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Spectator
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Thrilling: Garsington's Queen of Spades reviewed
Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades is one of those operas that under-promises on paper but over-delivers on stage. It's hard to summarise the plot in a way that makes it sound theatrical, even if you've read Pushkin's novella, and I've never found a recording that really hits the spot. And yet, time and again, in the theatre: wham! It goes up like a petrol bomb. With a good production and performers, Tchaikovsky hurls you out at the far end feeling almost hungover – head swimming, and wondering where those three hours went. The cast and staging at Garsington are very, very good. True, you'd expect great things from any production that can afford to cast Roderick Williams (Yeletsky) and Robert Hayward (Tomsky) in what are essentially supporting roles, and the director is Jack Furness, who at his best (like his Garsington Rusalka in 2022) has been responsible for some of the most compelling British opera of the past decade. Furness is on top form here, delivering multilayered storytelling underpinned by subtle characterisation. He has an eye for spectacle, as well as the tiny details that speaks volumes. The Philharmonia is the orchestra, and while they haven't always brought their A-game to Garsington, they've typically responded well to the festival's artistic director Douglas Boyd. Good news: he's conducting The Queen of Spades, and from the first notes – the clarinet's question in the silence; that hot-breathed surge of string tone – it's as tense as a guilty conscience. Cue baleful brass chords, aching woodwinds and those quiet, nagging ostinatos which mean that like the opera's anti-hero Herman (Aaron Cawley), we never really get to relax.
Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
The Queen of Spades review — Tchaikovsky's chiller comes up trumps
A hall of foxed mirrors designed by Tom Piper enfolds the cast of Garsington Opera's new production of Tchaikovsky's chiller, the effect part Versailles, part haunted fairground. It's the first sign that Jack Furness's staging is something of a collector's item among productions of The Queen of Spades. We're actually in the period the composer imagined, the 1790s, in the St Petersburg of Empress Catherine the Great. Tchaikovsky venerated Mozart, and Furness's insightful and pacey show is in some ways a kind of nightmare Marriage of Figaro, with aristocrats and underlings jockeying for position, acrimony seeping through a society of snobs, hypocrites and chancers. 'What is our life? A game!' the tormented antihero Herman will conclude at the tragic close. A game of cards, but also a game of dress-up, role play and buried identities. • The best musical, dance and theatre shows to book now Furness's show — excuse the pun — really shows its hand in the Pastorale, a play within a play at the midpoint of the opera, featuring an increasingly risqué ballet (clever choreography by Lucy Burge) in which all kinds of seduction are on the cards. The cast start to reveal their true colours too: Robert Hayward's powerfully empathetic Tomsky — a character who usually is the wry, grizzled type — clearly has unfinished romantic history with the bottled-up Prince Yeletsky (Roderick Williams). Stephanie Wake-Edwards's forceful yet thwarted Polina is pining for Laura Wilde's Lisa. And who knows what the old Countess really means when she starts reminiscing about her youthful fraternising with Madame de Pompadour? Tchaikovsky (and for that matter his librettist brother Modest) both wrestled with repressed homosexuality, but whereas Covent Garden's last production of The Queen of Spades turned the entire show into a nightmare Freudian autobiography, Furness pulls these strings far more subtly. So much for rococo spice. For all the Mozartian tints to his opera, however, Tchaikovsky's score practically throbs with anguish and ardour, and the propulsive playing of the Philharmonia — particularly its velvety strings — add the essential heat. Douglas Boyd's perceptive conducting is full of disconcerting details, including the eerie threnody that opens Act III. The tormented Herman is a beast of a role. The forceful Aaron Cawley certainly chews into it — and then some — though by the end of the night the tenor was tending to wiry and strident. Wilde is an affecting, vocally polished Lisa, and (replacing Diana Montague at this performance) Harriet Williams caught the acidulous ennui of the Countess. Nobody sounded more polished, however, than Roderick Williams's heartfelt Yeletsky, who delivered his noble aria with memorable and moving grace. ★★★★☆ 270min (includes dinner interval) To July 4, To be broadcast on Radio 3 in October
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Queen of Spades review – dark and convincing staging of Tchaikovsky's compulsive drama
Garsington's production of The Queen of Spades leaves little room for doubt that this is Tchaikovsky's most substantial and forward-looking operatic achievement. There are a few debatable aspects to Jack Furness's ingeniously busy production and Tom Piper's mirror-dominated stage designs, and on the opening night it took time for the show to fully hit its musical stride. Overall, though, this is an overwhelmingly convincing staging of a genuine music drama, and it will surely come to be seen as one of Garsington's most notable milestones. The opera's 18th-century setting, following Pushkin's short story, is retained. But in every other respect this is an unmistakably dark 21st-century reading. Furness is good at inserting troubling new details into the opera's apparently sunnier moments, literally so when black curtains zip across the late afternoon Garsington windows. The children playing soldiers on the banks of the Neva are here more sinister than cute, while the costume ball scene is riddled with transgressive suggestion. Suffice to say that the grand entrance of Catherine the Great after the ball scene's pastorale will not end as traditionalists will expect either. A successful performance of The Queen of Spades never rests solely on the shoulders of the opera's tortured antihero Hermann. Tchaikovsky's opera contains too many other fine cameos and ensembles for that. But without an outstanding Hermann, the opera's uniquely visceral impact might misfire. Fortunately, Garsington has a true Hermann in its ranks, in the shape of the Germany-based Irish tenor Aaron Cawley, who sings the role with prodigious intensity, almost too agonisingly, and with a brooding Heathcliffian presence which at times threatens to eclipse everything else on stage. Yet this is as it should be. Hermann's obsessive gambling, social awkwardness and sexual frustration are the dramatic focus of the opera in ways that look forward to the 20th century, to Berg's unhappy Wozzeck and to Britten's troubled loner Peter Grimes, a role for which Cawley would be ideal. Under Douglas Boyd's baton, Tchaikovsky's compulsive and innovative score, full of expressive woodwind detail and driven forwards by the march of fate, does the rest. Among the other principals, Laura Wilde is a suitably haunted and haunting Lisa, movingly depicting her character's journey from security to despair. Stephanie Wake-Edwards is bright and characterful as her friend Polina. Diana Montague, as vocally elegant as ever, plays the aged Countess without hamming the role. Robert Hayward uses his many arts to give more depth to Hermann's friend Tomsky than usual, while Roderick Williams does an eloquently sympathetic turn as the disappointed Prince Yeletsky. Until 4 July
New York Times
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How ‘The Queen of Spades' Brought Two Tchaikovsky Brothers Together
In 1888, Modest Tchaikovsky wrote a letter to his brother Pyotr, the composer. Modest, a former law student and budding dramatist and critic, had recently been commissioned by the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg, Russia, to write his first opera libretto: an adaptation of Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades.' Modest revered his older brother's talent and international renown. He had already proposed potential collaborations to Pyotr twice, to no avail. He had a composer lined up for 'The Queen of Spades,' Nikolai Klenovsky, but he was disheartened that he and his brother would not be working on it together. Pyotr's response to the letter was measured but blunt. 'Forgive me, Modya, but I do not regret at all that I will not write 'The Queen of Spades,'' adding: 'I will write an opera only if a plot comes along that can deeply warm me up. A plot like 'The Queen of Spades' does not move me, and I could only write mediocrely.' Then Klenovsky dropped 'The Queen of Spades.' Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the director of the imperial theaters, asked Pyotr to take over. He agreed. And so 'The Queen of Spades,' which returns to the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, became the first collaboration between the two Tchaikovsky brothers, men of different disciplines and artistic abilities, despite their closeness. This work was the culmination of nearly 40 years of Modest's attempt to escape the cool of Pyotr's shadow and bask in his light. The result, the musicologist Richard Taruskin wrote, was the 'first and probably the greatest masterpiece of musical surrealism.' It's a testament to their camaraderie and fraternity, as well as their openness and intimacy. When stripped to its thematic core, Pushkin's 'The Queen of Spades,' first published in 1834, has all the makings of spectacle — obsession, greed, madness, phantasmagoria — that you could also find in sentimental Italian operas of the 19th century. Pushkin was not just god of Russian letters, but the god, yet his writing wasn't easy to adapt into a libretto. His storytelling is anecdotal and ironic, lacking in empathy and tenderness for and between its characters. No one evolves, and there are no changes of heart. And 'The Queen of Spades' is short; Taruskin counts the text at 'barely 10,000 words.' If there was anyone for the job, it was Pyotr. About 10 years earlier, he pulled off adapting Pushkin with 'Eugene Onegin,' one of the most beloved works in all of Russian literature. And that was a case of spinning gold from straw: Pushkin's source material, while celebrated for its cynical commentary on high society and innovative use of prose, does not have a plot designed to necessarily sustain the attention of an opera audience. (For those reasons, Modest, when Pyotr shared his plans for 'Onegin' with him, was intensely critical. 'Let my opera be unstageable, let it have little action,' Pyotr retorted. 'I am enchanted by Pushkin's verse, and I write music to them because I am drawn to it. I am completely immersed in composing the opera.') Pyotr mostly adapted the text for 'Onegin' on his own. Any deficiencies in the libretto are compensated by his sonorous, impassioned score. You could say the same for 'The Queen of Spades.' Modest softened Pushkin's austerity without diluting the menace. Tchaikovsky's music, in turn, amplified the emotional stakes, drawing the listener into the characters' inner worlds. When Modest was brought on to write the libretto for 'The Queen of Spades,' recommended to Klenovsky by Vsevolozhsky, he was still in the process of paving his own artistic path. Unlike the prodigious Pyotr, Modest lacked tenacity and diligence, and often abandoned projects before finishing them. He tried his hand at law, fiction, criticism, translation and drama, with varying success. In his early career, Modest tried and failed to collaborate with Pyotr at least twice: once for the concert overture adapted from Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet' in 1874, and again three years later for an opera based on Charles Nodier's 1837 novel 'Inès de las Sierras.' Pyotr rejected both while encouraging his brother's literary talent. The brothers wrote to each other often. Pyotr looked forward to Modest's letters, in part because he 'wrote them with the grace of Sévigné.' He wrote to Modest in 1874: 'Seriously, you have a literary vein, and I would be very happy if it were to beat so strongly that you became a writer. Maybe at least there will be a decent libretto one day.' Eventually, that 'decent libretto' came along with 'The Queen of Spades.' When Pyotr was brought on, Modest had already been working on it for over a year, under Vsevolozhsky's and Klenovsky's guidance. The world premiere was just a year away. Pyotr would write the score for 'Queen of Spades' abroad. He had temporarily relocated to Florence, Italy, as a creative reset. Modest remained in Russia. His libretto was workable but would need to be altered significantly to meet the composer's and director's demands. Story lines had to be shifted, characters added, its timeline moved to the previous century, during the reign of Catherine the Great. Often motivated by deadlines, Pyotr created a working score in only 44 days in a fit of spectacular inspiration. Their different working modes were exacerbated by their distance. Pyotr arrived in Florence with only the first scene of text. When he finished a scene, he sent it back and eagerly awaited a new scene by mail. Modest could not keep up with his brother's speed. Pyotr made adjustments to nearly every scene to fit the score, and on several occasions, he was unhappy with Modest's verses and provided the text himself, including for Lisa's Act I arioso 'Otkuda eti slyozy' and Prince Yeletsky's Act II aria 'Ya vas lyublyu.' How 'The Queen of Spades' was created is less a reflection of the Tchaikovsky brothers' differences in artistic approach than their similarities and proclivities. Although Modest had a twin brother, Anatoly, it was recorded that Pyotr and Modest, too, had identical qualities. The actor Yuri Yuriev, who mentioned Modest several times in his memoirs, once described him as 'Pyotr's double.' 'He was so similar in everything to his older brother,' Yuriev wrote. 'I am convinced that they thought, felt and perceived life exactly the same. Even their voices, manner of speaking were similar.' At face value, this characterization of fraternal resemblance is innocuous, perhaps obvious. Pyotr, too, was aware of their likeness. 'I would like to find in you the absence of at least one bad trait of my individuality, but I cannot,' he once wrote to Modest, years before their eventual collaboration. 'You are too much like me, and when I am angry with you, I am, in fact, angry with myself, for you are always playing the role of a mirror in which I see the reflection of all my weaknesses.' But Yuriev's comments could also be interpreted as a euphemism that hints at secrets hiding in plain sight. It has been suggested that among the reasons Pyotr and Modest became so close as adults — closer to each another than to any of their other three brothers — is that they both had homosexual propensities. The scholar Alexander Poznansky, whose biographies on the Tchaikovskys uncover previously censored letters from open publication, has meticulously laid out the many correspondences Pyotr wrote to Modest about his many trysts and feelings of limerence with other men: prostitutes, conservatory students, coachmen, manservants. Few letters betray Pyotr's shame or guilt. If anything, they are strikingly contemporary. In a footnote to one letter, Pyotr refers to a male prostitute with feminine pronouns, a custom that still exists, and that Poznansky writes was a habit among 19th-century men who would be described as gay today. Poznansky and Taruskin theorize about Modest's queerness as well in their writings, based on examinations of his unpublished memoirs archived at the Tchaikovsky State House-Museum in Kiln, Russia. These documents are not available to the public, and few other people have studied them. One that Taruskin has cited includes Modest's reaction to learning about Pyotr's sexuality from his twin brother: 'I am not a freak, I am not alone in my strange desires. I may find sympathy not merely with the pariahs among my comrades, but with Pyotr! With this discovery everything became different.' Modest's earlier contempt for himself, he wrote, 'changed into self-satisfaction, and pride to belong among the 'chosen.'' It is apt that the brothers' first collaboration was creating an opera based on a tale about the hoarding of a secret, one shared with only those 'chosen' to know. Despite his initial reservations about the subject, Pyotr warmed up to it. Two months into the process, he wrote to Modest that 'either I am terribly, unforgivably mistaken — or 'The Queen of Spades' will really be my chef d'oeuvre.'
