Review: PEER GYNT at St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

I’ve never seen a stage so packed with performing talent!  Last night, at Peer Gynt, the stage at the Stifel was chock-a-block with the full St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the SLSO Chorus—plus ten actors/singers to play the roles in Ibsen’s sprawling, picaresque tale.  Counting ears and dividing by two—and adding one master of the hardanger fiddle (a uniquely Nordic instrument) we arrive at darn near 200 people crowding the stage.

It was glorious!

Now everybody’s heard of Peer Gynt.  We know him mostly from Edvard Grieg’s beloved suite: you know—“The Hall of the Mountain King”, “Anitra’s Dance”, “Morning”, “The Death of Åsa”.  Now I, despite my degrees in theater, must admit that though it’s been on my shelf for more than six decades I had never actually read Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.  (Well, it’s 140 pages long—as compared with 92 pages of A Doll’s House”.  And it’s in verse!)

But when I heard that SLSO was doing a joint production of Peer Gynt I sat down and read the Ibsen.  And wow!  How gripping!  How funny!  How wonderfully lively!  How (would you believe) modern!

The play premiered in 1876—twelve years before A Dolls House, the first of Ibsen’s “great plays”.  Incidental music was composed by Ibsen’s fellow Norwegian, Edvard Grieg.  Grieg was later to extract portions of this incidental music to create two different concert suites.

Peer Gynt poses great challenges for any producer.  It contains forty (count them, forty!) scenes in diverse settings such as a rustic Norwegian village, the underground palace of the Troll King, a luxury steam-ship, the Sphinx at Giza, a Bedouin camp, a lunatic asylum in Cairo, and a shipwreck at sea.  It was, in short, “cinematic”—in an era before that term was even dreamed of.

Now Ibsen wrote a long play.  In 1957 Ingmar Bergman mounted a five-hour production in Malmö.  It had a cast of fifty (including, as Peer, a young Max Von Sydow fresh from The Seventh Seal).  Bergman used none of Grieg’s music!

Bill Barclay and his company, Concert Theatre Works, have adapted Ibsen’s script into a wonderfully playable version—designed to be accompanied by a full symphony orchestra—just like that premiere in 1876.  It works!   It runs a little over two hours and it embraces almost all of that original incidental music.  And it rings true to Ibsen’s original.

With just a few bits of furniture—a small platform or two, a couple posts, a chair—scene designer Christina Todesco gives us all that’s needed to make this world.  It’s used with marvelous imagination.  It’s so refreshing!  It’s an escape from all the high-tech electro-scenic jabber that clutters so many large-scale musical productions nowadays.  It returns to honest, delicious simple theatricality.

Leading the cast as Peer is Caleb Mayo, who created the role in the premiere production with the Boston Symphony.  He is simply perfect—a quite beautiful young man with enormous energy and spirit.  He’s a most engaging scalawag.

Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling sings Solveig, the pure and faithful woman who, like Penelope, patiently waits a lifetime for the return of her errant love.  Ms. Tilling’s beautiful voice finds its ideal showcase in “Solveig’s Song” where she pledges to wait however-so long till they meet again—even if that’s only in heaven.  The sweet purity of her voice fills the moment with utter serenity.  In the vocalise passages she becomes a very lark.

Peer’s mother, Åse, is played by Marya Lowry, a small delightful creature.  Åse is an intense mother.  She vacillates between vigorously cursing her son for the lying, irresponsible, misbehaving bad-boy that he is—and desperately adoring and defending him.  Ms. Lowry  captures both the humor and the pathos.  She nails it!

Ibsen’s play is full of strange symbols and ill-defined spiritual figures.  One of these is The Button Moulder, who goes ‘round the world collecting souls—not those good enough for heaven or bad enough for hell—just the great mass of undistinguished, ordinary souls.  These must go back into the melting-pot to be remade.  Robert Walsh plays this role with great authority.  His voice could almost be that of God. 

Another mystery-figure is The Bøyg, a sort of shape-shifting Norse troll.  Will Lyman gives his rich cavernous voice to this unseen spirit, who enigmatically advises Peer to be true to his Self.  The Bøyg is like the Tar-baby:  you can’t get away from it, you can’t get over it, you can’t get around it.  Peer escapes only due to the prayers of the distant Solveig.

Peer Gynt always had an eye for a pretty girl.  He was made an outlaw for decamping with another man’s bride on her wedding day.  In his flight through the forested mountains he meets a strange Woman in Green—who turns out to be the daughter of the local Troll King.  Carolyn Lawton makes this role delightfully lusty.  She flirts with an audience member before leading Peer into the play’s most famous scene—The Hall of the Mountain King. 

Risher Reddick makes this barbaric underground monarch the show’s most comic  delight.  With tiny puppet legs he seems just a smidgen of his actual height, and he’s  riot.  He even teases Maestro Stéphane Denève about the spelling of his name.  “I’ll call your diacritical marks and raise you an umlaut!”  As they  discuss whether Peer must marry the (suddenly pregnant) troll princess the entire chorus devolves into a chaotic mob of jibbering trolls and imps.

Years of adventure pass, and we find Peer fabulously wealthy—from all sorts of immoral enterprises.  (Ibsen had him engaging in the slave trade and arms dealing.)  His colleagues steal everything and abandon him in the North-African desert.  Ever the survivor, Peer steals a horse and a robe and turban and enters a Bedouin camp where he is mistaken for an infallible prophet.  

And he meets the beautiful princess Anitra, who dances for him.  Kortney Adams gives us a quite voluptuous Anitra.  Her famous dance begins very like Salome’s seductive “seven-veils” number but comically evolves into almost vaudeville.  In Ibsen’s original Anitra knows of course that, as a woman, she has no soul.  When Peer “the Prophet” offers to give her one she shrugs and says, “that would be nice, but actually I think I’d rather have that opal in your turban”.  She is just as much a slave to selfish materialism as is Peer Gynt.

Daniel Berger-Jones gives us a stalwart blacksmith and a very looney head of a mad-house in Cairo.

The last, but certainly not least member of the Concert Theatre Works Company is the Norwegian master fiddler Vidar Skrede.  He plays the Hardanger fiddle.  This unusual instrument is double-strung;  that is it has strings under the normal fiddle strings.  These vibrate sympathetically, and lend a distinctive Norse flavor to the music.  He drifts among the scenes, adding a lovely folk-tale feel to everything.

The St. Louis Symphony, with director Stéphane Denève, interpret Grieg’s music with their usual perfection.  All in all it’s a memorable presentation of a very great work of music and theater.

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