English National Opera

27th November 2008

Riders to the Sea is about this woman whose sons all drop dead. The music is by Ralph Vaughan Williams and he’s really good at writing about the sea, have you heard his Sea Symphony? So it would probably have been quite good if it was just about the music. But it was kind of more about outside events. Richard Hickox who was supposed to have conducted it died last Monday. The performances were dedicated to him. The thing is even though the opera’s really sad and stuff, I mean this woman lost six whole sons which was quite careless of her really, at the end of the day it’s all just a story.

Richard Hickox was real and I think he was a really cool guy. He could conduct all kinds of stuff but Vaughan Williams was like his thing and he kind of got works performed that might not have been performed without him so the ENO putting on Riders to the Sea really showed what he was all about if you get me. So from that side of things it was good but it did feel like we were seeing the opera in a different way, it was more about the conductor who wasn’t conducting it than the opera.

It was quite spooky though, you get this opera all about men dying suddenly and mysteriously and then the conductor does it too. It’s probably a bit disrespectful to go on about that though.

Riders of the Sea was done in a really interesting way but there were a few things I didn’t like though so I’ll do them first then I’ll do the good stuff. First up, Riders to the Sea is only like 45-50 minutes long so they did this song called Luonnotar before it which was a sort of prologue so it ended up as 55 minutes.

But like no-one goes all the way to an opera house just for like 55 minutes. Well I suppose it depends on how close you live but even stuff like the lunchtime concerts at Wigmore Hall and other places are usually only like 1 hour long, I used to go when I was like 14 because I thought it was really cool to go to a concert instead of going to school but now it’s like you have to walk from home or school to the station, wait for a train, change to the Underground, then you’re only there for an hour and it’s not usually worth it. If Riders to the Sea hadn’t been so good I reckon people would have been on the ENO’s backs about it being only 55 minutes, like when the ROH did Pag with an interval and no Cav and then charged full price for it, well I think they did anyway but that was longer than Riders to the Sea and people were complaining. 55 minutes isn’t really an evening out.

It worked quite well putting the 2 things together. Luonnotar is also all about the sea but it’s about birth instead of death so there was a contrast thing going on there. Luonnotar’s by Sibelius so it didn’t sound like Vaughan Williams or nothing but you could kind of hear the sea in that piece and in the opera.

But it was quite weird because Luonnotar was in Finnish and Riders to the Sea was in English. I know it’s not really done to translate tone poems but if you think about it, why are operas different? Okay an opera is a drama that’s acted, a tone poem is more something that’s like recited (even though Susan Gritton who sang it was acting all the way through) but you could say with a poem each word is important, when you’re studying a poem you have to like read each word really carefully to get a sense of the whole meaning and if you translate it so it still fits the music it’s going to change the meaning. But when the poem’s in Finnish, you can’t understand each word. I know this is the ENO so even when things are in English you’re not going to be able to understand everything but it was weird going from one language to another. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a song cycle or Lieder or anything like that with a sung translation. Maybe it wouldn’t work but I’d like to hear it.

I suppose what I should do is think of an opera that would go with Riders to the Sea like Cav goes with Pag but I can’t think of anything at the moment.. I don’t think it should be anything funny like Gianni Schicchi or L’heure espagnole, I don’t reckon that would work. And which one would you do first anyway? It’s kind of like the prologue in Ariadne auf Naxos when they don’t know if they should have the tragedy first or the comedy troupe, whatever they choose to go first it’s going to be weird. So you want something a bit depressing really. Maybe Cav would be okay but the music’s a bit different really. It’s got to be something quite modern I think, I wonder how long Curlew River is, that’s by Britten and it’s quite spooky, I think him and Vaughan Williams were around at the same time.

Edward Gardner took over the conducting, he’s the musical director at the ENO so he probably knew all about it, conductors probably have covers like singers. It sounded good, quite quiet sometimes but it was that sort of opera, all menacing undertones and stuff like that. The singers mostly sang quite softly but you could always hear them over the orchestra. Luotonnar had more loud dramatic stuff.

I liked all the creepy stuff with all the sons all dying the same way and the music was easy to listen to. The programme says it’s all like naturalistic speech rhythms but I thought there was loads of tunes in it. Most of the singers sang with Irish accents even though some of them were Scottish. Hairy says no-one does an Irish accent like the Scots and I was like yeah no-one does it as crap as the Scots! But I only said that to piss Hairy off, Kate Valentine and Leigh Melrose sounded as Irish as the Irish people to me.

The singing was great. Patricia Bardon was really powerful as Maurya. Some of the others are usually a bit funny about her when she’s not singing Handel and I do get that, if she sang Vaughan Williams with the same kind of tone as what she sings Handel with it would sound a bit weird. But she doesn’t. Her Irish accent was very strong but her diction was still pretty good even though she was singing at the ENO, sometimes when you try singing in your speaking voice your diction can go totally because you don’t speak with brilliant diction most of the time, you don’t need to. She got the character totally, she’s not that old really I don’t think, younger than Hairy anyway but the way she moved made her seem old, I don’t mean she was tottering about or nothing even though she did have a walking stick but she was kind of you know, like she’d lost all her energy.

Kate Valentine and Claire Booth were sexy as Mauriya’s daughters Cathleen and Nora even though their clothes were weird, it says in the programme that’s how people dressed on the islands where the opera was set. Their voices were quite similar really, Cathleen is the oldest and she bosses Nora about a bit so some directors might have wanted a slightly heavier voice for Cathleen so there was like a contrast but you didn’t need that, you could tell which one was in charge. Not sure which one I like best, I like a girl who can stand up to me a bit but Cathleen’s a bit of a nagger. Leigh Melrose was cool too as Bartley, he was only onstage for about 2 seconds except when he was dead but he was all jumping about and restless and stuff and you could tell he was just the type to do things his mum told him not to.

One thing about the singing though the range seemed really small, there wasn’t really anything fast that I noticed and the intervals were quite small too, no big jumps. I’m not saying the music was easy or nothing but like as long as you know it well enough and if you can do all that lyrical stuff it seems like the type of thing that won’t trip you up, like if I really hated one of the singers (which I don’t) and I wanted to say they had dodgy high notes or something I couldn’t really do it because there aren’t enough high notes for me to tell.

The opera is based on a play by J M Synge, I think the libretto is pretty much the play. It was directed by Fiona Shaw, I wasn’t that impressed but it was the first opera she’s directed I think and it’s probably not the easiest one to start off with. She had Cathleen and Nora running all over the stage all the time and like waving their hands about which I thought it was all a bit OTT really. And it was a bit weird in Luotonnar having Susan Gritton standing in this boat that was turned on its end and she was like standing on this shelf thing halfway up it.

There were also videos in the background was which was a really interesting idea but mostly in Luotonnar I was just looking at Susan, maybe that’s just the guys though! And the lesbians obviously and to be honest I didn’t really notice the videos in Riders to the Sea much. It really worked in Gaddafi but not in this one.

The libretto’s in the programme, I don’t know if the ENO’s done that before. It was too dark to follow the libretto and there were surtitles anyway but it’s good I think, you can buy books with the libretto in and quite often you get them with recordings but the books are like 5 quid and the recordings with librettos usually cost £25 except some can be twice as much. Hairy will know all about that. But if the ENO programme has the libretto in it still costs £4.50. Most librettos are longer because the operas are longer but this one was only 5 pages and maybe most librettos wouldn’t be much longer because they sing the same thing like 10 times. Like Handel arias, they can take 5-10 minutes to sing them but some of them are only 4 lines long.

One thing that’s really different about this opera is that there aren’t really any people who hate each other. Maurya is a bit pissed off with Bartley when he says he is going over the sea and she can’t stop him but apart from that it’s the characters against the sea. It worked really well but I reckon if it had been much longer I’d have got a bit fed up with it, operas need conflict mostly. But this one worked really well without all that.

FitCrit

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