Yoohoolysses, darling!: The Return of Ulysses at the Roundhouse
The Return of Ulysses
The Royal Opera
Roundhouse
Rear Stalls M185, general rehearsal
9 January 2018
ROH page
Arriving with feverishly high expectations is rarely a recipe for either fair judgement or enjoyment, and had I the discipline I would never do it. But I don’t. Thus this Return of Ulysses, much anticipated, disappointed in almost every possible way.
Which is not to say there weren’t good things. I like being in the Roundhouse, and admire the sensitivity with which the Royal Opera sound team attempt to address its acoustical defects as an opera venue. Christian Curnyn and Early Opera Company gave a reasonable account of this lovely score. Heyemi Shin’s set design was a partially ingenious response to the challenges posed.
But let the moaning begin. The Return of Ulysses sounds stupid in English, just as Italian operas always do – maybe even more so than usual, as there’s no escaping Ul-Y-sses in every other line. I cannot for the life of me understand the rationale for a vernacular performance when the surtitles are extremely clear and you can’t hear the singers’ words anyway.
Coming to the singers. There were some strong performances: I always like to hear Andrew Tortise and Nick Pritchard; Mark Milhofer and Stuart Jackson are also very pleasant and Samuel Boden makes an agile if extremely quiet Telemachus. But for many of the larger roles The Royal Opera failed to provide singers suited to the particular challenges of Monteverdi and the resulting sounds were inelegant or even ugly.
The main drive for my rash anticipation was the joint appearance of two of my favourite performers, Christine Rice and Roderick Williams. Obviously I can’t moan about Christine Rice being ill and I’m sure she was more upset than I was: but still I must proclaim my bitter disappointment at missing her sing this role at these close quarters. Caitlin Hulcup did a fine job singing from the pit and I mean no discredit to her when I say that, for me, Rice is irreplaceable.
But maybe I shouldn’t have been counting chickens in the first place. I think almost nothing could shift Roderick Williams from the lofty pedestal he resides upon in my mind. But the unavoidable conclusion from this rehearsal was that the role is a bit too high for him. Perhaps he will find ways to approach these notes later in the run; but there were moments in the rehearsal that felt like listening to a much-loved recording on inadequate speakers.
And I despised the production. The cast frequently looked like they didn’t know what to do with themselves, most despairingly in the glorious prologue. Laboured references to the migrant crisis were offensively irrelevant. The staging of the ending was to my mind in total contradiction to the colour of the music. And Minerva riding a tandem bicycle round the stage terrified me in a bad way.
I love this music and I still enjoyed that. But I could have done with hearing it sung in Italian by a specialist cast shorn of a production whose primary unifying feature seemed to be its thoughtlessness.
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