Latest news with #JuliaBurbach
Telegraph
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Flying Dutchman, Opera Holland Park: Wagner's elemental tale is given a progressive spin
Pity Wagner's heroines, always having to save some errant man from hell or a guilty conscience. In his early masterpiece The Flying Dutchman, the male hero is a sailor, unwise enough to curse the Almighty when He sends him an unfavourable wind. And so he's doomed to sail the seas until a good woman saves him and sacrifices herself in the process. It's 19 th -century patriarchy on steroids, as Julia Burbach's intelligent new production for OHP makes abundantly clear. As is the fashion nowadays, the opera's essential theme is presented before the curtain officially opens, during Wagner's overture. A troop of pining blonde girls in nighties and macs drifts into Naomi Dawson's cleverly designed set, roaming up the narrow and alarmingly tilted platform behind the orchestra on which is the modest bric-a-brac of the heroine Senta's home – bed, table, hard chair. They continue around the orchestra to what seems like a beach at the front of the stage. They are the Eternal Feminine, anxiously looking for a man to rescue. Soon uncanny masked figures appear, premonitions of the supernatural Dutchman's ghostly crew. It's this elemental world of the sea the production stresses, while the solid bourgeois world of Senta's sailor father Daland – who's keen to marry Senta off to the rich, roving Dutchman – is barely hinted at. Senta, touchingly played by Eleanor Dennis, is the very submissive centre amidst the swirling sailor activity and orchestral din, singing of her obsession with a picture of the Dutchman in a voice of such pearly delicacy you could hardly hear it. Her father Daland is somewhat blandly characterized by Robert Winslade Anderson, and the Dutchman played by Paul Carey Johnson is frankly a bit wooden and formal when he first meets Senta. One felt his suffering but not his uncanny power. All this meant the production – suggestive though it is of the opera's underlying themes, and buoyed by sensitive playing from the City of London Sinfonia under conductor Peter Selwyn – needed a dramatic shot in the arm. That was delivered not a moment too soon by Neal Cooper as Senta's betrothed Erik. His aria where he laments Senta's obsession with the Dutchman was truly agonised. He paced about like a tormented caged bear, his voice cracking with emotion. Senta, who until that point had seemed rather milk-and-water, her annoyance with her teasing friends a bit too schoolgirls-larking-in-the-dormitory, suddenly discovered her true stature. In the final scenes the opera really caught fire. The sailors' terrified discovery of the cursed Dutchman's ship was a superb swirl of movement, lit with lurid effectiveness as if from the pit of hell by Robert Price. In the final scene, where Senta promises to go with the Dutchman to the ends of earth, Eleanor Dennis unleashed a vocal power one had never suspected. The orchestral din was thrilling, as were the chorus's terrified outbursts. Nature obligingly lent a hand, rattling the walls of Opera Holland Park's canvas venue with a strong wind. So a wonderful elemental ending, which really got to the heart of Wagner's drama. It's just a shame the production took a while to reach it.
The Guardian
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Flying Dutchman review – terrific cast and hurtling momentum in OHP's first ever Wagner
Opera Holland Park opens this year's season with a new production of The Flying Dutchman, directed by Julia Burbach and conducted by Peter Selwyn. The company's first ever Wagner staging, it aims high and doesn't always succeed, though the best of it, both musically and theatrically, is unquestionably impressive. Burbach essentially stages it as a psychological horror story (which it is), making Eleanor Dennis's Senta the central protagonist rather than Paul Carey Jones's charismatic Dutchman, and heightening the opera's sense of the uncanny by blurring the lines between reality and illusion as she dreams of escaping the normative confines of the world around her. Using both auditorium and stage for her setting, Burbach hauls us into Senta's vivid imagination. Holland Park theatre's tarpaulin roof has been extended to form the backdrop for the vertiginous platforms of Naomi Dawson's set, so we seem to be sitting beneath the unfurling sails of some monstrous ship ourselves. Sailors haul ropes through the aisles and doss down on staircases, while ghostly, faceless figures move wraith-like among the audience. Not all of it works. Burbach is strong on Senta's increasing disquiet at the erratic behaviour of Neal Cooper's Erik, whose bristling resentment marks him out as potentially abusive. Yet her relationship with her equally dangerous father Daland (Robert Winslade Anderson), who would gladly sell her to the Dutchman for the latter's wealth, is under-characterised and doesn't hit home as much as it should. During the overture, Burbach confusingly and unnecessarily fills both stage and auditorium with women who may be Senta's predecessors in trying to save the Dutchman's soul. And the ending, deliberately enigmatic as to what redemption might consist of, or indeed whether it is even possible, is anticlimactic after what has gone before. A couple of tweaks to the score are odd – a choral refrain from Senta's ballad transferred to the close of Act I, and Daland's crew and the Norwegian women are missing from the final scene. But there are some terrific performances. Dennis, radiant in tone, is outstanding and entirely convincing as a restless visionary in the grip of forces beyond reason. Carey Jones captures the Dutchman's spiritual and moral anguish with singing of great emotional depth and verbal subtlety. Cooper makes a fiercely intense Erik, less lyrical than some, which works well with Burbach's view of the character. Winslade Anderson, meanwhile, sounds suave, tellingly masking ambition behind glibness. Conducting a reduced orchestration by Tony Burke, Selwyn took time to settle on opening night, though the gathering tensions and hurtling momentum of the final two acts were superbly done. There was fine playing from the City of London Sinfonia, and the Opera Holland Park Chorus, sensational throughout, have done little finer. Until 14 June
