OPERA: Andrew Clements in Amsterdam
WITH David Pountney’s staging of Shostakovich’s The Nose for The Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam, his already fertile imagination as well as his budget ran riot. There can’t be many opera houses in the world that could have bankrolled something as extravagant as this.
Lasting under 100 minutes, it’s a virtuoso piece of stagecraft, and you can almost see the noughts spinning round on the company’s cash register as yet another hugely elaborate device is heaved on to the stage to make an invariably marginal dramatic point.
With the right imagination driving them, lavish productions can be a delight in themselves, just as frugal ones can make a virtue out of economic necessity. In most countries, of course, we see far more of the latter than the former. But whatever the scale, the money has to be spent to some purpose and spent on an opera that has the richness of musical and dramatic texture to benefit from luxury treatment. The Nose, though, doesn’t remotely fall into that category.
A slight, rather irritatingly inconsequential piece, it was Shostakovich’s first stab at an opera which premiered in 1929, the year before he began work on Lady Macbeth. The scenario is taken from a brilliantly satirical short story by Gogol about a junior military officer, Kovalyov, who wakes up one morning to discover that his nose is missing.
While he tries to find it, reporting his loss to the local police chief, attempting to place an advert in the local newspaper and encountering stifling bureaucracy at every turn, the nose takes on a life of its own, impersonating a state councillor and generally creating mayhem in the town. But there is no real resolution; Kovalyov wakes up the next morning to find his nose in its rightful place and life in the city back to normal.
Around this Shostakovich builds a score in his sardonic early style, full of grotesque imagery and manic business; the vocal writing is declamatory rather than lyrical, the orchestral music frail. There are moments when the musical invention flags, especially in the facile orchestral interludes. That’s why Pountney and Lazaridis obviously felt compelled to pile excess upon excess.
The action has been transplanted to a European super police-state of the near future (itself one of Pountney’s recent leitmotifs), heavily Americanised and full of automaton-like figures, moving frenetically and purposelessly, who bury Kovalyov in absurdity, rather as the production buries the opera in one absurd idea after another.
Dutch sub-titles, sometimes translating what is being sung, sometimes just a jokey commentary, are projected on to every available surface; a percussion-dominated interlude is delivered by a player on a platoon of motorbikes; the nose, giant and inflatable, makes its appearance as a state councillor at a royal wedding, whereupon the bride promptly strips off her clothes and writhes naked all over it – the portrayal of women doesn’t bear close scrutiny.
Well before the half-way point visual saturation sets in; one has ceased to bother about what each image means and how it might fit into the whole. I can’t remember now, if I ever did work it out, just who it was that appeared, singing, on a camel just before the last scene, and frankly by then I didn’t care.