When I was younger, starting to get the chance to see live opera regularly, I presumed that the more radical a production, the more likely I was to enjoy it. Most of the time, I would have the score for a particular work lodged to a respectable degree in my head. The thought of some smart individual putting relevant but contextually new scenery on it was thrilling. Sometimes, I confess, I would allow the nuances of character interaction and development to occupy less headspace than the general world being presented on stage.

It wasn’t long before that attitude started to erode. With all respect to later generations, when you’ve seen everything you can see on various international opera stages for 20 years – and I still see far less than some colleagues – you start to spot trends; to notice generational shifts; the ebb and flow of storytelling habits and theatrical fads. You realise that a production’s relevance and resonance can have very little to do with what era a director has chosen for its setting; that productions which look traditional might, in fact, be radical (and vice versa).

I never thought of myself as a reactionary. Still, a few years ago I found myself sitting in an opera house thinking like one. Why on earth, the voice in my head shrieked like an angry caller to a radio phone-in, am I being made to watch yet another operatic story told within grey concrete walls and under arid strip lighting? I found it dull, and couldn’t help but think of the majority in the audience who, statistically, buy opera tickets once a year for a night out. For many of them, the appeal of opera is still that of a spectacle – hundreds of performers on stage and beneath it; maybe a touch of bling; perhaps even a live animal – the escapism of a world that doesn’t quite resemble our own.

For me, the grit of realism can enliven opera like little else. I think of some English National Opera productions from the John Berry era: Richard Jones’ ‘club style’ Cav & Pag; Carrie Cracknell’s combat-stress Wozzeck. More recently, I’ve seen Dmitri Tcherniakov take the idea of domestic realism to a new level in operas that drag colossal motivational and psychological baggage behind them – Elektra, Tristan, the Ring. The effect is highly intelligent and theatrically overwhelming.

Then again, I’ve experienced some breathtakingly close-to-the-bone traditional productions recently and in the half-dozen or so years before the pandemic, I saw a load for whom the visual touchstone of grey concrete and/or strip lighting conspired to suck any sense of drama from the stage. There was a Nabucco at Covent Garden in which the concrete appeared to render even the music anemic. At around the same time, I saw a colleague tweet about how tired he was of the proliferation of grey concrete sets in opera houses. I saw the comments chime in underneath.

Reading those comments, it dawned on me that the problem might not be with the grey concrete sets as much as the deficiency of what was acted and sung out inside them. I recalled some productions that had deployed the ubiquitous concrete yet were gutsy, affecting and beautiful: a Royal Danish Opera Lohengrin in which the concrete resembled a Denys Lasdun forest fantasy; a Danish National Opera Aida in Aarhus that underlined the intimacy and claustrophobia of the piece by having it play out entirely within the confines of a shrinking concrete bunker.

Perhaps, in both these cases, the concrete served a resonant dramatic purpose, rather than acting as a blank canvas against which a director was gambling on the stage-bound human interactions pinging out a little better. Tcherniakov has an apparently consistent ability to remind us that any opera set acts as an extension and amplifier of what’s happening in and around it; that the dramaturgy of human interaction comes first (as dictated by the score).

Perhaps the bigger question is that of trend and stagnancy. Too much grey concrete, like too much Wes Anderson symmetry, and you might find yourself focusing on something other than the story being told. You might get the impression, even, that a whole bunch of Mittel-European opera directors are wired the same aesthetic way (heaven forbid) and spend their weekends stalking around brutalist art galleries…wearing grey.

I sense there’s less grey concrete around these days, perhaps the sign of an opera world (in Europe, at least) sprung from the dangers of the Covid-19 pandemic and strutting its stuff a little more confidently and colourfully. That might give the occasional grey concrete set a little more freshness and impact when it does appear. But there’s a lot else to get right besides.

@operalastnight

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Opera Now. Never miss an issue – subscribe today