Finding the meaning beneath the melodies

By WILLIAM DART

Raymond Hawthorne is setting up moves for his production of Orfeo ed Euridice and you get the feeling the man would like to play every part himself.

He is working on a crucial duet between Zan McKendree-White and Katherine Wiles, probing beneath Gluck's glorious melodies, looking for character, motivation and dramatic logic.

He erupts when four mask-wielding actors try to fit some tricky stage business to what sounds, on piano, like a deathless march ("That music's so jaunty!" he roars) and then it's back to his Orfeo and Euridice: "I want more despair, more physical weave in it."

Hawthorne's name is forever associated with two stunning productions, of Mahagonny and The Turn of the Screw for our National Opera in 1982, and many brilliant and resourceful Mercury Theatre productions later in that decade.

"I'm quite in awe of singers for the way they can stand up and characterise a role through the music and the notes," he says.

"As an actor I'm used to standing up and delivering, but to have to sing with such skill and technique and do everything at the same time is a miracle.

"The composer asks for the impossible and opera singers invariably give it."

Watching Hawthorne refining the dramatic process, I am reminded of the relentless energy and devotion of his Theatre Corporate troupe in the 1970s. He clearly enjoys working with young performers, and the three women in Orfeo ed Euridice represent "the smart new breed of singer, who understand what their function is to the production and to the music. They understand what the music is and what the actor's role is."

And what of the Gluck opera , which has not been seen in Auckland since Janette Heffernan's brave staging in 1981? Hawthorne's biggest operatic challenges in the past have been Mozartian: "The Marriage of Figaro is so hard because it's all to do with the intellect, brains and the machinations of people."

Initially, he was scared "Orfeo might turn into some wafty shepherd/shepherdessy-type thing and that's why I brought the actors in. I needed something to point the drama. On the musical side, too many people try to smooth the lyrical lines out. I'm going to try to shake that around a little."

Hawthorne's mix of hyperbole and shrewd common sense is infectious. One minute he's the orator, rapturously delivering Berlioz' praise of the opera - "a complete masterpiece and one of the most astonishing productions of the human mind"; the next it's all down-to-earth practicality. "It's not enough to have a line of music. You've got to have an intellectual understanding of the words, grip those words and tell a story with them."

John Cage would be thrilled to see someone so switched on to the power of silence or, as Hawthorne puts it, "the air around things".

"Not every conductor has this gift," he confides. "Juan Matteucci did back in those Mercury days. When you listened to him conduct, you realised how well he understood where silence sits in the orchestra, and how the non-sounds can frame the moment with such intense delight."

For me, the Orpheus legend has always been the ultimate testament to the power of music, as the hero goes on his way melting the stoniest hearts with his lyre. Hawthorne agrees, and slips in a relevant speech from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice.

But he also points to the more human issues involved.

"We're all very connected to that legend like none other because it's about the ultimate sacrifice of love.

"In this version, there is a happy ending but the journey to it is fraught with difficulties and this journey symbolises the journey of love."

* Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, with the Auckland Chamber Orchestra conducted by Peter Scholes, Town Hall Concert Chamber, tonight at 6.30.