Don’t look back in anger

Lisbon’s Teatro Nacional de Säo Carlos, the country’s foremost opera house, is an understated gem – on my bucket list for years. It was built in 1792, after the Tejo Opera House was destroyed in the earthquake of 1755. It boasts an elegantly understated classical façade, featuring a portico of three elegant arches, and a third-floor loggia with a garlanded clock. The 1,150 seat auditorium has the familiar, intimate feel of houses of that era spattered across Europe.

The Portuguese Royal Family liked it so much that, when Napoleon forced them to flee to Brazil in the early 19^th century, they had a replica built in Rio de Janeiro – as one does when en congés forcés.

But let me get my hands on the renovator with the fixation for chocolate coloured paint. The interior – where it isn’t originally gilded – has been confected into a drab version of a Cadbury’s Milk Tray selection. Dark chocolate pillars; milk chocolate balustrades; cocoa butter curtains; a swirling, mixed praline ceiling; and ruby chocolate velvet seats. The celebrated chef, Barry Callebaut, might think he was smart, inventing his Ruby Chocolate confection in 2017, but Säo Carlos got there first.

And the lighting is horrible. Who bought that job lot of energy efficient bulbs that glare intrusively?  The effect, combined with the chocolate, was nauseous. A revamp is long overdue, but cash is short.

In the last two years the house has trodden a rocky road of turbulent industrial relations. On 1^st October soprano Elisabete Matos took over as Artistic Director from the battered Brit, Patrick Dickie, a quixotic choice. He resigned in despair, after only three years in post, in late spring, having failed in his ambition to schedule ten main stage performances per season. This year the company is managing only seven, and one of those is the concert version of Gluck’s Orfeo reviewed below. The local gossip has it that the strikes and increasingly desperate budgeting crisis afflicting the house were the last straw for Mr. Dickie.

Doubts about plunging an internationally renowned soprano with no experience of management and direction into this demanding Götterdämmerung of Portuguese opera are rife in Lisbon. Watch this space.

On to Grecian legend – and the concert performance of Gluck’s Orfeo. Some back history. The Orfeo and Euridice legend has been latched onto by composers for centuries. First out of the traps was Germi. Who? Sorry, no first name or biography extant. Difficult to corroborate his contribution, or even speculate – as not a note of his music survives. But, there are records of a play by Politani, with Germi’s music, performed at the court of Duke Ludivico Gonzaga, Mantua on 18^th July 1472. This version is not on Spotify.

Three times since has the Orfeo story stood at the crossroads of musical history. First, at the beginning of the 17^th century, when the miserable lover wept tears over his dead Euridice in many musical dramas scored by many composers – most famously, Monteverdi in 1609.

These were productions for select, courtly, audiences, mostly passing into oblivion after one outing. Then, in the mid 18^th century Christoff Willibald Gluck, a German composer, and Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, his Italian librettist, revived the Greek troubadour and soon had Orfeo strumming his lute afresh for a wider opera going public. Gluck’s version is the most revived of the present day.

Spool on to the late 19^th century. Offenbach incongruously turned the lute playing swain firmly towards the burlesque, locating Orfeo in a high-kicking underworld. The conventional, placid, Blessed Spirits, who console Orfeo, morphed into raunchy Can-Can dancers.

Now, perhaps, we are at a fourth crossroads. Cue Harrison Birtwhistle’s The Mask of Orpheus, currently presented by English National Opera (ENO) at London’s Coliseum. That is a four-hour delight in store. Should I survive, I shall review it next week.

I can’t quite decide whether Mr. Birtwhistle is the true prophet of a new iteration of transformative mood music – or a vacuous charlatan.  Having listened to him in conversation earlier this year with Julian Anderson – a fellow ground-breaking opera composer – the needle is heading towards the charlatan end of my dial. I approach the upcoming Coliseum visit with an open mind. Well, sort of.

A difficulty in presenting Gluck’s version of Orfeo is to decide whether it is serious, comedic, or a bit of both. On the face of it, it’s a simple Grecian tragedy, but with a happy ending. Orfeo loses beloved wife, Euridice, is given a chance by the goddess Amore, to follow her down to Haedes and bring her back, provided he restrains herself from looking at her.

Inevitably, she, mistaking his reserve for indifference, persuades him to take a keek at her. Euridice immediately dies again – but, just as all seems lost, their intense love for each other is acknowledged by Amore, who unites them for ever. Cue cute heart emoji.

The work’s role in the development of opera is more complicated than the simple plot implies. Monteverdi tipped the balance from dance to music in his score of 1609. The Gluck version incorporated dance, recitative and aria for the first time, laying the groundwork for opera as the artform we recognise today. Concert versions focus on the music, the theatrical plot and curtail the dance passages.

Proceedings in Lisbon got underway under the baton of a Maestrina (I am hooked after discovering that elegant Portuguese descriptor of a female conductor), Jane Glover, the British doyenne of Baroque music. She debuted in Wexford in 1975 in Cavalli’s L’Eritrea and has been Music of the Baroque’s director since 2002.

Her career contribution to the Baroque movement has been to breathe life into scores, which, in the hands of less insightful conductors, can be dull, dusty, pedestrian, a bit plinkity-plonk. Under her direction, if Baroque “ain’t got that swing” she feels she is missing her point. This is music that lived in its time and it is her mission to make it live afresh.

At Säo Carlos she shaped the score into all the sudden mood changes Gluck demands in Orfeo. Rustling violins unsettled the atmosphere, booming cellos foretold doom and pastoral flutes framed the goddess Amore in her kindly, redemptive light.

An advantage of a concert version is that Maestrina Glover can be observed, in full control, centre stage, not plying her arts in pit obscurity. It was quite a sight. How she sculpted this performance, turning a beady eye on the soloists at every entry. She looked a bit like Margaret Thatcher overseeing an impertinent bunch of journalists. Often ensembles “know it all” and barely lift their heads from their scores. Conductors seem redundant. All eyes were fixed on this Maestrina.

I bumped into Ms. Glover on the London flight the following morning. Turns out she had rehearsed with the soloists for only a couple of days and when I taxed her on her constantly attentive “benevolent” or “beady” eye she cheerily admitted it was a bit of both.

I remember  – as a joke (I think) – Sir Alexander Gibson walking off the stage with an ironical shrug during a Strauss waltz at the Scottish proms in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall in the 1960s, and returning to clap his orchestra when it was all over and they – fortuitously – had ended on the same note. Can’t see Ms. Glover doing that.

Orfeo was sung by Croatian mezzo soprano, Renata Pokupić, much in international demand on the concert platform. Her broad mezzo range had her growling through Orfeo’s depths and soaring when ecstasy was required. She sang with visible conviction, pulling off difficult passages and high notes with sharp clarity. Her voice had just enough vibrato to add colour, and a few well-chosen grace notes – not too showy – added to a sparkling performance.

Now, the litmus test of Orfeo for all mezzos, the Che Faro Senza Euridice? aria in Act 3. This is one of the great moments in opera. I was introduced to Gluck and Che Faro by Janet Baker, who sang Orfeo in a Scottish Opera production in the 1970s. It was a lightbulb moment. This is what opera was for – the stripping of character and emotion into their essential components, using sheer beauty of phrase, and simple melodic line.

Ms. Pokupić is not Janet Baker. No-one is. But she held the audience in the palm of her hand with a piano, heartfelt, rendering, rising to a full-blown climax at the tragic conclusion.

Euridice was Eduarda Melo, a Portuguese soprano and recent graduate from Porto’s Superior School of Music. She sang beautifully and acted pertly. There are several ways of playing Euridice. One, is to present her as Mrs. Resentful, who from the moment of being restored to human form, nags Orfeo mercilessly for his reticence. That’s how this version was interpreted.

There was just a hint of a suggestion that Orfeo thinks it was a bit of a mistake to wake her up at all. Within the limitations of a concert performance format Srtas. Pokupić and Melo played off each other artfully.

Amore was played by Sandra Medeiros, also a Portuguese soprano, who studied at the Ponta Delgada Regional Conservatory. The role is comedic. Her deus ex machina interventions are required twice, to sort those pesky mortals out. She was dressed in an extravagantly cerise evening gown, topped with an incongruous, homely Portuguese white lace shawl – and sporting sparkly earrings. The lady who serves behind the counter of the National Confeitaria (national sweetie and cake shop) in Dom Pedro IV Square is her spitting image. As are some of the cakes.

She, too, had a strong, clear, soprano voice and oozed acting nous. Ms. Glover commented that it had encouraged her to find such home-grown talent on hand in Lisbon.

Before the performance there was an award to mark the 100^th anniversary of the birth of renowned poet, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen. Her daughter, to whom the award was handed, made a long, halting speech. The President of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa was to present the award. Sra. Andresen at last ran out of notes.

A stately figure, clad in field gray, swathed in golden epaulets and aiguillettes, stepped onto the stage and approached the microphone. Respectful silence. But he was only the President’s speech carrier. The President followed meekly in this grandee’s wake – and made an even longer speech.

Ms. Glover, waiting for the kick-off on the podium, fixed them both with a gimlet eye, then attacked the national anthem with gusto once the mysterious ceremony was over. In my conversation with Maestrina Glover I learnt she and I shared at least two things in common. Neither of us had the least idea of what Sra. Andresen or Sr.de Sousa were talking about. But we both liked the Gluck.