The Messiah Erkel Theatre Budapest
Dec 21st 2019
This was an evening that was many things – excellent musically, ear-opening in hearing the version of the Messiah (arranged Mozart) that we did, deeply unsatisfying dramatically, puzzling as a theatrical experience, but nevertheless something very good to have experienced…
Mozart’s arrangement, to my ears, gave the work a warmly romantic tinge – probably the wind such as clarinet and the horns (highly effective in The Trumpet Shall Sound) and one heard it with new ears. It did not have the cold-water clarity of a Handel-style performance with the much smaller chorus but it was very fine and did not sound heavy or turgid; it was certainly not a Victorian-style massed chorus soundscape that we got.
The soloists were uniformly excellent particularly the bass Krisztian Cser. Must look out for him in opera performances. Checking online I see that there were a few omissions in the numbers but, contrary to what I though, the order remained the same. The orchestra was vivid and responsive under Gergely Kesselyak.
Then problem was the whole idea of staging this work. Famously, as the programme prominently pointed out, there is no clear ‘plot’ to the work and no characters consistently represented by the soloists. This makes the concept of staging challenging in the first. Although I have not seen them, I know there have been stagings of Bach choral masterpieces, certainly the Passions (I am unsure about the B mi Mass) which apparently have been fascinating and revelatory in some cases. Deborah Warner has done something like this…https://www.deborahwarner.com/2012-messiah-lyon and https://www.deborahwarner.com/2000-st-john-passion-london
From the staging point of view it was utterly and frustratingly baffling. Who were the people on the stage (no idea), who or what did the dancers represent (no idea), what was the significance of all the costume changes (unexplained), why did the costumes not suggest or communicate something (their bland generality made it even more puzzling), what did the wall represent (the fact that a dramatic highlight was a wall tumbling down tells you something about how desperate one was for something to happen that was dramatically engaging), why the multi-coloured squares for a spell in the latter part on the rear stage wall (was there an ironical comment being made about 70’s computer games?), why did these squares then change, momentarily, to monochrome (well, something happened at least!), who were the two figures who came on at the very start through the closed curtain, incredibly slowly, one of whom was laid down on the ground – and to the accompaniment of atonal music that sounded like scraps of Handel play together (no answers were given and the fact that that figure then re-appeared at the conclusion gave no help or guidance whatsoever).
I will be very interested indeed to hear what the Hungarian critics made of this and will keep a look out on other sites to see if it reviewed e.g. sites like Bachtrack. But still, good to have had the experience even if there was no meaning in it!