FIRST nights of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck are not traditionally sellouts, but then this was anything but a traditional first night.
As the main event of Welsh National Opera’s inaugural weekend in its new home, the Wales Millennium Centre at Cardiff Bay, Saturday night’s performance sent out a volley of positive signals that will stand the company in good stead as it builds new audiences. There are more seats to fill than in WNO’s old house, but a strong forthcoming season combined with adventurous pricing policy should prolong the buzz.
A proper opera house has seldom been off the agenda during WNO’s 59-year history, and even if the powers that be ducked the issue in the naming of this one, opera in Wales now enjoys state-of-the-art facilities. The architect Jonathan Adams has come up with pleasingly rugged materials that evoke the Welsh heritage both natural and industrial, and the auditorium feels at once intimate and spacious.
Most British opera companies are still forced to muddle along, so this represents a massive boost for WNO. Several years ago it lost out to Glyndebourne when the Sussex house snapped up Vladimir Jurowski as music director, but Jurowski has returned to Wales since to do some of his finest work, and this Wozzeck, in partnership with the director Richard Jones, is no exception.
Premiered 80 years ago, Wozzeck is still a tough piece, but Jurowski and the WNO orchestra make it sound like the most natural thing. He draws out all the beauty without compromising the rigour and pain: Jurowski is a probing conductor, but the music never sounds clinical. It’s hard to tell if the new acoustics will suit everything, but here Berg’s music has warmth and clarity.
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Jones has a genius for works like this, and his co-production with Berlin’s Komische Oper is full of insight and black humour.
Wozzeck was intended as a critique of society — it was banned by the Nazis — and it still is, but Jones makes the title character a put-upon factory worker rather than a conscript. The nature imagery of German Romanticism and Viennese Expressionism is dispensed with in the designs of Paul Steinberg and Buki Shiff, and everything is now claustrophobically enclosed. Tin cans and a rubbish skip become visual motifs, and are used with deadly brilliance. Costumes suggest the old East Germany, but the bar-coded drop-curtain something more consumerist.
Christopher Purves is compelling and warmly musical in the title role; his tortured relationship with Marie is highlighted by Gun-Brit Barkmin’s rich lyricism. Peter Hoare’s Captain is outstandingly sung, but there is no space to do justice to Clive Bayley’s sinister Doctor, Peter Svensson’s strutting Drum-Major or the rest of the WNO cast: just go and see this Wozzeck.
Box office: 08700 402000. Until March 12, then on tour until April 14