Early and late music-theatre pieces by Hans Werner Henze, from 1951 and 2007, make up the Guildhall School’s latest double bill. On paper at least, it makes good sense to pair Ein Landarzt, which was based on Kafka’s short story A Country Doctor, and began life as a radio opera, with the two-act “concert opera” Phaedra, because in the near-half century that separates the two works, Henze went full-circle musically.
The chromatic Bergian music of his final works returns to one of the styles he had tested out at the start of his career; in Ein Landarzt, performed here in the solo version of the piece that Henze made for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in 1964, the laconic commentary the orchestra supplies shows that style still being assimilated.
Landarzt holds up pretty well, though, especially when delivered with the intensity and distinct edge of the sinister that Martin Hässler brings to the role of the doctor, called out on a snowy night to treat a dying boy. But the second half of the evening, Phaedra, remains as unconvincing as it did at its British premiere at the Barbican in 2010. The problem is Christian Lehnert’s text, in which the dramatic plotting of the story of Phaedra’s love for her stepson Hippolytus, and his death and subsequent resurrection by the gods, is suffocated by the self-conscious cleverness of the verbal imagery.
The Guildhall production, directed by Ashley Dean, doesn’t help matters by inserting an interval between the two acts of the 70-minute piece, and following a generally neutral and abstract presentation of the first half of the story with an unnecessarily updated treatment of the second, complete with video screens and life-support systems. Roles are double cast; on the first night there were good vocal performances from Ailsa Mainwaring as Phaedra, Laura Ruhi-Vidal as Aphrodite, Lawrence Thackeray as Hippolytus and Meili Li as the countertenor Artemis.
All struggled to make anything of their characters on stage, though; the production, the rather tepid performance of the orchestral score under Timothy Redmond and especially the dramatically flawed work itself, must take the responsibility for that.
