Stravinsky's Nightingale takes flight to open the Adelaide Festival

This year’s Adelaide Festival opener was a bit of a patchwork affair in more ways than one. The first half of the program comprised a number of short works by Igor Stravinsky, some instrumental and some vocal, with various combinations and permutations of voices and instruments, incorporating various other modes of expression. The second half was occupied by a performance of the short 1914 opera The Nightingale. The whole thing was directed by Robert Lepage, in a co-production with Opéra national de Lyon, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Canadian Opera Company, Dutch National Opera and Ex Machina (Canada) with (here) the Adelaide Festival and State Opera of South Australia. If that all sounds a tiny bit overwhelming, it was.

We began with Ragtime, jauntily played by a compact selection of musicians from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under Argentinian conductor Alejo Pérez with a neat sense of balance. This was followed by the first of the Three Pieces for Clarinet Solo, very nimbly played by Dean Newcomb; numbers two and three were interspersed between the successive vocal works.

The orchestral players were arrayed on the stage before a large screen. On either side of the front of the stage were two Chinese-style enclosures. The actual orchestra pit had been filled with water. Two women appeared clad, as Newcomb had been, in 19th-century Russian garb. One of them, contralto Meredith Arwady, launched into the four short Pribaoutki songs, with riveting stentorian low notes, while performers in the left hand enclosure projected accompanying impressionistic hand shadows onto the screen upstage. The other woman, Ukrainian soprano Yulia Pogrebnyak with a characteristically strong, somewhat metallic, Slavic sound, then rendered the Two Poems of Konstantin Balmont. Arwady stepped up again for the Berceuses du chat (Cat’s Cradle Songs), followed by Four Russian Peasant Songs” rendered by an 11-voice women’s chorus with a brass ensemble. The ladies here sat in two tiers, the front row with their feet in the water (necessitating subsequent mopping up) and accompanying their singing with co-ordinated hand gestures. The vocal items were all sung in Russian with English surtitles.

The final work before the interval was Renard, a “farmyard burlesque in one scene”. It was well sung by tenors Andrew Goodwin and Owen McCausland with bass Taras Berezhansky and baritone Nabil Suliman, and accompanied, on the one hand, by a chamber ensemble and, on the other, by acrobat/dancers enacting the roles of rooster, fox, goat (or ram, depending on which translation you consult) and cat in silhouette behind the screen. This was all very well received, but the overall effect was rather scattershot.

With the actual Nightingale after the interval, it was possible to relax more into the performance. The story is based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale, of which I can hardly better the Wikipedia synopsis: “a nasty Chinese Emperor is reduced to tears and made kind by a small grey bird”. The dramatic effects here were concentrated more on puppetry than shadow play, some of which were most effective, especially the dragons, fish, frogs and so on in the pool. A particularly stunning effect was achieved by the transformation of the Emperor’s sleeping pavilion into a surrounding oversized human skeleton representing Death. On the other hand, individual singers and the chorus holding aloft small simulacra of themselves seemed otiose.

Musically, however, the full-sized orchestra deployed sounded appropriately sumptuous, and the singing continued to be of a high standard. Another impressive Ukrainian soprano, Yuliia Zasimova, embodied the titular bird, with soaring glittering tone, well matched by resonant bass Taras Berezhansky as the Emperor and a strong cast. The well-drilled SOSA Chorus looked resplendent in their Chinese outfits, but slightly silly waving their tiny doppelgängers about. The reception was warm, if a little short of ecstatic.