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‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ at English National Opera

The final work in ENO’s 2022/23 season, a staging of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, made for a poignant, beautiful and moving close to a season beset with anxiety about the future of ENO in is current home, the London Coliseum, after Arts Council England (ACE) slashed its funding and demanded that the opera find a new home outside London. This is all part of the government’s so-called “levelling up” policy, but for many of us who care about such things, it – and other acts of desecration by ACE – feels like an attack on culture and also on excellence.

These points were more than touched upon in an emotional pre-performance speech by Stuart Murphy, outgoing CEO of ENO, who warned Nicholas Serota, Michael Gove and others that “history is watching you”. Murphy’s speech garnered enthusiastic support, with a few shouts of “Tories out!” from the balcony.

What followed was a performance which demonstrated exactly why we should value ENO and what it does – and what makes it distinctive from London’s other great opera house.

Of course Symphony of Sorrowful Songs is not an opera. It’s an orchestral work in three movements by Henryk Gorecki (1933-2010), a composer hitherto almost unkown outside his native Poland until this work hit the classical charts in the early 1990s in a recording featuring soprano Dawn Upshaw with the London Sinfonietta. The album remained in the charts for weeeks and weeks, and is one of the biggest selling contemporary classical pieces of all time.

The music is minimalist in style, approachable but also highly affecting, with an insistent pulse throughout which could suggest a human heartbeat. The only voice is that of a soprano, in the ENO production Nicole Chevalier, who in three meditative movements offers a triptych of motherhood – the first a lament of the Virgin Mary, the second a message written on the wall of a Gestapo prison cell, and the third a mother searching for her lost son. The production was presented in Polish with Englisha and Polish subtitles.

The work lends itself to a theatrical presentation and is rich in religious imagery, in particular the Pietà and figures at the base of the cross from the Crucifixion, both of which were referenced in the opening movement. A simple set with two apertures of light overhead created the sense of a cavernous stone tomb. At the back, a figure lay on a suspended slab while a woman dragged a cloth from a grave. Gathering it up in her arms, the cloth became at once a cradled child and a shroud. Throughout the performance, extraordinary lighting and video effects projected tears or waves, and the fuzzy images from an ante-natal ultrasound scan, which served to enhance and reinforce the message of the music and the words.

In the second scene, in a Gestapo prison cell, we see that the stone walls are in fact a series of closely-meshed ropes through which mysterious, masked figures emerge and depart. In the final scene, the tangled ropes suggests the mess and fog of war as the mother searches for her lost son. The resonances with the war in Ukraine were very obvious here and this made for a very moving episode in a work freighted with a visceral sense of poignancy and loss.

Nicole Chevalier’s translucent yet rich soprano brought power and tenderness to Gorecki’s long-spun lines, while conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya and the ENO orchestra gave an unsentimental but not less committed and absorbing reading of the score which appreciate the narrative arc of the individual movements and the work as a whole. The overall effect was compelling, deeply moving and yet ultimately uplifting: the closing moments of the final movement, the mother spreads her wings and ascends towards heaven, in an image redolent of the art of William Blake.

An ambitious, imaginative and haunting production from ENO, which demonstrates exactly why we must treasure and support this organisation.

Symphony of Sorrowful Songs continues until 6 May

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As I step into the Royal Opera House’s stylish new café, there is the familiar Covent Garden buzz. It’s the opening night of Werther, and also the start of the new opera season. The talking points are Joyce di Donato’s upcoming title role in Agrippina. She was also in the last 2016 performance of Werther, alongside the flamboyant Italian tenor, Vittoria Grigolo. Would the 2019 Werther, sung by Juan Diego Flórez, match Grigolo’s high octane performance in 2016?

I had been gripped by Grigolo’s ROH debut in Werther, a broadcast of  which I saw at the cinema. The camera angles were daring: I remember a close up of Grigolo’s pulsating vocal folds as he hit the high notes.

Werther is all psychological drama. The narrative is bare but doesn’t feel so because of the richness of the music. In parts Jules Massenet, the French composer, shows his love for Wagner, in others, sorrowful and heart-rending music of great delicacy.

Read Karine Hetherington’s full review of ‘Werther’ by Jules Massenet at the Royal Opera House

Image: Isabel Leonard as Charlotte and Juan Diego Flórez as Werther

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Guest review by Mary Grace Nguyen

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In Jane Gray’s sensitive and stirring production of Tchaikovsky’s Yevgenyi Onyegin, now showing at St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, tensions rise in Pushkin’s tale about a young girl who falls in love with a man who realises too late that he is also in love with her. Tchaikovsky’s alluring and stupendous music score, exquisitely performed on the piano by David Smith, elicits the love the young girl, Tatyana holds dear for an unsatisfied aristocrat, Onyegin as well as the suffering and torment of love’s powerful nature. 

Opera Loki’s new production has been touring in France and the UK. Sung in English, Onyegin is a refreshing opera for both avid opera-goers and those who are new to Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece. A vocally athletic cast take to Tchaikovsky’s vocal lines with ease and rapture, evoking the tragic and melancholic essence just as the Russian composer intended.  At St Paul’s Covent Garden, the staging is kept to a minimum, yet the use of a handful of props and collection of lush costumes, by Pam Line and Carolyn Bearare, bring the audience closer to Pushkin and his era.

There are a selection of noteworthy scenes in this production which demonstrate Tchaikovsky’s unique interpretation of regret, rejection and resilience. Hope for young Tatyana, engrossed in her fantasy novels of heroes and warriors, can be found in Act I when Tatyana writes her letter to Onyegin, disclosing her deepest feelings for him. Act 2 plays with fire when Onyegin turns on his closest friend, Lenski, by crossing the line, attempting to steal Lenski’s lover and all of her attention, leading to fatal consequences and an unexpected duel. It is only when Onyegin sees his friend lying dead on the ground that he realises he has made a big mistake.

The use of masks in a banquet scene in Act 3 — representative of Onegin’s loneliness and absence of love in his life — is a clever insight into Onyegin and Tatyana’s polarising characters: one was inspired by her emotions and passions; the other learned to feel too late and remains stuck in his own Byronic, wandering state. 

Kirsty McLean is adaptable for both the roles of young and old Tatyana. (It’s fascinating how a change of clothes and great acting skills can influence one’s performance.) McLean is vocally sharp and eloquent with a beguiling performance as the distraught little girl in Act 1. By the time the final act arrives, the audience is clenching their fists, angered by Onyegin’s foolish behaviour, yet sympathising with a woman who has suffered the brunt of unrequited love and the biggest rejection.

Jonny de Garis’s Onyegin is robust and vocally controlled in the first two acts, depicting a man of class and with a touch of stoicism. His most moving and heartfelt performances come in Act 3 — the entire audience was at the edge of their seats the night I attended as they watched Onyegin begging on his hands and knees for Tatyana’s forgiveness. This was perhaps the most intense scene in the opera; together McLean and Garis give an exhilarating and suspense-worthy performance to set both Tatyana and Onyegin free from the tension.

Jack Roberts (Lenski), Lara Rebekah Harvey (Tatyana’s sister) and Georgia Mae Bishop (Tatyana’s nanny) also gave terrific performances. Jack Roberts’s voice was warm and romantic; it projected effectively across the stage. His character is easy to pity,  particularly in Act 3 when we the sense Lenski’s friend was using him for his own amusement. Lara Rebekah Harvey’s singing in Act 1 is a joy to see and hear, vocally clear and graceful as Tanya’s sister. And Georgia Mae Bishop’s performance is filled with wit and delight as she tells Tatyana tales of her past loves.  Julian Charles Debreuil’s performance of ‘All men surrender to Love’s power’, as Gremin in Act 3, is brilliantly sung and full of wonder. And not forgetting to mention strong and supportive performances from Ryan Hugh Ross and Helen Rotchell.

Oneygin may not have his happy ending, yet here is a  wonderful production that demonstrates the vicissitudes of the human condition and the fragility of our emotions. In the face of rejection, one will regret but must eventually move on in order to survive. 

Opera Loki’s Yevgenyi Onyegin continues until 29 September – details and tickets here

Mary Grace Nguyen is a writer and blogger. She is creator of TrendFem, an online platform to promote the theatre, entertainment and arts scene in London, as well as independent off-West End shows and new works performed at some of best theatres in the world. Mary holds an MA in Journalism from Birkbeck College, London

 

Pictures from Opera Loki

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An aura of concentrated stillness descends over the London Coliseum as the opening measures of Philip Glass’s opera Satygraha are sung, simply and eloquently, by tenor Toby Spence. He is M.K. Gandhi: dressed in a formal dark suit, he is a young lawyer in South Africa, not yet the stoic nonviolent activist, the “Mahatma”, in his distinctive white dhoti.

Satyagraha, a sanskrit word meaning “truth force”, is a meditation on the early life of Gandhi when, as a lawyer working in South Africa in the early years of the twentieth century, he encountered racial discrimination: his response was the development of non-violent protest as a political tool. This central narrative feels appropriately topical in our troubled times of suspicion towards migrants, refugees, people of colour and those of different faiths, and this gives Satyagraha a relevance and immediacy which makes it all the more compelling.The attendant presences through the three acts of Tolstoy, the Bengali poet Tagore, and Martin Luther King respectively remind us of the wider influences and connections of Gandhi’s story and his philosophy.

Phelim McDermott’s gorgeously theatrical production, first staged at ENO in 2007 (when it broke box office records for modern opera), is a feast for eyes and ears, and the combination of a visually arresting set, enhanced by puppetry, film and projections, and Glass’s haunting, mesmeric soundscape make this quite unlike traditional operas. In fact, someone on Twitter compared it to Parsifal and while I have never seen Parsifal, I can appreciate the comparison: the length, the scale, the absorbing narrative and the sense of a whole art work – the Wagnerian Gesamtwerk.  And in mixing the sacred text of the Bhagavad Gita with the real life incidents of  Gandhi’s formative experiences in South Africa, the opera also has the feel of a grand oratorio.

If you saw ENO’s Akhnaten, also directed by Phelim McDermott, many of the tropes will be familiar: the slow motion and long ritualistic set-pieces, the visual and poetic allegories. These all inform and enhance the narrative – and you need it because the libretto is in Sanskrit and there are no surtitles! (But thankfully comprehensive programme notes, which made for interesting reading on my homeward train journey afterwards.)

The ENO chorus is on superb form, as always, and the orchestra was masterfully and sensitively directed by Karen Kamensek, a Glass specialist, who brought colour and vibrancy to Glass’s spooling repetitions and piquant harmonic shifts.

The entire experience was profound, moving and very beautiful.

Performances continue at ENO until February 27 — details here.