Tristan & Isolde MUPA Wagner Days Budapest
June 16th 2018
The Wagner Days of Budapest is turning out to be one of my musical highlights in the city and this year, when I saw two of the three productions was no exception.
The orchestra under Adam Fischer has always been superb – he seems to be a conductor who lest the music speak for itself (which is not a negative criticism) and I had the sense that his awareness of the structure of both the individual acts and the entire work was something that was just right. Its tricky to explain this further but I think it is having a sense that everything is ‘just right’ – a combination perhaps of musical phrasing, control of dynamics and a sense of forward dramatic momentum. This is true of both the operas and not just Tristan.
There was a fascinating age gap between the Tristan and the Isolde and yet they worked and communicated together superbly. The young UK soprano (like so many making her career in Germany, in Berlin where I may well have seen her – must check - ) was Allison Oakes. Young (cannot find out her age) she has a remarkably fine powerful and controlled voice with ease of production across its range – I just hope that she is not doing too much too early as she is already starting the two ‘biggies’ in the Wagner canon – Isolde and Brunnhilde. However, on the evidence of this performance, all is well. The voice was intact until the final note of the Liebestod (alright, to be REALLY pedantic, that final note did cut out a little early and there was a slight rough edge to it but…). Her portrayal of Isolde, particularly in the first two acts, was interesting as it was very much a young princess.– She was positively skittish at time as when she kicked off her shoes as Tristan approached in Act 2. Her fury in Act 1 was not the grand imperious rage of a Nilsson or Flagstad, but rather the unbridled fury and frustration of someone younger who, perhaps, has not been used to people saying ‘no’ to her. The only aspect of this I am not sure about was not having a sense of who she was, and how changed, in Act 3 (and I think Isolde must be – here. She must surely be a more mature character who can embrace the transcendentalism of the final scene and I am not sure that any sense of this came across. Given how I saw her interpretation in the first two acts I suppose this is quite a dramatic challenge and would be difficult to bring off. I am not even sure HOW it could be done to be honest.
Her Tristan was, I suspect, almost twice her age –the veteran and wonderfully rich-voiced Peter Seiffert whose honeyed vocal passion matched wonderfully well Oakes’s youthful vocal shine. He had the youthful vigour to make the passion real. He did not have the baritonal quality that many heldentenors have (and in places need) and he, again, demonstrated remarkable power, sweetness and evenness of tone from the beginning of the evening to the end. He made the amazing madness of Tristan wonderfully riveting in the third act and I found myself utterly involved in every note and phrase for its duration –which, to be honest, has not always been the case.
As King Mark Liang Li was very effective and engaging – even in his Act 2 monologue where he does the ‘I’m not angry with you Tristan, just very disappointed’ scene, again, can sometimes be NOT the most riveting part of the work. I was sorry not to see Matti Salminen though – a great veteran whom I recall seeing years ago in the Ring at Covent Garden.
All other roles were very well filled and performed and there was a real company sense to the whole event – quite an achievement given there had only been three performances.
The production was…pretty effective. The wide stage (in the superbly acoustic MUPA hall) was almost completely bare except for one item that changed in appearance for each of the three acts. This seemed to be a large sofa-like structure, which in Act 1 was on the floor, in Act 2 raised at one end and in Act 3 was skeletal. Not quite sure what it showed – it did sort of hint at a ship in Act 1 and I suppose the skeletal look in Act 3 was an effective representation of how Tristan and Isolde are being reduced to their essential essences and gradually coming out of the physical world into a different, transcendental reality…I think. I’m not sure though.
Video images were used throughout all three acts, projected onto the rear of the stage and this was a mixed blessing. I think that the use of video, very common now, is often really difficult to do well and too often the images can be over-repetitive, sometimes trite, and sometimes obtrusive –and even sometimes somewhat amateurish looking. Here the major theme was, understandably, the sea. In Act 1 a slightly choppy sea that was unchanged for the whole act. Again, perhaps too obvious – and was there not scope for some variety to match/mirror/comment upon what was happening on the stage? Again this can be tricky; one does not want a simplistic visual underlining of what is happening. In Act 2 the sea returned but this time were under it, with a cone of light shining down and small white elements floating across. this did give some quite effective sense of being in another world, as Tristan and Isolde are – although one could argue that showing light as the dominant element did work against the verbal language of the duet with its emphasis on erotic dark. At one stage earlier on, an image of a face with prominent eyes appeared – could have implied Melot spying on them, could be Brangaene on watch. Again I am not sure of its role and value. However once the duet really got underway, the little flecks of white were replaced by vividly coloured blobs writhing and slowly rising to the top of the screen. The problem with this was that these ‘blobs’ were very clearly recognisable as jellyfish and while the sensual wriggling and slow movement was on the right lines, their being recognised as what they actually were made it, frankly, somewhat ridiculous. If you are going for abstraction then GO for abstraction. In Act three the sea returned, as with Act 1 but I felt it was too choppy; surely to reflect the bleakness and bareness of the music and Tristan’s yearning for Isolde to come across the ‘bare and empty sea’ it would have bene far more dramatically effective for the sea to be like millpond. The movement on the sea in Act 1 worked as they were on ship and travelling. Here in Act 3, the sea is bare and empty and this would have been more plausibly conveyed by utter stillness. As the act progressed however, a series of rather gothic-looking tangled branches rose up and gradually filled almost all the screen. This provided, I suppose, a so-so representation of how Tristan was separate in his own transcendental world, blocked off from dull reality. These vanished as Isolde arrived but, again, as with many of the video images, I was not wholly convinced by what I saw and when.
Finally, though, these were (relatively minor) flaws in an otherwise wonderful evening.