This is Part II of a review of Britten Sinfonia with Mahan Esfahani and Ruby Hughes
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15 May
This is Part II of a review (work in progress) of a concert given by Britten Sinfonia with Mahan Esfahani and Ruby Hughes (standing in for Alice Coote) at Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden, on Sunday 15 May 2016 at 3.00 p.m.
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Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) ~ Phaedra (1975), Op. 93
There is so much going on in Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra that one can only give an overview of a live performance, and it even feels to begin very immediately - nigh in media res, as well it might from a composer who worked with the BBC on operas that were broadcast, or even premiered, on t.v.
The text, which was taken, by Britten, from Jean Racine’s verse play Phèdre (originally Phèdre et Hippolyte) in a version by poet Robert Lowell (published in 1961), straightaway, and in just four lines, makes a statement from and on which everything devolves and depends…
For, as if one has to judge, to choose - of course, the setting suggests quite otherwise - between viewing Phaedra as prey (of Aphrodite, revenging herself on Hippolytus, Phaedra's stepson), or as predator (on Hippolytus), the nature of this composition, as with Peter Grimes (1945, Opus 33), is to invite us into the psyche of the outsider, the person with behaviour or desires that others will not (easily) accept.
At the close of the Prologue, at the literally appalling words turned white, we descend to harpsichord (Mahan Esfahani) and single cello (Caroline Dearnley), which are to act as the continuo for words, scoring and vocal that are now no less charged and daring* than when first performed at Aldeburgh Festival in June 1976. For Phaedra, now living before us in the person of Ruby Hughes**, heaps blame for her actions, and attraction to Hippolytus, on Aphrodite :
We hear [of Phaedra’s / narrate her efforts] ‘to calm her wrath’ [i.e. Aphrodite's], and how she tried to do so by flowers and praise, and by building and desiring to decorate a temple, but we come back to the opening and very earthly territory that is Phaedra’s not being able to breathe or speak, and of :
capricious burnings [that] flickered through my bleak
abandoned flesh
Surely Britten, for whom his love for and life with Peter Pears was not all that hidden, nonetheless wished to be as open as, sometimes, some parts of twentieth-century society might have allowed him to be – and, no less than Phaedra being sexually and emotionally drawn to her fiancé’s son (as Hippolytus first is), he must have felt the imprint of the firebrand that is real stigma. Even if, for Phaedra, that way lies – and must lie – condemnation, castigation, banishment and exile, we are given this conflicted conflation of the bodily and the sacred / sacramental in Lowell’s words :
Alas, my hungry open mouth,
thirsting with adoration, tasted drouth ---
Venus resigned her altar to my new lord
In the Presto section (and elsewhere), and although it is the norm in the work for lines to be set ‘straight through’, some lines are repeated. One such place is just after the short sentence My mind whirls, which is at the centre of the third line (and where we first heard a mimetically whirling accompaniment, which is to recur at the end of this section), with the self-ascription Phaedra in all her madness stands before you !
Revisiting words then continues, with lingering over (some of) the words in :
I love you ! Fool, I love you, I adore you !
Yet Phaedra then retreats, into the comparative safety (and asserting the attempted power of human resistance), of, and starting softly, making other claims :
Do not imagine that my mind approved
my first defection, Prince, or that I loved
your youth light-heartedly, and fed my treason
with cowardly compliance, till I lost my reason
As the movement proceeds (though this is truly an undivided work, there is some sort of distinction between passages of sung text and those of recitative), we reach a moment of great and open self-revelation, with Phaedra imagining declaring The wife of Theseus loves Hippolytus !, and it is there that Britten takes us so swiftly from the mood of a processional (the marriage ?) to that of a dirge (pointing to the end of the work ?). That sense of swirling – of Phaedra’s being adrift ? – recurs with ‘Look’ in the first of the next three lines, which (with all their Freudian connectedness as to whether the desired ‘sword’ is a real blade, to kill in fact (and thus for Phaedra to die), or the metaphorical one of covertly desiring Hippolytus’ unlawful penetration) close this section*** :
See, Prince ! Look, this monster, ravenous
for her execution, will not flinch.
I want your sword’s spasmodic final inch.
Here, however, Britten does break the flow, and with a percussive interlude that reminds us that Racine’s world of the tragic originates in that of the Greece of Sophocles or Euripides (and also, of course, that the dramatist’s five-act play has been compressed into something of the order of one-tenth of its stage-time). (In her programme-notes, Jo Kirkbride remarks that the scoring of ‘the uncommon ensemble [sc. string-band plus percussion and timpani] presents a stark texture in which strings and percussion do not blend, but jar in a way that underpins the rawness of Phaedra’s fate’.)
When the more contemporary time of the composer did feel to come back in, maybe to greet us anew, it was with the pizzicato of Caroline Dearnley on cello, which grew to resemble to the sound of the guitar (or banjo). The succeeding passage of recitative also reflects the fact that Time has passed by (and it is maybe arguable that, overall, the five sections of the work - Prologue / recitative / Presto / recitative / Adagio - reflect the five-act structure of Racine’s Phèdre), since Phaedra, at the start of this second recitative, is remarking :
Oh Gods of wrath,
how far I’ve travelled on my dangerous path !
I go to meet my husband ; at his side
will stand Hippolytus.
In the third, broken line, Ruby Hughes gave an anguished feel in the caesuræ that are either side of the telling words at his side, for – ravelled up in this trinity of monosyllables – is much more than the more florid / flowery, romantic summary with which, maybe persuading us (maybe herself ?), Phaedra first presented the genesis of her triangular story of Theseus, Hippolytus, and herself :
The son is in relation to the father, as evidenced by literally being at his side, and also by virtue of kinship (i.e. psychically). As Theseus’ wife, however (and as Phaedra so well knows), she 'should’ likewise be there, by Theseus’ side – whereas, in fact, her mental need to be at Hippolytus’ side [sc. in his bed / arms] has become so strong, present and distressing to her that, as the recitative progresses, she fears her powers of pretence, and, in all this and most of all, fears herself. (Though some progress, this, as rather one of violent disintegration (and distrust)...)
It seemed fitting to choose to talk, here (at the centre of the piece), about what Ruby Hughes (@rubyvoce) showed us in Phaedra, both woman and role – as in the first half (review to come), she stepped onto the stage (with a little due delay), and did not appear to need (even if appearances can deceive...) to do more, when arrived, than ‘immerse herself in’, as the case might be, the music of the Sinfonia, or instrumental introduction. (A matter equally pertinent to how, in this venue, we could see Robin Blaze ‘acclimatize to’, or ‘prepare for’, a performance of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, or Bach’s Cantata Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, BWV 170.)
This was a performance that brought passion and a meaningful sense of madness (very far from the stock and once-obligatory ‘mad scene’ in operatic tradition), coupled with personal humility, gratitude and even sacrifice (as it cannot be easy to become Phaedra - just, or even just, for fifteen minutes). Phaedra herself may remind us that Theseus’ life was also wedded with that of Medea [told in Handel's Teseo, and where, not for the first time, Theseus was playing with others' hearts], in the product of whose art - almost ironically ? - Phaedra is to find her own peace.
So, when she paced that phrase at his side (which was referred to earlier, three paragraphs above), within the space that she helped create for it (in partnership with Britten, Lowell, Racine), it was not staccato, but was, equally, not legato, but accented : likewise, in the following line, we had a telling pause – where ‘telling’ for the audience means, of course, emotionally ripping for Phaedra – just after she says the name Hippolytus again (once more, in claustrophobic proximity to referring to Theseus) :
I go to meet my husband ; at his side
will stand Hippolytus.
Of course, we must acknowledge the latency in Britten's setting, and electing to set, the recitative****, and doing so alongside his paring of the text of Lowell’s translation in a short-form treatment (which in no way could be seen to substitute for reading, or hearing, what Racine wanted to tell us of Phaedra – or Lowell of Racine).
However, the implied analogy with film here may be a useful one, in thinking of the choices that Britten made in preparing the libretto : the parallel is with what a writer-director might undertake, first in adapting a literary work as a film's screenplay, and then, with the help, skill and insight of a trusted editor, crafting cinema from the footage that he or she has shot in production.
A touch of this approach is the emphasis inherent in, and given to, the phrase The very dust (which opens the quotation below) – we almost had the feeling that, not for the last time (please see the next paragraph), another trio of words lets us hear Phaedra, guiltily disgusted by her shared human nature, and by the tradition of our origins in the dust (i.e. mankind created from clay, e.g. in - amongst other religious accounts - Genesis 2 : 7) :
The very dust rises to disabuse
my husband – to defame me and accuse !
In one passage, there was demonstrated a very strong connection between Phaedra and the principal cello-part, played by Caroline Dearnley, and which one realized as much by exact observation as by identifying what one was hearing : Britten's having her play both tremolo (bow hand) and vibrato (hand on the finger-board) at once. (Likewise, when Phaedra forms the resolve from which everything else proceeds, not to live is another strong group of sounds, underlined by Dearnley having to produce a continuous drone.)
In the transition from recitative to the Adagio (and from the simplicity of the harpsichord-and-cello continuo), one effect with which we might notice that Britten characterizes Phaedra’s decisiveness is how, by modulating up, and up, but adding in, at the same time, first one cello, then both, and instrument by instrument, until he builds up to full, undivided forces.
Appropriate, to wind up like a spring in this way, because hers is a fait accompli - in the vein of, but reversing, D.O.A. [also Dead on Arrival] (1950). [Also, Britten's last chamber opera, in 1954, had been The Turn of the Screw.]
From her selected position of safety (in a sense, she was always only talking to us, in and of her life), Phaedra is now actually launching herself forward : giving Theseus a confessional story, but coupled with the impossibility of his acting on it (as Medea, too, did ?).
At the centre of this passage of text, we were to come, with all its suggestiveness, to a massive climax on the words noble son’. It was then, in the emptiness of the hiatus that succeeded it, where - if we still, somehow, ‘felt outside’ this story - we were to find ourselves uncomfortable in our own company. (Phaedra, who has been so present to us, momentarily seems absent from our side ?)
By the time of the calmness that, rapt, we were also disquietingly to feel more and more strongly, and locate most in Phaedra’s final half-dozen lines of the Adagio, we fully realized, and so felt : this is her way of finding the peace, in herself and in the situation, that had eluded her before.
On such occasions, no one wants to break the silence (and yet perhaps it was broken too soon), which shows the interpretative power of this soprano (@rubyvoce) and this ensemble (@BrittenSinfonia) with Britten’s towering skill of setting texts that matter : music and all its makers, very alive to possibility !
End-notes
* Even when one has heard the work before : Britten Sinfonia performed it, a handful of years back, at West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge (@WestRoadCH).
** Childishly, one cannot help revelling in the fact that, when her name is not pronounced clearly on radio, it does sound rather like Scooby-Doo… !
*** From the fifth line onwards (starting Do not imagine, and quoted above), we have text in which Phaedra imagines apostrophizing Theseus. (Yet, by the time of the Adagio at the end of the work, she will be addressing him, and absolving Hippolytus, in the act of undergoing her chosen death.)
**** Where, of course, the continuo players are necessarily led by, and so closely attendant upon, the way in which the vocal soloist chooses to interpret the individual words and phrases of the libretto of the recitative – by phrasing, accent, tone, timbre, etc.
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
