Opera Australia www.opera-australia.org.au Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice 14 September 2005 a t the Sydney Opera House Conductor Richard Hickox Director Jim Sharman Set Designer Brian Thomson Choreographer Meryl Tankar Gustav von Aschenbach Philip Langridge The Traveller/Elderly Fop/Gondolier/etc Peter Coleman-Wright Apollo Graham Pushee Tadzio Benjamin Nichols

These Hickox-Langridge performances of Britten's Death in Venice needs to be seen and not just heard. Finally, having made its way to Australia, this revival of a 1989 Opera Australia production at the Sydney Opera House comes from a series of semi-staged concerts by aforesaid pair in the UK, including presentations at the Cheltenham Festival as well as a shiny new recording for Chandos (CHAN 10280) with British singers Alan Opie, Michael Chance and the City of London Sinfonia.

Admittedly, as a recording, some of the more introspective interludes in Death in Venice can stretch into longeurs; watching the same onstage, with choreography and movement, is quite something else altogether. Either way, these concerns are outweighed by the fact that right from the opening soliloquy, Philip Langridge delivers a strong, intense rendition of the Gustav von Aschenbach character, a lonely man who confesses his own vanitas vanitatum, hailing from a lofty - not to say ivory-towered - position in life. (T)his Aschenbach is the type of person who eschews and deplores, we sense, the popular culture enjoyed by the masses, if only as a means of differentiating and elevating himself above the others.

The irony, as we discover, is that when Aschenbach falls in love with the boy, it is his guilt and timidity to pursue that unrequited passion which is precisely derived from his sense of societal values and expectations, and Langridge puts us squarely on the horns of that dilemma. Aschenbach is a difficult role, both physically and interpretatively, but Langridge, who soars both in anguish and delight, lacks for nothing: this is one of the finest performances we’ve seen all year, surely to become as memorable as Emma Matthews’s Lulu or Jonathan Summers’s Iago in recent seasons.

As his deuteragonist is Peter Coleman-Wright’s chorus figure, seven characters in search of an writer (Aschenbach, as it were), not tinged as much as overflowing with insinuating, dark humour and an incorruptible certainty of purpose - charting the milestones of Aschenbach’s journey of self-destruction with a vocal timbre that dexterously switches from the depths of a villainous baritone to falsetto hijinks in the upper tessitura.

As the figurative Apollo, countertenor Graham Pushee delivers an ominous presence: his introductory line, “He who loves beauty worships me” sends chills straight to the little hairs on the back of one’s spine. The climactic trio between Apollo, Dionysius and Aschenbach, as the opera sloughs towards its foregone conclusion, arrives with a thumping catharsis.

The other cameo roles are also excellently done, especially Henry Choo’s hotel porter. As the love-interest Tadzio, Benjamin Nichols has hardly a word to utter but makes the most of Meryl Tankard’s unassuming dance choreography of beach games and horseplay. The recurring appearance of a photographer, stalking the scenes like the Grim Reaper (a camera in lieu of a scythe) harks, we can imagine, to the distant superstitions in some cultures that camera snaps can steal a person’s soul away: the cameraman as psychopomp.

Richard Hickox is a master craftsman in meticulously shaping Britten’s unique sound-world in this opera, with its metallic-tinged Balinese timbres and portamenti textures, from the languid depiction of ante-bellum Serenissima (i.e. Venice) to the individual character and event motifs. It is not a little ironic, too, that Hickox derives such a liberating sense of aleatoric freedom from Britten’s writing inasmuch that this very same music is used to depict Aschenbach’s emotional turmoil (and how he is trapped therein.)

Brian Thomson’s innovative production design sustains the multi-scenic nature of this narrative excellently, allowing for quick-switch environments with a type of suggestive verism which is both subfusc and claustrophobic, as befits Aschenbach’s journey into his own heart of darkness. Both acts begin, for example, with a single sliding panel lifting upwards like a caul in the iron curtain on the proscenium, before the rest of the curtain rises to reveal minimalist screens with revolving walls for rapid onstage transformations.

With Rory Dempster’s striking lighting design and Rebecca Ritche’s costumes, the mises-en-scene through all seventeen scene changes was accomplished with a cinematographic fluency that had the look of a Bergman and the feel of a Cocteau, with perhaps one eye on the surreal: black pillars descending to intimate the colonnades of the Venetian piazza, for instance, or horizontally pleated overdrapery to suggest the roiling waves on the beach.

George Herbert once famously asked, “Is there in truth no beauty?” In this strongly autobiographical work, director Jim Sharman looks past the superficially respectable debate about truth and beauty to the tragic heart of the matter: that the paedophilic core of Thomas Mann’s book-turned-opera, unspoken and unexplicated, is not the cause of the problem but merely its symptom. This is an opus deeply steeped in conflict between the tortuous ambivalence of fruitful and barren love, the tragic dilemma one faces in acknowledging same-sex feelings while recognizing its limitations. Langridge imparts to us the essential loneliness in which Aschenbach the artist lives and the conflicts which he faces.

Ostensibly there is also some reflection on the creative art and the place of art in society similar to, say, Wagner’s Meistersingers, but only much less so here. "Simplicity, beauty, form - upon these all my art is built," says Aschenbach as he gazes upon Tadzio, but this young man turns out not to be his muse as much as, ultimately, his nemesis. Tadzio is nigh untouchable, splendid and unfallen in his empyrean. It makes Aschenbach proclaim, with his greatest stroke of passion yet, “I love you!” (except that he proclaims it to nobody in particular), and it is of course an entirely different kind of stroke which carries him off at the end. A brave and rewarding production.