Double trouble as two directors tackle new Dutch National Opera Rusalka

Rusalka, Dvořák's fairy tale opera of the water-sprite with a thirst for what she believes is a better life, is a salutary lesson in the difference between transformation and transcendence, but for it to work, fantasy and what passes for reality must be clearly defined.

Duality is very much at the heart of this production, a Dutch National Opera debut for co-directors Philipp Stölzl and Philipp M Krenn, but not quite as Dvořák imagined it. We find Rusalka in the backstreets of 1950s New York, an incompetent prostitute (glasses, a cardigan, an inability to stand upright with the rest of the girls outside the flicks) and a heroin addict. No surprise that she dreams of Hollywood, where bosomy blonde starlets arise twinkling from clam shells and a matinee idol Prince is looking for love.

It's a reasonable association. The trouble is that it’s an association that feels disingenuous in a city where sex work, drugs and organised crime are famously very much not the stuff of fairytales, as the running battles over the status of De Wallen will attest. Most troubling is that the only people of colour in the two Philipps’ New York are either gangsters or the witch, Ježibaba – played here by American mezzo Raehann Bryce-Davis, making an auspicious and authoritative debut as a backstreet hairdresser with a sideline in illegal procedures as well as a tiresomely stereotypical subplot in dumbshow (did I mention the gangsters?). Czech tenor Pavel Černoch as the Prince had a few good moments, though struggled to assert himself over either the orchestra or the chaos of Hollywood in what the car (of course there’s a car) says is the 1950s, but the swimsuits and headdresses say is Busby Berkeley’s 1930s. As to Rusalka’s transformation, let’s just say – inevitably – it comes as a (surgically-enhanced) pair.

But however hard you try in Hollywood, someone bigger and blonder will always come along. Annette Dasch as the Foreign Princess proves a triple threat, combining knockout vocal power with screen siren magnetism and the confidence to play it for laughs. Meanwhile, back in New York, Maxim Kuzmin-Karavaev as Vodnik is confined to a dimly lit fire-escape for the duration, occasionally interpolating a lacklustre “Woe!” from under a trilby. No wonder Rusalka longs for a bit of sparkle.

The notable moment of transcendent beauty is the famous Song to the Moon, in which soprano Johanni van Oostrum’s lower register especially mined all Dvorak’s dark melancholy lurking under a shimmering surface, while her high notes made more sense of the aria’s wide, yearning octaves than any amount of fussy, overworked stage business with a cooking spoon ever can.

Happily, there are two clearly defined worlds at play, thanks to the mesmerising presence of German conductor Joana Mallwitz. Fitting in this Covid-delayed Royal Concertgebouw debut en route to her new job as artistic director at Berlin’s Konzerthaus, Mallwitz danced through the score, teasing every ounce of fairy dust from the orchestra, from the signature chromatic flourishes to the deep, sonorous textures – a gravitational pull to the world below. Dvořák’s music is quite capable of illustrating the drama without the human voices spelling it out, which is why perhaps the best moments of the night could be had watching the world where all the magic happens – the pit.