THE NEW ZEALAND OPERA SOCIETY

I had expected, right from its announcement last November, that the performance at the Auckland Festival of the Death of Klinghoffer would be the most memorable and important event both in the festival and in the 2005 opera calendar in New Zealand. I am sure nothing later this year will show I was wrong.

Travelling to Auckland for it was a small price to pay, and the factors that limited it to one performance only, in one city, while regrettable, are understood.

The festival seemed oblivious to the importance nd success of the work: it did not even rate a mention in the overall assessment by director David Malacari. Extraordinary!

The forces assembled for it on 25 February were magnificent. There was no question that the decision to use the NZSO was the right one, to handle John Adams’s complex score. The normal opera chorus was enlarged with voices from John Rosser’s Viva Voce choir, though it might have benefited from even more voices. The chorus suffered, as all but the most scrupulously practised choruses often do, from indistinct diction and, as the evening wore on, from minor imprecisions.

The words in this work are of more than normal importance; but while we were supplied with a libretto, there was rarely enough light to read it. Surtitles would have helped. The use of amplification was of only marginal help in overcoming poor enunciation. I don’t suppose it had any bearing on the decision to drop certain choruses – presumably a matter rather, of avoiding paying orchestral overtime rates.

The musical director was American conductor Mark Stringer whose energy and sensitivity with a challenging work were to be greatly admired. He illuminated the extraordinary, complex orchestral textures vividly and managed the taxing rhythmic interweaving, drawing attention to the orchestra’s marvellous flexibility and the virtuosity of many individual players.

The use of the Town Hall in preference to the Aotea Centre was also right, though its virtues were, in part, dimmed through the use of amplification, but more of that later.

The most rounded characters are the Captain, sung by Jared Holt, and perhaps Mamoud, the most prominent of the terrorists, sung by Australian Jason Barry-Smith. I heard some comment that Holt was too young for the role, but surely, in an unstaged performance, we do not look for physical verisimilitude. I reject any suggestion that he was vocally immature; to me his voice had weight and authority and I found his ability to express compassion and to encompass a man faced with an impossible crisis, remarkable.

Barry-Smith had sung previously for New Zealand Opera – in the travelling Barber of Seville in 2003. His portrayal of Mamoud made convincing the poetic and philosophical quality with which the librettist Alice Goodman invests the role; to be sure, Mamoud is now a violent man as his soul has been distorted by the sufferings of his family and his people through the plundering of their lives.

In his intelligent and perceptive essay in the programme, Mark Stringer devoted space to the composer’s view of the terrorists; Stringer refers to Mamoud’s ‘icy manipulation of poetry and philosophy’ to seduce the Captain, meaning such things as Mamoud’s rejection of the idea of peace talks – ‘the day that I and my enemy sit peacefully, that day our hope dies and I shall die too’. Mamoud is of course merely saying that he can envisage no sort of Israeli concessions through negotiation that could possibly restore his people’s lands and lives.

The work has, accordingly, scarcely been performed in America since its first airing by the co-commissioners, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and later at San Francisco. The defence has been that the text is even-handed in its treatment of the two sides, that the respective music does not make one the goodies and the other the baddies. The defence might also claim that for any work of art to engage our interest requires that even the villains be given sufficient flesh for us to feel them as real people, and that is certainly correct.

But the defence is a little disingenuous. The opening choruses set the tone at once: I do not hear the music of the two sides as ‘even-handed’, though I believe such an interpretation will be read as just (a different matter entirely) in the likely judgement of future generations. The Palestinian exiles are given lamenting music of considerable poetry and beauty, while the Jewish exiles employ religious imagery and expression, but their music has a barely-concealed violence and aggressiveness.

The opera’s victim is Jewish-American Leon Klinghoffer, who is confined to a wheel chair. His statements reveal him as stupid and ignorant – ignorant of the historical events that have led to the Palestinian struggle to regain their homelands, or at least as cherishing a biased view of them. And stupid in hurling abuse at the terrorists, as a result, being the only passenger killed in the debacle.

The unsympathetic role of Klinghoffer was splendidly sung by David Griffiths. It is not a big role, but it is pivotal, for his behaviour makes him the first target for the terrorists. Our feelings about him are slightly mollified at his after-death soliloquy where a degree of thoughtfulness appears.

Marilyn Klinghoffer was sung by Anne Lamont-Low, suffering from a throat infection. Though it was obvious at the start, she managed courageously and, particularly in her last monologue with which the work ends, she was magnificent, almost turning her difficulties to her own account. Her voice was excessively amplified however, no doubt in the mistaken idea that she simply needed more volume. Her performance may well have had even more impact if her natural dramatic qualities had been left in their native condition.

Wendy Dawn Thompson’s was a most impressive performance in the three quite different female roles, all offering retrospective glances. The Swiss Grandmother is strong and sympathetic; in Sprechstimme style, an Austrian Woman is neutral to the issues involved (like Schoenberg, all Austrians sing in Sprechstimme?). The most engaging and enigmatic, if air-headed, is the British Dancing Girl, who is taken with Omar’s friendliness in offering cigarettes to his charges.

The other terrorists were sung by voices that were well cast and as clearly differentiated as if they had been acting and costumed: the young Omar by Zan McKendree-Wright’s many-coloured voice; the efficient and ruthless Molqi by Australian tenor David Hamilton, far removed here from his more familiar Evangelist roles in the Bach Passions; and Rambo, with the shortest fuse of all, by Richard Green, whose strong bass had been comparably well-used as Hunding in the Adelaide Ring last November; he gets type-cast as the implacable thug.

Baritone Andrew Glover sang the fairly small role of the First Officer, important in Act I. His attractive voice lit the hall impressively, no thanks to the amplification: further evidence that it was scarcely necessary.

I was assured that without amplification the NZSO at full strength on stage in front of the soloists would have swamped them at times. Yes – quite likely because of that placement.

Amplification largely obliterates dynamic and colouristic contrasts, and more importantly, accustoms people to the idea that it is normal and acceptable. Its surreptitious invasion of the classical music world, particularly opera and large-scale orchestral performance (and even some chamber music – the visiting Kronos Quartet, for example), is destroying one of the essential distinctions between popular/rock music and classical. The latter must cling to honest performance in which all the characteristics of a voice can be heard – its strength, its colours, its dynamic variations and subtle aspects of articulation – or of a violin or clarinet for that matter. The influence of recordings on the way we listen and on our expectations of live performance bears a lot of the blame for the worrying trend.

The other criticism I heard from some audience members was the inability to understand the words. Singing in English does not assure comprehension, especially not from most choruses and not from high voices. But it serves little purpose to say that singers should be better taught to enunciate and to give priority to making their texts understood; it’s not so simple. Or to command audiences to do their homework; opera needs audiences ten times larger than the few who will ever have the energy or interest to do that.

In order to help audiences understand and enjoy a dramatic performance, every available tool must be used: surtitles or texts with lighting adequate to read them by.

Finally, how much was lost as a result of a non-staged performance? Not a great deal: I doubt that staging would have added much to the impact of the dramatic conflicts and the interactions between protagonists that were so powerfully drawn. In any case, there are quite long, static, choral passages and monologues by most of the characters that do not seem to call for histrionics. The benefits of staging might hardly have equalled their costs.

None of the shortcomings that I have discussed detract from a performance that succeeded in every important way, and would have at least opened some ears to the idea that opera did not die with the death of Puccini.