US Edition 
Lulu, WNO, Wales Millennium Centre, review
Lulu by Welsh National Opera crackled with energy on stage, but it was in the orchestra pit that it really shone, says Rupert Christiansen.
As challenging to performers as it is gruelling for the audience, Berg’s Lulu is both a great work and a big ask, requiring large investment of effort for limited box-office returns.
The root of the problem lies in the opera’s third act, left in patches at Berg’s death in 1935. The composer’s executors were wary of posthumous attempts at completion, but once free of copyright, Friedrich Cerha wove the surviving material into a fabric: his version has never been considered altogether successful, however, not least because of the prolixity of an inconsequential scene set in a Paris casino.
For this new production, Welsh National Opera has therefore adopted a new edition prepared by Eberhard Kloke, which telescopes this episode and makes less effort to pastiche Berg’s idiom. On one hearing, the jury must remain out, but I suspect that the executors were right – Lulu (like Puccini’s Turandot) is more satisfactorily experienced without second-guessing Berg’s intentions.
Sardonically witty and sometimes intoxicatingly beautiful, the first two acts unfold the tragic-comic fable of a ferally amoral yet perversely innocent girl who inspires men to self-destructive folly, set in a decadent early 20th-century Europe on a fast track to catastrophe. Freighted with two hours of superb music, there’s feast enough here for anyone.
Directed by David Pountney and designed by Johan Engels and Marie-Jeanne Lecca, WNO’s staging is flamboyantly busy and relentlessly energised, focused on the idea of a prison cage which traps and punishes human animals. But the colourful welter of Surrealist and Expressionist imagery which spills around it occludes simple outlines of plot and character: more specific sense of location is required to make the complex action lucid.
Denied any evident social context, Lulu herself emerges as not so much a fatally alluring enigma as a vacuum – an impression reinforced by Marie Arnet’s rather blank interpretation of this hugely difficult role. Vocally she is admirably assured and her physique allows her to impersonate the teenage nymphet convincingly, but where was the text? I could detect barely a single German consonant.
There are strong supporting performances by Peter Hoare and Ashley Holland and the remainder of a fine cast, yet what lifts the evening to sublimity is the underrated Lothar Koenigs’s wonderfully sensitive and sensual conducting of the magnificent orchestra. On stage, this Lulu seemed somewhat soulless; in the pit, it was heartbreaking.
Until Feb 23, then touring to Birmingham, Llandudno, Southampton, Milton Keynes and Plymouth. Tickets: 029 2063 6464; www.wno.org.uk