Riga Opera house Photo -Monica Schofield

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• Riga Opera Festival
  

8-12 June 2006.

The Riga Opera Festival offered four contrasted operas on four successive nights. Warnings that the streets were dangerous at night proved unfounded, the stroll through the park back to the hotel after the operas so much more pleasant and safer than the exodus from Oxford’s New Theatre or the scramble for a taxi at the Royal Opera House.  During the day one was able, with an excellent and knowledgeable guide, to explore the heart of this beautiful city, in particular the mainly redbrick Hanseatic Old Town and the extraordinary art nouveau district, dating from a brief period of great prosperity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as an important Russian Baltic port. Façade after façade competes for the most outrageous jugendstil decoration from a group of architects led by Eisenstein, the father of the film director. Now, one of the least wealthy of the new EU member states with divided Latvian and Russian populations, Riga offers itself to tourists with a self-deprecating air, tempting them with the lowest of prices for exquisite linen, amber and chocolate. Our first opera, the day of arrival, introduced us to the delightful small, nine hundred seat, opera house, with its beautiful light green and gold decoration recently restored.

The opera was The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by Shostakovich. The story is a variant of those of Emma Bovary and Katya Kabanova, desperate housewives with oft-absent husbands, tempted into disastrous adulterous affaires. Instead of the guilt-ridden Katya’s domineering mother-in-law, the amoral Katerina Ismaylova has a lecherous father-in-law. But this is melodrama, not tragedy. Katerina poisons her father-in-law, murders her husband with the help of Sergei, her lover, and drags with her to a watery grave Sergei’s new mistress while en route to prison. The powerful score, more symphonic than operatic in nature, underlies the depravity of the action with long orchestral interludes between scenes. The production was superb, particularly the handling of detail within the crowd scenes with exceptionally strong acting from the minor characters as well as from the principals. Aira Rūrãne gave a magnificent performance in the erotically charged role of Katerina Ismaylova ably supported (so to speak) by Sergejs Naida as the lover. This was an unforgettable, genuinely Russian, theatrical experience. The Director was Andrejs Žagars and the performance brilliantly conducted by Mãrtiņš Ozoliņš

The second night we attended a performance advertised as Le Nozze di Figaro. The singing was excellent and the orchestral accompaniment beautifully played, conducted by Zbigniew Graca. The problem was that the production was such an appalling distraction that one completely failed to appreciate the musical quality until the beginning of Act III, when the director temporarily ran out of ideas and the music spoke for itself. The director had got hold of the loony idea that the social structure and personal relationships of the Almaviva household were reflected in the back-stage intrigues of an opera company. Thus, the overture was accompanied by the cast of a performance of the opera taking a curtain call, after which Scene One opened in the theatre’s dressing room. From there on things became unspeakably worse until Act III with its brief respite during which Dove Sono was beautifully sung by Maija Kovaļevska, an unusually youthful and slender Countess. (A pair of dancers failed to distract.) Act IV was set on a tropical island. The director responsible for this outrage is the young Bulgarian-born Vera Nemirova. Remember her name; avoid her productions. This  entertainment had little to do with Mozart. We could have been warned. Our sympathy lay with the performers.

The Queen of Spades was a glorious production, with the same conductor and director as Lady Macbeth, elaborately staged. Musically it reminded one of Welsh National Opera at its best, with a magnificent chorus and the orchestra responding superbly to the conductor. Žagars has moved the action forward from Pushkin’s 1820’s and Tchaikovski’s 18th century to post-soviet St Petersberg and in a programme note gives a biographical sketch of each character in this setting. The story of the outsider, Herman, obsessed with learning the Countess’ secret combination of winning cards to enable him to marry Lisa with whom he has fallen in love, translates without difficulty, if not entirely satisfactorily, into modern times. The social formality is replaced by modern ‘casual’. Catherine the Great is replaced by a swimsuit clad Miss World. The problem with this opera is the climax. What is the nature of the card game in which Herman’s last card is the Queen of Spades and not an ace? On this occasion the casino was represented by an array of one-arm-bandits. The performance did not have the terrifying conclusion remembered from after WNO’s 2000 production.

During the interval we were smugly saying how much better Tchaikovsky sounds with genuine Russian voices with a Russian orchestral sound. It was only later we discovered that Jans Storijs, singing Herman, was none other than Durham-born Ian Story (Eric, in WNO’s recent Dutchman)! He gave a truly authentic performance, matched by Kristīne Opolais’ Lisa. Their distraught final duet was the musical high point of the evening, with the panache of Kristīne Zadovska’s performance of Lisa’s buddy Pauline’s song in Scene Two, in close contention.

Opinions were divided on the new production of Das Rheingold directed by Stefan Herhelm. This was the first instalment of a Ring cycle in collaboration with Bergen Opera, each to have a different director. I hated it! The drama opened with the usual suppressed excitement and anticipation of the extended E flat major chord – a glorious sound if, on this occasion, a little light on string tone. But then the Rhine maidens appeared, dressed as schoolgirls seated at desks, under the tutelage of an explicitly paedophilic Alberich, before reverting to more appropriate dress. However the main theme of the production is revealed in the second scene as an exploration of Wagner himself, in a historical context; the telling of the story takes second place. The stage is populated with Wagner look-alikes (Wotan and Loge) and a parade of characters dressed as historical personages. Thus the music-drama became a parlour game, guessing who was who. For example, we had Fasolt and Fafner as Marx and Engels, though both switching to Wagner masks half way through. The main conversation after the performance was point-scoring on character recognition. This reduced the musical accompaniment to the status of musak, to be commented on only as an afterthought. Though the singing contended well with this distraction, at no point were we overwhelmed by the power of Wagner’s music. There was much that was distasteful (in addition to the opening) such as a squad of Nazi storm troopers emerging from Nibelheim, the humiliation of Alberich (one is not supposed to feel sorry for him!) and the fashioning of the gold into symbols of the major world religions. In following the text literally, no adolescent double entendre was overlooked. The crudity seriously diminished the impact of this masterpiece of music-drama.

Two outstanding productions out of four is, I suppose, not a bad score these days!