Opera North: The Orfeo Blog

A serving of risotto and Kurt Cobain

24 January 2007

It’s less than a week since I last reported in to you all, but a whole lot of stuff has gone down since then in my little world, let me tell you.  We’ve worked through the whole piece by now - no great accomplishment, as it’s only about an hour and forty minutes long! Happily, the overall shape of the show feels right, although there are still plenty of question marks lingering along the way (by no means a bad thing).  For the last hour of today’s rehearsal, we started again from the beginning of the show, working on Musica’s opening scena.  It immediately veered off in a new direction, much influenced by the cast’s collective viewing, late last week, of the film “I Shot Andy Warhol”.  The (anti) heroine of the film is Valerie Solanas, an unstable, disgruntled, relatively peripheral figure in the Warhol scene who…well, the title tells the story.  The film depicts pretty accurately the locations, atmosphere and principal players in this by now legendary microcosm which is such an important influence on our “Orfeo” production.  It answered some questions for the cast, was a good excuse for me to throw a party to show off my glamorous flat, and some serious bonding occurred.

This afternoon, Amy Freston’s Musica began to take on some of the tough, street-wise flavor of Lilli Taylor’s portrayal of Valerie Solanas, and, even better, the ambivalence of this pseudo-artist caught between her disdain for the glittering success of the Warhol crowd and her desperate desire to be a part of it all. That ambivalence is what this production is about, in a nutshell:  the Janus-like nature of Art in general, and Opera in particular, an art form which, on one hand, can go to the darkest, most disturbing and subversive places and, on the other hand, is expensive to produce and dependant on the support of rich patrons. 

Tomorrow night, by the way, I’m hosting another party for the cast (time for some more bonding).  Our wonderfully creative and supportive Italian language coach, Rosalba Lo Duca, has promised to cook risotto and we’re going to watch “Last Days”, Gus Van Sant’s poetic and moving evocation of the final week or so in the life of Kurt Cobain. In this dreamy, fragmented film, the tormented rock star wanders through the woods surrounding his home, alienated from his success, avoiding the demands made on him by his band and his handlers, finally dying from a drug overdose.  This film has loomed large as an influence on me and my designers in our preparation of this production, and Paul Nilon, who has already watched it, has factored it into his performance. Working with Paul, meanwhile, continues to be inspiring, bracing, rewarding.  Most of Act Five consists of a monologue in which Orfeo, mourning his inability to bring Euridice back with him to the land of the living, spirals through a seemingly endless cycle of regret, yearning and rage, like a broken record.  It presents as formidable a challenge as “Possente spirito”, but in an entirely different way. While the earlier scene epitomizes Opera as Sports Event, the ultimate elaborate display of vocal technique beloved of canary fanciers, Orfeo’s final scena is a still-to-this-day-unsurpassed example of the potential for words and music to create powerfully expressive theatre.  It is devastating in its spareness, its stripped-down distillation of existential Angst.  I want Paul to deliver it sitting motionless in a chair, without the crutch of movement to ease the expressive burden.  He says it feels like something out of a Samuel Beckett play, a singing mouth illuminated in a spotlight on an otherwise pitch-black stage.  He struggles with it in the rehearsal room and undoubtedly agonizes about it at home.  When I joked that sitting motionless in a chair is, at least, easy on his sprained ankle, he shot me a look which would stop even the mouth of Dr. Miller in the middle of one of his amusing rehearsal room stories.

(Paul Nilon as Orfeo. Photo by Brian Slater)

Initially, I thought that our six-week long rehearsal period was somewhat excessive for such a short piece.  I certainly feel differently now – we’re going to need every precious moment of it!  One reason for this is the extraordinary amount of time it takes to get this piece organized musically.  On every page of the score, there are countless decisions to be made, endless interpretive possibilities which need to be sorted out based on subtleties of dramaturgy.  This opera does not take care of itself, but needs constant nurturing and nudging.  Happily, we are blessed with the right team to get the job done.  Our conductor, Christopher Moulds, knows just how to play the tricky game of letting the singers explore a scene and begin to find their way into it before proceeding to layer in his own ideas about how to support and enhance their work, using the expressive tools available to early Seventeenth Century operatic performers.  His sensitivity, intelligence and laid-back attitude are essential ingredients in the creative atmosphere of our rehearsal room.  He is seconded by Rob Howarth, who appears to have a bottomless wealth of knowledge about this style of music, and Annette Saunders, who can, miraculously, make a modern piano suggest the range of colors of a baroque band.

The challenge of bringing The First Great Opera Ever Written to life is partly due, I think, to the fact that it has one foot in a past musical style and one in a more forward-looking one.  The stylistic journey which Monteverdi makes as he moves from the first two acts, with its Arcadian nymphs and shepherds, to the later acts in the underworld, is enormous.  By the time he reaches the juicy scene between Pluto and Persephone in Act Four his writing is as psychologically sophisticated as anything in “Poppea”.  I’ve had a great time developing that scene with Andrew Foster Williams and Ann Taylor, whose depiction of two people stuck for all eternity in a nightmare of a marriage is one of the lynchpins of this show.  In our production, they are the hosts of the Edward Albee-esque party during which the events are played out over one long, gloriously gruesome night.  If all goes according to play, it should be one helluva party.

Possento Spirito

18 January 2007

How many days have we been rehearsing, anyway?  I probably shouldn’t be asking you this question, dear blogreader, as I’ve hardly been keeping you up to date with the latest minute-by-minute developments in a certain rehearsal room in Leeds, now have I?  I flew here from NYC less than two weeks ago, but it feels like much longer.  Directing a show can seem like diving into deep water and not coming up for air for weeks.  But there’s no easier way to do it.  Like Orfeo, you gotta go to the deepest, darkest places if you wanna come up with the precious Plutonium that lies hidden at the bottom.  This is definitely one of those snorkeling kind of shows, with the extra added challenge of this production being such an ensemble piece.  The thirteen singers are on stage for the whole evening, singing in the choral passages in addition to their solos.  This means that, much of the time, I am fielding all of these different energies, working to keep them involved and interested, trying to be open to their moods, points of view and  feelings about a scene.  It’s quite a different challenge from directing a piece of cake like “Tristan”, for example, where a normal rehearsal day will involve dealing with, at most, a handful of singers.  Focus and concentration become much more of an issue.  But forgive me for venting like this – it’s been an exhilarating week or so, lots of trying-things-then-rejecting them-then thinking-it-all-through-yet-again-and-trying-something-utterly-different.  The shape of the first two acts has emerged pretty clearly, the vocabulary of the production seems to be making sense and the cast continues to rise to the challenges thrown in their paths by yours truly…
(Me during rehearsals. Photo by Brian Slater)

By the way, did I mention that  Paul Nilon sprained his ankle last Wednesday?   Actually, I don’t think I’ve mentioned Paul at all in this blog yet.  Odd that, ‘cause he’s playing Orfeo. Is this a thorough and informative blog or what? Anyway, Paul was clambering about on top of a lot of chairs and sofas which had been pushed together in the middle of the room to create an Arcadian landscape in which Orfeo and the three shepherds cavort before the Messaggiera shows up to deliver the first singing telegram in operatic history (“Your wife is dead…”).   A misstep, a cry of pain, a weird moment when Paul turned green then nearly passed out, an ice pack, Paul quickly hustled from the rehearsal room to the hospital. The next day, I re-worked that Arcadian scene, not because the Opera North Safety Committee strong-armed me or anything.  No, it was purely for aesthetic reasons, one of those tried-then-rejected things I mentioned earlier. A brainstorming session with set-designer Paul, costume designer Doey,  choreographer Claire,  and assistant director Mark (Hathaway, that is) yielded a simpler, more direct and drier solution to that scene.  OK, and safer too.

Don’t worry, you blog-reading fans of Paul Nilon.  He returned to the rehearsal room yesterday, eager to confront Act Three and the enormously difficult virtuosic set-piece “Possente spirito”, in which Orfeo attempts to charm Caronte, the Ship’s Captain from Hell, into ferrying him to the Other Side.  Up to this point Orfeo has seemed like something of a secondary character, singing a few brief soundbites but hovering around the periphery of the action. In an instant, Monteverdi brings him center stage and presents the audience with the paradoxical image of an artist who, in his attempt to create a work of art which will perform the impossible task of raising the dead, is suddenly vividly alive, wrestling with his demons, facing up to his fears and insecurities and throwing out a challenge to his critics and enemies.  I’ve only had the pleasure of collaborating with the extraordinary Paul Nilon once before, in Bizet’s “Djamileh”, another of those Little Greats, but I’ve admired him in a number of shows over the years, especially the ones staged by that crazy American director, you know, what’s his name?  Oh yeah, David Alden.  Paul is a uniquely gifted guy who takes his work very seriously.  His obsessive commitment to his craft is pretty Orphic.  He can definitely relate to a character facing up to his demons through the mastery of ten minutes of perilously difficult music.  He told us the story of his first audition, at the age of twenty-two, when he sang for Hans Hotter, hoping to be admitted to a master class he was teaching.  He channeled back to the moment when, after mangling “Il Mio Tesoro”, he observed, all too clearly, Hotter’s disgusted and dismissive reaction.   Vulnerable and exposed, the devastated look on Paul’s face seemed as good a point of departure as any for our work on “Possente Spirito”. 

A cast chosen for their intelliegence

7 January 2007, Leeds

Fast forward a month or so (are blogs supposed to be updated every day or so?  I've never written one before, but I have a sneaking suspicion they are...).  I've had my first couple of rehearsal days of the First Great Opera Ever Written and am enjoying my first day off, a quiet Sunday spent entirely in the posh flat arranged for me by Jane Bonner, the resourceful Lord High Everything Else of Opera North.  I asked for something glamorous, so she automatically put me in the flat which Phyllida Lloyd recently occupied during the "Grimes" rehearsal period.  Hopefully some of the mega-hit vibes of that show still linger.  I awoke late this morning after hanging out drinking last night after a viewing of the new (I guess it's not so new anymore) James Bond film.  The film's got some beautiful things in it, and they're not all named Daniel Craig.  The dreamy and rather disturbing sequence where the leading lady drowns in the sunken Venetian palazzo was particularly inspiring to this Orpheus-obsessed movie-goer.  She had "Euridice" written all over her when, earlier, Bond declared his love for her and tendered his resignation to Dame Judy Dench so that he could spend the rest of his life in her arms.  You knew there was no way he was going to retire.  You knew she was a goner, only there so she could die gorgeously.  Which brings me (as what doesn't these days?) to "Orfeo"...

I did manage to put in the necessary study time last month, between decorating the Xmas tree, obsessing about Mozart, Gluck and Verdi and just enjoying being home for the holidays.  Study basically consisted of re-reading various books (among them Robert Donington's "Opera and Its Symbols", Peter Conrad's "A Song of Love and Death" and the Cambridge Opera Handbooks "Orfeo" volume) and listening to the aforementioned CD a number of times to re-absorb the piece into my system. I first studied Monteverdi's "Orfeo" in 1967 in an "Introduction to Opera" course in my first undergraduate year at the University of Pennsylvania, so I've lived with it for 40 years now.  I staged it once before, in 1993, at the Long Beach Opera, the gutsy Southern California company where I had carte blanche to experiment and really find my voice as a director in the 80's and 90's.  And I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, taking it apart and putting it together again over the past year or so in my work with Paul Steinberg and Doey Luethi, the set and costume designers for this Opera North production.  The show we’ve imagined is utterly different from the one I did fifteen or so years back – not surprising considering how the world has changed, how I have changed since then.

 

First day of rehearsal – I gave the Konzeptionsgesprach. Did that word scare you?  It might have scared the cast a bit too, cause it’s the talk where I lay out the ideas of the production!  Actually, they seemed to take it all in stride, not surprising since they seem like a gaggle of hip young operatic performers who are conversant with the ways of directors like me.  The Euridice, Anna Stephany, didn’t bat an eyelash when told about being masking-taped to the wall and hanging there for a half hour.  “Oh, yeah, I did that in ‘Rosenkavalier’ in Linz a couple of years back”, she was probably thinking.

Second day of rehearsal – It’s a Saturday, so there is only one three-hour rehearsal before the weekend break. I begin by chatting some more with the cast – this time, it’s more informal and I encourage them to contribute to the discussion.  Mostly we talk about the milieu in which this production floats, a setting somewhat reminiscent of the art-friendly Ducal Palace in Mantua in 1607, somewhat like the Warhol scene in the 70’s. Jess Walker, who plays the Ninfa among other roles, tells us about accompanying her father, a 60’s rocker, to a re-enactment of a psychedelic party at the ICA in London.  When a bowl filled with little red dots was passed around, she declined one, saying she didn’t do drugs. She felt like a bit of a jerk when everyone took the dots and stuck them on their foreheads.  After an hour or so, we began working on the first scene, where La Musica gets things going.  Amy Freston was sensational from the get-go, her work with Claire Glaskin already kicking in. By the end of the morning, I had a sense of what the other twelve singers in the cast were capable of too.  The last thing I said before sending them off was, “Christine Chibnall promised me a cast chosen not just because of their voices but also because of their intelligence and potential to be engaged by some challenging weeks of work. She seems to have kept her promise.”

Choreography and Fate

December 2006, New York City -

I just got off the phone from a conversation with Claire Glaskin, who's the choreographer for my upcoming "Orfeo" with Opera North. We've done a number of shows together (and shared a lot of meals, laughs and exciting, if tense, rehearsal moments too). I think of her as Muse as much as Movement Lady, probably because I have an ambivalent relationship with dance in opera. By now, Claire fully expects that, whenever she choreographs an actual dance sequence, I will inevitably cut it.  To me, choreography is as much about how somebody sits at a sewing machine, walks over to the coffee machine to re-fill their cup, or cuts herself with a pair of scissors as it is about how they dance together. Forgive me if I'm still a bit fixated on the sewing machines and scissors of "La Vida Breve" - Claire and I just re-mounted that "Little Great" for the Greek National Opera. When we created the production for Opera North in 2004, she choreographed a gorgeous paso doble which was painstakingly taught to everyone in the show and then eliminated by yours truly the next day. I'm not sure Claire has ever quite forgiven me for that, although she certainly appreciates the fact that a lot of the power of that show comes from the tension between the extended stretches of some of the most danceable music ever written and the complete lack of dance in the show.

Actually, there's the possibility of some real dance creeping into "Orfeo", especially for the character known as La Musica, who only sings in the first scene.  When I was told that the soprano cast in that role, Amy Freston, trained as a dancer before becoming an opera singer, first I let out a little yelp of glee (I love opera singers who started out as dancers or actors) then I started to imagine that she would be present throughout much of the show, as an ever moving, ever shifting embodiment of Orfeo's muse, his creative urge, his soul, his music - which brings us back to my phone conversation with Claire. She probably secretly suspects that the intricate two-and-a-half-hour interpretive dance she and Amy will create together over the next months will be cut after the last Dress Rehearsal. But she seems to be gamely playing along in the meantime, and she is scheduled to have some preliminary, exploratory sessions with Amy beginning this coming week. They will play around with ideas and images, start developing the movement vocabulary, and give each other advice about what Christmas gifts to buy for that difficult relative.

Claire and I already talked through the ideas, images, events of the production over a few extended breakfasts at our favorite coffee place in Kolonaki Square in Athens last month (OK, we were somewhat distracted by the parade of chic, sexy Athenians passing by our table) but now Claire wondered if I had any inspirations since then. Actually I have, but they've mostly been about Verdi's "Nabucco", Mozart's "Entfuhrung" and Gluck's "L'Isle de Merlin" (you've probably never heard of that one - neither had I when I was approached about directing it) all of which I'm studying, dissecting with various dramaturgs and working on with different designers for upcoming productions in Dusseldorf, Basel and the Spoleto Festival in Charleston. Being an opera director sometimes feels like being an air traffic controller, but instead of planes, we're juggling opera productions in various stages of take-off and landing. My conversation with Claire confronted me with the fact that it's time to turn off all my inner electronic devices, return my psychic seat to its fully upright position and focus in on the imminent flight called Monteverdi's “Orfeo,” the First Great Opera Ever Written.

    

The other way Fate whispered to me that it is time to put Verdi, Mozart and Gluck aside is an encounter I had at a party last night - I was chatting with the South African tenor, Kobie van Rensburg, who had just sung the title role in "Idomeneo" in the Met's Saturday afternoon broadcast. He was telling me about how he has started a second career as a stage director. Now I'm not sure I'm as thrilled by singers-turned-directors as I am by dancers-turned-singers, but Kobie is a smart, sharp, interesting guy. When I told him I was about to start rehearsals for an opera in Leeds, he said he was about to start rehearsals for an opera in Halle, Germany.

"Oh, yeah? What piece is it?", I asked.

"Monteverdi's 'Orfeo'", he answered.  "What are you about to direct?"

"Monteverdi's 'Orfeo'", I answered.  "When does yours open?"

"February 16th", he answered.  "Yours?"

"February 16th", I answered.

I guess there are going to be lots of productions of Monteverdi's "Orfeo" in 2007 - it is, after all, the 400th Anniversary year of the premiere of The First Great Opera Ever Written - but you'll understand if I tell you I was slightly spooked by that conversation. And you’ll permit me to sign off, dear Blogreader, and once again take down from the shelf the old Emmanuelle Haim/Ian Bostridge  “Orfeo” CD, put on my headphones, and move into my final phase of preparation.