At the Adelaide Festival with Alan Slade
The Adelaide Festival Theatre is an impressive structure and one of South Australia’s most prestigious venues.
It has seating for close to 2000 people across three levels. The new interpretation of Verdi’s homage to his friend Alessandro Manzoni, by Ballett Zürich with Adelaide’s Symphony Orchestra and the Adelaide Festival Chorus, with choreography and production by Christian Spuck, the renowned ballet dancer turned director and choreographer, was billed as a highlight of the 2023 Adelaide Festival.
The promotion described the event as “A work of enormous size and power, this is an Adelaide Festival experience that will be talked about for years to come. Verdi’s mighty Requiem is a sacred oratorio with opera coursing through its veins. It runs the gamut from whispered pianissimos to some of the most shattering climaxes ever written. Christian Spuck – who won the ballet world’s top award for best choreographer in 2019 – thrusts this already spectacular work into a new orbit, giving physical shape to every contour of Verdi’s score. Over 170 Adelaide singers and musicians join 36 dancers from one of Europe’s most revered ballet companies to poignantly express the composer’s vision of death as every individual’s most solitary and mysterious challenge.
Whether you love opera, dance, choral music, theatre or all four, a profound experience awaits.”
Every person interviewed as they left the theatre declared the performance to be wonderful, entrancing, superb and other superlatives. This audience member was the only one who disagreed.
Verdi’s Messa da Requiem is usually performed as a stage production with the four soloists in front of the large orchestra, level with the conductor, and the double choir on tiers behind the orchestra. Because of the size of the ensemble, it is rarely seen in a church and is mostly regarded as operatic rather than liturgical.
The performance opened in silence as the curtain rose on the huge stage to a blank stage lined by greyish walls and a floor littered with leaves – a lone female in a patterned body suit standing to the left of centre stage. The orchestra was in the pit under the stage. As the orchestra strings eventually began the quiet introduction to the Requiem, she moved seductively off as the 170-member chorus dressed in black entered to sing the Introit, joined by the soloists, Soprano Eleanor Lyons, Mezzo-Soprano Caitlin Hulcup, Tenor Paul O’Neill and bass Jud Arthur.
At this stage, another major difference from the traditional evidence – the entire cast sang from memory instead to the usual from a score either on a stand in front of the soloists or held by the chorists. As they sang, other members of the ballet troupe performed artistic acts of acrobatic and gymnastic dance, with some of the dancers verging on contortionist feats, occasionally held aloft effortlessly by obviously very powerful partners.
The exciting Sequence fanfare was enhanced musically by the trumpets at the rear of the theatre. Throughout the performance, the choir participated in the ballet, occasionally swaying in place, Mexican waving and running from one side of the stage to the other. Meanwhile, various members of the ballet troupe danced their complex sequences, sometimes entwined with the choir or alone on the stage when the choir left during orchestral passages.
The performance was spoilt to some extent by the audience’s phlegmatic coughing and sneezing. Another disturbing factor was the unavoidable clumping of vast numbers of people running across a timber floor. Some of the ballet sequences were nonsensical – for example, during the Lux Aeterna two male dancers crisscrossed the stage with a table, dragging a female colleague clinging to one leg of the table. Another disconcerting feature was the entry of the ballet troupe dressed in black bridal wear, complete with a veil, with two tall male members dressed identically, towering over the females. It was comedically inappropriate.
Unfortunately, the symbolism of the ballet and the choir dynamics were unexplained, and to this member of the audience, the performance was, to use a good Aussie phrase, a dog’s breakfast. In an attempt to evaluate the individual elements, I closed my eyes to listen to the soloists, choral and orchestral passages and came to the conclusion that the combination of choral and ballet performances may work in other settings but failed in this rendition of Verdi’s magnificent requiem.
