First Night of the Proms – Hyde/BBC SO/Stasevska: Vaughan Williams, Poulenc, MacMillan, and Sibelius, 30 July 2021

Royal Albert Hall

Vaughan Williams: Serenade to Music
Poulenc: Organ Concerto in G minor
James MacMillan: When Soft Voices Die (world premiere)
Sibelius: Symphony no.2 in D major, op.43


Elizabeth Llewellyn (soprano)

Jess Dandy (contralto)

Allan Clayton (tenor)

Michael Mofidian (bass-baritone)

BBC Singers (chorus-master: Martin Fitzpatrick)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Dalia Stasevska (conductor)

Cards on the table. Poulenc aside, I have not previously been a great fan of the music of any of the composers featured in this year’s First Night of the Proms. It does one good, though, to test one’s preferences and prejudices; in any case, this was a moment of return for which I wanted, even needed, to be present, almost irrespective of repertoire. Last year saw a few Proms at the end of the season, albeit with no audience. I was not in London for the summer of 2019, so it was not far off three years since I had lest ventured to the Royal Albert Hall. This was a lovely concert for which to return.


And what piece could be more apt as an opener than Vaughan Williams’s Shakespearean hymn to music? (Whatever my ambivalence toward some of Vaughan Williams’s output, I have loved this piece since first hearing it as a schoolboy.) Its London pedigree—premiered here in 1938 by Sir Henry Wood, for whose diamond jubilee as a conductor it was composed—made the Serenade to Music all the more apt. This was a performance imbued with delight from its opening chords, Vaughan Williams’s orchestration and later vocal writing resounding perfectly through the hall’s challenging acoustic. Dalia Stasevska’s direction, untroubled by drab English tradition, drew from the BBC Symphony Orchestra sonorities and languor it was difficult not to think of as in the line of Ravel, with whom the composer had studied three decades earlier. Stasevska’s shaping of contours and climaxes was spot on, permitting words and above all music to speak and sing for themselves. Especially memorable (for me) were duetting arabesques between Elizabeth Llewellyn and leader Igor Yuzefovich; the deep summons of ‘affections dark as Erebus’ by Michael Mofidian; Jess Dandy’s contralto call, ‘Music! Hark!’; and the final choral echo of Llewellyn’s ‘sweet harmony’, bathed in sweet orchestral warmth. There were no weak links, though, in a magical performance.


Also written in 1938 was Poulenc’s Organ Concerto, here given an excellent performance by Daniel Hyde, the BBC SO and Stasevska. The splendour of its opening is quite different in nature, of course, yet offered another fine Albert Hall moment. Registration was always well chosen for score and instrument alike. Hyde rightly played his part straight, as did strings whose imploring sweetness seemed to prefigure Poulenc’s later sacred music and even the Dialogues des Carmélites. Wagnerian harmonies were soon put to decidedly anti-Wagnerian use, posing questions rather than answers, Poulenc’s mock-Bachian gestures relishing the fairground of barely suppressed desire. For there was serious questing at the heart of this performance, whatever the masks Poulenc cunningly employed, wit and poignancy two sides of the same coin.


Co-commissioned by the BBC and Help Musicians, When Soft Voices Die, ames MacMillan’s setting of two poems by Shelley, emerged as a workable companion piece for the Vaughan Williams Serenade, using as it does four soloists and orchestra (no chorus). Performances were as committed and variegated as elsewhere, Llewellyn recalling the virtues of her Puccini roles. As for the piece itself, there was craftsmanship in MacMillan’s setting and no denying his taste in verse. Nevertheless, conservatism aside—Vaughan Williams and Poulenc seemed almost avant-garde by comparison—the overall sense was of anonymous proficiency.

Finally Sibelius, with whose symphonies I have long struggled. I shall not bore you with that now, other than to say this was the first performance both to convince and move me. Perhaps it was simply the right time for this music to come knocking on the door, but surely it was more than that: testament to another fine performance, flexible yet directed. by the BBC SO and Stasevska. It was striking that, even to a long-term sceptic, the opening of the first movement seemed to speak as if an old friend. Balletic lightness of touch recalled Tchaikovsky and, beyond him, perhaps more surprisingly, the orchestral writing of Mendelssohn. Not that that precluded the ardent and majestic where required, quite the contrary. Soon I could only wonder what my problem with this music had been. Pizzicato cellos and double basses in the second movement both picked up from the first and contrasted with it. Mendelssohn again came to mind as a processional forerunner, this time the Italian Symphony, though of course the music developed very much in its own, again not un-Tchaikovskian way. At any rate, rhetoric in performance seemed designed to be understood in terms of such inheritance. I am not sure I quite appreciated the movement’s lengths, but that is doubtless my problem; after all, some others still feel that way about Schubert. A third movement full of nervous energy, woodwind in its trio a necessary contrast in many ways, prepared the way for a finale that combined strong senses both of expectation and culmination. We were nearly there, that is, but there was some way yet to go. Stasevska imparted a wondrous sense of inevitability and ultimately triumph to this final leg of the journey. I may not quite be a Sibelius (or Vaughan Williams) convert yet, but greater curiosity has certainly been piqued. Just please do not ask me to sit through The Lark Ascending…

Manon Lescaut, Opera Holland Park, 4 June 2019

Holland Park

Images: © Robert Workman

Manon Lescaut – Elizabeth Llewellyn

Lescaut – Paul Carey Jones

Des Grieux – Peter Auty

Geronte di Ravoir – Stephen Richardson

Edmondo – Stephen Aviss

Singer – Ellie Edmonds

Dancing Master – John Wood

Innkeeper, Sergeant of the Royal Archers – Alistair Sutherland

Backing Singers – Hannah Boxall, Susie Buckle, Lara Rebekah Harvey, Ayaka Tanimoto

Shadow Manons – Angelica Barroga, Isabella Martinez, Hanan Mugga

Karolina Sofulak (director)
George Johnson-Leigh (designs)

Rory Beaton (lighting)

Tim Claydon (choreography)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Richard Harker)

City of London Sinfonia

Peter Robinson (conductor)

Manon Lescaut is a curious opera. Its protracted genesis and sometimes unsatisfactory dramaturgy seem ultimately to work against it, whatever the attempted solution. A Leipzig revival of its original, 1893 version suggested that reinstatement of the original first-act finale was certainly not the answer. I am yet to be convinced that it can be made to work, though I shall happily be proved wrong. Perhaps Puccini’s greatest devotees feel the same way I should about La finta semplice, Feuersnot, or Die Feen. The operatic repertoire is full of works, after all, whose potential has been incompletely realised; we do what we can with them and should often be the poorer without them. The gap between potential and realisation can even prove part of a work’s fascination, especially in a knowing production and performance.

Elizabeth Llewellyn (Manon Lescaut) and Shadow Manons

Alas, Karolina Sofulak’s production, ambition notwithstanding, does not come across as engaging with quite enough of those apparently intractable problems – and a little too often seems unclear. The 1960s updating works well enough in theory and has its moments in practice too. A society preoccupied with style and with a strong tension between reaction and liberation has obvious parallels with the eighteenth-century world of the Abbé Prévost. Where Sofulak’s production does score is in trying to make something of the heroine. If only we had something of Manon and Des Grieux’s time in Paris, she might come across as more fleshed out. (Puccini continued to entertain such a possibility for a decade.) Instead, Sofulak offers us a nightclub singer and entertainer who attempts – I think – to take responsibility for her own career, to wrest its control from the lowlifes around her. The idea seems to me a good one; the problem lies, perhaps as with the work, in its partial, confusing realisation. There is nothing wrong with making an audience work, asking it to fill in certain aspects; not everything can be portrayed on stage or indeed in the pit. The clashes between ‘original’ and new setting, though, often seem arbitrary rather than productive. By the time one realises what is happening in the fourth act, that Manon is making her escape from this world, abandoning her lover too, one may have ceased to care. A keener sense of place, even if place explicitly not created, would have helped. One does not need to see Le Havre or the bizarre ‘desert’ outside New Orleans, but if much is to remain the same, either abstraction or knowing, purposive infidelity may need to come across more strongly. Perhaps, though, I was missing the point and might feel differently on a second viewing; it has happened before and will surely happen again.

That difficulty with caring or with otherwise feeling truly involved is part of the work’s problem, at least for many of us. Too often, I found myself wishing that this were Lulu or, somewhere in between, Boulevard Solitude. Perhaps, though, that did credit to much of the musical performance. If, in my heart of hearts, I might prefer a few more strings for Puccini, I could hardly fault the City of London Sinfonia under Peter Robinson, and do not wish to try. There were a few moments when pit and stage fell out of sync in the first act, but that can happen in the finest of houses. More to the point, Robinson and his players pointed up nicely the character of each act, permitting one’s ears to draw all manner of connections between Puccini’s roots, his future, and his influence and affinities. Wagner loomed increasingly large, but so did devices Puccini would adopt more successfully in subsequent works, as well as sounds one might have thought stolen from Debussy, Stravinsky, even Poulenc – save for the fact that, if anything, it must have been the other way around.

Lescaut (Paul Carey Jones), Manon, Geronte (Stephen Richardson)

Elizabeth Llewellyn unquestionably did what she could to have one care about Manon and her plight. If the character remains unsatisfactory, that is in no way to be attributed to Llewellyn, whose typically intelligent, sympathetic performance rose far above the vocal difficulties recent laryngitis occasionally revealed. Paul Carey Jones and Stephen Richardson brought similar depth to their roles as Lescaut and Geronte respectively, again supplying as much implied context as anyone could reasonably ask. If Peter Auty’s performance as Des Grieux proved somewhat generalised and gestural, there could be no doubting his enthusiasm. The Holland Park Chorus combined such enthusiasm with greater precision – vocal and staged; so too did other members of the cast, Stephen Aviss and Alastair Sutherland making a particular favourable impression.

Carmen, English National Opera, 21 November 2012

(sung in English)

Carmen – Ruxandra Donose

Don José – Adam Diegel
Escamillo – Leigh Melrose
Micaëla – Elizabeth Llewellyn
Zuniga – Graeme Danby
Moralès – Duncan Rock
Frasquita – Rhian Loise
Mercédès – Madeleine Shaw
Dancairo – Geoffrey Dolton
Remendado – Alan Rhys-Jenkins
Lillas Pastia – Dean Street
Girl – Anya Truman

Calixto Bieito (director)

Joan Antonio Recchi (assistant director)

Alfons Flores (set designs)
Mercè Paloma (costumes)
Bruno Poet (lighting) 

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

 

A triumph for ENO! I suspected that Carmen would prove eminently suited to Calixto Bieito’s talents, and so it proved. Shorn of any ‘picturesque’ pandering – remember Francesco Zambello and her donkey? – what we saw here is perfectly attuned to Bizet’s resolutely unsentimental score. Spanish heat is for once no cliché; instead, we feel that heat almost unmediated, its oppression, its sexiness, its glory, its desperation. This is a more unsparing depiction of 1970s Spain than anything one would see in Almodóvar. Life is brutal: Carmen seems much more a product of her society, defiant and yet unable to transcend it, than we tend to imagine. The tawdry car-park world of gypsy trading is not romanticised; it does not necessarily appear better – or for that matter, worse – than that of the army. The figure of the abused girl is all the more disturbing for the lack of exaggeration. Ruthless realism, as in the opera, is the order of the day. We always think of Don José as a mummy’s boy; here his most erotic moment is the lingering, passionate kiss with Micaëla – a far more rounded, credible character than a mere angel of goodness – when she passes on the kiss from his mother.  Escamillo is no deus ex machina; he is cut down to size as twentieth-century ‘heroes’ tend to be. The marking of the bullring in the fourth act circumscribes the boundaries for the action in a fashion more chilling than I have ever experienced. The crowd has turned to us, has made its own entertainment – shaping of bull and toreadors from the men available is a masterstroke – and has disappeared. Now we – or they – are alone. Fate, as foretold in the cards, is played out. Hesitance prolongs the agony, yet the desert bleakness – social, scenic, existential – of the drama is in a sense the true protagonist here. Franco or his successors? Is there that much of a difference, especially under the present regime?

 

Ryan Wigglesworth conducted as fine an account of the score as I can recall hearing in the theatre, infinitely more subtle than the bandmaster performance of Antonio Pappano at Covent Garden, let alone the perverse manufactured intimacy of Simon Rattle in Salzburg. Rhythms were precise yet never – save, perhaps at the very opening – did the score seem harried. Colour was painted vividly; at times, this might almost have been Ravel. And Wigglesworth knew when to hang back, especially during the opening of the fourth act. There was nothing arbitrary to this; the score was not pulled around. Rather, dramatic tension was screwed up in tandem with the action on stage. Throughout the ENO Orchestra played magnificently, the performance from the chorus – and children’s chorus – equally faultless.

 

Ruxandra Donose made an excellent Carmen: vulnerable but not too vulnerable, strong, but not too strong, complex, conflicted, and at times devastatingly alluring. Grame Danby and Duncan Rock made great impressions as Zuniga and Moralès respectively; it would be well-nigh impossible to distinguish between the distinction of their vocal and acting performances. Elizabeth Llewellyn was a touching Micaëla, though here at least as much as anywhere else, one regretted the lack of the original French (not that there was anything intrinsically wrong with Christopher Cowell’s valiant translation). Leigh Melrose sang well enough as Escamillo, but his portrayal lacked the requisite virility – even given the concerns of Bieito’s staging. He seemed somewhat miscast. The only real fly in the ointment, however, was Adam Diegel’s Don José. Uncertain of intonation, whether through excess vibrato or simple poor tuning, this was a performance whose stiffness seemed anything but dramatically motivated; stylistically it hovered at its best between Puccini and musical theatre. Such, however, was the power of the ensemble performance that it was difficult to mind too much.

 

This was the best performance I have seen at ENO for quite some time – and the best performance of Carmen I have ever seen. More Bieito and more Wigglesworth, please!

(Pictures shoud follow when available: later today, I hope.)

Così fan tutte, Opera Holland Park, 8 June 2012

Holland Park

Fiordiligi – Elizabeth Llewellyn

Dorabella – Julia Riley

Ferrando – Andrew Staples

Guglielmo – Dawid Kimberg

Despina – Joana Sears

Alfonso – Nicholas Garrett

Harry Fehr (director)
Alex Eales (designs)
Colin Grenfell (lighting)

Opera Holland Park Chorus
City of London Sinfonia

Thomas Kemp (conductor)

Are my expectations too high when it comes to Mozart’s operas in general, and to Così fan tutte in general? Probably. Should they be? Certainly. For the problem remains, as I have doubtless said far too many times before, Mozart’s music, and not just his operas, requires but one thing: perfection. It is the most unsparing music of all, with nowhere, but nowhere, to hide. Every note must be considered and sounded both in itself and in connection to every other. Place a wrong or even slightly excessive accent upon a single note and the fault will be glaringly magnified; misjudge a tempo, which is not to say that there is only one ‘correct’ tempo, and the entire apple-cart will be upset. However, conduct Così fan tutte like Sir Colin Davis – or rather, as Sir Colin Davis – and it is an experience that will remain with an audience for the rest of its life, opening doors one had never expected to be there in the first place.

Yes, the comparison is odious, but Thomas Kemp is no Colin Davis. I have heard worse, most obviously from the aggressively ‘authenticke’ brigade; Kemp did not seem actively to be trying to make Mozart’s music sound unpleasant. Nevertheless, on this evidence, he is not a conductor who could claim any particular or even general sympathy with Mozart. The opening bars of the Overture were taken far too fast; thereafter, far too many numbers never hit upon the just tempo. (It is worth repeating at this point that I do not for a moment think there is one ‘correct’ tempo; the trick is to make whatever is chosen sound right, to perform with conviction, sympathy, understanding, and of course, a sense of connection to a greater whole.) ‘Smanie implacibilie’ was breathless in quite the wrong way. Other sections of the score dragged, not so much because they were slow – I doubt that anything was as ravishingly, heart-stoppingly lingering as Davis would so often nowadays present it – but because the tempo seemed arbitrary, applied from without, with little connection to anything else, above all with little or no sense of harmonic motion.

The City of London Sinfonia played decently, though the strings could tend somewhat towards the anonymous. (At least they lacked the acerbic nature of a ‘period’ orchestra.) For the most part, as so often in Mozart, it was the woodwind section that most delighted; there was some fine work indeed here from a number of principals. The kettledrums, however, were often bizarrely prominent, not helped by the employment of hard sticks. Karl Böhm would have rolled in his grave.

Had they been supported by a more sympathetic conductor, the cast of young singers would doubtless have appeared in a stronger light. As it was, there was nothing really to which one could object, but there remained a sense that things might have been better. (Perhaps that will dissipate during the run; first nights are rarely the best time to catch singers in particular.)  Elizabeth Llewellyn, whom I admired greatly last year at Holland Park as the Countess, delivered what was probably the strongest performance overall, as Fiordiligi. The beauty of her tone-production could not be gainsaid, though her diction was sometimes, for instance in ‘Per pietà’, occluded. Julia Riley’s Dorabella sometimes lacked focus, though when that was achieved, showed considerable promise. Hers was a forthright portrayal, doubtless in part so as to achieve greater contrast with Fiordiligi, but was it sometimes excessively so? There second act duet between the two veered dangerously close to crudity on Dorabella’s part. Andrew Staples’s tone is very much of the ‘English tenor’ variety. I was not always convinced that this served Ferrando so well, but it is a very difficult role to get right; in other cases, often one ends up thinking the music sounds too close to Puccini. ‘Un’ aura amoroso’ was beautifully sung, though there were times elsewhere when greater presence might have been achieved. Dawid Kimberg’s Guglielmo was blustering, swaggering even, able to call upon considerable vocal reserves. Joana Seara offered a lively Despina, though her tuning sometimes went a little awry. Nicholas Garrett, 2010’s Don Giovanni, presented an intelligent portrayal of Don Alfonso.

What of the production? It was, for the most part, difficult to say anything much about it at all. I do not doubt that it would have pleased self-proclaimed ‘traditionalists’, since the costumes were all impeccably, almost aggressively, ‘period’ – if hardly Neapolitan. Of course, Così  is in no sense whatsoever ‘about’ eighteenth-century Naples, but the logic of the literalist position is that it must be. It was difficult to detect in Harry Fehr's production any idea of what Così might be about, any attempt to probe beneath its painfully beautiful surfaces, or even to celebrate the pain upon the surface. We had a ‘period’ set, ‘period’ costumes, and that was really just about it. There was a nod to directorial cliché in placing an audience on stage, supposedly ‘reacting’ to the events witnessed, but have we not seen that sort of thing far too many times before? Such framing can be interesting, even refreshing: I think, for instance, of Nicholas Hytner’s production of Handel’s Serse for ENO. However, if the intention were to highlight the artificiality of the drama – the artificiality is absolutely necessary to permit Mozart’s agonising psychological explorations – then it failed to come across; it appeared instead rather more as an attempt to generate stage ‘business’ in the absence of any other ideas. That is, until, part way through the second act, Fehr suddenly decided to add a few more, which jarred hopelessly given the uninvolving nature of what we had seen hitherto. Ferrando was laughed at by members of the ‘audience’: it might have been movingly cruel, yet here simply came across as an intrusion upon the music. Fiordiligi took off her dress, put on a soldier’s uniform – a very odd, quasi-literalist interpretation of her attempt to persuade herself to find her (erstwhile) lover – and then had that taken off by Ferrando. (No need to worry: there was plenty beneath the dress and the uniform.) Such ‘action’ merely came across as a realisation, too late in the day, that nothing much had happened. This is, of course, an extremely difficult opera to direct, yet Fehr barely seemed to have tried.

Le nozze di Figaro, English National Opera, 5 October 2011

(sung in English, as The Marriage of Figaro)

The Coliseum

Count Almaviva – Roland Wood
Countess Almaviva – Elizabeth Llewellyn
Susanna – Devon Guthrie
Figaro – Iain Paterson
Cherubino – Kathryn Rudge
Marcellina – Lucy Schaufer
Doctor Bartolo – Jonathan Best
Don Basilio – Timothy Robinson
Don Curzio – Alun Rhys-Jenkins
Antonio – Martin Lamb
Barbarina – Mary Bevan
Two girls – Ella Kirkpatrick, Lydia Marchione

Fiona Shaw (director)
Peter McKintosh (designs)
Kim Brandstrup (choreographer)
Jean Kalman (lighting)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Nicholas Chalmers)
Paul Daniel (conductor)

Susanna (Devon Guthrie) and Figaro (Iain Paterson)
Images: Sarah Lee

Mozart remains not only the most difficult composer to perform, but also, it would seem, the most difficult to stage. Whether at the Coliseum, Covent Garden, or anywhere else, the number of failed productions should be enough to warn off all but the most experienced of opera directors. Don Giovanni is perhaps the most notorious graveyard of all, but Figaro seems to come close. Whatever her undeniable strengths as an actress, Fiona Shaw seems quite at sea here, though accounts from the Stalls – I was in the Dress Circle – had her laughing uproariously at her own jokes.

A trait shared with many productions is absurdly ‘busy’ behaviour, as if one were unable to hear the life in Mozart’s music without scenic underlining that will always fall short. Much of this activity hails from a wearisome, near-inevitable additional cast of extras. Whilst not so bad as Katie Mitchell’s Idomeneo, where extra-itis reached epidemic proportions, it remains quite unnecessary: the money would surely have been better spent upon providing more strings for an underpowered, pastel-sounding orchestra. One has to wait quite some time before the music – remember Mozart? – is permitted to begin, since characters must try to find a buzzing insect inside a harpsichord. (Yes, I wish I were making this up…) To add insult to injury, the blind man who ‘introduces’ the first act turns out to be Basilio. Apparently, it is intrinsically amusing for someone to be blind, an assumption some, one would hope many, might find offensive. At least it makes a change from another bizarre recent trend, which insists upon turning this stock buffo character into a camp monstrosity that might have had the makers of Are You Being Served? think twice, Barrie Kosky’s Berlin production in that respect as much else the ne plus ultra.

Barbarina’s coarse behaviour suggests that she is more of a drunk than Antonio; I have no idea why. The Count wanders around his garden without his trousers on and attempts to bugger the Countess (whom he thinks is Susanna, of course), though Figaro – intriguingly – emerges a far more central figure in the fourth act than is often the case. Thank goodness for that, since many others are behaving as if they were teenagers out on a (mild) Saturday night rampage.

Peter McKintosh’s designs bewilder. Doubtless some ‘post-modernist’ point is being attempted in having a mix of eighteenth-century dress and vaguely contemporary clothing. It merely ends up looking a mess. The revolving set permits scene-changing, but tends to tempt the production to unnecessary examples thereof. Why, for instance, does the second act suddenly shift to what appears to be a kitchen, rendering nonsensical talk of jumping from the Countess’s window? If the impression of a maze is intended to portray the Count as Minotaur – there are skulls and carcasses all over the place too – then it is difficult to understand why. Perhaps I am being unimaginatively literal about this, but I am unaware that he wishes to kill anybody. Tedious film images portray nothing in particular from time to time, whilst we apparently need a sound relay of fireworks to delay the beginning of the fourth act, since none of us would know what they sounded like otherwise. (If fireworks must be portrayed, a visual impression would have been preferable, and surely would have been better off placed at the end of the act.)

Worst of all, it is difficult to discern any but the most incidental social tension. Da Ponte and Mozart are not Beaumarchais, of course, but this remains a deeply political opera. Here Figaro’s only problem with the Count is that the latter is an unpleasant man unable to keep his hands off anything in a skirt. The French Revolution stands as distant as it does from a wet night in Walthamstow.

If Shaw knows better than Da Ponte, than so does Jeremy Sams, whose ‘versions’ of Mozart operas have become quite a menace. At best, the text is loosely after the plot, weirdly ranging from the occasional correct translation to the language of EastEnders. ‘Where the hell is Marcellina?’ is one unmusical, undignified gem, if I remember correctly. The number of forced rhymes – a few, and I mean a few, members of the audience found them hilarious – is greater than anyone could reasonably be expected to count and I certainly had no intention of trying. Since almost everyone in the audience will know the original, and will be mentally hearing it in opposition to any translation, let alone to this, would it not be more sensible in an age of surtitles to permit Da Ponte to speak for himself?

Musically, things are better, though they ought to be better still. Paul Daniel is a puzzling Mozart conductor. There is life to his reading, at least when it does not race ahead unnecessarily, as in what may well be the fastest fandango on record (needless to say, presented scenically by unnecessary ‘additional’ dancers). Moreover, the astounding finale to the second act veered dangerously close to turning into a trivial forerunner of Rossini. (Nikolaus Harnoncourt, hardly a ‘traditionalist’, has warned against that path, yet increasingly few seem willing to heed him, let alone masters such as Erich Kleiber, Karl Böhm, or indeed our own Sir Colin Davis.) Indeed, throughout the performance, the orchestral sound lacked depth, sounding strangely muted. This is symphonic music in many – though not all – respects, yet it did not sound like it. In a large house such as the Coliseum, one needs a large orchestra; it really is as simple as that. On the other hand, Daniel slowed down beautifully for the Count’s plea and the moment of forgiveness: a magical moment, the only other being the transformation in ‘Dove sono’. That is, sadly, two more magical moments than many performances muster.

Mentioning ‘Dove sono’ brings me to the high point of the performance, Elizabeth Llewellyn’s Countess. An extremely short notice replacement for Kate Valentine – whom I had much been looking forward to hearing – she truly excelled, penetrating to the very heart, in every sense, of Mozart’s greatest miracle of characterisation. Despite the busy-ness around her, Llewellyn managed to impart a considerable degree of stillness: just what the director should have ordered. Whilst this Countess had impressed at Opera Holland Park, she progressed still further here, the handicap of translation notwithstanding. Roland Wood offered a masculine Count Almaviva: temper tantrums the director’s fault, not his. However, he shaded too close to mere speech at times. Iain Paterson’s Figaro, splendid of diction, presented undeniable, truly laudable honesty of character, though there were occasions when he sounded a little on the elderly side for the role. His Susanna, Devon Guthrie, likewise seemed – and this was more a matter of acting than vocal quality – more mature than is often the case or indeed desirable. Lucy Schaufer’s Marcellina, less of an old hag than usual, indeed often seeming younger than her soon-to-be daughter-in-law, proved a cut above the rest of the cast.

I wonder, however, whether the real problem is inability to distinguish comedy from the merely comic (akin to the Rossini problem mentioned above). Comedy is more a matter of form than of making one laugh; if it would be downright offensive to find Così fan tutte amusing, it is surely at least unnecessary to do so with Figaro. It is perhaps no coincidence that by far the best production I have seen is no laughing matter at all, Claus Guth’s brilliant Ibsen-, even Strindberg-like inversion. That, rather than a touch of vomiting in the garden, is the sort of infidelity upon which Mozart’s characters and indeed Da Ponte’s libretto can thrive.

Le nozze di Figaro, Opera Holland Park, 10 July 2011

Holland Park

Figaro – Matthew Hargreaves
Susanna – Jane Harrington
Count Almaviva – George van Bergen
Countess Almaviva – Elizabeth Llewellyn
Cherubino – Hannah Pedley
Dr Bartolo – Lynton Black
Marcellina – Sarah Pring
Don Basilio/Don Curzio – Andrew Glover
Antonio – Henry Grant Kerswell
Barbarina – Jaimee Marshall
First Bridesmaid – Katherine Everett
Second Bridesmaid – Kate Warshaw

Liam Steel (director)
Emma Wee (designs)
Colin Grenfell (lighting)

Opera Holland Park Chorus (chorus master: Matthew Waldren)
City of London Sinfonia
Matthew Willis (conductor)


I am delighted to report of an estimable performance of Mozart’s imperishable masterpiece, The Marriage of Figaro, above all from the City of London Sinfonia and conductor Matthew Willis. Although I worried slightly during the Overture – and not just because of irritating stage business, of which more anon – the somewhat driven rendition of Mozart’s opening number did not persist any further. Though small in number (the strings numbered only 5.5.4.3.2), the orchestra did not sound meagre; indeed, it sounded much fuller of tone than many bands heard in ‘major’ houses, often too fearful of playing out, lest authenticist fatwas be issued (and quite ignoring Mozart’s avowed preference for string sections of a size such as he would never be accorded today). The woodwind was alert, perky, and often magical: here it is, of course, that we often hear the composer at his most tender, the joy and pain of love never more keenly felt. And if one might have felt that heart-rending pain a little more keenly at times – it may not be quite so unbearable here as in Così fan tutte, but it is present nevertheless – there was joy aplenty to be heard. Willis generally chose sound tempi; more to the point, for there is no ‘correct’ answer to questions of tempo, he permitted the music to breathe and showed thoroughgoing understanding of its forms, whether operatic or more ‘instrumental’. (Some would deny the importance of sonata form in Mozart’s operatic writing, but then some would claim that the Earth is flat.) A special word of praise should be accorded to the lively yet never exhibitionistic harpsichord continuo player, Catriona Beveridge, for the ebb and flow between recitative and aria is key to musico-dramatic coherence.

Often, one seems to find either the principal male roles or the principal female roles more strongly taken. Such was the case even at Covent Garden a little over a year ago, when the astounding Count of Mariusz Kwiecien and Figaro of Erwin Schrott quite overshadowed some surprisingly disappointing singing from across the gender divide. This time, though the gulf was not so great, the ladies had it. Jane Harrington made an enchanting Susanna, no irritating soubrette, but a credible, intelligent human being. After occasional early vocal fuzziness – and it was only occasional even then – Elizabeth Llewellyn’s Countess combined with great success beauty of tone and poignancy of affect. Their stage presence was first-rate too. Matthew Hargreaves lacked charisma as Figaro, often sounding a little dry of tone and wooden of manner, and George van Bergen’s Count, whilst musical, lacked a certain masculine punch. There was much to enjoy, however, from Hannah Pedley’s Cherubino and Sarah Pring’s Marcellina, the latter more a woman, less an old hag, than one often hears, and all the better for it. Lorenzo Da Ponte might create stock characters, but Mozart by this stage in his career could not fail to humanise them. Jaimee Marshall also took her brief opportunity to shine in Barbarina’s cavatina. (The ‘traditional’ cuts were employed in the fourth act, though I seem to be almost alone in regretting them.) So whilst this was not the sort of outstanding vocal performance one might hear, say, in Salzburg or Vienna – though one certainly cannot guarantee that even there – there was a commendable sense of company, with all contributing to a palpable sense of love and enthusiasm for Mozart’s score. Fine choral singing played its part here too.

Unfortunately, Liam Steel’s production somewhat detracted from that overall success. I have seen far worse, but, as so often with Mozart’s operas, I felt that too much emphasis was placed upon a narrow understanding of ‘comedy’, as if the form of opera buffa necessarily implied farce. Mozart, we should always remember, is never sadder than when he is smiling. Steel’s production, the programme informs us, takes place in the England of 1914. Quite why, we were not informed. Nothing seems to be gained: perhaps the idea was that an English public would respond more readily to the world of Upstairs Downstairs than to the time and place in which Figaro is set. It is not the end of the world, but struck me as pointless, since this is not an updating in which any positive virtue seems to be made of the new setting. It jars somewhat, therefore, with the eminently ‘period’ backdrop, though one would be clutching at straws to discern such post-modernist jarring as intentional, and again, the question would return, why specifically there and then? That would not matter so much if there were a stronger emphasis lain upon the conflicts that lie at the heart of the drama, but little is made of class distinction, despite sharp direction of the characters on stage, in which one truly has the impression that movement has been thought through and well executed. There is no discernible sense of Mozart’s, let alone Beaumarchais’s, Figaro as chafing at the revolutionary bit. Quite why Susanna appears initially in her underwear and knee high boots remains obscure, for it is an isolated instance in what is certainly not otherwise a raunchy or even erotic production. The incessant stage business, reminiscent of David McVicar’s irritating Covent Garden production, is very well choreographed, almost balletic, but, however well presented, the plethora of extra servants ultimately irritates. In at least nine times out of ten, less is more. What seems on occasion a sensible approach to furniture removal and replacement – that is, a servant does the job – soon becomes an end in itself, with things being moved around to no evident purpose. A good few members of the audience, however, seemed to find hilarious a chair being pushed from one side of the stage. Presumably many of them were the same people who laughed – unforgivably – at the Count’s final plea for forgiveness. Ultimately, this, then, is a production that fails to distinguish between comedic form and serious content, a production whose main purpose seems to be to ‘entertain’; Mozart’s score is so much richer than that. And anyone who finds amusing a plea for divine forgiveness, for that is what the Countess, miraculously, is offering, should steer well clear of Mozart, or indeed of anything more elevated than Donizetti.

Opera Holland Park nevertheless deserves to be taken seriously indeed. This was not a Figaro for which one needed to make ‘allowances’, as one often feels with smaller companies; it was a thoroughly professional performance. It was not perfect, but it compared favourably to what I have sometimes heard in ‘mainstream’ venues – infinitely preferable, for instance, to a recent, truly dreadful effort from the Komische Oper in Berlin – and there was a great deal to enjoy, especially when it came to the orchestra (and there can be few more demanding Mozartians than I in that respect). On that note of being taken seriously, although the translation provided in the surtitles often left a great deal to be desired – it is not to be sung, so why can we not have something stylish and faithful, literal even? – it remains a great relief that OHP continues to present works in the original language. Mozart sounds especially dreadful in English, but I have yet to meet a younger listener who preferred opera in translation. I mention this only because I overheard one man complaining about the use of Italian. There remains, bewilderingly, a category of listeners, generally of a certain age, who extol the non-existent virtues of opera in translation; the greater part of the opera-going public is perfectly content to hear Da Ponte, perhaps if necessary – horror of horrors – even doing a little work beforehand, and to benefit from the titles that have made such translation obsolete. I know plenty of people who stay away from ENO because, sadly, they cannot bear to hear works performed in translation. Perhaps they go too far, but I have neither encountered nor heard of a single person who boycotted the Royal Opera for presenting works in the original language. Three cheers, then, to Opera Holland Park for offering us the real thing and for declining to condescend.