One of his short stories inspired Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker, but ETA Hoffmann – German romantic writer, polymath, rake – was also a sci-fi pioneer. He tried to build his own automata and invented tales about artificially created beings even before Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. The wind-up mechanical doll, Olympia, from his story The Sandman (1816), has a central role in composer Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, which has opened at the Royal Opera in a richly inventive new production conducted by Antonello Manacorda and directed by Damiano Michieletto. No gag opportunity is missed, no surprise suppressed. The whole event is a riot, done with extreme seriousness.
Offenbach died in 1880 before the work could be staged. Had he not done so, he might have left a definitive edition of his odd, lopsided but touching creation. The Royal Opera, in a co-production with Opera Australia, Opéra National de Lyon and the Teatro La Fenice, Venice, presents a new edition. For an opera staged regularly but not frequently, any changes should distract few: it manages a degree of chronological security that leaves the Italian production team – also responsible for, among others, the Royal Opera’s winning Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci last year – free to pursue their wildest fantasies.
And they do. Industrial quantities of glitter, a pea-green corps de ballet who dance with chairs, extreme wigs, carnival masks, a smashed cello, enchanting child ballerinas, parrot and doppelganger, stilts, tumblers, hula hoops: all – relatively – normal operatic fare. Add in the shrivelled brain, the enlarged eyeball, the mathematic equations in which integers end up as a choreographed chorus (you had to be there), and a bizarre new Hoffmannesque world emerges. In Paolo Fantin’s joyful set designs, an extravaganza of greens, pinks and crimsons, with costumes by Carla Teti, lighting by Alessandro Carletti and choreography by Chiara Vecchi, skill and imagination are boundless.
All this would be worthless without excellent soloists, chorus and orchestra to deliver Offenbach’s melodic, sprawling score. In short, the old man Hoffmann recalls his failed, youthful loves: Olympia (Olga Pudova), who is merely a doll; Antonia (Ermonela Jaho), who will die if she sings – her talent shown here through the metaphor of dance; and Giulietta (Marina Costa-Jackson), a courtesan. Pudova’s coloratura, chiselled and icy, and her stiff, clockwork gestures stole the show for dazzle, but Jaho, as ever, caught the work’s heartbreak. Costa-Jackson made the most of the less rounded character of the glamorous Giulietta.
Hoffmann himself is a curiosity, hard to comprehend but elegantly sung by Juan Diego Flórez, intonation always secure though at times his top notes lasted just a bit too lo-o-ng. His nemeses – various devil-like figures played with sinister brilliance and terrific vocal finesse by Alex Esposito – held us mesmerised. With outstanding support from Julie Boulianne, Christine Rice, Jeremy White, Alastair Miles and more, and a committed chorus required to perform unlikely complex sequences including lying on their backs and waggling their feet, this was the Royal Ballet and Opera on best form.
The orchestra delivered this long score with endless panache and attention to detail. Manacorda paced the performance well, and idiomatically, though the stop-start gaps for applause were excessive. Offenbach, after so many effervescent operettas, wanted to be taken seriously. This production honours his strange and idiosyncratic genius.
Composers of one generation can cast shadows, as well as light, on the next. Nineteenth-century romantics struggled beneath the tonnage of Beethoven. For a generation in Finland, Sibelius dominated. As the composer-conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen (b.1958), said in a recent interview: “When I was growing up. I chose to go to Italy to study, because I wanted to get somewhere far away from Sibelius – he was everywhere.” Now based in Los Angeles but back in London as conductor laureate of the Philharmonia Orchestra, Salonen acknowledges Sibelius as the greatest artist in Finnish history. Accordingly, a deep understanding shaped his reading of Sibelius’s Symphony No 1, drawing fearless, well-drilled playing from the orchestra.
The centrepiece of this all-Finnish concert, after the short, jubilant Flounce by Lotta Wennäkoski (b.1970), first heard at the Proms in 2017, was the UK premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Viola Concerto. A friend and exact contemporary of Salonen, Lindberg more willingly embraced the influence of Sibelius, creating pieces which capture similar expanses of Nordic landscape, musical or actual. He wrote the viola concerto for Lawrence Power, one of the most imaginative exponents of the instrument, and currently a resident artist at the Southbank Centre.
The three movements flow into one another, punctuated by heady brass fanfares. Every string technique is employed by the soloist: pizzicato (plucking), quadruple stopping (bowing four strings at once), harmonics (touching the string lightly to create ghostly, ethereal high notes) and, in an extended cadenza, playing the viola as a banjo and singing along, as if searching for notes in the ether. All that, plus the long, lyrical lines so distinctive in this middle-voiced instrument, made this a compelling work, immediately worthy of a place in the repertoire as long as someone apart from Power is capable of playing it (Timothy Ridout or Tabea Zimmermann should cope).
Another world-class string player, the Norwegian Vilde Frang, made a powerful case, were one any longer needed, for Erich Korngold’s Violin Concerto, which draws on melodies from his own Hollywood film scores, causing inevitable disdain in some quarters at the time of its 1947 premiere. In a concert with the Berlin Philharmonic under the baton of the orchestra’s chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, Frang caught the mood of bittersweet melancholy and yearning, galloping to an elfin, catch-me-if-you-can finale, exuberant horns stating the luscious main theme in the closing section. The orchestra also played Dvořák’s Symphony No 7, as if this familiar score had been taken to pieces – Petrenko is exhaustive in his analysis of every note, every bar – and reconstructed with fresh, rebellious, carefree energy.
The other work was Rachmaninov’s tone poem The Isle of the Dead, inspired by Arnold Böcklin’s spooky painting. A mysterious rocking melody builds to a ferocious climax, often likened to Charon ferrying the dead to Hades. The Berliners united in a mighty roar. The River Styx was in full spate. The return to a perfectly hushed pianissimo came as balm to the soul.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Tales of Hoffmann ★★★★
Philharmonia/Salonen ★★★★
Berlin Philharmonic/Petrenko ★★★★★
The Tales of Hoffmann is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 1 December
