Weill: The Silver Lake - Ronald Samm, David Webb - English Touring Opera (photo Richard Hubert Smith) |
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 7 October 2019 Star rating: (★★★★)
Daringly re-thought version of Weill and Kaiser's play with music which makes this a real Winter's Fairy Tale for our modern times
Weill: The Silver Lake - Ronald Samm English Touring Opera (photo Richard Hubert Smith) |
Despite having some superb music, and terrific songs, Der Silbersee is rarely performed because the full version lasts around three hours with equal quantities of music and spoken drama, it requires singers who can act, and actors who can sing.
English Touring Opera (ETO) braved the conundrum, and staged Kurt Weill and Georg Kaiser's Der Silbersee: ein Wintermärchen (The Silver Lake: a Winter's Fairy Tale) at the Hackney Empire (seen Monday 7 October 2019) as part of their Autumn tour. A modern German singspiel to complement Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail [see my review]. James Conway directed, with designs by Adam Wiltshire, lighting by David W Kidd and choreography by Bernadette Iglich. James Holmes conducted. David Webb was Severin, Ronald Samm was Olim, Clarissa Meek was Frau von Luber, Luci Briginshaw was Fennimore, James Kryshak was the Lottery Agent and Baron von Laur, and Bernadette iglich was the narrator. ETO's ensemble of nine singers (representing shopgirls, gravediggers and youths) was joined by a choir from the London hub of Streetwise Opera. At further performances in other towns and cities, ETO will be collaborating with other local choirs, including the Nottingham and Newcastle hubs of Streetwise Opera.
Weill: The Silver Lake - David Horton, Jan Capinski, David Webb, Maciek O'Shea, Andrew Tipple English Touring Opera (photo Richard Hubert Smith) |
For ETO, James Conway had come up with a relatively compact version of the work, suitable for touring.
The bulk of narrative (in a spoken text translated by Lionel Salter) was carried by the narrator, Bernadette Iglich, a character who moved between adressing the audience directly and participating in the action. Kaiser's plays tend to be in a sequence of tableau-like scenes, with the audience expected to use their imaginations to supply the connective tissue between them, and this does lend itself to a scene-setting narrator. Conway's production took this one step further, and used a variety of alienation techniques which we associate with Brecht, but Kaiser's dramas were never naturalistic nor realistic and I think that we might have been rather surprised by those premiere productions in 1933.
Weill: The Silver Lake - Ronald Samm, Bernadette Iglich, Clarissa Meek, David Webb, Luci Briginshaw English Touring Opera (photo Richard Hubert Smith) |
Weill: The Silver Lake - James Kryshak as the Lottery Agent English Touring Opera (photo Richard Hubert Smith) |
David Webb had a tricky task as Severin, the sung portions of the role are taxing and for much of the drama the character is angry. Only in the last act does he realise that by letting go of his anger and desire for revenge can he free himself. Webb succeeded in making us care for Severin, and we could understand why he was angry. This was a brave and generous performance, the sort the role needs, concentrating on the music-drama rather than the sheer beauty of the musical line.
The role of Severin is often taken by an actor and is notionally a baritone, so it was rather daring to cast it with dramatic tenor Ronald Samm [last seen as Walther in Fulham Opera's production of Wagner's Die Meistersinger, see my review]. But it paid off. Samm's musical performance was highly text based, as it ought to be, and very vivid, and was complemented by his engaging stage personality. Also, as an actor he knows when to do little or nothing, to be still, and also how to use his highly expressive face and eyes. From the outset, with Olim's long monologue after he has wounded Severin, Samm made us worry about Olim's concerns and his desire to care for Severin.
Weill: The Silver Lake - David Webb, Ronald Samm English Touring Opera (photo Richard Hubert Smith) |
Around these two swirled a variety of characters who came in and out of focus. James Kryshak was simply brilliant as the Lottery Agent, but then his tango is probably the hit number of the piece, [believe it or not, it was rather my party-piece in the 1980s when performing with the Pink Singers!] and Kryshak popped up in Act 3 as a nicely vicioius Baron Laur. Clarissa Meek had a wonderful time as Frau von Luber, Severin's housekeeper in his castle once he has won the Lottery; a woman constantly plotting her revenge.
Luci Briginshaw as Fennimore was the closest that the work comes to a heroine. She gets two major solos and a duet with Severin. Briginshaw managed to pull off the trick of singing with great ingenue insouciance, yet giving the music a real edge (in her first solo she sings about being a poor relation, and in her second she 'entertains' Olim and Severin with a song about the murder of Julius Caesar).
In the pit, James Holmes conjured wonderful things with his orchestra of two dozen or so, this was Weill with edge yet with a richness of texture too. The music is complex, and the orchestra does far more than simply supply accompaniments to the songs. From the opening, we were gripped.
I must confess that having read some of the early reviews for this production I was slightly worried about what I would see and hear. But I needn't have been. We were both wonderfully engaged throughout the evening, and taken on a magical and engaging journey which never left its political point behind, but also ensured that there was plenty of stage magic and musical delight along the way. The story has immense relevance to issues in contemporary society, but the strength of this staging was that it didn't hector or lecture, but simply left us to make our own devastating conclusions.
Weill: The Silver Lake - Ronald Samm - English Touring Opera (photo Richard Hubert Smith) |
The great German singing actor Ernst Busch created the role of Severin in Magdeburg in 1933, and in fact recorded two of the songs. Somewhere, I have Busch's recordings on old vinyl discs bought in the DDR in the 1980s, but have yet to find them on CD.
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