Who is popular today?

Garsington Opera, Stokenchurch; St John’s Smith Square; Woolwich Works, LondonA visceral production of Dvořák’s opera about a love-stricken water nymph; a jolly evening with the Finnish violinist and conductor; and a journey to the outer limitsAs a young man, Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904) was playing viola in the Prague opera pit when Richard Wagner came to conduct his own music. The experience left its mark, notably in the most popular of Dvořák’s 10 operas, Rusalka (1900), with its Czech water nymphs, who are surely close cousins of Wagner’s Rhinemaidens. Garsington festival’s ambitious new production, complete with aerialists and tumblers, ropes, ladders and walkways, sinister inky pool and pre-dinner disembowelment, is at once natural and industrial, spectral and spectacular. Conducted by Douglas Boyd and directed by Jack Furness, it shows disturbingly how the tale of a water spirit who seeks light and life among humans mirrors our desires and our worst fears.The setting, in Tom Piper’s designs (lighting by Malcolm Rippeth), has a belle époque atmosphere in keeping with the opera’s composition date. Decorative iron-work suggests a central European lake spa, the colonnades of Marienbad, say, or railway-age splendour, perhaps the Franz Josef station in Prague, where Dvořák spent hours as a committed trainspotter and knew the timetable by heart. A circular platform rises and falls, at times alarmingly, to reveal the depths where Vodnik the water sprite holds sway (played with anguished magnificence by the bass-baritone Musa Ngqungwana). Dvořák, in his restlessly surging and melodic score, creates an underwater world with low woodwind and brass: gurgles of cor anglais, bass clarinet, bass trombone and tuba are added to the standard orchestral mix, all vividly played by the soloists of the Philharmonia under Boyd’s incisive direction. Continue reading...