Conductor Vladimir Askenazy leads the Sydney Symphony through a rehearsal of the opera Queen of Spades. Picture: Attila Szilvasi Source: Supplied
IT'S not easy, in Australia, to get beyond the popular Bohemes and Traviatas on the opera stage. The national company is a behemoth with the rare responsibility for more than one city and it has to balance its books.
That's why, presumably, the many operas of Hans Werner Henze, the German composer who died last month, have never been heard here despite being well known in Europe. Indeed, we heard little enough of his orchestral music despite his protege and preferred opera conductor, Markus Stenz, being chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for five years. An MSO concert of Henze's orchestral music, brought to Sydney by Stenz a decade ago, attracted a poor audience, mostly music professionals and students it seemed.
Nor does the opera repertoire here often venture outside the Italian and the (earlier) German, though Benjamin Britten and Leos Janacek have regular outings. So this month in Sydney is doubly interesting: Jean-Philippe Rameau's Castor and Pollux and Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades will be performed, the first by Pinchgut Theatre, the latter in a concert version by the Sydney Symphony.
Although Tchaikovsky is a staple of the ballet theatre, his work is not so frequently performed on the Australian opera stage. Eugene Onegin is seen from time to time, but Queen of Spades, an even darker psychodrama, has been staged only once, in Sydney by the Australian Opera in July 1979, with Richard Bonynge conducting.
Not that it is top of the pops anywhere outside Russia. A production at Covent Garden in 2002 -- directed by Francesca Zambello and conducted by Valery Gergiev, with Placido Domingo in the lead role -- caused a worldwide stir because of its rarity as well as the high calibre of musical performance. Under Gergiev's subtle direction, it veered away from melodrama to genuine dread.
Tchaikovsky was the third composer the opera was offered to by the Imperial Theatre, St Petersburg. The libretto had been written by Tchaikovsky's brother Modest, after a novella by Pushkin, and when Peter Illyich finally got hold of it he wrote it in a fever of inspiration in just 44 days, rewriting part of the libretto as he went along.
The music is intense, full of ominous silences and very Russian, despite Tchaikovsky's antagonism to the Slavophiles of his days. "Either I am horribly mistaken, Modya," Tchaikovsky wrote to his brother, "or the opera is a masterpiece."
He took another three months to orchestrate it and the result was "quite fantastic, incredible," according to Vladimir Ashkenazy, the Sydney Symphony's principal conductor and artistic adviser, who will conduct the concert version within a Tchaikovsky mini-season.
The opera was an immediate success when it opened in December 1890, though the music was challenging and not as lushly lyrical as Onegin.
Gustav Mahler conducted its premieres in Vienna and New York, and Rachmaninov conducted a Moscow performance 20 years later.
"They're not particular melodic lines because he was more interested in the plot, in the climate of the piece, the general feeling," Ashkenazy says. "He was a very honest, a very devoted artist. He wouldn't compromise."
Some of the original critics didn't like the Tchaikovskys' compromises with Pushkin's story: most notably the amping up of a minor romantic side note into half the central existential disaster, and in general the replacement of its cool note of horror with the heat of tragedy.
In Pushkin's short story, the protagonist Herman is an infantry officer who becomes obsessed with an old countess's secret for winning at cards.
He fakes an interest in the countess's poor ward to get to the old lady, who dies of fright when he threatens her with a pistol while demanding the formula. The manipulations of her ghost and Herman's madness follow, and he ends his life in an insane asylum.
In the Tchaikovskys' hands the poor ward, Lisa, becomes an aristocratic princess and her love is returned, albeit confusedly. When all is consumed by Herman's obsession with gambling, first Lisa, then Herman, commits suicide.
Despite the reciprocal love interest, however, the opera, like the short story, belongs to Herman. It is an exhausting ride right from the start. Not only is the tessitura of the role, where it lies in the vocal range, very high -- Ashkenazy says the key aria is often lowered half to a full tone to make life easier for the tenor -- but Herman is on stage and singing in every scene.
The dramatic demands are high too. "The first time we see Herman, he is already quite obsessed and a bit strange, a little bit crazy. He's very hard to understand from an outsider's point of view," says Stuart Skelton, a Sydney-born heldentenor who has been based overseas for most of his career, and who has come home to sing the role.
"Most opera characters get to go crazy over the period of the opera. Herman starts like that, which means there's a vocal intensity built into the role right from out of the gate."
To make things harder, Tchaikovsky put Herman's bravura aria -- the one in which he tells the gambling house patrons that the only sure bet is death -- right at the end of Act III, when a live singer will already be tired. (You can see Placido Domingo singing in a YouTube clip of the whole 1999 Met production that included Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Olga Borodina and Galina Gorchakova.)
"It's not that much different to, say, a slightly manic Lohengrin, in terms of vocal demands," Skelton says, by way of minimising the difficulty. "So it's not undoable. You just have to be aware of how you pace yourself. You have to go into this thing with eyes wide open."
It is his first time in the role and he has prepared the psychological terrain well, even though he will be standing and delivering, not acting out the role in costume. It is the music, however, that says it all.
"I know this sounds glib, but a lot of the time it actually is just a question of singing the notes," Skelton says of concert versions of opera. "The really good composers -- Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Wagner, Britten, Janacek, Puccini, Verdi -- if you sing what they wrote, you will get it right. They give you everything you could possibly need, to get not only the musical values of the piece across but to get the dramatic values across too. They didn't write one phrase without being inspired by the text in front of them."
The Sydney Symphony will perform Queen of Spades at the Sydney Opera House on Saturday and December 3.
Pinchgut Theatre's Cast and Pollux is on December 6, 8, 9 and 10.
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