![]() ![]() Yet – at least from my position on the floor – the thick middles of Berg’s textures almost entirely swallowed the low ranges of many a valiant singer. Davis clearly relishes this score, and provides deep pleasures. Unless the balance between stage and pit is calibrated in future performances, this Wozzeck will remain less a drama than a kind of staged tone poem, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This attentiveness to Berg’s orchestral writing came at some cost to the singers, many of whom only easily cleared the orchestra in their high ranges, or when delivering realist shouts and barks. Some of the best brass writing in opera is in Wozzeck, and the sound from the orchestra was consistently balanced with a hint of edge, as if always on the cusp of becoming overwhelmed. Bringing out the unabashed colour and detail of the score, Sir Andrew Davis delivered a superb reading in the pit, tightly coherent and with exemplary attentiveness to articulation. In some ways, the musical priorities on opening night mirrored the abstracting effects of the production. The effect is to render the opera’s visceral and histrionic excesses with a kind of symbolic lightness – depravity frozen in tableaux. ![]() The regular punctuations of the sheet give the opera’s action a fresco-like quality of flatness and stillness, which is emphasized by the frequent uses of shadows projected on screens at varying stage depths. In this Wozzeck, there is no stage curtain. Instead, in Vicki Mortimer and David McVicar’s production, a long sheet – the kind used to separate patients in crowded hospital rooms – is drawn across the front of the stage, opening and closing at varying speeds to accommodate scene changes.
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