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Lulu WNO
Marie Arnet as Lulu: ‘fearless physicality’. Photograph: Robert Workman
Marie Arnet as Lulu: ‘fearless physicality’. Photograph: Robert Workman

Lulu; Huw Watkins day – review

This article is more than 11 years old
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff; Wigmore Hall, London

The figure of Lulu, whether translated into play, film or opera, invites scenes of grotesquerie and violence. She is the archetypal man-eater, a murderer and prostitute ready to devour every admirer who comes her way until one humiliates her. Then her interest is piqued, her power challenged. "When I looked at myself in the mirror I wished I were a man – a man married to me," she tells her latest lover, already engaged to a decent girl but now in thrall to this far from nice dominatrix.

Berg's opera, based on two plays by Wedekind, was unfinished at the time of the composer's death. The work presents endless tangles for anyone trying to stage it: which version, which ending, whose completion? Voluptuous music aside, the temptation to play up the work's nastiest qualities, if only to provide a clear route through the muddied narrative, is hard to resist. These patterns of violence almost mirror the musical motifs which act as discreet aural stepping stones through the score – a 12-tone "row" in particular associated with Lulu herself, as well as codes, patterns and even a palindrome.

The defining quality of Welsh National Opera's new staging by David Pountney, his first since becoming artistic director of the company in 2011, is its beauty. This comes as a shock. Yes, there are butcher's hooks and bodies of victims dangling as carcasses in an abattoir. (Is it worth noting that Wedekind, a man of many talents, apparently once worked as publicity manager for a meat stock-cube manufacturer?) A pink love-nest bed made of outsized breasts and other slabs of fleshy body parts suggests the work of a surgeon's knife in the land of giants. There is, too, a familiar menagerie of circus-trainer types and figures in animal heads – orange sheep, green alligator, yellow parakeet, with suits to match.

Yet gratuitous violence and sexual abuse are kept to a minimum. The magnificence of Johan Engels's set, a mix of tubular scaffolding and helical twists, as well as Marie-Jeanne Lecca's delicious costumes, all sheath dresses and sequins, made the moments of ugliness all the more unsettling in an already disconcerting work where redemption is absent, a warm gesture hardly glimpsed.

It helps that Lothar Koenigs, conducting, plunders the score for every last ounce of feeling, exceptionally delivered by the WNO orchestra. The additional textures of alto and tenor saxes, sousaphone, banjo and accordion sing out moodily, heightening the tension between jazzy sensuality and serial formality.

Instead of the completion by Friedrich Cerha, widely in use since Pierre Boulez endorsed it in 1979, Pountney has gone for the 2008 version by Eberhard Kloke. Kloke has tightened the long and complicated "Paris scene" – featuring a casino, an acrobat, the collapse of Jungfrau Railway shares and a good deal more. He provides flexible options for cuts and only uses material written by Berg. The result is shorter and more transparent. Even if you're unfamiliar with the opera, you need to know that this was the edition chosen, and that it worked. The saga of Lulu's performance history is in itself fast becoming fetishistic. There are those who speak of it with the earnestness of the late Christopher Martin-Jenkins describing Hampshire batsmen of yesteryear.

Almost without exception, the large cast – mostly British – was first rate. Their characters remain unlovable, yet their music remains with you long after the curtain comes down: this was true of Ashley Holland's Dr Schön/Jack the Ripper, Peter Hoare as the composer Alwa and Richard Angas as a Wotan-like Animal Tamer/Schigolch, with luxury support from Mark Le Brocq, Alan Oke and Patricia Orr.

The only one to elicit real sympathy is the Countess Geschwitz, played with wrenching emotion by Natascha Petrinsky and sung with urgency and assurance. Marie Arnet's Lulu, restless and bewitching, if at times overwhelmed vocally by the orchestra, gave a performance of compelling, fearless physicality. She deserved her noisy cheers. Lulu is never an easy work, and enjoyment isn't part of the experience. This comes close. Yield to its strange powers if you can. It's on tour next month.

There is almost zero overlap between Cardiff's Lulu and the music of Huw Watkins (b1976), though – and this is stretching it – Watkins is a Welshman. Wigmore Hall devoted a day to his compositions, played by various ensembles and, in the final event, combining his own works with Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale Suite and Fauré's Piano Quintet No 2 in C minor. The word often used of Watkins's music is "clarity". He writes at the keyboard – he's a fine pianist too – often exploring ideas at first through improvisation before notating them, whereas others only write "in their head".

You might think that would limit the sound palette he can create. Instead, his Partita for solo violin (2006), written for and played here by Alina Ibragimova, crashes into life with powerful, splayed chords and explores every possible violin technique, especially effective at the pianissimo end of the spectrum. The soprano Carolyn Sampson and tenor Mark Padmore caught various moods – lustrous, arch, sombre – in settings of Larkin and Dylan Thomas, aided by the Elias Quartet and others in works which balance approachability with novelty and invention.

In a pre-concert talk with Watkins there was much debate about the degree to which a composer should take his audience with him (or her, especially in the Watkins household. He is married to the equally admired composer Helen Grime.) Some don't care and write what they like. The Birtwistle line is "if they don't like it, that's their problem". Watkins feels a responsibility to engage, as far as an artist can.

But there is no pleasing everyone. Why had Watkins adulterated the day's programme with music by dead composers, one disgruntled chap asked, saying that he certainly wouldn't be staying to hear the Fauré, and adding "typical soft programming. They think we can't take it" – or words to that effect.

It took a moment to realise that instead of grumbling about too much new music – the usual moan, and a cue for some to go off for a drink till it's all over – this man was actually demanding more. Verbal fisticuffs in pre-concert talks are almost unheard of. Please stay for the Fauré, implored Watkins, adding that it was a wonderful, wistful, ardent piece – words which, uncoincidentally, a critic might reach for to describe Watkins's own music.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Brahms, Schubert, Franck: Sonatas for Viola & Piano, Vol 2 – review

  • I Was Glad: Sacred Music of Stanford and Parry – review

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