Lohengrin, Nationale Opera 11.11.23
Have you ever wandered beneath the glass-awnings of Covent Garden Market, bombarded the busker-bel canto of a sub-par soprano, and fantasised about what it might be like to a have a some nordic Royal Opera House Lyrischersopran singing a Wagner aria to you in unspecified imaginary shopping centre instead? Well as I foundout to my cost, the private pique of fantasising about such things, is rarely matched by reality when said fantasy is finally acted out, with or without consequences for one's marriage... I should disclose here, my only real qualification for reviewing any opera at all is that my wife (and me by extension) share a conducting coach with Cate Blanchett, oh, and of course Granny's stories of 1930s Bayreuth, but I digress.
Take yourself off to the soulless glass and steel city hall - cum - opera of Amsterdam, and you really can see Malin Bystrom, the best Swedish Salome since Birgit Nilson, sing in an edifice, which to all intents and purposes, both aesthetically and acoustically speaking, reassembles suburban mall. Lohengrin opened this week at the so-called 'StOpera' a portmanteau of 'stadhuis' and 'opera', under the rather hard-driving baton of Lorenzo Viotti, a boy-band-handsome thirty something, cosplaying (for the first act at least) as a pre-Riefenstahl Furtwangler. The shimmering strings of the Prelude, drawn-out to spar so expressively with the brass, showed flashes of Viotti’s ability to conjure up the sublime.The Swiss impressario’s baton darted imperiously, but with a loose approach to tempo and dynamics, surely surprising and delighting even the acoustically-bereft Amsterdam audience, forced to hear Wagner in such unsatisfactory surrounds.This is apparently Viotti’s swansong (if you’ll forgive the Lohengrin double entendre), having chosen not to renew his contract with the ‘StOpera’. His predecessor Marc Albrecht saw out his stint with Tristan und Isolde five years ago, and an insider of my acquaintance remarked that ‘if you try to leave the Nationale Opera, the ‘men in grey suits’ force a Wagner number on you as final demand, usually with a stripped down set - it’s the best money-spinner they can think of before one goes on to better things.’
Indeed, men in grey suits are much evident here, supposedly the gay array of the militia of Brabant mustered by the fanfare horns of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry the Fowler. Though suspiciously this chorus in their drab tailoring look much like the hunting party from Act II the 2018 production of Tristan. Christof Loy’s direction denudes the stage of little more than a garage door, punctuated by the occasional overlay of spindly black trees. A few rather brauny dancers popped out at the start of Act II, and other than their girations the only other visual to help orientate the narrative is said dancers forming a human daisy chain to suggest some sort of serpentine form that might be interpreted wings of a swan. Combined with the distinctly 80’s environs, one begins to feel trapped in some past-its-sell by date West German experimental theatre productions, with only the sudden schmaltz of Treulich Gefurth (Viotti too appeared to have lost all passion by this point) to break the spell.
