Love Wagner? See this. Don’t know Wagner? See it anyway.

MUSIC
Simone Young conducts Das Rheingold
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Opera House Concert Hall. November 16
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★★

It was at the entry of Noa Beinart, statuesque and premonitory, as the earth goddess Erda in the climactic turning point of the fourth and final scene, that the full triumph of casting in Simone Young’s concert performance of Das Rheingold became complete.

The contradictory motivations, the variegated grain of vocal types and the subtle hues and blazing brilliance of the orchestral score all paused, while Wolfgang Koch as the one-eyed, all-powerful god Wotan learnt that things weren’t going to go quite as he had planned.

Falk Struckmann sings the part of Alberich with iron strength and stony ferocity.Credit: Daniel Boud

Das Rheingold is the “preliminary evening” of Wagner’s epic, The Ring of the Nibelung, in which a world corrupted by power is propelled towards destruction and redemption. Young and the SSO plan a multi-year presentation, but on the evidence of this performance, the end of the world will be well worth waiting for.

It started innocently enough with the barely disturbed glow and stillness of the horns, as the prolonged opening E flat chord gradually eddied and surged with increased animation in the magnificent clarity of the concert hall acoustic. Samantha Clarke, Catherine Carby and Margaret Plummer created a delightfully light, glistening sound as the Rhinemaidens, ineffectually guarding the gold.

Falk Struckmann, singing the part of Alberich with iron strength and stony ferocity, steals it, renouncing love for power. His curse when the ring he fashions from it is itself stolen was one of the evening’s many towering moments. Meanwhile, the gods are becoming concerned at the cost of their renovations.

Michaela Schuster as Fricka has a voice of wonderfully rich and vivid drama, full of dramatic colour without stridency. As ransom for their new castle and a symbol of forsaken purity, Eleanor Lyons as Freya captures a penetrating tone of flashing colour. Koch’s vocal characterisation of Wotan evolves compellingly over the drama, beginning with a patrician noble sound that edges towards the pompous, capturing moments of sharp-edged ferocity in the central scene in Nibelheim, and ending with expansive spaciousness.

Just as the gods’ problems spiral into a domestic chaos, in comes the captivatingly suave bloom and mellifluousness melodic shaping of Steve Davislim’s voice as the mercurial Loge. His performance is a gem of fluid vocal characterisation. As the labouring giants Fafner and Fasolt, who are starting to realise they’ve been had, Jud Arthur had firm-edged bluntness and Simon Meadows’ youthful strength tinged with lyricism.

Simon O’Neill as Froh, who, with his hammer, sees every problem as a nail, had an attractive light heroic tenor sound, while Samuel Dundas as Donner announced the final scene with collected vocal poise. A happy discovery was to hear Andrew Goodwin, best known for baroque roles, create the pointed querulous sound needed for Mime with such effective projection. Beinart’s sound as Erda was a voice from the depth and beyond, once heard in a dream and never forgotten.

The SSO under Young brought forth a wealth of glories. To the burnished brilliance of the brass and warmth of the horns is added the tactile textural complexity of the Wagner tubas, while the woodwind coloured both dark and brilliant moments and the strings energised with swirling figuration. Young paced the work with an experienced dramatic understanding. Those with an interest in Wagner won’t want to miss this. Those without an interest won’t want to miss the chance to get one.

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THEATRE
THE MASTER & MARGARITA
Belvoir St Theatre, November 15
Until December 10
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★★

Were adaptor/director Eamon Flack to fall under a tram tomorrow – as happens to poor Berlioz in the play – he can go knowing he’s made something to live in the annals of theatre. I promise this will surprise the hell out of you. Even if you know and worship Mikhail Bulgakov’s phantasmagorical novel on which it’s based, your eyebrows will be exhausted from reaching heavenward, as your mouth will be from constantly dropping open in wonder, laughing or smiling – whether wryly or slyly.

Bulgakov, an intellectual thorn in Stalin’s regime, completed the book just before he died in 1940 – long before it finally appeared in 1967. Despite also being a dramatist, I doubt he imagined it becoming a play. Nor did I. Flack did, however, and with help from the actors he gradually refined a way of bringing to the stage a novel about a novel (about Pontius Pilate) that’s also tangled with other stories.

Gareth Davies, Marco Chiappi, Josh Price, Amber McMahon and Matilda Ridgway.Credit: Brett Boardman

These centre around Woland (Paula Arundell), a rather appealing Satan figure, and his henchmen Korovyev (Amber Mcmahon), Azzazelo (Gareth Davies) and Behemoth (Josh Price). Although they play some black practical jokes on the bewildered burghers of Moscow, they’re infinitely preferable to any surrounding authoritarian regimes, whether Roman in Palestine, Stalinist in Russia or your choice of current contenders.

You can make a pact with Woland, which you can’t really do with power-crazed humans. Margarita (Anna Samson) does a deal with him to be reunited with her lover, The Master (Mark Leonard Winter), and Margarita is liberated and empowered in the process.

She calls him The Master because she believes his novel about Pilate to be supreme. Bulgakov’s genius was to be able to include excerpts from this putative novel, and make them justify that epithet. Flack’s triumph is to have captured much of that quality, despite the excerpts becoming mere snippets so as to contain the performance to three hours.

The play isn’t perfect: it needs more of Woland, and Price’s vastly entertaining Behemoth could include more crazy feline characteristics, for instance, and the revolve creaks. Nonetheless, exceptional performances abound, from Samson’s bold Margarita to Arundel’s rare presence as Woland, while McMahon and Davies excel as their playfully dangerous zanies.

Winter is equally good as both the crushed artist who’s The Master and as Yeshua, the Christ-figure, whom Bulgakov depicts as a simple, kind, caring man, already alarmed by the twisting of his words – imagine what he’d make of today’s evangelical maniacs!

The consistently convincing Marco Chiappi plays Pilate, riddled with misgivings while doing what he believes is expected as a despot’s middle manager. The 10-strong cast – which sometimes seems like 20 – is completed by Tom Conroy, Matilda Ridgway, and a gripping Jana Zvedeniuk.

Gary Daley performs live accordion as part of Stefan Gregory’s edgy score. The music, costumes (Romanie Harper) and lighting (Nick Schlieper) decorate a simple black-box stage, with animated use of a revolve. The novel is replete with the devil’s wiles, and Adam Mada has gifted the show a host of stupendous magic and illusion tricks.

And that’s part of the point. Magic – whether illusory, theatrical or imagination-stirring – counters a world of lives half-lived; lives cheated by greed, power, beliefs and a creeping, grey conformity. “It doesn’t have to make any sense,” Korovyev tells us emphatically, and he’s right. But The Master & Margarita will restore your faith in the human spirit. Just don’t take the kids: Bulgakov’s descriptions of wildness and nudity are fully realised.

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Chopin and the Mendelssohns
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Opera House Concert Hall, November 12
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

Early genius and premature death marked the three 19th century Romantic composers of the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s final concert for the year.

All had been astonishing prodigies in their teens, but none made it to the middle of the century in which they had been born. Fanny Mendelssohn, the oldest, died first of a stroke aged 41, her younger brother Felix suffering the same fate within six months.

Frédéric Chopin, the youngest of the trio was taken by the illness that had consumed his last years just under two years later. To begin the concert, pianist Polina Leschenko and ACO director Richard Tognetti played the Concerto for Violin and Piano in D minor, an astonishingly precocious work by the 14-year-old Felix, who also performed the brilliantly virtuosic piano part, partnering with his violin teacher Eduard Ritz, at its first performance.

Pianist Polina Leschenko and ACO Director Richard Tognetti opened with Felix Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Violin and Piano in D minor.Credit: Nic Walker

Although clearly written in the classical mould of Beethoven (still alive at the time and a profound inspiration for the young prodigy), the duo concerto has some hallmarks of the new generation. It exaggerates the difference in expression and tempo between the spiky, driven first idea of the first movement, with nimble impetuous passagework from the soloists, and the expressive second theme.

Leschenko’s natural manner at the piano nurtures its softer tones and, in the second movement, after the orchestra strings had announced an adagio theme of classic simplicity, she established a dreamy sound with moments of stillness towards the close. In the last movement, Leschenko and Tognetti sprang forward as though releasing the energy pent-up in the first.

Chopin’s Piano Concerto No 2 in F minor (actually the first written) was also the work of a teenager, and Leschenko created piano filigree with a tone of clarity and quiet finish. In the second she created arabesques around the central idea with fanciful freedom, while the finale swept forward with graceful facility.

The ACO, led by Tognetti, accompanied discreetly in an arrangement of Chopin’s original for string orchestra by Ilan Rogoff. Commenting on her String Quartet in E flat, Fanny Mendelssohn, in a regrettable moment of culturally influenced self-doubt about her abilities as a female composer, expressed the view she was better suited to smaller forms and lacked the ability to develop ideas in a sustained way.

After hearing the ACO articulate the subtle whimsy and restraint of the quiet adagio that makes up the first movement, one could beg to disagree. The things she had doubts about were, in fact, her artistic strengths. After a vigorous scurrying scherzo, she again finds her distinctive voice in the slow movement, while the last movement leapt with touching high spirit underlaid by contrapuntal skill. The Chopin concerto is a frequent and welcome guest on concert programs and one could wish the same for these neglected works by the Mendelssohns.

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