Alternative view

With diffidence, I differ from my esteemed opera colleague. But I think Michael Tanner has got the new Covent Garden Lulu (Arts, 13 June) upside down. Catching it by chance a few nights ago, I’ll take the opportunity for an alternative opinion.

First, for where we don’t differ. Singing is always adequate, sometimes outstanding, and the orchestral playing and direction quite marvellous. MT had bad luck with Agneta Eichenholz’s heroine: I found her in the entire range between coquetry and anguish fully up to the role’s exorbitant demands. From her succession of admirers, lovers, husbands, clients, Jennifer Larmore’s Countess Geschwitz stood out for touching presence and beauty of voice, Michael Volle’s Dr Schön/Jack the Ripper for lethal power.

But a strong Schön is no rarity. New to me is a compelling portrayal of his son; an Alwa with the lyricism and freedom to permit the iridescent love-music its full bloom. Usually, the part produces tight dryness: Klaus Florian Vogt unloosed this marvellous skein of music as one has always imagined but never actually heard it.

Nor do MT and I disagree substantially over the orchestra under Antonio Pappano, though I would praise them more highly. It’s their achievement to transcend, at last, the difficult score’s strain and tension. Expressionist rendering of thick emotion yields to lightness and ease; the fearsome constructivistic grind of how it’s made, to limpid spontaneity; above all, everything is lyricised, with a floating/gliding delicacy of sonority and momentum that places deliciousness over Angst. The dark stains remain, for sure, in this saga of depravity and exploitation. But the genius of Berg’s maturity (so cruelly truncated) poises music of metallic facture and translucent loveliness upon the horrors moral and physical of his subject, as subtle perfumes arise from a crushed mess of decaying vegetable matter. Lulu is not Wozzeck cubed: ‘a superlative has no future’. It enters a strange new world of abstraction and chic.

Which is where this production succeeds so well. For MT the absence of sets and props, the defiant drabness of costume (stark black suits and white shirts for all ages and genders), the provocative minimality of movement and gesture, combine to deprive the work of human plausibility (as well as going frequently against the extremely explicit and detailed letter of its instructions).

All this is true: another flagrant instance of the high-handed treatment opera lovers have come to expect and detest. This Lulu ought to be thoroughly guilty. But she’s innocent! It works: its severe economy obliterates the extraneous and distracting to focus hard and merciless upon essentials. Within the formalist straitjacket, so well attuned to the music’s secret severity of construction, is a play of gesture and facial nuance in tune with its almost mimetically precise surfaces. But the contradictions are also meaningful. No opera is so lavish as Lulu in affective pathos or richness of colour (in this latter Berg courts the kitsch of Korngold only to dangle it from his tweezers with elegant disdain). To match these in costumes and setting is replicative; to vie with them, counterproductive. Here, visual starvation makes powerful complement to aural juiciness.

Meanness enhances and intensifies the impact of music and story alike. And, to my understanding, this production makes more sense than I’ve found hitherto in some of the work’s more problematic aspects, conspicuous since the 1979 restitution of the third act left unhoned and partially unscored at Berg’s premature death 44 years before. One or two places, especially the unconvincing quartet wrought out of Alwa’s love-music, remain worrisome. But the act’s trajectory, from high-life yet louche Paris to prostitution, murder and Liebestod in sleazy East End London, carried me fully with it: and the composer’s own (rather, for once, than a director’s conceit) far-fetched identification of Lulu’s three clients with her three husbands was convincing, horrible, overwhelming.