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Agitpropera on the grand scale
Grim reaping: mass suicide beckons as the Old Believers prepare for the end. Pictures: Donald CooperKhovanskygate: A National Enquiry
The Freedom Tent, Midland Arts Centre
**** GRAHAM Vick’s Birmingham Opera Company
may not be alone in drawing untrained members of the community on to the
operatic stage; but it may well be the best ensemble in the world for
turning mass opera into a searing and relevant political rant. Vick’s speciality –
when not directing at the Met, Mariinsky or Munich - is seeking rundown
or out of the way Brummie venues – a mothballed TV studio, the
half-knocked down Bull Ring Centre, a massive marquee at Villa Park (or
as here, abutting Cannon Hill’s MAC Arts Centre), drawing in chorus
singers, dancers, and unveiling socio-psychological drama on a big
scale: hard-hitting (Don Giovanni
or ‘He Had it Coming’), mentally twisted (Berg’s
Wozzeck),
cynical corruption (Fidelio),
self-discovery (Bernstein’s Candide),
chokingly pathetic (Britten’s Curlew
River). But Modest Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina – or
as Vick has it here, Khovanskygate: A National Enquiry – is one
of the biggest plums in the repertoire, and surely one of the most
challenging to piece together. It needs, for instance, an orchestra like the CBSO – fervid strings, shiveringly beautiful cor anglais for Marfa (in one moment BOC’s terrific regular conductor, Stuart Stratford, got the whole orchestra to sigh), nursing clarinets in the Act 3 slow march prelude, or a superb tuned percussionist teasing out xylophone - to shine through a score so orchestrally scintillating (though it was Rimsky-Korsakov and later Shostakovich who put together a decent orchestral version; apart from a scene or two, Musorgsky, who died around the time he revisited his early 1870s outline, scored only a couple of scenes; the rest was in short score, just a handful of two to six lines at the most). The CBSO brass were a pretty big hit – and
there’s
Yet – playing brutal police, G8-like protesters,
gay-hating religious fanatics, they sang like trained singers. I’d have
lined them up for Beethoven’s Ninth the next day, such was the quality,
and the clarity of diction, and the warm, full-bodied tone. We didn’t
hear a lot of the CBSO Children’s chorus, but they were there, their
plucky girls and one or two courageous boys, up with the orchestra,
chanting their bit. Vick’s direction is always spot on. One might
better call it crowd management, though he has plenty of helmeted riot
cops (those backing Khovansky are the Streltsy, nasty pieces of work) to
assist. The moves are mapped, and the emotional highs. He feels happiest when squeezing a sparky
political point out of some relatively harmless piece of text, though he
didn’t have to here – it’s all in the libretto, compiled by the composer
with the reliable Vladimir Stasov as his historical guide and aide. At times, Vick’s stagings verge on self-parody –
the ranting from platforms, spitting from halfway up a lighting gantry,
parading around in buses and motorbike sidecars and police vans with
‘Scum’ and ‘Wanker’ scrawled across them. But there’s no doubting, it
gets you in the goolies – or the solar plexus - every time. This was an evening of high drama, set originally
in the early 18th century, when Peter the Great was striving
to fight off his opponents and unify Baritone Eric Greene (Khovansky) leads the
tub-thumping politicians, till he gets bumped off by the other side’s
plenipotentiary Shaklovity (Robert Winslade Anderson: his big recitative
and aria in Act 3, beautifully hymnic, seemed to flow like a river);
with his son and heir (tenor Joseph Guyton) in constant attendance,
waiting for the main chance, ambitious yet wavering in his allegiances. Even more impressively, tenor Jeffrey Lloyd
Roberts, a veteran of just about every English opera company (Opera
North’s Peter Grimes, a crazed Queen of Spades Hermann at Yet the three performers who, for me, stood out
were contralto Claudia Huckle as the heart and soul of the opera, the
sympathetic traditional believer Marfa; Paul Nilon as the hectored and
bullied ‘scribe’ – here journalist (Podjaci); and Keel Watson as Dosifei,
the spiritual leader who – when all is lost – leads his followers to a
graphic mass suicide.
Huckle has a fabulous voice, as rich and purply
and resonant as the term contralto suggests. Like all of these singers,
without a hint of a microphone or artificial aid, it carried right
across the venue, showing just why some people flock to opera and cannot
abide the genre Musical, where an array of speakers dictates all – and
disembodies. A wonderful, fabulously alluring performer. Slavonic (or
here, mock-Slav) repertoire seems perfect for her. You could imagine her
in Dvořák, singing Jezibaba in Rusalka, or
Svatava in the same composer’s St. Ludmila, or Boris Godunov’s
daughter Xenia (actually a soprano), the achingly beautiful princess
role in Dimitrij. In each of her big arias – the second comes in
Act 3 – and her appeals to Dosifei, or the mystic hymn she sings picked
out by tuned percussion, there was a poignancy and tenderness not just
in every word Huckle sang, but in her every move; even though she was
got up, emblazoned T-shirt and jeans, like an old crazy sect member or
protest-leading groupie. The mottoes that adorned every dais and stanchion
and the placard-waving Jesus crowd chorus – ‘Homosexuality is a disease’
(something Marfa’s friend Susanna is obsessed about in a seemingly
autobiographical way), ‘Khovansky for Tsar’, ‘Don’t ignore the abortion
holocaust’ and their opposites,’ Decriminalise sodomy’, set the tone for
the whole show. For the other side, it was ‘Give us back our future’.
With Vick in charge, it’s certainly a case of passion politics. Paul Nilon, a regular with Vick’s ensemble since
he sang – fabulously - Odysseus in Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses,
sang the tricky role of the scribe who, standing outside events yet
embroiled in them, is in a sense the other soul of this piece. The
Journalist in some ways recalls the Simpleton – the helpless viewer of
the action in Boris Godunov, the opera Musorgsky completed three
years before he embarked on the long The voice is as breathtakingly appealing across
the range as it is singing Baroque opera (for Garsington, for instance).
His first exchange with Winslade Anderson (‘Hey, scribbler, God bless
you…’) set the scene for a bumper evening vocally.
The other figure who is – now – always
outstanding in Vick’s productions is the bass-baritone Keel Watson. One
has watched Watson emerge as a singer, from the very early days when he
produced a highly presentable Mid-Wales Opera Papageno (his acting has
never been in doubt; witness his awesome Pizarro opposite Winslade
Anderson’s Florestan in their Fidelio at Aston Villa). But now
the voice is better coached and firmly supported – magnificently so, one
might say; everything Dosifei uttered had a strength of conviction that
came through the voice, a rewarding richness, and a marvellous clarity.
You could honestly say that everything he touches is gold. Were there other heroes? The women’s chorus,
pitched against the men and often on their own, proved wonderful: their
part in the build-up to Ivan Khovansky’s first Act I entry, a
mesmerising rising and falling melody, was outstanding. A super tenor of
around 30, Ben Thapa, a former G4 member who was a runner-up in the
first ever series of X-Factor, sang Kouzka, another tragic figure
(nominally a police student), who makes his mark at the start but
reappears near the end in a tussle with the baton-wielding Streltsy,
warning against rumour and showing himself as good a poet as the
Journalist: a lovely sound. Giuseppe Di Iorio did the lighting – a nightmare
of fine timing and shrewd positioning and pointing across this vast
arena; has one ever seen Di Iorio light anything less than superbly, at
Garsington, Glyndebourne, But if anyone deserves out thanks, as BOC’s only
begetter Graham Vick points out, it is Peter Moores, the most enabling
sponsor of opera in this country. We owe to him Chandos Records’
ever-increasing series Opera in English, which since recording, at his
instigation, Reginald Goodall’s ENO Ring cycle in the 1970s has gone
under the auspices of the Peter Moores Foundation (http://www.pmf.org.uk)
to embrace more than 24 composers: Smetana, Berg, Bartók and Poulenc in
addition to the Italian (a dozen Verdi, four each of Donizetti and
Puccini), German (4 Strauss) and Austrian (6 Mozart) giants. Over 70
operas have now been recorded. Wherever there is a worthwhile opera
project in That he put his trust in Vick’s fiendishly
original, in your face Birmingham Opera Company shows Moores’s
discernment and determination to make causes possible. This
Khovanskygate was a fitting reward for his trust and his treasures. Runs at The Freedom Tent, Midland Arts Centre, Roderic Dunnett
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loads for them to do. But Musorgsky calls for additional brass –
supplied by a super team called Banda, students at the Birmingham
Conservatoire, with their efficient though uncredited conductor. It
needs a humdinger of a chorus too, and Jonathan Laird has pieced
together a choir of astonishing quality from just ordinary folk off the
sidewalks. 
drawn-out Khovanshchina. Dashing around, strapped on a
white police van, manhandled, Nilon cuts a pathetic, tragic figure.