Madama Butterfly, The Nutcracker, and Il Barbiere di Siviglia
20 December 2011 |
Posted by Jim Masson |
Madama Butterfly, The Nutcracker, and Il Barbiere di Siviglia
Reviewed by
George Fleeton
In early November, Belfast’s Waterfront Hall hosted, on consecutive nights, Ellen Kent’s touring production of Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, followed by the Moscow Ballet ‘La Classique’ touring production of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, a company I had not previously heard of.
Madama Butterfly
This claimed to be a brand new production, but I doubt that.
Both soprano (Rosa Lee Thomas) and tenor (Ruslan Zinevych) have sung this opera here before and the bulky, static set was very familiar.
What was new however were the chorus, orchestra and conductor from the Ukrainian National Opera & Ballet Theatre of Kharkiv.
Kharkiv, by the way, is one of the eight venues in Poland-Ukraine for the UEFA EURO 2012 football matches.
It is an understatement to say this performance sounded and looked exhausted.
The company had been touring Butterfly in these islands since September 30th (seventeen performances before reaching Belfast) and they continue to travel, mostly one night stands, until May 5th.
With breaks, that means sixty-four performances, in effectively five months, at venues ranging from Aberdeen and York to Limerick and Cork.
No other company – to my knowledge - comes anywhere near.
Add to that their interlocking touring productions of La Traviata (October 1st to May 3rd) and La Bohème (February 13th to May 1st), which leapfrog all over Butterfly across both jurisdictions, and it’s no surprise they’re tired.
These operas of course are the old chestnuts that will fill nearly every venue.
All three are bullet-proof and the music is sublime (Puccini and Verdi at their respective peaks).
The Ellen Kent Eastern European formula may be heavily criticised by opera’s self-appointed nobility and critics but she has done oceans more than they ever will to popularise opera and to reach out to those who may be initially terr!f!ed of this most fabulous of all music-in-drama genres.
Ellen came to Belfast as early as 1993, during some of that city’s darkest days and long before there was any talk of a peace dividend (and I have taken the opportunity to meet her and to thank her for that vote of confidence in us).
While no longer as hands-on as before - she no longer runs her own companies - Ellen’s productions are now being promoted by Derek Block & Blackburn International.
The company returns to the Waterfront on April 10th with Verdi’s La Traviata.
The Nutcracker
On the following evening in the Waterfront we had an astonishing production of the last of the three ballets composed by Tchaikovsky, attended by scores of children (the two earlier ballets are Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty).
The Nutcracker was first given in the Mariinsky Theatre St Petersburg less than eleven months before the composer’s death in late 1893 and, like Bizet and his Carmen in 1875, Tchaikovsky, mentally very ill at the end, never knew how successful his last ballet would become.
Perhaps the innovative work being done at the Queen’s Film Theatre Belfast, in bringing the Bolshoi Ballet: Live in HD productions to a large screen, is arousing interest all around - when The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker were shown in the QFT in November and December, both were sold out.
We so rarely see fully staged ballet anywhere in Northern Ireland, yet it is clear there is an audience out there for this allegedly most esoteric of all art forms.
With no orchestra for The Nutcracker in the Waterfront (where was it? and conductor Vladimir Bogorad?) Tchaikovsky’s music was pumped out to us from about two dozen massively stacked amplifiers on either side of the stage.
Very curious.
That made the best seats those in the centre throughout the Hall, so one wonders what it sounded like in the corners.
This ‘glorious technicolour and stereophonic sound’ production was breathtaking; the dancing was world class, the corps de ballet masterly.
Vainonen had revised Petipa’s and Ivanov’s original choreography in 1934, and the Vainonen version was then further adapted for touring productions by Valery Kovtun in 1990.
I could see children all around me captured by the wondrous fantasy in which all things are possible: toys come to life, flowers dance and snowflakes waltz.
Clara was danced by Ekaterina Shalyapina, the Prince by Dmitry Smirnov.
Director Elik Melikov founded Moscow Ballet ‘La Classique’ in 1990, so it has taken twenty-one years to reach Belfast. Why?
And “More please,” as the child sitting closest to me said at the end.
Well the news is not good: in 2012 they are touring Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty in the UK (which will complete Tchaikovsky’s great trilogy of classical ballets) but it seems they are not coming to Belfast.
Perhaps someone could tell me that this is not so?
Il Barbiere di Siviglia
Finally, when I was at the Venice Film Festival in September (reported here for DownNews between September 14th and October 2nd, with a fourth critique still to appear), I managed to see Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville in La Fenice’s Teatro Malibran, at the matinée following opening night and, of course, with the second cast.
This was a production of the quality we simply don’t see in this part of the world: opera at its most polished and wondrous.
For instance, the balance between the orchestra and the singers was perfect, and every word was pin-point clear. This was real musicianship; it never dragged or lost its clarity, even if, as always, the first act is far too long.
Il Barbiere opened disastrously in Rome in 1816.
Everything went wrong on the night but it recovered its poise at the second performance and its place in music history was copper-fastened for ever.
A breakthrough opera in its own right, it takes up the back story of some of the key characters who had appeared in Mozart’s own breakthrough opera The Marriage of Figaro thirty years earlier.
By Rossini’s time however the political, economical, social and cultural faces of post-Napoleonic Europe had changed beyond recognition.
Enlightenment had given way to the Romantic and Industrial revolutions.
Audience tastes in opera had become more demanding, less proletarian.
Barber is probably the most popular and most performed piece in the whole operatic repertoire, possibly the greatest of all comic operas.
And the production in Venice was freshly sung by Georgio Coaduro (Figaro), Dmitry Trunov (Almaviva) and Marina Comparato (Rosina) and Omar Montanari (Bartolo).
On a return visit to Belfast, English Touring Opera are bringing their production of Il Barbiere to the Grand Opera House Belfast for one night, March 13 (followed on March 14 by Tchaikovsky’s Yevgeny Onegin – whose first professional night was at the Bolshoi Moscow in 1881).
Two operas not to be missed.
In 2012 the following Ellen Kent/Kharkiv productions will be performed in Ireland:
April 2nd, Madama Butterfly, Limerick
April 3rd, La Traviata, Cork
April 4th, La Bohème, Cork
April 5th, La Bohème, Cork
April 7th, Madama Butterfly, Dublin
April 8th, La Bohème, Dublin, and
April 10th, La Traviata, Belfast.
The remaining Bolshoi Ballets: Live in HD at the QFT are:
Adam’s Le Corsaire on March 11th
Shostakovitch’s The Bright Stream on April 29th
Glazunov’a Raymonda on June 24th
None of these three ballets are as well known as Tchaikovsky’s but they are also expected to sell out.
© George Fleeton mmxi
