Hard on the heels of Nikolaus Lenhoff’s new Glyndebourne staging of Tristan and Isolde comes English National Opera’s revival of David Alden’s 1996 production of the same work. In some respects the two versions are both complimentary and antithetical. Lehnhoff calmly and flawlessly analyses Tristan’s metaphysics to produce an interpretation of great cogency and beauty, occasionally purchased at the price of the opera’s emotional extremism. Alden gives us neuroses and emotional wildness in spades, but seemingly distrusts the opera’s philosophical underpinnings.

Where Lenhoff’s lovers strive for mystical fusion beyond the phenomenal world, Alden presents us with an obsessive, self-absorbed pair, out of touch with reality and barely capable of communicating with each other. Susan Bullock’s fiery Isolde paces about the ship in Act I like a caged animal, flings savage taunts at Jane Irwin’s prim yet masochistic Brangäne and keeps Morold’s mummified head in her luggage like some fetishistic totem.

She and David Rendall’s Tristan perform the central love duet as a pair of parallel fantasy monologues. He worships her, Madonna-like, when she appears in a niche in the crumbling walls of Ian MacNeil’s set. She is turned on by memories of him attacking Morold with his sword. After Tristan’s death – bloody and messy, jolting the audience like a slap in the face – she remains unable to look at him, singing the Liebestod lost in a dream and seemingly very much alive when the final curtain falls.

Vocally things are mightily impressive. Bullock, manic and incisive, has a touch of metal in the voice that cuts thrillingly through the orchestra even at the most powerful climaxes. Rendall sings with a combination of beauty, steadiness and great heft. Irwin, her tone wonderfully creamy, is a glorious Brangäne. The rest of the cast isn’t quite in the same league. Jonathan Summers’s voice is now fraying a bit, which makes him less than ideal as Kurwenal, and he is further hampered by being curiously got up like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, albeit minus the blue war paint. Matthew Best is a rather dull King Mark, his diction poor compared with everyone else.

In the pit, Dietfried Bernet lets the score unfold with a lingering sensuality. There are some over-slow speeds on occasion, though the playing is often gorgeous. Musically this is an imposing achievement, though it doesn’t always obliterate the awkwardness of Alden’s production.

Tim Ashley | 26 May 2003

You can’t hurry love

An obituary in the Guardian of 24 May recorded that its subject and his wife, who had been married for almost fifty years and died within a few weeks of each other, wished it to be known that they were survived by their pet tortoises Tristan and Isolde. A cynic, or someone whose brain hasn’t yet clicked into Wagnerian gear, might say that there is something chelonid about both the length of time it takes for anything to happen in Tristan and Isolde and the speed and grace with which it happens. (Tortoises, though, have the air of having achieved Buddhist detachment, which in which Wagner shows an interest only in Parsifal, if at all.) The trouble with Tristan is that it presents as a public spectacle a minute anatomy of the timeless process of consciousness. The process is intimately related to love, or more probably sex, but the plot, although on paper apparently conventional, is merely a skeletal frame for the music-based drama of the protagonists’ burgeoning sense of self. And the result, for those who have not already internalised the work, can be a pair of rigid carapaces going through the motions of love in an ungainly way.

Whether Tristan works depends on the performance, even more than for other highly authored nineteenth- and twentieth-century works. The highly praised new production at Glyndebourne, directed by Nicholas Lehnhoff, seems to aim for lyric intensity on a human scale, casting vocally and personally glamorous performers in a comparatively intimate, but abstract, setting. The ENO’s production, directed by David Alden and revived here for the first time, inevitably presents singers with the vocal chops to fill the much larger space, and allows the space to dwarf them as figures. The production itself was impressive the first time out, with the characters consciously playing roles in a ruined theatre that gave way to a cavernous bare stage in the last act, when Tristan and then Isolde have abandoned the audience of the living completely. But, in spite of a luminous Isolde in Elizabeth Connell, a sympathetic King Marke in Gwynne Howell and a glamorously cryptic Brangäne in Susan Parry, an inadequate Tristan made the performance pretty much intolerable overall.

This time out, things were generally much better. Above all, Dietfried Bernet, conducting the ENO orchestra for the first time, kept the score under dynamic tension, moving forward with power if not speed. Neither Susan Bullock nor David Rendall are quite mainstream Wagner singers, but both had the strength of voice and dramatic presence to engage interest throughout. The other roles were well-filled, apart perhaps from Matthew Best’s King Marke. He wasn’t as off-pitch as the British Eurovision entry, and was identifiably singing music, but his haywire intonation and occasional barking grated, particularly when we are now used to glamorous voices in the role. His mean-and-miserable characterization in act two, softened only by a final embrace of Tristan, undermined the tragedy of the situation by implying that Isolde might well have been driven to adultery anyway for some human warmth. But King Marke is really only part of the plot, and what mattered was the splendid, unreflective and organic growth of the lovers’ self-made selves in the music.

H.E. Elsom | London Coliseum 05/24/2003

Having been deprived of stagings of Tristan und Isolde for a while, Wagnerians currently have two options to ponder – a new production at Glyndebourne and ENO’s revival, which opened within days of each other.

In ENO’s revival of David Alden’s 1996 production, the challenges presented by Wagner have, on the whole, been well met.

The plaudits are primarily due on this occasion to conductor Dietfried Bernet (a senior figure hardly known to London audiences), who has the measure of Wagner’s magnificent score and who has encouraged stirring and committed playing from the orchestra, which gives no evidence of tiredness throughout the course of the long evening.

Bernet’s view is, overall, a spacious one, with plenty of time given to the articulation of details sometimes submerged in less considered or thoughtful readings, which, nevertheless, do not draw undue attention to themselves but are integrated as part of the drama and character motivation. He is also appropriately tempestuous in Act One, with the music surging and swelling in accompaniment to Isolde’s scorn and fury.

It’s just as well that Bernet enables Wagner’s graphic sea music to be clearly heard and recognisable as such, since, in David Alden’s staging, there is precious little indication that the first act is set on board a ship – more of which anon.

Bernet’s conducting of the Prelude that prefigures the drama is broad indeed. This ever-puzzling yet mesmerising music vibrates in this production with the seething tensions and passions that grip the protagonists. Rhys Meirion provides the first voice heard, that of the lyrical sailor, which I would prefer more distantly placed.

Susan Bullock reveals herself immediately as a compelling and convincing Isolde. Her initial outbursts have a fine steely ring to them, with plenty of venom directed against Tristan and the situation she finds herself in. But her sound never becomes ugly and is never covered by the orchestra, even when the latter is at its most vehement. When it comes to demonstrating warmth and expression, she is not to be found wanting in either quality. Indeed, Susan Bullock is a thoroughly creditable heroine. Any drawback in characterisation is due to the requirements placed upon her by the director. Writhing and rolling about on the floor does very little positive for Susan Bullock’s – or Wagner’s – Isolde.

Her companion Brangäne is clearly seen by Alden as an ambiguous figure, possibly veering on the malicious side. Jane Irwin does all that is required of her. Her bespectacled and rather shabby appearance does not do Brangäne any favours, either. Irwin demonstrates a powerful, bright voice, which in an ideal world would be tempered with a little more profundity of tone. Momentary hints of flatness during her Act Two warnings are small blots on a portrayal that is extremely convincing in its own terms.

David Rendall’s Tristan is a surprise – and a revelation. Hitherto, his fach has primarily been in Italian and French opera, although smatterings of Mozart and Russian opera are also to his credit. In terms of Wagner, his essaying of Erik in The Flying Dutchman is hardly preparation for the trials and tribulations of Tristan, which is second only to Siegfried in terms of taxing demands.

Rendall’s tone has darkened of late, and there is appropriate weight and depth in his delivery. If he does not have the bright, ringing timbre of a Heldentenor, then this is more than made up for in the sincerity of his utterance and demeanour. Here is a troubled man, torn between duty towards his king and uncle, and the uncontrollable feelings he has for Isolde. His sincerity in his Act Two exchanges with Isolde is poignant, and his demented mien in the third act is almost unbearable to see and hear. The Coliseum is the right size of house for Rendall’s Tristan, and the intensity of his performance is quite remarkable.

Matthew Best does not really have sufficient gravitas in voice or bearing as the wronged if ultimately sympathetic king. His monologue is delivered with care for the enunciation of the text but ultimately lacks that sonorous resonance which is a pre-requisite for Wagner basses.

Jonathan Summers, sporting a kilt, is a characterful Kurwenal, although his voice is not now as strong or firmly focused as once it was. The composer requests a tenor for the small but crucial part of Melot, so Leigh Melrose’s baritone already put him at a disadvantage, but his blustery delivery does not make the right kind of impact.

Alasdair Elliott as a pipe-less shepherd (the distant cor anglais most exquisitely played by Geoffrey Browne) sings mellifluously but is obliged to spend much of the time staring at the audience before crawling on the floor and ultimately cradling Tristan’s sword.

David Alden’s direction has been widely admired so perhaps mine is a minority view when I admit to being quite baffled, in places, by what he has put on stage on this occasion.

It seems to me to be quite wrong for Tristan and Isolde never to touch or face each other during their Act Two encounter, or for Isolde not to acknowledge Tristan’s presence when she arrives in Act Three, let alone to wander off into the distance at the opera’s conclusion when she is supposed to die.

The opening scene is set by Wagner “at sea on the deck of Tristan’s ship”, which here seems to be a ruined chapel or courtyard of some kind. There is much playing with Tristan’s sword: at one point in the love duet, Tristan seems to be fighting off some invisible foe instead of communing with his beloved. And why must the characters be so scruffy in dress? Isolde is a princess, after all, and Tristan a knight. (Curiously, Alden’s Munich production of Tannhäuser had the characters appearing in less than flattering garb and, also, the action is set around a ruined building.) The love-potion, which affects and afflicts Tristan and Isolde, is apparently available to anyone who desires it. Melot has a sample before attacking Tristan and even King Mark takes a swig on his arrival in Act Three.

It’s not an irritating production, yet neither is it especially illuminating of Wagner’s characters and scenario.

In the end, this all matters far less given the musical qualities, which evince careful preparation and rehearsal. There isvirtually flawless co-ordination between stage and pit with orchestra and singers at one in realising Wagner’s stringent demands.

Dietfried Bernet has that increasingly rare ability – Reginald Goodall had it too – of building tension to an almost unbearable level. The conclusion of Act One is quite shattering, with full-toned chorus and properly balanced off-stage brass.

Wagnerian conducting of this kind is rarely heard, and for this reason, as well as the performances by the principals, I urge you to catch one of the remaining performances.

Timothy Ball | London Coliseum 2 June, 2003