BOV Opera Festival

Riders to the Sea
Manoel Theatre

Staging Vaughan Williams’s Riders to the Sea, a one-act opera composed in 1927, was a very bold step taken by the organisers of the opera festival that shows once and for all that our hitherto repetitive diet of Verdi and Puccini can be relieved by something refreshingly different.
This is not your run-of-the-mill opera, by any means. Although containing the de rigueur ingredients of tragic melodrama that opera requires, there are no heroics in this opera, no grand arias to make your hair stand on end. It is full of that particular brand of extreme melancholia that seems to blend so well with the British idiom.
Those ethereal high-pitched strings and those grey slate-like colours fitted so well with Synge’s dark and gloomy libretto.
The chromatic colour and velvety harmony of the score was beautifully delineated by Emmanuel Oliver, who conducted the orchestra. The plot is relatively simple if lugubrious.
The sea has claimed the lives of too many men of Maurya’s family. Michael has been drowned and the action of the opera surrounds the last moments in the life of the last one, Bartley.
Two of his sisters, Cathleen and Nora, hide the parcel with the clothes of the drowned brother from their mother. What results is a double tragedy when Maurya discovers that both her sons are no more; very depressing but very moving too in a radically different way to which we are accustomed.
The production by ARCAL was visually successful with an attractive but functional stage and costumes that were in shades of grey which complimented the plot and the music.
Christian Gangneron’s stage direction, from extreme verismo tended to become a trifle gimmicky towards the conclusion but all’s fair game in opera and if the direction emphasises something in the libretto or the score it is all very well and good. I am not complaining.
It was, however, the female singers that I have slight reservations about. Despite their lovely voices it could be because they are French that at times their English was unintelligible.
Maurya, sung by Jacqueline Mayeur, had the largest part and believe me I could not understand one word in 25. Her voice was utterly beautiful; a rich and creamy contralto.
As the auditorium had been plunged into deep darkness, it was impossible to follow the libretto provided unless one had a special torch to do so which sadly I hadn’t. As I had listened to the opera and skimmed through the programme notes I vaguely remembered what it was all about but I hate to think what I could have surmised of it all had I not done so and relied on understanding the English text!
The other singers were far more articulate, especially baritone Patrice Verdelet, who sang Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel before the opera itself and beautifully too. Having these songs performed just before the opera itself as afterwards one got the impression that it could really have been Bartley singing them. I must say I do love song cycles and orchestrated poetry. Starting with the apex which is, I am convinced, none other than Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs to John Adam’s deeply moving Harmonium, these lovely works I feel are more suited to the 21st century psyche than the traditional type of opera. For one thing I feel that the lyrics are more contemporary and less precious. Can one not be transported when listening to Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs or charmed by Samuel Barber’s hauntingly beautiful Knoxville? The Songs of Travel are a very splendid set indeed and having the surtitles appear on the curtain in such an innovative fashion in both English and Maltese was a brilliant idea that I wish could have been carried into the opera.
Riders to the Sea was an experiment that partially worked; however, to do so fully, one must have a more varied operatic fare throughout the year other than just that offered during the BoV Festival. With a bit of ingenuity and imagination one can even beat the credit crunch where opera, the most expensive of genres, is concerned. There are plenty of operas like Riders that can be put up with relatively little cost when compared to a Macbeth or a Turandot; a cost that would be negligible in fact but with a no less successful result.

Source: Weekender, March 28, 2009