Beyond the Garden in Prague - Review
Another excellent review for Beyond the Garden - this time from the Prague Opera Festival “Beyond the Garden (with the subtitle When the Past Is Not What You Want to Remember…) is definitely a remarkable feat by which the Opera 2022 Festival show transcends the current Czech-Slovak landscape”.
Susan Bickley in Beyond the Garden at Venuše ve Švehlovce in Prague
Opera+ 31.01.2022
Opera 2022: Alma Mahler's Ghost Garden
Stephen McNeff: Beyond the Garden
Concept Operapovera and Slovenian Chamber Music Theatre
Venuše ve Švehlovce, Prague
Svatava Barančicová https://operaplus.cz/autori/barancicova-svatava/
One of the most psychologically complicated relationships is the mother-daughter relationship. He also became the subject of the ghost opera by the British contemporary composer Stephen McNeff Beyond the Garden, performed on January 29, 20022 as part of the Opera 2022 show at the Venus Theater in Švehlovka. The performance was created as a co-production project of Conceptu operapovera, sponsored by director Rocc and the Slovenian Chamber Music Theater.
The opera deals with Alma Mahler's relationship with her prematurely deceased daughter Manon Gropius. The elderly Alma, a lioness of Viennese salons, lives abandoned in New York and remembers her tumultuous life, lovers, husbands, fame, parties, trips around Europe and escapes, including emigrating to America before Nazism. Her daughter appears as a ghost coming to Alma's private salon / garden from the outside and uncomfortably comments on her human failures.
The directors have chosen the truly haunting space of Venus in Švehlovka for the ghost opera, a dark, in an incredibly dismal state of disintegration, where a statue of the hanged Venus welcomes you at the entrance stairs. Nothing for ordinary visitors to opera houses: if you don't stumble anywhere in the dark or if chairs in improvised rows fall with you, you better not look for toilets, they are only for thicker natures. Scenes made for psychological drama.
The original glass door to the hall functioned as a realistic backdrop to the social salon, the balcony above the stage served as a subtitling device where the text was projected. The chamber ensemble of musicians (clarinet, harp, drums, violin, double bass, piano) was part of the scene. The main protagonist, Otelia, introduces Alma Mahlerová, who sits alone in a bathrobe in the middle of her salon or private garden, and the tormenting figure of her daughter Klára intervenes in her thoughts. In an interview with Opera Plus, director Rocc said: “Alma has become Otelia, and Manon has been Klára. The whole concept may be reminiscent of Bergman's film Persona. There is an older lady in the room who suddenly starts talking to a younger girl we don't know if it's her caregiver, daughter, girlfriend or just an idea… The ending is not entirely clear and one balances what reality is and what fantasy is . "
The brilliant libretto was written by the Swedish-Irish poet Aoife Mannix, one of the most impressive components of the opera. The plot goes against time, from the latest memories of Alma Mahler living in New York to the oldest, and in the end she approaches Easter in Venice, where her daughter contracted polio and died prematurely at the age of eighteen. There are a number of allusions to historical facts in the text that the student will not understand without their knowledge. For example, the verse Otelia that she was married to the wind refers to Alma's affair with Oskar Kokoschka and his painting The Bride of the Wind, where he portrayed both in an embrace. Or allusions to Mahler's jealousy of Alma's own artistic ambitions, or an adventurous escape with Franz Werfel from Europe to emigrate across the Pyrenees. There is also talk of angels, alluding to Berg's Violin Concerto, which he wrote in Memory of an Angel after the unfortunate death of her daughter, Manon Gropi. Director Rocc built this unusual seven-part unit with a prologue as a suggestive chamber psychological drama, in which he maintained the urgency of the message and the audience's attention, despite minimal changes and events.
Both protagonists, mezzo-soprano Susan Bickley (Otelia) and soprano Katja Konvalinkova (Klara) have to pay a huge tribute; we rarely see the demanding and focused performance they gave in this opera. In fact, I haven't seen anything like it yet, so that an opera soloist, modelled after one actor's theatre, can sing a coherent role in an atonal style for seventy minutes by heart, where you don't have much to catch intonation or memory. And sometimes the same in duets. Otelia really doesn't get off the stage all the time and pulls the whole opera. Susan Bickley sang in a delicious, delicious mezzo-soprano, clean and boiling, expressive, but nowhere did she switch. She is one of the top opera artists in Britain. The performance of the soprano in the role of Klára, who occasionally went to sing backstage, on the balcony and the like, was also very cultivated and convincing. Katja Konvalinková works as a soloist and director of the Slovenian Chamber Music Theatre.
The composer of the music Stephen McNeff does not make it any easier for the singers, in the two years since its premiere (2020) some places are constantly improving and changing. As Rocc noted in the interview: "After each implementation, he makes other minor adjustments. I understand him - and musicians 'hate' him because they get used to something and then it changes (laughs). It is sometimes very difficult to catch something intonation there. After the last performance in Olomouc, Stephen wanted to make some drastic adjustments, but we agreed that we would still leave the Prague performance in "Urfassung" (original) form. ”Stephen McNeff participated in the Prague performance in person.
Stephen McNeff's music is consistently atonal, yet pleasantly fluid, light, with refreshing rhythms, with a minimal but interesting instrumental mix. Marimba and the harp give the group great colour options. The band centered around the piano could easily have been a small saloon orchestra, they fit the scene perfectly. The music was studied and directed by Iztok Kocen, who works at the Slovenian Chamber Music Theatre and is also a composer.
Opera Beyond the Garden with the subtitle When the Past Is Not What You Want to Remember… is definitely a remarkable feat by which the Opera 2022 show transcends the current Czech-Slovak landscape..
(For the original Czech language version see https://operaplus.cz/opera-2022-zahrada-duchu-almy-mahlerove/ )