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Concert Reviews |
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 Index of Reviews |
Berg: Wozzeck. Welsh National Opera, 1 April 2005, Birmingham Hippodrome Alban Berg’s landmark 1922 opera, Wozzeck, is probably best described to musicians and non-musicians alike as ‘difficult’. Both the director (Richard Jones) and conductor (Vladimir Jurowski) of this new production have called it a ‘psycho-trip’. Despite its complex and dissonant score, the plot is straightforward. It tells the story of a poor soldier – Wozzeck himself – driven insane by jealousy, a jealousy which leads him ultimately to kill Marie, the mother of his child, who has fallen for another soldier, the Drum-Major. As Wozzeck tries to earn his way and pay for the child, he is taunted by his employers, the bourgeois moralist Captain and the megalomaniac Doctor. The story is presented in fifteen short scenes – each a self-contained musical structure – with little plot development over the whole, except in the ever-increasing sense of menace and Wozzeck’s mental disintegration. In this production, the usual backdrop of an army barracks was replaced by the stark, enclosed setting of a baked-bean factory, though I could not help but feel that this was little more than a gimmick. The production line, with its connotations of mechanistic uniformity certainly brought home Wozzeck’s predicament, trapped in a world of stifling, hypocritical moralism and inhumane economic forces, yet the bright, smooth wood-panelled sets seemed somehow inappropriate to the themes of the opera. The final scenes, in which Wozzeck slits Marie’s throat with the sharp edge of a can of beans, showers the contents over her and later proceeds to drown in an industrial skip (full of baked-bean cans, of course) were comically bizarre rather than darkly tragic. Maybe this was the intention, but it stood ill-at-ease with Berg’s agonised, obsessive music. The performances, on the other hand, were excellent. Peter Hoare was particularly menacing as the Captain, a part requiring massive vocal dexterity, shifting as it does between falsetto and ‘Sprechstimme’ – a half-spoken, half-sung style – the effect is one of hysteria. Christopher Purves, in the title role (and, intriguingly, a former rock and roll singer), gave a similarly haunting performance, his stage-presence appropriately low-key as a downtrodden antihero. The theatre’s dry acoustic could not do full justice to the huge orchestral forces, and though the playing was always incisive, it sometimes lacked drama. However, Wozzeck remains an intense and powerful work; this production, if over-earnest in trying to bring its Marxist intimations to the fore, succeeded in conveying the horrors of an economic and moral system that drives its inhabitants to insanity, and murder. Tim Foxon |
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