Elaborate stagecraft is superfluous in a piece as spare and grim as a Norse epic
Riders to the Sea Coliseum, London WC2
As great an actress as a singer: Patricia Bardon as Maurya
Vaughan Williams's Riders to the Sea is a work fraught with mortality, but the sudden and untimely death of the conductor Richard Hickox, just days before the opening of this new production at the Coliseum, gave the first night an added poignancy. Edward Gardner, English National Opera's music director, stood in for him, and all the performances were dedicated to his memory. Hickox had been a noted champion of English composers and had played a leading part in the commemoration this year of the 50th anniversary of Vaughan Williams's death, of which this uncommon revival was one of the highlights.
Written in 1927, this 40-minute chamber piece has a cast of five and its libretto is largely the text of the 1904 one-act play by J M Synge. It is set on the Aran Islands, that locus classicus of Irish culture off the west coast of Ireland, and there we witness the final scene of a long-running family tragedy.
The matriarch Maurya, having already lost her husband and four of her sons to the sea, awaits news of another, Michael, feared drowned, while attempting to dissuade Bartley, her youngest and last, from crossing to the mainland to sell horses at Galway Fair. She fails and he sets off, without her blessing, even though a storm is brewing.
Washed-up clothes confirm to her and her two daughters Michael's death, and Maurya has a vision of her dead son following her last son on horseback. Soon news comes of Bartley's death by drowning, too. After Vaughan Williams's restless and brooding musical seascape, a sublime stillness and peace settle on Maurya, a calm after the storm. The sea has taken all she has and can no longer hurt her: "No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied."
At a recent viewing of the 1980s romantic comedy The War of the Roses, directed by Danny DeVito, a film director friend pointed out to me a common failing of movies directed by actors - a fixation on the technical, a fascination with the elaborate shot and the whole magic toybox of cinema rather than a greater concentration on their own speciality: the quality of the acting, as one might have expected. This observation came to mind at the ENO production of Riders to the Sea, with which the leading Irish actor Fiona Shaw made her directorial debut in opera.
The stage of the Coliseum is one of the largest in London, and for this production it was filled with a naturalistic re-creation by the set designer Tom Pye of a rocky seashore and a full-scale cliff, in addition to a large, non-naturalistic screen at the back on which were projected various videos of seascapes by the Irish multimedia artist Dorothy Cross. High above it were suspended representations of a capsized boat and a floating figure, to remind us of poor Michael. To me, this seemed too much. It was not that the powerful piece could not bear the weight of all this stagecraft, but that the work, as spare and grim as a Norse epic, does not require such elaborate decoration.
The cast was superb, and was led in the role of Maurya by the wonderful Patricia Bardon, as great an actress as a singer, and especially moving in her song of resignation at the loss of her sons, "They are all gone now." Kate Valentine and Claire Booth as her daughters and Leigh Melrose as the doomed Bartley were worthy support.
ENO deserves great credit for reviving Vaughan Williams's most successful opera and certainly making the case for it as a masterpiece. It should be seen more often, though there is always the problem of what to pair such a short work with. At ENO, it was successfully preceded by Sibelius's Luonnotar ("Daughter of Nature"), a 15-minute tone poem for soprano and orchestra, and another elemental work about the sea's power. In a creation myth taken from the Finnish epic the Kalevala, Luonnotar, a spirit of the air, tells us of her attraction to the sea, her pregnancy, and her wandering before giving birth to the heavens, moon and stars. The superb Susan Gritton delivered it in a long, sea-green dress, like a Finnish Ophelia, standing in an upended, suspended boat. Here Cross's mesmeric video projections of sea, foam, boats and sea creatures were entirely at home.
Classical pick of the week
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Royal Festival Hall, London SE1
Simon Rattle conducts all four Schubert symphonies (8, 9 Dec).
Hansel und Gretel
Royal Opera House, London WC2
Engelbert Humperdinck's interpretation of the fairy tale.
Elektra
Opera North, Leeds Town Hall
Susan Bullock has won rave reviews as the tortured heroine (11, 14 Dec).
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