The Golden Cockerel, English Touring Opera, 5 March 2022

Hackney Empire Theatre

King Dodon – Grant Doyle
Prince Guidon – Thomas Elwin
Prince Aphron – Jerome Knox
General Polkan – Edward Hawkins
Amelfa – Amy J Payne
Golden Cockerel – Alys Mererid Roberts
Queen of Shemakha – Paula Sides
Astrologer – Robert Lewis

James Conway (director)
Neil Irish (set designs and costumes)
Rory Beaton (lighting)

Chorus and Orchestra of English Touring Opera
Gerry Cornelius (conductor)

No one could have known at the time of planning—a couple of years ago, I think—but in current circumstances it was eerie, even uncanny, to sit down to a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s final opera, The Golden Cockerel. Composed in the aftermath of the disastrous Russo-Japanese war and only premiered, following extended disputes with the censor, in 1909 after Rimsky’s death, it portrays a lazy king persuaded once again to defeat in war following claims, once again, of enemy incursions at the borders of his realm. King Dodon and his two sons are, to be blunt, idiots; their advisors, official and otherwise (the Golden Cockerel, brought as an Astrologer’s gift) are not necessarily any better. A foreign queen who conquers the realm through conquering the king’s heart stands a little close to home too. Situations differ, of course, but it would have been strange indeed not to draw contemporary parallels, if only in hope that a cockerel might come to peck Russia’s latest autocrat to death. ‘What will the new dawn bring? What shall we do without a tsar?’ 

I found it fascinating, if not entirely convincing. In Iain Farrington’s extremely skilful chamber reorchestration, one would often not have known—at least up in the gods—that one was not hearing a larger orchestra. Rimsky’s meeting-point between the folkloric and more modernist, Stravinskian tendencies, mediated as so often by darker, Wagnerian roots, both delighted in itself and posed intriguing dramatic questions of its own, not least in combination with Pushkin. Gerry Cornelius’s command of detail and sweep in the score impressed greatly, as did the playing of the English Touring Opera orchestra. If the referential motivic elements of the composer’s writing sometimes seemed a little obvious, that was hardly a fault of the performance. The English translation by Antál Dorati and James Gibson sounded very dated, making the opera sound unfortunately close to Gilbert and Sullivan. Thank goodness we have now gone beyond attention-seeking rhyming couplets. 

Alas, the second act seemed considerably over-extended for its material. Whenever Rimsky comes closer to Verdi—as, for instance, in The Tsar’s Bride—his musical drama becomes less appealing to me, often bordering on the tedious. Overall proportions to a relatively brief work are a little odd, or felt so. That said, James Conway’s colourful yet darkening, subtly militarising staging offered a sense that knowing orientalism must by now offer its own self-critique—which may just offer us hope. The Astrologer, oddly uncredited in the cast list yet ultimately revealed in the biographies to be Robert Lewis, underwent a final revelation on stage as holy man Rasputin to the Queen’s Tsarina Alexandra. They were the only ones who had actually existed, the rest an illusion (as we had been warned, yet had probably forgotten). Make of that what you will. 

Lewis certainly made the most of his ritualistic appearances dramatically and vocally: a memorable assumption. Grant Doyle offered a fine comedic performance, with rich hints of something darker, to King Dodon, as verbally acute as it was centred of tone. Thomas Elwin and Jerome Knox shone, insofar as the work permitted, as the king’s useless, sailor-suited sons, contrasted and complementary. So too did Paula Sides’s Queen of Shemakha with bewitching coloratura and beguiling lyricism. All roles were cast from strength, detailed portrayals from the company at large contributing to a pervasive sense of barbed merriment. Closer interpretation was largely and, I think, fruitfully left to us.

Mozartists/Page - Haydn, Applausus, 15 March 2018

Cadogan Hall

Haydn: Applausus, Hob. XXIVa:6 (UK public premiere)

Ellia Laugharne (soprano)

Elspeth Marrow (mezzo-soprano)

Thomas Elwin (tenor)

John Savournin (bass-baritone)

David Shipley (bass)

It is not every day one attends a Haydn premiere, even if only a UK public premiere. Haydn’s Applausus, written 250 years ago, for the fiftieth anniversary of a Cistercian Abbot’s vows, seems never to have been performed again until 1958, for a BBC studio recording under Harry Newstone, the soprano one Joan Sutherland. (She must have relished the coloratura!) Despite a few performances elsewhere in the meantime, and three recordings, it does not seem to have been performed in concert in this country until now.

Was it worth the wait? Unquestionably, although I fear that contemporary audiences, longing for superficially ‘exciting’ substitute film music, will not necessarily react kindly or even comprehendingly to a celebration of monastic virtues on a suitably monastic time-frame. There is no plot of which to speak; the work might almost be characterised as an allegory without an allegory. There can certainly be no questioning the quality of the music in this cantata. (Would it fare any better if we called it an oratorio, the two terms being more or less interchangeable? Hummel, after all, recorded The Seasons as an ‘oratorio’ in his 1806 catalogue of the Esterházy collection.) Conductor Ian Page offers sage advice, moreover due food for thought, when he writes, ‘If an aria is beautiful, why should it bother us if it lasts for more than ten minutes? If the same line of text is repeated a couple of dozen times, how do these repetitions affect us as we consider and contemplate the text? How should we best prepare ourselves for the experience of listening to a complete performance of the work?’ It would be interesting to know how it would fare in an abbet such as that at Zwettl, in Lower Austria, for which it was written. How would the acoustic and the visual experience of the architecture shape our experience? In the meantime, though, this concert hall experience gave a fine account. So too did Classical Opera’s splendid documentation, the concert programme a model of its kind, with an excellent note by Page, as well as an important reproduction of a letter by Haydn concerning the work.

By way of an introduction to the opening recitativo accompagnato, we heard, as seems often to have been the case in the work’s relatively few performances, the first two movements of Haydn’s Symphony no.38 in C major. Hand on heart, my preference remains for modern instruments in such music, but it is always good thing from time to time to revisit one’s preferences and prejudices, and I found much to jolt me from ‘modern’ complacency in the sound, especially from the wind instruments. The Mozartists, Classical Opera’s ‘period’ band, certainly sounded preferable to my ears to the current, peculiar fashion for mixing and matching modern and period instruments. Even the echoes of the second movement, marked by a certain intonational fragility, were well shaped enough to render that fragility more touching than anything else. And there was something to the sound, here and elsewhere, that brought the music close to the world of the eighteenth-century – and not just Haydn’s – Missa solemnis figuraliter, trumpets, drums, and all. The opening of that first recitative, moreover, seemed to speak of Handel, even if this were similarity rather than influence as such. (The period of Handel’s true influence on Haydn, nurtured by Gottfried van Swieten’s Vienna concerts of alte Musik, lay a good few years in the future.)

By the time we reached the first quartet, ‘Virtus inter ardua quaerit habitare,’ there was, moreover, little doubt concerning the quality of the soloists either. The coordination and blend of their often highly melismatic writing was second to none. Ellie Laugharne’s silver-toned soprano and Elspeth Marrow’s richer mezzo proved well matched and contrasted; Thomas Elwin’s fresh, truly Mozartian – for that matter, Haydnesque – tenor proved fully equal to the extraordinary challenges Haydn afforded him, especially later on in two highly ornate arias of truly ‘heavenly length’. John Savournin’s bass-baritone and David Shipley’s bass likewise offered a pleasing degree of comtrast, the former truly coming in to his own in the rage aria, ‘Si obtrudat ultimam,’ the latter ably handling the fascinating tonal plan of the first aria of all, ‘Non chymaeras somnitatis’. Harpsichordist Steven Devine and violinist Steven Devine offered fine solo work too. Throughout, one could only marvel at the care lavished by Haydn on this more or less unknown music, never to be heard again in his lifetime. Page’s tempi were judicious; this is not music to be hurried, let alone harried, nor was it in practice.

The closing chorus, here taken as quintet, is an ‘Amen’ in all but name – and words. It is a delightful one at that, and proved a true culmination, a point of arrival. ‘I hope,’ Haydn wrote in the aforementioned letter, ‘that this Applausus will please the poet, the worthy musicians, and honourable revered Auditorio, all of whom I greet with profound respect.’ It certainly pleased this member, honourable and revered or otherwise, of the Auditorio, who hopes against hope that he will not have to wait too long until the next audition.

La vera costanza, Royal Academy of Music, 19 November 2012

Helen Bailey (Rosina)
Images: Hana Zushi, Royal Academy of Music

 

 Sir Jack Lyons Theatre

 

La Baronessa Irene – Rosalind Coad

Il Marchese Ernesto – Thomas Elwin
Lisetta – Sónia Grané
Villotto – Nicholas Crawley
Rosina – Helen Bailey
Masino _ Samuel Pantcheff
Il Conte Errico – Stuart Jackson
Rosina’s son – Jude Chandler

Jamie Hayes (director)

Tim Reed (designs)
Jake Wiltshire (lighting)

Royal Academy Sinfonia

Trevor Pinnock (conductor)
 

Nicholas Crawley (Villotto), Il Conte Erico (Stuart Jackson)

Il Marchese Ernesto (Thomas Elwin),
La Baronessa Irene (Rosalind Coad), and
Lisetta (Sónia Grané)

I often fear that I am the only enthusiast for Haydn’s operas. Quite apart from the questions that raises concerning one’s sanity, it is heartening to be reminded that I am not quite in a minority of one. According to Jane Glover’s programme welcome note, Trevor Pinnock, having conducted La fedeltà premiata – how I wish I had caught that – in 2009, suggested following that up with La vera costanza, a proposal Royal Academy Opera ‘embraced ... with great enthusiasm’. And so it should have done. This, like many of Haydn’s works, only more so, is an opera whose neglect does shame to all concerned, superior in almost every way to a good number of pieces that inexplicably hold the stage. No, it is not written by we-all-know-who, but apart from that lack of profound characterisation in which some of the Salzburg composer’s greatest genius lies, Haydn is not entirely embarrassed by the comparison here, which is more than can be said of many. La vera costanza is at least to be ranked alongside La finta giardiniera and in some respects – not least the surprisingly sophisticated ensemble writing – even looks towards the likes of Figaro. The likes of the Baroness Irene, Rosina – an unfortunate name in retrospect, I admit – and Count Errico will not linger in our imaginations; there is no one remotely akin to Susanna, let alone the Countess, here, but the advanced level of musical thought is undeniable. Take for instance the canonical writing in the second act finale, or the opening storm music. The latter cannot boast the almost psychoanalytical quality to the opening of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, but it would make an excellent, thrilling, concert overture, and thrilled even more here in the theatre, in so fine a performance.

 

Samuel Pantcheff (Masino) and Lisetta

Part of the problem with Haydn’s operas seems to be an extension of the general problem Haydn’s music faces: beloved of all true musicians, it rarely seems to appeal to non-musicians. Wagner adored Haydn’s music, and increasingly so, often comparing his symphonic writing favourably to Mozart’s. (A parallel or opposing error one often comes up against is gross underestimation of Mozart as a symphonist, on account of his writing being so very different from that of Haydn and Beethoven, but that is a cause for another day.) I can only assume that it is a lack of formal understanding that means many listeners simply do not follow as attentively as they must what Haydn is doing and how he rings his changes. The strange inability truly to characterise in musical terms remains a considerably shortcoming, of course, and a shortcoming that cannot be ascribed simply to formal convention, yet the music is so glorious – that of the opening scene alone – that one can forgive a lot. Indeed, in order fairly to dismiss Haydn as an opera composer it would have to be on that basis alone and one would most likely therefore have to confine oneself exclusively to Monteverdi, Purcell, Mozart, Wagner, Strauss, Berg, and Janáček. I for one have never encountered someone who fell into that category.

 

Trevor Pinnock led a gripping account of the score by the Royal Academy Sinfonia. I wondered during the opening storm whether he might be tempted to drive a little harder, a little too hard, but was delighted to have my fears assuaged. This was a performance full of life, which yielded where necessary, and which never once failed to delineate Haydn’s musico-dramatic structures, whether at a micro- or a macro-level. Only occasionally did I feel the lack of a greater body of strings (6.6.4.4.2). Those few moments of relative thinness aside, I have nothing but praise for a stylish, warm, alert performance from all concerned. Chad Kelley’s harpsichord continuo was also a model of its kind, mercifully free of the ludicrous exhibitionism in favour in certain quarters.

 

Jude Chandler (Rosina's son)

Moreover, every member of this young cast contributed to the overall success, every one of them contributing something positive. (If only one could say that of most performances on starrier stages, the contrast with a recent Götterdämmerung being especially glaring, from the out-of-his-depth conductor down...) Italian pronunciation and diction were excellent throughout; ability to shape a phrase was equally apparent. All performances exuded dramatic and musical honesty and understanding. If I was especially taken with Helen Bailey’s portrayal of the sentimental – in the eighteenth-century sense – heroine Rosina, abandoned by the Count as a consequence of the Baroness’s machinations, that was perhaps a matter of the role as much as anything else, though Crawley has a distinctive voice which, allied with stage presence, ought to mark her out in the future. Rosalind Coad and Sónia Grané both entered into their roles with spirit and style. Thomas Elwin and Nicholas Crawley fashioned finely-honed marriages of words, music, and gesture, very much with eyes – and ears – for what Haydn’s prodigal inventiveness requested. Samuel Pantcheff’s Masino showed keen awareness for the social differentiation of characters in Haydn’s dramma giocoso, whilst Stuart Jackson’s portrayal of the Count, after a slightly bluff start, blossomed into something rather affecting, partly on account of his command of the text. Even Jude Chandler delivered his spoken line as Rosina's son in convincing Italian.

 

The production by Jamie Hayes was richly rewarding too. It had no especial ‘point’ to make, but keen direction of the singers, within a somewhat stylised – no pandering to false naïveté – evocation of eighteenth-century manners proved a perfect setting for Haydn’s music to work its wonders. This was without a shadow of a doubt the best live performance I have yet heard of a Haydn opera – and that includes Armida at the Salzburg Festival.


Performances will continue on 22, 23, and 26 November, a second cast alternating with this one.