Buxton Opera House:  Double Bill –  17th July

The Maiden in the Tower (Sibelius) & Kashchei the Immortal, Buxton Festival (Rimsky-Korsakov)

Double bills present problems. Even Puccini’s relative success with Il Trittico hasn’t encouraged other composers into the genre.

Thus the idea of joining single act dramas of any type into a single entertainment presents all sorts of problems to a director let alone to a cast. Therefore Buxton has to be commended for choosing to try to give repertoire room to two relatively unperformed works by one by Jan Sibelius and the other by Rimsky  Korsakov. These two one act operas also have the advantage of sharing the fairy tale genre and indeed sharing elements of the same tale – a maiden held in a Tower against her will until released by a ‘hero’.

These similar stories are treated in this production as a continuum since they share singers; basically the same set; the same characterisation and we are led to believe that they sequentially belong to the same timeline – though one is set at its beginning and the other at its end of this ‘fairy tale’ timeline.

They also share the same interpretive idea – a grimly determined take on Freudian theory and psychoanalysis that sees fairy tales through a prism of hidden, repressed or deviant sexuality.

So dolls have their skirts lifted up; the children’s games in the first opera seem oddly sexualised; the boy who will imprison the maid wear a weird mask; the imprisoned maiden has sex with him, her captor. In the second opera the magician behaves like a serial abuser towards his imprisoned victim; his brutalised daughter has taken to ritualised, serial murder as a side-line to sex; and the victim in the Tower at the end cannot be taken from the abuser on whom she has become emotionally dependent.

Needless to say – as with all bad ideas allowed to run amok – this one results in some ghastly moments of inappropriateness. No actor should be exposed to the indignity of singing from a small window in a Wendy house; doors open; door close; door open again; they close again; unidentified characters enter stage and exit stage through them singing not a single note. It’s busy silly rather than busy to any purpose. Sometimes composers write music so it may be listened to without active distractions on the stage. Music may be there to create atmosphere. Visualisations should complement whatever is happening in the story and not beome an end in itself.

In the second opera, however, the characters never use the double doors which have been inexhaustibly opened and closed through the first. No, this time the characters enter and leave the stage via the narrow door to a long-case grandfather clock….I will not go on…for fear I turn this review into a rant….the magic mirror is a television…the wizard a dirty old man; the wind an old man of the sea complete with grey beard and nautical hat; at one stage the maiden leaves her cage with what looks like a piss-pot that turns out to be a basin of water whose sole real purpose is to extinguish a shakily lit mask which will mark the end of the wizard’s power. But the opening of the second opera with the heroine in a cage with her legs spread in both an uncomfortable and suggestive manner took the particular biscuit for visual crassness for which this production seemed to be a sponsor.

The performances themselves deserve recognition.The Australian soprano Kate Ladner (Maiden/Princess) has a glorious voice. Richard Berkeley-Steele (Lover/Kashchkei) sang his part with fortitude and some force. Owen Gilhooly (Bailiff’s son/Ivan) and Emma Selway (Governess/ Kashchei’s Daughter) manage their contrasting roles assuredly. And Robert Poulton makes an impressive Storm Wind. But the productions poor weather hampered their singing on occasion.

And none of this is helped by vast amounts of English libretto flashing on to the two flat screens on either side of the stage. I’m a great believer in sur-titles in opera performance. But when the cast sings an English translation I cannot think this excess of words helpful particularly when they’re so distracting.

All that said we must come to the music itself. Beyond these two operas being curiosities personally I think you’d need to be tone deaf to believe either work is a gem of purest ray serene locked the ocean deep of artistic neglect.

Sibelius thirty minute story is mercifully short and my review will be blissfully as brief.

Short of plot, short of character, short of music, short of depth it is veritably short of any characteristic that might render it worthy of performance. After a glass of wine it might be something you might listen to eyes closed in order to drop off to sleep. It hasn’t a single moment of music that would rob you of any well earned rest or demand your attention.

Sibelius wrote lovely music and some very great music – not least his songs inspired by Finish myth. This opera, written in 1892, so very early in his career, isn’t such a work. Sibelius didn’t want it published. It was written as a favour for a single performance and was not again performed whilst Sibelius was alive. That was his judgement. I respect it. I’ll will add nothing further to it.

Rimsky Korsakov is no mean composer particularly of opera but although this has more meat than the Sibelius it still isn’t amongst his greatest works. There is all the energy of the early twentieth century in the insistent rhythms that betray its Russian origins. The aria of the magician’s daughter is wonderful and the duet at the end for the maiden and her prince delightful but it was hard to see the magic of the forest for all the dead wood of the production.

And it is in my judgment highly unlikely that either of these works will be raised from the watery grave of neglect by what I saw at Buxton on Tuesday afternoon.