Music Review: New Versions of Some Old Classics
Petrushka and Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky. Performed by the Győr National Ballet.
Il mondo della luna by Franz Joseph Haydn. Performed by Gotham Chamber Orchestra.
This review is about three recent adaptations of classical works: The Győr National Ballet’s take on Stravinsky’s early-twentieth-century masterpieces, Petrushka and Rite of Spring, and Gotham Chamber Opera’s production of Haydn’s opera Il mondo della luna (The World on the Moon).
Petrushka was originally composed by Stravinsky for the Ballets Russes, the company responsible for premiering most of the sensational avant-garde ballets that took Paris by storm in the first decades of the twentieth century. It premiered in Paris in 1911. The ballet’s conceit has its roots in Russian folklore, as did most of Stravinsky’s works from this period. It takes place during the festival of Shrovetide, in St Petersburg’s Admiralty Square. The title character, Petrushka, is a puppet whose master endows him and his fellow puppets, the ballerina and the Blackamoor, with real human emotions. The requisite love triangle ensues, and ends calamitously with the Blackamoor killing Petrushka in front of an audience of festival-goers. When the puppeteer tries to reassure the audience that the puppets are not real humans—that they are, in fact, just wooden puppets—Petrushka’s ghost appears above the theatre.
Almost nothing remains of this plot in the Győr Ballet’s rendition of Petrushka. The choreographer, Dmitrij Simkin, states in the program: “I present here, not dolls with human feelings . . . , but humans who act like puppets in a society controlled by propaganda where misleading the masses and brainwashing controls the whole society.” Simkin’s choreography basically inverts the original tale, presenting Petrushka as a man who refuses to give in to the will of the Soviet equivalent of a puppeteer: a military commander.
The ballet begins (and ends) not with Stravinsky’s score, but with a Soviet song, the type commonly sung in that era by the workers’ choirs that were the government’s favorite form of music-making. As the song plays, a dozen or so Soviet “puppets,” decked out in Soviet costumes replete with red handkerchiefs around their necks, begin a rather mechanistic dance. Even after the song ends, they keep dancing, seemingly incapable of recognizing on their own something as simple as the end of the music. The only two characters who stick out from this corps of good Soviet folk are Petrushka (the only man onstage with a bare neck) and his would-be master (in full military uniform).
The plot of the ballet is abstracted to the point of formlessness. The set comprises statues of a hammer, a sickle, and Lenin’s head, with a glowing red star suspended in what appears to be driftwood presiding over the stage. The ballet itself alternates between the Soviet-puppets’ mechanistic dance, and the existential duel between Petrushka and the commander. Rather predictably, Petrushka dies, and several of the dancers are crushed by Lenin’s head as it rolls across the stage.
This is too bad. Stravinsky’s score was composed for a very specific tale—you hear, in the music, a man with a hurdy-gurdy and a man with a music box fighting for the audience’s attention, the puppeteer charming his puppets to life with his flute, and so on. To erase all of these moments from the choreography seems a waste, and ruins the delicate balance between dance, narrative, and music that first made the ballet such a success. Listening to the score without watching the ballet is similar to listening to a film score without seeing the film. Watching the Győr Ballet’s production does not do much to fill in those blanks. I’m sure it’s possible to update the ballet in ways that would convey the same anti-Soviet message, while keeping the narrative of the original ballet intact. Unfortunately, this production failed at the task.
Perhaps Rite of Spring would have been a better vehicle for an anti-Soviet ballet: the original plot revolves around Stravinsky’s vision of a Pagan Russian spring ritual ending with the sacrifice of a virgin. Surely a group of frenzied comrades in Soviet garb sacrificing a terrified girl who refuses to submit could send much the same message as the Győr Ballet’s production of Petrushka?
At any rate, this is not what choreographer Attila Kun does in his new production of Stravinsky’s watershed ballet. The 1913 premiere, with its scandalously primitive sets and costumes, ugly, angular dancing that more closely resembled a communal seizure than ballet, and jarringly loud, dissonant music, caused a riot: perhaps the most-discussed moment in the history of classical-music concerts.
Kun’s production follows the basic outline of Stravinsky’s scenario, but removes the primitivist-Russian flavour. The dancers are scantily clad in simple white costumes, perhaps closest in ethos to ancient Greece, although some audience members I spoke with thought the look to be more space-age. The set is practically nonexistent: the only thing onstage besides the dancers being a white sheet which they sometimes dance behind, creating ripples in its surface as they touch it. The counterpart to all this whiteness is the lighting, which constantly changes colors and brightness. When the victim finally succumbs to her fate, her white costume is drenched in blood.
This is all fairly effective, but as in Petrushka, something is missing: the original choreography. The dancing in this production was simply too nice, too close to conventional ballet, too artful. The only real signs of primitivism were the several times that the dancers ran around on stage, something that is none too exciting to watch. The thing that made the original Rite of Spring really shocking was the way in which the dancers’ bodies contorted, and the perfect synchronicity between their actions and Stravinsky’s brutal music. Without that, this production felt sanitized.
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Gotham Chamber Opera’s production of Haydn’s little-performed comic opera Il mondo della luna was another animal entirely. The company’s production amounts to a postmodern pastiche, collapsing several centuries’ worth of fashion, technology, and performance traditions into each other, but the mélange works: this was one of the most entertaining and enjoyable opera productions that I have ever seen.
The big hype surrounding this production was the unusual performance space: the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium. Where better to produce an opera that revolves around an aristocrat tricked into believing he has been sent to the moon than in a planetarium that can really be made to look like the moon? Yet it seems somewhat miraculous that not only did the folks at the Planetarium agree to allow the production to be staged in the first place, but also that everyone managed to get along well enough to see it through to the end.
The best part about the decision to produce Il mondo della luna at the Planetarium is that it seems to have inspired the company to take unprecedented license with the opera. If you are going to project images of the night sky onto the ceiling of your performance venue (something Haydn could never have dreamed of), what else can you modernize? Perhaps more importantly, what else will the performance space force you to modernize, and how well will you adapt?
The first thing to be changed was the music of the opera itself. The conductor, Neal Goren, explains in the program notes that while some of the opera’s arias are “not only the best of Haydn, [but] the best of music . . . there is a great deal of chaff among the wheat of Il mondo della luna.” So he trimmed the opera down considerably, from over three hours in length to a swift ninety minutes, with no intermission. Mr. Goren’s shortened version of the opera worked well; it had a snappy pace, only lagging a little towards the end.
The unusual locale of this production presented several obstacles. The planetarium is circular, its 350 seats situated around the circumference. There is no stage; no orchestra pit; none of the comforts of a standard opera house. But the company rose splendidly to the task. The orchestra was seated on a raised platform to one side of the planetarium. The main action of the opera took place directly in front of their platform. The singers moved around between the floor and a second elevated platform and rolling ladders, all maneuvered by a team of stage hands throughout the show. In the end, the lack of a stage turned out to be one of the show’s biggest assets. The fact that the singers were in constant motion made the production more interesting to watch. And because the singers were often on the floor or wandering between aisles, there was an interaction between them and the audience that rarely happens in contemporary opera productions. I found myself wondering whether the ultimate consequence of staging the opera in such a supposedly modern environment was to bring it back to its original setting: the opera was first performed in the Esterháza, the palace of Haydn’s patron, presumably in a hall much smaller than today’s opera houses.
Adding even more to the visual interest were the wonderfully outrageous costumes. At the beginning of the opera, when everyone is firmly earth-bound, the costumes are typical, with the aristocrats wearing the usual 18th-century period costumes replete with fancy wigs. When Buonafede is tricked by the astrologer Ecclitico into thinking he has traveled to the moon (in reality he is merely a little out of it from taking a heavy sleeping potion), the aura changes entirely. Buonafede himself is decked out in an Apollo-style space suit, and the other main characters of the opera get outfits straight off the set of Star Trek consisting largely of shimmery, white spandex. These costumes don’t just look twentieth century and beyond, they are also quite technically advanced. Since the use of stage lights would wash out any projections on the Planetarium’s ceiling, the singers’ faces are lit during the moon scenes by lights that have been worked into their costumes in various ways. This merely adds to the sci-fi quotient of the costumes.
The thing that really made the production a success, though, was the performance style, which had been adjusted forward several centuries, drawing heavily on the comic style of Gilbert and Sullivan shows. All of the singers ham it up as much as possible, and considering how ridiculous the plot of the opera is to begin with, this is really a very good thing. In addition to being very funny, the singers also play up the raciness latent in the opera’s text. The maid sports a fairly scandalous costume, and the lover of one of Buonafede’s daughters sticks his head up her skirts in an ensemble early in the opera. Even traditional 18th-century elements of the opera, such as the moon nymphs’ dance, were updated. Instead of featuring traditional ballerinas, the moon nymphs in this production were hula hoop dancers, decked out in head-to-toe spandex, using light-up hoops that seared through the dark Planetarium.
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Watching the Győr Ballet one night and Gotham Chamber Opera the next illuminated what works and what doesn’t when companies try to update classic works. The Győr Ballet’s productions of Petrushka and Rite of Spring added little to my understanding of the works largely because they tried to improve on artworks that needed little improvement. It would take a true work of genius to make those ballets better than they already were. Gotham Chamber Opera, on the other hand, managed to take a second-rate comic opera and update it just enough that contemporary audiences would find plenty to fall in love with.
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