Wozzeck, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - harrowing tale told in brutal-tender music and thousands of photographs

Before last night's still-shocking saga of a downtrodden soul began, Southbank Artistic Director Mark Ball came on to tell us that while concerts were mere events, Multitudes, "our multi-arts festival powered by orchestral music", was offering experiences. Rachel Halliburton, who reviewed Bach's The Art of Fugue with acrobats, would agree; Bernard Hughes, though, found Messiaen's Turangalîla ruined by a "tiresome film". I felt the same last year about Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony burdened with a very tangential animation by the usually wondrous William Kentridge.

At his best, Kentridge offers overload in the best sense: his English National Opera production of Berg's Lulu was so rich that I had to go twice. I wish there were the same opportunity for this one-off presentation of the composer's earlier, 1925 masterpiece Wozzeck, based on Georg Büchner's extraordinarily modern, visionary play. left in fragments at his death in 1837, about a soldier persecuted so badly (and specifically) by society that he kills the thing he loves, his woman Marie, and then himself. 

Image

Preliminaries looked unpromising, even worrying. On the big screen were photos of the main characters, definitely not the singers, including Wozzeck, not a soldier but a near-invisible worker on the fringes of metropolitan life, and the Captain as a banker, perhaps, a disagreeable-looking figure at the other end of the social scale. The "Wretches Like Us" –  it's a quotation from the opera, but I've left it off the Southbank Centre's restyled title, since this is totally Berg's work and "us" is not, of course, the audience – seemed to be suffering from some kind of horrible skin condition. Once Edward Gardner lifted his baton and magical-seductive sounds immediately poured with precision from the London Philharmonic Orchestra, eyes were riveted on Peter Hoare nailing yet another characterisation, every note in place, every semi-comic gesture meaningful, pitted against Stéphane Degout's frighteningly still Wozzeck (Degout pictured above with Annette Dasch). 

It quickly became apparent, though, that Ilya Shagalov is a very creative video artist whose use of thousands of photos really deserves the often-used term "visionary". It's a pity the more visceral of them weren't caught by the hall photographer. UPDATE: for debate on the IMO creative use of AI, see the discussion in the comments.

Shagalov's visions are as fractured and disturbing as Wozzeck's, as bizarre as the unreal nature of Berg's queasy setting and Büchner's text. Locations shift within scenes; unintended substitutes like the high-rise posh restaurant for the street where Captain and Doctor babble, Wozzeck later hovering on the outside, or the container site for the single barracks room at the end of Act Two, are compiled in multiple shots. 

The hospital experimentation Wozzeck undergoes to take money for his woman was almost unwatchable, but no violation of the horrible things being discussed. There's virtuosity in the most rapid flick-through of shots, but it always suits the music. The only moving image is the still surface of the lake where Wozzeck has murdered Marie and drowned. A wood at night, with negative images, and the blood-red moon are faithfully rendered. Faces livid with rosacea become waxy-white, then mannequin-blank. Any liberties too far? Just one, for me: the fact that the child who witnesses such adult baseness and violence is unborn; how does that make sense of the final scene, where a boy is told his mother is dead? A general recurrence, or what? The crows and birds that have dominated take over here; a small group of Tiffin Boys in school uniform delivered the children's cruel games.

Image

Musically, it was all not only faultless but went further than any Wozzeck I've seen or heard, with the exception of Abbado's in Vienna (experienced on film only). Gardner, who conducted Carrie Cracknell's extraordinary ENO production back in 2013, had total control of the nightmarishly difficult textural shifts, maintaining perfect balances within the orchestra that brought out Berg's still-Wagnerian leitmotifs in sometimes unexpected places as well as between orchestra and voices. The pub dance band (pictured above) was heard with exceptional clarity. Gardner's singers were as much with him as his incredible players. Degout was as ideal a combination of the lyrical and the scary as you'll ever get in the role. Annette Dasch might not have been tonally lustrous, but captured every nuance as debased, terrified Marie, strongly offset by Kitty Whately's unkind neighbour Margret; when there was less going on in the physical performances, as with Brindley Sherratt's Doctor and Christopher Ventris's Drum Major, the screen images hold us totally. 

Every bit of casting proved strong, down to Adrian Thompson's Fool (a kind of tar monster attached to Wozzeck in the nightclub of the film) and Callum Thorpe's First Apprentice (various drag queens the visual equivalent). The London Voices cut like a razor in the club before haunting us in sleep humming. 

I can honestly say I've never seen anything quite like it. With a lesser master in control of the film, it might have gone horribly wrong; what we had was a total fusion of a kind unknown, I'd hazard a guess, to any opera "production" before this. It has to be seen and heard again. Only one complaint: the online-only programme was inadequate; it's disrespectful not to provide biographies of the singers, and I wanted to know more about Shagalov as well as the woman who shared the stage with him at the end (it turned out to be Nina Guseva, not mentioned in the text).

• Multitudes at the Southbank Centre continues until 30 April
• More opera reviews on theartsdesk