Musically peerless but battering: Wozzeck at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence

Interviewed in the programme for last night’s Wozzeck at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, Sir Simon Rattle says that the famous orchestral interludes should be played “as if they were miniature Mahler symphonies, like musical bonsais”. For the last of those interludes, the “Invention on a key”, Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra accomplished that mission in no uncertain terms, the swelling strings overwhelming with the emotions of everything that had gone before. Earlier, the climax that follows Marie’s murder was enormous, bone-shaking, filling the Grand Théâtre de Provence with the biggest wall of sound I can remember in an opera house. 

But this was no blunderbuss of an orchestral performance. Wind players, especially at the low end of the register, provided tremendous subtlety; string solos tugged at our feelings, percussion continually added colour. The LSO did themselves proud by revealing Berg’s score in unparalleled levels of detail.

This production featured the same three male leads as Deborah Warner’s recent staging at Covent Garden: Christian Gerhaher in the title role, Brindley Sherratt as the Doctor and Peter Hoare as the Captain, all three once again demonstrating their excellent qualities. Gerhaher’s velvet baritone was delicious to listen to while conveying complete honesty and changing emotions by the bucketload as Wozzeck veers between normality and paranoia. Sherratt’s bass was strong, confident, sonorous. Hoare was even more effective than at Covent Garden, with a more percussive ring to the Captain’s manic outbursts. Malin Byström was a superb Marie vocally, the fundamental sweetness of her soprano interrupted by contrasting passages of heightened tension, harsher but always perfectly in tune and phrased.

Director Simon McBurney and set designer Miriam Buether use a setting that appears simple but is complex to execute. The stage is largely blank, with a set of concentric revolves which can rotate at different speeds and/or in different directions, giving a disturbing, surreal feel to the way the characters move. A single doorway, moved around the stage, allows for characters to move from one setting into another, either physical (entering or leaving Marie’s flat) or metaphorical. When a scene changes, McBurney’s direction and Paul Anderson’s clever lighting make the new scene appear out of nothing.

Black and white video, by Will Duke, is projected onto large screens at the back and sides of the stage. Its most striking usage is to add a manic reworking of what’s happening on stage, distorted by acute camera angles. The overall staging is focused on Wozzeck’s recent memories of war, depicted unmistakably as World War 1. When Wozzeck and Andres go hunting, there’s a decided feel of them walking through the trenches and the ground is littered with corpses. The Captain is in military uniform, accompanied by a mini-me who assists him in tormenting Wozzeck as he will torment Wozzeck’s son in the final scene.

It’s a virtuosic staging, but a misconceived one. Where Warner goes for the conventional structure of making the story manifest on stage and allowing the audience to infer the resulting emotions, McBurney inverts this by focusing immediately on the emotions and allowing the audience to infer the story, zeroing in on Wozzeck’s suicidal state from the very beginning. The result is a loss of dramatic arc. The bleakness factor is dialled up to maximum at the very beginning and remains there for the whole 100 minutes, heightened by the LSO’s full throttle performance of the music. There’s only so much misery that an audience can take and from about an hour in, I saw at least a dozen people who left the theatre, presumably having had enough. 

With such exceptional musical qualities that revealed ever more of the beauty of Berg’s score, this should have been a performance of Wozzeck to recommend to the skies. But McBurney’s decision to concentrate single-mindedly on the horrors of a suicidal state makes that impossible. I left the theatre with no sense of catharsis, feeling rather battered.