Black in mood, black in music, black in outlook, The Force of Destiny is the closest Verdi came to operatic nihilism. It’s hard to think of a more relentlessly despairing opera. Based on an early romantic Spanish drama, it begins with accidental death and a curse, and ends with suicide and revenge. Fate is scorched into the three-note brass fortissimo that ignites the prelude. A restless, shuddering string motif immediately sets off at a gallop, nervy and spectral. Scarcely a minute in, we already feel tense.
At the same time there’s a different kind of anxiety: this is a four-act work full of plot tangles and lasting nearly three and a half hours which, badly done, can feel interminable. The music bursts with Verdian showstoppers, offering an exciting vehicle for big, flexible voices, but it remains a headache to stage. This is English National Opera’s first attempt for 20 years. The Royal Opera House had a production in 2004 from La Scala Milan, which received some of the worst reviews I have ever seen (or written; my only use in print of the word “ludicrous”).
ENO turned to the Catalan director Calixto Bieito for this new staging, conducted with lucid intensity by Mark Wigglesworth, with sterling orchestral playing in a score alive with instrumental solos. Verdi wrote La forza del destino mid-career in 1862 after an uncharacteristic hiatus, revising it in 1869 – mostly the version used here, with tweaks. Usually a reliable controversialist, Bieito gave us nothing to disturb beyond the shocking and legitimate tropes of war, whether the 1930s Spain of his own background (as told to him in childhood by his grandmother), the Holocaust (the chilling image of a child writing on a blackboard) or modern Syria. Images of tyranny, concocted into an essentially abstract sequence, are projected over and within the clean white facades of official-looking buildings. Designed by Rebecca Ringst, these bombastic structures tilt, revolve and oppress, their spotless exteriors simultaneously revealing the drab frames and battens of their fabrication.
Using the monochrome palette of Picasso’s Guernica, gashes of bright red blood aside, all is black, white or grey. Symbols borrowed from the painting – a white horse, a lightbulb, a dead child – spin before our eyes. What did it all mean? (We should be careful. As Picasso said when asked to explain Guernica: “the horse is a horse”.) By the first interval I was too irritated to care. By the second I had grown strangely, almost reluctantly hooked. The hesitation came chiefly from the impact this grandiose tableau had on the action. Foreground and background were reversed: no longer love in a time of war but the conflict of both. The trio at the heart of the work, the “half-breed” Alvaro, his lover Leonora and her vengeful brother Carlo di Vargas, are singing not to one another but to the barren air.
Human interaction is splintered, emotion reduced to cold, placard statements despite the red-hot frenzy of the music. You scarcely have any sense that Alvaro, sung with energy and piercing vehemence by the tenor Gwyn Hughes Jones, loves Leonora – played by the magnetic, daring American soprano Tamara Wilson, making an unforgettable British debut. She has a voice of raw gold. Anthony Michaels-Moore, a seasoned Verdi baritone, mustered appropriate if somewhat solitary – see above – maniacal venom. He and Hughes Jones had a few hairy moments in their big Act 3 duet, and there were several times when tuning from all the soloists seemed on the point of hazard. Could they hear the orchestra or each other properly, I wonder.
Rinat Shaham made a striking debut in the thankless, skeletal role of Preziosilla. James Creswell glowered vocally and physically as Padre Guardiano. Andrew Shore, the only character to have any levity, revelled in the shrill, brittle cruelty of Fra Melitone. The 80-strong ENO chorus excelled. In their case, the stand-and-deliver drill worked potently. This opera doesn’t come round often: go for the music, give the production a chance. Radio 3 will broadcast it on Boxing Day – apt family entertainment just when you might need it.
Two great chamber music ensembles delivered a flurry of premieres, with characteristic flair and ease, at Wigmore Hall. Anxiety expressed in this column a few weeks ago that Wigmore’s strong contemporary strand was going unnoticed already seems unfounded. Each was well attended. In a concert devised by composer-in-residence Julian Anderson, the Nash Ensemble played Stravinsky, Ravel, a buoyant piano quintet by John Woolrich – Pluck from the Air (2013) – and four works by Anderson himself. Ring Dance (1987), for two solo violins and receiving its belated UK premiere, borrows the sour-sweet folk techniques of the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle. Using extreme techniques and open strings, strange pitches emerge, new acoustical discoveries are made. Van Gogh Blue (2015), the last of Anderson’s trilogy of “blue” works, received its world premiere. In five movements moving from dawn to night, its tones and microtones, rhythms and polyrhythms dance around each other in vivid, tautly controlled dialogue. This richly atmospheric work culminates in an aural depiction of the painter’s Starry Night and ends with a lament.
The Arditti Quartet played a classic work from 1964, Berio’s Sincronie, long in their repertoire and sounding fresh and luminous. The second quartet, ...in verästelten Gedanken... by the Swiss composer Michael Jarrell, receiving its UK premiere, made grateful use of the medium, building the entire work around the note D. The concluding piece was the world premiere of a major new quartet by Harrison Birtwistle, The Silk House Sequences.
The 19 sequences of the title, a perpetual motion of reinvented patterns playing at different speeds in constant oscillation, felt like a new departure, while also referring back to Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum (1997/8), a work central to Birtwistle’s creative vocabulary. Melody appears for a moment, then vanishes. There’s no logical conclusion. A programme note says: “The engine could, notionally, go on for ever.” Just as you wonder how the composer will switch the engine off, it ends. A sudden unison puff of air, two instruments pizzicato, two bowed, and that’s that: gone for ever but staying on in the mind.
Star ratings (out of 5)
The Force of Destiny ****
Nash Ensemble ****
Arditti Quartet ****
