Despite celebrations of Carl Nielsen's 150th birthday, 2015 has failed to do for Maskarade, Denmark’s national opera, what Danish TV detective Sarah Lund did for the Icelandic jumper. The opera’s rarity outside Denmark is not a reflection of its quality. Nielsen’s orchestral tapestry is rich and sophisticated, with constantly changing colours and rhythms. Wittily scored dialogue links a parade of musical forms, including satirical love duets, chorales and exuberant dances. The hurdle is probably the libretto, written in operetta-like verse, which requires either singers fluent in Danish or a vernacular translation that can decode a Pernille that rhymes with “persille” (parsley). (One translation proffers “vanilla”.) At this concert performance the mostly first-rate singing, by Danes and two Swedes with Danish careers, was enhanced by their relaxed flair with the idiom.
Maskarade refers to a form of entertainment introduced in 18th-century Copenhagen – masked balls at which people from all social classes danced together, drank coffee and gambled at cards. The Lutheran establishment closed them down in 1724, prompting Ludvig Holberg, the Dano-Norwegian Molière, to write a comedy in their defence. “Our whole life is a constant masquerade,” he wrote in an essay decades later, “because convention, fashion and the authorities make us wear masks… so that we are only masked when we are not wearing masks.” Promoting personal freedom and democratic mingling, masquerades appealed to Holberg, an advocate of Enlightenment values.
Vilhelm Andersen’s adaption of Holberg’s play for Carl Nielsen duly celebrates egalitarianism and self-expression. The diverse characters move along a simple plot line. Leander, an aristocrat, and Leonora, moneyed middle-class, are engaged, but they have never met. At a masked ball they both fall in love with other people. Parental ire looms. Fortunately, Leander’s sharp-witted servant, Henrik, helps him foil his sanctimonious, autocratic father, Jeronimus. Everyone ends up at a lavish masquerade, which takes up all of Act III. It turns out that the masked dancers the lovers fell for were none other than themselves. Tragedy is averted, but for some the end of the masquerade means the end of freedom – Leander’s mother, for example, for whom unmasking means that her killjoy husband can continue to quash her joie de vivre.
Joie de vivre gushed from the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic’s every note, as Markus Stenz spurred them on in an exhilaratingly bubbly performance. They played marvellously, the only caveat being that they sometimes covered the singers. Orchestral passages, such as the springy Dance of the Cockerels, spun with a heady dynamism that comes from meticulous preparation. The Netherlands Radio Choir was similarly well-rehearsed, and lucidly brought the soldiers and sundry folk to life. Chorus members capably took the smaller solo parts, with mezzo-soprano Elsbeth Gerristen a creamy-voiced stand-out as the Third Girl.