The music may be Weill, but I like it!

[This is actually the Blog for Friday 25th of May]

Second time lucky for Alison and me: we arranged to have a meal and see an opera and this time we made it to a performance which actually took place! This was one up on the Zombies concert which we had to leave because of the band being stuck somewhere on the M4 in the second broken down van.

Terra Nova came up trumps on the pre performance meal: sitting outside (in May!) {in Cardiff!} [relatively warm!] in the jutting ‘prow’ of the first floor looking out at the Bay. The Moroccan Shank of Lamb on mashed potato with al dente vegetables was juicy, spicy and tasty. And if the beer was too expensive, it was just preparing us for the cost of the glasses of wine inside the Millennium Centre!

Once again, the delight of being in an operatic venue in Cardiff which was not The New Theatre was almost overwhelming: space, comfort and a decent acoustic makes every performance a success for me when I remember my suffering in The New!

The imaginative double bill was ‘Duke Bluebeard’s Castle’ coupled with ‘The Seven Deadly Sins.’

The opening narration of ‘Bluebeard’ sets the imaginative tone for the opera emphasising the symbolic nature of the entertainment which may be taking place ‘inside or out’ of the head of the observer. The set reminded me of those eerie pictures of The Titanic: a wreck at the bottom of the ocean, but some objects surrealistically still in place – incongruous and unsettling. The picture on stage that we are shown is of a wreck: rubble litters the floor and a grand chandelier lays an angled, magnificent skeleton of crystal stage left. Stage right the series of doors that Judith, the hapless new wife of Bluebeard, sets herself to open. These doors are vast, recalling the intimidating portals of banks and insurance offices: portentous and belittling.

The intensity of the music is concentrated by the focusing of the singing on two characters as they move uneasily and unsteadily around and through the wreckage on the stage. As each door is opened, knives, flowers and jewels are produced with considerable dramatic effect from the floor where they have lain unobserved by the audience.

Whether the action is an exemplification of a fairy story or the dramatic presentation of a worrying psychology it is fair to say that it is not ‘realistic’ and the Expressionist form of acting which Sara Fulgoni and Andrea Silvestrelli adopted was in keeping with the intensity of the musical experience.

The singing and orchestra were excellent and the theatrical devices employed during this shocking one act opera were genuinely exciting; an enthusiasm which was reflected in the audience response at the end of the opera.

The interval was forty minutes long which gave a luxuriously long time to sip rather than gulp the large glass of expensive red wine that was waiting for us. Never let it be said that operas like these did not press the right buttons to activate a whole incestuous strata of Cardiff society and the number of familiar faces was almost comforting!

By the time we returned to the auditorium the front of the stage had been encased in what looked like shiny white plastic with four holes cut into it and a flight of stairs in the centre.

The opening of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ illuminated a stage scattered with irregular white wedges. These wedges feature in every scene of this sung ballet and are combined to provide the central plinth for the finale as the Anna are subsumed into the clawing mass of the participants on stage.

The male singers were ‘caught’ in their holes on the structure which jutted into the orchestra and spent their time watching the action or turned to the audience and, lit from below, looked like Halloween manikins as they sang.

The dancing from Diversions was mesmeric. All of the audience who were not German speaking (thank you Alison!) had to make the difficult decision of whether to glance at the surtitles and miss some of what might be happening on stage or watch the amazingly athletic performances on stage and miss the ‘sense’ of what was going on. I opted, more often than not, for the stage where the action was an interpretation of what the words were rather than a literal exposition.

This was a relatively short piece and was greeted with a storm of applause – quite rightly too!

Although the two operas taken together only lasted an hour and a half, I felt that we had been given a very generous evening’s performance.

And I got a lift home (thank you Bryn.)

Who could, in all conscience ask for more!