New Opera from The Arts Desk ? The Varied, Relevant and Unusual Art Form - Entertainment - Music

<p>At the Bayreuth Festival, Stephen Walsh witnessed a strange and rather vulgar new staging of Wagner's raw, early work, Tannhaser. In a seemingly conscious effort to provoke the sensitive Bayreuth audience, Sebastian Baumgarten has transplanted the action from a 13th-century castle on the Wartburg to an AVL biogas plant, unearthing some old political issues about the German Left and Right, East and West, and parodying the ideas that run through the opera. The setting of this self-sufficient Slave City concept, as designed by Joep van Lieshout, has inevitable echoes of materialist societies as well as gas chambers and extermination camps, though none of it bears much relevance to the opera itself. The reductio ad absurdum interpretation inherited from Baumgarten's Komische Oper leanings - which has Venus as a suburban housewife, Tannhuser as a likely lad - did indeed raise some hackles, with boos and catcalls soon coming from the audience. The soloists - excepting Camilla Ny
lund giving a warm performance as Elisabeth - were only adequate, which left conductor Thomas Hengelbrock as the lone shining star of the production for Walsh, leading a beautifully paced orchestra and drawing exquisite playing and choral singing from his performers, regardless of the weird and rather wearing antics on stage.</p>

<p>Back in London, Charlotte Gardner's trip to see Vignette Productions' take on La Bohme was a far cry from the usual grand opera experience. Up-and-coming young tenor Andrew Staples is the man behind this unusual opera company, which aims to stage operas that are better and more exciting than the usual fare. Thus audience members found themselves not in an 18th-century Parisian garret but in an edgy warehouse in Shoreditch, The Village Underground, kitted out as a decontamination zone in a post-apocalyptic world where the population is wasting away thanks to a mysterious incurable disease - similar to the TB outbreak which blighted Puccini's own time. The wacky atmosphere was augmented by the audience having to move around the warehouse as each act was performed in a new space. It made for a light-hearted feel which matched the production's unusually amusing libretto translations. What really made this production extraordinary, however, was the quality of the musical interp
retation - which was both intelligent and charming - and the acting. Despite (or perhaps because of) the lack of a full orchestra, Puccini's music could be heard afresh, with conductor Steven Moore drawing warmth and expansiveness from Jonathan Dove's 18-piece chamber orchestra. The singers, thus far unknown, are undoubtedly destined for great things according to Gardner, and thanks to Staples' careful, text-based rehearsal process, they not only sung beautifully but delivered wonderfully nuanced, natural dramatic performances, making the whole thing nothing less than gripping.</p>

<p>Meanwhile David Nice from The Arts Desk reappraised Mark-Anthony Turnage's opera Anna Nicole due to its release on DVD this week. The new opera, based on the turbulent life of Anna Nicole Smith - from knocked-about wife to the infamous trophy bride of octogenarian oil magnate J Howard Marshall II to her untimely death in 2007 - is not quite as voyeuristic and tacky as you might expect. Turnage, says Nice, can write elegies dedicated to waste and loss like no other contemporary composer, and the team behind the production, including lyricist Richard Thomas, acclaimed director Richard Jones and Royal Opera conductor Antonio Pappano, are experts at pulling the rug out from under a complacent audience. Add to that the superb and charming performance of dramatic soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek as the buxom blonde bombshell, the excellent ensemble work and the perfectly pitched kitsch look of Jones's production and Nice found himself unexpectedly caring about this woman's fate and f
eeling quite certain that, whether in the opera house or on DVD, this opera won't pall anytime soon.
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