Review-Before Brabant-Hong Kong Arts Festival
20-3-14
By: Tom Hope
In Willy Russell’s ‘Educating Rita’, his heroine is asked how she would address the difficulties of staging Ibsen’s ‘Peer Gynt’. Her one sentence response is succinct: ‘do it on the radio!’
‘Before Brabant’, HKAF’s specially commissioned chamber opera prequel to Wagner’s ‘Lohengrin’ (performing later this week for the festival), works a plot line whose staging poses equivalent challenges:
- a litter of seven puppies (substituted for Queen Beatrice’s septuplets by her jealous mother-in-law Metabrune) are discovered in the royal birthing bed to perplex her not-so-rejoicing (not to mention incredibly credulous) husband King Oryant, who then has his lady wife locked up for being a witch bitch.
- the seven royal babies (spared from drowning by the Queen Mother’s conscience-stricken hitman Markes who instead leaves them for dead in a forest) are suckled by a white she-goat before a passing hermit adopts the lot.
- 16 years later, the septuplets’ teenage angst transforms all but one of them into swans, leaving the last (and future knight Lohengrin) Helyas to learn his true identity from a passing angel.
- as Helyas confronts his parents, his flying swan siblings transform back to humans when reunited with their mother except for one who hauls Helyas away on a riverboat to meet his destiny downstream (in the form of act 1 of Wagner’s mega-work…)
How does this world-premiere production address those staging issues? By the simple expedient of doing it as a recital.
Strictly speaking, therefore, I shouldn’t be reviewing it for HKELD because this production of ‘Before Brabant’ was not a staged work. But let’s not be too fussy on that score: it’s a world premiere, after all, and Jeffrey Ching, the Philippines-based Chinese composer/librettist, was present to introduce the work before it started with a selection of what to listen out for.
Here’s his list of special features:
- the hoofbeats of Oryant’s horse (pounded out by the percussionist) as an overture to the King’s dissonant dismay on finding his lineage bestialized;
- the bird calls of the chamber orchestra (coincidentally a seven piece ensemble of wind, brass, strings, keyboard and percussion) as the seven royal adolescents are taken up and down the swanee; and
- the intermezzo’d coughings of the orchestra (with audience participation welcomed) to signify the passage of 16 years between scenes II and III.
In the programme notes, Jeffrey Ching describes how he based the libretto on Robert Copland’s ‘The Knyght of the Swanne’, a pre-Shakespearian romance, but for the score drew more widely, including music from China’s Song dynasty (which was roughly contemporaneous with Copland’s work). As he puts it, ‘the transplantation is not merely an homage to the Asian birthplace of the opera. Intrinsic to the tale is the spiritual gulf separating the worldliness of town and court from the mystical detachment of a life closer to nature… symbolised by a musical tradition proximate in time to [the] Europe [of Helyas/Lohengrin] but in geographical origin as remote from it as possible.’
For me, these cross-cultural elements struggled to manifest. They were supposedly to the fore in the swan-transitioning scenes in which the repetitiously flatulent sounds of the trombone had me giggling at what sounded more like a scout camp farting contest than a magically liberating transformation of the soul. Jeffrey Ching’s creativity seems informed by a mischievous intelligence but I somehow doubt he intended that particular frame of reference.
More successful was the opening chaotic quartet cross-fire of King Oryant questioning his wife’s virtue rather than the sanity/villany of his mother and their midwife. The opera’s close also worked well as the restrained harmonies of the reunited royal family sent Helyas/Lohengrin on his river-bound way.
There was plenty to admire elsewhere in the mix also, with conductor Lio Kuokman skilfully guiding his consistently excellent singers and orchestra through the intricate maze of Ching’s soundscape.
I couldn’t help feeling though that a trick had been missed. The Pina Bausch ‘Iphegenia in Tauris’ last week showed how dance and operatic recital can complement each other. ‘Before Brabant’ cried out for a similar visualization of its drama.
If not dance, then how about a video projection on a screen - or (especially appropriate to the magically transformative subject matter of this particular narrative) a puppet show?
Yes, a recital allows the imagination to run free. Yes, commercial constraints are a fact of life and HKAF should not be criticized for letting them get in the way of this work’s realization as a fully-fleshed opera. But, with all the local talent now available in Hong Kong for such exquisitely beautiful and dynamically visual interpretative art forms as sand-painting, there must surely be scope next time around for framing the mystic references of this style of work by something more than mere music…
Before Brabant has closed. For more information, click here.
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