Michael Dervan saw The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant by the English National Opera at The Coliseum in London, Martin Adams saw RTÉ NSO at the NCH in Dublin, Brian O'Connell was in Cork to see Cathal Coughlan/ Flannery's Mounted Head at the Father Matthew Hall, Martin Adams saw Mutter, Orkis at the NCH in Dublin and Gerry Colgan was at the Lambert Puppet Theatre allso in Dublin to see Music'elles/My Tree
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
English National Opera, The Coliseum, London
There are many things which mark out Gerald Barry's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant as an unusual opera.
The composer has set the entire text of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's original play. The cast of six is all female, and one of the characters who looms large neither sings nor speaks a single word. And then, of course, there's the torrid, fraught affair at the heart of the opera which has prompted headlines about "singing lesbians" and "lesbian love" at the opera.
Barry's music, insistently involving, works both like a whirlwind whipping up doom and a sometimes touching, sometimes wry, sometimes gleeful commentary that winds up the tension in the strange and strained relationships of Fassbinder's mirrored character pairings.
The monstrous, not quite pitiable, twice-married fashion designer Petra von Kant rules ruthlessly over her mute, masochistic secretary/slave Marlene. And Petra herself falls under the spell of a young, go-getting protege, Karen, turning her into a successful model before becoming fully enslaved herself. After her eventual abandonment, the distraught Petra reaches a point where she turns a human face to Marlene, an upturning of the familiar order which the latter finds alienating and terrifying.
The singers' lines flutter and leap through the vocal stratosphere with a freedom as untrammelled as the violence in a Punch and Judy show.
The onstage substance abuse is of alcohol, but the nerviness and energy of the music suggested characters subjected to altogether more modern psychoactive influences.
There is no weak link in the ENO cast. Stephanie Friede's Petra is fierce and fragile, flouncing and petulant; Rebecca von Lipinski's Karen dangerously volatile, self-seeking, unthinkingly exploitative.
Barbara Hannigan as Petra's daughter Gabriele vaults impressively through vocal acrobatics that put Strauss's Zerbinetta in the shade.
Kathryn Harries as Petra's mother Valerie dons the utterly shockable gravity of failed parental authority. Susan Bickley negotiates the rough emotional ride of the concerned friend Sidonie.
And always and everywhere is the watchful, willing, never-failing Marlene of Linda Kitchen, a silent black and white presence in the swathes of saturated colour, and, with a mistress as demanding as Petra, a woman whose work is truly never done. The audience rewarded her patient, diligent reserve with the biggest cheer of the evening.
Musically, the differences between Friday's stage première at The Coliseum and the RTÉ NSO's concert performance last May were substantial.
The concert performance was an orchestra-dominated, in-your-face tour-de-force. For ENO, director Richard Jones and designer Ultz opted to strengthen the voices by locating the tall, bright and lurid set in front of the curtain and out into the auditorium. The flat, exploded view of the mannequin-inhabited apartment placed the audience as voyeurs to the hothouse drama.
By building over the pit, Ultz and Jones also tamed the orchestra, and conductor Andre de Ridder allowed his players to bite and snarl and bellow within their unusually contained ambit so that their loudest efforts did not engulf the stage.
As a result, the voices rarely had to struggle to be heard. A high proportion of the text was comprehensible. And anything that was missed could be culled from surtitles, making a long-overdue and very successful début at ENO.
Barry's previous operas, The Intelligence Park and The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit, both stretched the boundaries of opera in unusual ways.
In The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant he has done this yet again, treating text and music with both a confluence and independence which is entirely fresh, while at the same time it harks back to the very origin of opera in the 16th century.
In that sense, this black and also often comic work is like a gesture of creative provocation. It will be interesting to see if anyone can travel the path it seems to have opened up.
Michael Dervan
Amoyal, RTÉ NSO/Markson
NCH, Dublin
Ian Wilson - Winter Finding
Saint-Saéns - Violin Concerto No 3
Berlioz - Les Troyens: Overture; Royal Hunt and Storm; Ballets; Trojan March
Ian Wilson says that Winter Finding "'seeks to explore the universality of human experience filtered through the prism of the natural world".
The initial idea behind this RTÉ commission came via the American painter Cy Twombly's Quattro Staggione; but, "not wanting to be too close to these paintings musically", Wilson commissioned from his long-term collaborator Lavinia Greenlaw, with the support of the Arts Council, four poems based on the paintings.
The music engages vividly with the poetry's successive images. In four sections played without a break, this extended work shows its composer's characteristic technical command and manipulation of orchestral sound.
Yet is also raises one of music's oldest conundrums - whether one needs to know the external idea in order to appreciate the music. In this particular case I am not sure.
However, there is no denying Wilson's ability to conceive ideas that hold one's attention, that connect, that show humane sensibility, and that demand to be taken seriously.
Saint-Saëns's Violin Concerto No 3 epitomises the 19th century's soloist-as-king concept of concerto. However, it lacks the substance of equivalent works such as Tchaikovsky's concertos. Pierre Amoyal clearly relished his role, playing with all the gutsy bravado that such music calls for and with plenty of delicacy too.
The evening ended with a tribute from conductor Gerhard Markson to the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's third-horn principal Tom Briggs, who was retiring after 43 years.
That was after music which gives the horns plenty of meat - excerpts from Berlioz's opera Les Troyens. Here is pictorial music so strong that it achieves autonomy even if one knows nothing of what it portrays.
The RTÉ NSO and Gerhard Markson were on strong form in music that still sounds utterly audacious.
Martin Adams
Cathal Coughlan/ Flannery's Mounted Head
Father Matthew Hall, Cork
Cathal Coughlan is still unwell, and there is little hope for recovery.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Cork's Capital of Culture programme was that of Coughlan, the anti-establishment, angry and articulate voice of punk Cork for more than two decades. Here was a guy who needed to flee the scene he was largely responsible for recreating, having been part of influential outfit Microdisney and then later Fatima Mansions.
He sought refuge in the state of "ex-pat", giving him the necessary distance to respond to his environment, sometimes with vitriolic passion.
Yet, as with many ex-pat observers, the nuances of change are less obvious, and society is viewed in polemics rather than consequence.
And so, on a thematic level, in Flannery's Mounted Head - Coughlan's one-off response to his native city - we're hearing nothing new. Institutions get a rough ride, as does commercialism, mental illness, and prosperous individualism offset against collective struggle.
The narrative of the embittered ex-pat's one-off song cycle is delivered to us in the comprehensive programme notes, which is a good thing because although Coughlan uses the spoken word on three occasions during the performance, you could spend your whole time trying to fill in the blanks here.
What makes this a truly exceptional achievement, though, is the manner in which Coughlan and his Grand Necropolitan Orchestra blend the strands of narrative and some of Coughlan's finest songwriting.
Ophelia Crescent is Burning, Rat Poison Rendezvous and Asunderland will all stand up in their own right in time to come.
In the persona of Flannery, a petrol-inhaling, night-time manager of a call centre, Coughlan takes us on a musical rampage at times both delicate and damaging. The resolution that "damaged evil will do it's worst" becomes inevitable as the performance progresses, and there is little leftof Flannery for us to relate to.
Welcome home Cathal.
Brian O'Connell
Mutter, Orkis
NCH, Dublin
Mozart - Sonatas in C K296. F K377. D K306. E flat K302. A K 526.
This recital showed exactly why Anne-Sophie Mutter is one of the premier violinists of our time.
She is a musician for our time - for an age that, as certainties crumble, tends to find certainty in precision, that values music-making which, through precision, suggests perfection in its execution.
The musical conception might not always be immaculate, but presentation and delivery are.
It is so rare to hear a recital by a string player in which not one of the thousands of notes was even slightly mistuned. Yet this was not the tuning of an automaton as Anne-Sophie Mutter's way of bending an unstable pitch to press it towards resolution was awe-inspiring.
It says much about her that she can hold an audience throughout a programme of Mozart piano sonatas. Also, that when it came to her sole encore, she chose one of the most subtle of all movements, the Minuet finale of the Sonata in E minor K304.
However, there is something almost passionless about this admirable perfection. It limits the music's humanity; and that impression was reinforced by the piano's subservience to the violin. Even when the violin retreated, the piano stepped back.
This was all the more striking because in every other respect Lambert Orkis was an impeccable partner, as fully on top of his challenges and as fine-toned as Mutter herself. On the occasions when the piano did assert itself, as in the superb Sonata in E flat K302, one longed to hear more of the passionate give-and-take that surfaced.
Martin Adams
Music'elles/My Tree
Lambert Puppet Theatre
Two shows from the closing days of the International Puppet Festival amply repaid their audiences. The Pavaly Company, a husband and wife team from France, brought Music'elles, a revue of musical numbers and sketches.
It opens with a pianist bedevilled by a busy cleaning lady, followed by a busty opera singer, the epitome of the fat lady singing, whose weight collapses the stage.
Others include a reed-playing Indian with exotic dancer, a trumpet-blowing clown, a can-can and a traditional Pierrot named Valdez who exudes melancholy. The Guignol marionettes are worked brilliantly by the puppeteer and his wife. From the UK came My Tree, a contemporary fairy story that tells the tale of Tilly the puppet, who finds herself on a rubbish heap with one leg missing and her favourite lime tree gone. She sets out to find the tree, and meets other characters similarly out of joint. It transpires that she was carved from lime wood and, when she eventually tracks down the tree, her leg is restored.
It is an ingenious tale, and the company displays noteworthy skills in telling it. Thus the story is driven more by the spoken word than by the narrative force inherent inpuppetry and the tale's progression is at times opaque. But the happy-ever-after ending wraps it nicely up.
Gerry Colgan
