Lulu, live from the Met, review: 'hard work but fascinating'

Even after 35 years of knowing it, I still find Berg's Lulu hard work. The rigorously complex score, with its angular, explosive vocal lines, is borderline hysterical, and its dramatis personae are all either fools or knaves, infatuated with a “heroine” of repellent spiritual vacuity. The unfinished third act remains problematic too: Friedrich Cerha’s completion of Berg’s sketches is no solution, and the penultimate scene is a downright bore.

Yet in a performance as imaginatively staged and strongly cast as this one, Lulu can still be deeply engaging and even moving. I may never learn to love its mysterious intricacies, but my fascination with them increases.

Lulu at the Wales Millennium Centre in 2013: review

The Met’s production has been conceived by the great South African artist William Kentridge, in collaboration with a co-director and theatrical designers. Visually it is quite stunning – dominated by walls of huge screens on to which are projected Kentridge’s signature black-ink drawings. These comprise a sequence of quick-fire sketches which seem to create a running commentary on the opera’s resonances, passing through everything from sleazy Secessionist Viennese culture to wittily marginal idle doodling.

If that makes it sound like an awful mess, I can only retort that I found the visual parade marvellously responsive to the text’s nightmarishly black comedy and the score’s febrile restlessness: judge for yourself when the production travels (financial cuts permitting) to ENO in London.

The Met has pitched a superlative team of singers at the challenge. Marlis Petersen is a mature Lulu – more smoochy Zarah Leander than gamine Louise Brooks or neurasthenic Teresa Stratas – and she has wisely announced that these performances constitute her farewell to a role she has been playing for over a decade. But with what expressive confidence she sings it – a vocal marathon as taxing in its way as Brünnhilde or Norma – and how richly she builds the character as she meets her doom at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Johan Reuter (Schön), Daniel Brenna (Alwa), Susan Graham (Geschwitz) give her exemplary support, and the smaller parts are all cast from strength too.

The broadcast was not altogether satisfactory, mainly because its microphones gave excessive prominence to the stage over the pit – and it is in the latter that so much of the opera’s perversely sumptuous beauty can be found. WNO’s Lothar Koenigs conducted the Met’s fabulous orchestra with aplomb, but one needed to hear more of it.