Wagner, Der fliegende Holländer: Seattle Opera, soloists, cond. Asher Fisch, dir. Stephen Wadsworth, set designer Thomas Lynch, costume designer Dunya Ramicova, lighting designer Joan Arhelger  Marion Oliver Mc Caw Hall, Seattle, 19.8.2007 (BJ)

 

Greer Grimsley as The Dutchman

Along with superb orchestral playing under the baton of Asher Fisch, who made his authoritative mark from bar one, the first thing to enjoy in Seattle Opera’s revival of its 1989 Flying Dutchman production was the stage picture during the overture. There wasn’t one. It is indeed refreshing these days, when many directors seem to feel that any time an audience spends confronting a closed curtain is time wasted, to be allowed to enjoy the overture’s atmospheric foreshadowing of the drama without being distracted by fussy and unnecessary stage business on a prematurely exposed stage.

The foreshadowing in this case, moreover, turned out to very fully prophetic of the conviction and dramatic impact of all that followed. Stephen Wadsworth and his designers placed Wagner’s mythical story in the present, with jeans dominating among the costumes, and bicycles featuring among the props. While many such an updating makes nonsense of essential elements in the opera it is intended to illuminate, this one dramatized the otherness of the unfortunate Dutchman, whose richly ornamented 18th-century looking costume stood out brilliantly from the prosaic contemporaneity of everyone else’s clothes. The background, too, with finely detailed ships on hand in the first and last acts (the Dutch ship, with its blood-red sails, making a chillingly ghostly first entry thanks to Joan Arhelger’s expert lighting design), and an equally meticulous indoor set in place in Act II, facilitated the plot without getting in the way.

Jane Eaglen (Senta) and Greer Grimsley (Dutchman)

Fortunately, the cast was in every way up to the challenge of realizing the human and metaphysical implications played out in this environment. I thought a different costuming approach might have helped Jane Eaglen look more like Senta, but the character’s obsession with first the idea and then the reality of the Dutchman was clearly and movingly represented, and the great soprano was in authentically thrilling voice. Two excellent tenors, Jason Collins (a finalist in the company’s first International Wagner Competition last year) and Jay Hunter Morris, made more respectively of the Steersman and the spurned lover Erik than is commonly the case. Luretta Bybee was just as successful in enlivening the sometimes colorless role of Mary. The Australian bass Daniel Sumegi, meanwhile, was a sympathetic Daland–a personage whose easy-going venality and cosy human warmth recall the character of Rocco in Beethoven’s Fidelio –and projected with style and apparent ease the Italian melodic lines that coexist in the score with hints of the mature Wagner to come. And Beth Kirchhoff’s large and lively chorus matched the prevailing orchestral splendor with singing of exemplary vividness and power.

But central to the success of any Dutchman production is the Dutchman himself. In this role, Greer Grimsley, who is a Seattle Opera favorite but whom I was encountering for the first time, covered himself with glory. A handsome man, slim of build, he looked the part, and his singing was a sumptuous outpouring of  bass-baritone sound, molded with style and sensitivity. Indeed, the long section of Act II leading up to his understanding with Senta was as beautiful and as profoundly expressive as any performance of it I can recall hearing.

I have just one small criticism to offer of the stage deportment both of the Dutchman and of Daland. If the Dutchman’s Frist really is um, offering him one more chance of finding redemption after seven agonizing years at sea, and if Daland really is face to face with the prospect of welcoming a rich son-in-law, then these gentlemen should surely not be standing around with their hands in their pockets – something more urgently charged by way of demeanor is called for. That, I suppose, is the sort of thing to be expected when a production is revived after a nearly 20-year interval. (I have no idea whether the Dutchman and Daland back in 1989 displayed the same sang-froid.) But it was an infinitesimal blemish in a music-theater experience that was otherwise as theatrically compelling as it was musically satisfying. I begin to understand how Speight Jenkins’s Seattle Opera has won its reputation as the American Wagner company par excellence.

 

Bernard Jacobson

Pictures  © Seattle Opera

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