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…

Don Giovanni, Royal Opera, 5 July 2021

Royal Opera House

Images: (C) ROH 2021, by Bill Cooper

Don Giovanni (Erwin Schrott),
Donna Anna (Adela Zaharia)

Don Giovanni – Erwin Schrott
Leporello – Gerald Finley
Donna Anna – Adela Zaharia
Don Ottavio – Frédéric Antoun
Donna Elvira – Nicole Chevalier
Zerlina – Zuzana Marková
Masetto – Michael Mofidian
Commendatore – Adam Palka
Donna Elvira’s maid – Josephine Arden

Kasper Holten (director)
Jack Furness (revival director)
Es Devlin (set design)
Luke Halls (video design)
Anja Vang Kragh (costumes)
Bruno Poet (lighting)
Signe Fabricius, Anna-Marie Sullivan (choreography)
Kate Waters, Simon Johns (fight direction)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Constantin Trinks (conductor)


This was the real thing, a return to Covent Garden that reminded one what opera can, should, even must be. We had made allowances for La clemenza di Tito, with which the ‘first reopening’ took place; there were admirable things, not least the return of some sort of hope for the art form in a hostile country, but we were making allowances—and rightly so. This Don Giovanni, however, was the real thing.

 

Masetto (Michael Mofidian), Zerlina (Zuzana Marková)

Such was clear from the opening bars. What a relief it was not to have them fashionably rushed. Indeed, Constantin Trinks led the finest Mozart I have heard at Covent Garden since we lost Colin Davis. It is a truism, but a truism worth repeating, that performing Mozart is the most difficult task in the musical world. Such complexity, especially in his later music, lies beneath the surface, yet it must sound the easiest, simplest of things. There is nowhere to hide. Like, say, Daniel Barenboim, but unlike most contemporary conductors, Trinks understands that Mozart’s music is ultimately founded on harmony—and knows how to communicate that. The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House sounded rejuvenated, responding in style and with seeming relish to a vision of the work both attentive to detail and cognisant of tonal-dramatic architecture. Tempi were well chosen, not in isolation—‘Mme X will sing it like this’—but as part of what seemed to be a genuine company sense of a shared whole. For once, I could forget my objections to the all-too-familiar conflation of Prague and Vienna versions, enjoying a feast of music for what it was, if not the mutilation of the scena ultima (alas, the production’s doing, about which the conductor will have had no say). Trinks’s handling of recitative, both secco (from the fortepiano) and accompagnato, proved crucial both to musical and dramatic success, welding them together with that necessarily lightest of touches. If a conductor of the past occasionally came to mind, it was not so much Furtwängler (as it might have been with Barenboim) as a Carlo Maria Giulini of earlier vintage: less overtly ‘Romantic’, for want of a better word, though quietly, comprehendingly aristocratic. For this alone, it would have been Mozart worth making every effort to hear.

 

Don Giovanni

It was not, of course, alone, conductor and orchestra joined by a fine cast of singers. At its head was the ever-astonishing Don Giovanni of Erwin Schrott. Here was a role inhabited rather than portrayed, primarily animateur yet also, in chameleon-like reaction—how he slithers between, adapts, insinuates himself into all social-musical settings— animé. In keeping with and, in new circumstances, extending Kasper Holten’s production, here ably revived and similarly extended by Jack Furness, this Giovanni was dangerously seductive, disconcertingly (yet, in both musical and dramatic terms, brilliantly) spontaneous, and, at the last, or rather just before the last, thrillingly heroic. Holten’s undercutting of that heroism, having the final scene, albeit shorn (why?) of its opening, play out as the mental collapse of the hero signals, as so often, an unwillingness to take this most deeply Catholic of operas ultimately on its own terms, though less so than many others, which refuse or simply do not understand its premise in the first place.


Gerald Finley’s Leporello was just as excellent. One sensed a servant’s desire to become his master—as Schrott is a noted Leporello, so too is Finley a noted Giovanni—in musicotheatrical and metatheatrical terms. The particular mix of, and on occasion tension between, Mozart and Da Ponte that make the work what it is, galvanised by conscientious and charismatic performance was seen and heard not only in Finley and Schrott, but throughout the cast: Adela Zaharia and Frédéric Antoun a noble seria pair, their fundamental dignity both corroded and, especially in Donna Anna’s case, transformed by Giovanni’s combination of Casanova and Faust. Their arias, beautifully prepared and contextualised by recitative that told us just as much, proved moments of beauty yet, insofar as possible—that Prague-Vienna conflation really does not help—crucial dramatic reflections too. Zaharia’s coloratura was properly expressive, no mere decoration, as was that of Nicole Chevalier’s yearning Donna Elvira. Zuzana Marková and Michael Mofidian offered sweetly expressive and disarmingly bluff personifications of Zerlina and Masetto, studies in ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ that always offered more than the stock buffo characters they can sometimes seem. Adam Palka’s dark, direct Commendatore rightly put the fear of God—or Something Else—into the hearts of all but our atheist hero.

 

Zerlina, Donna Anna, Don Giovanni

In Holten’s staging, dramatic tension is generated by, on the one hand, through projected writing and rewriting of names upon the set, a sense of écriture poised somewhere between Barthes and Derrida; and on the other, that set’s labyrinthine video-propelled reinvention as it revolves, by dint of projected colour, new walls and passageways, phantom characters from past, present, and perhaps future. Such productive tension felt all the stronger in Furness’s revival, which seemed to mirror Trinks’s careful balance between detail and the whole. There is a strong sense of something Venetian, as so often in a work haunted by Da Ponte’s friend Casanova, in the masquerades, intrigues, and ultimately human passions that propel the drama. There is no question here that Donna Anna is attracted to Don Giovanni, doubtless a (post-)Romantic view, yet frankly far more faithful to the score and its spirit than the puritanical ‘reservations’ levelled by some at production and work alike. (There are many reasons unimaginative twenty-first century spectators might recoil at this drama. If they dislike it so much, why not do something else instead? No one is obliged to attend.) That does not, though, preclude her, nor indeed any female character, of agency. They know what they are doing and must also face the consequences of their actions; they are not dolls, but living, breathing women—and all the more involving for it. The male gaze, here at least, can be reversed if one wishes. Each character here has his or her own texts to write, to bring into dramatic reality; so should we all. Dramma giocoso indeed.

Phaedra, Royal Opera, 16 May 2019

Linbury Theatre

Artemis (Patrick Terry), Hippolyt (Filipe Manu), Phaedra (Hongni Wu), Aphrodite (Jacquelyn Stucker)
Images (C) ROH 2019, by Bill Cooper

Phaedra – Hongni Wu

Hippolyt – Filipe Manu

Aphrodite – Jacquelyn Stucker

Artemis – Patrick Terry

Minotaurus – Michael Mofidian

Noa Naamat (director)

Southbank Sinfonia

Edmund Whitehead (conductor)

Hans Werner Henze’s penultimate opera, Phaedra has been fortunate indeed in London since its 2007 Berlin premiere. Astonishingly, this was the third time I had seen the work in London: first a Barbican concert performance; then the Guildhall’s excellent double-bill, coupled with the early radio opera, Ein Landarzt; now a staging at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre, from members and one soon-to-be-member of its Jette Parker Young Artists Programme and the Southbank Sinfonia.

Hippolyt and Phaedra

I continue to find it an elusive, even enigmatic work, difficult to pin down – as often with Henze. There is nothing wrong with that, quite the contrary. Immediately obvious works that have little to reveal on subsequent encounters – Tosca, for instance, whatever its qualities – are not the most interesting. Layering of its libretto, by Christian Lehnert, is, for me at least, a little too self-conscious, indeed in that sense itself obvious; that of the score, however, continues to fascinate, both in itself and with respect to Henze’s lengthy career and well-nigh unmanageable œuvre. Conductor Edward Whitehead and the Southbank Sinfonia proved strong in their communication of the score’s textural layering, Schoenberg, Berg, Mahler, and Wagner lying behind or, perhaps better, beneath it, the orchestra’s lines seemingly summoned up like a refined Götterdämmerung oracle. I was put in mind of a remark by Henze from four decades earlier, from an interview with Die Welt given to coincide with the premiere of The Bassarids: ‘The road from Tristan to Mahler and Schoenberg is far from finished, and … I have tried to go further along it.’

Henze’s way was always, or usually, though, then to take up another path thereafter, perhaps resuming that earlier path some time later. We perhaps view his way with greater clarity now, or kid ourselves that we do. At any rate, other tendencies shone through too: Weill-like (Hindemith too?) wind and percussion; mesmerising saxophone lines that lured one seemingly to nowhere (a remimaging of Natascha Ungeheuer?); magical forest colours (König Hirsch); and, perhaps most tellingly, towards the close, when Hippolyt surprisingly, disconcertingly returns as Virbius, the transformational magic of Ariadne auf Naxos, Straussian reference clear, but kinship to Hofmannsthal’s ideas (perhaps via Elegy for Young Lovers) ultimately more meaningful. At its best, Noa Naamat’s staging seemed to take its leave from these circles, lines, interactions of musical and aesthetic meaning, a sense of eastern ritual (perhaps a little Robert Wilson, but less formulaic than his work has come) coming into contact and conflict with turning of the wheel. Comparison and contrast with the work of Birtwistle came to mind, as they had on my previous encounters with the work.

Artemis

The singers all proved excellent. Though the work is called Phaedra, I do wonder whether Henze would have been better lending Hippolyt(us)’s name to it. (But then, arguably, Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie is similarly misnamed.) Filipe Manu, due to join the JPYAP next year, proved compelling indeed in the would-be title role, as vulnerable an object of contemplation and, later, as equivocal a vehicle of reinvention as Henze’s earlier Prince of Homburg. Was Hongni Wu’s Phaedra presented too vampishly in this production (not necessarily in performance)? Perhaps, but the deepening of her range of vocal colour throughout the evening offered compensation. Jacquelyn Stucker and Patrick Terry (the programme’s first countertenor) offered strong, detailed performances as Aphrodite and Artemis, whilst Michael Mofidian’s Minotaurus, richly sonorous yet equally careful of detail, left one wishing greedily that he had had more to sing, his persistent stage presence notwithstanding.

Why, then, did I emerge feeling slightly dissatisfied – or perhaps wondering whether I should have done? It may just have been a matter of how I was feeling on the day: it happens to us all. I do not think, though, that it was just that. Did the decision to introduce an interval get in the way? I think it did, making the work seem longer, more drawn out, more sectional than it is. I am not sure that the parameters within which Naamat’s staging had to operate helped in that respect. Though necessarily simple in scenic terms, it paradoxically seemed to dart around somewhat from scene to scene, perhaps through no fault of its own somewhat blunting the underlying ritual power of the score. Perhaps, alternatively, that was actually a reflection of the fragmentary qualities of the opera, of Hippolyt’s partial, flawed regaining of consciousness under his new identity. If I continue to find Phaedra enigmatic, Henze’s genre designation of ‘concert opera’ included, then that will doubtless say something about it, me, the performance, the production, or about any combination of the above. Such, after all, is opera.

Minotaurus (Michael Mofidian), Hippolyt

Madama Butterfly, Glyndebourne, 19 May 2018

Glyndebourne Opera House

Pinkerton – Joshua Guerrero

Goro – Carlo Bosi

Suzuki – Elizabeth DeShong

Sharpless – Michael Sumuel

Cio-Cio-San – Olga Busuioc

Cousin – Jennifer Witton

Cio-Cio-San’s Mother – Eirlys Myfanwy Davies

Yakuside – Adam Marsden

Aunt – Shuna Scott Sendall

Imperial Commissioner – Michael Mofidian

Official Registrar – Jake Muffett

Bonze – Oleg Budurtaskiy

Prince Yamadori – Simon Mechlinski

Sorrow –Rupert Wade

Kate Pinkerto – Ida Ränzlöv

Annilese Miskimmon (director)

Nicky Shaw (set designs)

Mark Jonathan (lighting)

Kally Lloyd Jones (movement)

Ian William Galloway (video)

Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus master: Nicholas Jenkins)

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Omer Weir Wellber (conductor)

‘Picture it,’ as senior Golden Girl, Sophia Petrillo used to say. ‘England, 19 May 2018…’ An audience found itself enthralled by the marriage of an impressive woman to a privileged man, impeccable and dashing in his military uniform, from another nationality and ‘race’. They wished her well in this fairytale, investing their hopes, personal and communal, in the success of their union, even as some of their number risked spoiling the party by exploring a little of the history of this meeting of cultures. All the while, the mediating moneymakers – well, they made money. Would it last? Were some of them/us already gearing up to be thrilled by its potential difficulties, failures, even tragedy? From Windsor Castle, then, to the Sussex Downs did not seem too lengthy a journey – I saw signs at Clapham Junction for the latter, as I found my platform for the latter – especially for a festival opening for which the not-quite-so-great-and-good-as-would-have-resulted-in-an-invitation-to-the-reception were naturally out in force.

Annilese Miskimmon’s production of Madama Butterfly, Glyndebourne’s first, has been seen previously on the 2016 tour, but this was its first appearance at the Festival proper, and my first encounter with it. It would be considered reasonably straightforward for most composers, bar the ‘updating’ – must we continue to use that dated word and idea? – to the 1950s, yet for Puccini, who perhaps suffers more than any other opera composer from a surfeit of reactionary stagings, probably marks quite an important step. It is not Calixto Bieito, nor would one expect it to be. What we see, however, portrays the drama, both a clash of cultures and expectations on anything but a level playing-field and a very personal tragedy, with unfailing intelligence and emotional commitment. I liked it – and the stage performances – very much, and responded pretty much how I ‘should’, whilst being provoked to think rather more than I often have been.

What comes across very strongly from the outset is that, whatever the exalted setting – be it a royal castle or an opera stage – and the undeniable personhood of the sacrificial victim, there is something distressingly typical about the story and the social structures that give rise to it. Cio-Cio-San is placed explicitly in a line of geishas, ‘married’ off to their respective ‘husbands’, educated onsite at the marriage bureau by the slide show, ‘How to be an American wife’, a ready source of income for the grubbily venal Goro. (He returns at the close of the first act to count his money.) A neon-lit HOTEL stands next door, for ease of consummation; or rather, the bureau stands next door to it, for ease of commerce. The overweening arrogance of Pinkerton is his personally and culturally: not just the cigarettes he smokes, but his – in context – shocking act of forcing a horrified Cio-Cio-San to toss her bouquet behind her. She does not understand, nor do the girls behind her, who dart away from it. It is cultural misunderstanding, yes, but from a man and a culture – a gender too – which, holding all the cards, have neither need nor wish to understand. Perhaps he does, a little; he too, after all, is ultimately ordinary, nothing special. (Unlike his ‘bride’, he remains that way, resolutely untransfigured, untransfigurable.) There are a few little signs of such, and, in the duet with which the first act closes, he shows her a degree of kindness, or at least of toxic masculine, Yankee concern. He is, however, a colonial tourist and overlord – and will remain so. So says the score too, of course, as Puccini subjects the Star-Spangled Banner to further exploration than one might innocently expect. In Madam Butterfly, we are all robbed of whatever innocence we may fondly delude ourselves we possessed in the first place.

The second act, tellingly, shows us an American house, set in a Japanese – or, rather stylised, orientalised ‘Japanese’ – landscape. There is no doubting Butterfly’s – sorry, Mme Pinkerton’s – belief and pride in her new situation, whatever the parlous financial situation of which Suzuki informs her. She smokes American cigarettes too now, or claims to; she proudly offers one to Sharpless, and discreetly chokes on hers. Prince Yamadori was surrounded by Americans as well as ‘natives’, when he paid her a visit: he is the compromising member of a colonial elite one would expect. Much is done with light, much is done with designs, costumes included; she is dressed as an American woman too. Until the end, that is, when to die in honour, she dresses, tragically and yet not without her hallmark pride, as the Japanese woman she has, perhaps, always known herself to be. And her son, little Sorrow, plays with a model of an American gunboat, as he waits for his father – and as his mother kills herself. Throughout, the tragedy is intensely personal and intensely imperialist.

In the title role, Olga Busuioc impressed greatly, especially during the second and third acts, when she seemed more at ease in the role. (This was, after all, an opening night.) As Alexandra Wilson writes in her programme note – and this goes for so much Puccini in general: think what we actually see and hear first-hand in La bohème! – ‘one of the particular strokes of brilliance about the opera is the way in which Puccini manages to trace the development of … [her] personality so vividly and perceptively across the span of a comparatively short opera.’ That needs performative brilliance too, which one certainly received later on, the dynamic scale of her vocal contribution not the least of her dramatic tools. Elizabeth DeShong made for a kindly yet – again – proud Suzuki. If I am rehearsing colonialist stereotypes, what else is one to do in such an opera? Perhaps the best we can hope for is to do so with a degree of critical awareness, unless, that is, we are puritanically to consign this and so many other works to the dustbin of history – and then remain with what?

Joshua Guerrero portrayed Pinkerton to a tee: his easy, false charm, his arrogance, and yet, a hint of the ambiguous, albeit quotidian devil to him too. (The pantomime booing he received was, as ever, deeply regrettable. Can we not put a stop to that, right now, please?) Carlo Bosi made us loathe the shallow evil of the aforementioned Foro, whilst Michael Sumuel did an excellent job as the duly compassionate – up to a point: repeat, up to a point – Sharpless. Indeed, every member of the cast impressed, and contributed to a greater whole; I noted, especially, Michael Mofidian’s Imperial Commissioner, Oleg Budartaskiy’s Bonze, and, as much in stage beaing as in voice – for, as one always rediscovers, she has so little to sing – Ida Ränzlöv’s Kate Pinkerton.

The London Philharmonic clearly relished playing Puccini’s score. (Which orchestra would not?) String sheen and more general tonal allure were not purchased at the expense of incisive drama: quite the contrary. I could not help but wish that it had been given its head a little more often by Omer Meir Wellber, but perhaps that was his point. If he did not always communicate the quasi-symphonic form of the musical work as strongly as he might have done, with a consequent lack of dramatic impetus at times. For the most part Wellber showed himself a good accompanist, more often than not alert to the ebb and flow, often a little reticent and sometimes even sluggish. In Puccini, just as in Wagner and Strauss, the relationship between orchestra and singers is not, or should not be, a zero-sum game: attention paid to the one should heighten our attention to the other. More of that will probably come, though, as the run progresses. This remained, by any standards, an impressive opening night for the 2018 Glyndebourne Festival. For those, moreover, who cared to think, it may have had a good deal still to tell us about our own hopes and fears, about our own prejudices and our struggles, however vain, to surmount them. As Carl Dahlhaus once observed, ‘it is precisely in order to radicalise conflicts — so that “resolutions” are ruled out — that dramas are written; if not, they would be treatises.’