempt to take human life is abhorrent, and thank heavens the alleged plot was foiled. But let us not forget that killing on an unimaginable scale by aircraft is not the monopoly of any one ideoology. ' As German fuel supplies dwindled in the autumn of 1944 and into the final months of the war, aircraft were grounded, tanks halted, training for replacement pilots could not be maintained, and most of the new and highly effective Messerschmitt 262 jet-fighter aircraft (photo above), of which over 1,200 had been produced by the end of 1944 and which might have considerably prolonged the war, had neither fuel to fly nor trained pilots to fly them. The ME 262s were anyway extremely fuel-hungry aircraft, and those that went into action had to be towed to their end of their runways to conserve fuel, cows were used to do the towin...
Read more

The Accidental Pilgrim

Image
There are an awful lot of books around about the journey to Santiago de Compostela in particular, and pilgrimages in general; and let’s be quite truthful a lot of them are rather average. But one that stood out from the crowd for me was David Moore’s The Accidental Pilgrim which was published in 2004 as a paperback by Hodder Headline Ireland, and is available in both the UK and US. The serendipitous path that links these posts meant that I bought this book in the departures lounge at Stansted Airport en route to the Danish Thread Subtitled 'Travels with a Celtic Saint', The Accidental Pilgrim is the story of a 1500 mile bike ride by the author from Bangor in Northern Ireland to Bobbio in northern Italy via France and Switzerland. The journey follows in the footsteps of the Irish missionary Saint Columbanus who made the journey in the 6th Century. (Which coincidentally, and linked to other threads , was around the time that Gregorian Chant was emerging as the official musi...
Read more

The Berlin Philharmonic's darkest hour

Image
Wilhelm Furtwängler was born on 25th January 1886. He was Music Director of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1923 to his death in 1954, and held this position for the twelve years that Hitler was in power. In January 1945 he was conducting in Vienna, and fled from there to Switzerland where he remained until the Battle of Berlin ended in the defeat of the Nazis. The musicians of his orchestra remained in Berlin during its darkest hour. Here is their story: On 28th March 1945 the Russian forces commanded by Marshal Georgy Zhukov were just twenty miles to the east of Berlin. A month previously Albert Speer had been replaced as Nazi armaments minister after trying to persuade Hitler that defeat was inevitable. Speer now turned his energies to preventing the musicians of his adored Berlin Philharmonic from perishing in the inevitable final battle. Reich Commisioner Dr Joseph Goebells, who was in charge of the defence of Berlin, had ordered the entire orchestra to be drafted into the Vol...
Read more

Now we rise and we are everywhere

Image
A sesquialtera is a mixed stop popular in English organs of the 19th century. It uses several ranks of pipes to reinforce the fundamental and produce a brighter ( Bryter ?) sound. The sesquialtera stop seen in my header photo was added to the organ in the church of Saint Mary Magdalene in Tanworth-in-Arden in memory of Nick Drake. Below is a view of the 14th century church with Nick's grave visible bottom left. The words Now we rise and we are everywhere , which are inscribed on the back of his headstone, come from the last track on Nick Drake's final album Pink Moon , recorded in 1971. Read more in A skin too few and I am a camera - St. Tropez 1967 . The overgrown path that brought me to Nick Drake was Brad Mehldau's performance of River Man on his double CD Progression: Art Of The Trio (Volume 5) released in 2000. Wonderful solo performance of the Nick Drake classic on the video below, non-German speakers should fast-forward to 1.00 minutes. Photos are (c) On An Ove...
Read more

Is this the greatest-ever woman musician?

Image
Recent celebrations of women musicians as part of International Women's day started me musing on the question of who was the greatest-ever woman musician? There are many great contenders for the title, from Hildegard of Bingen to Maria Callas and Edith Piaf to Janis Joplin. It can be argued convincingly of course that debating greatest-ever rankings is meaningless as any such judgement is subjective and highly personal. But stay with me, as my nominated contender is particularly noteworthy because she is not the stereotypical white Judeo-Christian celebrity woman musician. Despite her ethnicity Om Kalthoum has a very strong claim on the title of greatest-ever woman musician. When she died in 1975 four million Egyptians attended her funeral, and the diva's recordings continue to sell around a million copies a year. Moreover, her claim to the greatest-ever title is not just based on popularity: among those who have acknowledged her influence are not only Maria Callas, but also B...
Read more

She was not just a woman

Image
My passion  for the music of Alice Coltrane  is shared by  a number of prominent musicians .  This passion was reawakened recently by listening to albums such as Journey in Satchidananda , Illuminations and above all  World Galaxy when travelling in Kerala down in the south of India. That header photo shows  Swamini Turiyasangitananda  - aka Alice Coltrane - at the Sai Anantam Ashram which she founded in 1983 in the Santa Monica Mountains, California. In 2018 the Ashram, which had been closed for a year, was  destroyed in the Woolsey wildfire ; a demise which neatly symbolises society's progression from the the metaphysical to the material.  Alice Coltrane is one of those great women musicians who are still overlooked because they do not fit into the rigid pigeonholes defined by today's virtue signalling culture . (Another great but totally overlooked woman musician has sold millions of albums and influenced, among others, Bob Dylan and Ro...
Read more

Nada Brahma - Sound is God

Image
It may be my age, but those moments when a piece of music really hits me in the solar plexus seem to get rarer and rarer. But during my recent extended travels in India I was metaphorically punched time and time again when listening to ECM's Codona recordings on headphones. Recent posts have touched on the potential of virtual concert halls and the fact that no one mixes for speakers these days , and the Manfred Eicher produced Codona sessions from between 1978 and 1982 really demonstrate the impact of the up close and personal sound of headphones . The line up for Codona was African-American trumpeter Don Cherry, Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos, and Colin Walcott on sitar, tabla, hammered dulcimer, sanza, timpani, and voice. The band took its name from a circus trapeze act of the early 20th century called the Flying Codonas , and the three albums packaged by ECM for CD as The Codona Trilogy capture the peerless musicians-beyond-frontiers performing their creative hig...
Read more