Tannhauser
Richard Berkeley-Steele as Tannhauser.
Photo: Anthony Johnson
First a note about the birthday boys and girls. Were the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra really to play music that reflected their current situation in the Opera House pit, they would play nothing but Scene III of Wagner's Das Rheingold, where enslaved heavy metalsmiths, excluded from air, light and human comfort, ceaselessly hammer out priceless objects from gold ore.
On this occasion, the 40th anniversary of their founding as the Elizabethan Trust Orchestra in 1967, the ore they were given was an earlier though no less demanding Wagner score, Tannhauser, but the hammering, under Richard Hickox, was more than usually effective, particularly in the smooth, well-tuned woodwind and brass chords of the overture and the energised string playing at the beginning of Act II. No less resplendent was the chorus, who were exhilarating in the pilgrims' chorus at the close. Hickox's tempos were firm but occasionally they could have tolerated more space and flexibility to allow light, shade and detail to emerge more distinctly.
Wagner would have hated Elke Neidhardt's productions for the way they subvert his grandiosity and self-mythologising. I love them and would go further to say that after the unfortunate nazification of Wagner's obnoxious (but in his case not genocidal) anti-semitism, subversion is one of the few honourable routes.
The tour de force of subversion is in the second act where the hall for the song competition is grandly assembled but plagued by marvellous human bats and a sordid cupid representing lust, whose revoltingly comic phallus is strangely resistant to the refractory detumescence that normally afflicts human males unassisted by chemicals.
The opening scene, performed by wonderful, freakily dressed dancers on and through a virtual, laser-generated platform of smoke and air, is a brilliant coup de theatre. But Neidhardt's setting of this scene stressed debauchery over seductive sensuality, which for me was a failing.
Richard Berkeley-Steele's Tannhauser, with flaming red hair and school sports jacket, was, as my companion remarked, reminiscent of one of the more wilful manifestations of Dr Who, and the brilliantly precise edge and clarity that he brought to his singing fleshed this out nicely in musical terms. However, the first moment of truly glorious vocal outpouring came in Act II from Janice Watson as the angelic, forsaken Elizabeth, with a voice of powerful, glowing warmth.
Milijana Nikolic, stepping in at short notice, sang Venus with colour, force and imperiousness. Jonathan Summers was popular as Wolfram von Eschenbach, though I found the sound not quite smooth and suave enough for the famous Song of the Evening Star in Act III. As Hermann, Daniel Sumegi blended vocal power with Neidhardt's delicate lacings of hypocrisy in the characterisation. Wagner would not have been proud. Opera Australia can be.
