The Canadian Opera Firm: Wozzeck by Alban Berg. Michael Kupfer-Radecky, Wozzeck; Ambur Braid, Marie; Matthew Cairns, Drum Main; Michael Schade, Captain; Anthony Robin Schneider, Physician; Krisztina Szabó, Margret; Owen McCausland, Andres; Michael Colvin, The Idiot. Could 8, 2025, 4 Seasons Centre, Toronto. Continues to Could 25; tickets right here.
Image a tavern scene: two dozen refrain members cavort alongside a handful of actors, a number of in gasoline masks, transferring alongside in damaged, limping gait, lifting and shaking picket chairs. Backstage a display screen is projecting speeded-up clips of a lady being thrown from one man’s arms to a different one’s lap. From a picket wardrobe emerges a bunch of pub musicians. Two singers seem from behind them, singing distorted standard songs then drunkenly collapsing; two extra (Wozzeck’s mistress Marie and her seducer, the Drum Main) enter dancing and swirling as Wozzeck himself seems to be on in outrage and despair. The backdrop presents dense charcoal drawings and video projections.
Attempting to take all of this in, the attention frantically glances to and from the surtitles. And the music? On the one hand you would argue that it invitations the disorienting visible barrage. On the opposite, you would say that it makes a lot of that barrage superfluous, if not infuriating.
The Kentridge Manufacturing
OK, we get it. Wozzeck is spiralling by way of disorientation to disintegration. He’s a soldier within the German military, topic to dehumanising cruelty. Berg is writing his opera on the time of the First World Conflict. Expressionist theatre and movie are all the fad. However, on the coronary heart of the opera is the compassionate humanity with which Berg treats his central characters — Wozzeck, Marie and their youngster. And, humanity is what William Kentridge’s manufacturing (a co-commission of COC and the Salzburg Pageant, the place it premiered in 2017, Metropolitan Opera, and Opera Australia) conspicuously lacks.
It deploys super care and talent to emphasise the already apparent. However, in so doing it rides roughshod over such textual particulars within the rating as Wozzeck shaving the Captain (somewhat than projecting a movie), experiencing apocalyptic visions whereas amassing firewood (somewhat than trying aimlessly anxious), and slitting Marie’s throat (somewhat than her stomach), all of which makes a nonsense of the textual content and leaves one questioning whether or not Kentridge truly learn the rating or the libretto intently sufficient.
He imposes his personal signature sensory overload on essentially the most touching passages — Marie’s Bible-reading penitence, the Mahlerian orchestral interlude reflecting on the tragedy, and the ultimate scene with the kid. Did I point out that the kid is ‘performed’ by a Tim Burton-ish puppet? No marvel the viewers response on the finish is extra perplexed than heartbroken. Berg’s concept was that the orphaned youngster, taunted by its ‘pals’, was destined to develop into the subsequent Wozzeck. Kentridge’s staging might hardly have been wider of that mark.
A Premonition of WWI?
Not that each manufacturing has to observe Berg’s directions to the letter (although Abbado and the Vienna State Opera did so to super impact within the Eighties). However nor ought to it make us really feel that it’s merely serving the director. It shouldn’t be complicated both. In his notes, Kentridge claims that the opera serves as a premonition of the First World Conflict. However, his photos of strategic maps, exploded our bodies, gasoline masks, wounded troopers and nurses, downed planes, and blasting bombs, counsel that we’re proper in the course of the battle.
A post-explosion inside of what seems to be like an artwork studio for a dystopian La Bohème makes up the setting, virtually unchanging in its gray and earth-colour hues throughout the complete 90 minutes of the opera. Kentridge treats the stage as a stay canvas during which visible results overtake the singers and even Berg’s music. A bit extra emphasis on how the principle characters work together and fewer on the historic context would have made all of the distinction. The place Wozzeck’s progressive delirium requires visible shock, every little thing stays static. His exclamation that the tavern-drinkers are ‘waltzing in blood’ performs out solely to a grotesque video of the dance on the on-stage canvas.
The Singers
That canvas at instances displays the frame of mind and phrases of the singers and at others provides a parade of navy characters emulating the ‘Ministry of Foolish Walks’: which isn’t the one a part of the animation that carries a Pythonesque component of mockery. Fairly entertaining, and executed with expertise and aptitude. However, how way more chilling the impact could be when the grotesquerie is totally invested within the performing? Michael Schade, Anthony Robin Schneider and Matthew Cairns have been vocally spectacular because the Captain, the Physician and the Drum Main, however visually solely semi-convincing as Wozzeck’s tormentors-in-chief.
Admittedly, the largely static supply works effectively sufficient for the physician’s scene — in a claustrophobic wardrobe-cum-laboratory. However, the dearth of chemistry between Michael Kupfer-Radecky’s Wozzeck and Ambur Braid’s Marie, and naturally between Marie and her puppet-child, is a deadly flaw.
Remaining Ideas
Johannes Debus and the COC orchestra navigate the complexities of the rating confidently and sure-footedly. In the event that they take the large orchestral interlude far too quick for its emotional influence to register, which will as a result of they should observe the timing of Kentridge’s background animations.
So, concurrently their Eugene Onegin with minimal props and extraneous motion, the COC’s providing of a Wozzeck on the reverse excessive exhibits what number of methods there are to attain a near-miss.
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Michelle Assay is a Marie Curie/UKRI World Fellow on the Universities of Toronto and King’s Faculty London engaged on Ladies and Western Artwork Music in Iran (Womusiran.com). She holds a PhD from the Sorbonne and College of Sheffield and has been a Leverhulme Fellow on the College of Huddersfield. She is the creator of award-winning articles on Russian and Soviet music and on Shakespeare and music, and usually seems in concert events as a pianist. She is a daily broadcaster for the BBC and contributor to Gramophone, Worldwide Piano, and Bachtrack, together with Ludwig Van.
