Opera review: Der Rosenkavalier delights in Dublin
Samuel Dale Johnson (Faninal), Celine Byrne (Marschallin), Paula Murrihy (Octavian) and Claudia Boyle (Sophie) in Irish National Opera’s Der Rosenkavalier in Bord Gáis Energy Theatre. Picture: Patrick Redmond
★★★★☆
The playful anachronisms of films like The Favourite and Corsage may seem very much of our post-bloody-well-everything moment, but as Der Rosenkavalier shows, Richard Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal were at the same thing over 100 years ago.
“Our Figaro”, as the pair called it, is unabashedly nostalgic, eschewing the atonality and dissonance of Strauss’s previous hit, Elektra, for a score thrumming with melody and tonal beauty. Yet while setting the action in the 1740s, they evoked the glories of imperial Vienna, cramming Act 2 with waltz music as one old, vanished world is placed inside another, even older, one.
A real pleasure of Bruno Ravella’s unmissable revival for Irish National Opera is its aliveness to these layers of time, and how it adds to them. Gary McCann’s design echoes the Baroque: huge, sweeping plasterwork dominating his white spaces. His costumes, meanwhile, are 1950s glamour with nods to earlier periods, all framed by a strip of LED light. There’s fun, too, with Polaroid cameras, listening devices, and glitter balls as we are located firmly within living memory. Thus, even as the score sweeps us along in a sort of musical timelessness, we are invited to consider how close we are to this work. And, with that, it’s easy to think of its premiere: in Dresden, in 1911. How solid a world that must have seemed. How little the audience must have thought of the coming cataclysm, which would eventually destroy their jewel of a city in a storm of fire.
This is not to say this patina of poignancy clouds the many delights in Strauss’s comedy. Ravella’s spacious, unhurried direction gives full room to the opera’s many faces, as farce, comedy, rambunctious crowd scenes, and masquerade go hand-in-hand with some of opera’s most psychologically realistic, frank and touching writing about love and sex.
Things begin slowly, with Act 1 doing the heavy lifting of exposition. We meet the Marschallin (Celine Byrne) and her teenage lover Octavian (Paula Murrihy) in bed. Byrne is superb in the lovers’ duets, her voice pure and clear as she exudes the Marschallin’s worldly authority.
Into the boudoir comes Baron Ochs, the oafish villain of the piece, played with gusto by a possibly too darn likeable Andreas Bauer Kanabas in loud tweeds and mop of curly red hair. He’s set to marry Sophie von Faninal, daughter of a bourgeois on the up. After some slapstick confusion, Octavian becomes Ochs’s “rosenkavalier”, bringing his pledge of love to Claudia Boyle’s Sophie. Inevitably, he becomes smitten with the young woman himself, and so the comic plot unfurls, as mezzo soprano Murrihy brilliantly meets the demands of the gender-swapping trouser role: woman plays man playing woman, and all that.
The lively INO Orchestra under Fergus Shiel delivers all the swelling romanticism and range of tone and colour you could ask for, while staying alive to the moments of dissonance that remind us we’re in the 20th century here, for all Strauss’s nostalgia. There is a stillness to the final trio that, fittingly, lets the voices of the three sopranos shine. It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for, and it’s one that will live long in the memory.
- Until March 11
