A Thrilling Wozzeck

I’ve attended at least four other productions of Alban Berg’s marvelous opera, and all but one have been excellent. It’s almost a sure thing, if you have good enough singers, competent musicians, and a simple enough staging. That’s the only risk—that the power of the music and the plot can be overwhelmed by too much additional stuff going on onstage (especially since there are so many short scenes). It’s always best if Wozzeck’s sad fate has a chance to come through directly, and that’s why concert performances of this opera are often the best.

Still, though I expected it to be good, I was blown away by the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tuesday night performance of Wozzeck at Carnegie Hall. Part of the power lay simply in the strength of the orchestra—not only the individual abilities of its players, and not only the fine conducting by Andris Nelsons, but the sheer number of people onstage. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the music come through so well. And though these blasting chords threatened on occasion to drown out the individual human voices, that too is consistent with the nature of this strange opera, where the music seems to be an objective correlative of Wozzeck’s inner state—to emanate, as it were, from his increasingly besieged and confused mind. I didn’t mind not being able to hear every spoken or sung word (they were rendered for us in English, in any case, in the highly visible supertitles) when the whole musical experience was so fittingly overwhelming.

As for those individual voices: well, they too were terrific. Christine Goerke was predictably wonderful as Marie (and her incredibly strong voice never got drowned out, however loud the music was). But the big surprise of the evening was a Dane named Bo Skovhus in the role of Wozzeck. His voice, his diction, his facial expressions, even his bodily stance (and this in a concert version, mind you!) were all absolutely true to the character: he was Wozzeck, in all his pathos and frenzy and distress. I also loved Toby Spence as the Captain (he played the role more comically than I’ve seen it done before, and it worked), Franz Hawlata as the Doctor, and Mauro Peter as Wozzeck’s only friend, Andres. But in fact the whole cast was more than up to par—as good as they needed to be to render this masterpiece in all its remarkable complexity, and to keep faith with the BSO’s remarkable performance.