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Telegraph
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
What Tchaikovsky's darkest opera could teach Putin's Russia
It suited his political ideals, and allowed him to escape what he considered the frivolities and trivialities of most of the operas of Mozart and his contemporaries. The idea of justice was vital to Beethoven, and by telling this story so simply he never obscures the message. The Garsington cast is so uniformly excellent that it seems invidious to single individual members out for praise: but Sally Matthews is an entirely convincing Fidelio and Robert Murray was no less outstanding as Florestan. The production runs throughout July, and if you can find tickets you will not be disappointed. Sadly, Jack Furness's production at Garsington of The Queen of Spades has just ended, but was so impressive that the company would be mad to leave it for too long before reviving it. The 10th of Tchaikovsky's 11 operas, it is, along with Eugene Onegin, the only one frequently performed today. Like Onegin, it is based on a story by Pushkin that deals with the dire consequences of obsessive love – and neither opera ends well. Furness's direction contrasts the almost mindless and idle behaviour of the Russian upper classes of the 1770s with the desperately earnest obsession of the less-privileged Herman, the anti-hero and an outsider, for Lisa, the niece of a countess, who is engaged to be married to a prince. Herman dreams of having enough money to marry Lisa himself, and when he hears that the countess knows the three-card secret of how to win at the gaming table, he determines to get the secret out of her: but she drops dead as he is pestering her to tell him. However, she appears before him as an apparition – or at least he thinks she does, given by this stage we have come to realise he is clearly mad and he has earlier hallucinated about shooting Catherine the Great – and tells him the secret of the cards. He goes to the gaming table and on the first two cards, played as the ghost has told him, he wins a small fortune, which he then stakes on the third card, which he believes is the Ace of Spades: in fact it is the Queen, and he loses to his love rival the Prince, who thus exacts revenge. Herman shoots himself, though does so clumsily and dies slowly. Tchaikovsky would die within three years, apparently by suicide. The darkness in the opera is not unrelenting, but it is overbearing. Lisa, ironically, wanted Herman for himself, not for any money he might have, so misery is compounded by irony. And moments after Herman's death the gamblers are playing cards again, as if he had never existed. There is a metaphor there for Russia today, and the opera represented a time of cultural magnificence that, in that benighted country, now seems lost forever.
Times
02-06-2025
- 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
30-05-2025
- 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
Telegraph
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Queen of Spades, Garsington: Romantic despair and mad obsession – with a strong whiff of sulphur
After the bright daylight and saucy flirtations of Garsington Opera's season-opener The Elixir of Love, their second night plunged us into romantic despair and mad obsession, with a strong whiff of sulphur. The titular Queen of Spades in Tchaikovsky's great opera is an elderly Russian countess who has the secret for winning cards, but it's a secret that will bring death to anyone who learns it. For the opera's bitter anti-hero Herman the way to that secret lies through the Countess's niece Lisa. But perhaps love for her will rescue him from his mad obsession? That's the intimate heart of the opera, but as this fabulous new production makes clear the story is rooted in the tensions of Russian society. Director Jack Furness and designer Tom Piper summon that world's luxuriant, telling detail as well as its huge epic sweep and barely concealed brutality. In the barracks at the very beginning we see some lads playing soldiers. It's charming, and the excellent Garsington Opera Children's Chorus savour the Russian words. But when one of them falls down the others give his head a good kicking. Later, when we see Herman explaining his infatuation with the socially unattainable Lisa to his good friend Tomsky, he gets contemptuous looks from the strolling St Petersburg high society, who admire themselves in the mottled mirrored detachable walls that make up the set. These spin round to reveal previously hidden worlds. It might be the make-believe of a Rococo theatre-in-a-theatre, or the grim cramped barracks where Herman dreams his dream of infinite wealth. This picturesque but fundamentally grim world is enlivened by the dancers in the ball scenes and above all by Garsington's lavish 32-strong chorus, breathtakingly vigorous whether they're playing eager gamblers round the gambling-table or the Countess's chattering servants. Tchaikovsky's blazing score, which ranges from Mozartian pastiche to Russian charm to the tremor and shriek of the supernatural is brought to vivid life by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Garsington's musical director Douglas Boyd. However the couple at the opera's heart are not quite so strong. Laura Wilde as Lisa has an impressive flaring voice but her performance felt rather dramatically tepid, and though Aaron Cawley's dark-grained baritone seemed right for Herman's obsession one missed a sense of that countervailing tenderness for Lisa that might have saved him. The circle of army friends around Herman were more convincingly portrayed, above all gravel-voiced Robert Hayward as the jovial, ever-optimistic Tomsky. Roderick Williams as the stuffed-shirt Prince Yelestsky who loses out to the romantically fascinating Herman provided the subtlest singing of the performance, in his aria of dignified heartbreak. However the evening's most spell-binding moment came from Diana Montague as the Countess, alone in her bedroom, recalling her young days in Paris when she learned the secret of the 'three cards'. On opening night, when the lights fell and the orchestral sound dropped to a whisper, you could feel everyone lean forward to catch the old witch's secrets. Sometimes the best moments at the opera are the quietest.
