A real Oresteia

A false Oresteia is one like Robert Icke's at the Almeida, now transferred to the Trafalgar Studios - rejecting any attempt to translate Aeschylus' tough, dynamic language and setting itself an extra problem in its contemporary setting by starting with the sacrifice of Iphigenia. Magnificent and thrilling as was Lia Williams' performance, you can't slant it all in favour of Clytemnestra; Athena as much as Apollo  would be dismayed by that, and the Furies would have too much of a part in civic life.

That there can be a civic life after all that atavistic blood-grudge saga is one of the things that has to fill one with wonder at this oldest of great dramas. Rory Mullarkey makes sure it takes its rightful place in a version which is only an adaptation in that it allows Agamemnon, Choephoroe and Eumenides to be performed in a single evening - in other words, halving the text but keeping the essence of every speech.

Although Mullarkey only studied ancient Greek for a year at school - which sets him at a disadvantage alongside the fabulous Anne Carson, whose Bakkhai in the only faithful-to-the-playwright staging of the Almeida's admirable Greek season was one of the best translations-in-action I've ever encountered, at least where I know the original - he seemed to me to get to the tough heart of the poetry. And I say this as a huge admirer of Tony Harrison's version for the classic National Theatre Oresteia directed by Peter Hall. Mullarkey talks total sense in the programme interview with Heather Neill:

Aeschylus is full of craggy verbal soundscapes, big, chunky language [complex, too - it was a killer to study in the original at university]. It felt necessary to try to capture some of that. Certain writers in English seemed influenced by Aeschylus and I glutted myself with them as I was working on it - Joyce, Shelley, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes. There's something in the elemental nature of that language, the way the words sing in the air. Later Shakespeare too: the complexity of Leontes' language in The Winter's Tale has something of that muscularity.

If only Icke, and Rachel Cusk in her so-called Medea also at the Almeida, had tried to come up with a contemporary equivalent of 'the way the words sing in the air'. But this kind of verse also needs intelligent, powerful delivery and, by Zeus, it got it in the two key performances.

Katy Stephens as Clytemnestra was all artful command and undercutting irony when she first appeared in a dress of fabulous design by Hannah Clark (top image; all pictures by Robert Day for Shakespeare's Globe). Those raised, sculptured arms, oh my, and that force in the crucial confrontation with son Orestes, which was the first point at which I really got a lump in my throat.

I'm possibly bound to be a bit biased in favour of Joel MacCormack since I regard him as something of a protégé since he participated - entirely on the shrewd instigation of Harriet Walter - in the Hofmannsthal readings as part of the German Opera Discovery Day I curated in Birmingham. There he played a sensitive, almost feminine Octavian and an ardent Composer (in the scene with Zerbinetta, excellently played by Daisy Boulton, culled from the original Bürger als Edelmann backstage scene linking to the operatic Ariadne). Orestes was, on the other hand, going to ask for blood and he delivered it, nervous, volatile and ultimately assured, speaking Mullarkey's pure poetry beautifully. I'd travel to hear his Hamlet, a role he must play soon. Though the Orestes in the Almeida Oresteia wasn't bad,  I've forgotten him already; I'll remember this one, and not just because I know the guy.

Electra is more marginal in Aeschylus than she is in Sophocles or Euripides, but I thought Rosie Hilal could have been a bit dirtier of voice and appearance. Still, sparks flew between her and MacCormack.

Elsewhere the acting was variable but never less than concentrated - I was never bored or distracted. Naana Agyei-Ampedu (pictured below with George Irving as Agamemnon) as the spat-upon 'barbarian' Cassandra spoke powerfully, but her words couldn't be made out when she sang.

The sung parts, in fact, were the least impressive part of Mira Calix's often just-right score - not on a level, inevitably, with the extraordinary complexity of Orlando Gough's choruses in the Almeida Bakkhai. But these ones made their point above all in the ritual screwing-up of courage to the sticking-point at the heart of Choephoroe.

Horn, clarinet and saxophone players came down from their box to participate at this point. I liked it that there was no percussion other than what we got from the electronics, much as I miss one of Birtwistle's greatest achievements in his score for the National (unforgettable the shrieking clarinets for Cassandra).

It's difficult to know who was who in the various choruses, though I was especially impressed by the metaphor of the ravening lion devouring an entire household, and the zombie Erinyes, only just a little bit comic, spoke well, too (which actress is this below?).

Still not sure why Adele Thomas' ancient-versus-modern production had the chorus in the first and last plays dressed in what looked like grey-black post-Second-World-War garb, and there was sometimes a home-made look about the presentation, but Clark's costumes usually came to the rescue.

The final Globe jig around an enormous gold phallus was well earned, a cathartic coda to a play which, whatever one may think about its patriarchal concessions, always surprises in its measured speeches after the horrors of the two before it. They'd sold out of Mullarkey's text in the shop, so I've ordered it up along with Anne Carson's proposal of a different Oresteia - Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Electra and Euripides' Orestes. Let my get my hands on a theatre and the right actors, and I'd be back in the director's chair like a shot for that one. Meanwhile, I hope someone reads this in time to rush to the Globe tonight for the last performance. The beauty of it is you can still walk in and buy a £5 groundling ticket to see top quality acting up close and personal.

From Marschallin to Moses

'That's the first time actually I've ever been moved by the words of The Ring alone...I normally find that the text alone makes you yearn for the music, but that seemed quite wonderful to me.' Thus Michael Tanner, lecturing on Götterdämmerung, about Dame Harriet Walter declaiming Brünnhilde's Immolation Scene in its various incarnations and her husband Guy Paul reading Wagner's stage directions. There they are above in the green room of Birmingham's superb CBSO Centre preparing for the afternoon session, with lovely Daisy Boulton on the right, one of the two young actors with great careers ahead of them (Daisy is shortly to appear in the stage version of Shakespeare in Love). Can it be only three weeks ago? So much has happened since - I've sizzled pleasantly in Setúbal, Berlin and of course Dresden leading up to the great man's 150th birthday.

Looking around for a portrait to do Strauss justice, I was hoping to find the one of him stepping off his first flight in 1947, looking at the camera in naive wonderment. But another from the festival he conducted in the Royal Albert Hall that same year will do. Because we are still struck by the disparity between the frequent look of seeming lassitudinous indifference, and the fires within. But it was Stefan Zweig, his collaborator on Die schweigsame Frau, who wrote in his autobiography The World of Yesterday about the 'particular magic power behind this bourgeois mask' in 'those bright blue, highly radiant eyes...wide-awake...not daemonic but in some way clairvoyant, the eyes of a man cognizant of the full significance of his task'.

I'm very proud and happy with how our 'Discovery Day' grandly titled The German Operatic Tradition worked out. I was given what seemed to me like a not too paltry budget and the brief to cover four operas being performed in Birmingham over six weeks: Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, in concert that afternoon conducted by Andris Nelson and reviewed here; his Ariadne auf Naxos, which the Royal Opera under Pappano brings in concert on 6 July; the last instalment of Opera North's Ring, Götterdämmerung, on 21 June; and Schoenberg's Moses und Aron on Monday in the Welsh National Opera production which opened on the very day we were 'performing'.

I've written this elsewhere, but quite apart from the attentive, responsive and sizeable audience, what I'm left with is a sense of how the actors learned from the lectures - Harriet especially was full of praise in the morning, having had a harrassing start with a hotel bill she wasn't expected to pay and being sent to the wrong venue in the pouring rain - and how we lecturers were indeed moved and sometimes stunned by the actors.

Adding to the riches of the day were superb performances by two recent graduates of the Birmingham Conservatoire accompanied, very spaciously and sensitively, by Shah Johan bin Shahridzuan (a Malaysian prince, I believe, and a princely pianist). Baritone Samuel Oram began with Harlekin's little song to Ariadne and continued with 'Allerseelen', managing the expected breadth of line masterfully, while soprano Carrie-Ann Williams obliged me by learning 'Du Venus Sohn', originally presented to Monsieur Jourdain in Hofmannsthal's adaptation of Le bourgeois gentilhomme (she also did the Echo effect for the Serenade), in a couple of days, then delivering like a Strauss soprano to the manner born in 'Die Nacht' and a delicious rarity, 'Breit über mein Haupt'. Here are the friendly three just before their performance.

I kicked off the day with a tour around Der Rosenkavalier, beginning with the start of the Prelude to Strauss's first opera, Guntram, to point up the Wagnerian element in Strauss's makeup before going on to the Mozart vein (the breakfast minuet-into-waltz and the composer conducting the third movement of Mozart's Symphony No. 39). Then it was time for the Hofmannsthal vein, which is where I introduced Guy to read passages from the watershed Letter of Lord Chandos (1901-2) which the poet uses to characterise his own sense of having 'lost completely the ability to think or to speak of anything coherently', of everything having 'disintegrated into parts, those parts again into parts' after the seeming wholeness of his precocious early inspiration.

Thence to the Marschallin's monologue and the first part of her scene with Octavian at the end of Act One. Again, it was effective and moving as pure theatre in the hands of Harriet and the very original Joel MacCormack, pictured right here (for I was clear I wanted a young man rather than a girl in trousers to read Octavian, as he is portrayed in the 1926 silent film).

William Mival elegantly encapsulated the complexities of Ariadne's journey from her place within Le bourgeois gentilhomme or rather Der Bürger als Edelmann, from which he played the Overture as conducted - again brilliantly, and in such good sound - by Strauss. The oboe sicilienne also served as neat prelude to Carrie-Ann's performance of 'Du Venus Sohn'. I was amazed to hear William, a composer of no little standing, rate Strauss as the most comprehensive musical voice of the 20th century. Indeed - he had such a far-reaching influence, probably not significantly less than his opposite number Stravinsky.

We also had Guy read Jourdain's last lines as they bring down the curtain on the original Ariadne, with Strauss's first ending. The other playreading here was of the dialogue scene between the Composer and Zerbinetta (Daisy, dangerous rather than merely flirty) as it appears in the original backstage scene of the play. There's no extended love duet here, only a quick jump to the Music Master's call to arms and his easy persuasion of the Prima Donna. Harriet's 'do you think I can?' got a big laugh.

I was pleased with how my second set of translations sounded - I tried to effect them with the actors' delivery in mind, so it was exciting to hear how they were interpreted. Below: the great Jeritza as Ariadne. Curious that the creator of the role in Dresden was Eva van der Osten, the first (and perfectly plumptious, careful with the wording) Octavian. Other portraits: Marschallin by Alfred Roller, the original designer, Brünnhilde of course by Arthur Rackham, Moses by Ribera.

I've dealt with the post-prandial musical intermezzo, but not the coda: Harriet, Joel and Daisy reading their parts in the Rosenkavalier Trio separately, because those beautiful words so often get smothered in the sheer heady beauty of the vocal writing. Sophie's lines are specially worth quoting:

I feel as if I were in church,
It feels sacred and frightening.
And yet I feel unholy too.
I don't know how I feel.
I want to kneel down before the lady
And do something to her,
Because I feel she gives me to him
And at the same time takes something of him away from me.
I just don't know how I feel.
I want to understand everything
And not to understand anything.
I want to ask and not to ask,
I feel hot and cold.
(looking into Octavian's eyes)
Yet I feel only you and know only one thing:
That I love you!

So on to our distinguished afternoon speakers. Michael's precis of the entire Ring saga up to and including Götterdämmerung was absolutely masterly and wryly funny: I've not heard him speak before, and was captivated by a master storyteller. It was also a dream come true to hear Harriet read two of Wagner's very different drafts for the original ending of the drama before the one we know and love. Stephen Johnson and I were both struck afresh by lines in the most essential of all Wagner's letters on The Ring, the one of 23 August 1856 in which he writes to Röckel how 'I had (unfortunately) never really sorted out in my mind what I meant by this "love" which, in the course of the myth, we saw appearing as something utterly and completely devastating'. Which explains the change from 1853's 'Let there be only - love' to the annihilation of the final version.

Michael stunned us all in his choice of recorded Immolation Scene, or at least the part of it he played: Flagstad as I've never heard her before or since, with Furtwängler in Milan, 1950. The recording came up with incomparable vividness on the transfer he played. I don't know if this is as fine, but here it is on YouTube. The entire opera is also available there in the same performance, all four hours and 15 minutes of it.

Stephen had the hardest task with the least easy to love of our four operas, Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, but energetically explained both his own reservations and what he admired about the achievement. He started by announcing that we were to have a complete performance of Act 3 - which is to say, the page or so of text Schoenberg never set to music. Cue Harriet in more austere mode as Moses - after all, this is the woman who's played Brutus and wants to play Macbeth - with Guy as Aron and interjections from the young 'uns.

SJ demonstrated the nature of 12-note rows both consonant, up to a point (Berg's Violin Concerto), and dissonant, as they mostly are in the opera. Also reminded me what a superb piece the Second String Quartet is, and how convincing Moses sounds with the firm rhythmic underpinning of Boulez's interpretation.

Then it was time for a few questions and gratifying votes of thanks from Stephen and the very supportive Roger Neill who was in the audience (and has written a more succinct account of the experience on his blog). My thanks too to the indefatigable Hannah Baines of the THSH organisation which organised the event, a delight to deal with throughout.

So off we rushed to the concert Rosenkavalier. This is Stephen, looking a bit 'oh God, do we have to' as J snaps, and me slightly paunchy with the vivacious Mrs Johnson, Kate Jones, beaming between us after a meal during the long interval.

I'll say no more about the ultimately dizzying performance, duly written up on The Arts Desk, other than to add that our rather distant seats up top gave an interesting perspective both visual and aural (the orchestral woodwind sounded unbelievably vivid). Here's the view of one of many 'curtain calls'

And a closer-up with Sophie Bevan, Alice Coote a little in the shade, Andris Nelsons, Soile Isokoski, Franz Hawlata, Bonaventura Bottone and Pamela Helen Stephen.

So nearly 12 hours after we'd gathered in the CBSO Centre, we reeled out happy and drove back to Stephen and Kate's place in Sutton St Nicholas near Hereford. The final shot should go to the most vocal, sensitive and personable cat in the world, their Agatha. I'm much more of a dog person but I'd give Agatha house room any time. Mind you, even though she's more of a mouser than a birdcatcher, I'm glad she's not here at the moment because we have a deliquescent blackbird family nesting somewhere in the ivy on the back yard fence. An hour ago I caught the infant staring at me impudently from the weeping mulberry a few yards away as she brazenly consumed the fruit.