Bychkov is convinced and in turns convinces you of every bar of this score. He carves, he cares, without ever brutally imposing extraneous ideas or aesthetics on to the music. There is dazzle and noise, as there should be in Die Frau, but it was the tenderness, calm and space that he found that really astounded. The touching passivity turning to passion in Barak's music in Act I, the urgency of the motifs underpinning the Empress's confrontation with Barak/Keikobad in Act II and the sheer beauty of the interlude before 'Vater bist du's' in Act III are just some of the highlights of a reading in which, as in his Elektra in 2003, Bychkov employed the detail of the passing moment to inform the whole structure in which the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House responded beautifully to ever beat of his baton.
In this, he is also afforded a superb cast, led by Emily Magee's fearlessly touching performance of the Empress. Placed within a psychiatric ward, her narrative unfolds as nightmarish catharsis or breakthrough, with hints of Breuer and Freud's 'Private Theatre' metaphor. Magee is on stage for the larger part of the evening, yet her energy never flags, nor does her commitment, aided and abetted and then misrepresented by Michaela Schuster's exemplary Nurse. Magee and Schuster are matched by Elena Pankratova's wonderfully un-shrewish performance as Barak's Wife, skipping through some of Strauss's most angular writing with consummate ease, while riding over the orchestra and imbuing her and Barak's crisis in Act III with tender humanity.
And with Johan Reuter's hapless but homely Barak, how could she not? There's a new richness to his voice in this role, which paid considerable dividends in the final stretches of Act I – as I wiped a tear at the Nightwatchmen's goodnight chorale – and in 'Mir anvertraut', the couple's crucial duet at the beginning of the final furlong. More disarming too was Johan Botha's Emperor, in much finer and more rounded voice than when he last sang the role at Covent Garden in the oh-so-two-dimensional Hockney fest in 2001.Feeling that potential risk of dramatic flatness, Strauss complained to Hofmannsthal that 'characters like the Emperor and Empress, and also the Nurse, can’t be filled with red corpuscles in the same way as a Marschallin, an Octavian, or an Ochs'. He went on to say that 'my heart’s only half in it, and once the head has to do the major part of the work you get a breath of academic chill'. How wrong he was and indeed Strauss ultimately rejoiced in the opera.
Taking his lead from such a change of heart, Claus Guth and his production team have created a production that has a chilly surface – the clean lines of their sanatorium give nothing away – but which reveals, in Christian Schmidt's ever-evolving set, a series of images that brilliantly meld the ordinary and the extraordinary. Getting far beneath the surface of Hofmannsthal's prolix fairytale, this production tells a visceral tale, in which life and death are not part of a distant Never Never Land but of our present, as mental and physical wellbeing are bartered and exchanged with terrifying consequences. Everyone involved was clearly committed to that narrative and the results were enthralling. Truly, if you're going to do anything in 2014 to mark Richard Strauss's 150th birthday, this is the one. Click here for more information.
Photos © ROH/Clive Barda
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