Vancouver Opera, British Columbia, Canada
March, 2001
"VO meets the challenge of Wagner's Dutchman"
-Lloyd Dykk, Vancouver Sun Monday 26 March 2001
For Vancouver Opera it's been 26 years since Wagner was last produced and 33 years since The Flying Dutchman hove into view with its blood-red sails and haunted captain, doomed to sail the seas forever.
Perhaps the assumption was that people here go to Seattle's Ring Cycle for their Wagner fix. And then his operas are notoriously huge, expensive and hard to cast, but that doesn't lessen the responsibility of our opera company to represent a composer who changed the field as dramatically and irrevocably as Wagner did. After such a wait, it almost had to be good, and it is -- very.
For an opera, three hours is average but short for Wagner, The Flying Dutchman being an early work, and a masterpiece. It was written before he really defined his style, though it's all nascently there, making it an ideal introduction to Wagner. But even an hour can seem long if there's no involvement and this Dutchman does fly, on the strength of powerful yet lyric voices, gripping characterization and lively, atmospheric staging.
In its look and in its sound, it has the feeling of the sea in it. Its surge forms the elemental drive of the opera, with that tremendous overture and lashing violin scales, plus other motifs that return obsessively and essentially tell the story of the Dutch mariner fated by the devil to roam the seas in his ghost ship forever, allowed to land only once every seven years in search of a woman who might fall in love with him and break the curse.
There are absurdities in the story. For example, why would the devil punish the Dutchman for his navigational boast (of being able to round the Cape of Good Hope) when the devil is supposed to be an agent of pride and other cardinal sins? But Wagner was less interested in practicality than myth, which he believed contained the fundaments of mortal truth. He makes these arguments musically, and they get under your skin.
An expanded Vancouver Opera orchestra, conducted with great colour, energy and detail by John Keenan, played better than I can ever recall, with nothing routine, lax or less than suggestive of the forces of nature that are essential to the opera.
The same can be said for the choral sections, which have a big sway in the argument of the story. The Vancouver Opera Chorus, standing in for the Norwegian seamen and their women, and 20 voices of the Chor Leoni Men's Choir, representing the Dutchman's phantom crew, were splendid -- a true orchestra of voices, robust, comic and terrifying by turn. And that spinning song, the women carding wool and working their looms as Senta gazes transfixed by a picture on the wall, was extremely beautiful.
So, too, is the casting of the solo roles. As Daland, Senta's mercenary father, who agrees to let him marry her in exchange for chests of loot, bass-baritone Stefan Szkafarowsky rings with power and character when too often Daland can come off merely bluff; and the Steersman, tenor Philip Webb, sings his watchman's aria lyrically, as he should, being a young man in love himself.
As Erik, the huntsman in love with Senta -- his role routinely described as ungrateful because it's small -- John Mac Master made a major impact on his time in the story by singing ardently with a lucid, fluent style that rose to the high notes effortlessly, piercing them through the heart. Mezzo-soprano Lucie Mayer was an admirable nurse to Senta.
Which leaves the leads, baritone Tom Fox as the Dutchman and Mary Jane Johnson as Senta. I found Johnson, a Texas soprano no stranger to recent productions here and quite effective in them, generally overpowered her role as the all but psychic girl who should sometimes disappear vocally into an inward, private voicing of her obsession with her picture of the "pale man" on the wall. She had plenty of the Wagnerian strength it takes to sing the part but there are passages that call for soft singing, too, and sometimes she sounded more like a Valkyrie than a girl.
Fox was magnificent, the overriding strength of an already strong production. He looked and sounded the part: notes ringing with external authority as the weird captain, yet beset by private anguish, as in his beautiful mezza voce in Wagner's first great love duet, Wie aus der Ferne with its dangerously exposed, unaccompanied passage. He confessed his pain to Senta in quiet, soft-grained but perfectly firm lines and was always interesting, always held the stage, vocally and dramatically.
The sets, too (borrowed from New Orleans Opera), will hold your attention: a rocky Norwegian coast and two ships, one work-a-day, the other fantastic and silent, slowly converging prow to prow -- the mundane innocently drifting into Wagnerian Liebestod.
Speaking of which, how strange to be deprived of love-death in the opera's very last minute. When the Dutchman sails off, embarking again on a routine voyage of disappointment, Senta hurls herself from a cliff as his boat sinks. Her immolation should change his fate, according to Wagner, who specified that they then rise in the sky together.
There was only a symbolic roseate glow on the back wall, which, for strangers to Wagner, would have been enough to put a sad ending on a happy one. Will the flying Dutchman never rest?
Wagner's aural feast rises above silly story
Reviewed by Louise Phillips, Vancouver Courier, March 28, 2001
The singers, not the songs, win over opera-goers who are undecided about Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman. The choreography, lighting and sets are also first-rate, creating an atmospheric, well-rounded production for Vancouver Opera's latest.
For tyro students of opera it's Wagner 101, written when the composer was only 30, and the first two acts still smack of schmaltzy German romanticism, mainly in the absurdly jolly chorus work of sailors and spinsters. You can see the shape of things to come in its theme of redemption through love, as though this was a practice run for Tristan und Isolde, but you have to put up with some near-kitsch as well.
Still, it's fun to spot the trademark Wagner conventions-the musical semaphore that a particular character is about to appear, for example, and the over-the-top declarations of the libretto, which Wagner also wrote. The work is appealing if you're not ready for the musical complexities and interminable angst of the Ring cycle, but tame if you've already fallen for the Olympian later epics.
So it's lucky that baritone Tom Fox and Texan soprano Mary Jane Johnson were available to sing the lead roles: the mariner condemned to roam the seas forever, and Senta, the obsessed girl who willingly sacrifices herself to win his eternal rest. Add the seasoned bass-baritone of Stefan Szkafarowsky as the girl's greedy sea-captain father, and John Mac Master's lush tenor for the spurned suitor, and there's an instant recipe for an aural feast.
It may be easy Wagner for the audience, but for the performers it's Wagner all the same. A strong thematic through-line in the score and the dramatic plot connect disparate musical components that involve the leads almost continuously. The music-drama format that Wagner was evolving with this work needs stamina for the lead roles and mature voices capable of sustained projection and emotive power. He made character development as important as technical prowess, and that means ingenues need not apply.
Here's the Wagnerian dichotomy: it takes a big voice and a lot of experience to play the idealistic young Senta. Johnson has both, a soprano as full-bodied and smooth as well-aged red wine, and a major acting talent honed over years. The opera pivots on Senta's second act ballad ("Have you ever met at sea"), and Johnson delivers it with pure top notes and extreme sweetness.
Fox is equally imposing-a tall romantic figure in flowing blond wig and greatcoat, with a voice like rich chocolate, as well established in its lower register as you could want from a man who'd rather sink in 40 fathoms.
If anything, the second act torrent of song that flowed from these two powerhouses was almost overwhelming in the long interchanges, at times even approaching stridency in sealing Senta's fate as tragic heroine. No surprises here when she finally threw herself into the sea without so much as a helpful life-ring tossed in after her.
The equally long and kitsch-filled spinsters' song at the top of Act Two was unexpectedly pretty, however. Expertly choreographed by director Roman Hurko and bathed in muted golden light streaming through a window, the female chorus carded, spun and sewed in perfect rhythm.
Under conductor John Keenan's hard-working baton, the orchestra didn't miss a beat either. They really brought out the sea-wind and wave sounds in the score, letting chords crash over the audience, while the strings ebbed and flowed with the emotions on stage.
Offstage the all-male voices of Chor Leoni, led by Diane Loomer, sang the ghostly dirge of the Dutchman's crew in Act Three, when tenor Mac Master came into his own with one of the few musical passages written intimately enough to be genuinely moving ("Don't you remember the day"). The lighting was designed by Stephen Ross, the spooky ships, stone quay and timbered house interior by Constantinos Kritikos of New Orleans Opera.
The Flying Dutchman
Reviewed by Janet Smith, The Georgia Straight, March, 2001 (excerpts)
Director Roman Hurko...comes up with some clever stagecraft to set the mood. As for what Puccini called the "wonderful moments," this Vancouver Opera production...pulls off a few showstoppers.
...Hurko brilliantly used two hidden organ spaces on either side of the stage to depict the souls trapped in the holds of the phantom vessel.
In the third act, the drama hits a fever pitch. Hurko has us bid adieu to the Dutchman by having him throw himself against the stern of his ship like a Christ figure. Although it will provoke debate, I like Hurko's solution to Wagner's difficult directions for the final scene. (The souls of the Dutchman and Senta are supposed to rise heavenward.) As the sky gave way to clear blue and sunrise pink for the first time, it was a transcendent moment that left the ending more open to interpretation than usual.
