Fergus Linehan’s operatic offerings look rather safe in his first year as director of the Edinburgh International Festival, but at least he brings in an acclaimed new Magic Flute from the Komische Oper, in Berlin. This production, by Barrie Kosky, Suzanne Andrade and the animator Paul Barritt, is a display of theatrical pyrotechnics to rival the fireworks over the castle at the closing concert.
Linehan doesn’t strike it so lucky with his first “staged” Mozart offering, The Marriage of Figaro, a project initiated by the Budapest Festival Orchestra and its admired founder-conductor, Ivan Fischer. The latter is simply labelled “director” — responsible for both the musical performance and the rudimentary production — in the programme.
Fischer is a great musician, but this Figaro suggested a rough-and-unready approach to the dramatic presentation of opera. What should be more than a concert performance turns out to be considerably less than a satisfying stage presentation: a deficit for Mozart’s immortal masterpiece. A clunky stage-management team move furniture around a central acting area and plonk dead-sheep wigs on the on-stage orchestral players — even, toe-curlingly, on Fischer himself. The cast alternate between concert wear and garish period costumes, some of them suspended from the flies and looking as if they have fallen off the back of a touring rep truck circa 1965.
It’s sad for a goodish cast to play glorified clotheshorses, putting on the ugly costumes in place of developing believable characters. Miah Persson’s lissom, elegant Countess, phrasing her two big arias in long, sculptured breaths, is the pick, followed by Rachel Frenkel’s lively Cherubino and Marie McLaughlin’s glam Marcellina. Sylvia Schwartz, heavily pregnant, redeems her squeaky and shrill Susanna with a poised account of her seductive Act IV aria.
Hanno Müller-Brachmann and Markus Werba, the leading men, make pugilistic antagonists as Figaro and the skirt-lifting Count, but both sound uncomfortably challenged by their music. Apart from Filippo Fontana’s too youthful Antonio, the supporting roles are well cast. Fischer’s conducting of the opera had its moments — and the wind soloists of the BFO always give special pleasure — but it would be even better if he stuck to the day job, concentrating on what he is good at.
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That opera can be simply semi-staged, and far more effectively, had been demonstrated the night before in Andrew Davis’s brilliant account of Stravinsky’s only evening-length opera, The Rake’s Progress. No director was credited, but I later learnt that Davis had devised the (blissfully) simple staging. A few essential pieces of furniture, an exotic costume for a bearded Susan Bickley as Baba the Turk, and a paper bag with a drawing on it for Tom Rakewell’s miraculous stones-into-bread machine were all that was needed to signpost the drama, along with an all-round excellent cast singing from memory and acting their parts.
Andrew Staples as Rakewell and Emily Birsan as Anne Trulove made a lyrical, youthful pair, more innocently naive than most, while Gidon Saks’s charismatically sinister presence and sense of irony made for a diabolical Nick Shadow. Bickley’s Baba, Peter Rose’s Trulove, Catherine Wyn-Rogers’s Mother Goose and Ashley Riches’s Madhouse Keeper were as good as any I’ve seen, but Alan Oke’s vividly projected Sellem — the auctioneer who sells off the ruined Tom’s possessions (and wife) — was a brilliant cameo, snatching his opportunity in the limelight. On every level, this was a more satisfying evening, musically and dramatically, than Fischer’s fishy Figaro.
Kilkenny is one of Ireland’s most charming cathedral cities — there are two here, but the 13th-century St Canice’s is the jewel among several extant medieval buildings — and the Kilkenny Arts Festival one of the country’s most venerable. This year was its 42nd, the second under the artistic direction of Eugene Downes, and the 10-day event was packed with stellar names: Jordi Savall, bound for Edinburgh with his programme of Celtic Dialogues, inspired by visits to Kilkenny in the 1970s; William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants; and the rising Iranian-American harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani.
The classical focus of the festival was the music of Bach — always good for the box office — so Christie’s ensemble played the rarely programmed secular Wedding and Coffee cantatas. Esfahani gave one of three performances (the others on saxophones and piano) of the Goldberg Variations and Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Paul Hillier conducted the local forces of the Chamber Choir Ireland and Camerata Kilkenny in the B minor Mass.
I heard the Camerata — actually a European band gathered around its Swiss leader, Maya Homburger — in Bach concertos for harpsichord (No 1 in D minor) and two violins (the great D minor), as well as the Brandenburg, No 5 (with flute, violin and harpsichord solos), in lively small-force performances at the tiny St John’s Priory. A fusion concert of movements from Bach partitas and folk music from The Liffey Banks, by the late Irish fiddler Tommy Potts, was beautifully introduced and played by Aoife Ni Bhriain, even if her programme overran by 20 minutes, threatening a late arrival at the Cardinall’s Musick’s glorious programme of mainly Thomas Tallis at St Canice’s.
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The night before, Andras Schiff held the 500-strong audience spellbound in a programme to which he is uniquely suited and devoted: the last piano sonatas of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Schiff’s Mozart is all charm, filigree fingerwork and a vocal approach to melodic cantilena, while his Beethoven and Schubert amount to religious acts: he crosses his chest with his arms before touching the keys. He brings spirituality and drama to Beethoven’s valedictory Op 111 in C minor, as well as Schubert’s sublime farewell to the world in B flat.
Schiff has always been one of the foremost interpreters of works that are better than they can be played, but his understanding of this unfathomably inspired music deepens with each performance.