Venus and Adonis Hans Werner Henze, text by Hans-Ulrich Treichel "An opera in one act for singers and dancers" UK premiere Prima Donna (Venus) Evelyn Herlitzius Clemente (Adonis) Christopher Ventris Hero-Player (Mars) Ekkehard Wlaschiha Madrigalists (Shepherds): Margarita De Arellano, Jennifer Trost, Anne Pellekorne, Kevin Conners, Michael Kupfer, Raphael Sigling Conductor Marcus Stenz BBC Symphony Orchestra Henze's new opera has already been staged at the world premiere in Munich in January. This was a concert performance, but it left me hoping for a production very soon. The full cast consists of the three singers, six dancers, three of whom double the three singers, and six "madrigalists". The singers are both the characters Venus, Adonis and Mars, and the singers who sing them in the opera within the opera. The dancers appear as puppet-like extensions of the singers, who come to life for the dances. The work consists of seventeen separate numbers, divided into recitatives (the singer-characters), boleros (ballets), dance-songs (sung by the mythological characters, from black-bound scores, after each bolero), and madrigals (the commentative chorus). In addition, each character has its own sub-orchestra. Even in the concert performance, with no dancers, the madgrigalists at the back of the orchestra and the soloists on stands in the middle of the orchestra, it was perfectly clear, and very effective. Reading the preview in the paper, I was expecting Ariadne-style complexities and reflections, but this is a simple story told in three different registers (realistic, literary, visual). There isn't a composer in the plot. The story itself is Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis: Mars is in love with Venus; she turns him down, and falls in love with Adonis, who turns her down. He then realises he loves her, but is torn to bits by a wild boar in the moment that he tells her. In the parallel plot, the baritone Hero-Player stabs Clemente, the tenor, who is in love with the soprano Prima Donna. (The tenor wants the soprano, the baritone wants to stop it, again.) This was my first experience of Henze's music in any form, and it was a pleasant surprise. Henze's model for his vocal setting is clearly Monteverdi, with the music at the service of the words and drama. It's not always pretty, but it is generally tonal, and dramatically effective. The orchestral elements are more textural, providing colour for each of the characters and the action. (The programme points out that Henze produced a performing edition of Monteverdi's Ulisse which uses a similiar approach.) The ending, with Adonis transformed into a star above the planet Venus (singing from the second tier in the hall) was lovely and ethereal. The singers were all very impressive, especially, the madrigalists, who had a lot of complex music, and who managed to have the presence of a full chorus. Christopher Ventris sounded rather English, but was very touching as the wimpy ("gentle") tenor. I zoned out a couple of times because Ekkehard Wlaschiha looked, from where I was sitting, just a teeny bit like the Rev Ian Paisley. As I said, I'm really looking forward to a fully staged production, with these solists. ------------------------------------------------------- The Henze performance was pretty surreal in some ways. The hall was perhaps one third full (it said in the Guardian that morning that about a third of tickets had been sold, but I'm not sure that everybody used theirs). Henze turned up, looking strangely like Gianni Versace, and was enthusiastically applauded. During the first half, an excellent selection of Monteverdi madrigals that explore the same pastoral themes as Venus and Adonis, there were helicopters zooming over Kensington like Apocalypse Now. The audience tried not to clap in the middle of the set, but after two tenors gave a heroic performance against the helicopters, they gave up and applauded each number. In the interval, Diana's coffin was carried by the hall in a hearse, on its way to Kensington Palace. The previous Sunday, the concert went ahead with two minutes silence and Nimrod at the beginning. Dawn Upshaw's performance of Britten's Les Illuminations was stunning. The more I thought about it beforehand, the more I expected something like Donald Swann's performance of his Nerval setting, because Upshaw has always seemed to me rather wholesome and clean scrubbed. But her intense but detached manner is perfect for the symbolist poetry and music. The performance of Jephtha on Monday 1Sept97 also went ahead, and was almost sold out. One reviewer in this Sunday's paper pointed out that, in another century, this would have been an expression of national feeling, and it was certainly an emotionally heightened performance. Anthony Rolfe Johnson started off uncertainly, but sang Deeper still and deeper, Jephtha's deliberation between love and duty, superbly. Waft her angels, his prayer for the daughter he is about to kill, was very moving. (Though the audience's response was similar in the performance in Westminster Abbey in June -- Handel knew what he was doing.) Felicity Palmer was full of barely suppressed violence as Storge, a character closely related to Clytemnestra, which Palmer sang in Elektra at Covent Garden in the spring. Alastair Miles was a bit too vocally interesting as Zebul, whose whole point is his lack of charisma. On the general atmosphere, at these two concerts (though not the Henze prom) and in London generally over the past week, I'm tempted to agree with those who see something operatic in it. I'm one of those who don't actually give the proverbial about Diana (beyond being sad that anyone died in such a horrible way, and feeling very sorry for her children), but it's impossible to ignore the sense of shared emotion that people still seem to feel, and to want to express. It's not nationalistic, and it's not religious -- in fact, it's very like what Sam Abel describes in Opera i the flesh, a collective act of passionate identification with a suffering woman. Now Charles Spencer has joined in, I think we're also in Shakespeare or Schiller, that is, Verdi, territory, where emotion both informs and is manipulated by political interests. If Va pensiero were about revenge rather than exile, the crowd outside the Abbey might have sung it after Spencer's speech on Saturday. And I promise never to mention her again.