Showing posts with label Diana Montague. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Diana Montague. Show all posts

Sunday, 20 December 2015

Eugene Onegin, Royal Opera, 19 December 2015


Olga (Oksana Volkova), Eugene Onegin (Dmitri Hvorostovsky), and Tatyana (Nicole Car)
Images: Bill Cooper/ROH
 
Royal Opera House

Tatyana – Nicole Car
Eugene Onegin – Dmitri Hvorostovsky
Young Tatyana – Emily Ranford
Mme Larina – Diana Montague
Filipyevna – Catherine Wyn Rogers
Olga – Oksana Volkova
Peasant Singer – Elliot Goldie
Young Onegin – Tom Shale-Coates
Lensky – Michael Fabiano
Monsieur Triquet – Jean-Paul Fouchécourt
Captain – David Shipley
Zaletsky – James Platt
Guillot – Luke Price
Prince Gremin – Ferruccio Furlanetto

Kasper Holten (director)
Mia Stensgaard (set designs)
Katrina Lindsay (costumes)
Wolfgang Göbbel (lighting)
59 Productions (video)
Signe Fabricius (choreography)

Royal Opera Chorus and Extra Chorus (chorus master: Renata Balsadonna)
Dancers
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Semyon Bychkov (conductor)
 
 
 

The first revival of Kasper Holten’s Royal Opera production of Eugene Onegin (reviewed here the first time around) brought one major advantage, undoubtedly worth the visit to Covent Garden alone, namely the conducting of Semyon Bychkov – and, of course, alongside that the playing of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. Vocally, it was for me far more of a mixed bag, although the audience seemed wildly enthusiastic. As for the staging itself, I was less convinced than last time. There remains a good deal to have one think – presumably that was the reason for the sadly predictable display from the house’s first-night animal-noises department – but the changes made, combined with lesser acting strength, above all in the title role, sometimes makes for a confusing evening dramatically.
 

Young Tatyana (Emily Ranford) with her
elder self
 
 
 
The central idea of memory is a good one; it is, after all, the work’s own. The bookish Tatyana receives her inspiration through recollection and the haunting of the present – or, at times, perhaps the future – by the central pair’s younger selves has considerable effect. It would have more, however, were there more dramatic commitment on Dmitri Hvorostovksy’s part; especially before the interval, he seemed content merely to stand and sing. Moreover, his ‘double’ lacks the charisma of Tatyana’s. The production offers confusion of its own; it is, for example, unclear – and not, I think, in a productive fashion – why the elder Tatyana sings the Letter Scene to her younger self. Would it not make more sense if singers and ‘doubles’ swapped roles as appropriate (not the actual artists, of course, but they could surely don younger and older ‘appearance’ and costumes). Memory can play tricks, but I am not sure that is the point being made here; perhaps it is, and I missed it.


More fundamentally, though, I felt more strongly than last time the loss of what is surely the underlying theme, even if involuntarily so on the composer’s part, of the opera. This is a staging whose heterosexuality would warm the heart of Vladimir Putin. Perhaps that allows greater agency on Tatyana’s part; I was especially intrigued by thinking of her writing her drama as a counterpart to the ‘masculine’ – and, rightly so, whatever the uncomprehending complaints one heard, often from people who know not their Prague from their Vienna – writing of Holten’s Don Giovanni. That is not strongly pursued, though, partly, I think, as a consequence of less dancing than first time around; the doubles are there enough to irritate, but not long enough now really to make their point fully coherent. That Tatyana is a creation of a gay man – and surely this screams from the score – there is no visual sign at all. More damagingly, though, the principal relationship in the opera, that between Onegin and Lensky, is merely that of the frightened surface. Of the homoeroticism that is less a subtext than the text of a non-ideological understanding of the work we again see nothing. So Lensky is merely jealous of Onegin’s ‘flirtation’ with Olga. That the truest and most deadly love is between the two men is entirely ignored: a retrograde step indeed. I do not think for one moment that this is intended in Russian Minister of Culture fashion, but the likes of Vladimir Medinsky would have little to argue with – which should give pause for thought.
 

Mme Larina (Diana Montague) and Lensky (Michael Fabiano)


It is, then, perhaps a little unreasonable to complain that the singers play their roles in such a way, although I am sure that there was greater psychological depth in the relationship between Simon Keenlyside’s Onegin and Pavol Breslik’s Lensky. Hvorostovsky proved a little more engaged dramatically after the interval, but wooden indeed before, although, given his recent travails, it was impossible not to feel sympathy for him. His singing was often deeply impressive vocally, but that is not necessarily enough; memories of Keenlyside were too strong for me. Mine certainly seemed to be a minority view concerning Michael Fabiano’s Lensky; he received a roar of applause both at the end and – deplorably – during the fifth scene. I could not question Fabiano’s commitment, which put that of almost everyone else to shame. However, for me, the timbre and, more important, the emoting style of his performance did not quite sound ‘right’ for the work and the character, more suited perhaps to the world of Italian verismo. It was, I have to admit, a performance very much in keeping, though, with the heteronormativity of the production; this was, as I said, a committed performance – of a lovelorn young man distraught at the loss of his girl. Nicole Car offered an attractive soprano voice as Tatyana, and acted well too; I did not, though, find a great deal of insight beyond that. Memories of Krassimira Stoyanova, as with those of her Onegin, were not effaced. Oksana Volkova was a decent enough Olga, but again without any particular individuality. The stand-out performance was for me Jean-Paul Fouchécourt’s deliciously stylish Monsieur Triquet, sung with such perfect attention to words and line that I longed to hear it again. Ferruccio Furlanetto’s Prince Gremin was a little rough around the vocal edges at times, but still interesting to hear. Diana Montague as Mme Larina and Catherine Wyn Rogers as Filipyevna shone as last time. The choral singing was excellent too, save – and here some of the soloists were at fault too – for a few too many discrepancies between stage and pit.

 
Tatyana and Prince Gremin (Ferruccio Furlanetto)

It was, however, as I started by saying, in the pit that the greatest honours lay. Bychkov had the orchestra sound – as it always does under him – as one of the greatest in the world, utterly responsive to his touch. The strings were febrile and warmly Romantic, the utter antithesis of any absurd ‘period’ affectations; the woodwind were as full of character as I have ever heard in this work. Implacable brass at full throttle might almost have been from St Petersburg. Rubato, especially the lingering at the end of phrases, was greater than one often hears, always with its own justification, always having one sit up and listen, both to savour the moment and to breathe out when the story resumed. Broader tempo variations were again well calculated, dramatically convincing. There was some breathtakingly soft playing – for instance, the ravishing sonic cushion for M. Triquet’s final lines – which could not have stood in greater, more tellingly intimate contrast with the Fatal climaxes. Bychkov understands what is and what is not ‘symphonic’ in Tchaikovsky’s score – and communicated it in what, Daniel Barenboim notwithstanding, is probably the best-conducted, certainly the most orchestrally variegated, performance of Eugene Onegin I have heard.

 



Wednesday, 2 July 2014

The Turn of the Screw, Opera Holland Park, 1 July 2014


Holland Park

The Governess – Ellie Laugharne
Peter Quint – Brenden Gunnell
Mrs Grove – Diana Montague
Miss Jessel – Elin Pritchard
The Prologue – Robin Tritschler
Miles – Dominic Lynch
Flora – Rosie Lomas
Annilese Miskimmon (director)
Leslie Travers (designs)
Mark Jonathan (lighting)

City of London Sinfonia
Steuart Bedford (conductor)

The absurdity of last year’s Britten over-saturation seemed to prove to the converted that their hero conquered all; to the rest of us, it confirmed us in our scepticism or, better, selectivity. Opera Holland Park did well to defer its first staging of a Britten opera until this year, and did better still to select The Turn of the Screw, by some distance the finest of the composer’s operas. It is not entirely free of the mere cleverness that bedevils many of Britten’s other scores, but the commands of construction and form keep that and other shortcomings more or less in check throughout. Indeed, the dialectic between the serial turnings of the screw and the development of the story, the impedimental and yet ultimately generative grit thereby ensured, are as much part and parcel of the drama as the ghost story itself.

A successful staging should recognise that as much as a successful performance; at the very least, it will not stand in the way. Anniliese Miskimmon’s production seems to me to do just that. It provides space for the score to ‘turn’, not in a hands-off abdication of responsibility, but with stage direction that treads a properly uneasy – and properly productive – line between freedom and determinism, an antimony lying at the root not only of many a philosophical problem, but equally many a dramatic problem. Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron is surely the operatic exemplar in that respect, but Britten’s great respect for the Austrian master (as well as for his pupil, Berg, whose closed forms in Wozzeck have such profound implications for The Turn of the Screw) tends in any case to underpin, audibly and visually, his stronger works. What might on occasion therefore seem an uncertainty as to how the Governess is reacting, what she will do, is actually better understood as an indication of the extent to which she is trapped. Likewise with the premonitions of past and future, the latter presented by the directorial innovation of an old-fashioned, blackboarded schoolroom in Leslie Travers’s excellent designs, starkly atmospheric, with room for the drama to emerge from between the cracks. The regimented processions of schoolboys seek not, or at least so it seemed to me, to hammer home a point, but to present a possibility for reflection. Who are they? Are they ‘real’, whatever that might mean? Do they evoke a past, whether the work’s or the composer’s, a present, or a future? Again, they work in tandem with the score.

It is more or less impossible for us, especially in the light of recent and ongoing legal cases, not to pick up on the barely suppressed paedophilia in Britten’s opera. That is not shied away from, especially in the case when Miles, quite unsensationally, apparently quite ‘naturally’, removes his shirt, ready for his bath. But again, the point is not hammered home; it is perfectly possible for a production successfully to highlight this element, as indeed did David McVicar’s superlative ENO staging, but it is not the only way. Here, the space left for reflection enabled the possibility at least – it is largely up to the audience member whether to take it up – of asking him- or herself the difficult questions concerning personal and social complicity. To what extent is ‘childhood’ an adult, even voyeuristic, construct? Again, the construction of the opera, just as much as biographical knowledge, suggests answers that many will not want to hear.

Musical performance is most crucial of all, of course, in enabling the heightened state at which we might be compelled to ask ourselves such questions. I was slightly disappointed – and surprised to be slightly disappointed – at Steuart Bedford’s conducting of the first act. It certainly was not bad, and I suspect that there was an element of becoming used to the acoustic: both for the performers, with an audience, and for us in the audience too. But everything seemed tighter after the interval. The cruel, glistening beauty of Britten’s score registered more powerfully in the City of London Sinfonia’s now-expert performance; so too did the deadly constructionism of the composer’s musico-dramatic method. I should very much have liked to hear the first act again, if only to discover whether a second performance would have emerged the more tightly, or whether indeed the failing had been mine.

At the heart of the drama stood Ellie Laugharne’s Governess. Her helplessness and her goodness – not saccharine, but human – came across powerfully indeed, torn as she was between incompatible, maybe impossible, paths to take. Brenden Gunnell’s Peter Quint was eerily, at times frighteningly seductive: all too easy to succumb to, all too difficult to pin down with simplistic oppositions between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’. As his accomplice – or is she that at all? – Elin Pritchard’s Miss Jessel added a feminine complication that seemed intriguingly wilder. The compromised ‘normality’ of Diana Montague’s Mrs Grose registered with startling immediacy, little short of a master-class in the role. Robin Tritschler’s Prologue contributed ambivalence and ambiguity from the outset: perhaps not an unreliable narrator, but one we at least asked ourselves whether we should trust. As the children, Dominic Lynch and Rosie Lomas both impressed greatly. Lynch’s Miles conjured up just the right sort of all-too-pure innocence, disconcerting and provocative in context, as surely it was for Britten. Lomas’s Flora offered an interesting foil, slightly controlling, productively poised between ‘childhood’ and something else. It is difficult, of course, to discern precisely where personal performance ends and directorial conception begins; but that is the hallmark of a fine opera production. This is certainly one of the finest performances I have witnessed at Opera Holland Park.     
 




Tuesday, 12 February 2013

Eugene Onegin, Royal Opera, 11 February 2013

Eugene Onegin (Simon Keenlyside)
Images: Bill Cooper
Royal Opera House
 
Tatyana – Krassimira Stoyanova
Eugene Onegin – Simon Keenlyside
Young Tatyana – Vigdis Hentze Olsen
Mme Larina – Diana Montague
Filipyevna – Kathleen Wilkinson
Olga – Elena Maximova
Peasant Singer – Elliot Goldie
Young Onegin – Thom Rackett
Lensky – Pavol Breslik
Monsieur Triquet – Christophe Mortagne
Captain – Michel de Souza
Zaletsky – Jihoon Kim
Guillot – Luke Price
Prince Gremin – Peter Rose

Kasper Holten (director)
Mia Stensgaard (set designs)
Katrina Lindsay (costumes)
Wolfgang Göbbel (lighting)
Leo Warner (video)
Lawrence Watson (animation)
Signe Fabricius (choreography)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Robin Ticciati (conductor)


Kasper Holten’s new production of Eugene Onegin, his first staging for the Royal Opera House, was in many ways excellent, an auspicious debut indeed. Unfortunately, it was truly let down by some of the most lacklustre conducting I have heard at Covent Garden. Whilst an interesting, intriguing evening was still to be pieced together from production and singing, it would be idle to pretend that Robin Ticciati’s jejune performance did not detract significantly from the experience. To start with, it seemed as though Ticciati’s reading might prove interestingly different. The balletic side to Tchaikovsky seemed on the verge of shining through, the woodwind section of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House offering sparkling playing, and what a nice change it made for once to hear the harp! Alas, it soon emerged that those advantages had been achieved largely by default. It became impossible to ignore the thinness of the string sound, despite a sizeable number of strings in the pit. That was not on account of any ineptitude of execution by the players, who remained polished throughout, but because Ticciati seemingly wished to elicit the sound of a middle-ranking chamber orchestra from one of the best opera house bands in the world. Fair enough if you simply have to put up with a small number of strings, or even if you are playing in a small house, but such was not of course the case here. More damagingly still, the performance dragged, at times interminably so. Without any sense of life – not to be confused with alleged ‘airiness’ – and without any sense of Tchaikovsky’s tormented soul, the only signs of anything dramatic being at stake had to be gleaned elsewhere: a great pity. Let me be clear. This was not about ‘intimacy’, about approaching Tchaikovsky’s ‘scenes’ in the manner in which they were first performed at the Moscow Conservatoire – although the perversity did have something in common, albeit significantly magnified, with the attempt by Ticciati’s mentor, Sir Simon  Rattle, to present an ‘intimate’ Carmen upon the vast stage of Salzburg’s Grosses Festspielhaus. Nor was it about actual speed; I genuinely have no idea whether the performance was fast, slow, or middling, by the clock. What I do know is that it dragged, despite sometimes being unduly driven, because Ticciati proved hopelessly incapable of finding a pulse, variable or otherwise. Instead of intimacy and interesting if unusual tempi, we had mere thinness and tedium.

 
Tatyana (Krassimira Stoyanova)
Holten’s production, on the other hand, offered what was often a searching exploration of memory. Inscribed into the score, its visual manifestation was effected by a number of means. Most obvious, but far from the only example, was the use of doubles, a young Tatyana and a young Onegin, to observe, to remind, to haunt. Mirroring the structure – some might say the lopsidedness – of Tchaikovsky’s drama, the young Tatyana is often seen during the first four scenes, whereas her counterpart does not emerge until the older, wiser Onegin appears in St Petersburg. The two young figures meet only in the final scene, offering a glimpse of what might have been, but what is now cruelly denied. Or should that read, 'wisely denied'? For in a fascinating gloss, Prince Gremin appears in that scene too: no longer a mere doddery if noble old fool, he too will have to learn to live with the truth. I can imagine that some might have found the histrionic display of the young Tatyana during the Letter Scene a little much, but by the same token, it seems a valid response to one side at least of the music – and Tchaikovsky’s character. It does not last very long, moreover, and more important seems to be the slippage between the two Tatyanas: who is writing? Who is truly affected? Is this for once an attempt to construct, with all the potential for failure that might entail, a character who is more than Tchaikovsky’s self-projection?

 
Colour is used to great effect: an especially telling moment is the infection through lighting and film of the outside world – or is it again a projection, this time from Tatyana herself? – with Tatyana’s scarlet, following the Letter Scene? Has she been rash, to put it mildly? Is this foreboding? Does her uneasy relationship to the outside world doom her to an unhappy, unsociable life? Is this where it all goes wrong, the moment to which her elder self will perforce return, time and time again? The relationship between books and memory is of course not a new concept in Onegin productions, but it is a good one, and their presence at Mme Larina’s house, not least in Tatyana’s hands, makes its point well. As time went on, above all in St Petersburg, it was as if Tchaikovsky’s and Pushkin’s reminiscences were straining towards Wagnerian leitmotif. They did not and could not reach it; technique and indeed aspiration are quite different. But I could not help but wonder if Holten’s Wagnerian experience played a role here. If only there could have been some counterpart to that in the conducting, which continued signally to fail to join up the dots. Let us hope that the production will be revived with someone else in the pit. A conductor with whom the Royal Opera House has a strong relationship, such as Semyon Bychkov, who has a fine Onegin recording to his name already? That might really be something.

 
Lensky (Pavol Breslik)
The cast was for the most part excellent too. Krassimira Stoyanova’s Tatyana was beautifully sung, no mere cipher, but a strong, flawed character, uncertain of where she was heading and all the more credible for that. I was a little disconcerted by Simon Keenlyside’s Onegin during the first act; it seemed coarser than I recalled from a few years ago. But dramatic truth gained over ‘mere’ beauty, for this Onegin gained in insight as the work progressed, quite in tandem with the production. As ever, Keenlyside’s way with words, just like Stoyanova’s, was pretty much beyond reproach. Beauty there was aplenty in the honeyed tones of Pavol Breslik, every inch the Romantic poet; his verbal acuity was no less impressive. Holten had elected to downplay, even to ignore, the homoeroticism of the relationship between Onegin and Lensky: a pity, since it so permeates the score, but of course the director had other ideas to explore. Instead we witnessed two young, quite immature men as genuine rivals for the affections or at least the attentions of their women. Olga was finely and richly sung by Elena Maximova, whilst Diana Montague and Kathleen Wilkinson almost stole the show with their equally fine portrayals of Mme Larina and Filipyevna. The only disappointments were an unidiomatic Zaretsky from Jihoon Kim and an intonationally-challenged Triquet from Christophe Mortagne. Peter Rose’s Gremin did everything it should – and more. Likewise the Royal Opera Chorus was on splendid form, for which Renato Balsadonna should once again receive considerable credit.

 

Sunday, 13 November 2011

Eugene Onegin, English National Opera, 12 November 2011

Coliseum

Madame Larina – Diana Montague
Tatiana – Amanda Echalaz
Olga – Claudia Huckle
Filipievna – Catherine Wyn-Rogers
Eugene Onegin – Audun Iversen
Lensky – Toby Spence
Monsieur Triquet – Adrian Thompson
Zaretsky – David Stout
Prince Gremin – Brindley Sherratt
Captain – Paul Napier-Burrows
Peasant Singer – David Newman

Deborah Warner (director)
Tom Pye (designs)
Chloe Obolensky (costumes)
Jean Kalman (lighting)
Kim Brandstrup (choreography)

Chorus and Additional Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Merry)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Edward Gardner (conductor)

Images: Neil Libbert

Was this ENO? Or had I nodded off and slipped into a living Met nightmare? Actually, ‘nightmare’ is too harsh, too interesting, for Deborah Warner’s production of Eugene Onegin, actually conceived, I discovered, as a co-production with the Metropolitan Opera, is just plain dull, a strange throwback to the 1970s or further back still, in which singers sing their lines against a pretty – to some – backdrop in ‘period’ dress that might well have come from a television serial. The ‘period’ in question seems to be slightly later than Pushkin, to no obvious end. Now there is nothing necessarily wrong with ‘traditional’ productions, but this one offered no discernible view upon the work, no discernible insight, save perhaps for a tired, slightly misandrist suggestion that the work might be better off entitled ‘Tatiana Larina’, into the characters and their development, and no discernible provocation or even invitation to think. It is, I think, the first time I have witnessed members of the audience even –  I assure you, I am not making this up – applaud a Coliseum set, in this case as the curtain rose for the third act, obscuring Tchaikovsky's Polonaise. (They indulged in plenty of disruption elsewhere too, a selfish couple seated behind me a particular menace, speaking throughout the performance, unresponsive to the iciest of glares.)

Even from a literalist perspective, there are problems beyond the slight ‘updating’. Once one engages upon such a path, fetishising costumes, scenery, and the like, any deviation tends to stand out like a sore thumb. Thus, whilst a more neutral or suggestive space would doubtless double up without too much trouble for the first three scenes of the first act, we are left wondering in literalist mode why Tatiana appears to sleep in a capacious barn. (It will doubtless be more capacious still in New York.) Child ‘extras’ running around for no particular reason are an irritant; they seem to be a favoured device of the director, her ENO Messiah a case in point. Are not the costumes for the celebration of Tatiana’s name day a little on the dour side for such an occasion? Why does the final scene not appear quite where it ‘should’?

Lensky (Toby Spence)

More serious is the problem alluded to above, whereby Warner’s sympathies seemed only to be elicited by the female characters. It used often to be a critical plaint that the opera should not have been entitled Eugene Onegin; this production, whether by design or by default, comes across as an attempt to revive that view. Everything is centred upon Tatiana. The subtext – at times, it is barely ‘sub-‘ – of Romantic friendship or more between Onegin and Lensky is ignored. Surely it does not take even a leap of the imagination to appreciate how Tchaikovsky would have understood Onegin’s rejection of Tatiana, herself of course in many respects a projection of male homosexuality. To take at face value without any further probing the description of Onegin as an ‘outsider’ seems in this context merely bizarre: would one not at least ask what is meant by ‘outsider’, just as one would in Peter Grimes? The following words surely speak for themselves:

If I had wished to pass my life
within the confines of the family circle,
and benevolent fate had decreed for me
the role of husband and father,
then I should most likely not choose
any bride other than you.
Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Munich production (reviewed here by Jens Laurson) made explicit what might though need not remain implicit. One can remain relatively reticent, though, and still address this central issue of the opera: take Steven Pimlott’s woefully underrated production for Covent Garden, ‘traditional’ in look, but so much more dramatically alert than Warner’s production. Had the action been centred upon Tatiana in especially dramatic, more revisionist, fashion, I am sure that would have been a valid approach, but Warner’s focus seemed more a default setting than anything else.


Onegin (Audun Iversen) and Lensky

There was considerable compensation, however, to be heard from Edward Gardner’s conducting: undoubtedly the best I have heard from him at the Coliseum. If I have been spoilt by my most recent two hearings of the work in the theatre, both conducted by Daniel Barenboim, Gardner nevertheless impressed, Shape and sweep almost unfailingly present. There was a fine swagger to the choral numbers and the dances (in which the dancers made a good impression), which the more intimate moments – insofar as the production permitted them to exist – were executed with tenderness and genuine sympathy. If Gardner’s reading did not quite scintillate in the way that some can, there is plenty of scope for intensification as the run of performances proceeds. He certainly has the ENO Orchestra on fine form, though a few more strings would have been welcome. The chorus, trained by Martin Merry, returned to form too, though all suffered from Martin Pickard’s clunky English translation: if we must do without the Russian text and its inimitable sonorities, then we need a superior substitute.


Toby Spence shone out from the cast. (Lenskys often do.) Though his ardent sincerity was somewhat robbed of context by the production, it nevertheless left its mark. Audun Iversen was likewise hamstrung in the title role, though earlier on, fine English diction notwithstanding, he rarely seemed truly to get inside the part even in musical terms. His performance in the third act heated up nicely, however, so maybe first night nerves were a factor. Amanda Echalaz merely seemed miscast as Tatiana. Her high soprano often seemed thin and disengaged; attempts to compensate skirted dangerously close to Puccini-caricature. Claudia Huckle’s often blowsy Olga struck a discordant note in more than one sense. Adrian Thompson, however, made a fine impression with a sensitive rendition of Monsieur Triquet’s couplets, even if one could have done without the assumed 'French' accent. One dry patch apart, Brindley Sherratt shaped Prince Gremin’s aria well. Catherine Wyn-Rogers and Diana Montague contributed a focus to the roles of Filipievna and Mme Larina that was not always present elsewhere. I could not help wishing that they might be offered a little more to do.

Tatiana (Amanda Echalaz) and Prince Gremin (Brindley Sherratt)

For those weary, then, of Konzept-heavy productions, this Onegin might offer some balm; it is certainly worth hearing for Gardner and Spence. Yet there remains ample room for a more ‘traditional’ production that does not forego interpretation, of whatever variety.

The performance on 23 November will be recorded by BBC Radio 3 for subsequent broadcast.

Recommended performances on CD and DVD: