The surprise of the Spier Opera Season has been an Africanised adaptation of a Purcell opera with Amampondo and the Free Flight Dance Company
Guy Willoughby
The Spier Arts Trust set up in the mid-Nineties at this magnificently appointed estate in the choicest part of the Stellenbosch valley resembles its companion wine industry more and more every year. As artistic management teams come and go like seasonal fruit on the vines, each more enthusiastic of vaulting vision than the next, performing-arts aficionados can be forgiven for asking: will this year’s vintage of theatre, music and opera be as good as the last?
In 2000, the eager movers-and-shakers from London’s inner-city Broomfield Opera Company tried their distinctive brand of Africa-meets-Europe musical theatre, with an eclectic hodgepodge of shows in an eclectic hodgepodge of styles. (The best of them, Carmen and The Mysteries, are replaying Cape Town now at the Joseph Stone Auditorium after a rousing season in London.)
This season, it’s the chance of ex-Cape Town Arts and Culture dynamo Delecia Forbes, the trust’s new executive director, to rattle the vats, and indeed she’s begun well with an end-of-year programme that hauled in the kiddies to family shows on the new second stage. Now we’re in the middle of the litmus test: the opera season. What price this most venerable, and now, happily, richly contested of our sub-continent’s musical theatre forms?
Spier 2002 is wisely collaborating with other seasoned regional role-players Cape Town Opera, Artscape, the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra to produce, by diverse hands, a ravishing trilogy. First up: The Magic Flute, Mozart’s last opera (first performed in 1791) that odd combination of the utterly sublime, and plain silly, that was such a disarming feature of his meteoric career.
Die Zauberflote (the German opera of substance actually written in German) weds a score of transcendent beauty with a libretto of utter tosh, its enduring popularity proving that music survives everything, even hack writers. There must be a lesson in this somewhere.
Director Angelo Gobatto’s good- natured production adroitly combines the resources of the Cape Town Vocal Ensemble and the Sanlam Choral Training Programme with some delicious principals. The cast were a little shaky on opening night and Peter Cazalet’s setting eschews attempts at Ancient Egypt for a vaguely Grecian one; but hey, this jumble of Freemasonic tat and fairytale motifs could be set anywhere.
The romantic leads Zanne Stapelberg and Luzuko Mahlaba win our affection, the impish Simphiwe Quavane delights as the lovable bird-catcher Papageno, and Beverley Chiat’s Queen of the Night glides up to those famously fiendish high Fs with ravishing ease. With the chorus in magnificent, multi-layered form, the reduced philharmonic soon find their feet and render those chaste, passionate Mozartian harmonics with affection and restraint.
The compelling surprise of this short season has to be Paul Stern’s production of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, which manages to pay fond tribute to an arcane baroque creation the earliest English opera (first performed in 1689) still in the repertoire while recrafting the work as a heart-stopping dialogue between African and European aesthetic sensibilities. Pulling off a task like this is a rare achievement and tribute too to the timeous, galvanising power of opera.
Stern affects this dialogue by refashioning the prologue, epilogue and various climactic dances of Purcell’s taut, concentrated drama as pre-Western African music, created by that wonderful percussive ensemble, Amapondo. The dialogue of forms is both visually and aurally reinforced by the literal framing of the action: Hans Huyssen’s chamber orchestra of classical instruments occupy one side of the stage, Amampondo the the other.
The Free Flight Dance Company embody the wild, released energies of the doomed love of African Dido for Roman Aeneas (Sibongile Mngoma and Brad Liebl, in splendid voice); the chorus under Vetta Wise offers a haunting, plangent counterpoint. In total, this baroque proto-opera mediates a daring clash of cultures, and the balance of sound, given all these elements (and the other, natural elements, to boot) is little short of ingenious.
Finally, Stern directs Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly this week grand opera in the most lavish late- Romantic tradition in a pared-down version, Kabuki-style, for open-air stage of his 1993 and 1996 Cape Town production. In his own words, Stern foregrounds “the misunderstanding of two cultures Japanese and American just as Dido describes that between Rome and Carthage”.
With the heady combination of local and overseas talents Kumiko Endo as Butterfly and Jannie Moolman as Pinkerton, previously sung these roles in Cape Town the modest Spier stage is set for a stirring finale to a strong and principled season. Spier have uncorked a delectable blend of cultivars, grounded in good local soil, this time round. Dull would she be of palate who would not enjoy them.
Dr Guy Willoughby is the Africa Correspondent for Opera News Magazine, New York
The details
Dido and Aeneas will be performed on January 27 at Spier in Stellenbosch. Performances of Madama Butterfly will be on January 25, 26, 28 and 30, and on February 1 and 2. Tickets are available at R25, R45, R75 and R110 through Computicket on 083 915 8000 or the Spier box office on (021) 809 1165