Processions and riots enflamed the streets of Stockholm last winter: the Folkoperan were at it again. The latest production from Sweden’s formidable alternative opera company was a collaboration between their Artistic Director, Claes Fellbom and composer, Daniel Bortz, whose Bacchae opera (Baccanterna) had made a considerable impression on me in its Ingmar Bergman production at Stockholm’s Royal Opera in 1991.
This new opera, Marie Antoinette, came straight to this year’s Brighton Festival – though without the accompanying street theatre and carnival atmosphere. And now, commendably hot on its heels, the recording. Thanks to its fine quality – acoustic depth matched by spatial breadth and vividly distributed detail – the ecstasies and the agonies of Marie Antoinette’s love for the Swedish Count Axel von Fersen in a time of revolution are focused compellingly for private listening.
Until these two operas, Bortz had been best known for essentially small-scale chamber and solo works. And it is this co-existence of a broad dramatic canvas, characteristically stretching across shifting time-scales, and a fine eye for detail and imaginatively spare use of full orchestral resources which now distinguishes Bortz as a composer of music drama. For that is what Marie Antoinette must be called. As Bortz time-travels between the Paris of 1789 and the Stockholm of 1810, where Marie Antoinette and Axel meet their respective deaths at the hands of a revolutionary mob, the shifting levels of recession between past and future, dream and reality, art (Purcell and Gluck) and life, are expressed through a virtuoso range of vocal expression. Supple, impassioned arioso grows out of and returns to speech; anguished declamation splinters into dialogue and is calmed to melisma.
Chamber-musical textures express what words cannot: in the first love duet, a solo violin gives coherent voice to what Marie and Axel express only haltingly. And a miniature concerto for orchestra brings an austere, almost ritualized tone to Marie Antoinette’s trial scene. Her solo melismas soar above its verbosity, and lead to a final, beautifully declaimed prayer for forgiveness; Axel’s last moments are met by the dry bones of a dance of death, and a final superimposition of lenses as the mob’s laughter, Bortz’s characteristic orchestral tone clusters, and strains of rococo music merge.
Musical ‘lenses’ are important to Bortz. Not only is the listener aware of the cinematic nature of his flashbacks, but there is a sense of aural zooming and panning, particularly in the Versailles and Trianon scenes. In the close focus of a recording, one appreciates to the full Bortz’s shifting kaleidoscope of minor characters, sympathizing, gossiping, intriguing. Even Gluck himself (Iphigenie en Aulide is not, after all, an insignificant subtext) tangles with it all.
The Folkoperan’s casting provides a vivid palette of characters, from Malin Gjorup’s piping Page and Erling Larsen’s versatile Surgeon/Gustav III/Guard to Marie Antoinette herself. The title-role is splendidly created by the young soprano, Katarina Nilsson, whose wide and brilliantly focused range incarnates the sentient, the sensual and the noble in the beleaguered Queen. Sweden’s great Iago and Don Giovanni, Olle Persson, is the powerful and many-faceted Axel; mezzo-soprano Marianne Eklof the sinister and scheming Madame de la Motte. Those who already declare an interest in Franco-Swedish history and/or contemporary Nordic music drama will pounce on this recording: those who don’t should hasten to discover what they’re missing.'