Così fan tutte, Royal Opera, 25 February 2019

Royal Opera House

Dorabella (Serena Malfia)
Images: ROH 2019/Stephen Cummiskey

Ferrando – Paolo Fanale

Guglielmo – Gyula Orendt

Don Alfonso – Thomas Allen

Fiordiligi – Salome Jicia

Dorabella – Serena Malfi

Despina – Serena Gamberoni

Jan Philipp Gloger (director)

Julia Burbach (revival director)

Ben Baur (set designs)

Karin Jud (costumes)

Bernd Purkrabek (lighting)

Katharina John (dramaturgy)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)

Stefano Montanari (conductor)

Ensemble

First the good news. With one partial exception, there was much splendid singing, and stage performance more generally, to enjoy from an entirely new cast for the first revival of Jan Philipp Gloger’s Così fan tutte (reviewed here first time around). Our pairs of male and female lovers were nicely differentiated, whilst blending with equal skill and pleasure – crucial in an opera with so much ensemble writing, endlessly varied, endlessly revised and renewed. (There is dramaturgical genius in that, of course, not that sceptics and outright decriers – believe it or not, there remain a few – bother to think about that before regaling us with their ‘thoughts’ on the work.) Salome Jicia and Serena Malfia made for a sparkling pairing of ladies from Ferrara, linear clarity matched by complementary contrast such as one might enjoy in a fine wind ensemble. Much the same, perhaps still more so, might be said of Paolo Fanale’s Ferrando and Gyula Orendt’s Guglielmo, the former’s arias as sweetly sung, tenderly phrased as anyone might reasonably ask. Serena Gamberoni’s keenly sung Despina was properly knowing without lapsing into the unduly arch. Thomas Allen’s Don Alfonso had its moments, but it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that this, a role he long made his own, is now a vocal challenge too far, whatever his continued enthusiasm on stage. Hand on heart, I cannot say that any of these performances surpassed those at Holland Park last year, but I doubt that anyone would have had serious grounds for disappointment either.

 

Dorabella and Guglielmo (Gyula Orendt)

There were, alas, grounds aplenty for disappointment in both the conducting and the production: concerning the former, rather more than mere disappointment. Described in the programme as ‘charismatic’, Stefano Montanari certainly made his presence felt Charisma, however, entails a gift, not a curse, be it divine or otherwise. It is difficult to think of anyone more deserving of the claim than Mozart. If only we had heard a little more of his work and a little less of Montanari’s extraordinary – extraordinarily ignorant, too – arrogance. Arrogating to himself the fortepiano continuo too, Montanari went on to show us that he has little ability at conducting but considerable ability at obscuring scores with his own, allegedly witty, yet in truth tediously predictable, sonic vandalism. To begin with, his ‘contributions’ remained within the realm of the unnecessary, if still highly irritating. The level of premature ejaculation soon, however, reached the level of medical emergency, at times entirely taking leave of Mozart’s bass line and harmony so as simply to present some ‘songs from the shows’. It was the sort of thing a bumptious first-year organ scholar might have done over late-night drinks, albeit more cleverly; here, the results were quite unforgivable. Occasionally hard-driven, Montanari’s conducting was more often merely flaccid: nothing to do with speed, everything to do with a lack of harmonic and formal understanding; it was as if the performance were led by the lovechild of René Jacobs and Marc Minkowski. For a performance of Così fan tutte drag so much is an achievement of sorts, not one I wish to hear repeated. To hear it in the house that was once Sir Colin Davis’s was little short of scandalous.

Dorabella and Ferrando (Paolo Fanale)

Some changes have been made to Gloger’s production since its first outing, presumably by revival director, Julia Burbach. In the first act in particular, they are to its benefit, tightening and clarifying, although the second act fizzles out much as it had done before (if slightly differently). It is, perhaps, indicative of the state of British opera audiences that anyone would see something remotely adventurous in the hamfisted attempt at metatheatricality on show – ‘show’ being the thing – here. Clichés abound, without apparent awareness that clichés they are, and therefore might be played with. The more promising moment remains the substitution of applauding members of the real cast, initially seated in an audience box, for the cast in eighteenth-century garb on stage. There is nothing wrong with the idea that the characters might learn from a performance of the work; it has much to commend it. There is everything wrong, however, with the confusion – somewhat mitigated now, yet only somewhat – with which that is allegedly accomplished. Identities, acts, characters are not ambiguous; they appear simply not to have been thought through, rather as if this were an early sketch for a production rather than the finished article.

As for Gloger’s preposterous claim, allegedly justifying such confusion, namely that to be ‘realisable in realistic terms’, the female characters must ‘know from the beginning of the second act that the “foreign men” are really their own boyfriends,’ it is difficult to think of a graver admission of incompetence. By all means play with such an idea, should it prove dramatically fruitful. The idea, however, that such banal realism has anything to do with the work, that ‘we decided to explain…’ signifies anything other than a catastrophic misunderstanding of the opera’s artificiality and its dramatic consequences, is both saddening and infuriating. Perhaps there is scope for further revisions; I certainly appreciate the attempt. I cannot, however, claim to be hopeful. Like Montanari's conducting, if less so, the production thinks itself far cleverer than it is. More seriously, neither seems remotely to appreciate not only the intelligence but the profundity of this most ravishing of operas.

Le nozze di Figaro, Royal College of Music, 30 November 2018

Britten Theatre

Count Almaviva – Thomas Isherwood

Countess Almaviva – Eleanor Dennis

Susanna – Catriona Hewitson

Figaro – Theodore Platt

Cherubino – Anna Cooper

Marcellina – Holly-Marie Bingham

Dr Bartolo – Timothy Edlin

Don Basilio – Glen Cunningham

Don Curzio – Samuel Jenkins

Barbarina – Milly Forrest

Antonio – Peter Edge

Two Bridesmaids – Camilla Harris, Jessica Cale

Sir Thomas Allen (director)

Lottie Higlett (designs)

Rory Beaton (lighting)

Kate Flatt (choreography)

Royal College of Music Opera Chorus (chorus master: Leanne Singh-Levett)

Royal College of Music Opera Orchestra

Michael Rosewell (conductor)

A lively, enthusiastic young cast, as skilled at acting as at singing, proved the definite highlight of the Royal College of Music’s end-of-term Marriage of Figaro. There was no weak link, each of the singers offering something particular in roles many of us perhaps know all too well. At this stage in their careers, singers will always have a good deal of vocal development to await. Nevertheless, from the stern and angry Count of Thomas Isherwood to the decidedly luxury casting of Milly Forrest’s Barbarina, there was much to enjoy here. Eleanor Dennis, an RCM alumna deputising at the last minute, offered a noble Countess: poised, dignified, pained, and compassionate, an object lesson to her younger collaborators. Theodore Platt and Catriona Hewitson sparkled as a likeable, stylish pair of servants, Figaro and Susanna, Holly-Marie Bingham’s Marcellina and Timothy Edlin’s Bartolo perhaps giving a splendidly knowing hint of where the characters, if hardly the singers, might find themselves in a few years’ time.

Michael Rosewell’s conducting was sane enough: something to be grateful for in an age of perverse, often downright ugly Mozart ‘interpretation’. It lacked charm, though, orchestral writing too often going unshaped, even barely phrased at all. A few too many disjunctures between pit and stage were skilfully retrieved, yet all in all – and this is quite a different thing from minutes on the clock – the pace somewhat dragged, a greater sense of the musical whole proving elusive.

There was not much to glean, either, from Thomas Allen’s production. It was less aggressively, even offensively ‘traditional’ than the Figaro I last saw at the RCM (Jean-Claude Auvray, 2012), yet it would be difficult to claim any great insights. (Not that an extraordinarily disruptive – drunken? – audience, laughing and applauding almost every bar, seemed to seek insight; alas, the Glyndebourne Guffaw Brigade seemed very much to be at large.) Notwithstanding a strange initial preoccupation with babies, soon dropped, as it were, the production was very much school of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, albeit on a necessarily less grand scale. What worked in the mid-Seventies – in many ways gloriously, as we may still see on film, Karl Böhm’s presence certainly not hindering – does not necessarily ring so true four decades later. Why would it? Additional elements of something bordering on silliness did not help. There was not much more to it than that. I have little doubt that the cast would have learned much from working with Allen; I have little doubt, moreover, that that showed in their own character portrayals and their interaction.

For a greater idea, be it of the eighteenth century or any other, I sought in vain: a pity, given that two other London conservatoire performances of the last few years have offered much food for thought. The Guildhall (Martin Lloyd-Evans, 2013) offered, in retrospect, chilling presentiments of #MeToo in an American electoral campaign, whilst the Royal Academy’s gentle updating to pre-revolutionary Cuba (Janet Suzman, 2015) brought forth perhaps the single finest, all in all, Figaro I have seen and heard. Claus Guth’s Strindbergian Salzburg production of the previous decade doubtless changed the work forever. It need not, indeed should not, be imitated. Some awareness and communication of the work’s savage darkness, however, is now for many of us a crucial starting point, as much as it would be for Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte. Mozart never suffers from sharply etched chiaroscuro. Still, there will surely be another opportunity before too long – and better this than the incoherent nonsense I endured from Johannes Erath in Dresden a couple of months ago.

Happy 450th anniversary, Claudio Monteverdi!

I have adored, more to the point thirsted for, his music since I first heard it, as an A-level student, the 1610 Vespers one of my set works. (Yes, I have since learned, indeed I learned then, that 'work' was definitely to be placed in inverted commas, especially in this case.) We listened to John Eliot Gardiner from St Mark’s, but I found the performance, indeed the whole approach, rather stiff. I managed to borrow a copy of Gardiner’s earlier recording, and liked that rather more; I still do, unfashionably. However, I still know of no single performance or recording that conveys more than a little of what I imagine of the intimacy, the grandeur, the eroticism, the piety, the richness of verbal and musical meaning: of those and so many other qualities. Perhaps that is as it should be: the ‘work’ is ‘impossible’ to perform in the best sense(s).

Getting to know some other of Monteverdi’s works during those A-level years, I encountered Zefiro torna, which made a lasting impression – although not nearly so much as when I discovered Nadia Boulanger’s legendary recording of this and other madrigals.

Other sacred music seemed almost to cast a magic spell upon me. It remains the sacred œuvre that says most to me before Bach’s – and yet is so utterly different from his in almost every way. Sample, immerse, never ignore.  

I came to the operas later: Poppea, then Ulisse, then Orfeo. I actually knew Alexander Goehr’s Arianna before any of them, being lucky enough to attend a performance in Cambridge. (I even played a tiny, tiny role, or deluded myself that I did, in the performance and, I think, the recording. A friend was working in the studio on the manipulation of the Kathleen Ferrier Lament to be incorporated at the heart of Goehr’s inventive new drama, and I had to listen, as a second pair of ears, for the pitch to be correct.) It was after that that I plucked up the courage to write to him, concerning his father, Walter’s early performances, and he kindly sent me cassettes, including Walter’s Philharmonia Poppea. The knowledge that there was someone else in Cambridge who loved both Monteverdi and Schoenberg emboldened me to listen to more of both and to listen to, indeed to read, more Goehr too.

It is now perhaps those operas, and perhaps above all Ulisse of which I think most often when I think of Monteverdi. Ulisse’s Shakespearean range and depth have rarely, if ever, been surpassed. If they have, then it is surely only by Mozart and Wagner. But I am sure my feelings, my provisional judgements, will change; I hope they will. Monteverdi is, after all, for life, not just for A-level.

Ariadne auf Naxos, Royal Opera, 13 July 2014

Royal Opera House

Music Master – Sir Thomas Allen

Major-Domo - Christoph Guest

Lackey – Jihoon Kim

Officer – David Butt Philip

Composer – Ruxandra Donose

Tenor, Bacchus – Roberto Saccà

Wig-Maker – Ashley Riches

Zerbinetta – Jane Archibald

Prima Donna, Ariadne – Karita Mattila

Dancing Master – Ed Lyon

Naiad – Sofia Fomina

Dryad – Karen Cargill

Echo – Kiandra Howarth

Harlequin – Markus Werba

Truffaldino – Jeremy White

Scaramuccio – Wynne Evans

Brighella – Paul Schweinester

Christof Loy (director)

Herbert Murauer (designs)

Jennifer Lipton (lighting)

Beate Vollack (choreography)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Sir Antonio Pappano (conductor)

 

I hope I shall be forgiven for keeping this relatively brief. Having been distinctly under the weather this week, I have fallen a little behind, and in any case have written about Christof Loy’s production of Ariadne auf Naxos before. This time, hearteningly, I recaptured some of my earlier enthusiasm, having found the staging looking somewhat tired last time around. Perhaps it was a matter of the revival direction, or perhaps it was a matter of sitting closer to the stage (the back of the Stalls Circle, the restricted view seemingly not much of an issue). At any rate, the virtues that I had originally hymned – a very real sense of the audience and the audience member being told that this was a tale told about them, a nice balance between the present and a re-imagined and then re-imagined again eighteenth century – were married to a well-acted company performance.

 

For the most part the singing was very good too. Thomas Allen’s Music Master continues to inspire; this time, he found a fine foil in Ed Lyon’s Dancing Master, his German as impressive as the French of the repertory in which I have previously tended to hear him. Both can act too – and did. Ruxandra Donose’s Composer was beautifully sung – and a character in whom one could truly believe, whom one could take to one’s heart. I am not sure that I have heard so distinguished a trio of Naiad, Dryad, and Echo, as Sofia Fomina, Karen Cargill, and Kiandra Howarth, whether corporately or individually. Markus Werba offered a predictably excellent Harlequin, well supported by the rest of his troupe. Jane Archibald reached for the heights and attained them with her lovely Zerbinetta: an object-lesson in the role. Disappointments? Roberto Saccà’s dry-toned Bacchus, fare more so than I had heard in Salzburg in 2012. And, I am afraid that, try as I might, I could not find Karita Mattila ‘right’ for the role of Ariadne. She is a wonderfully engaging artist, and there was much to enjoy, but I missed the floating of line that seems essential to the part, likewise the neo-Mozartian grace. Others have clearly felt differently, and I have tried not to be hidebound by recollections of great historic assumptions; ultimately, however, and with considerable regret, I thought Mattila miscast.

 

The other disappointment, perhaps more predictably, was Antonio Pappano’s conducting. Quite why he insists on inflicting himself upon a German repertoire for which he clearly has little sensitivity, let alone understanding, remains a mystery. Granted, this was not nearly so bad as his Wagner, and there was considerable life to the Prologue. However, the Opera soon became listless, with little sense of harmonic or indeed any other direction. The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House played very well, but how one longed for the wisdom, refinement, wit, and humanity the late Colin Davis brought to this work in this production.

 

Ariadne auf Naxos, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 18 May 2013

Glyndebourne Opera House

 

Music-Master – Sir Thomas Allen

Major-Domo – William Relton
Lackey – Frederick Long
Officer – Stuart Jackson
Composer – Kate Lindsey
Tenor. Bacchus – Sergey Skorokhodov
Wigmaker – Michael Wallace
Zerbinetta – Laura Claycomb
Prima Donna, Ariadne – Soile Isokoski
Dancing Master – Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke
Pianist – Gary Matthewman
Naiad – Ana Maria Labin
Dryad – Adriana Di Paola
Echo – Gabriela Iştoc
Harlequin – Dmitri Vargin
Scaramuccio – James Kryshak
Truffaldino – Torben Jürgens
Brighella – Andrew Stenson

Katharina Thoma (director)

Julia Müer (set designs)
Irina Bartels (costumes)
Olaf Winter (lighting)
Lucy Burge (movement)

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

 

Katharina Thoma’s Glyndebourne debut had been heavily publicised. Sad to say, not only does her production of Ariadne auf Naxos fail to live up to any expectations that might have been engendered; it fails dismally to live up to Strauss and Hofmannsthal, indeed even so much as to engage with them. Audience members would apparently erupt into uproarious laughter when someone, anyone, so much as walked onstage seemed delighted, but there was more sign of the artwork we know, love, and desperately wished to have interrogated in the miserably paraphrased surtitles – is it that difficult to offer a reasonable translation? – than on the Glyndebourne stage, at least during the Opera proper.

 

The 1940s seem almost to be de rigueur for a certain breed of opera directors at the moment; this staging follows in the dubious footsteps of David McVicar’s not entirely dissimilar Médéefor ENO. A pandering desire to ‘entertain’ – ironically here, given the concerns of the Prologue, though the irony seems entirely accidental – replaces genuine dramatic, or indeed almost any other variety of, engagement. And yet, of course, Zerbinetta does not appeal to the lowest common denominator; that she both amuses and touches is owed to an expected level of Kultur on the part of the audience. Insofar as what she offers is ‘low’ culture, and that is a considerable ‘insofar’, that only has meaning in terms of contrast with its ‘high’, seria antipode – or cousin. Here, we simply have her reduced to a ‘mad’ person, straitjacketed in a wartime hospital, who, tedious ‘joke’ of tedious ‘jokes’, sings some of her high notes whilst having an orgasm induced by a visitor. I am not sure what is more offensive: the transformation of mental illness, presumably a product of wartime, into fodder for laughter, the refusal so much as to listen to the text (and no, the orgasm does not betoken serious study of the score), or the fact that so many seemed to respond so positively to Carry on Ariadne. Naiad, Dryad, and Echo are nurses, whose every shaking of a sheet elicited helpless guffaws from that vocal section of the audience.

 

A still greater indignity suffered by the work comes at the end when Ariadne, reuinited with her fighter pilot Theseus, has him land himself on top of her behind a curtain. It was difficult to decide whether such prudishness were preferable to a more full-frontal vision; either path would simply have been embarrassing in context – or rather, weirdly out of context. Hoffmansthal’s concern with transformative myth receives not so much as a nod, but then nor does the transformative power of Strauss’s music. Goodness knows what the Composer has been doing, wandering around the Opera, not unreasonably lost; to start with I thought he was a doctor, then a patient, but he really seemed to be there to give the false impression that what we see is somehow connected with the Prologue.

 

For that is the greatest problem of all with this staging, bafflingly so, since one would have thought that, whatever Konzept or none, it would have been pretty straightforward to get right. Much of the Prologue is presented reasonably enough: no particular insight is gained, but it does not jar especially with what we are seeing and hearing. (Many audience members appeared to be doing neither, instead reading the shoddy titles and responding accordingly, that is when they were not simply chattering to each other. Stony glances had no effect whatsoever upon them.) The setting is said to evoke the Glyndebourne of the period, that is of the arbitrarily selected early 1940s, though I am not sure one would have known that without being told. But things happen pretty much as they should; rather in the sense of an ultra-conservative staging, one gleans little but has ‘the story told’. (Christof Loy, as his wilful, equally un-engaging Salzburg Frau ohne Schatten shows, is not necessarily the most sympathetic director of Strauss, yet he engages with the Royal Opera House in a considerably more revealing version of the site-specific approach in his staging of Ariadne.) Then suddenly, at the close of the Oper, the melodrama of an air attack bursts upon the scene. Some people, apparently, ‘just loved’ the ensuing fire: an effect quite without cause, slightly to misquote Wagner on Meyerbeer. For the rest of us, it seemed more akin to a desperate attempt to ‘do’ something with or to the work, given that for some, unspecified reason, the richness of Strauss and Hofmannsthal was not nearly enough for Katharina Thoma.

 

But far worse is to come, for any idea of the Opera as a staging suggested in the Prologue appears to have been thrown out of the window. There really is no connection between the two sections of the work. Instead one has the house transformed into a wartime hospital, in which for some reason Ariadne awaits the return of her aforementioned fighter pilot. The very essence of the work, not just its delicious satirising of responses to ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, but its metatheatrical probing of opera as a performative art, has simply been passed over. Thoma comments in a programme interview, ‘But sometimes when I leave the theatre and see the news, and there are catastrophes, think, what have I been worrying about? There are more important matters in the world.’ Unfortunately, the æstheticism of the work and its creators is not so much undercut as rejected in favour of uninvolving incoherence.

 

Musical performances were better, though I suspect – and hope – they will improve as the run proceeds. Vladimir Jurowski had the excellent LPO on a tight leash: often too tight, harrying the score rather than giving it time to speak. Strauss of all composers does not need to be sentimentalised, but, despite certain kinship or rather pre-emption, this is not Stravinskian neo-Classicism. A half-way house, akin to Busoni, would be perfectly justifiable, intriguing even; however, for much of the time one desperately wanted to ask the conductor just to calm down a little, perhaps more than a little. The Opera fared somewhat better than the Prologue in that respect, though its musical course did not come across, as it should, as if in a single, long breath. Strauss may be an ambivalent Wagnerian here, but a Wagnerian he remains, especially in that requirement for understanding and communication of the melos.

 

Although the voice is not what it was, Thomas Allen still imparted to the Music Master a theatrical authority so evidently lacking in the stage direction; Wolfgang Ablinger-Speerhacke provided an effective foil as Dancing Master, though he was perhaps inclined to overact. Of the principal characters, Laura Claycomb’s Zerbinetta was by some distance the most successful. Notwithstanding an unfortunate passage of extremely stray intonation during her big aria, she otherwise managed her coloratura very well, and acted the part in as lively and sympathetic fashion as the staging would permit. Soile Isokoski’s Ariadne improved as the Opera progressed, her music before ‘Es gibt ein Reich’ having suffered from severe inability to sustain, let alone, to float a Straussian phrase. Yet, though matters improved in that respect, hers was not an involving portrayal. (Much of the fault may of course have been the director’s, but not all of it.) Sergey Skorokhodov experienced technical difficulties as Bacchus – one can readily forgive some of them, given Strauss’s cruel writing – but also managed on occasion to display greater mettle; his is certainly a performance I can imagine becoming more impressive on subsequent evenings. Kate Lindsey, though she threw herself commendably into the role of the Composer on stage, disappointed vocally; the voice lacked any of the richness, even vocal variegation, one longs for in the role, however unfair it may be to hark back to Irmgard Seefried. Smaller roles were generally well taken, offering a properly ‘Glyndebourne’ sense of theatrical company; Dmitri Vargin (Harlequin) is a singer whose future we might be well advised to watch.

                                 

Yet, despite the wonderful surroundings and some more than creditable music-making, the evening was sorely let down by Thoma’s staging. It offers neither ‘fidelity’, whatever that slippery concept might mean, nor the courage to try something new and to pursue its conclusions; the incoherence is its ultimate problem. Where the work presents a myriad of possibilities, the production closes them down, without offering anything satisfying in their stead. And if that makes me of the Composer’s party, so be it. Ultimately, we all know that, though Strauss plays his games of masks at least as cleverly here as anywhere else, the moment when they drop, when we hear his voice, is the Composer’s ‘Musik ist eine heilige Kunst...’. All of us, it would seem, except Thoma.

Così fan tutte, Royal Opera, 27 January 2012

Royal Opera House

Ferrando – Charles Castronovo
Guglielmo – Nikolai Borchev
Don Alfonso – Sir Thomas Allen
Fiordiligi – Malin Byström
Dorabella – Michèle Losier
Despina – Rosemary Joshua

Jonathan Miller (director)
Harry Fehr (revival director)
Jonathan Miller, Tim Blazdell, Andrew Jameson, Colin Maxwell, Catherine Smith, and Anthony Waterman (set designs)
Jonathan Miller and John Charlton (lighting)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Sir Colin Davis (conductor)

Ferrando (Charles Castronovo), Don Alfonso (Sir Thomas Allen), Guglielmo (Nikolai Borchev)
Image: Royal Opera/Johan Persson

In principle, there could be no better way of celebrating Mozart’s birthday than hearing Sir Colin Davis conduct Così fan tutte. It was certainly advisable to think of this performance from the standpoint of hearing two well-loved knights from British musical life: Davis, of course the world’s greatest living Mozartian, and Sir Thomas Allen, marking his fortieth year with the Royal Opera.

For Jonathan Miller’s production, always a tawdry slight upon this most ravishing and sophisticated of operatic masterpieces, has not improved with age. The ludicrous slapstick – in this of all works! – continues at best to irritate, not least given its effect upon sections of an extremely poorly-behaved audience. When not coughing, chattering, dropping items, reading the subtitles out aloud, or making strange oinking noises (the row behind me), far too many people seemed to find the appearance of mobile telephones intrinsically, indeed overpoweringly, hilarious, their selfishly prolongued guffaws well-night obliterating the magical strains of Mozart’s – and Sir Colin’s – orchestra. Designs for the most part now simply look dull, outlandish costumes representing an attempt to breathe life into a corpse that should be put out of our misery. (It is extraordinary to think that no fewer than six people, Miller included, are credited for the set designs. What could they all have been doing?) To take the most brazen example: why ever would the girls be interested in the hideous biker transformations to which Ferrando and Guglielmo are subjected? They are certainly unrecognisable, so the disguise at least has worked; yet, however fickle Fiordiligi and Dorabella may be, they would be in need of psychiatric attention to forget two handsome young men in favour of what is put in front of them. The only glimmer of a real idea – and it is, to be fair, an interesting one, partly to be attributed to Rosemary Joshua’s fine acting skills – is the final outcome for Despina, who appears genuinely troubled by what she has seen. Was this, though, the doing of revival director, Harry Fehr? I do not remember it from before, though that may simply be a matter of fallible memory. Enough of the production: I have probably dwelled too much on it in the past and have granted it far too great a benefit of the doubt. Let us proceed to the more congenial matter of the music.

Davis remains a master of this score. If he did not perhaps quite scale the heights of greatness I heard in 2007 – probably the best conducted Mozart opera I have ever heard – then it is difficult to conceive of anyone nearing, let alone matching, him. As so often, the overture gave a clue, its opening bars somehow both sensuous and magisterial, the unbearable lightness of being that followed a true and poignant opening to the work as a whole. There is often more than one answer to a puzzle of tempo, but Sir Colin’s wisdom ensured that we never realised there was a puzzle in the first place, every number so seemingly ‘natural’ both in pacing and progress that one could not imagine it being performed otherwise, and every number of course integrated into a greater whole. That is the key to this opera, both in music and drama: the highest artifice, expressed with the greatest ease. (Would that Miller had been listening.) The wind ravished, as they must, witnesses to the unspeakable pain that Mozart as musical dramatist inflicts upon us, more so, should we listen, than anything even in Wagner. There were a few occasions, however, when, in a house of this size, the excellent strings would have sounded even better had they been augmented. Paul Wynne Griffith’s witty, ever-musical harpsichord continuo proved a joy throughout, attesting as did Davis’s conducting to some of the truths voiced in David Syrus’s splendid programme note, ‘Interpreting Mozart Operas’. As Syrus, writes, ‘Directors don’t always welcome discussion of music when rehearsing recitative, and some prefer to treat the text as if it was as free for interpretation as a spoken play.’ How many times have we all suffered, as again here, from un-musical directors? And how greatly do we value directors such as Peter Konwitschny, and Stefan Herheim, who are musicians?

There was, quite rightly, an extended curtain call for our other musical knight, at which he was presented with a cake in honour of those forty years. The humanity of Sir Thomas Allen shone through both in his brief, typically modest response, and of course in his portrayal of Don Alfonso. (From my encounters, including an interview at Covent Garden, I can attest that every personal compliment paid him is if anything an understatement.) Allen held the stage as much through his visual as his musical assumption of the role: indeed, the two were quite properly indivisible. However many times he may have played Don Alfonso, the freshness is such that it might have been the first. He was, it must be said, equally fine in Salzburg, where he was blessed with a far superior production. Joshua’s Despina was a pleasure too: far removed from the frequent portrayal of a servant several years past her best. (One only has to read the libretto to be disabused of that strange notion.) As agile of voice as on stage, hers is a Despina to be savoured. Of Charles Castronovo, I am afraid I can only repeat, word for word, what I said of Matthew Polenzani last year in Paris: ‘… he sounded strangely miscast. “Un aura amoroso” received great applause, but this was an emoting delivery, vibrato disconcertingly wide, the all-too noticeable ‘effect’ of his mezza voce more appropriate to Puccini than to Mozart. It was almost Pavarotti-lite ...’ Così simply does not work – thank goodness – as La bohème. The contrast with the superlatively sensitive Egyptian cotton spun by the orchestra was stark, similarly with Malin Byström’s Fiordiligi. There were a few too many times when she failed to maintain her vocal line, and as for the attempt a crude sexual humour upon a trill… Whether her idea or the director’s, it has no place in Mozart. Nikolai Borchev’s Guglielmo and Michèle Losier’s Dorabella occasionally lacked the proper degree of Mozartian chiaroscuro, yet nevertheless had much to offer in musical sensitivity.

LSO/Haitink - Ravel and Mendelssohn, 23 June 2011

Barbican Hall

Ravel – Ma mère l’oye
Mendelssohn – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, opp.21 and 61

Sarah-Jane Brandon (soprano)
Daniela Lehner (mezzo-soprano)
Sir Thomas Allen (narrator),
Eltham College Boys’ Choir
London Symphony Orchestra
Bernard Haitink (conductor)

This was a wonderful concert: delightfully programmed and performed, with only the occasional blemish to rob it of greatness. Blemishes, alas, matter more in Ravel and Mendelssohn than in many other composers. After some highly uncharacteristic slight hesitations from the London Symphony Orchestra’s wind at the very opening of the Prelude, Ma mère l’oye was a joy to experience; soon, a veritable magic carpet was unveiled, as Bernard Haitink’s ear for orchestral blend and balance revealed itself. Moreover, the LSO, especially its strings, managed to sound convincingly ‘French’ in tone: not perhaps an absolute necessity in this music but highly desirable. It was perhaps northern France, the warm, utterly un-Boulezian glow edging towards the land of Haitink’s fabled Concertgebouw recording, but none the worse for that. A sharp ear for drama was present too: the Sleeping Beauty’s finger was well and truly pricked, without the slightest need for exaggeration. The dignified sadness that characterised the pavane was an object lesson: nothing maudlin, but the line spun so as to allow a slower tempo than most conductors could sustain. There were not so many occasions when the orchestra was truly given its head: Ravel does not permit that. When there were, however, the LSO sounded magnificent. Climactic passages, culminating in the final bars of ‘Le jardin féerique’, benefited from a perhaps surprising degree of nervous energy and orchestral bite: none of Debussy’s vagueness here. Solo work was first-class too, not least that of leader, Roman Simovic and principal flautist, the ever-excellent Gareth Davies. The LSO woodwind provided surprisingly realistic – if with a proper hint of Ravelian clockwork – birdsong too: Messiaen, it seemed, might have learned from Ravel. But the final triumph, though supported by the LSO, indeed impossible without it, was Haitink’s: his careful shaping of the closing pages was possessed of an unforced nobility that might have been Elgar’s. Perhaps that is not so surprising when one considers what a great Dutchman conducting such utterly French music might sound like.

Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream music was given in a performance edition with narrator by Ara Guzelimian. I rather liked it, and not just because the narrator was Sir Thomas Allen. We discussed his upcoming engagement to perform this work with Haitink in Chicago, when I interviewed Sir Thomas in 2009, and it was clear from the present performance that the baritone’s ambitions, which we also discussed in that interview, to branch out into spoken theatre, are well founded. He has a naturally musical way with Shakespeare’s text, the occasional missed word going for nothing against such a winning and meaningful delivery: old-school, doubtless, but none the worse for that. The shift into broad Geordie for the rustic prologue was a delight, though I suspect it would have bemused anyone whose first tongue was not English. It was a pity, though, that the Barbican resorted to amplification: it was unnecessary, given Allen’s projection and diction, and undesirable in terms of balance. Sarah-Jane Brandon proved a fine soprano, and the Boys of Eltham College sang splendidly too. The only real fly in the fairy ointment was Daniela Lehner’s mezzo, who sounded as though she were auditioning for the role of Sorceress in Dido and Aeneas, quite out of keeping with the other performers.

I was startled at the hard-driven quality of some of the Overture, especially the first group, despite the LSO’s gossamer – the word is as unavoidable as it is predictable – strings. It was a relief that Haitink relaxed for the second subject, but the brass blared and the music turned relentless again during the recapitulation, so that was clearly how Haitink wished to take the music. I was put in mind of quasi-Lisztian bombast, notably absent, ironically, from Haitink’s recordings of Liszt’s music. On the other hand, the moment of exhaustion at the end of the development section was captured to perfection: I do not think I have ever heard it sound so magical. Haitink brought true symphonic and dramatic impetus to the scherzo, which sang with a real sense of woodland danger and emerged far more substantially than in most performances. During the fairies’ chorus, the twinning of trumpets and drums, so characteristic of Mendelssohn, sounded far more balanced than it had during the overture. As the tale progressed, we even heard Wagnerian musico-dramatic intimations: we were, after all, listening to arguably the greatest living conductor of Wagner. Unfortunately, an exceptionally selfish member of the audience ruined the narrated passage between ‘Andante’ and ‘Intermezzo’ with a long-running alarm. The ‘Intermezzo’ itself displayed a freedom and turbulence that can rarely have been bettered; Haitink’s shaping of the cello line and the cello section’s execution, were ravishingly beautiful. And then, the rustics’ music was captured without overstatement: I could not help but wonder what indignities more exhibitionistic conductors might have unleashed upon it. The great Nocturne was perhaps a little too plain-spoken, at least to begin with; moreover, I should have loved Haitink to dare to take it more slowly and to place less emphasis on the bar-lines. At least, though, it resolutely steered clear of sentimentality. The middle section, moreover, was rivetingly dramatic, doubtless benefiting from Haitink’s long experience in the opera house. There remained occasional doubts: the Wedding March might have smiled a little more – its steely glint seemed more apposite to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony – but the trio relaxed nicely, without dragging. No one could doubt, moreover, Haitink's alertness to the precendent Mendelssohn set for Mahler in the little funeral march. And even if the preceding performance had not proved for the most part so beguiling, the miraculous glow brought by Haitink and the LSO to Mendelssohn’s final chord would have made the visit to the Barbican worthwhile.

R.I.P. Robert Tear, 1939-2011

Living Monteverdi: Janet Baker and Raymond Leppard; Thomas Allen and Hans Werner Henze

Ottavia's lament from L'incoronazione di Poppea, the greatest (surviving) opera of the seventeenth century, indeed probably the greatest before Mozart:




And here, on stage at Glyndebourne, in a role Dame Janet was surely born to play, Penelope, from Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria:




The entire performance may be seen on DVD.

How distant those days seem - and how I wish I could have known them at first hand - when Monteverdi's music was performed as music, as part of a living, dramatic tradition, rather than as a dry archaeological exercise or a mere freak show. (Nikolaus Harnoncourt was a different matter entirely, but he is probably as unfashionable today as Leppard.)  Perhaps our only hope, and it is a slim one, is for composers again to re-imagine Monteverdi's music. Here is the Prologue from Henze's tremendous realisation. Has Monteverdi's music ever sounded so utterly of the Mediterranean? Sir Thomas Allen, Ulysses in this 1985 Salzburg Festival production, discussed it with me in a 2009 interview (for which, click here). Jeffrey Tate conducts the ORF Symphony Orchestra, and what a splendid supporting cast we have too:






In March, we shall see what ENO makes of Ulisse...

Hänsel und Gretel, Royal Opera, 23 December 2010

Royal Opera House

(Images: Royal Opera/Johan Persson)

Hänsel – Christine Rice
Gretel – Ailish Tynan
Gertrud – Yvonne Howard
Peter – Sir Thomas Allen
Witch – Jane Henschel
Dew Fairy – Anna Devin
Sandman – Madeleine Pierard
Echo – Kai Rüütel
Angels, Children

Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier (directors)
Elaine Kidd (revival director)
Christian Fenouillat (set designs)
Agostino Cavalca (costumes)
Christophe Forey (lighting)

Members of Tiffin Boys’ Choir and Tiffin Children’s Chorus (director: Simon Toyne)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Rory Macdonald (conductor)

After being appointed Music Director of the Vienna State Opera, Franz Welser-Möst made a remark to the effect – I cannot remember the precise words – that how a house handled a week-day repertory Figaro was just as crucial to its flourishing as a starry new production. Indeed. Whilst the situation at Covent Garden is somewhat different, in that it does not have a repertory system along the lines of many German houses, there is a case to be made that the quality of revivals matters as much as that of more ‘newsworthy’ new productions. One does not necessarily employ quite the same criteria; it depends. And so, this first revival of Hänsel und Gretel, whilst it lacks in some though by no means all cases the star quality of some participants from the first run, may be accounted a considerable success. One does not expect a young conductor to evince the lifetime’s experience of Sir Colin Davis, though Rory Macdonald did an increasingly fine job as the night went on. Likewise, it would perhaps be unreasonable to expect Angelika Kirchschlager and Diana Damrau on every occasion. But if the performance took a little while to settle down, notably assisted in that respect by the appearance of Yvonne Howard and Sir Thomas Allen, the sole survivor from the original cast reprising the role of Peter, this proved an enjoyable and ultimately moving evening.

Part of that is down to the delights of Humperdinck’s score. Derivative it might be, but the fairy-tale Wagnerisms enchant rather than irritate, though the Meistersinger-ish opening scene perhaps remains excessively dependent upon its weightier model. During much of the first act, I felt a slight lack of focus, never damaging, and something that I suspect will soon dissipate once the run of performances beds down. The luxuriance of Sir Colin’s interpretation lingered in the mind. However, as time went on, Macdonald imparted a different quality to the score, marking this out very much as his own reading. Woodwind suggested Mozart and Strauss; indeed, I was at times taken aback at quite how much the score’s textures seemed to presage the latter: hardly Elektra, but perhaps Ariadne.

I do not really have anything to add to what I said about the production last time (click here for the DVD). It works well, and has surprisingly dark moments given that it is at least partly aimed at children. There is proper contrast between the magical dream of Christmas and the industrial scale oven of the Witch’s house. Like a true fairy tale, there is more than tinsel to this Christmas offering. Elaine Kidd’s work as revival director seems assured.

Christine Rice presented a suitably boyish Hänsel, looking as well as sounding the part. Though I find it difficult to warm to Ailish Tynan’s thin tone, this Gretel certainly provided the best performance I have heard from her, and again she acted credibly. The parents, Yvonne Howard and Sir Thomas Allen, both impressed, as one might have expected. I was amazed once again how Allen could make so much out of so relatively little. His diction, vocal presentation, and stage presence once again proved second to none. Anja Silja had assumed the role of the Witch in 2008; I very much liked her portrayal, though some were more affected by its vocal shortcomings. Here, Jane Henschel proved a more than worthy successor. I could not help but think of her wonderful assumptions of the role of the Nurse in Die Frau ohne Schatten: a more ambivalent character, to be sure, but perhaps not wholly unrelated. In any case, she combined stage presence and a more secure vocal line than her predecessor. Sir Charles Mackerras was to have conducted; the performance was dedicated to his memory.

Der Rosenkavalier, Royal Opera, 22 December 2009

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Die Feldmarschallin Fürstin Werdenberg – Soile Isokoski
Der Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau – Peter Rose
Octavian – Sophie Koch
Herr von Faninal – Sir Thomas Allen
Sophie – Lucy Crowe
Jungfer Marianne Leitmetzerin – Elaine McKrill
Valzacchi – Graham Clark
The Marschallin’s Major-domo – Robert Anthony Gardiner
Faninal’s Major-domo – Steven Ebel
Italian Singer – Wooyung Kim
Notary - Lynton Black
Mohammed – Ostin D’Silva
Noble Widow – Glenys Groves
Doctor – Alan Duffield
Innkeeper – Robert Worle
Commissioner – Jeremy White

John Schlesinger (director)
Andrew Sinclair (revival director)
William Dudley (designs)
Maria Bjørnson (costumes)
Robert Bryan (lighting)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Kyrill Petrenko (conductor)

After a number of recent disappointments at Covent Garden, I am delighted to report that this Rosenkavalier marked something of a return to form. John Schlesinger’s production has a wisdom born of age – it is not that much younger now than the Marschallin – yet does not seem tired. It is quite different in spirit, for instance, from the Otto Schenk production in Munich, which really needed to be retired as soon as Carlos Kleiber stopped conducting. Whilst the sets in some respects look similar – though there is less ostentation in London – one resembles a museum piece, and the characters inhabit it as such, whilst the other sets a frame for musical drama. Time has passed – it is, after all, ein sonderbar Ding – but that is not necessarily a bad thing in this of all works. Andrew Sinclair’s revival direction seemed to highlight comedy rather more than I recall Schlesinger having done: a valid enough choice, I suppose, but I could have done without it.

Kyrill Petrenko was clearly anxious not to wallow; indeed, his aim seemed to be to highlight the modernist tendencies, so often misunderstood or straightforwardly ignored, in what is anything but a benign score. There were occasions when this perhaps went a little far: a few clarinet lines, for instance, which shrieked to little avail, evoking neither Elektra nor Mozart. However, as a guard against undue nostalgia, this was on the whole an estimable account. The orchestra played gorgeously, the Viennese sweetness of the violins a perfect joy. As so often when not labouring under the baton of its music director, its world-class status was reaffirmed.

Singing was a little patchier. There were no bad performances, but there was probably only one that truly stood out, namely Peter Rose’s Ochs. This seemed to me a considerably stronger account than I had heard from him at the beginning of the year in Berlin. It combined the subtle virtues of that performance, nowhere more so than when dealing with Hofmannsthal’s German, with a greater stage presence, yet without any danger of falling into the all-too-typical boorish caricature. This Ochs was a nobleman, if a provincial one. Soile Isokoski’s Marschallin exhibited commendable Lieder-like attention to the text, but lacked charisma, especially during a rather frosty first act. There is something a little amiss if one does not immediately fall in love with her, as one had in different ways with Renée Fleming and Dame Felicity Lott, the two previous Covent Garden reincarnations. I have heard better from Sophie Koch, though there was nothing, save a degree of anonymity, especially wrong with her performance. (How, though, I longed for Angelika Kirchschlager!) And Lucy Crowe made a reasonable enough job of Sophie, though she lacked the beauty many singers have brought to the role. If she could not prevent the character from exhibiting a certain irritating pointlessness, then that is hardly her fault; almost no one can. It was, though, a joy to witness once again the sheer professionalism of Sir Thomas Allen as Faninal: his fiftieth role for the Royal Opera (as discussed in an October interview).

L'Heure Espagnole and Gianni Schicchi, Royal Opera, 24 October 2009

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Torquemada – Bonaventura Bottone
Concepcion – Ruxandra Donose
Gonsalve – Yann Beuron
Ramiro – Christopher Maltman
Don Inigo Gomez – Andrew Shore

Gianni Schicchi – Sir Thomas Allen
Lauretta – Maria Bengtsson
Rinuccio – Stephen Costello
Simone – Gwynne Howell
Zita – Elena Zilio
Betto di Signa – Jeremy White
Marco – Robert Poulton
La Ciesca – Marie McLaughlin
Gherardo – Alan Oke
Nella – Janis Kelly
Maestro Spinelloccio – Henry Waddington
Ser Amantio di Nicolao – Enrico Fissore
Pinellino – Nicholas Garrett
Guccio – Paul Goodwin-Groen
Buoso Donati – Peter Curtis
Gherardino – Alexander Howard-Williams

Richard Jones (director)
Elaine Kidd (revival director)
John Macfarlane (set designs)
Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)
Mimi Jordan Sherin (lighting)
Lucy Burge (choreography)
Paul Kieve (illusionist)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Paul Wynne Griffiths (conductor)

After the dismal Christof Loy Tristan und Isolde, which I saw again in the vain hope that I might yet see the light, the Royal Opera has provided a much-needed tonic, gratefully imbibed. There was more to enjoy in almost every minute of L’Heure espagnole than, singing apart, there had been in a double measure of that misconceived presentation of Wagner’s drama.

Ravel’s score is a joy, well communicated here by the splendid performance, colourful and precise, of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, conducted by Paul Wynne Griffiths. Vocal performances were equally splendid. Ruxandra Donose replaced Christine Rice, whose pregnancy ironically precluded her from assuming the role of Concepcion. There was no sense of second best here, however. As alluring of voice as she is on stage, Donose ascribed just the right kind of airy Hispanic sultriness – the apparent paradox is surely Ravel’s – to the part of the bored housewife. Christopher Maltman was a cheekily naïve Ramiro, the same going for that near contradiction. Maltman’s dark, handsome baritone was as well fitted to the part as his display of the bulging biceps of which we hear so much in the libretto. Yann Beuron, Bonaventura Bottone, and Andrew Shore all made a great deal of their supporting roles, dependent upon single characteristics, as such comic parts tend to be, without betraying the Gallic sophistication of Ravel’s comedy.

Richard Jones’s production, here revived by Elaine Kidd, is at least as felicitous. The clockwork goings on – not for nothing did Stravinsky liken Ravel to a Swiss watchmaker – were punctiliously and lovingly observed in a riot of colour, so ably realised in John Macfarlane’s designs. If the audience’s response was somewhat over-the-top in its uproarishness, one can only assume that certain members of matinée audiences do not get out that much – or perhaps they do, lucklessly find themselves at Loy’s Tristan, and are grateful for the light relief. The arrival of the dancing girls for the closing habanera provided a marvellous apotheosis, even, if with Ravel, one is not quite sure of what.

The production of Gianni Schicchi is just as fine: an updating from the libretto’s very specific 1299 to a magnificently awful vision of 1950s Italy. The garishness of the frocks alone, credit to Nicky Gillibrand, would sear it upon one’s memory. And of course, the family of the deceased Buoso Donati is magnificently awful. Production and opera agree upon injecting a certain amount of soap into the opera. I only wish that Puccini, in what must rank as one of his best scores, did not lapse into sentimental mawkishness for the music of Rinuccio and Lauretta, though Jones’s cinematic freeze-frame ending captured the change of mood wonderfully. Yes, I know that the contrast makes a dramatic point, but the heartless Puccini is so much more palatable, at least for me. Orchestra and conductor once again revelled in the fantasy of – much of – the score, doubtless well prepared by Antonio Pappano, who had conducted the earlier performances.

There was not a weak link in the cast. Stephen Costello was the real thing as an ardently youthful Rinuccio, with Maria Bengtsson, whom I had previously admired in the very different role of Gluck’s Armide, as elegant a Lauretta as the role permits. ‘O mio babbino caro,’ was well sung, though I cannot help but find it a fly in the ointment. (Audible and visual relaxation of some otherwise inattentive members of the audience made the point all too clearly.) Elena Zilio simply was Zita; one would never have guessed, save of course for the richness of her voice, that she was not a contemporary of the recently deceased. And Sir Thomas Allen made a triumphant Gianni Schicchi, fully justifying the glowing terms in which he described both role and work when I spoke with him a couple of weeks earlier. His comic timing, his attentiveness to Giovacchino Forzano’s text, the musicianship of his response to the score, and the sheer winningness of his stage presence combined in a memorable portrayal. His next stop for the Royal Opera: another role debut as Faninal...