We left at the interval...

Tchaikovsky – Pikovaya Dama

2012-02-01T17:24:00.000+01:00

ONP Bastille, Tuesday January 31 2012

Conductor: Dimitri Jurowski. Production: Lev Dodin. Sets: David Borovsky. Costumes: Chloe Obolensky. Lighting: Jean Kalman. Hermann: Vladimir Galuzin. Tomsky: Evgeny Nikitin. Prince Yeletsky: Ludovic Tézier. Chekalinsky: Martin Mühle. Surin: Balint Szabo. Countess: Larissa Diadkova. Liza: Olga Guryakova. Polina: Varduhi Abrahamyan. Masha: Nona Javakhidze. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris. Children’s choirs of the Hauts-de-Seine and the Opéra National de Paris.

The ever-excellent Opera Cake blog is not alone in noting that at the Paris Opera these days, only reruns of old productions are any good (though not all of those). This is the fourth outing of Lev Dodin’s staging of La Dame de Pique in Paris, and a good one it is (better, thank goodness, than his Salome, which has already been ditched), so it’s surprising it still manages to get booed on opening night, when the man himself is there too boo at. It comes as welcome change, both dramatically and vocally, from the recent serial duds.

It’s easy enough to describe. In the original story, Hermann goes mad at the end and is committed to an asylum. That is Dodin’s cue to set the opera in a madhouse from start to finish, with Hermann either thinking back, or just imagining things. With good actors painstakingly directed (including every member of the chorus with his or her own, individual twitches, grimaces and tics, scratching or clawing, slumping or crawling or dangling of limbs…) it works right through.Of course, with less expert directing, in only one or, at a pinch, two sets, it could have been monumentally boring.

The basic set is, then, the madhouse itself: brick walls painted green to shoulder height and white above, with some high, deep cornices and occasional relief, and one plain hospital bed that stays more or less in the same spot all evening, doubling as Liza’s bed or the countess’s as Hermann’s imaginings require. The white part of the wall glides back to create a broad ledge for some of the action: the opening scenes in the park, for example; but characters also descend to Hermann’s level. Only at the very end of the second act does the rear wall part to reveal a couple of tall, white, fluted Ionic columns supporting a beam, some white classical statues (including the nude Venus of Moscow) and a white marble staircase to the right, these new spaces serving as the Countess’s rooms (in which she dances a ghostly minuet with Hermann) and her funeral chapel.

The costumes are a superb parade of beautifully-made period clothes (early 19th C) in shades, largely, if white, cream and buff with occasional touches of green, brown and charcoal. The lighting is classic, creamy white from the sides.There are some cuts that upset some people, and there’s some pulling about of the story but not enough to bother me. In the first act, for example, when Tomsky tells the Countess’s tale, she’s on stage to sing her own “quotes”. The pastoral “tableau” in the second act is acted out (as is quiet often the case in modern productions, I think) by Liza, Hermann and the Countess. Things like that. But with the acting quality we get in this production, it all works very well.

Vocally there were some thrills of a kind that have been rare in my opera-going experience of late. Galuzin, who was in this production form the start at the end of the 90s, now “owns” the part, as (I’m afraid) people say, flawless (as people also say quite a bit) throughout. Guryakova’s voice is harder and less agile than it used to be, understandably, but still what an instrument and what a gorgeous actress. Diadkova is a younger Countess than we sometimes get (not that we get this work often enough) and in full, sumptuous voice, not just chest notes and wobble like some - fun though that can be. Nikitin seemed off peak last night (and looked unhappy at the end) but still put out some great notes. And Tézier, who may not be so well known abroad as his colleagues, was simply marvellous, as those who do know him would expect, as Yeletsky.

I wasn’t as impressed as some of the critics by the orchestra under Dimitri Jurowski - and by the way, this time, just a few seats along in the stalls from where I was last, I could hear it perfectly clearly, such are the quirks of the Bastille acoustics. As usual – maybe more than usual, as this was Tchaikovsky - I’d have liked more energy, more drive; and to my taste he was too cautious with the balance between pit and stage: the orchestras could have played louder and everyone would have made more noise. Here it was quite Scuthbert-like.

But who’s complaining - except about the dreadful audience? It was one of those corporate nights with bankers, their spouses and guests everywhere, slouching, coughing, fidgeting, leaning and whispering, as if at home in front of the TV, and chauffeurs lounging on limousine bonnets outside. But apart from that, I’m very glad I went, for both the work and the performance

Massenet - Manon

2012-01-14T15:49:00.000+01:00

ONP Bastille, Tuesday January 10 2012

Conductor: Evelino Pido. Production: Coline Serreau. Sets: Jean-Marc Stehlé and Antoine Fontaine. Costumes: Elsa Pavanel. Manon: Natalie Dessay. Le Chevalier des Grieux: Giuseppe Filianoti. Lescaut: Franck Ferrari. Le Comte des Grieux: Paul Gay. Guillot de Morfontaine: Luca Lombardo. De Brétigny: André Heyboer. Poussette: Olivia Doray. Javotte: Carol Garcia. Rosette: Alisa Kolosova. L’Hôtelier: Christian Tréguier. Deux Gardes: Alexandre Duhamel, Ugo Rabec.

“Manon massacred at Bastille.” “Unfortunately, this new Paris production is no break with (Joël’s) form: under the directorship of Nicolas Joel the house on the Seine seems more and more to be bidding farewell to living, advanced music theatre.” “The year has got off to a bad start at the Paris Opera: this Manon (…) is indeed a total failure and was greeted with copious booing.” “This Manon, the worst production we have seen in a long time, is a disgrace to the Paris Opera.” “A hotchpotch of ideas that freely mixes eras and costumes, an incoherent bid for the universal message of Manon’s story that looks like intellectual laziness.” “Yet another turkey.” “Another shipwreck at the Paris Opera. Following a calamitous Faust, a Forza del destino simply too… feeble, there’s no risk that this Manon will set back on course a season that has gone adrift. The fault, above all, of Coline Serreau, creator of a spectacle of gobsmacking incoherence and vacuity.”

If anyone reads my write-ups, they may recall that after Forza I wrote: “I realised last night that I’d miscounted: the singing in Werther so eclipsed the production that I forgot how dire it was. In other words, Faust made four stinkers, not three; and Forza makes five." So Manon makes six: Joël continues to churn out duds like apparitions in Macbeth. Who would have thought the old man to have had so much dud in him? Surely after the booing, then these unusually unanimous reviews, he’s starting to get the message?

I quite enjoyed, though the Austrian ambassador didn't, Coline Serreau's Fledermaus production with prison uniforms from the concentration camps and ballets forming swastikas. I liked her Barbiere less, though it's been quite a popular hit. In both, ideas were raised but not worked through in any satisfactory way. Manon had me wondering, right from the opening scenes, what she was getting at; or more precisely, wondering if she was getting at anything at all, or simply had nothing much to say.

Hers will be remembered (until it’s forgotten) as the “punk” Manon. The ONP’s workshops pulled out the stops to produce, for Lescaut and his friends (the chorus), a wholly authentic-looking Berlin punk-Goth extravaganza of wildly spiked black-and-red wigs, leather jackets and trousers, torn jeans, chains, platform-soled, steel-reinforced biker boots, nose rings, armbands: you name it, they thought of it. That’s what will be remembered best. But in fact set and costume periods were mixed up madly.

In act one, in Grand Central Station – you couldn’t mistake the giant, round-headed windows or those shallow arches under the chunky balustrade – the revellers were kind-of-Paul-Poiret and, after dinner was thrown up to them from a supermaket trolley, Manon alighted from a 50s bus in a simple 18th century dress. She and Des Grieux left for Paris on Lescaux’ motor bike.I quite generously supposed that this anachronistic jumble couldn’t be so corny as to symbolise the eternal timelessness of Manon’s plight, but the professional critics seem to think that’s all there was to it. For the rest, it simply seemed as if Serreau was chucking random silly gags at the work to poke fun at it. There was no hint of an overarching vision.

In act two, the little house was lowered down and unfolded to show a grubby little room with a bed and (la petite) table, to which two pizzas were delivered in boxes. When Manon sang “Reine… par la beauté” a “Miss Arras” sash and large tiara made a brief appearance. And as the FT put it, to the point as usual under the header “Let’s Make Fun Of Massenet”: “The award for crass sabotage goes to the drop-down panel featuring a 1950s US housewife waving to friends in a car which triggers audience laughs just as Des Grieux tiptoes to the end of ‘En fermant les yeux’."

Act three got weirder. We were in a “Grand Palais” sort of greenhouse with monstrous columns of tropical plants. Manon was now dressed as Madonna; Lescaut serenaded three muscular, bearded men in topless, leather-corseted crinolines; during her big number, our heroine was helped into Vogue-ing poses by more muscular men, this time in leather-corseted bondage with their mouths taped over. The “élégantes” were a crazed, jerky fashion parade in black and white on platform shoes; the girls also had their mouths taped up. I think there was a message of some kind, in these scenes, about male and female sex objects but again, if so, it was corny. Then, unexpectedly, the tropical plants swivelled into church piers and the Grand Central windows were recycled into Saint Sulpice. Des Grieux wore an oddly low-cut cassock and a see-through tee-shirt. His father was costumed as Germont père. Why his groupies were Belle Époque beauties on roller skates is beyond me, but they raised a few laughs.

For the Hôtel Transylvanie scene, the station had been “baroquified” in a heavy, Brooklyn Academy of Music sort of way, the ruined staircase was made partly of scaffolding, the floor was littered with paper, the punks and Goths were joined by gangsters in pale suits, black shirts, white ties, trilbies and sunglasses, and Manon and Des Grieux were arrested by modern French riot police. The litter stayed in place, for the final scenes, in an otherwise barren landscape crossed by battle-scarred “guards” of all eras, from Roman centurion to mediaeval knight to GI. Manon died under a shower of snow.

The production seems to have been taken, by the critics, as mitigating circumstances for the singers. It has been rumoured that some, having signed up when the show was supposed to be by Laurent Pelly and, during rehearsals, seen the iceberg approaching, tried to wriggle out before the ship went down but were threatened by the ONP with legal action. Natalie Dessay was very uncharacteristically subdued during curtain calls, taking only one bow, stepping back and looking glum, a sign she wasn’t pleased with herself. She was on fragile form – “walking on eggs,” as a friend put it at the second interval. She managed a fine “Obéissons” and was as good as you might expect in “N’est-ce plus ma main?” but her voice “caught” frequently and she was, by the end in particular, often inaudible in the middle and lower range.

Filianoti was, on the contrary, very audible throughout, a valiant though Italianate and somewhat unsubtle Des Grieux. He was so generous most of the way through that it would be unfair to complain if he flagged toward the end; no doubt, if he doesn’t find some way to drop out of this disaster, he will learn to pace himself better as the run progresses. Ferrari hammed his way merrily through the part in his comic-strip punk gear and red-tipped porcupine hair. Gay was elegant but stretched at the top.

Pido seemed to be chivvying the orchestra along in a way I’d normally like (though the local critics didn’t), but on row 11 of the stalls, we were in one of the Bastille’s unpredictable blind (or deaf?) spots, so the sound was muffled. The score, by the way, was fairly drastically cut, so, what with all the gags on stage, the evening didn’t drag on too long and, after pretty vicious booing of the production team, we were out in time for a restorative steak and chips.

Parterre is discussing this show.

Johann Christian Bach - Amadis de Gaule

2012-01-07T10:38:00.000+01:00

Opéra Comique, Paris, Wednesday January 4 2012

Conductor: Jérémie Rhorer. Production: Marcel Bozonnet. Choreography: Natalie van Parys. Sets: Antoine Fontaine. Costumes: Renato Bianchi. Amadis: Philippe Do. Oriane: Hélène Guilmette. Arcabonne: Allyson McHardy. Arcalaüs: Franco Pomponi. Urgande, 1er Coryphée: Julie Fuchs. La Discorde, 2ème Coryphée: Alix Le Saux. La Haine, L’Ombre d’Ardan Canil: Peter Martinčič*. Soprano solo: Ana Dežman*. Tenor solo: Martin Sušnik*.

* Soloists from the chorus of SNG Opera in balet, Ljubljana

“Period instruments, painted canvases, historically informed acting and choreography will all contribute to this major discovery of our repertoire,” says the Opéra Comique’s website in my translation, more accurate than their own.It would be odious indeed to make comparisons with Atys, revived in the same house last year. You might wonder, as the man on my left did, aloud, whether the Royal Opera in Versailles, then the Salle Favart in Paris, are the right places for productions that might most kindly be called “gentillet” (rather than Limoges, as he suggested). But I wouldn’t go so far as the FT’s ever-acerbic critic in calling it “a feast of leftovers.” Once you settled into the idea that this was an honest attempt to bring us baroque spectacle on a budget (and not another of Nicolas Joël’s tiresome attempts to turn the clock back and the Paris Opera into the Met), you were inclined to be indulgent and give it the benefit of the doubt.

So, no, the painted flats: fluted Doric columns, a fortified bridge, barred prison windows, “sublime” outcrops of rock, Rome, and, especially, a Caracalla-type brick ruin framing a circle of Veronese sky… were effective enough - not to mention Urgande descending at the end in a beautifully Kitsch, flaming orange mandorla. I didn’t find them as “worn and recycled” as the FT. The costumes were sometimes pretty, particularly during a Fragonard-like, pastoral ballet episode, though it’s true that at the end the chorus looked rather bedraggled in (puzzlingly but temping fate in reminding us directly of Atys) Louis XIV court dress. The FT critic thought the demons looked “like The Muppet Show while Arcabonne is dressed like a demented red parakeet,” but to me they looked more like science-fiction monsters from those old, cult, “Creature from the Lagoon” films, more amusing than frightening; my neighbours agreed that Amadis himself (cloaked in white, with lion's-head kneecaps) looked like Princess Leila. The FT was right in suggesting that the producer was “unsure over Baroque gesture. We start with much hands-to head from Arcabonne – as in ‘I need an aspirin, quick' – and dramatic upper-torso posturing from brother Arcalaüs, whose feet seemed to be trapped in a patch of glue…” yes, we found that annoying too; “but efforts from the rest of the cast are half-hearted.” The ballets could have been a lot worse (they usually are), and a couple of quirky hornpipes by two skinny but enthusiastic men were warmly applauded.

With raggedy attacks, dodgy ensemble playing and dodgy tuning, the Cercle de l’Harmonie is not yet up to Arts Florissants standards, but Rohrer nevertheless had them playing with energy and oomph. And finally, while, with the exception (see later) of Franco Pomponi, it was, you sat there thinking, too early for the leads to be singing such taxing arias in such a prominent house, your inclination was to admire the pluck of student singers making the most of their first big break.

Trouble is, that wasn’t exactly the case. Hélène Guilmette was last season’s underpowered, sometimes inaudible Thérese in Les Mamelles and Philippe Do (FT: “threadbare tenor”), to my amazement, sings Werther, Don José and (crikey) Verdi’s Requiem. Allyson McHardy has a very good middle range of the “North-of-England-mezzo” kind, but turned shrill and tremulous at the top of her soprano (so I believe) role.

Re Franco Pomponi, I see I’d noticed him before, in Henze’s The Bassarids in 2005: “Who," I asked, "is this Franco Pomponi? Visibly young and obviously, with his looks and figure, a candidate for Billy Budd, his is a bright, clear but forceful baritone and he threw himself into the part so generously I feared, I admit, for the length of his career.” To me, on Wednesday night, he was the only singer who really should have been up there singing that score.And the score was, to me, the evening’s winner: well made, lively, punchy, full of incident, plenty of anger and remorse, plenty of good arias and ensembles, reasonably short… Anyone who feels, for example, that Gluck didn’t compose enough operas would do well to look into Amadis de Gaule.

Massenet - Cendrillon

2011-12-10T09:40:00.001+01:00

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday December 11 2011

Conductor: Alain Altinoglu. Production: Laurent Pelly, Benoît De Leersnyder. Sets: Barbara de Limburg. Costumes: Laurent Pelly, Jean-Jacques Delmotte. Choreography: Laura Scozzi, Karine Girard. Lighting: Duane Schuler. Cendrillon: Rinat Shaham. Le Prince Charmant: Frédéric Antoun. Mme de la Haltière: Nora Gubisch. La Fée: Eglise Gutiérrez. Noémie: Ilse Eerens. Dorothée: Angélique Noldus. Pandolfe: Lionel Lhote. Le Doyen: Yves Saelens. Le Surintendant des plaisirs: Quirijn de Lang. Premier Ministre: Donal J. Byrne. Le Roi: Patrick Bolleire. Premier Esprit: Yuhmi Iwamoto. Deuxième Esprit: Charlotte Cromheeke. Troisième Esprit & Une Jeune Fille: Caroline Jestaedt. Quatrième Esprit & Une Jeune Fille: Amalia Avilan. Cinquième Esprit & Une Jeune Fille: Audrey Kessedjian. Sixième Esprit: Camille Merckx. Le Héraut: Pascal Macou. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie.

There are times when operas are like corporation buses: you wait ages for one, then three turn up at the same time. In over thirty years of unflinching opera-going I’d never seen Massenet’s Cendrillon; this year I’ve seen it twice, in different productions, first at the Opéra Comique, now at La Monnaie in Laurent Pelly’s peripatetic production from Covent Garden, due, I believe, to go on to Lille and the Liceu (and from there, who knows?).So it was a chance for my fellow subscribers and me to compare impressions.

Back in the spring, I started my write-up with a whole “tra-la-la,” as the French call it, about how Massenet is a luxury composer requiring top-flight singers to succeed. Also back in the spring, we had a Lucette who was, as a friend reminisced over coffee between lunch and the performance, “aussi intéressante qu’un plat de nouilles froides sur le bord de l’évier,” i.e., more or less literally, "as fascinating as a dish of cold spaghetti on the edge of the kitchen sink."There isn’t a great deal to say about the cast we had this time round. Eglise Gutiérrez was the same as in Paris, so you have only to refer back, again, to what I wrote earlier this year: the notes are all there (though the top ones are slender indeed) but personality isn’t. Nora Gubisch was a bit of a disappointment, not only in comparison with the outrageous Ewa Podles in Paris, but also because I’ve heard her in better form. Lionel Lhote was perfectly sound as Pandolfe. And our couple of heroes, in this case a soprano and a tenor, though by no means cold noodles, were simply what, once more, the French might call “gentils” – a good looking young couple, brave to take the roles on but at no point making them soar.

Musically, therefore, what with an occasionally ragged orchestra and off-beat chorus (this was, I think, only the second performance) the afternoon didn’t succeed in making sense of what seems to me an odd, disjointed score.I’ve read a lot, with regard to Cendrillon, about Massenet “the magician,” but the afternoon wasn’t magical and, on the home-bound train, when one of the band read out, from the programme notes, that at the time of composition Massenet was “at the height of his powers,” I’m afraid another exclaimed “C’est vache !” – "That’s unkind." (It wasn’t me; save your complaints for her.)

In an interview on La Monnaie’s website, Laurent Pelly talks about his inspiration for the production (my translation): “When I started working with Barbara de Limburg […] I mentioned an old book I’d read at my grandparents' when I was a child. It was an edition of Perrault’s fairy tales illustrated by Gustave Doré. When you’re five or six years old, it’s the kind of book that makes an impression on you: big and heavy, with a red, gilded cover and magnificent pictures […] This book was the basis of our staging, conceived as a giant book of fairy tales that opens and multiplies ad infinitum. We play with the pages, the costumes are inspired by the colours of the cover, the shades of black and white of ashes and the print on the paper. ‘Once upon a time…’ Everything flows from that phrase.”

So yes, the sets were highly mobile walls the colour of yellowing paper, printed with pages from the book, moving smoothly around to form various spaces, and inset with multiple doors. Through these, not only characters but other pieces of set glided: e.g. the smoking chimneys that made up the “forest,” Pelly’s idea being that transporting us to the rooftops (inevitably bringing Mary Poppins to mind) added to the scene’s dreamlike quality. The fairy, in wispy, ashen grey, directed the business from the top of a pile of books. Her followers were identical Cinderellas, carrying little table lamps. The noblemen were in a kind of hybrid court dress, 19th century black and white with breeches and red sashes, but 18th century wigs and 17th century ruffs – and ermine for the king; the women were in a parade of extravagant, deep red dresses with exaggerated forms: hour-glass figures puffed out with padding, giant, bell-like crinolines, balloon skirts, hobble skirts, extravagant bows… At the ball, they did a frenzied, jerky dance that reminded me of The Rocky Horror Show. Only Cinderella’s ball gown was glittering white, fading from grey at the hem, presumably to recall the ashes she’d emerged from. Prince Charming changed from red silk pyjamas, at his sulky start, to ordinary (but nicely-tailored for his trim figure) evening dress. The typography theme was carried through to Cinderella’s carriage, made up of the letters of her name and pulled by prancing dancers with horses’ heads, to the wrought-iron gates at the entrance to the ball, and to the backs of the chairs in the final act, spelling out “Cendrillon” as they were placed in a row.

A simple staging, dictated, as Pelly said, by the music and easy to read (“C’est le cas de le dire,” as, once more, the French would say). But I can’t say that, for me or the people with me (in fact, "Tarte" was their tart verdict), it actually took off, and I spent much of the afternoon wondering which other singers might have managed it better.

Verdi - La Forza del Destino

2011-11-30T15:28:00.001+01:00

ONP Bastille, Tuesday November 29 2011

Conductor: Philippe Jordan. Production: Jean-Claude Auvray. Sets: Alain Chambon. Costumes; Maria-Chiara Donato. Lighting: Laurent Castaingt. Il Marchese di Calatrava: Mario Luperi. Donna Leonora: Violeta Urmana. Don Carlo di Vargas: Vladimir Stoyanov. Don Alvaro: Marcelo Alvarez. Preziosilla: Nadia Krasteva. Padre Guardiano: Kwangchul Youn. Fra Melitone: Nicola Alaimo. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National De Paris.

I don’t always read the reviews before going along to the opera, but this time I did and found them ominously full of faint praise. “Inoffensive” production (in these uncertain times in Paris, that’s seen as a good thing). “Well-made costumes… secondary roles well sung…” In the event, the production wasn’t so much inoffensive as inexistent; and while Alvarez was off sick on the first night, he was there yesterday, more of which later.

I suppose quoting yourself isn’t done, a good enough reason to do it. You may remember that, after Faust, I wrote: “First Mireille (‘Putain, Mireille!’ as a French friend kept repeating), then Francesca de Rimini, now Faust. Is Joël trying to prove something?.” I realised last night that I’d miscounted: the singing in Werther so eclipsed the production that I forgot how dire it was. In other words, Faust made four stinkers, not three; and Forza makes five. I suppose I can see why a friend suggested, this morning, “Better that than Martinoty.” But I must admit that, by the time things had ground on as far as Preziosilla’s ineffable “Rataplan” racket, I was in “Springtime for Hitler” mode, gaping at the awfulness of it all.

There were no sets to speak of, just painted sheets - mostly abstract, maroon smudges but, in the first scene at least, imitating walls with paintings. They were lowered or raised or brought in sideways; or sometimes fell or were pulled to the floor and dragged slowly off by invisible hands. If that sounds reminiscent of the 80s, it’s normal: this new production, clapped out at birth, was pure 80s Garnier standard. It was so reminiscent, indeed, of Paris’s early 80s Tosca that I did a bit of Googling this morning and found, lo and behold, that Auvray was responsible for that as well. I suppose we must give him first prize for consistency. So, sheets gliding, rising or falling; a long, ugly wooden table (in Tosca it was grey marble, as I remember) and two even uglier, knobbly chairs – the same table and chairs turned up in Leonora’s dad’s Seville dining room at the start, in the officers’ quarters in Italy and probably in the monastery as well. At one stage, it doesn’t matter much which, a dramatically-lit giant Christ, crucified but cross-less, was lowered in, back to the audience, on ropes attached to his outstretched wrists like an Olympic gymnast doing something tricky on the rings. I wondered if he’d been recycled from Faust. This kind of large, single, realistic object, starkly lit, was a recurrent feature of 80s productions (in Tosca, it was the angelo atop the Castel). At another stage, a distant mountain range appeared low in the distance against a blank sky (in Tosca, the Roman skyline). At the end, that same giant Christ was lying on the ground on the left (like statues of heroes in most 80s productions) while Leonora hid under the painted sheet from the opening scene (her dad’s Seville dining room) before it was dragged slowly off by invisible hands.

The acting was so conventional you wondered if it were deliberately so; the crowd scenes might have been from any cash-strapped provincial house’s Carmen or Elisir d’Amore or any work involving peasants and/or gypsies, doing what peasants and gypsies always do in the circs (e.g. gypsy girls swaggering round with their hands on their hips and ogling the peasant boys). My neighbour was amazed such things still went on in international opera houses, “unless at the Met.” There was, however, a concept: this was supposed to be 1850, and there was a fleeting reference to the Risorgimento: soldiers painting out “la Guerra” on a sheet proclaiming “Viva la Guerra” and replacing it with “V.E.R.D.I.” But this came so perilously close to being an idea that it was immediately unhitched, rolled up and carted off by extras.

Now, the singers.

Among the principals, Alvarez’ voice was the only true Latin, Verdian sound. He was very, very good, but he had clearly not got over the illness that kept him away on the opening night and was not in full voice, though he did some very clever things pianissimo. At his peak, he would have been outstanding and I’m sorry not to have heard it. Violeta Urmana is, as you might guess, not a typical, romantic Leonora. She has none of the luminous femininity we might expect in the role and her top notes verge on (but are not) shrieks. Also, in her frumpish costumes and wigs, she sometimes looked like Susan Boyle. But I guess there can be different ways to “do” Leonora and as my neighbour rightly said, she’s a real professional. All the notes were there.

According to the friend quoted above (on Martinoty), Vladimir Stoyanov (Vargas) is “a shouter, like Nucci,” but as far as I know plenty of people get along alright with Nucci, and I thought he was pretty good, though when overstretched his intonation was occasionally dodgy. On that opening night, the critics got Zoran Todorovich instead of Alvarez, so if they didn’t like him (they mostly didn't), and weren’t keen on Urmana’s Leonora, and Nadia Krasteva was no more resounding a Preziosilla than yesterday evening, that might explain why they focused on the secondary roles: Youn was very good, though, hampered perhaps by the wooden production, not as striking as he can be; Nicola Alaimo was an excellent, funny Melitone.

The chorus were on reasonable form. But the truth I really should have got in earlier, if I’d been a cleverer writer, was that while little or nothing was happening on stage – however well people sang, the production did nothing to make the plot more plausible or legible, so there was little actual emotional impact - the real drama was in the pit. In case you didn’t know, in France, orchestras play well if they like the conductor and badly (in which case they can be truly awful) if they don’t. The Opera orchestra must love Jordan: they put in a ripping (yet nuanced and detailed) overture (between acts one and two) that brought the house down. So at the end, it was Jordan (whose precision conducting is worth watching) and the pit that got the loudest applause of all.

Opera Cake also enjoyed this show.

Enescu - Œdipe

2011-11-07T12:03:00.000+01:00

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday November 6 2011

Conductor: Leo Hussain. Production: Alex Ollé (La Fura dels Baus), Valentina Carrasco. Sets: Alfons Flores. Costumes: Lluc Castells. Lighting: Peter Van Praet. Œdipe: Dietrich Henschel. Tirésias: Jan-Hendrik Rootering. Créon: Robert Bork. Le Berger: John Graham-Hall. Le Grand-Prêtre: Jean Teitgen. Phorbas: Henk Neven. Le Veilleur: Frédéric Caton. Thésée: Nabil Suliman. Laios: Yves Saelens. Jocaste: Natascha Petrinsky. La Sphinge: Marie-Nicole Lemieux. Antigone: Ilse Eerens. Mérope: Catherine Keen. Une femme thébaine: Kinga Borowska. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie.

“Œdipe is one of the supreme operatic masterpieces of all time, one of the pinnacles of 20th century opera, of the kind that, alongside Pelléas, Wozzeck, Lulu or Die Soldaten, can be ticked off on the fingers of our hands.” Harry Halbreich.

So he’s a fan. Also in the programme notes for this new Brussels production, as well as in La Monnaie’s subscriber magazine, the conductor, Leo Hussain, wonders why Oedipe isn’t part of the standard repertoire. Having heard it yesterday, I wonder why too: it’s smashing, luscious, exotic, dramatic (time flew) opera. I thought I knew the work from my student days, but was wrong: I must have been mixing it up with some dreary French neoclassical stuff I used to have on tape. This, for me, was a major discovery of the kind I haven’t made since Die tote Stadt or (to a lesser extent) Die Gezeichneten. It should appeal to anyone who enjoys large-scale, post-romantic tonal works, from the Gurrelieder to – even - 50s Britten, via Zemlinsky, Schreker, Korngold, Janacek, Canteloube, Hindemith , Respighi, Vaughan Williams, Delius and so on (and is probably a good deal better than at least one or two of those). I ordered a set of CDs as soon as I got home and hope we might get a DVD of this production, either from Brussels or from Paris when it shows up at the Bastille.

I’ll try to be brief about the production. The basic concept seemed to be that man’s hubris in believing he can beat nature and escape his fate is timeless. We think we’ve got things nailed, but natural or man-made disasters continue to prove us wrong. Sets and costumes in the production were smeared with terracotta mud inspired by the escape, from an aluminium plant in Hungary in 2010, of a torrent of toxic red sludge. The overall colour of clay may also have been a reminder that a return to earth is the eventual fate of all of us.

Photos in the programme gave clues as to other sources of ideas for the production. During the musical introduction, what appeared to be an antique terracotta plaque in four, busy tiers of high-relief figures was projected on the safety curtain – in fact, a visual quotation from the doors of Milan cathedral: more biblical than classical. The curtain rose to reveal the same, but as a tableau vivant: four tiers of chorus, soloists and extras lining a portico in terracotta costumes. In acts two, three and four the portico, with or without terracotta statues, surrounded a single space for the action, which had its strong and weaker points.

Relatively weak was playing the scene between Oedipus and his adoptive mother as the Freudian analysis of a patient on the very couch, draped with a Persian carpet, depicted in the programme as Freud’s own, from Berggasse. Fairly strange, for the act four “epilogue,” were the terracotta busts (think terracotta army) emerging from the ground – though they made more sense once votive candles were placed before them - and Theseus and his men in white, post-apocalyptic overalls (Fukushima?). But the end of this opera is a bit strange anyway, aun unexpected sort-of-Christian redemption with the now innocent Oedipus, presumably shriven by his many trials, in this production purified under a sudden shower of water from the flies before slowly walking off through double doors into a blaze of white light.

Act three was an effective enough evocation of the plague via references (grubby body bags, plain, square coffins…) to natural (tsunami) and man-made (toxic red sludge) disasters. But the best bits were definitely in act two: the scene at the crossroads, where workers with wheelbarrows were mending the road among yellow warning lamps till car headlights screeched in from the rear and the fight took place in the dark; and above all, the amazingly well-handled arrival, in search-lights, of a WWII Stuka, home to the sleeping Sphinx, and the most extraordinary acting and singing performance (with the support of a musical saw, a rare sight in the pit) of Marie-Nicole Lemieux, deranged in dreadlocks (lots of clay-smeared dreadlocks in this show).

The acting throughout was otherwise fairly conventional, but well-directed and committed, so I don’t agree with Le Monde’s ill-tempered review, which claimed there was no acting at all, just singers left to get by with stock operatic gestures. Nor do I agree with Le Monde’s bitter take on the musical side. Perhaps in the early days, when the critics were there, orchestra and chorus were still struggling with the score, but not yesterday: they were magnificent (indeed, as, in a different vein, with Atys, “magnifique” seemed to be the word on everyone’s lips at the interval; on the Walloons’ lips at any rate, though I imagine the Flemish were exclaiming whatever the Dutch equivalent may be) and Leo Hussain and the pit got some of the loudest applause. Le Monde at least agreed that even secondary roles were strongly cast, and took note of Marie-Nicole Lemieux’ tour de force (I wish I could for once get to see her in a leading role). But to pan Dietrich Henschel and hope, in all, for better casting in Paris was unkind. Henschel these days is, certainly, a touch “under-volumed” for the (killer) role, unable to dominate the sometimes paroxystic orchestral parts, but undeniably made up in elegance (and diction) for any lack of oomph.

The Brussels audience is an undemonstrative one, especially after Sunday lunch, but yesterday there were cheers, even from the usheress. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard “bravi” at La Monnaie before. Let’s hope that this production, as it travels, will restore the magnificent Oedipe to the international repertoire. Meanwhile, don't hesitate (even with Barbara Hendricks' name on the cover) to buy the CDs.

Berg - Lulu

2011-10-26T13:14:00.000+02:00

BNP Bastille - Monday October 24 2011

Conductor: Michael Schonwandt. Production: Willy Decker. Sets & costumes: Wolfgang Gussman. Lighting: Hans Toelsede. Lulu: Laura Aikin. Gräfin Geschwitz: Jennifer Larmore. Eine Theatergarderobiere, Ein Gymnasiast, Ein Groom: Andrea Hill. Der Maler, Der Neger: Marlin Miller. Dr Schön, Jack: Wolfgang Schöne. Alwa: Kurt Streit. Der Tierbändiger, Ein Athlet: Scott Wilde. Schigolch: Franz Grundheber. Der Prinz, Der Kammerdiener, Der Marquis: Robert Wörle. Der Theaterdirektor, Der Bankier: Victor Von Halem. Eine Fünfzehnjährige: Julie Mathevet. Ihre Mutter: Marie-Thérèse Keller. Die Kunstgewerblerin: Marianne Crebassa. Der Journalist: Damien Pass. Ein Diener: Ugo Rabec. Orchestra and chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Willy Decker’s production of Lulu, now over ten years old, has established itself as something of a modern classic in the Bastille repertoire. It is all that Martinoty’s recent Faust, in stark contrast, is not. It is intelligent, relatively simple (and presumably relatively cheap), coherent and legible, there are a few good ideas properly worked through, there are some striking images, and the acting is detailed, well-drilled to the last gesture, committed and convincing. It is less relentlessly sordid than Lulu might be in other hands - though Lulu’s treatment of the countess is explicitly harsh - and exploits the plot’s comic potential as well as the tragic.

The set is the same throughout: a high-walled arena, circus or amphitheatre, in exaggerated perspective, so the wall curving from the rear rises rapidly to the front, to the full height of the stage. Wall and floor are streaked in shades of pale straw. Behind and above the arena rise tiers of seats or terraces, black. There are multiple doors, open or shut depending on the action, and one or more ladders, as well as the props needed (often red or with a touch of red) to set the scene. There are also two key “presences”: menacing men in black coats and trilby hats, either observing from the tiers or joining in the action (there’s a touch of the “dirty old man” here in this essentially sexist work); and Lulu’s nude portrait, whole or in parts, on loose canvas, stretched or framed, in every scene, whether mentioned in the text or not (1).

The curtain rises before the music starts. Lulu, with orange, bobbed hair, is sitting on display with her back to the audience on a red stepladder, under a spotlight: the first striking image. She is dressed in the flesh-coloured slip, her breasts and pubic hair highlighted to recall her portrait, that she will wear throughout under whatever else she may slip on or off. One by one, the men in black file in on the black tiers above and sit with their hands on their knees to watch the prologue.

In act 1 scene 1, the stage is filled with blank canvases of various sizes and Goll is dramatically handed down, in a violet suit, into the arena from above by the men in black – no ladder. In scene 2 we discover the Mae West sofa (in the form of red lips) that has, over time, become the symbol of this production and Shigolch makes the first of his entrances and exits by ladder. In scene 3, the props are dressmaker’s dummies, a whole crowd of them, wearing Lulu’s many 20s stage costumes in shades of red, pink, purple and plum. The African prince, in yellow tiger stripes and a leopard-skin hat, and the dresser are comic figures – she, for example, takes a desperate swig herself before handing the glass to Lulu to recover from her faint.

Act two opens with grey leather club chairs in a circle and a grand piano to the left. The first scene is treated almost as bedroom farce, with people dashing in and out through the many doors and hiding behind furniture and in the piano, Lulu sitting atop to keep the lid down. It ends with another of the striking images: Lulu in an “art deco” pose under a stark spotlight as she’s arrested by the men in black. After the film music (no film), the furniture is under dust covers and all is grey.

Lulu’s act 3 party takes place around a brightly-lit, circular bar. Gaily-dressed, tipsy guests (the women in extravagant wigs) wear conical party hats and carouse under showers of streamers and confetti – as do the men in black, up on the tiers. For the final, gloomy scene, all the doors are open and as well as multiple black ladders there are empty black frames strewn around. The terraces above are the dark street where Lulu works and the men in black are the punters. As Jack carries Lulu off, the men in black slip into the arena, crowd round and slowly raise their knives, then disperse rapidly after the kill.

The acting throughout this production is excellent and dominated, as is the singing, by Laura Aikin’s initially playful and innocent, later manipulative, and finally neurotic Lulu, leading the dance. “What a mover!” as a friend e-mailed to me later. (2)

Lulu must be one of the most magnificent scores in the operatic repertoire and one of the biggest challenges to singers brave enough to take it on. In the vast barn of the Bastille, with the great maw of the orchestra pit gaping at their feet, it makes even tougher demands on them all. It makes little sense, with such as strong cast as this year’s, to make comparisons. On Monday night, Laura Aikin, as I said, dominated, but she was well supported by Kurt Streit at the absolute peak (and no doubt limit!) of his current form, a great Schön (marvellous confrontations with Lulu), a great athlete… and Jennifer Larmore, unexpected in the role and unrecognisably slimmed down, who emitted some truly beautiful sounds in the final scene. Even the banker and high school boy were excellent. I mgiht have like a bit more Viennese Schmaltz from the pit (sustained string playing à la Bruckner isn't a French forte), but that's splitting hairs.

I wondered, writing up Faust, if after Mireille and Francesca de Rimini, Nicolas Joël was trying to prove a point. The contrast between that Faust and this Lulu seems to make another…

(1) An omniscient mussel in the US writes: "Whether it's mentioned in the sung text or not, the portrait is mentioned in the stage directions for every scene, and the set of chords that act as the portrait's leitmotif appear whenever the portrait is referred to in the dialogue or the stage directions."

(2) For a more intelligently analytical review, rather than this flat description, see Opera Cake.

Gounod - Faust

2011-10-22T10:55:00.000+02:00

ONP Bastille, Wednesday October 19, 2011

Conductor: Alain Altinoglu. Production: Jean-Louis Martinoty. Sets: Johan Engels. Costumes: Yan Tax. Lighting: Fabrice Kebour. Faust: Roberto Alagna. Méphistophélès: Paul Gay. Valentin: Tassis Christoyannis. Wagner: Alexandre Duhamel. Marguerite: Inva Mula. Siebel: Angélique Noldus. Dame Marthe: Marie-Ange Todorovitch. “Faust II”: Rémy Corazza. Orchestra and chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

“Mr. Martinoty's solution is wretched excess: an immense library-cum-mad-science lab with a giant crucifix looming above, an older actor lip-synching Mr. Alagna's aged Faust, Mr. Alagna popping out of a space-age sphere in a gold T-shirt after the devilish deal, a huge chorus in a costume mashup that includes Enlightenment academics, Foreign Legionnaires, Second Empire soldiers, beauty contestants in bathing suits, peasant girls in Dutch bonnets, a humongous skeleton in a flurry of rainbow streamers, and carnival maskers part African-part Ensor. In the end, shedding her straightjacket, Marguerite shrugs two chains over her shoulders, tugs in a guillotine platform, runs onto it and ducks as the blade falls and a fake head shoots out.” (Wall Street Journal)

He forgot the Polytechniciens, the Daumier lawyers, the dancing couples with numbers on their backs and Mephisto’s sparkling red “Fellini Roma” bishop’s outfit during the church scene.

At the opening the set was actually very impressive: the library was a high, white, circular affair with galleries reached by two cast-iron spiral staircases; on the left, a massive bronze rhinoceros topped with a crystal obelisk containing Marguerite’s statue and, on the right, the large crystal globe from which Alagna would emerge, Rocky-Horror-like, in his golden tee-shirt. But that lip-synching idea was dreadful, causing Alagna’s voice to emerge with a nasal, hollow sound from inside the set.

The library could, as we saw later, split apart to allow crowds in and out. In the middle of the work, lit green, it housed Marguerite’s garden, which rose shakily out of the floor to reveal her iron bedstead, covered in ivy, under what looked like giant broccoli. After the birth of the baby (a doll swathed in white which she cradled ridiculously almost to the bitter end) the bookshelves were in ruins and the broccoli were blighted.

“I doubt this production will last 28 years unless, like the notoriously bad Ferrero Rocher ad, its nonsense goes on to acquire cult status. Highlights include rejuvenated Faust’s gold lamé T-shirt, a beauty pageant in the Kermesse, the ghoulish violinist who suddenly emerges from under the bed to accompany “Salut! Demeure chaste et pure” and the grand finale that sees deranged Marguerite sprinting suicidally towards a guillotine. Her severed head jumps five yards (more audience mirth) and is promptly turned into a religious relic.” (Financial Times)

By Wednesday evening, the bouncing head had gone: Marguerite knelt symbolically behind the guillotine but no head shot out.

“Car cette production est indigne. Elle est à la fois d'un conventionnel crétin, d'une impudeur choquante et d'un manque total de poésie. Rien ne nous est épargné, des draps tachés du dépucelage de Marguerite, du meurtre du bâtard poignardé dans l'église, de la tête de la malheureuse roulant sous le couperet - puis portée en triomphe comme une relique dans une châsse.” (Le Monde)

"La mise en scène de Jean-Louis Martinoty n’aurait jamais dû être présentée à Bastille s’il y avait eu un directeur digne de ce nom." (Le Canard Enchaîné)

You get the idea. When the production wasn’t simply boring (in the middle) it was just silly. The acting was as conventional as could be – in other words, hardly acting at all. In the circumstances it’s hard to pass judgment on the singers’ performance. If it was in some ways lacklustre, mightn’t it be because, knowing they were participating in a monumental flop (monumental here being the operative word: as one reviewer said, the costs must have been "pharaonic" but the ideas were "mummified") and would face booing anyway, they basically just threw in the towel? Alagna started out fairly valiantly but was very discreet by the end and may, judging by a few hoarse sounds, have been nursing a cold. Inva Mula has, as a friend insisted, a very good voice; but she isn’t a natural actress (there were chuckles when she swanned around the stage swathed in her bedspread – her swanning is awkward); and she has an introverted stage personality that only works in tragic moments; no way does she radiate any joy in “Ah, je ris…”

Paul Gay made a young, tall, seductive Mephisto and sang with more enthusiasm. But he’s a bright baritone, not a bass, so the bottom notes were inaudible, while the very top had me thinking he’d do well to avoid singing the role often in large houses. Nicolas Joël is supposed to be good at choosing singers; why he couldn’t find a better Siebel for the Paris Opera is a mystery. Thank goodness we had Marie-Ange Todorovitch as Dame Marthe; and best of all, really (with the loudest, longest applause) Tassis Christoyannis, who, despite the production’s best efforts to make him look ridiculous in his foreign legion leather apron, simply sang, and with superb diction.

The orchestra was reasonably well behaved, unlike the chorus, ragged and often out of synch with the pit until they finally pulled their socks up towards the end.

First Mireille (“Putain, Mireille!” as a French friend kept repeating), then Francesca de Rimini, now Faust. Is Joël trying to prove something?.

Cherubini - Médée

2011-09-18T11:31:00.000+02:00

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday September 11 2011

Conductor: Christophe Rousset. Production: Krzysztof Warlikowski. Sets and costumes: Malgorzata Szczesniak. Lighting: Felice Ross. Médée: Nadja Michael. Jason: Kurt Streit. Néris: Christianne Stotijn. Créon: Vincent Le Texier. Dircé: Hendrickje Van Kerckhove. Première servante: Gaëlle Arquez. Deuxième servante: Anne-Fleur Inizian. Orchestra: Les Talens Lyriques. Chorus of La Monnaie.

I’m always glad to have a production by Kzrystof Warlikowski, so of course – and especially as we didn’t get it the first time round, in 2008 - I was glad to see his staging of Médée pop up on my Sunday matinee schedule in Brussels this year.

Noting, simply enough, that divorce and child custody are perfectly modern themes and may well, in an extreme case, end in tragedy, Warlikowski reconstructs Médée as a contemporary, postmodern patchwork in which the 18th century musical numbers are just one element among others in a nearly-new work. The themes are marriage and separation, motherhood and children, the symbols are Médée as a dangerous, unconventional outsider (Amy Winehouse: the “signature” Winehouse black hair, tattoos, little, black patent dress), as the Virgin Mary, as a weary modern mother folding her sons’ bloodstained pyjamas and putting them in a drawer at the end before, in absolute silence, walking off and slamming the metal door behind her.

As usual with Warlikowski, there were videos: 50s and 60s home videos of happy marriages, happy families, happy schoolkids… projected as the audience arrived and during the interval, in a relit auditorium with spotlights picking out the cherubs dotted around the boxes and accompanied by pop songs of the period – Oh Carol, (I am but a fool) for example. The chorus were the period bourgeoisie, in superbly reproduced 60s costumes and hairstyles. Médée and Jason were strictly contemporary: she, as I said, at first as Amy Winehouse, he with long, heavy dreadlocks bunched down the back of his dinner jacket (and some tattoos as well, once he was down to his vest). Créon and his escort were in black tracksuits, with towels and bottles of water.

The set was simple and geometric. There were whitewashed brick walls, a dark wooden floor and a sand box, highlighted with neon, running from the rear to the apron. Glass cases at the sides contained, I think (I couldn’t really see) life-size statues of the Virgin, one of which would end up naked as, in act 3, Médée wore the blond wig and blue robe. There was a partition halfway back in two-way mirror, so sometimes we could see what was going on in the background: people milling round with drinks in their hands, the two, be-suited sons scrawling anti-Dircé graffiti – “Whore” in French, for example; and sometimes we could see Rousset in the pit, bouncing up and down as usual, and ourselves in the background. The two squares of yellow floor in the background sometimes moved on rails to the front. There were echoing sound effects: thunder, a kind of drip... during the dialogues. For Warlikowski, the storytelling was pretty straightforward and, though the "fleece" was a (Damien Hirst?) skull, the fatal dress really did go up in flames – though not on the unfortunate Dircé: she was standing behind.

It’s probably a mark of how much the critics have, on the whole, liked this production that hardly any complain about the (spoken) dialogues being rewritten in contemporary French and with contemporary candour: “Casse-toi,” (“Piss off”) they included*, echoing Nicolas Sarkozy’s famous reply to a critic he met on a walkabout, though here we were spared “Pauvre con” (“miserable sod”). I doubt, too, the 1797 version would have had Médée telling us she was still filled with, among other reminiscences of their love affair, Jason’s sperm.

What they do complain about, and how right they are, is the fuzzy, echoing amplification of these spoken sections. I don’t know if it’s just me or if it’s the same for everyone: my ears had a devil of a job adjusting from amplified speech to unamplified song. Maybe the idea was to allow the singers to whisper venomously: “Thank goodness we know how to read,” remarked my elderly neighbour, as in any case reading was absolutely necessary. As a result, though in my thoughts I could imagine the “patchwork” reconstruction working very well without this awful miking, I found the first two acts disjointed and pretty tough going. But perhaps, again, that was just me: I’m usually the least conservative of the gang I go to Brussels with, but to my surprise, at the interval, even that little old lady, usually very down on Eurotrash updates, claimed time had flown.

The third act, being mostly sung, was therefore a relief. The cast was dominated by Nadja Michael. Hers is not a “beautiful” voice. “What a racket that woman Najda Michael makes. Ghastly voice, all force and no finesse,” was what one friend e-mailed to me this morning. I’ve nothing much against racket; I prefer it to mincing around, which is what too many singers do these days. And though her voice is, undeniably, uneven (hugely percussive top, almost alto-sounding bottom, relatively weak middle) Nadja Michael is a magnificent singing actress – so it isn’t surprising to see she also sings Lady Macbeth. So, she dominated.

Kurt Streit wasn’t at his best on Sunday and though I like him a lot I’m not sure a French “haute contre” role is quite right for him. He was unusually strained at the top. Hendrickje Van Kerckhove's voice was sweet but tiny, perhaps in harmony with her timorous character. Christianne Stotijn was simply excellent: more of her, please. Vincent Le Texier was pretty blustery. The Talens Lyriques under Rousset were, as usual, lively and supple and crisp; I could just have done with a bit more drive in parts of the first two acts, but that's just me, always wanting conductors to go faster.

I didn't catch this on Mezzo, but I suspect it would work well on TV or DVD as the miking would no longer be an issue**. In the house, for me, it very nearly ruined the afternoon. Considering that, returning to Brussels to restage his production, Warlikowski changed a number of things, including sets and costumes, it's a pity he didn't change his mind about that.

*I got that wrong. It was "Fous le camp."
**That turned out to be true. La Monnaie streamed it. On video, it worked a treat.

Offenbach - Les Brigands

2011-06-29T23:59:00.000+02:00

Opéra Comique, Paris, Monday June 27 2011

Conductor: François-Xavier Roth. Production: Macha Makeïeff and Jérôme Deschamps.Costumes: Macha Makeïeff. Lighting: Marie-Christine Soma. Falsacappa: Eric Huchet. Fragoletto: Julie Boulianne. Fiorella: Daphné Touchais. Pietro: Franck Leguérinel. Le Comte de Gloria Cassis: Philippe Talbot. Le Baron de Campo Tasso: Francis Dudziak. Le Prince (Duc de Mantoue): Martial Defontaine. Le Chef des carabiniers: Fernand Bernadi. Antonio: caissier du prince: Loïc Félix. Carmagnola: Léonard Pezzino. Domino: Thomas Morris. Barbavano: Antoine Garcin. Pipo: Jean-Marc Martinez. Adolphe de Valladolid, un page: Marc Molomot. Princesse de Grenade: Michèle Lagrange. Zerlina, La Duchesse: Christine Rigaud. Le Précepteur: Ronan Debois. Chorus of the Toulon Opera. Orchestre Les Siècles.

Passing in 24 hours from one end of the French romantic spectrum to the other, I found myself mixing them up as I prepared to write and, for a brief moment, thinking dead chickens fell from the sky in Les Huguenots. They didn’t: it was in Les Brigands the following evening. They were later plucked naked.

This was a revival of a 1993 production madly staged at the Bastille, but this time with a period-instrument orchestra and a conductor so historically-informed he stands in the middle of the pit, surrounded by the players. The Salle Favart of course made much more sense since any facial expressions are lost several hundred feet down in the Bastille, and a very amiable evening of nonsense we had of it. It’s the kind of deliberately, tongue-in-cheek traditional show, almost pantomime-like, that could be dire, with its cardboard cut-out, painted flats (a glade with receding mountain ranges; an inn at the well-known border between Spain and Italy; a gothic castle supposedly in Mantova set against a volcano – that erupted in a shower of sparks at the end) live chickens as well as dead ones, and “Disney-gothic” costumes. But in this case the hammy acting was so well-rehearsed, fluent and good-humoured (as if everyone was really having a whale of a time); the music was so carefully crafted, to Minkowski’s respectful standards (he wasn’t in the pit but in the audience, no doubt resting from Meyerbeer); and the cast was so good – some of them having been with Minko himself in the famous Pelly productions (remember Baron Puck and Prince Paul in La Grande Duchesse?) that we had a highly entertaining evening and a nice, undemanding end to the season.

Highlight: the proud, comic-book Spaniards, their extravagant gestures and stamping feet. And stuck in our heads for hours after: "Le bruit des bottes, des bottes, des bottes…"

Meyerbeer - Les Huguenots

2011-06-29T21:37:00.000+02:00

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday June 26 2011.

Conductor:Marc Minkowski. Production: Olivier Py. Sets and costumes: Pierre-André Weitz. Lighting: Bertrand Killy. Marguerite de Valois: Marlis Petersen. Valentine: Mireille Delunsch. Urbain: Yulia Lezhneva. Raoul de Nangis: Eric Cutler. Comte de Saint-Bris: Philippe Rouillon. Comte de Nevers: Jean-François Lapointe. De Retz: Arnaud Rouillon. Marcel: Jérôme Varnier. Cossé: Xavier Rouillon. Tavannes: Avi Klemberg. Thoré: Marc Labonnette. Méru: Frédéric Caton. Dame d’honneur: Camille Merckx. Une coryphée: Tineke Van Ingelgem. Deux bohémiennes: Camille Merckx, Tineke Van Ingelgem. Orchestra and chorus of La Monnaie.

La Monnaie decided to end the season with a grand gesture, pulling out all the stops to stage Les Huguenots for the first time since the 1930s, with as strong cast as it could muster under a famous conductor, directed by a famous producer and so, as they say in French, “creating an event,” with people searching the web for spare tickets. It must have cost a lot of money, as people remarked during the afternoon.

The expensive-looking staging might be summed up simply as “black and gold.” The sets were a complex and ingenious 3-D puzzle of highly-mobile, interlocking renaissance façades, with pedimented doors and many-paned windows, cut out of sheets of brassy gold metal, sometimes blackened. The different, perfectly-fitted shapes slid in and out silently across the glossy black floors, joining and separating between two octagonal turrets to form internal or external spaces varying in shape and size or reveal, in the generally dim, golden lighting, flights of glossy black stairs or a glossy black bridge (for Chenonceau).

Costume periods varied. The Protestants were mostly in black: top hats and coats for the men, with black breastplates for the more warlike moments; black dresses buttoned up to the neck for the women. The Catholics were jackbooted from the start but had little white ruffs recalling the renaissance and their breastplates, for the more warlike moments, were gold; the women had the same little ruffs and long white veils. The page wore a black “Buttons” outfit. For the massacre, the Catholics above had white armbands on their coat sleeves marked with a cross, while the Protestants wore mid-20th-century street clothes. So the production, which also included the odd, anachronistic automatic rifle, dealt with religious persecution through the ages, not just in 16th century France.

It was also a show that, at first, looked like it might involve quite a lot of bare skin. It opened with an extra quite clearly chosen for his body, bare-chested and holding a cross in both hands above his head. As he advanced, he spread his arms, revealing that there were in fact two crosses not one. (Later, the same plain wooden crosses would be wielded like wooden swords; fortunately the threatened duel was staved off, avoiding actual ridicule.) The Chenonceau scene opened with a brief ballet between a male dancer, stark naked apart from antlers (and antlers hide nothing), and a female one with just a tiny crescent moon on her head, hiding no more. While the ladies-in-waiting, in long white nighties, bathed (in real water, in a black channel in the black floor under the black bridge), the Three Graces, equally naked, more or less vogued in classical poses. But there’s a progression in Les Huguenots from nearly frivolous to deadly serious: the act three ballet, very neatly done on a broad, black staircase, was only half naked aagin, and the bare skin and posing faded out as bickering escalated to massacre.

As you can see from the names, the cast was, as I said, strong. I was very glad to hear Marlis Petersen for the first time, having seen her name often; her glamorous timbre was what people often call “creamy” and her Marguerite was about as flawless, vocally and scenically (she is charismatic and totally at ease) as you are likely to get. Mireille Delunsch was on form, making the most of her current means and artfully disguising any vocal difficulty as dramatic effect, as experienced singers do, with her familiar “wounded” sound at the top, well-known presence and acting skills (the acting throughout was well directed, though perhaps unexpectedly conventional, as if the sheer length of the thing had, in the end, exhausted the producer’s imagination). Yulia Lezhneva scored a popular hit as the page, and Eric Cutler is, as I already noticed in King Roger at the Bastille, a very remarkable high tenor, slipping easily and convincingly from full voice to falsetto. Marc Minkowski, in the pit, drove the score forward in his usual forceful, sometimes brutal manner.

But Les Huguenots was composed for the likes of Marie Cornélie Falcon, Nourrit and Levasseur, and revived by Joan Sutherland and Bonynge. Can it be made to work without performers of that calibre? This was my first experience of Meyerbeer live and in the theatre. I know how risky it is to express an opinion on that brief (albeit it this case not so brief) encounter; I also know there will be Meyerbeer fans out there ready to call me stupid, bitter, small-minded and so on. But to me, though Meyerbeer undeniably occupies a special place in opera history, what I saw and heard seemed awkwardly positioned between Rossini and Verdi, with the melodic gift of neither, none of Rossini’s fascinating delicacy and inventiveness in his accompaniments (viola d'amore or solo bass clarinet notwithstanding) and, in terms of story-telling, none of Verdi’s gift for breathing life into characters and driving the plot forward with urgency. Probably because of both the duration (5 hours) and the religious theme, Don Carlo(s) came to mind: a comparison, it seemed to me, unflattering to Meyerbeer. “Sterile,” said the man behind me; “rambling,” thought I, and judging by the glassy, “gorblimey” look in the eyes of people staggering out at the intervals and the end, I wasn’t alone in finding it a trial.

But I'm no professional, and it seems to have gone down well with the press.

Mozart: Solemn Vespers for a Confessor; C Minor Mass.

2011-06-25T19:33:00.000+02:00

Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Paris, Friday June 24 2011.

Conductor: Jérémie Rhorer. Sally Matthews, soprano. Ann Hallenberg, mezzo-soprano. Rainer Trost, tenor. Nahuel di Pierro, bass. Le Cercle de l'Harmonie. Choeur Les Eléments.

I thought I’d better dash off a brief account of last night’s Mozart concert today, as tomorrow I have five hours of Meyerbeer in Brussels and may find myself with a lot more to write about. The magnificent C Minor Mass, so magnificent even I have a recording of it, was preceded by the smaller-scale and less magnificent Solemn Vespers, though they do contain one smash hit for the soprano.

I was, for once (and by accident; if I’d paid more attention I would have chosen seats elsewhere), on the front row. This naturally brings you a bit too close for comfort to the people on stage - at such close range they are all too human: you can see the un-hemmed trousers, the hairy nostrils, the state of their shoes (in baroque orchestras, usually terrible) the odd socks, etc - and ruins the balance; so the chorus, who were rather remote for me, on the other side of the orchestra, sometimes lacked a degree of the oomph they no doubt had for people in more sensible seats.

Le Cercle de l’Harmonie is visibly a youngish baroque orchestra, its members looking and dressed as if they’d been raised on locally-produced, organic (and probably vegetarian) fare. There’s safety in numbers, and whereas in smaller configuration for the Vespers they were sometimes cruelly exposed, in the Mass they made the deep, richly-coloured, crunchy sound I prefer by far in Mozart to smooth, silky modern orchestras. The wind and brass sections, the old trombones especially, had that extra fear-of-death factor that is so impressive in “historically-informed” performances of funereal works. And overall I didn't feel, as I have in the past with Rhorer, that there was any shortage of liveliness.

Côté solistes, we couldn’t have been luckier with our ladies. Not that there was anything at all wrong with the gents but they had little to do all evening except sit and look interested; indeed, bringing in Reiner Trost for so little was surely quite a luxury. The women’s voices were highly contrasting, each corresponding, curiously, with the dresses they wore. Ann Hallenberg was in a generously flowing, low-cut dress of old rose shot silk overlaid with flowery fabric, and an airy cream stole. She was radiant as usual and looked as if she was enjoying every minute. Sally Matthews was, on the other hand, narrowly buttoned-up in part medieval, part bondage black with multiple belts and just a hint of crinoline emerging from a gap, down where the buttons were left open towards the hem of her tunic. Her hair was very, very neatly bobbed (living in Paris, how I miss the precise cut of English hairdressers, but that’s off topic of course) and she looked as if she found the whole evening rather tense and trying.

So, while Ann’s singing was warm and round and easy, liquid, generous, and flowing, Ms Matthews’, though very good indeed (I see she’s now a much-admired Fiordiligi), was cooler, drier, less nuanced and, most of the time (there were occasional exceptions: there was, after all, a hint of crinoline and netting peeking out of that severe designer dress) more strait-laced. But she did, after all, once the loud applause turned rhythmic during the curtain calls (if a mass may be said to have such things), eventually break into a smile, albeit a rather English one.

Lully - Atys

2011-05-18T17:30:00.000+02:00

Opéra Comique, Paris, Monday May 16 2011

Conductor: William Christie. Production: Jean-Marie Villégier. Sets: Carlo Tommasi. Costumes: Patrice Cauchetier. Choreography: Francine Lancelot, Béatrice Massin. Lighting: Patrick Méeüs. Atys: Bernard Richter. Cybèle: Stéphanie d’Oustrac. Sangaride: Emmanuelle de Negri. Célénus: Nicolas Rivenq. Idas: Marc Mauillon. Doris: Sophie Daneman. Mélisse: Jaël Azzaretti. Le Sommeil: Paul Agnew. Morphée: Cyril Auvity. Le temps ; le fleuve Sangar: Bernard Deletré. Maître de la cérémonie / Alecton: Jean Charles di Zazzo. L’impresario: Olivier Collin. Flore: Elodie Fonnard. Iris: Rachel Redmond. Melpomène: Anna Reinhold. Zéphir: Francisco Fernández-Rueda. Zéphir: Reinoud Van Mechelen. Phobétor: Callum Thorpe. Compagnie Fêtes Galantes. Gil Isoart, dancer at the Opéra National de Paris. Chorus and Orchestra: Les Arts Florissants.

First staged 25 years ago, this production of Atys, never forgotten, has achieved legendary status in France. In the early eighties, the Rameau and Händel tercentenaries brought us a flourish of baroque revivals; but it was Atys that really confirmed, in Paris at least, that baroque was back in the operatic repertoire for good. It seemed at once to bring the court of Louis XIV majestically back to life before our eyes – not through rose-tinted glasses, but largely austere and stiff with convention, yet bristling with intrigue and potentially dangerous – and demonstrate, equally majestically, that Lully's tragédie lyrique remained a meaningful, viable art form for modern audiences.

So now as then, at the intervals and at the end, “magnifique” and “extraordinaire” were to be heard all round.

Why? It seems odd to need to describe a production as famous as this one; but as far as I know there has never been a commercial video, only very blurry clips on YouTube. And in any case, only high definition could really do it justice, for purely technical reasons: pre-HD TV simply didn’t reproduce proper black, nor was it able to convey sharp shafts of gleaming light or even certain colours such as mauves and purples (we may have thought all the spectrum was there, but that was just habit: remember NTSC?). So, for those who have no idea, I’ll describe it here while hoping that at last Atys will be filmed in high definition and put on sale for wider viewing.

Again, why the “magnifiques” and “extraordinaires”? Well, if there’s such a thing as a perfect production, this is one of them; at any rate, of its kind they don’t come any better. It is neither a Regie ideas-machine in the Warlikowski vein, nor an attempt at recreating period practice, like Benjamin Lazar's candle-lit Cadmus et Hermione in the same house. The fundamentally intelligent concept seems to have been as (a) this is a tragedy and (b) the Sun King was often at war and his court was often bereaved, to stage the work not in the period’s own extravagant take on classical mythology, but in (splendid) court mourning. The set is simple but stately, the dark costumes – hundreds of them, it seems - are simply amazing, and the placing and acting, though still hieratic, is of the utmost professionalism: everything is just right. And the story, once this scene is set, is straightforwardly but grippingly told.

The usual prologue in praise of the king is dealt with as a rehearsal, in a room lined with tapestries of the same bleak landscape of bare trees as on the curtain that rose to reveal it; the chorus watch and chatter and sing from the cornice above, under the coffered ceileing – all we see is their bewigged heads. Towards the end of this prelude, in strides a sinister major-domo in black court dress with a giant, feathered hat in his hand to put a stop to the shenanigans (involving not just singers and dancers but also commedia dell’arte players fooling around with the dance-master). At the final chord, the tapestries fall to reveal the walls behind: black marble.

The four acts then take place in this funereal space floored with patterned marble (a central lozenge and four large circles), furnished, as in Versailles, with silver objects: stools, throne, braziers, etc., and for the last act with a silver enclosure bearing tall candles: a kind of altar-space for the now-furious Cybèle. There are doors at the sides and rear and lighting often streams, like golden daylight, through them.

Soloists and chorus are dressed in a sumptuous succession of beautifully designed, cut, embroidered and bejewelled costumes in every shade and texture of black (velvets, silks, satins…), some greys, maybe some violet, Bordeaux and brown, occasionally, just occasionally, cream… Stiff, narrow court dresses for the women with funereal, fringed cartouche-like hangings of silver embroidery, lace trimmings and high, narrow, linen headdresses; for the men, tight black coats, breeches and stockings, more lace, more linen and more embroidery; and throughout a profusion of elaborate white or grey wigs, peaked or not. Cybèle is done up rather like a weeping Virgin, in nearly-plain black with a long train, a silver crown and spiky halo, a sceptre and a sprig of pine. Her attendants (in deepest black) and zephyrs (in creamy white, edged with shorn fur) are 17th-century nuns with widows’ peaks, Atys, at first in coat and breeches like the others, once ordained, dons a long grey cassock lined with cardinal red and a modest, priestly black hat with white feathers. This austere magnificence is broken – as in Lully's score, interestingly on sale alongside the programmes – by the dream sequence, with costumes in every shade of gold from white to copper, and the curtailed wedding, with harlequin dancers in pale, sage green and old rose.

As I already said, every grouping, action and gesture is perfectly managed. The dancers, for once, look in their place. And the singers, despite the formality of it all, throw themselves into both tragedy and music with total commitment, hence those spontaneous cries of “magnifique,” for example at the end of the second part (the evening was divided into three, over four hours in total) after the dream scene and Cybèle’s indeed magnificent “Espoir si cher et si doux…”

I needn’t bother comparing the present performance with the original, on the famous CDs. Obviously Christie (who often simply stands and observes) and Les Arts Florissants – continuo, orchestra and chorus - are by now as fluent in this work as can be. In some cases the singers are even better than before: the casting, here, was so luxurious as to have Paul Agnew and Cyril Auvity as, respectively, Le Sommeil and Morphée – not exactly leading roles, albeit very good ones. Nicolas Rivencq was as dashing as the king, Célénus (here obviously modelled on a slender young Louis XIV himself) in gun-metal armour, a giant cape and the most flowing white wig of all, as he was a quarter of a century back. Emmanuelle de Negri was an irreproachable Sangaride. Stéphanie d’Oustrac looks and sings a very different Cybèle from Guillemette Laurens but must now be at the height of her powers. And Bernard Richter was simply outstanding in what is a killingly long role: much more of him, please. I note, by the way, a point of interest to all regular opera-goers: the sets for this production have walls and a ceiling, forming – as a very experienced friend put it the other evening – a megaphone. So not once all evening did we have to strain to hear. Cyril Auvity, inaudible even with amplification in Pigmalion at the Châtelet, proved here it didn’t have to be so with a director and designer who know what they’re doing. One friend joked that the sound was “Wagnerian.”

So, “extraordinaire” indeed, as was the long applause (with many people on their feet and much cheering) in a city where one or two curtains are the norm and the lights usually go up within minutes, if not seconds. Surely, now, we can have a video?

Tribute to Farinelli

2011-05-14T09:21:00.000+02:00

Théâtre des Champs Elysées, Paris, Monday May 9 2011

Conductor: Christophe Rousset. Ann Hallenberg, mezzo soprano. Les Talens Lyriques.

Works by Broschi, Johann-Christian Bach, Porpora, Giacomelli, Hasse and Leo

To avoid a single, solemn ceremony, we were told in a speech at the start of this concert, when celebrating their twentieth anniversary, Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques have chosen to tour a beautifully crafted concert of 18th-century gems, including a generous (the unfortunate singer might well say gruelling) selection of arias composed for Farinelli, who – because of the film - played an important part in the group’s performing history. I’m not usually a great recital fan, either on disc or in concert, as I find a whole evening of arias a bit like eating a box of chocolates in one sitting. But in this case, having, for one reason or another, recently been mightily impressed by clips of Swedish mezzo Ann Hallenberg on YouTube (after recently being mightily unimpressed by some of her consoeurs), I wanted to find out if a live performance would confirm I could really believe my ears as well as the microphones. It did (more later), and was, as I said, so well crafted a programme that there was no sense of surfeit at all.

I wondered, as I sat there, how early on in their career I first heard Rousset and his band. It must have been pretty early, and since then I’ve come to admire very much their smooth-grained, raw silk sound, neither over-feathery nor over-ripe, and the ever-youthful Rousset’s sprightly, springy conducting, a pleasure to see as well as hear. Who else could carry off those “romantic poet,” frock-coated, black velvet evening suits, complete with floppy bow tie, he wears? As well as accompanying the evening’s spectacular arias spectacularly, they gave us, in the middle of each half, ripping performances of (a) a very fine, very dramatic three movement symphony by J-Christian Bach and (b) an equally fine and only slightly less dramatic overture - in effect, also a three-movement symphony - by Hasse.

But I imagine it was the arias above all that drew people to the Théâtre des Champs Elysées – along with Ann Hallenberg, who clearly, from conversations I overheard, had fans in the hall.

Her voice is mature but fluid and feminine and the timbre is rich, ripe, round and fruity: not a dark, velvety Bordeaux but a lighter –and rarer – Burgundy. It seems she can do anything she likes with it without accident. Runs, or even – harder still – arpeggios at any speed are legibly (I mean you could take dictation) both rhythmically and note perfect: “C’est étonnant,” said my wide-eyed neighbour at one stage. Even when she floats a pianissimo at the top, and you think it might go shaky (as it would with so many other singers) it doesn’t. This sense of absolute, even effortless - though I’ve no doubt there’s huge effort behind it - mastery also runs through her shaping and phasing, maintained (rather than abandoned, as by many other singers) in the agile passages: i.e. they may be fast but they are still sung, musically.

Ann Hallenberg is also a natural actress, in both senses: a born one and an unforced, sincere one. An actress, but in no way actressy. On the contrary, that sincerity is a key element in her engaging overall stage presence: she exudes not so much charm as enjoyment, bouncing and swaying to the music and interacting not only with the conductor, but with the musicians, individually and collectively with a look, a smile or a gesture, and with the audience. In terms of what you might call "charismatic niceness," the only singer who came immediately to mind was Caballé; and she showed Caballé’s sense of fun in her choice of extravagant, shimmering neo-baroque costumes, running even to a jewelled and blue-feathered helmet (marvellously not matching the blue of her dark, swaggering cape) for the last two scheduled arias.

After the first encore, a giant, multi-layered, multi-coloured cake was wheeled out with fireworks blazing and candles for Rousset, taken by surprise, to blow out with childish excitement. You imagined Hallenberg wishing she could wear it, not just eat it. Then we had a serious moment with “Lascia ch’io pianga.” And finally, after the mezzo gestured to Rousset to go steady, he turned impishly to the audience, announced “Presto” and launched into a mad, murderously fast and furious Porpora aria. I can think of no other mezzo in this repertoire likely to offer eleven* such arias in an evening; and none that I’ve heard in the past few years able to carry them off so flawlessly. With others, you might (on rare occasions) get all the notes but lose musicality, diction, projection or any sense of ease; or get great acting skills to compensate for dodgy runs; or whimpering as a substitute for feeling. I name no names (you can, if you have time to kill, browse back over the past eight years and see who I have in mind). But with Ann Hallenberg you get the lot: mastery and sincerity. I know of nobody better in the baroque repertoire today. In both design and execution, this was a great concert – and a rare one, in that it brought Parisians to their feet.

*I originally wrote ten. How I made such a stupid mistake is beyond me, though it's no great surprise. I was graciously corrected by someone who could count. Eleven then; and blow me if she didn't go and do it all over again the next night in Caen.

Programme

Riccardo BROSCHI (1698 - 1756
Son qual nave ch’agitata (from Artaserse)
Ombra fedele anch ‘io (from Idaspe)

Johann Christian Bach (1735-1782
Symphony in G minor Op. 6 No. 6

Nicola PORPORA (1686 - 1768
Si pietoso il tuo labbro (from Semiramide riconosciuta (1729))

Geminiano GIACOMELLI (c1692-1740
Già presso al termine (from Adriano in Siria (1733))

Nicola PORPORA (17686 - 1768
Alto Giove (from Polifemo (1735))

Geminiano GIACOMELLI (c1692-1740
Passagier che incerto (from Adriano in Siria (1733))

Johann Adolph Hasse (1699-1783)
Overture to Cleofide

Leonardo LEO (1694-1744
Che legge spietata
Cervo in bosco
(from Catone in Utica (1729))

Verdi - Nabucco

2011-05-04T19:36:00.000+02:00

[In concert]

La Monnaie (Cirque Royal), Brussels, Saturday April 30 2011

Conductor: Julian Reynolds. Nabucco: Carlo Guelfi. Ismaele: Zoran Todorovich. Zaccaria: Carlo Colombara. Abigaille: Marianne Cornetti. Fenena: Catherine Keen. Il Gran Sacerdote: Kurt Gysen. Abdallo: Xavier Rouillon. Anna: Olga Kindler. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie.

La Monnaie no doubt had its reasons for scheduling Nabucco in concert, not staged; I haven’t taken the time to see if they were stated anywhere. But I don’t think it was a wise decision. Nabucco is far from being Verdi’s greatest work, whatever political resonance and advertising fame that dreary chorus may have acquired (OK, shoot me down in flames). Performing it in concert exposes the score and the singers and removes the support and distraction of the on-stage drama a work like this needs. I suspect, therefore, that last Saturday’s cast would have come across better in sets and costumes.

Checking back, I see we’ve had several of the soloists at La Monnaie before; and I quite like, sometimes, to check my impressions for consistency.. .

Marianne Cornetti I’d seen in Aïda, and asked “Should it have been called ‘Amneris’? [...] Marianne Cornetti’s round, powerful mezzo stood head and shoulders above her principal colleagues.” (The colleagues included Michèle Crider.) That was true on Saturday night as well. She is vocally perhaps more solid than subtle, moves lumberingly and isn’t a born actress (and left to her own devices in concert she had the most startling orange and yellow hair); but if well directed in a decent production (any chance of that at the Met? She’ll be in it, with Colombara, later this year) I reckon she might score a real hit. She has both power and agility, and good top notes.

Zoran Todorovich: “His upper middle in particular,” I wrote about a performance of La Forza del destino, "was very good, but overall in Verdi I hope for a more seductive timbre from the tenor and, yes, all of his top notes - all of them - were so flat that even my elderly neighbour, when she was awake, noticed.” Nothing to add to that. The word “braying” did come to mind, and not only to mine – but only at the top, I should in all fairness stress.

Carlo Colombara is someone I’ve heard in Verdi three times and was always impressed. On Saturday night he may have been ill; he seemed to tire quickly and soon - though at times, in his comfort zone, he recalled even Ghiaurov - the top notes were weak, snatched-at and close to Sprechgesang. I hope this is a passing thing and that he’ll be back on form for New York later this year. (not that I'll fly to NYC specially for a Nabucco).

Catherine Keen was Alisa in Lucia in the same Cirque Royal a couple of years back, but she didn’t make a huge impression on me, apparently, as she was, I’m afraid, confined to: “And the rest were as faultless as needed for the little they have to do.” In concert, she was underpowered compared to her colleagues and a little wobbly; she did however come out with one or two strong high notes.

Guelfi, who I have not seen at least since I started recording such things, grew on me. At first his voice sounded elderly and short-winded. But the “wounded bear” sound that somehow brought to mind Jon Vickers in his latter years suited the part, and Guelfi’s experience showed in his phrasing.

In the programme notes, conductor Julian Reynolds said how much he admired Verdi’s directness and spareness/lack of superfluities. He certainly set up a ripping pace in the overture and conducted in a very dry, matter-of-fact way; by the end I was finding it almost brutal, though I prefer Verdi fairly plain and swift and the approach suits La Monnaie’s orchestra.

All in all, it was a very decent stab, but I still think doing it in concert was a mistake: the work can’t stand alone like that, and arouse and retain your interest all evening.

Dinner at Belga Queen afterwards was better than I expected in such designer surroundings. The Gevrey Chambertin was excellent.

Weber - Le Freischütz

2011-04-17T10:29:00.000+02:00

Opéra Comique, Paris, Friday April 15 2011

Conductor: Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Production: Dan Jemmett. Sets: Dick Bird. Costumes: Sylvie Martin-Hyszka. Lighting: Arnaud Jung. Agathe: Sophie Karthäuser. Max: Andrew Kennedy. Annette: Virginie Pochon. Gaspard: Gidon Saks. Kouno: Matthew Brook. L’Ermite: Luc Bertin-Hugault. Kilian: Samuel Evans. Ottokar: Robert Davies. Samiel: Christian Pelissier. The Monteverdi Choir. Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.

There are fashions in music and opera, and though we all know it well from recordings, Freischütz has become a rarity in the theatre these days, perhaps because of the supernatural elements in the plot. In over thirty years of opera-going, I had previously seen it just once, in an amusing, over-the-top Okotoberfest kind of production at the Châtelet. The Opéra Comique, which gets better and better, has brought it back in a still rarer form, the French version prepared by Berlioz, with recitatives and a ballet (Invitation to the Dance). This sounds like it might be bizarre; but it turned out to be highly effective. With the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and Sir John Eliot Gardiner in the pit as well, the venture shone a whole new light on the work and its context.

Musically speaking, it was the changes of balance that were most striking. I must admit, for a start, that I simply love the crunchy, compact sound of this orchestra; but beyond just “loving the noise it makes,” there’s a significant and highly satisfying change in the relationship between brass, woodwind and strings (and the singers), that would be easily grasped by comparing the famous hunting chorus by Friday’s team with Carlos Kleiber’s (great) recording – i.e. comparing a handful of natural horns, at once mellower and raspier and balanced with perky clarinets, with Dresden’s, presumably at least a dozen of them, presumably a semitone or so higher, blasting away brilliantly like a wall of flame; and just 16 men of the Monteverdi choir, shaping and nuancing their singing, barber-shop style, with however many were mustered in Dresden: an army it might seem, stomping their feet and slapping their thighs heartily, we imagine.

With forces like those, you need Heldentenors and Brünnhildes and the whole thing becomes (appropriately enough) a kind of shooting match between orchestra, chorus and soloists to see who can shine brightest and loudest. Gardiner’s cast were more modest – in “scale” as it were - but again the striking thing was balance, among the singers themselves and between them and the pit. There’s little to say about the soloists individually: the girls (with Agathe played particularly anxiously in this production and the ever-optimistic Annette constantly cheering her up) sang sweetly, the introspective Max sang valiantly (but on a Mozartian, not a Wagnerian scale), Gaspard (“les cheveux hagards, l’oeil hérissé” as Marie Dubas might have said) sang cavernously; and the Monteverdi Choir were just astonishingly good: accuracy, phrasing, dynamics, diction… a great luxury.

In various ways, the production was puzzling. It was set in the 30s – a marvellous array of convincing period costumes, wigs and make-up – but where? The Financial Times evoked Agatha Christie and Miss Marple. Others thought it was in pre-war France. Others still, like me, took note of the Tyrolean details on some of the costumes and supposed it was in Germany during the rise of Hitler, which gave it an appropriately sinister tinge. But if that was intentional, it was very subtly done: you might have expected the director to bring in an occasional swastika, but he didn’t. The villagers brought to my mind Nazi official painting of the Adolf Wissel, “farmer’s family” kind. But nothing else in the production confirmed any specific location and you were just left wondering – as you were also, in fact, left wondering what it brought to the work at all, apart from overall prettiness (“too decorative,” declared a friend).

Apart from the period, so skilfully recreated, the “concept” was a travelling fair. There was a single “main” set of receding arches of dark, panelled wood, lined with red and white light bulbs and, at the rear, a painted backdrop showing the wolf’s glen in full-blown, “sublime” romantic style. The opera opened on a shooting range at the fair. Kouno had a frogged, fairground jacket. Gaspard glowered. Samiel, a sinister Max Wall figure, bandy-legged in funereal black with long, grey hair peaked at the sides, lurked. Agathe and Annette lived in a large caravan, seen first from outside, later inside with elaborate, “gypsy” rococo panels. For the wolf’s glen scene, the main set went dark, tree trunks (or were they giant rose stems? They had thorns) rose through trap doors and dropped from above, Gaspard appeared through the floor looking wild, and the red lights flashed dramatically. The chorus themselves did the ballet, a kind of country dance to welcome the prince – or as the FT critic put it, the production forced “the hapless chorus (the Monteverdi choir, in glorious voice, as ever, but somewhat stiff of limb) into a side-splitting ballet mixing semaphore and disco.” The acting was so-so, at times verging on twee (the bridesmaids' mimsying around with veils), and the director only half succeeded in handling the superstitions and supernatural oddities of the plot convincingly.

But though you couldn’t see what it was getting at, if anything at all, it was handsome and colourful and nicely lit and did no actual harm. With such excellent music and music-making, it made for an agreeably old-fashioned, intellectually undemanding evening of opera. As my neighbour said, as we left: “J’ai passé un bon moment.”

Toshio Hosokawa - Hanjo

2011-04-11T14:16:00.000+02:00

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday April 10 2011

Conductor: Koen Kessels. Production: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Sets and lighting: Jan Joris Lamers. Costumes: Tim Van Steenbergen. Hanako: Ingela Bohlin. Jitsuko Honda: Frederika Brillembourg. Yoshio: William Dazeley. La Monnaie chamber orchestra.

It was interesting to have Hanjo so soon after Akhmatova. As I mentioned when writing up the latter, there has been little praise for Mantovani’s score, though I found it serviceable enough. Hosokawa's music is really something else: often (not always: there are plenty of drums, of different sizes, for times of drama) delicate and diaphanous, refined, subtle…sometimes infinitely quiet, quieter than any music we usually hear. So poor old Akhmatova seemed positively rustic and clodhopping in comparison. There’s little more musical “action” in Hanjo than in, say, L’Amour de Loin (though I must say at times it reminded me of Turn of the Screw or Death in Venice, only more modern and with a still lighter touch); but the music is so beautiful, the text is a great deal less corny, and in this case the production and singers were so good, that 90 minutes without a break weren’t too much. I might even be tempted to listen to Hosokawa at home; though that would require being very calm, having plenty of time with no interruptions and probably using headphones, as he sometimes calls for such tenuous threads of sound and tiny tinklings.

The staging was “stage-within-a-stage,” possibly in a nod to the way Nô is done – I wouldn’t know. I’m told in a Nô play the instrumentalists are on stage; here they were in the pit as usual. And I believe in Nô there are dancers; here, thank goodness, even though the production was by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, a notorious choreographer, there were none. There was a central wooden floor with, at the rear, a slatted wall down-lit by a row of strong spotlights, and a couple of little “school” chairs: tubular steel and bent plywood. On either side, beyond a stretch of buff matting, there were large revolving panels, cream-coloured on one side, blue the other, edged with the lacquer red of the structure that was also echoed in a band of red across the front of the stage. The panels were swivelled in sight by stage-hands in black. Beyond the panels, in the wings, was scaffolding supporting more spotlights, horizontal. Horizontal lights were a feature of the production, which ended with strong spots blazing through the slats at the rear into the house.

Hanako spent much of her time in a slip, but sometimes donned a large and elaborate, many-folded, dove-grey kimono structure and a vast, circular skirt that, at the start, took up most of the stage and later formed a giant, heavy train. This naturally impeded her movements considerably, presumably in line with the story, in which she refuses to budge. Jitsuko, far from being an arty diesel-dyke in jeans and a leather jacket, had her hair neatly up and wore timeless, figure-hugging cocktail dresses of the kind chic Japanese ladies wear at cocktail parties and which are now so popular in modern productions: one champagne lamé, one silver-grey and the last, at the very end, black with touches of deep, dark lacquer red red. She changed from one to the other at the rear of the stage, with a helper in black, showing her “one-piece foundation garment” and suspenders as she did so. Yoshio was also very smart in a kind of Norfolk or safari jacket and broad-brimmed hat. The acting was slow-moving (not a great deal actually happens in this tale: it’s more a recital of monologues or exchanges) but well managed; the confrontation (between Jitsuko and Yoshio, fighting over Hanako) was a powerful moment.

And the singing was excellent, especially the strong, straightforward, interestingly grainy bronze mezzo of Frederika Brillembourg, which came close to creating an imbalance with the lighter, sweeter voice of Ingela Bohlin.

The orchestra pinged, ponged, sighed, hooted, tooted and tinkled beautifully and was as enthusiastically applauded at the end as the singers and, above all, the diminutive composer himself, there for the occasion. It’s nice to see contemporary works drawing a fair crowd to a biggish, generalist house and going down so well: apparently opera isn’t dead yet.

2011-2012 Season

2011-04-03T13:44:00.000+02:00

It looks like my 2011-2012 season will be as follows. I may also buy a few extras (i.e. not in the subscription series) at the ONP, and there will probably be trips abroad I don't yet know about.

Médée - Monnaie
Faust - Bastille
Œdipe - Monnaie
La Forza del Destino - Bastille
Cendrillon - Monnaie
Amadis de Gaule - Favart
Manon - Bastille
Salome - Monnaie
La Cerisaie - Garnier
Egisto - Favart
Dido and Aeneas - Favart
La Muette de Portici - Favart
Cav/Pag - Bastille
Otello - Monnaie
Re Orso - Favart
Les Pêcheurs de Perles - Favart
Hippolyte et Aricie - Garnier
Il Trovatore - Monnaie
Arabella - Bastille

Ann Hallenberg sings Scherza Infida

2011-04-03T09:15:00.000+02:00

I've never posted a link before but in this case...

Ann Hallenberg - Scherza Infida

And more...

Ann Hallenberg - more Ariodante

And more...

Ann Hallenberg - still more

Mantovani - Akhmatova

2011-04-02T19:23:00.000+02:00

ONP Bastille, Thursday March 31 2011

Conductor: Pascal Rophé. Production: Nicolas Joel. Sets and costumes: Wolfgang Gussmann. Lighting: Hans Toelstede. Anna Akhmatova: Janina Baechle. Lev Goumilev: Attila Kiss-B. Nicolaï Pounine: Lionel Peintre. Lydia Tchoukovskaïa: Varduhi Abrahamyan. Faina Ranevskaïa: Valérie Condoluci. Le Représentant de L’Union des écrivains: Christophe Dumaux. Un Sculpteur, Un Universitaire anglais: Fabrice Dalis. Un agent: Ugo Rabec. Orchestra and chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

The professionals haven't given a warm welcome to Bruno Mantovani's new opera Akhmatova. French daily Le Figaro talks of a "pall of boredom" over the Bastille; Le Monde writes of the score's "thunderous vacuity" while the Financial Times says it's "gratuitously aggressive"; and Diapason is far from alone in labelling the libretto "banal." While the peerless FT's integrity is unquestionable, I must say I wonder if there aren't elements of envy and disgruntlement in the reaction of the Paris microcosm, provoked by the admittedly intriguing cosiness behind the creation of what might fairly be dubbed a "state" piece: the director of the Paris opera (Joel) commissions from the recently-appointed young director of the Paris conservatoire (Mantovani, 36 - second such commission in a couple of years) an opera to a libretto by the Paris opera's own "dramaturge" (Ghristi). Mantovani dedicates the opera to Joel who, having promised he would not, as director, produce operas in his own house, does so once again, casting the dramaturge's wife (unless I'm misinformed - Janina Baechle) in the leading role. We might be forgiven for wondering who gets paid for what.

So, not a critical success but it went down alright with the audience. There was no mass exodus at the interval, and at the end the chap behind me clearly said "C'était sympa." Maybe not the adjective I'd have used after two hours of unrelentingly grim episodes from Anna Akhmatova's life, but we got the point. Anyway, I don't expect every new work to be an absolute masterpiece. If musical masterpieces were all people accepted, nobody would go to Bellini or Donizetti; as for banal libretti... And as many of you know, my personal gold standard in contemporary operatic ghastliness is L'Amour de Loin. There's so much risk, these days, that an "opera" will turn out to be a dreary oratorio to a text awful to the point of ridicule that I'm grateful for anything that actually moves, on stage and in the pit. In this case, the second half (in fact act 3) was better than the first: both action and music showed more contrast. But the FT critic is right to say that, though the orchestra is large, a conversation in music of this intimate sort really ought to be given in a smaller house.

The cast was strong. I'd like in particular to hear Attila Kiss-B in Janacek to see how he handles more melodic lines: his voice is powerful and seems to have the high notes and bite that Janacek needs*. Christophe Dumaux rang out (proving that voices can make themselves heard at the Bastille). Janina Baechle brought great dramatic presence to the leading role and was magnificent in act 3 - which calls on the singer to "emote" through a lengthy musical epilogue.

It's ironic, in a way, that Anna Viebrock wasn't called in (though I guess the chances of that, under Joel's management, are slim) to recreate for this production the gloomy Kitsch of soviet-era interiors. I think that would have given more humanity and emotional oomph to the story than the solution chosen: 1975 Roche-Bobois middle-class minimalism. Large, slick, black or white rectangles slid silently along the floor, across the stage or down from the flies to form the requisite spaces. A line drawing of Akhmatova by Modigliani was everywhere, floor as well as walls. The work opened and closed (the score was cyclical too) with Akhmatova, back to the audience, in a square white armchair. After the siege of Leningrad, the stage was strewn with overturned black furniture. Costumes were black or grey. Once, in the first half, there was some spots of red but, as my young neighbour noted, conventionally composed (he, being more interested in productions than scores, left at the interval, declaring this show "too Ikea"). The directing was efficient but a little bit too "comic book" conventional to me - the stiffness of the agents or of Dumaux as baddy; a more natural style and, as I said, a less glacial staging might have supported the tragedy better, instead of distancing it from us.

Not something I much want to sit and listen to at home, then, and of course not something I need a DVD of, in view of the production. But not as dire, to the untrained operagoer, as it seemed to the pros; certainly not as dire as L'Amour de Loin, but that, as I said, is my gold standard in direness. We didn't leave at the interval.

Oh, by the way, it was nothing like my father's old vinyl LP of Charmaine.

*Re Kiss-B: what I later found on YouTube was far from flattering.

Wagner - Siegfried

2011-03-27T11:38:00.000+02:00

ONP Bastille, Tuesday March 22 2011

Conductor : Philippe Jordan. Production : Günter Krämer. Sets : Jürgen Bäckmann. Costumes : Falk Bauer. Lighting : Diego Leetz. Siegfried : Torsten Kerl. Mime : Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke. Der Wanderer : Juha Uusitalo. Alberich : Peter Sidhom. Fafner : Stephen Milling. Erda : Qiu Lin Zhang. Waldvogel : Elena Tsallagova. Brünnhilde : Katarina Dalayman. Orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris.

Günter Krämer’s version of the Ring is turning out, to me, to be a bit perplexing. The conceptual thread is clear enough (assuming I’ve got it right): vignettes from German (or maybe just Western) history and culture. But visually speaking, you never quite know what the curtain will rise on: apart from one or two repeat elements (“Germania” in Gothic letters, the “Kokkis” inclined mirror over the stage, the terrifying “Valhalla” staircase) I haven’t yet grasped much visual/stylistic consistency in the staging.

Still, the first act was excellent entertainment. It was a good idea to play it as a kind of low-life Cage aux Folles, with Mime as a tacky old queen in a yellow wig, jeans, basketball boots and braces over a too-short yellow Argyle sweater, under a billowing Chinese silk dressing gown with a dragon embroidered in the back. This worked well with the “Is this is all the thanks I get after all I’ve done for you, cooking, cleaning and slaving…?” whingeing in the libretto. Mime’s home was suitably Kitsch: to the left, a giant rubber plant lit green, with a working model windmill and garden gnomes (family portraits?) at its base; rear left, an industrial lift; more or less centre stage, a kitchen table with a flowery cloth, an old-fashioned TV (b & w), some geraniums in window-boxes and a suspended ceiling-light made of antlers with red lampshades; to the right, a large pot plantation under heat lamps behind galvanised crowd barriers. The giant backdrop, evoking a forest, was one of those factory curtains made of broad, vertical bands of translucent plastic, here in varying shades of green.

As I say, this was an entertaining act and there was a certain amount of slapstick: Siegfried, here played as a total (though tubby) teenager in overalls and blond dreadlocks, came down in the lift with a pantomime bear that chased the screaming Mime across the stage, and later overturned his spaghetti on Mime’s head. The Wanderer was a smelly tramp until he cast off his rags to reveal a shining breastplate. He and Mime did their “riddle scene” in front of a black backdrop, chalking the answers up. The whole set rose one storey up to reveal a forge for the forging scene, and here, at the rear, we had some dancers doing jerky, robotic, Metropolis-style, movements that were the first sign that things would go slowly downhill from now on.

The second act opened on a nearly bare stage strewn with autumn leaves and lit with broad bands of light. There was a single railway track running down to the front from the gloom at the rear, bringing to mind the camps, and above, a billowing sheet printed with a gorgeous forest scene, swelling and deflating slowly: the dragon breathing? Naked bearers formed a snaking procession bearing crates marked "Rheingold." When they finally opened them, out came guns: the silliness had started. So Fafner was some sort of warlord or drug baron, and though I thought he might emerge as a flaming, steaming locomotive he was just borne out by his bearers (who by now, for some reason, had shorts on) in army surplus gear and a Burger-King-type crown on a makeshift throne. So when Siegfried slew the dragon, it was a bit as if he wiped out the Farc. Oh, I forgot to mention that the bird was doubled by an annoying kid with a mirror who taught Siegfried sign language.

For Wotan’s visit to Erda – she still in her jet-incrusted black bustle and train - we had the tilting mirror above a gloomy library with green-shaded lamps at multiple tables, the only unlit one being Erda’s. There was some awkward tussling with Wotan and his lance on the library table. And then, for the final scenes, back came that terrifying Valhalla staircase (what must it be like for the soprano, singing on a ledge 30 feet above the boards with the Bastille’s hangar-like space and 3,000 faces looming before her and the orchestra pit glowing busily below?), with "GER" still smouldering bottom left (and "MANIA" still implicitly intact somewhere, or already burnt to a crisp?) and a gaggle of gods in winged helmets huddled top right (and immobile, poor devils, through the whole damned awakening and love scene). Brünnhilde lay about halfway up until awake, though most of the interminably static final scene took place downstairs. Wotan sat with his back to us on the stairs until, at the very end and as a golden sun shone through the stairs, he was helped slowly off by that gaggle of gods who, we now saw, were cross-dressed: a nod at Ludwig II of Bavaria?

The show had, to me, been a gradual decline from that fun first act to the painful dullness of the end. Meanwhile, vocally speaking, the curse was, as Anna Russell used to say, working – in this case, the curse of the Bastille’s size and acoustics, not helped, as is now so often the case, by there being no flat sets to reflect sound into the gaping auditorium. We could vaguely hear that Torsten Kerl was doing a sterling job, singing, not shouting, his role. But, as the critics have tended to note, his voice remained a long way off behind the footlights and neither his sword-waving "Nothung!" moment nor his lovemaking were thrilling, any more than Katarina Dalayman’s awakening: she had some volume and notes, but was stingy with them. And in any case, as I wondered above, what must it be like trying to sing Wagnerian top notes on a ledge above an abyss? In the press Uusitalo has come in for some stick, I don't know why, he seems alright to me. But the stars of this show were the bird, Erda, and above all Mime for his fantastic camp acting and Sprechgesang and Fafner, the excellent and altogether audible Stephen Milling. I'm not sure that a Siegfried in which Fafner is best is a great Siegfried.

I know there are Wagnerian ayatollahs on the web who claim no French orchestra should be let near Wagner, but I think it’s fairly obvious to the more reasonable that the French will bring clarity and transparency to the score and be especially good at rustling and rippling, of which there’s a deal in Siegfried after all. The six harps were lovely. But I do wish Jordan had brought more energy to the undertaking, especially during the fifth hour: the thrill-free end, as I said, seemed interminable.

Mozart - La Finta Giardiniera

2011-03-26T15:48:00.000+01:00

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday March 20 2011

Conductor: John Nelson. Production: Karl-Ernst Herrmann, Ursel Herrmann. Sets, costumes and lighting. Don Anchise, podestà di Lagonero: Jeffrey Francis. La Marchesa Violante Onesti (Sandrina): Sandrine Piau. Il Contino Belfiore: Jeremy Ovenden. Arminda: Henriette Bonde-Hansen. Il cavaliere Ramiro: Stella Doufexis. Serpetta: Katerina Knežíková. Roberto (Nardo): Adam Plachetka. ...: Mireille Mossé. Orchestra of la Monnaie.

I don’t deny for a moment that Mozart was one of the greatest composers of all time, but he composed in a period that doesn’t appeal to me much. So the idea of young Mozart (I won’t actually say “second-rate” for fear of getting shouted down) in a 20-year old production had me, once again, fearing the worst. It turned out, however, that the Hermanns had completely revamped their staging: it was fresh as a daisy and outstandingly good, all that an outstanding production should be: intelligent, handsome, rich in detail and rehearsed to perfection, with an excellent cast to boot. A classic Monnaie production, in other words, and a reminder of how consistently good Brussels has been since at least the 80s and Mortier.

With a cast so strong (with the exception of Stella Doufexis’ rather woozy Ramiro) you shouldn’t really single anyone out. But Sandrine Piau is now at her peak: a seasoned artist, sure of her notes and her style, definitely the star of the show (and at La Monnaie, a reasonably-sized house with decent acoustics, unusually audible); Henriette Bonde-Hansen is both visually glamorous and vocally impressive; Jeremy Ovenden is the ever-welcome (well, most of the time) elegant English tenor; and Czech bass-baritone Adam Plachetka is definitely one to watch – according to his website “From the season 2010/2011 he will become a member of Wiener Staatsoper” : a round, velvety but commanding voice and great charm and presence: tall, dark and handsome, as the saying goes. As you might expect, under John Nelson, the orchestra was at its best and the score bounced along.

The production is part easy, part impossible to describe.

The easy part is the set, costumes and lighting. The action took place in a coppice of tall, slender silver birches with leafy crowns, lined up six across and five deep on a peninsula of pale wooden parquet ending, at the rear, at a black lake (Lagonero, I suppose) and curving, white walls beyond. The pale boards continued round the edge of the pit, never a happy idea at La Monnaie where, when out in front, the singers become inaudible. There were some cane or other chairs dotted around, and a fridge topped with a bottle or two and a slice of water melon: a fairly relaxed garden, basking in beautiful, pale, zenithal summer sunlight, dappling the boards with leafy shade. The overall colour scheme: black, white, grey and various shades from beige to cream. Sometimes there were white sheets hung out to dry. People arrived in a slick little white boat gliding silently round the peninsula on the black waters.

The costumes were chic: Arminda had a figure-hugging “pony” (or, less flatteringly, “cow”) print cocktail dress in white with black patches, a huge, matching hat and stilettos; the Contino was equally dressy, in morning gear suited to a wedding; Sandrina, once she’d slipped, at the start, out of her fur-collared coat and high-heeled shoes, was in crisp linens and a broad-brimmed straw hat, very much more like a Parisienne holidaying in the country than an actual gardener; Nardo put on working Bermudas, an apron and a bob hat, but kept his patent dress shoes and sock-suspenders.

The action (which is undeniably but agreeably mad) was initiated, then (sometimes literally) prodded along by a mischievous and sometimes malicious dwarf in tails who emerged, before the music started, from a hole in the floor.

The impossible part is to describe all the detail. I didn’t mention that, of all the tall, slender birches in the wood, just one was at 45 degrees. But after a storm in act 2, when the lighting went dark and the whole coppice swayed from side to side in impressive unison, a single tree remained vertical. That’s just one example from a production that was full of them, from a little snail climbing (at snail’s pace) up the proscenium all afternoon (I wouldn’t have noticed had I not read about in advance) to the charming and funny way, when the Contino came bounding up like an excited puppy to present a rose to his betrothed, all the petals dropped off. The acting (including the comic stuff: Nardo imitating a French lover by simply ruffling his hair, sticking a cigarette in his mouth and slouching...) was spotless, not one move out of place: absolute professionalism and, as I already said, a Monnaie classic if ever there was one. I haven’t checked if, being 20 years old, it’s already on DVD; I think not, and as there are already several DVD versions of this presumably hard-to-sell work (it isn’t, after all, Carmen or La Bohème) this may not make it. But if it does, with these singers, it will be a treasure for truer Mozart lovers than me.

When buying our train tickets three months before we didn’t know the show would go on for over four hours, so in this case we really had to leave at the (second) interval. Not entirely without regrets; but then, agreeably mad though it be, the work is long for what it is, so I think two acts was enough.

Massenet - Cendrillon

2011-03-13T11:59:00.000+01:00

Opéra Comique, Paris, Wednesday March 9 2011

Conductor: Marc Minkowski. Production: Benjamin Lazar. Choreography: Cécile Roussat and Julien Lubeck. Sets: Adeline Caron. Costumes: Alain Blanchot. Lighting: Christophe Naillet. Cendrillon: Judith Gauthier. Le Prince charmant: Michèle Losier. La Fée: Église Gutiérrez. Mme de La Haltière: Ewa Podleś. Pandolfe: Laurent Alvaro. Noémie: Aurélia Legay. Dorothée: Salomé Haller. Le Roi: Laurent Herbaut. Le Doyen de la Faculté: Vincent de Rooster. Le Surintendant des plaisirs: Julien Neyer. Le Premier Ministre: Paul-Henri Vila. Orchestra and Chorus of the Musiciens du Louvre – Grenoble.

I remember once reading (you can probably tell me where) that Strauss’s operas were “luxury” works requiring “luxury” performers to succeed. I think the same can be said of Massenet. There’s a potential for outdated mawkishness in the texts (think: “Adieu notre petite table” – or in this particular case, Cinderella reminiscing tearfully about an armchair) and for trashiness in the music that’s best avoided by having a top-flight orchestra and cast. You don’t schedule Esclarmonde if you haven’t got a Sutherland, you don’t schedule Thäis if you haven’t got a Sills, and you don’t do Massenet at the local high school.

So always some misgivings with Massenet… But musically we got off to a good start the other evening. Minkowski and his band naturally brought briskness and bite to the opening bars and it was clear from the outset that the staging was going to be lively and fully theatrical.

Laurent Alvaro, though I believe a last-minute stand-in, was at his best (why are some critics so unkind about him?); and I might add at this point that the only redeeming feature of the scandalously overpriced “baignoire” I was in at the rear of the orchestra was the extraordinary acoustics: the voices were so present as to be almost embarrassingly intimate and exposed, so any flaws would have shown up immediately. There weren’t any, and the father and daughters raised hopes of an evening of strong, team singing. And then of course we had the bustling entry of the wonderful Ewa Podles. The voice is now diminished but still unmistakably hers: butch and chesty and under thoroughly professional control. And of course she’s a bête de scène and hammed it up a treat as the harridan in giant leg-of-mutton sleeves and extravagant feather head-dresses (a feature of this production: the production team must have eaten pheasant for weeks on end). Prince Charming was very fine.

Stiff in a jewel-ecrusted art nouveau dress straight out of a period poster, Eglise Gutiérrez was rather a cautious fairy, not quite the “French coloratura” vocal type the part seemed to be written for. It might have been better to bring in a Russian singer used to Rimsky-Korsakov. But still, though lacking in projection and personality, she had the crystalline top notes. Of course, she came on after Cendrillon but I’m saving the great disappointment of the evening for last: Judith Gauthier. Over the past few days I’ve been wondering quite how to describe my impressions without risking a libel suit. I’ll start with something I wrote to a friend on Facebook: “She sings like an amateur. An amateur with a few unexpectedly high notes but who needs a great deal of training before she can go on stage. If ever she can go on stage, because clearly she has not an ounce of theatrical sense in her.” Nearly all the best, lushest or most magical moments in Massenet’s score involve Cendrillon: Cendrillon with the prince, Cendrillon with her father, Cendrillon with the fairy. All were ruined. I couldn’t believe my ears. When I read, in Opéra Magazine, that “Judith Gauthier ne pensait aucunement à une carrière de chanteuse,” I think “she was dead right.” When I see that three months ago she was singing Frasquita in Bonn, I wonder why on earth she’s now singing Cendrillon in Paris. The parti-pris of the production may have been to play Cendrillon as a frail, fragile creature: she was often in a nightgown on a cot. But to me, not only does the score call for more charisma, but Judith Gauthier should not even be singing professionally; she ruined the evening. Even I found myself longing for Renée Fleming, which surely goes to show…

The production, lively and highly theatrical as I said above, blended grand siècle and belle époque with abandon. As I understand it, Cendrillon was the work with which the burnt-out Opéra Comique rose again from its ashes in 1899, complete with electric lighting, and the director took his cue from that, mixing colourful costumes that looked very like a 50s Comédie Française take on Louis XIV, exaggeratedly peaked periwigs, the aforementioned feather headdresses and stylised gestures, with turn-of-the-century technical innovations, very early films of French music hall projected magically on a column of smoke, not one Loïe Fuller but two, lit from beneath, and above all “la fée électricité” as she was called: the magic of electric lights. The set was essentially black; a black-framed glasshouse, sometimes with black-and-white print cut-outs of furniture, chimneypieces and mirrors, sometimes with ladders or spiral stairs wheeled in, sometimes with chandeliers, and so on, all forming a black backdrop for lighting effects: little “will-o'-the-wisp” bulbs on the ends of springy wires attached to the dancers, the magic tree outlined in fairy lights, stars descending from the skies, Cinderella’s electric ball gown… The acting was a bit OTT for me, a bit too silly and slapstick (highlighting Cendrillon’s contrasting droopiness) but tightly managed and thoroughly rehearsed.

Maybe the other (mezzo) Cendrillon cast in this run is better. In which case, if there’s a DVD of this otherwise fine show, let’s hope it will be with her.

Zandonai - Francesca da Rimini

2011-02-12T18:00:00.000+01:00

ONP Bastille, Wednesday February 9 2011.

Conductor: Daniel Oren. Production: Giancarlo Del Monaco. Sets: Carlo Centolavigna. Costumes: Maria Filippi. Francesca: Svetla Vassileva. Samaritana: Louise Callinan. Ostasio: Wojtek Smilek. Giovanni Lo Sciancato: George Gagnidze. Paolo Il Bello: Roberto Alagna. Malatestino dall’Occhio: William Joyner. Biancofiore: Grazia Lee. Garsenda: Manuela Bisceglie. Altichiara: Andrea Hill. Adonella: Carol Garcia. La Schiava: Cornelia Oncioiu. Ser Toldo Berardengo: Alexandre Kravets. Il Giullare: Yuri Kissin. Il Torrigiano: Alexandre Duhamel. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Perhaps there are people who are fond of the corny conventions of what the French call “papa’s opera” in the same way dance fans are fond of the conventions of romantic ballet. (The Met has regulars after all.) Nicolas Joel, the boss of the Paris Opera, would seem to be one and Giancarlo del Monaco, described by a French critic as “not just conservative but reactionary”* and whom Joel insists on employing, might be another. Del Monaco’s production of Francesca da Rimini is the sort in which people sit sidesaddle, as it were, with one leg stretched out behind and strike poses harking back to silent film. As far as I know, nothing quite so outdated and unconvincing had been seen in Paris since… er… well since Del M’s own equally panned Andrea Chenier last year, which I had the good fortune (so I was told) to miss.

The production focused heavy-handedly on D’Annunzio, with his death mask almost ever-present on a gauze or in low relief among the sets, inspired by his megalomanic villa-cum-museum-cum-mausoleum on the shores of lake Garda.

Act one set a high standard in awfulness, thankfully not quite equalled in the remaining three. If the Little Britain team (i.e. from the UK TV show) had wanted to amuse us with genteel “ladies” in wincingly pretty, pastel, 1900 frocks (think Romanovs in summer) and big hats, prancing (daintily of course) through stiff rose-beds in a garden of dusty, drooping artificial trees, it would have been no different. Acts two to four were set indoors in decors recalling D’Annunzio’s rooms, with high, dark, slick panelling, slender gold mouldings and scrolls atop the pilasters, here all blown up to giant Bastille scale. The battle of Rimini took place in a vast empty hall with golden, art nouveau windows at the rear that slid open for Giovanni Lo Sciancato (in wheelchair) to emerge from the be-statued prow of the Mussolinian cruiser Puglia, actually moored in the poet’s garden, here with spotlight ablaze.

The costumes were an uneasy hodge-podge. By act three, Francesca had gone from “straight” 1900 to art-nouveau mediaeval while her handmaidens looked, as one review remarked, as if they’d escaped from a third-rate pastiche of Botticelli. Paolo il Bello was dressed, as another newspaper put it, “as Merlin the Wizard” throughout, in a blue cape. The bedchamber, littered with bric-à-brac (though by no means so cluttered as D’Annunzio’s own, according to photos) that included, as well as the necessary lectern and busts, oriental lamps and ornaments of all kinds, a rotating Liberty-style statuette of entwined lovers, now had red arched panelling punctuated with squares of late romantic painting. Over the heavily be-pillowed bed was a monumental, Michelangelo Medici Chapel mantelpiece, draped with reclining figures. To keep Francesca amused, the maidens put on a puppet show (I’m not making this up) over a red boudoir screen and actually went so far as to strew rose petals from a lacquer tray, reminding my neighbour, so he said, of La Gran Scena’s drag version of Butterfly. The musicians, who had already looked odd (think Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, though without naked women) in black tails and top hats in that ghastly act one garden here returned looking even odder in white, as if just off the set of Hello Dolly!

Act four (all these scene changes meant two actual 20-minute intervals plus long pauses between all scenes) started in a blacker version of the bedchamber (no red panels) with bigger, more imperial-Roman bric-à-brac (i.e. big busts) and a huge table with twin peacocks as a centrepiece. Giovanni Lo Sciancato (in wheelchair) and his evil brother started out hamming it up like old-fashioned melodrama villains, but in the event, their fight scene was the one well-managed part of an otherwise acting-free evening and a moment of high drama of the Philip-II-meets-Grand-Inquisitor kind. At last things woke up a bit. Another long pause took us back to the bedchamber for the final, short scene, with the lancing of Francesca and stabbing of Paolo.

The evening included other moments reminiscent, as that fight was, of other operas: the presentation of the rose (in this case a red one in act one), or Tosca, Mario and Scarpia (scene between Francesca and Malatestino with offstage screams). The music was less modern than my pre-performance reading had led me to believe; as if a student of Puccini’s (note the double genitive there) had joined Korngold in Hollywood. I only wish the orchestra had been more in a mood for paroxystic incandescence under Oren (I wasn’t alone in finding them lacklustre; he was booed a bit at the end).

The cast, however, was fantastic, small roles included. Alagna’s voice is now darker, more “corsé” than before, still very supple and wholly distinctive, with the usual great diction. Svetla Vassileva is an amply-voiced soprano, to say the least, but capable of a great deal of nuance, despite what some reviewers said. Gagnidze showed he could be hugely powerful, as did Joyner, and I’d be more than happy to hear both of them again. My neighbour, utterly bored by the staging and not too keen on the music, felt it was a “waste of a good cast.” I was glad to have such a good one for my first hearing of the work; but it‘s true it did occur to me more than once that it would have been nice to hear the same team in those other Italian works the production (indeed the storyline) brought to mind.

*I later read: "Dans l'article de Didier van Moere, on apprend que le digne fils de Mario del Monaco a déclaré 'je ne suis pas conservateur, je suis réactionnaire'." So he said it of himself, apparently.

Prokofiev - Betrothal in a Monastery

2011-02-05T11:27:00.000+01:00

Opéra Comique, Paris, Thursday February 3, 2011

Conductor: Tugan Sokhiev. Production: Martin Duncan. Sets and costumes: Alison Chitty. Lighting: Paul Pyant. Choreography: Ben Wright. Don Jerome: Brian Galliford. Ferdinand: Garry Magee. Louisa: Anastasia Kalagina. The Duenna: Larissa Diadkova. Don Antonio: Daniil Shtoda. Clara d’Almanza: Anna Kiknadze. Mendoza: Mikhail Kolelishvili. Don Carlos: Yuri Vorobiev. Padre Augustin: Eduard Tsanga. Father Elustaf/ 1st Masker: Vasily Efimov. Father Chartreuse/ 2nd Masker: Marek Kalbus. Father Benedictine/ 3rd Masker: Mischa Schelomianski. Lauretta: Eleonora Vindau. Orchestra and chorus of the Capitole de Toulouse.

It’s been a long time since I trundled out my threadbare line that opera-going is a triumph of hope over experience. I just browsed back through my reports to see when I last had a really fantastic evening at the opera and lo and behold, it was almost exactly a year ago in the same house, the Salle Favart, for The Fairy Queen. But I also see that my write-ups are getting longer and longer, so this time I’ll try to keep it short.

What was so good?

Fantastic opera: good comic text and a great Prokofiev score: colourful, inventive, sardonic, witty, lyrical, magical… If you don’t know it, buy it. Even on CD it’s one of the all-time great comic operas. In the house, it goes off like a barrel of fireworks.

Great conducting and playing: Orchestre du Capitole on peak form, full, rich, sound yet detailed and accurate, great drive but great delicacy when needed. The quartet was fabulous, a magic moment, everything seemed suspended.

Simple production but wonderful comic acting: budget sets of gantries with spots and metal structures hung with doors, windows, chairs, ladders… All grey but lit up in vibrant colours: green and blue, red and orange and pink… The characters perhaps hinting at Chagall (Mendoza especially, with his long, stiff beard), in 1920 costumes; the angular ballets (and projections) definitely recalling constructivism (and as usual, pretty superfluous). The singers acted up a storm, down to every facial gesture and jaunty move and looked as though they were enjoying every minute, as we did. Chorus gaily cross-dressed: tall, beefy men in flapper dresses, dapper little women in tails, some with clown faces.

Brian Galliford: simply amazing, totally in charge, running the show, conducting the little on-stage trio (what a clarinettist!) and playing the glosckenspiel himself at the end. Larissa Diadkova: what is there to say? Absolutely Russian sound, great timbre, great actress, having a ball. Mikhail Kolelishvili: where do they find these young guys? What a bass, and again, what an actor!

Anastasia Kalagina: another absolutely Russian voice type, this time the kind that sings the Queen in The Golden Cockerel: sweet and silvery. Irresistibly pretty and coquettish. Anna Kiknadze: a very sound young mezzo, gave us a truly moving convent aria.

Garry Magee very charming personality but perhaps getting over a cold; Daniil Shtoda a small voice but all the notes were there so the “big tune” was lovely. Vasily Efimov as a tall, very drunk monk, very remarkable - clarion high notes: one to look out for in future.

Everyone loving it, on stage and off and, we noted, no straining to hear the singers as we had to for Les Mamelles in the same place couple of weeks back, or at Garnier for Cesare. Natural, unmannered, generous and communicative.

So, about once a year it’s worth the trouble and expense. I wonder if there’ll be a DVD of this? It would be scandalous not to have a permanent record of Galliford’s masterly contribution alone, and then there’s all the rest…

Händel - Giulio Cesare

2011-02-02T19:48:00.000+01:00

ONP Palais Garnier, Tuesday February 1 2011

Conductor: Emmanuelle Haïm. Production and costumes: Laurent Pelly. Sets: Chantal Thomas. Lighting: Joël Adam. Giulio Cesare: Lawrence Zazzo. Cornelia :Varduhi Abrahamyan. Sesto: Isabel Leonard. Cleopatra: Natalie Dessay. Tolomeo: Christophe Dumaux. Achilla: Nathan Berg. Nireno: Dominique Visse. Curio: Aimery Lefèvre. Orchestra of the Concert d'Astrée, Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

I thought this midnight exchange of e-mails after Giulio Cesare might, as it sums up my first impressions, do as a start to my write-up:

Friend: So how was it? Dessay finally on form?

Me: My first thought: very good cast in theatre too big for them. I.e. not voiceless wonders à la Christie at all, but Garnier too big - and the production didn't help, with them often singing from the middle (i.e. not the front) of the stage with no sets behind.

Second thought: to me, Haim takes too many liberties with the score, yet at the same time, overall, achieves quite a humdrum effect - again to me, often apparently careless of what the singers are doing. I'll have to think more about that. I don’t like the near-total rewriting of the da capos for Dessay.

Dessay seemed on form tonight, yes. But does she rein in her voice so as not to overshadow the others?

****

Since then, re the problem of projection in a large theatre, people have kept telling me Garnier is small. But surely that’s only because they now compare it with the Bastille? Garnier has almost exactly the same number of seats as Covent Garden, and let’s not forget that for over 100 years it was Paris’s biggest opera venue. As far as I can gather (call that "Google") Händel's King's Theatre had half as many.

Then, sitting down to write this evening I recalled what the FT critic wrote, and wondered if he had in fact put his finger on it: “Händel’s glorious score would have sufficed but for the intransigence of the Baroque ayatollahs who insist on the original low pitch. This can work in the right acoustics but Garnier is a 19th-century house and requires considerable lung power. The cast find themselves grovelling for subterranean notes, most notably Lawrence Zazzo (Caesar), a fine musician with a ripe and robust alto voice as long as the music is comfortably above middle C. Isabel Leonard’s stylish Sesto would also feel happier a semitone higher and even Varduhi Abrahamyan’s woolly laments in the contralto role of Cornelia are sometimes inaudible.”

I’d previously found Zazzo impressively audible at the Bastille, so maybe this was the clue after all.

Anyway, to move on… The contrast between Cesare and Tolomeo was good: Zazzo’s is a more virile, huskier timbre, more carefully (beautifully) phrased too, than Dumaux’ more straightforward, “petulant” sound (I’m not complaining, just trying to explain the difference). Isabel Leonard was excellent throughout, though not as vehement as, say, Della Jones (nor did she sing with a Welsh accent); Varduhi Abrahamyan maybe less so… Nothing inherently wrong with her voice, but I’ve often heard fuller-bodied and more moving Cornelias. Nathan Berg had a good, ripe, dark middle but even at low, baroque pitch put out some ugly top notes. Visse (I’ve said this before, but what else is there to say?) was Visse.

The reason for the specific question about Natalie Dessay (“Dessay finally on form?”) was that she’s had rather a chequered run so far, having once had to stop the music and start again, and at another performance give up after two acts. Yesterday evening she stayed the full course, made the (marvellously fluent) coloratura sound simple and occasionally let rip, but on the whole – whether recovering from illness or simply still scared – I think she was being cautious. her acting was less committed than usual too, it seemed to me. She looked marvellous, though, with spiky, short hair.

Now, what about Emmanuelle Haim? I make no pretence to know much about baroque performing practice, but as I said above, I suspect her of taking liberties with the score, so much so that what I hear at times sounds to me (i.e. to my ignorant ear) like no less of an arrangement than Sir Hamilton Harty’s old, un-PC and probably now forgotten ones for “romantic” orchestra. Some critics have praised the "imaginative" da capos; to me, again as I said, Dessay’s were more like total rewrites, and in dubious style. And though Haim (like Biondi in Vivaldi) goes for effects – exaggeratedly staccato chords, for example, pizzicato passages, or the unusual highlighting of a particular instrument (a recorder suddenly tooted out over the orchestra for the closing cadence of the score) , this doesn’t seem to extend, as you might expect it would, to tempi: fast arias aren’t very fast, slow ones aren’t very slow and indeed have something perfunctory about them, as if deliberately avoiding sentiment. It’s this evenness of tempo, I think, that brought the word “humdrum” to my mind, and its relentless chugging on that seemed, at times, careless of the singers.

But all this sounds very negative for an evening with not a moment’s actual boredom. No doubt “Handel’s glorious score” guaranteed that – as usual. He’s always the hero of the evening.

The production is a new one, by Laurent Pelly. It's set in the reserves of an Egyptian museum, a single vast space with a goods lift and a door to the right (fire extinguisher on the wall), a motorised shutter at the rear (that rose to reveal the distant pyramids in a sandstorm) and on the left, a series of tall warehouse stacks that could roll in and out. Indeed, museum workmen wheeled, trolleyed, trucked and fork-lifted statues, urns, columns, display cases, models, carpets, etc., in and out and around all evening while the historic characters acted their parts out among them. Now they saw the singers and sometimes joined in - as soldiers, for example - now they didn't. Some critics found this at once too busy and, over four hours and twenty minutes, too boring, but I found it cleverly done - there was more variety to the staging than they implied. It was the same store-room space throughout but:

Act one was in the sculpture department. The opening chorus was sung by a row of assorted antique busts on a shelf on the left, Caesar arived first in bronze and only then in the form of Lawrence Zazzo, and Pompey's head was that of a colossal statue, delivered to the museum suspended on a fork-lift trolley and, as such, came as less of a shock than the severed, human kind, a case of the production concept undermining the drama; critics complained of the overall distancing effect, along with the constant distractions. Each act had one or two impressive, large-scale items; here, Celopatra made her entry on a giant, reclining statue, and her "fight" with Tolomeo (barefoot and bare-headed but in a "dress" of lapis lazuli tiles) involved keeping or taking it. Caesar and Tolomeo "met" each other on Egyptian chairs in separate glass cases.

Act two was in the painting department. Depictions of Cleopatra from the Renaissance to 19th century orientalists, framed and unframed glided from left to right and back and forth, mixed with 18th century fantasies of ancient, Arcadian landscapes. For the seduction scene, Cleopatra's maids and the on-stage instrumentalists were all - men as well as women - in pastel-coloured, Watteau-style dresses and high white wigs, and she sang (and "vogued") "V'adoro, pupille"inside a golden frame, with a landscape behind her. The famous portrait of Händel by Hudson looked on, the object of curious scrutiny by Nireno.

Act three opened on Tolomeo's debauchery (as well as being surrounded by girls he seemed also to be getting a blow-job from a kneeling, bare-chested muscle-man) in the carpet store, but ended with simple packing cases stacked up as a podium for the two thrones. Cleopatra was duly delivered in one of the carpets. The impressive set piece here was a majestic, full-scale felucca sail at the rear; and during "Da tempeste," workers proudly carried a model ship, then other ancient items, across the apron. During the final chorus, their wives turned up at the door to fetch them and they switched out the lights and left: it was the end of the working day.

So yes, it was quite a distancing production but to me well done. Caesar unfortunately pulled the short straw in the costume department, all grey and dusty like the statue of the Commander. He could have looked and acted a lot more heroic. But I was more concerned about the lack of projection from the stage as musically, apart from my suspicions, it was good.

The question is, why did the Paris Opera order a new production of Cesare instead of keeping the old one (a fun and in fact influential 80s staging by Hytner) but adding another Händel piece to its repertoire?

Poulenc - Les Mamelles de Tirésias

2011-01-18T20:42:00.000+01:00

Opéra Comique, Paris, Wednesday January 12 2011

Conductor: Ludovic Morlot. Production, sets and costumes: Macha Makeïeff. Lighting: Pascal Mérat. Choreography: Thomas Stache. Thérèse/La Cartomancienne: Hélène Guilmette. Le Mari: Ivan Ludlow. Le Directeur de théâtre/Le Gendarme: Werner Van Mechelen. Presto: Christophe Gay. Lacouf: Loïc Felix. Le Journaliste parisien: Thomas Morris. Le Fils: Marc Molomot. La Marchande de journaux: Jeannette Fischer. Actor: Robert Horn. Orchestra and Chorus of the Lyon Opera.

Le Mamelles de Tirésias was, thanks to friends, the first opera I ever knew by heart. It introduced me to Apollinaire and taught me how to say “combine harvester” (and much more) in French. I continue to find it a more interesting work – words and music – by far than Dialogues des Carmélites. And those who dismiss it as a “bit of fluff” (it has happened) might read what Poulenc had to say about it: “I do believe I prefer this work to everything else I wrote… If people want to form an idea of my complex musical personality, they will find me quite exactly myself in Les Mamelles de Tirésias.”

Perhaps because it’s short (posing the problem of what to add to the programme to flesh the evening out), perhaps because it remains an unusual piece, perhaps for other reasons, Les Mamelles isn’t performed often, and when it is (a) it may be under-cast, perhaps because star singers don’t want to take the time to learn it, and (b) it may be put on cheap or directed as silly farce, which it isn’t; it’s as tricky to get right as Offenbach. The current Paris production, up from Lyon, was the best I’ve seen and heard.

I imagine it must be quite daunting for young singers to attack Les Mamelles with Denise Duval and Jean Giraudeau still floating around on EMI, though they may take comfort in its being less well-known than Norma, over which the ghost of Callas hovers. Hélène Guilmette, though near inaudible in the frequent rapid patter, nevertheless had a very fair stab at Thérèse. She was more at ease when she had time to “seat” her notes, as the French say, and gamely hit all the top ones while still acting the part.

Ivan Ludlow had me perplexed, not only because he was - though tall and muscular (huge biceps) and suitably ungainly in a long, flimsy dress - a rather placid husband, lacking, as one critic put it, the vis comica, but also because I didn’t recognise the vocal line. Like anyone who knows the piece well, I suppose, I have the Cluytens and Ozawa recordings in mind, both with tenors. Any time I hear a baritone in the part, it isn’t exactly that the notes are not the same, but they are, as it were, distributed differently between octaves. To find out once and for all what Poulenc actually called for, I’ve ordered a vocal score. We’ll see…* If Ludlow had reworked the part to suit his voice (and there are illustrious precedents: I remember Caballé as Cleopatra, or perhaps it was Cleopatra as Caballé, in Giulio Cesare) it wasn’t a great success, with shaky falsetto top notes being only part of the trouble; yet in the end he was, in a way, engaging.

Werner Van Mechelen, the Directeur, was especially strong and moving in his opening tirade, with his head bandaged like Apollinaire; and the best of the evening were Presto and Lacouf, done up to look like Prince, in black-and-white print suits on electric scooters. The orchestra was lovely, setting just the right tone (not an easy task with Poulenc part bouffe, part lush, swooning over Paris).

I’ve seen Les Mamelles paired with Dido and Aeneas. I don’t remember what else. La Voix Humaine? In this case, the evening was rather surprisingly presented as a “soirée Dada.” Perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising, but I’d never thought of either the play or Poulenc’s music in that light, having for some reason always thought the former from 1903, though first performed in 1917, by which time the term “Dada” had been invented. The production was set in a rather sinister 20s circus. It opened with rehearsals backstage, to a Shostakovich foxtrot, involving a saxophonist, guitarist and trombone player from the pit done up as (blue-and-white, rather than black-and-white) minstrels in Afro wigs, under the humourless orders of a white-faced, Italian-style clown in spangled blue, who turned out to be something of a ringmaster. He spoke, throughout the evening (though not often as his part isn’t actually in the play) in English, perhaps picking up the “Hands up” and “my dear” in the text. It continued, without interruption, with Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur le Toit, introducing characters both in and not in the original, including Thérèse and the husband (bickering), Presto and Lacouf and a “vieille danseuse,” but also a black boxer, slick-haired acrobats, a giant pipe on wheels, for people to ride on, and a live bull.

This, I know from what I heard afterwards, was confusing to some people, who thought it was all part of the opera and found it odd no-one sang for so long. The production, once the Directeur had got his manifesto out of the way, carried on in the same busy, circus vein, with the male chorus members as gloomy white clowns in high, white, stove-pipe hats with tiny red lips and the women as jolly, hand-waving ones in baggy black and white and enormous clown shoes. There was a caravan that served all kinds of purposes, now with a boxing ring on top, now with a milk-bottle production line inside and out. There were “Montparnasse” period projections (including some Man Ray) in hazy black and white to the left, and when the “inhabitants of the hive” came up in the text, an acrobat in a bee suit flew up into the flies. The journalist son wore loud checks and carried a chihuahua; the policeman was (oddly, among so many 1920 references, too many, I don’t doubt, to pick out) lieutenant Colombo and was aided at some stage by a basset hound. There was a strong woman with dumbells and siamese twins in silver lamé, there were those acrobats, with odd black and yellow socks and suspenders, leaping about and Presto and Lacouf on their scooters, there was a male Josephine Baker (Brazilian, I should think, from his name) with golden bananas and a huge grin, there were men dressed as nannies (“male nurse” took on a new meaning) rocking an assortment of vintage prams, and the chorus, at the end, male and female alike, stripped down to spangled leotards and did a fan dance (red and pink ostrich feathers), with Josephine, on the front edge of the pit. It was fun and it worked.

The reservations I had were that those in the audience not knowing Les Mamelles might wonder what was going on; and, more seriously perhaps, that a production pushing its Dada credentials somehow undermined itself by setting the shenanigans in a circus. They would surely be more bizarre, by far, on the Côte d’Azur?

*The score eventually arrived and confirmed that I am just not used to the baritone version, as sung by Ludlow.

Puccini - La Bohème

2010-12-20T19:59:00.001+01:00

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday December 19 2010

Conductor: Carlo Rizzi. Production: Andreas Homoki. Sets (what sets?): Hartmut Meyer. Costumes: Mechthild Seipel. Mimi: Ermonela Jaho. Musetta: Anne-Catherine Gillet. Rodolfo: Giuseppe Filianoti. Marcello: Massimo Cavalletti. Schaunard: Lauri Vasar. Colline: Giovanni Battista Parodi. Parpignol: Marc Coulon. Benoît: Jacques Does.

Not being a fan of La Bohème, I’d never given the plot and characters much thought. Being paid to do it, however, Andreas Homoki has. His production, now in Brussels, raises a couple of interesting points that had never struck me before. First, “Bohemians” were really what are now called "bobos." We can assume that, as young painters, poets, musicians and philosophers, they were children of the bourgeoisie; and there’s little doubt that they aspired to material success, even if they set out to épater their class. Second, that being so, there’s every likelihood that, once success was upon them, they would (and did) ditch the likes of Mimi and Musetta.

Unfortunately getting these ideas across involved, in the production, diverging a great deal from the libretto in both words and actions.

In this staging there were no garrets, no café, no toll-gate… in fact there were no sets at all. There was just the empty stage, the rear wall painted dark grey, with a sprinkling of snow (though less than outside the theatre: I'd come up from Paris alone, nobody else having dared), and so it was from beginning to end. The action took place outside, with the local middle classes present as spectators to the “Bohemian” tomfoolery - the men amused, the women shocked. (Oddly, despite the snow and references to the cold, nobody had a coat on. The costumes, by the way, were the indefinitely modern dress we find in most productions these days, ranging from the 50s to Rodolfo’s present-day Pumas.) So, Marcello had two plastic buckets of paint, red and yellow, and threw them in broad splashes at the rear wall as the opera got under way, something that had the local ladies disapproving from the start. The fire was lit in an oil drum that happened to be there, and Schaunard arrived wheeling a supermarket trolley.

By now I was already wondering quite what the lads were doing living (and painting, writing, eating and drinking) out of doors. Benoît still knocked, and of course they said “come in.” That made no more sense than Mimi later complaining about the stairs, as there weren’t any. As to references to coaches and livery or Louis Philippe… Of course we’re used to these mismatches these days, but here there were an awful lot, the action having been moved outside; and this also meant a lot of tiresome mental gymnastics, trying to figure out what Homoki was getting at, reconcile the “new” action with the “old,” and even tell what was irony (in the original) and what not (here).

As the first tableau progressed, the locals dragged in a giant Christmas tree. In the second, they raised and decorated it while the kids chased, and in fact debagged, Parpignol, dressed as Santa Claus and left running around in his undies with the red trousers round his ankles. When the military music came on at the end, the tree crackled and flashed like a night raid over Baghdad while they fought over their presents, littering the stage with torn paper and cartons. When the curtain went up on the third tableau, they were still fixed in the same fighting poses: sometimes, when the music went quiet, Homoki had the chorus freeze or move in slow motion; here they froze for some time, before wandering slowly off, apparently hung over from the night’s festivities. This was really the morning after.

The fourth tableau was, I guess, a year or two later but still at Christmas. This time, we were at a literary cocktail party or gallery opening, with waiters and waitresses bearing canapés and asking our heroes, now kitted out in fancy suits, for autographs: they had made it, it seemed. So where the plot says “all parody eating a plentiful banquet, dance together, and sing,” this was no parody at all but a society event that rapidly got out of hand – and it wasn’t at all clear if Colline’s remark about a ministerial job was ironic. The lads, true to their reputation as former “wild boys,” I suppose, flirted with the waitresses and ended up throwing custard pies at each other; the tables were thrown apart in the scuffling and the giant tree fell down before Mimi’s dramatic return put an end to the havoc. She died as the cocktail guests arrived, dressed up to the nines. They fled in disgust. And, true to Homoki’s clever point about our bobos’ true allegiance, finally even Rodolfo quit the scene, leaving Musetta alone, crouched over Mimi.

I imagine casting Bohème is a conundrum: whether to go for credibly youthful looks or the mature ability to soar with Puccini (and over his orchestra at its most convulsive). The choice here was for youth, and that being said the cast could barely be faulted. Filianoti is undeniably (and unsurprisingly, given his name) an Italian tenor with a sun-filled timbre, Ermonela Jaho has a surprisingly ripe, round voice for so slight a frame and lovely piano singing, though she will need to keep her vibrato in check… But as a result of going for youth, with one exception the voices were Mozartian in size and a glance at the programme showed their usual repertoire is Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Bizet and so on… So I couldn’t help thinking they’d have been better employed in Cosi fan Tutte and wondering if they were doing the right thing here: the last time I saw Bohème in Brussels, the Rodolfo was Rolando Villazon, about a month before, suddenly, he was world famous. Look what happened to him.

The exception I mentioned and to me the star of the cast was Massimo Cavalletti as Marcello: he’s a strong but musical baritone with something of the Bryn Terfel to him: at once resounding but nuanced and with more projection than anyone else on stage. He was perhaps the only one on stage who should really have been singing Puccini – though I could equally imagine him singing Don Giovanni.

The orchestra was at its most sumptuous under Rizzi and the afternoon was applauded vigorously.

Oh, by the way, the bravo-guy was there, so Puccini’s through-composed score was interrupted by unwanted applause at (odd but predictable) intervals. The bravo guy really doesn’t know or care, does he?

Hindemith - Mathis der Maler

2010-11-27T10:12:00.001+01:00

ONP Bastille, Thursday November 25 2010

Conductor: Christoph Eschenbach. Production: Olivier Py. Sets & costumes: Pierre-André Weitz. Albrecht von Brandenburg: Scott Mac Allister. Mathis: Matthias Goerne. Lorenz von Pommersfelden: Thorsten Grümbel. Wolfgang Capito: Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke. Riedinger: Gregory Reinhart. Hans Schwalb: Michael Weinius. Truchsess von Waldburg: Antoine Garcin. Sylvester von Schaumberg: Eric Huchet. Ursula: Melanie Diener. Regina: Martina Welschenbach. Die Gräfin von Helfenstein: Nadine Weissmann. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

My preconceived ideas are nearly always wrong. I suppose I’ll even end up on my deathbed, like a character in Mauriac or Waugh, copping out and making the sign of the cross. How many times have I started a report by saying an evening at the opera turned out either better or worse than I expected? And how come, having said so many times we should expect nothing (never to be disappointed), I go on having these expectations one way or the other? I didn’t expect Mathis der Maler to be much more interesting than Cardillac; but at some point during the second hour I found myself thinking “this is a bloody good opera.” It’s opera that wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste – the antithesis of divertissement and unlikely to appeal to those whose idea of bliss is an evening at home with La Finta Giardiniera, a cup of Earl Grey and a plate of sprouts. It’s meaty: a dense story, with things to think about and a garrulous text and score, the latter not nervously chatty like Cardillac but more, in a way, like Hindemith’s Tote Stadt. I’ve ordered a set of CDs to get to know it better, as I admit I previously knew only two of his works: the symphony drawn from Mathis, and the Symphonic Metamorphoses (as it happens, one of the first pieces I ever played in a “proper” orchestra).

The Paris Opera’s aim in staging this for the first time was evidently to do it proud. Often the Bastille’s gaping proscenium is doubled up with a second, black frame to make it a more reasonable size for other houses’ sets. Here, for once, the stage and its computer-driven machinery were used in their entirety and apparently with little expense spared, occasionally bringing to mind - the battle-scarred façades waltzing around, no doubt, and people running across the stage with red flags - Francesca Zambello’s War and Peace, probably the best thing she ever did in Paris. Py’s production of Mathis wasn’t up to that standard, but it was a fair stab at what must be nearly as daunting a task (as tackling War and Peace, I mean). Giant chunks of set were spun slowly round a great deal. Three studded brass boxes, each the size of a house, rising to three tiered storeys of golden gothic arcades when required, could be turned to form a golden courtyard for the cardinal, or lined up side-by-side simply to fill the whole proscenium, en long et en large, with a kind of gilded Doges’ palace. For scenes of war, the lights of battle sparkled across a vast, silvery backdrop (looking only a tiny bit like Christmas tree lights in a draught), bottom-edged with a bombed-out city-scape, while extras and chorus, in perfect 40s costumes, black and grey, wheeled those battle-scarred façades and wove full-size tanks in and out and round and round the garish street lights, in a kind of virtuoso display of stage-handing. When the house was searched for seditious texts, a whole basement-full of tightly-packed papers rose out of the boards while, above, guards in Nazi uniforms with tugging Alsations (German shepherds to some of you) prowled and books were burnt in an oil drum. Sometimes, on the other hand, the stage, vast and marked as a football pitch, was bare.

The Isenheim altar was never actually reproduced on stage, but its form appeared, larger than life, as giant windows cut out of a black screen, behind which studio assistants and artist’s models made their preparations and took up their poses for a “sitting” seen as shadow-play. There were bare-chested angels with red wings and evening trousers whose function (the angels', not the trousers') wasn’t quite clear; though, true, as I remember there’s at least one red-winged angel (without the evening trousers) in the pictures; and during the (not-very-scary; in fact a bit bathetic) Temptations of St Anthony, extras wore monstrous headpieces taken straight from Grünewald.

I don’t know Py particularly well, so I don’t know if the overall theatrical stiffness, with characters more like symbols than actual people, was a parti pris, Hindemith’s fault, or simply a directing weakness. The action seemed more hieratic than fluid. It was, as I said, a fair stab at a difficult piece. But the use of free-standing sets and otherwise vast, empty spaces didn’t help the singers’ projection. And I must say I had the feeling we might be watching a revival of something from the 90s, not a brand new, 2010 production. I know why Py used Nazi uniforms - he explained in an interview in the Opera's own magazine - but it was corny nevertheless.

The score, over three hours long, calls (at least if you're going to stage it in a barn like the Bastille) for a Wagnerian cast: Brünnhildes and Sieglindes and Frickas. Perhaps I was in one of the house's unpredictable acoustic blind spots. And certainly, when you're on the first balcony, the orchestral sound shoots straight up from the pit. But despite their very best efforts, and I don't doubt they were making them - you could see and sort-of-hear they were putting in sterling work - and with the cavernous stage often wide open behind them, the two principal ladies lacked impact. In the circumstances, perhaps only Gwyneth Jones could have pulled off Ursula, with a young Deborah Voigt as Regina, perhaps. Nadine Weissman, on the other hand, didn’t seem up to her role.

The men fared better. Gregory Reinhart rang through as Riedinger, Scott Mac Allister was a remarkable, clarion Albrecht, and Matthias Goerne, whose soft timbre made it hard for him always to project across the orchestra, nevertheless sang beautifully and ended all – music and production – magnificently, with a moving, final, Lieder-like scene over an at-last-quiet orchestra (that had me oddly thinking of the death of Don Quichotte), dropping his belongings slowly and silently, one by one, into a trap before expiring at the final chords.

The chorus at times sounded like they were still unfamiliar with the work, but the Opéra orchestra played magnificently, as, in that peculiarly French way, the can when they set their minds to it, under Eschenbach. They and he would have been the stars of the show, had Goerne not stepped in at the end to steal it.

A brief footnote: I spared a thought for Rodney Gilfrey, who was so upset by the winking red lights of people’s cameras when he sang The Sound of Music at the Châtelet. In the reflective golden sets, you could see them – great gobs of red light going off all the time as people took snapshots of the show. I see how distracting it might be…

Janacek - Katia Kabanova

2010-11-10T13:06:00.000+01:00

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday November 7 2010

Conductor: Leo Hussain. Production: Andrea Breth. Sets: Annette Murschetz. Costumes: Silke Willrett, Marc Weeger. Savjol Prokofjevič Dikoj: Pavlo Hunka. Boris Grigorjevič: Kurt Streit. Marfa Ignatẻvna Kabanová (Kabanicha): Renée Morloc. Tichon Ivanyč Kabanov: John Graham-Hall. Katerina (Kát’a): Evelyn Herlitzius. Váňa Kudrjáš: Gordon Gietz. Varvara: Natascha Petrinsky. Orchestra and chorus of La Monnaie.

A friend of mine, complaining about a change of boss, once said: “They didn’t break the mould when they appointed him, it just got mouldier.” Until I actually checked, a week before, I’d supposed that La Monnaie was reviving Christoph Marthaler’s grungy but interesting “council flats” production of Katia Kabanova. It turned out that, though the Marthaler show wasn’t all that long ago, they’d asked Andrea Breth, a famous German director, to do a new one. In this case, it didn’t break the mould, but it was grungier - and less interesting (by far, so much so that even the old lady next to me, who hated the now-ditched production, found herself wishing we could have it back).

The cast looked very promising on paper, but there were some surprises in the house. The risk, I think, in Janacek is that the men let the side down, the tenors especially. It was left, for example, to Anja Silja in both Aix and Brussels to carry Makropoulos single-handed. “Janacek tenors,” as a friend and I have taken to calling them (though for all I know it may be an accepted term), are a rare breed. Kurt Streit was almost perfect as Boris. I say “almost” as even he had a touch of weakness at the cruel top. John Graham-Hall, excellent as Aschenbach in the same house, had less vocal presence here over Janacek’s writhing orchestra, but still... Gordon Gietz was, I’m sorry to say, a weak link; but with all due respect, I’ve never grasped how he became such a familiar name. To suggest it’s his looks that did it would be unkind; perhaps he shines in other repertoires.

So we had a kind of “three-bears” array of tenors, one excellent, one alright and one weak, but as this was, in a way, in order of importance in the score, so far, more or less, so good. I can’t believe, however, that it’s hard to find better singers for Dikoj and Kabanicha. Both, in this performance, had trouble making themselves heard.

The two “girls” were outstanding, or at any rate outstandingly loud, which I usually like. The odd thing was that, with Katia’s dark timbre and Varvara’s bright, clear one, the roles were somehow reversed. And Evelyn Herlitzius, after an almost wobbly, unruly start, was sometimes relentlessly, unsubtly loud – even I noticed that. But I’m not going to complain about singers who throw themselves into their parts and that you can actually hear. With Streit, they made a strong central trio and, as a result, the afternoon had its moments, reminding me (I hadn’t listened for a long time) what a beautiful opera this really is.

Young Leo Hussain, who I hear’s considered very promising, certainly seemed to have some ideas for the score, most noticeably some very loving, lingering slow bits. I haven’t heard an opening like that since Tristan in Vienna. But the Monnaie orchestra is a hard-working, professional pit band well suited to giving you excellent, no-frills Verdi and Donizetti and Rossini; it’s more a runabout than a Rolls, you could say - it isn’t a sleek, well-oiled symphonic machine of the BPO or VPO or CPO kind that can come up with the sumptuousness or paroxysms you might sometimes like (or that Hussain might have sometimes liked) in Janacek.

Nevertheless, as I said, the afternoon had its moments; and it might well have had more by far with a less distractingly failed production. There were two main drawbacks. First, in this show the singers didn’t project any convincing personality. It may or may not have been deliberate on the director’s part. She’s supposed (according to the programme notes) to have a gift for psychological penetration, so maybe she just didn’t manage to persuade the singers to believe in what they were doing. Second, the show had many of the (now clichéd) failings of German grunge-Regie, provoking a constant “so what?” exasperation all the (brief, of course) afternoon.

The single set was a filthy, gloomy yard (Anna Viebrock's council flats were glam in comparison ) with a trickle of water running through, too shallow and dirty, surely, for the old madwomen in black serving the family to do the washing in, though they tried. The modern, frosted-glass doors to the left and rear were never actually used. I imagine that was significant but I didn’t get it, or wasn’t in a mood to try. Katia was, at the start, huddled inside an abandoned fridge. Dikoj was slouched in a motionless stupor in an old armchair with his feet on the prostrate Boris; whatever the libretto said (about Dikoj mistreating Boris) neither budged until they started singing. Tichon’s relationship with his mother, as he entered, was signalled by his instantly dropping his trousers to be flannelled down by her in a tin bath.

There were the usual knickers round ankles: Varvara. There was the usual fumbled masturbation: Kabanicha (!). In her grotesque dalliance with the dead-drunk Dikoj, she started with her knees wide apart and feet on the table, eating what looked like a potato but I suppose was an apple. She then climbed on it, tore her skirt apart, grappled with him, and ended up comically with his braces twisted round her head and shoulders. There were puzzling oddities such as Kabanicha furtively shovelling earth over a doll in a corner (burying a child or what? Is this Katia or Jenufa?), or Boris arriving near the end with a little suitcase dripping blood that he eventually emptied into a bathtub.

That was the bathtub Katia had sat in, fully dressed, during her duet with Varvara (not the tin bath Boris was flannelled in: no expense spared in this show), while the latter scribbled on a dressing-table mirror with lipstick - and sang, annoyingly in such a great duet, to the back of the stage. And it was the same bloody tub Katia slit her wrists in (as the cry went up "there's a woman in the water"). The various references to religion, including, in the final scene, lots of tapers on up-ended oil drums – looking a bit like a cocktail party - and tended by those ubiquitous old madwomen in black remained nevertheless somehow incidental and almost forgettable (I mean, I nearly forgot).

Und so weiter… The Konzept was relentless nastiness. Every character was played as fundamentally vile in a senselessly amoral, violent and grimy world; as a result, you had sympathy for no-one and nothing in the story startled or shocked as it might in a more "bourgeois," better behaved setting. And as I said, the director didn't manage to help the singers project any personality: they were cardboard, cartoon monsters or zombies, often just motionless, back to the audience with dangling arms, or singing stretched flat out on the floor.

And another annoying thing… At the end of each scene, the curtain went down as soon as the singing stopped, leaving the orchestral coda in the dark.

I couldn’t be bothered to clap – until Streit appeared, then Petrinsky and Herlitzius.

Some people have a gift for brevity that I unfortunately lack. Here’s what a friend wrote: “Chekov with bite is how I like to think of some of Janaeck’s libretti but this is just a director crushing the theme with a steam roller and then putting the motor into reverse to make sure it’s quite dead. Fridge, bath, rubbish strewn everywhere...it’s all a bit hackneyed now.” ‘Fraid so.

Kern - Showboat

2010-10-19T17:48:00.000+02:00

Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, Monday October 18 2010

Conductor: Albert Horne. Production: Janice Honeyman. Sets: Johan Engels. Choreography: Timothy le Roux. Costumes: Birrie le Roux. Magnolia: Janelle Visagie. Ravenal: Blake Fischer. Captain Andy: Malcolm Terry. Parthy: Diane Wilson. Julie: Angela Kerrison. Joe: Otto Maidi. Queenie: Miranda Tini. Orchestre Pasdeloup. Production from Cape Town Opera.

It was hard to tell whether this production of Showboat, from Cape Town, was deliberately, knowingly old-fashioned, au deuxième degré as the French say, or just plain outdated. The latter, I think, and the FT (unlike Le Monde and Le Figaro, whose critics have perhaps never been to Broadway: all the quotes in this report will be from the FT) seems to agree: “[A] ringard (naff) offering that rolls out garish sets and costumes, relentless choreography even when none is required and ham acting that is uncomfortably close to the parodies of hand-on-heart gestures mocked in the Cotton Blossom’s nightly shows.” Of course, you’re inclined to be indulgent – Cape Town Opera can’t be rolling in money. But “Janice Honeyman, the producer, suggests parallels with South Africa’s recent history but curiously fails to translate any of these intentions into her staging.” Exactly: you’d expect more political resonance from South Africa, not just those “garish” (but simple: a wall of cotton bales wheeled in from the sides, two steamboat smoke stacks at the rear…) sets and costumes: costumes that looked like costumes, not clothes, not to mention wigs that looked like wigs, not hair.

“If Choplin’s Châtelet wants to be more than a de luxe garage for toothless touring entertainments, it needs to engage more cutting-edge talent […] to show that musicals too can be more than woodenly acted museum pieces.” I agree with that too: the Châtelet is capable of doing better and often has. This was a provincial show, not one of one of the capital’s main theatres.

It’s probably illegal to say so, but the black people were best. Of all the soloists, Miranda Tini as Queenie seemed least to need her mike, and indeed I’m not sure she had one, unlike everyone else. The black chorus and dancers were excellent. Otto Maidi got plenty of applause for Ol’ Man River, but even he was afflicted by the evening’s woolly diction, and the white cast members, however sweet some of their voices, seemed to think being amplified was an excuse to mark instead of sing; as a result they were often drowned by the orchestral noise blaring from the loudspeakers. The excellent FT critic notes “the crude amplification system,” almost as bad here as in Sydney for The Pirates of Penzance, and continues: “The spoken dialogue also gets chewed up by the mikes, leaving even English-speaking patrons scrutinising the French supertitles for guidance.” Yup, that’s spot-on as well (I often wonder how the FT critic gets so much biting truth into so few words). We may as well not have had a live orchestra at all, just recordings, and as in Sydney, you had to watch lips to see who was speaking or singing.

Let’s hope My Fair Lady will be better. As the production is by Carsen, it may be. But as we all know, with live music theatre, there's no guarantee, we can only suck it and see.

Sullivan – The Pirates of Penzance

2010-09-24T09:24:00.000+02:00

Sydney Opera House, Friday September 24 2010

Conductor: Andrew Greene. Production: Stuart Maunder. Sets: Richard Roberts. Costumes: Roger Kirk. Major-General Stanley: Peter Carroll. Pirate King: Anthony Warlow. Frederic: Matthew Robinson. Mabel: Rosemarie Harris. Ruth: Suzanne Johnston. Sergeant of Police: Richard Alexander. Samuel: Andrew Brunsdon. Edith: Amy Wilkinson. Kate: Tania Ferris. Isabel: Angela Brun. Opera Australia Chorus. Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra.

I didn’t fancy Rosenkavalier in what I believe to be a traditional production, and couldn’t get tickets on the web for Rigoletto, so I decided I’d give The Pirates of Penzance a go. The photos looked like it might be fun, and you expect a national opera house to do it proud. However, I left asking myself “what’s the point?”

This was a pretty enough production, with a stage within the stage and sky-blue proscenium lit up in lights. Red-wheeled, cardboard cut-out, “coloured engraving” sets were pushed or pulled on and off by the characters themselves – the pirates’ ship (large version and small), trees, funeral monuments, all with doors characters could appear through… The Pirate King was got up as Captain Jack Thingie from those Caribbean films (even I knew that: I had the misfortune to have to sit through one once). The girls were in pretty Victorian muslin, with parasols, the Major-General wore a kilt and white helmet.

But the singing style turned out to be Disney-musical crooning, what’s more, miked and piped through a poor, echoing sound system. The only way to tell who was singing at any time was to watch the singers’ lips: they might as well have been miming; and it sounded to me like there were different volumes for different performers, depending on just how weak their voices were.

The acting and fooling around were at the level of children’s pantomime.

The Sydney Opera House was of course as splendid (architecturally speaking) as ever. It is, as I said the last time I was here, a much more interesting and impressive building than it looks in photos. At night it’s magnificent, as are the views from the upstairs bar at the back: to the left, the bridge; to the right, the moon and moonlit bay; and ferries gliding or scuttling in and out, depending on their size and speed. The puzzling thing is why such a great building has such awful interior lighting, with all the comfort and charm of a warehouse. And why it’s home to such a flimsy piece, which could just as well have been staged in a smaller (and less expensive) venue.

Sydney is a surprisingly dressy city (lots of little black dresses and tall stilettos), so there was good people-watching, and I was delighted to see one handsome young couple in black whiling away the time before the show, not with a glass of champagne, but with a bottle in a bucket. That, I thought, was style.

Tchaikovsky - Eugene Onegin

2010-09-18T18:21:00.000+02:00

ONP Bastille, Monday September 20 2010

Conductor: Vasily Petrenko. Production: Willy Decker. Sets & costumes: Wolfgang Gussmann. Lighting: Hans Toelstede. Madame Larina: Nadine Denize. Tatiana: Olga Guryakova. Olga: Alisa Kolosova. Filipievna: Nona Javakhidze . Eugene: Ludovic Tézier. Lenski: Joseph Kaiser. Prince Gremin: Gleb Nikolski. Monsieur Triquet: Jean-Paul Fouchécourt. Ugo: Rabec Zaretski. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

There are evenings at the opera when everything is so sound that you can’t easily put your finger on what it was that left you not-quite-satisfied (“sur votre faim”). So it was this Monday at Eugene Onegin.

The singers? Surely not. Nadine Denize may now make a rather underpowered Madame Larin, but hers isn’t a pivotal role. Olga Guryakova’s voice may be a little harder and stiffer than it was back in War and Peace, but, as my neighbour said, what magnificent sounds she makes. And (a) whatever she may have lost (and that’s not much), she has gained in experience: what an artist (letter scene of impressive restraint, no playing to the gallery in the big number) ; and (b) what an actress (looking as young and wide-eyed a Tatiana as she was a Natasha). I was relieved to find that the friend who told me her voice was shot (having gone the wobbly way of all Russian voices) was wrong. I wonder why she isn’t at least as famous as Netrebko (in different parts, of course); and only wish I’d seen and heard her more often.

Tézier was, here, particularly wooden and charmless (and his costume looked as if it had been cut to make it so) but made up for it, as usual, in spades with the facility and charisma of his singing. You have to wonder what a phenomenon he might have been if he were the bête de scène he unfortunately isn’t. Kaiser’s Lensky was more tall and gawky young lover, unsure of himself, than seductively romantic poet, but I suppose that was the production, not him; vocally he certainly wasn’t Russian, and maybe lacked éclat, especially at the slightly fuzzy top; but here I’m stressing the little that was wrong, when he was mostly very much alright. Alisa Kolosova was a youthful but strong Olga –one to watch out for in the future, especially if she develops a more distinctive vocal personality. Nona Javakhidze may also be worth looking out for – she might even have been better cast as Larina. Fouchécourt was in his place in a walk-on character part (rather than ruining the evening in a leading role). Gleb Nikolsky was sort of the opposite of Tézier: plenty of presence but a disappointing Gremin.

So no, I don’t think it was the singers. How about the production?

No. This isn’t an earth-shattering (or ground-breaking, as people now like to say) show, but it makes up in single-set, one-interval coherence for what risks being single- (and pretty much empty-) set monotony, especially in the first part, which lasts 100 minutes. With decent directing and period costumes (more of which later), it’s solidly “efficacious” as the French say.

Many of you may have seen it on TV and for all I know (I can’t check, I’m writing on a plane) it may be out on DVD. The single (You should have got that by now) set is basically a vast, skewed box to the front and gently rolling hills to the rear against a blank backdrop. (The chorus are mostly confined to the area behind the box, open to the rear; as a result, they are less audible than they should be and have frequent trouble following the conductor.) In part one, the set is yellow, streaked with orange, bringing to mind wheat fields, with a red brocade sofa to the left and a few chairs to the right. In part two (the duel then act three) it’s white, streaked with black and grey, and in the final act an impressively gigantic chandelier is lowered down above a few black chairs. Each of the two parts runs without a break of any kind, the main “idea” of the show and one that knits the story together quite neatly.

There are some striking images: Tatiana in her white dress against the night sky before she writes her letter, kneeling at a chair; tiny, rouged Monsieur Triquet attempting a few rococo dance steps on his podium; that chandelier coming down… At the end, Onegin kneels at another chair, on the same spot, to write (a letter to Tatiana, presumably) as he sings his closing words. Madame Larina’s guests, in brightly-coloured day (rather than evening) costumes involving a lot of gaudy checks and stove-pipe hats, evoke (to an English member of the audience) Frith’s Victorian crowd scenes. Prince Gremin’s, however, are all in stiff (funereal, even, as if in mourning) bustled black, more like James Tissot. Is the idea that the country is so very far behind the capital? Half a century seems to be stretching it… But (a) I’m no expert on costume so maybe I’ve got my dates wrong and (b) in any case, these days you often get all periods on stage at the same time so who knows?

No, this is a fair enough production. In the end, my conclusion was that the trouble was in the pit and, more particularly on the podium. Vasily Petrenko’s conducting (the bee’s knees according to some critics) seemed to me placid and bland when I’d have preferred it to be passionately red-blooded. With more thrust and better coordination, the orchestra would have stirred out of its torpor and the strong cast might have proven excellent. Why couldn’t we have had Jurowsky?

Boesmans - Yvonne, Princesse de Bourgogne

2010-09-18T18:14:00.000+02:00

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday September 19 2010

Conductor: Patrick Davin. Production: Luc Bondy. Sets: Richard Peduzzi. Costumes, hair and make-up: Milena Canonero. Lighting: Dominique Bruguière. Yvonne: Dörte Lyssewski. Le Roi Ignace: Paul Gay. La Reine Marguerite: Mireille Delunsch. Le Prince Philippe: Marcel Reijans. Le Chambellan: Werner Van Mechelen. Isabelle: Hannah Esther Minutillo. Cyrille: Jason Bridges. Cyprien: Jean-Luc Ballestra. Innocent: Guillaume Antoine. Le Mendiant: Marc Coulon. Les Tantes: Beata Morawska, Alain-Pierre Wingelinckx. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie.

I’d heard of psychodrama but Yvonne, Princesse de Bourgogne was my chance to meet psychocomedy. I suspect that to be fascinated by either you need to be intellectually inclined, and I’m not, so I wasn’t. Yvonne is based on a play by a Pole called Gombrowicz, in which a prince decides that, as convention would have him marry a beautiful, charming princess, he will marry the graceless Yvonne instead. Soon, somehow, Yvonne’s shortcomings embarrass king, queen and courtiers by reminding them of their own sins and they decide to see her off by feeding her a fish full of bones. She chokes to death and Prince Philippe sees reason. This is supposed to be a hilarious parody of Shakespeare. I didn’t get it.

So for once I decided this was an opera to be heard, not seen, and preferably without paying any attention to the words; because Boesman’s music, as I’m sure I’ve said before, is no problem. It’s “resolutely” post-serial, by which I mean it has recognisable rhythms and forms and tunes – without being retrograde (in the non-serial sense of the word!) – it sparkles with Glockenspiels and celestas and xylophones, it sometimes, in its brightness, brings to mind Rimsky-Korsakov, it quotes and makes references and (unlike some contemporary opera I can think of) is undeniably theatrical, even cinematic. I probably said all that before, but can’t check (or lazily quote myself, as I sometimes like to do) as I’m writing this somewhere over the Ukraine, on the way to Asia. In brief, it’s something I’d gladly listen to at home (especially if conducted with a bit more vim and vigour).

And the cast was good. The faint “tearing” sound of Mireille Delunsch’s high notes is no trouble in a character role of this kind and her comic acting was as good as usual (remember Platée?). Paul Gay was particularly strong, so was Hannah Esther Minutillo; the rest of the cast was very sound (and it was interesting to hear Van Mechelen again in something very different after being struck by him as Sancho Panza last season)… What more is there to say about a team opera of this kind, if nobody lets the side down?

The production was impeccably directed but it made no particular sense of the play (nor did it raise many laughs, but I suspect any smiles Gombrowicz intended to provoke were sardonic ones anyway) and there was, to me, an odd mis-match between sets and characters. It was as if the world of Tim Burton – deep and richly coloured costumes in shiny materials, 40s cuts revisited by 80s bling; the women, in fancy, geometric wigs, a caricature of glamour; the men (apart from the king, an odd, nervy, “sporting” character in a red tracksuit with gold stripes and trainers at first; in singlet and shorts under an open dressing gown later) all modern dandies: “Gothic Baroque,” if such a thing might be said to exist – as if Tim Burton’s world, as I was saying, had invaded the bleak, unsettling one of Chirico: simple sets in shades of ochre and grey, with sometimes a staircase to the left, a large window to the right and, in the second tableau, a padded wall to the rear. Oddly, I was reminded of the blank, soulless and forlorn new “Mediterranean style” shopping centre I visited (and photographed) in Beijing last year; that too was like visiting a Chirico. And into this (in Brussels, not Beijing) flailed the graceless, straw-haired figure of Yvonne, a Balthus (ick) adolescent in baby-doll dress.

Buy the CD, not the DVD.

But having said that, as the directing was so good, it might be one of those productions that comes across better, with close-ups, on the screen than in the house. Rent it, maybe, to find out?

Verdi - Macbeth

2010-07-04T09:42:00.000+02:00

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday June 27 2010.

Conductor: Paul Daniel. Production: Krzysztof Warlikowski. Sets and costumes: Malgorzata Szczesniak. Lighting: Felice Ross. Video: Denis Guéguin. Macbeth: Scott Hendricks. Banco: Carlo Colombara. Lady Macbeth: Iano Tamar. Dama di lady Macbeth: Janny Zomer. Macduff: Andrew Richards. Malcolm: Benjamin Bernheim. Medico/Servo/Araldo: Justin Hopkins. Sicario: Gerard Lavalle. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie.

Strenuously thought-provoking productions are probably better taken in on cold winter evenings than sweltering summer afternoons. When you’re hot, tired and (after lunch) sleepy, you don’t even make the most of the singing, a shame when it’s as good as it was last Sunday in Brussels, the end of our 2009-2010 season.

The male leads were all singers I’d already taken note of separately, in various works:

1. "We had a strong cast of men. Indeed, they all made themselves heard over the row from the pit [in Szymanowski's King Roger, also directed by Warlikowski], and I doubt they could have been better. Eric Cutler soared radiantly through the difficult part, with remarkable ease; Scott Hendricks was a very powerful high baritone; and Stefan Margita was Stefan Margita, which is perfectly fine by me." Hendricks is also a great actor, wholly invested, as they say in French, in the part as seen (i.e. pretty tortured) by Warlikowski. He and Iano Tamar, his equal in commitment and presence, made a great couple of political climbers.

2. Re Verdi's Requiem, also in Brussels: "Carlo Colombara is a typical Verdi bass, already singing Philip II, that I singled out in La Forza last June ('... bass Carlo Colombara, the Verdian voice of the show, really')." He got off to a shaky start, but was soon up to speed, rather like a jumbo jet appraoching take-off. Some critics find him a bit too blustery but I had no commplaints.

3. "The young American tenor Andrew Richards [as Werther] tried perhaps even too hard but shows definite promise of a Carreras kind, if he can learn to achieve a more even timbre throughout the range and avoids the temptation to strain his voice by showing off." Apparently he's learnt. He's now an unusually good Verdian tenor.

And by bringing together three men who had stood out separately, La Monnaie ensured that the whole male cast was outstanding. La Monnaie is good enough for me, but I wonder how long it will be before these guys move on to even greater things - surely it can only be a matter of time before a singing actor of Hendricks' calibre - and a Texan, to boot - gets sucked into the Met star system? (I just checked his web site: "Future engagements include debuts with the Bayerische Staatsoper, Royal Opera House Covent Garden and the Metropolitan in New York..."). But if that happens it's unlikely he'll need to bend so willingly and well to the demands of a Warlikowski.

Unless I'm mistaken, I'd never seen Iano Tamar before. We're often told Verdi wanted an ugly voice for Lady Macbeth, or at any rate not a beautiful one. Tamar's voice is idiosyncratic, often very fine in its comfort zones but sometimes far from lovely, landing on lower notes in a kind of vibrato-less honk. It's hard to say what other roles she would be right for, but she's definitely right for Lady Macbeth. Very high notes were troublesome, especially if rapid; so I didn't expect her to go for the top at the end of "Une macchia." But she did and, to my surprise and my neighbour's, nailed it, sang it as a full note (no whimpering) and made it sound as if she could go higher. And she, too, is a great singing actress, radiating drama - especially in the glittery, glamorous dresses and big, Thatcher-plus hair Warlikowski likes his wicked matrons to wear.

For the orchestra, I can refer back to that Verdi Requiem: "... brisk, no-nonsense Verdi, no fancy phrasing, no messing about with the tempi, intensely human in the gentler passages but starkly matter-of-fact in its underlying message: for all the pleading, there is no hope." And the chorus were on magnificent form, filling La Monnaie with sound from under the dome.

As you all know, I'm a Warlikowski fan. But as all fans know, your idols aren't always at their best. Ask supporters of France's national soccer team. This production, though to me less interesting, less coherent and, to some extent, more regie-as-we-already-know-it than others I've seen by him, nevertheless managed to be unsettling, not to say harrowing.

There was a single set with various props wheeled in and out, as is often the case these days. The basic room was apparently a gym hall, as there were sports markings on the parquet, with tall windows. I think this was meant to show the precarious way Macbeth, the victorious soldier, and his Lady lived in a war-torn country. There was a glass box across the rear that could move forward when needed and, to the left, a very useful washbasin.

Lots of video was used. A film I've never heard of: "Nicholas Ray's 1948 noir They Live By Night, a film whose criminal central couple bear obvious comparison to Macbeth and his wife," (according to the review on Musical Criticism; but on Wikipedia I discovered the hero of the film is in fact innocent) figured first on a giant curtain, then on TVs wheeled to the sides of the hospital beds that, in rectangles of vertical light, represented four bedrooms at night. There was a fair amount of filming from above, very effectively through the ceiling fans, e.g. as Macbeth and Banco played chess together in fatigues on the floor, during the opening bars; and during the banquet scene, where there were few guests (the chorus were, throughout, up in the gods and represented on stage by single singers, or children) there was a hidden camera in the centre of the dining table, shakily capturing the fear on people's faces. Lady Macduff, by the way, looked exactly like a nouveau russe trophy wife: ice-blonde hair, long fur coat draped over her shoulders, high heels and a sour look on her face.

The Macbeths were played as a corrupt, Ceausescu kind of couple, rising quickly to power surrounded by aides de camp in officers' jackets, black stockings and stilettos (great legs, you have to hand it to them) who later became retainers serving drinks and dinner. At the end, with the fall of their masters, they would commit collective suicide at the rear. Rising quickly then, but obsessed with or haunted by children, for obvious reasons found in the plot (nothing in Warlikowski's work, it seems to me, strays far from the original, whatever angry old ladies may say at the interval). The witches were little Lolitas in masks. Duncan's coffin was carried on by eight little boys in black suits (which, for some reason, enraged the usherette). The Macduffs brought their little son to the banquet. The singing apparitions were crippled kids, and Banco's descendents, little Bancos all with his head, were seated, in their little black suits, at old-fashioned school desks in the "aquarium" at the rear. When Macbeth found himself "alone," he was in fact surrounded at the dining table by kids pulling apart plastic dolls and casting away the limbs.

Rising quickly, then, haunted by children, and apparently declining slowly after a reign of some years: by the time Birnam Wood turned up, Macbeth was alrady slumped in his wheelchair, and the hair of his magnetic wife (what a bête de scène Iano Tamar is) had turned quite grey.

I suspect if it hadn't been so hot up there and I hadn't been so tired, I'd have got much more out of this. In any case, a Warlikowski staging, as directed as can be, is full of details, so seeing it again would no doubt bring new understanding. If I can see it again with the same cast this coming winter, I will.

I. U. [Heart] at The Third Line, Dubai

2010-06-20T13:15:00.000+02:00

Something completely different: this post has nothing to do with opera. It's a text I wrote in the run-up to the exhibition I.U. [Heart] at The Third Line gallery in Dubai, opening on June 23, 2010.

Iranian contemporary art: a view from Europe…

It’s convenient for us to pigeonhole countries we don’t know with a handful of stereotypical attributes. Relatively few people in the West, whether interested in art or not, have a mental picture of Iran that goes beyond the caricature conveyed by the media: a repressive, murderous Islamic republic, enemy of the West and bona fide member of America’s “Axis of Evil,” ruled by elderly, bearded imams and a vociferous, unpredictable president, possibly mad and capable, it seems, of making the wildest claims regardless of the intelligence of his audience.

The first reaction to Iranian contemporary art is often just surprise that it exists at all: there were no white-walled contemporary art galleries in that mental picture we had of Tehran.

The second, as we have seen with the burgeoning of exhibitions of modern Iranian art over the past two or three years (1) and the publication of a number of books on the subject (2), is surprise at its “vibrancy,” variety and awareness of what’s going on (in art or in everything) outside Iran.

These discoveries may (supposing the gallery visitor has not seen Marjane Satrapi's cartoon film Persepolis) provide the first hint that Iran is actually something very different from the meagre contents of our virtual pigeonhole: a more complex place by far than we innocently thought.

Art with a global outlook

I put “vibrancy” in inverted commas because the word seems to pop up often in reviews of Iranian art but go undefined. I think, again, it shows surprise at the humour, often ironic or grating, found in much of the work, along with a sense of lively imagination and bubbling creative ferment, and a degree of what we suppose can only be seen by the regime, supposing it pays any attention, as provocation. The variety – the absolute un-alikeness – of the work is also unexpected. Perhaps what we do expect is some kind of official Islamic art or state propaganda, but it is not, far from it, what we get. Alternatively, we might expect social or political messages and comment on the fate of women in Iranian society. Those we get, but far from exclusively.

What we find least of all in what we see is specifically “oriental” imagery. When we do see it, it is used consciously, deliberately and, on the whole sparingly, not decoratively or anecdotally. Iranian art today is, to put it from a western-centric perspective, almost entirely westernised or, to put it more correctly, global in outlook. The fact is (as Mamali Shafahi points out in his own curator’s introduction to I.U. [Heart]) that, like artists anywhere in the world, Iranian artists want above all to be free to express what interests them most, whatever it may be; and some of them may find the expectation that, being Iranian, they will take religious or specifically Persian themes as their subjects, irksome – and reject it.

Breaking taboos

So, whether art imitates life or vice versa, what we experience thanks to our young Iranian artists is the emergence of a more accurate picture, through the pictures on show, of urban Iran today.

Galleries do exist in Tehran and other Iranian cities; indeed there’s a busy art scene, part (along with cafés and restaurants, wild weekend parties, plunging necklines, make-up and mini skirts, poolside holidays, visits to relatives in Los Angeles, etc.) of the “parallel,” non-Islamic life led by at least the broad urban middle classes. Life has got harder since the contested election of June 2009, and even before, every planned exhibition needed official authorisation, but the shows – if authorised - go on.

Though the role of religion in public life is among the themes, none of the work I have come across in my acquaintance with contemporary Iranian art would be called “religious art” as such, and much of what I have seen in the West could presumably not be shown publicly in Iran. In some cases this is for the simple and obvious reason that it contains nudity: young Iranians “let loose” are understandably keen to explore their identity and sexuality, or just enjoy breaking taboos. In some cases we may, through our outsiders’ eyes at least, see sarcasm or criticism directed at the regime, or comments on Iran’s relations with the U.S. and the rest of the world. In addition, quite often we see the clear influence of American pop (or post-pop) art of what might (affectionately) be called the “trashiest” kind.

A common thread: ambiguity

Just as the Iranian authorities must know what actually goes on behind closed doors at weekends, so they must know what is exhibited at home and abroad. In both cases, in what looks like a sort of cat-and-mouse game (3), sometimes they react, mostly they don’t, raising an intriguing question as to whether or not, for example, a portrait of Mr Ahmadinejad in a Soviet-style “socialist-heroic” pose would be taken as sarcasm by us foreign devils but at face value by the state. (Or even just seemingly at face value?) There’s an ambiguity between political discourse and pragmatism, between the party line and an uneasy, fitful day-to-day tolerance that permeates the whole “Iran phenomenon.” This ambiguity is a permanent feature of life in Iran, of Iranians’ relationship with their homeland and of Iran’s relations with the world, and provides, I believe from my own observation, the one thread that unites the work of Iranian artists today (4) and that they play on constantly in their art.

Political, religious or sexual ambiguity. Ambiguity as to concept, message or intent: face value or double or triple meaning? Serious or playfully ironic or bitterly sarcastic? Ambiguity as to national allegiance or individual identity or attitudes to the “West” (the U.S. especially but also the “West” in its widest sense, including, e.g., Japan) and its art. Ambiguity which makes Iranian contemporary art sometimes puzzling or at least intriguingly enigmatic but, to me at any rate (and fortunately for the artists, who have to eat, to others) fascinating.

Ambiguity which in fact, as a wide-ranging reflection on love-hate ambivalence in relations between Iran and the US, gave this exhibition its name: I. U. [Heart]: “I” as in Iran, “U” as in U.S., “I love you.”

(1) “Lion Under The Rainbow” at Art Athina in 2008, “Iran Inside Out” at the Chelsea Museum in New York or “Raad O Bargh” at the Galerie Thaddeus Ropac in Paris, both in 2009, are just three examples.

(2) Such as “Different Sames: New Perspectives in Contemporary Iranian Art,” TransGlobe Publishing Ltd, 2009.

(3) In the early stages of preparing for I. U. [Heart], curator Mamali Shafahi compared Iran and the US to Tom and Jerry: apparently always fighting but apparently inseparable.

(4) Those under thirty have grown up under the post-revolutionary Islamic regime and seem to know how to deal with it.

Rossini - La Donna del Lago

2010-06-19T18:43:00.001+02:00

Friday June 18 2010

Conductor: Roberto Abbado. Production: Lluís Pasqual. Sets: Ezio Frigerio. Lighting: Vinicio Cheli. Costumes Franca Squarciapino. Giacomo V (Uberto di Snowdon): Juan Diego Florez. Duglas d’Angus: Simon Orfila. Rodrigo di Dhu: Colin Lee. Elena: Joyce DiDonato. Malcolm Groeme: Daniela Barcellona. Albina: Diana Axentii. Serano: Jason Bridges. Paris Opera Orchestra and Chorus.

It's a brave (or foolhardy) house that schedules a killer work like La Donna del Lago. How to stage it these days is a trivial question beside that of how to cast it. The Paris Opera has put together about the best cast you could hope for (the next morning I listened to Pollini's recording; in the comparison, only Ramey came across as better) but even so, it was a case of "safety in numbers." The ensembles, from duets upwards, were less precarious than the solo arias because, plucky though everyone was, nobody was wholly at ease, wholly consistent throughout the range, (understandably: Rossini was pitiless in his demands!), nobody made the performance look normal and natural, rather than a stupendous feat - with one exception: Florez.

So now I know why he's famous. It isn't the size of his voice, which is quite small (hard to believe he sings at the Met; but as any Met regular will tell us, the acoustics there are simply the best in the world). It's his exceptional ability to sing these madly difficult heroic arias with every note nailed, with a consistency of timbre from bottom to top so absolute it might be boring were it not so amazing, and with engaging, still-youthful pugnacity and sincerity. And that sincerity is just as engaging in the "sentimental" numbers: not a hint of a sob.

Joyce DiDonato was, wrote a critic, "au sommet de ses possibilités vocales." She was very, very good, more footsure than Ricciarelli on that recording I mentioned. But to be perfectly honest, to me she is vocally and temperamentally better-suited to Händelian tragedy, in which she really convinces, than Rossinian artifice. My impression is that in Rossini she is not only at the summit but also at the absolute limit of her vocal powers and that there's nothing left to spare for sentiment or the projection of a strong personality. You're impressed but not thrilled.

Daniela Barcellona is more at home in Rossini. Hers is more the kind of voice we expect and, built like a house and striding vigorously around in her armour, sword in hand, like some giant, jolly, carnivorous dyke spoiling for the fun of a fight, she projects personality like it was about to go out of style. Colin Lee did what he could with Rodrigo, which, apart from loss of volume at the bottom, was impressive at the gut-busting top. It must be maddening to be pitched, in ensembles, against Florez making the same notes seem so effortless. Simon Orfila was loud and clear if not in any way subtle.

Subtlety was not evident from the pit, either. Roberto Abbado has apparently learnt nothing about Rossini from his uncle and the orchestra tub-thumped its way through the score from f to ff without a shred of delicacy. There were as many scrappy attacks in the pit as from the chorus, although the latter, once they got going, were sometimes splendid.

I'd been warned that this was a dusty, traditional production. It was in fact a typical 70s or 80s one. While the chorus wore evening dress - tails for the men, long dresses for the women, I mean - the protagonists were in highly stylised armour and fringed brocades, glittering with gold and silver. They brought to mind "pupi siciliani," those marionettes you see on souvenir stalls all over Sicily. The single set was a decaying renaissance theatre of the Teatro Olimpico kind, with eight engaged Corinthian columns (in fact reminiscent of the ones that hold up the pediment of the Teatro Massimo in Palermo; it did occur to me that Sicily might have been an underlying theme) on a sturdy basement now pock-marked by rising damp (sometimes the "lake" was the central arena, dimly-lit with dappled blue from above), meeting in a kind of "ducal box" in the centre, and two levels of balustraded gallery. The whole concave colonnade parted in the middle to reveal a mirrored wall, reflecting back the chandeliers and splendours of the Palais Garnier, a deliberately tattered painted flat of a "sublime" mountain landscape and lake, or a giant, diagonal breach in a pink brick wall of Imperial Roman dimensions. Sometimes props - a boat, some stones, a harp - rose comically through the floor. Once, there was a flat, painted oak tree.

"Pupi" in a theatre, the chorus in evening dress, and Elena singing her final aria on a podium, with a music stand (another prop that came though the floor) under the chandeliers... I guess the idea was to highlight the ritualised artifice of Rossini's opera seria, with the protagonists as marionettes and the chorus as audience, looking on. This is no way, of course, to help you engage with the characters; on the contrary, it naturally has a distancing effect and, as the singers struggle with the score while making conventional semaphore gestures (there was no other directing here as such) it risks making them look silly. But I'm not sure that in these works we can really ever get close to the drama - the music is distancing anyway.

I nearly forgot the ballets - easily done as they were totally irrelevant and altogether forgettable. The four dancers were booed resoundingly but, as booing opera ballets is a time-honoured tradition at Garnier, took it - like the soldier-extras at the Bastille on Wednesday - with great good humour.

Wagner - Die Walküre

2010-06-19T01:16:00.000+02:00

ONP Bastille, Wednesday June 16 2010

Conductor: Philippe Jordan. Production: Günter Krämer. Sets: Jürgen Bäckmann. Costumes: Falk Bauer. Lighting: Diego Leetz. Siegmund: Robert Dean Smith. Hunding: Günther Groissböck. Wotan: Thomas Johannes Mayer. Sieglinde: Ricarda Merbeth. Brünnhilde: Katarina Dalayman. Fricka: Yvonne Naef. Gerhilde: Marjorie Owens. Ortlinde: Gertrud Wittinger. Waltraute: Silvia Hablowetz. Schwertleite: Wiebke Lehmkuhl. Helmwige: Barbara Morihien. Siegrune: Helene Ranada. Grimgerde: Nicole Piccolomini. Rossweisse: Atala Schöck. Ortlinde: Gertrud Wittinger. Orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris.

You’d hardly have guessed this Walküre was in the same series as the Rheingold that went before. For a start, the singing was much better - so I’ve been lucky with Wagner in the last couple of weeks. As for the production, apart from “Germanja” in giant gothic letters (more later), most of the other gimmicks had gone: instead of bulging muscle suits and plastic breasts, Wotan wore a black dinner jacket with his bow-tie hanging loose and Fricka a vast red crinoline and a tight black top. There was no “toy” world for the gods to clamber over, either. There were, however, our old friends, soldiers in all kinds of borrowed battledress (more of that later, too).

Black, red and white were the overall colour scheme, and costumes and hairdos were resolutely WWII Germany/Austria. As the orchestra churned over the opening bars, there was a gory massacre on stage (by those soldiers, with spurts of blood so high it was almost comical): a flashback, I think, to Siegmund’s past and the marauders who burnt down his hut, killed his mother and abducted his sister. The fire was already burning on the left. The dead lay in the background throughout the act. Hunding’s house had two high, narrow, white walls bearing row upon row of little deer trophies, as if its owner had been out shooting goats. At the rear was a wall of glass with water cascading down it, like the window of a Chinese restaurant. It got more Chinese when spring broke out and an orchard appeared in full blossom behind, in the light of a giant moon (or white, watery sun). The ash tree was not a tree, but an ugly painting of one (so ugly I wondered if it was by the same person as the hideous Madonna in the Bastille’s old production of Tosca) that Siegmund and Sieglinde (in a Dirndl and blonde plaits - Sieglinde, that is) slashed open with daggers to reveal the sword behind. Hunding was in a kind of officer’s uniform and his men were the rag, tag and bobtail mercenary army we’d seen at the start.

You may remember Rheingold was a kind of compendium of ideas from other people’s productions. Act two opened with, at the rear, a giant mirror tilted forward, reflecting a flight of stairs, broad as the stage, rising from beneath: Les Troyens at the Châtelet, but in place of the horse’s head, young men in white shorts and singlets (“Jugend” I suppose – ask the Pope) struggled up the steps bearing those giant letters spelling out “Germanja.” This was actually a reference back to the appearance of Valhalla at the end of Rheingold, when everyone climbed up the stepped façade: then we were at the bottom, looking up; now we were at the top, looking down. The Valkyries, all with Andrews Sisters (blonde) hair and white 40s frocks, were frolicking around gaily with kilos of apples rolling about on a long table. Fricka appeared from below, at first reflected majestically (it was a very large crinoline) as she climbed the stairs, a splash of blood red in the overall black and white scheme. When Wotan finally lost his temper with Brunnhilde (in a white tunic, white trousers and little, pale green boots), tables, chairs and letters were strewn, leaving only “manja” standing: geddit? For the second half of the act, Valhalla disappeared (of course) and left little but apples on a black stage while Brunnhilde appeared to Siegmund. As she explained the deal, she started placing the apples mysteriously in a circle (I suppose this was a promise of eternity) while the orchard reappeared in the background, this time beyond a Styx-like chasm, with the Valkyries beckoning hieratically. Siegfried died closely encircled by the soldiers in surplus, and Fricka put in an appearance to make sure all had gone to (her) plan.

The high point of the whole evening was act three, and the high point of the production its opening scene: there were the Valkyries, jolly as Carry On nurses, dragging in the dead in blankets, laying them out stark naked on morgue tables, washing the blood off, wringing their cloths into bowls and bringing the heroes back to life with those hieratic gestures, now explained. Several batches were revived and marched off, still naked, before the girls finished their caterwauling. Brunnhilde and her father were left alone before a plain black curtain, with only a row of black, spoon-back chairs and Siegmund’s body, carried in by Wotan, in a blanket on one table. The fire was at first just a thin red line under the curtain; but the curtain rose at the very end, as a veiled Erda put in a brief, portentous appearance, to reveal a charred, smoking, war-torn landscape and a burning, black moon.

The singing throughout was excellent and, as I implied above, we had a super act three. For various reasons this was very different Wagner from Barenboim’s in Milan. In the Bastille’s acoustics, there’s no way you can sing it as Lieder: it has to be loud, and the whole cast threw themselves into the task. Katerina Dalayman and Ricarda Merbeth, both relatively dark-hued sopranos with a grain, were better-cast here than, respectively, in Ariadne and Die tote Stadt. The only quibble – and it would be a quibble – might be that they weren’t different enough. The FT was right to say the part sits a little low for Robert Dean-Smith, and he was a touch underpowered for the cavernous Bastille, but those are quibbles too. He sang his way through with barely a sign of fatigue. Thomas Johannes Mayer was a more satisfactory Wotan than Falk Struckmann, bright and clear and charismatic with it. Yvonne Naef, described as vulgar by the FT, was fine by me: haughty and with a voice with plenty of edge. Günther Groissböck did what he could with a deep, gruff Hunding. The Valkyries were as noisy as you could have hoped, but musical too, and way, way better than the Rhinemaidens.

The orchestra was different from Barenboim’s too. He managed, somehow, to make the Scala orchestra sound wall-of-sound Germanic (well, for Italians Milan is practically Austria, just as Calabria is "l'Africa") with war-machine brass. He also made the score sound like one single piece from end to end. Philippe Jordan didn’t have quite that mastery of overall architecture; and the Opera orchestra was unmistakeably French, with dry, transparent strings, lovely woodwind and, from where I was sitting, weak brass. But I was in the orchestra stalls, where the acoustics are patchy, and the brass were tucked well into a corner of the pit. I imagine that up on the balconies the sound was more impressive. A pity, that.

Army surplus shops must do a roaring trade with opera houses these days. But audiences are suffering from “fatigues fatigue,” so the only break in the enthusiastic applause and cheering at the end was for the extras as soldiers, booed loudly - much to their amusement.

Debussy - Pelléas et Mélisande

2010-06-17T08:33:00.000+02:00

Opéra Comique, Paris, Monday June 14 2010.

Conductor: Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Production & sets: Stéphane Braunschweig. Costumes: Thibault Vancraenenbroeck. Lighting: Marion Hewlett. Pelléas: Phillip Addis. Mélisande: Karen Vourc'h. Golaud: Marc Barrard. Arkel: Markus Hollop. Geneviève: Nathalie Stutzmann. Yniold: Dima Bawab. Accentus choir. Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.

“I'm not a great fan of Pelléas. I don’t listen to it at home, but it works for me in the theatre if grabbed firmly by the scruff of the neck and given a good shake, as it were: plenty of drama in the pit and plenty of commitment on stage.” That’s me quoting myself. I always say the same thing when writing up Pelléas, so I thought I might as well copy and paste. I don’t actually remember, but I suppose, when filling out the subscription forms for the Opéra Comique over a year ago, I expected Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire – so good in Les Troyens – and producer Stéphane Braunschweig – so good in Jenufa, one of the most memorable things I’ve ever seen – might do just that: grab it and shake it as required.

I was wrong. At the more violent moments in the score, of course the revolutionary orchestra had bite and attack and plenty of crunchy timbre. But even my neighbour, who, being French, likes Pelléas, found Gardiner’s conducting largely lacked oomph, and those few moments took a long time coming. Also, as one friend very fond of this work put it at the interval, it was more an interesting experiment than a convincing perfomance; there were “accidents” and on the whole I got the impression, right or wrong, that the orchestra wasn’t at ease, or at any rate fluent, in Debussy. This was exactly the Debussy that gives me the pip: gloomy and meandering and grim as a month of wet Sunday afternoons.

As for the production, the truth is that, impressive though Braunschweig’s subsequent career has been, I’ve never seen anything else as good as that Jenufa. I remember his Brussels Elektra only as the “bathtub” production, and remember nothing at all about his Makropoulos Affair (other than that the acoustics in Aix were hopeless and the cast so inadequate that it was left to Anja Silja to carry the show, neither of which was his fault). This Pelléas will be remembered as the “lighthouse” one. Most of the time, in the single, gloomy set of dark, slatted walls and floorboards, there was either a toy lighthouse on the right (Yniold’s), or a very big one on the left (though not actually life size, of course: "That must have been a very small bed,” said my friends) set in what looked like a giant, ugly oyster shell. When unplugged from its setting, it left a large hole that served as the fountain. There was little else on stage at any time, other than a table, a chair, Arkel’s wheelchair, Golaud’s hospital bed or a trapdoor. The “Breton” theme (“Tintin and Captain Haddock,” my neighbour called it) of the lighthouse and oyster was pursued in part in the costumes: Pelléas at one point wore a Breton sweater with buttons along one shoulder. Costumes were black or white (the women’s, in particular, especially tight-laced, high-necked black, though Mélisande also, sometimes, wandered around in a slip with her nipples showing). The acting was carefully directed, and the title pair were portrayed as unusually young, smiling and carefree (as far as either of them can be carefree in this odd play). In the “hair” scene, they were just “making it all up” like children, sitting together at Yniold’s toy lighthouse, so it made sense for Golaud to say they were just kids. But “action-packed” was not the word for this show. Nothing happened. It was dire.

It wasn’t the singers’ fault. With the exception of Markus Hollop, whose voice was strangely disembodied, like an electric buzzer at the bottom of a barrel, they were all strong: Karen Vourc'h a silvery, occasionally crooning Mélisande; Phillip Addis so bright a baritone he’s more like a clarion tenor, loud and almost piercingly metallic at the top; Nathalie Stutzmann, with a voice of burnished bronze, sounding, a friend said, like she thought she was singing Mussorgsky; and Marc Barrard, who made it, in the end, Golaud’s show, though my neighbour thought he could have let go more in his outbursts of anger.

I say “in the end.” But when at last, after three interminable acts, we were let out for a breather and had drinks and a chat in the foyer, a friend joked that my blog should really be called “We left at the interval.” And as it was obvious things were not going to get any better, we did.

Wagner - Das Rheingold

2010-06-02T17:03:00.001+02:00

Teatro alla Scala, Milan, Saturday May 29, 2010

Conductor: Daniel Barenboim. Production: Guy Cassiers. Sets: Guy Cassiers and Enrico Bagnoli. Costumes: Tim Van Steenbergen. Lighting: Enrico Bagnoli. Videos: Arjen Klerkx and Kurt d'Haeseleer. Coreography: Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Wotan: René Pape. Donner: Jan Buchwald. Froh: Marco Jentzsch. Loge: Stephan Rügamer. Alberich: Johannes Martin Kränzle. Mime: Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke. Fasolt: Tigran Martirossian. Fafner: Timo Riihonen. Fricka: Doris Soffel. Freia: Anna Samuil. Erda: Anna Larsson. Woglinde: Aga Mikolaj. Wellgunde: Maria Gortsevskaya. Flosshilde: Marina Prudenskaya. Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro alla Scala, Milan.

An excellent (supposedly working) week in Italy, which had already taken in Maria Stuarda in Palermo, ended on the (very) high point - again thanks to my extraordinarily hospitable colleagues there – of Das Rheingold at La Scala, conducted by Barenboim. Well, not quite “ended,” as once more there was a delicious Italian dinner afterwards in the most entertaining company, but this is an opera blog, not a food column, so Das Rheingold it will be.

I had joked, when a Facebook friend mentioned my week of “lovely operas,” that “lovely opera” hardly seemed right for Rheingold. Yet that is what, under Barenboim and intriguingly to me, it became. I’m no rabid Wagnerian (or Wagnerite: that always gets their goat), far from it. But never before had I heard Wagner as I heard it last night, played as German high Romanticism of sheer loveliness and sung like Lieder – by a cast, as you can see, of a very high order. I say ‘high Romanticism,” not “late” and even less “post,” as this to me was the amiable Germany of Schumann and, in his sunnier moments, Brahms. I rarely go in for visual metaphors (and am not, strictly speaking, a nature-lover), but elsewhere, commenting on my evening out early this morning, I did say it was like basking in a landscape of mountains, forests and rivers... perhaps an idealised one in a great painting or tapestry. Now of course, someone who really knows how Wagner should be played, some self-appointed online Wagnerian guru, might rage that Barenboim had got it all wrong, that singing Wagner like Lieder is a travesty and the cast were all duds (not to mention what he might have to say about the staging and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s ballets). But as far as I’m concerned, as the average opera-going ignoramus (OK, OK, I know we aren’t supposed to call the hallowed Ring opera), in La Scala’s gorgeous acoustics, with the orchestra on outstanding form and with this cast, it was really a privilege to be there.

I thought I might save myself some effort and keep things short by saying that the cast made such a good team, consistent in (super) singing and (super) acting quality, that there was no point in singling anyone out: we could move directly to the production. But I know, for example, that at least one fan (of the singer, not of my writings) wants to know how Rene Pape fared. Well, Rene Pape isn’t quite what he was, but what he is is very good indeed (and a great deal better than what we got in Paris: comparing 2010’s Rheingolds and concluding easily but with a sigh that Milan is going to get a better run than Paris, one friend of mine declared “I’m fed up with Joel”) and certainly good enough for me. His presence remains commanding, his facial expressiveness remains fascinating and though he may sing with a touch less force, he continues to sing with the customary humanity and elegance.

Elegance seems to have been the parti pris of this Lieder-like approach, presumably possible only in outstanding acoustics. Until I looked up his name afterwards (we’d dashed in late, delayed by sudden torrential rain, a bonus for Milan’s Asian umbrella-sellers: there’s nowhere for fancily-dressed opera-goers to shelter between the gaping mouth of the Vittorio-Emmanuele gallery and La Scala: you can only make a sprint for it across the square and hope that the pedestrian lights will be in your favour in front of the theatre) I thought Stephan Rügamer must be English. Instead of a grimacing caricature of a Loge, he gave us a wry, dandyish, puckish one, singing like a Langridge or, very nearly (but fortunately not quite) a Bostridge. He was loudly applauded. Johannes Martin Kränzle as Alberich had a bit too much rapid tremolo for my taste, but even so… Doris Soffel was a suitably haughty Fricka, Mime was excellent, Erda was the towering alto I last heard in a harrowing Verdi Requiem in Brussels, towering even more here as she rose through the ground to about 15 feet in height, and putting in some moving singing. The Rhine maidens were a good deal better than our Paris ones… I don’t really need to go through the cast one by one: in all, unless my memory is failing me (surely not!) this must have been the best all-round cast I’ve had in a Ring instalment.

The staging was relatively simple, in part simply because, when there are ballets about, you can’t have many sets or props; but it told the story clearly, and though modern dance may not always be welcome in opera, you can often ignore it and, in this case, the dancers made themselves useful. So, at the rear were giant panels of stone. On these were projected videos, more evocative than figurative, in deep, rich colours (and, thank Wotan, much less corny and tree-hugging than Bill Viola's for Tristan): ripples of water for the Rhine maidens then bright golden lights for the gold; what looked like a giant open-cast mine for Valhalla, breaking into a mass of naked bodies: asleep, sick, dead…? as the gods started losing their force. When the (normal-sized, black-suited) giants appeared, their shadows appeared giant-size; and when the giants fought, their giant shadows fought all the more violently. Erda, as mentioned, rose through the ground to about fifteen feet while the projections showed a vast landscape: perhaps the same as the Valhalla mine-scape, but at twilight, dotted with twinkling cities in the gloom. When the gods entered Valhalla, the projections carved deep reliefs into the stone - sculpted bodies, recalling Greek or Roman friezes (but also recalling the naked bodies that appeared when the gods were out of apples).

Sometimes a square, metal, cage-like structure descended; for Alberich, it was festooned with security cameras projecting live videos of the stage action on to the stones behind. The dancers, here, followed Alberich around and formed a throne wherever he chose to sit - a clever symbol of absolute subjugation to absolute power; they, too, formed the helmet, dragon and, more successfully, toad. They were also, later, Alberich's shackles (I did say they made themselves useful). Sometimes there were enigmatic props: a rapidly-spinning globe whenever the gods were assembled (a golden apple?); one vertical shaft of red laser-light pinpointing the spot where Fafner clubbed Fasolt.

The costumes were more or less of Wagner’s period (and Fricka had the kind of stiff-corseted, straight-backed, bustled court dress, albeit shabby, that was missing in Palermo's Maria Stuarda), but de-structured and wonderfully dusty or, for the likes of Alberich and Mime, involved animal skins and hoods. The “ring” was a magnificent, sparkling glove: Zwarovski, no doubt…

As I said, the story was limpidly told, as it was in Bob Wilson’s totally different production at the Châtelet. But there, you had to make more concessions; here there were few if any to make, and no doubts whatsoever about the musical quality. Milan is in for a much better Ring, as already mentioned above, than at the Paris Opera this season and next; and if both come out on DVD, this will be the one to go for, I suspect. Sadly, I won’t be in Milan to find out for sure.

Donizetti - Maria Stuarda

2010-05-30T11:10:00.000+02:00

Teatro Massimo, Palermo, Thursday May 27 2010.

Conductor: Fabrizio Maria Carminati. Production, sets, costumes and lighting: Denis Krief. Elisabetta: Kate Aldrich. Maria Stuarda : Dimitra Theodossiou. Anna Kennedy: Patrizia Gentile. Roberto di Leicester: Shalva Mukeria. Giorgio Talbot: Mirco Palazzi. Lord Guglielmo Cecil Silvio Zanon. Orchestra and chorus of the Teatro Massimo.

If there is one compensation (other than a pittance) for the indignity of having to go to work every day, it must be having colleagues in Italy. It was thanks to mine that I found myself at the Teatro Massimo the other evening for an excellent performance of Maria Stuarda (and later at a table in a cobbled square for an excellent Sicilian dinner as well) with one exception: the costumes. I’ll explain later.

Naturally, I’d wondered beforehand how good it could be. As people who know me know, I’m not a great lover, musically speaking, of either Donizetti or, especially, Bellini (whose organ-grinder scores seem to me the worst music still regularly aired, if we leave out French musicals, the Eurovision Song Contest and so on) and a poor performance usually finds me fleeing the house at half time vowing never to hear him again. But I readily admit that, when the singers are outstanding – the main roles at least – both undeniably "work," i.e. an outstanding evening of Donizetti is an evening of exciting, first-rate opera, because there’s opera and opera and in some cases it isn’t the score alone, judged by Germanic standards, that counts.

Though the right voices are hard to find and prevalent voice types have moved on since Callas and Gencer, Sutherland, Sills and Caballé, we had just about as good a cast as you’ll get these days the other night, starting with Dmitra Theodossiou. Hers was the only name I knew well on the cast list and I was glad to have a chance to see and hear her. Having done so, I imagine she probably has diehard fans and diehard detractors but, to me, she was doing her damnedest to carry her forebears’ flame. She may not be a second Caballé, but I honestly wondered if she hadn’t studied with her (apparently not), so obviously, it seemed, she’d learnt from her. Theodossiou’s singing is passionate but controlled, carefully phrased, with a reasonable (not that Caballé was ever reasonable with it) use of excellent, “floated” pianissimo, but fearless fortissimo as well and no pusillanimous petering-out at the top – rather the opposite. Those top notes were on the verge of strident, just this side of ugly, but on this side nonetheless and, so, thrilling. She was like an echo of the past – like all echos, without quite the force of the original, but this is no time to quibble. Her acting was old school: not much moving about but a few effective gestures; and I think her presence, which was real, was along the same lines (though not as phenomenally charismatic) as Caballé’s: somehow both comfortingly (even placidly) maternal and nobly dignified. The high points of the evening were (you guessed it) her confrontation with Elisabeth, where the very moment Mary’s patience snapped and the insults started to flow was (literally, though in my case only I can feel it, no-one would actually see it happen) hair-raising, and the moving final scenes.

Now, it may be a story from English history channelled to Donizetti by Schiller, but I think we can all agree Maria Stuarda is about as Italian as operas come. You may, as part of the production concept, want to play up the Protestant v. Catholic angle and with it, less relevantly, an “Anglo-Saxon v. Latin” angle. But the problem I had with Kate Aldrich as Elisabeth was not so much her singing style, though I think it was less “idiomatic” than Theodossiou’s, to use a dubious word, but with the fact that she was costumed to look like a well-bred, bossy English governess. In this production (more later) the costumes are vaguely 1900, and Kate Aldrich’s face and figure, with her hair drawn up into a soft bun at the back, dressed in a mustard-coloured, tight-waisted amazone, could have been painted by Sargent. Queen Alexandra might have worn an outfit of the kind one afternoon while relaxing (if ever she loosened her corsets) during a hunting weekend, but my feeling is that we need a more obviously regal, more full-blooded, more monstrous sort of Elisabeth. I couldn’t even tell if the visual aspect (her little heeled bootees had me thinking of Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins, not something you should be thinking of during this opera) was misleading me into imagining that Kate Aldrich’s singing was “un-Italian.” She certainly threw herself into the task. In act one I found her timbre a bit plummy and covered, though even then she let out considerable volume (though in tricky, coloratura passages, timbre and volume both take a break). But in act 2 it seemed she’d probably been reserving her voice for the slanging match, and here she found more timbre and really let rip. And her acting was impeccable: she exuded menace, hatred and spite, but in a Julie Andrews sort of way. As she is now fairly well-known for singing Carmen (with cascades of black curls, not in a prim bun) well enough to hold her own opposite the ultra-charismatic Kaufmann, not to mention doing cartwheels, I put this coolness down to the director and his costumes, not her.

The Georgian tenor Shalva Mukeria was the kind we aren’t allowed to hear in Paris because he’d be considered vulgar, and since he was costumed like an ageing matinee idol in a dark blazer, white shirt and cravat, when the block of set he was standing on slid aside with him at its prow, he looked like a Sunday sailor preening on the deck of his yacht (and not a bit like Robert Dudley). Just as Dmitra Theodossiou seemed to hark back to better days (in Donizetti singing, I mean), so Mukeria seemed to represent a late graduate from the Del Monaco school, at least in terms of bulldozing determination, his voice itself being brighter, you might almost say shriller, than the latter’s. It was the kind of voice that sounds perilous and likely to go awry on the top notes, but it didn’t. So, not an elegant tenor but an efficacious one, as the French say - though they probably wouldn’t like him a much as I did: I was enjoying my Palermo evening out after a week in Rome and Calabria, so he seemed just right to me.

Mirco Palazzi, though he didn’t have so much to do, was a very interesting bass (and very natty-looking in his top-to-toe Jesuit black) with surprisingly clear, articulate, in-tune bottom notes, down in the Sarastro basement area. Zanon was less reliable, though mostly so, as Cecil. Patrizia Gentile was less audible and sometimes scarcely audible at all as Anna, but that hardly matters.

The orchestra had, in a way, the great merit, in Donizetti, of not drawing attention to itself; in the excellent acoustics of the vast (and dilapidated) all-wooden theatre, they gave us a pleasantly warm, round sound, not the brash and almost rudely in-your-face Donizetti we sometimes get (although I do think both he and Bellini need to be roughed up and bustled along a bit to avoid boredom). The chorus actually got the loudest cheers, and though we might assume their clans were in the audience, they deserved them.

If Elisabeth had been costumed, not as Queen Alexandra putting her feet up, but as Queen Alexandra in full British Empire regalia, giving that upstart photographer a steely glance signifying “get on with it, young man,” and Mary in something more Parisian along the same lines, the production would have been perfect.

I had initial misgivings as the gauze bearing royal standards rose to reveal a massive set occupying much of the stage; I thought we were going to have another staging in which the singers were confined awkwardly to a little space, as in Don Quichotte in Brussels. But the set turned out to be very ingeniously used, with the help in particular of ingenious and often simply beautiful lighting. Facing us was a steeply-raked labyrinth, filling all the space, of grey marble walls, some higher than others. The symbolism was obvious, and characters moved around it casting nervous glances to one side or the other and hiding behind walls: a climate of fear, distrust and terror no doubt true to the period and something like modern Iran, I should think.

For the forest scene, the labyrinth walls lowered all to the same, waist-high level and clever lighting turned them green: hedges, like Hampton Court. For Mary’s prison cell, they split apart to reveal their wooden underpinning. For the chorus of lamentations and Mary’s preparations to die, the lighting dimmed, the marble turned dark grey and lo and behold, before us was a graveyard filled with tombstones. For the end, they turned red. It was as simple and effective as that. And as, by the end, Mary had at last swapped her frumpish skirt, blouse and shawl for a proper, white, trained gown, stole and jewels, she looked at last like a diva and gave us a good old-fashioned moment of operatic magic.

The evening opened (as it would in Milan two nights later, to a less polite reception) with ten minutes of dignified protest by young opera employees with banners on the stage, with the reading, in Italian and, more briefly, in English, of a protest against Italian government cuts in the cultural area. But sitting there, looking around me, I wondered who these young people’s audience would be in twenty year’s time. As I’m now well over fifty I think I can say it: the Palermo audience is almost entirely made up of the elderly: the retired bourgeoisie, with box upon box of old ladies. I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite such a striking absence (if you can see an absence) of young people in an opera house. It’s a worrying phenomenon.

At the end, I also wondered why the applause was so restrained, considering the evening had been so unexpectedly (in today’s bel canto context: personally I can’t bring myself to consider Renée Fleming a bel canto star) good. But most of the people there were in their prime in the days of Callas and Gencer, Sutherland, Sills and Caballé. That may explain it.

Massenet - Don Quichotte

2010-05-23T18:22:00.000+02:00

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday May 16 2010

Conductor: Nicholas Jenkins. Production: Laurent Pelly. Sets: Barbara de Limburg. Costumes: Laurent Pelly. Lighting: Joël Adam. La belle Dulcinée: Silvia Tro Santafé. Don Quichotte: José van Dam. Sancho Panza: Werner Van Mechelen. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie.

For his farewell, after 50 years, to his country’s royal opera house, José Van Dam – described in more than one review as a “living national treasure” – chose Don Quichotte. It was either that or Falstaff, I suppose. His lower range is now (indeed has been for some time) fleshless and breathless and his upper range has a husky, “old man’s sound; only a few notes in the middle ring out from time to time. So this was a Don Quichotte in which often, in duets (I think of the windmill scene), the Don was outshone, vocally, by his younger partners; a Don Quichotte often without its hero. But this is no time, of course, as he bows out, applauded by his fellow countrymen for a lifetime’s achievements, to dwell on his present deficiencies. The acting skills, presence and phrasing are still there; and if the first four acts left us wishing for more, the final scene – the death of the Don – was naturally Van Dam’s finest hour – or finest ten minutes. Even I – in my friends’ view, exasperatingly heartless – was moved and felt tears welling up in my eyes… until Nokia’s ubiquitous “guitar tune” rang out twice in the house, ruining everything. The double beep-beep of an incoming message, a minute or so later, hammered the last nails into Don Quixote’s coffin.

I haven’t had such a catastrophic telephone moment at the opera since Christie publicly berated a woman from the front row of the stalls whose Carmen overture ring-tone destroyed Joyce DiDonato’s spellbinding performance of the great central aria in Händel’s Hercules. A shame Christie wasn’t with us in Brussels last Sunday to bawl out whoever it was this time. Why do people need their phones in the theatre? Mine was back at home in Paris. My neighbours’ were checked in with their coats. Why, having turned them off at the start (La Monnaie asks people to), must people turn them back on at the interval? I suppose it’s illegal to use some kind of scrambling system? But if so, again, why?

Werner Van Mechelen was no doubt helped by Van Dam’s relative weakness, but even so he’s a very sound baritone indeed and will be interesting to watch: perhaps he’ll take over where Van Dam is leaving off. Silvia Tro Santafé has an interesting voice, juicy and rich in timbre with hints of both Berganza and Crespin. If she can make her vocal production more stable and consistent while developing a firmer personality and presence, she too will be well worth keeping an eye (and ear) on. In the pit, Nicholas Jenkins sounded like he’d learnt a lot from Minkowski: his opening bars were strikingly brisk and his conducting throughout, with even a touch of brutality in the “Spanish bits,” made sure that this often contemplative score didn’t fall entirely into wistfulness.

Staging Don Quichotte must be tricky. The whole picaresque epic is condensed into five short scenes, so short that the music lasts little more than two hours. The scenes are so short that little actually happens: they’re practically a suite of tableaux. Pelly opened with Don Q. in 19th century trousers and waistcoat and tie and a dustcoat, in an armchair under a standard lamp in a wallpapered room, reading. To the right, a pile of papers – pages from the many books he’d read, we supposed, rose nearly as high as a small balcony in the wall, where Dulcinea would eventually appear. The chorus were dressed, for the men, in torero-type outfits in the same pattern as the wallpaper, for the women, in paper flamenco dresses: a clever way of suggesting their dreamlike nature.

The “Romanesque” theme (in the French, “literary” sense) was pursued in the following four acts with act one’s pile of pages becoming a dusty Spanish mountain of them for the rest of the work – such a mountain as required the insertion of orchestral interludes or long pauses while the stagehands beavered away behind the curtain. There were, I thought, some weak moments: the bandits weren’t very frightening as gentleman thieves of the Arsène Lupin kind. There were puzzling ones: in act four Dulcinea danced on her balcony above the arid paper landscape with men in black tails and full-size, black horses’ heads (odd, I thought, but maybe another item in the series of Spanish “bullfighting” clichés; toreros, flamenco dresses…). And there were some striking ones, most notably when Don Quichotte bounced around on the end of a waving pole (at nearly 70!) tilting at the giant windmill sails that swept down from behind the proscenium.

Overall I had the feeling that the massive, moonscape sets hindered the action, squeezing it all into a small space at the front and making crowd movements precarious underfoot: it was one of those productions where the chorus members had to queue up to trail in and out, however lively the music. And the scene changes (the mountains, though always massive, changed from act to act) were too long for momentum to be maintained.

Not one of Laurent Pelly’s greatest achievements. But with his Platée and Offenbachs, he has admittedly set standards very high.

Thomas - Mignon

2010-04-18T08:57:00.000+02:00

Opéra Comique, Paris, Wednesday April 14 2010.

Conductor: François-Xavier Roth. Production: Jean-Louis Benoit. Sets: Laurent Peduzzi. Costumes: Thibaut Welchlin. Lighting: Dominique Bruguière. Choreography: Lionel Hoche. Mignon: Marie Lenormand. Wilhelm Meister: Ismael Jordi. Philine: Malia Bendi-Merad. Lothario, Nicolas Cavallier. Frédéric: Blandine Staskiewicz. Laërte: Christophe Mortagne. Jarno: Frédéric Goncalves. Un serveur: Laurent Delvert. Danseuses, Marie-Laure Caradec, Vinciane Gombrowicz, Aurélie Genoud, Caroline Savi. Accentus. Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France.

Since the Théâtre du Châtelet switched from a full season of opera, rivalling the Opéra National (in the 90s especially), to more eclectic programming, we’ve fortunately been able to turn to the Opéra Comique instead. Change of management (and status: it is now a Théâtre National) there has brought a policy of scheduling new or recent works while reviving French pieces that have become rare. And so we’ve had the chance to see on stage works such as L’Etoile, Cadmus et Hermione, Zampa, Dusapin’s Roméo et Juliette, Eötvös’s Lady Sarashina, Le Roi Malgré Lui and, now, Thomas’s Mignon, a work which, in its day and after a shaky start, became a hit:

“Napoléon III assista à la 22e représentation et, enthousiasmé, fit donner 15 représentations l'année suivante pour les souverains européens réunis à Paris pour l'Exposition universelle de 1867. Dès 1868, l'opéra fut représenté à Weimar et à Vienne où il devint rapidement populaire. En 1870, Mignon fut donné à Londres en italien avec un très grand succès. En 1894, Mignon fêta sa 1000e représentation à l'Opéra-Comique, devenant le premier ouvrage lyrique à avoir été joué mille fois du vivant du compositeur.” (Wikipedia).

The new production at the Opéra Comique (today's house emerged from the smoking ruins of a building which burnt down, killing 84 people, during a performance of this very piece) has been universally praised by the critics. For an English-language sample, I turn to the ever-excellent Financial Times:

“Jean-Louis Benoit’s excellent staging so cleverly blends farce and emotion that this is the theatre’s most comprehensively successful production since new management came in in 2007. He rolls out an impeccably timed show and his young cast showcases tuneful singing and superb diction to get to the elusive kernel of the opéra-comique style.”

So I feel sheepish to admit that, though there was nothing wrong with the singers at all, we left at the interval.

In my experience, you have to be a truly sophisticated listener (or deliberately fogeyish, a different matter) to find real interest and get real pleasure out of second- or third-rank composers. Thomas’s music is well-made but doesn’t have the fluency of Massenet. And the plot of Mignon seemed to me (and the person with me) impossibly uninteresting, so I guess we just aren’t open to “the joyous pantomime spirit that goes with the genre,” according to a friend who found it “wonderful.”

Plus, although the critics insist on the quality of the production and even of the acting, my own impression was that, in addition to being visually dull (bare boards to the front with plain wooden chairs; to the rear, a theatrical curtain opening on painted landscapes; great coats and tricornes and rococo dresses), it was possibly the worst-acted show I’d ever seen on a Paris stage. It looked to me very much like amateur theatricals, with the tenor, for example, in an ill-fitting wig making him, though actually a very handsome lad, look like a moron, loitering all over the stage with one arm down his side and one hand held “18th-century-style" in front of him, occasionally stroking his chin pensively to show he was listening… I’m told, inevitably, that the second part, fire and all, was much better.

Oh well…

The voices were small but beyond reproach. Marie Lenormand, peering out from under another awful, mop-like wig and three-cornered hat, was a very fine mezzo along Susan Graham lines, not overdoing her big Act 1 number. Ismail Jordi (our Chanteur de México under the Châtelet’s now-eclectic policy) has a very clear, tenorino type voice with all the notes but perhaps more timbre than body. Malia Bendi-Merad, though we were no longer around to hear “Je suis Titania,” also had all the notes required at least for Act 1, but hers is an old-fashioned, Mady Mesplé type voice of a kind I’m not too keen on. And so on: a strong, team cast with no weak links and excellent playing from the Philharmonique under Roth.

We didn’t, as I explained to the aforementioned friend – the one who found it "wonderful," so much so, he said, that he literally wept with joy; he’s one of many people who would like to see a determined revival of this whole neglected genre of French romantic opera – storm out in a huff. We found the cast “sympathique” and would have stayed for another production. And we will continue, with enthusiasm and pleasure, to subscribe to the Salle Favart and look forward to discoveries every season. But we knew we wouldn’t get any more joy out of part two than part one, and left.

Joplin - Treemonisha

2010-04-10T19:41:00.000+02:00

Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, Tuesday April 6 2010.

Conductor: Kazem Abdullah. Production & choreography: Blanca Li. Sets & costumes: Roland Roure. Lighting: Jacques Rouveyrollis. Treemonisha: Adina Aaron. Monisha: Grace Bumbry. Lucy: Janinah Burnett. Remus: Stanley Jackson. Andy: Mlamli Lalapantsi. Cephus: Loïc Felix. Zodzetrick: Stephen Salters. Ned: Willard White. Simon: Jacques-Greg Belobo. Parson Alltalk: Krister St. Hill. Luddud: Jean-Pierre Cadignan. A foreman: Joël Ocangha. Ensemble orchestral de Paris.

I was as glad to see Treemonisha on the Châtelet’s schedule this year as I am to see Les Mamelles de Tirésias on the Opéra Comique’s for 2010-2011. Not that they have much in common, but they’re both rare treats. And I was glad to get the impression that, musically speaking, the show must have improved since the opening night, as what I heard wasn’t as weak as some of the professional reviews implied.

In fact, the cast was strong throughout: Adina Aaron as Treemonisha didn’t have, last Tuesday, the tuning problems some mentioned, though her diction is hazy. Nor did Grace Bumbry, though physically frail (always leaning on someone’s arm or sitting on a stool) sound either especially elderly or especially wobbly: her singing was remarkably fluent and strong. Stanley Jackson had a very interesting timbre and engaging personality as Remus, and Krister St. Hill made a wonderfully charismatic, grinning Parson Alltalk in a very tall stovepipe hat. Willard White’s big Act 3 aria was loudly applauded, rightly so. And the orchestra must have got used to the rhythms by this stage of the run.

The sets were colourful and naïve, cut-out, scrapbook images hovering somewhere between Rousseau and Chagall and children’s books, with slowly-moving watercolour video backdrops. The costumes were brightly coloured too, or sometimes plain linen, or African witch-doctor outfits for the baddies.

The trouble with the show was that (a) it somehow didn’t really get going till near the end: there was something tame and cautious about it, and the dances, when they came, seemed too deliberately pasted on. And (b), Blanca Li treated the whole thing as a rather sugary fairy tale, rather than letting the darker side bite. The sorcerers weren’t frightening at all, nor was Treemonisha’s ordeal. The crowning of Treemonisha at the end, with the giant, starry curtain as her veil, was, as my neighbour put it, “tarte.” I’m not quite sure how to translate that. Corny? Kitschy? I’m not saying the political side of the fragile plot could stand a great deal of emphasis, but it could have stood a bit more evil and a bit less “bon sentiment.”

Still, it was a handsome show, by now musically sound, the dances – though a touch too hip-hop – were energetic and well done, and the encores, at last, took off, with the singers joining in the dancing while the conductor conducted, William-Christie-style, from the stage.

Strauss - Der Rosenkavalier

2010-04-09T21:01:00.000+02:00

Hungarian State Opera, Budapest, Sunday April 4 2010.

Conductor: Dénes István. Production: Andrejs Zagars. Sets: Julia Müer. Costumes: Kristine Pasternaka. Lighting: Kevin Wyn-Jones. Feldmarschallin: Eszter Sümegi. Baron Ochs: Lars Woldt. Octavian: Andrea Meláth. Faninal: Péter Kálmán. Sophie: Rita Rácz. Leitmetzerin: Mária Temesi. Valzacchi: Zsolt Derecskei. Annina: Jolán Sánta. Polizeikommissar: Sándor Egri. Haushofmeister bei der Feldmarschallin: László Beöthy-Kiss. Haushofmeister bei Faninal Sándor Kecskés. Notar: Kázmér Sárkány. Wirt: Péter Kiss. Sänger: Attila Fekete.

One of the nice things about Budapest last weekend was the kind of restaurant that’s a rarity now in Paris: well-run, professional establishments upholding a long tradition of dishing up generous, well-prepared fare at reasonable prices purely for their patrons’ pleasure, seemingly glad to have your custom and praise; rather than slaves to fashion, the dreaded "creativity" and "innovation" covering up lack of actual substance under layers of dubious, irrelevant “style” and gimmickry, out to make a quick buck (at twice the price) and a name in the media.

It was much the same at the Hungarian State Opera. No crooning and whimpering for effect, dissembling dodgy intonation or lack of projection or range, but generous, professional, committed singing of what’s now an old school – even, I thought, a hint of 50s and 60s Vienna.

Our Marschällin (a star in her home country, I think) had a big creamy voice and no need to sing her top notes in a mincing head voice, though she could project pianissimo perfectly when needed. She was better in Act 3 than the monologue. Octavian was a passionate, edgy mezzo who really should be much better known, one of the two most striking performers in the show, the other being, without a doubt, Ochs. This was the kind of performance, both in singing and acting (not, by the way, overdone, just very well acted indeed: as the French say, he “inhabited” the role), that reminds you Strauss’s working title until the work premiered was Ochs von Lerchenau. Sophie’s voice was small but perfectly formed, as the phrase goes, and she was as young and charming and uncannily “period” looking a Sophie as could be. Marianne was a wonderfully busty old trooper with a shock of red hair, a chesty voice and huge, hooting high notes that would have been awful in another work but were fine in this one. The Italian singer blasted it out with volume and the right notes if not great delicacy.

The rest of the cast were a good deal less good than the principals, and the extras were gauche; but what struck me was that when the singing and playing – the orchestra is sumptuous yet note perfect, even in those hair-raising, feathery triplet passage at the opening of Act 3 that must be hell to play; but I suppose if you’ve played a piece every other month for a hundred years you do end up getting the hang of it... when the music-making, as I was saying, is of this standard, the production takes on less importance.

This one was traditionally (but well) directed and as I said, the principals acted well and Ochs was outstanding. It was set, however, at the time of the première. So the Marschällin’s boudoir or whatever was a large, burgundy-coloured room with art nouveau banisters up the stairs and balustrade running along the gallery, a kidney-shaped window at the rear and a frosted-glass ceiling with art nouveau tracery. The costumes were, then, roughly 1910, Ochs wore tweed suits, and Sophie, in a slender, chiffony number in hazy layers of blue and green, with her period hair and silent-movie face, might have stepped out of a society portrait at the Hungarian National Gallery.

What was odd about the show was that the Marschällin’s bedroom became Faninal’s palace without any alteration. The appearance, with Octavian, of six tall, stiff (and undeniably handsome) hussars in gleaming white uniforms and feathered helmets, raised a chuckle. What was odder still was that in Act 3 the same room was now laid on its side: the glass roof was the “blind window” to the right, the doors and galleries were all askew… There was clearly an idea here, but I’ve little notion what it was and, as I said, it didn’t really matter: the music was fascinatingly good. The other oddity, outright bizarre, was that Mohammed was a tall, white, local blacked up with a minstrel wig.

But who cares? I should mention, by the way, that the house is magnificent and magnificently restored, rivalling the Palais Garnier, though in a less eclectic, more disciplined neo-Renaissance style, and lavishly gilded everywhere. Marvellous acoustics, like Vienna only better-looking. Best seats (we were in the middle of row 6 of the stalls) cost 40 euros each. And as the whole, long Easter weekend in Budapest was a pleasure, we’ll definitely be going back.

Philippe Fénelon - Faust

2010-04-03T18:51:00.000+02:00

ONP Garnier, Wednesday March 31 2010

Conductor: Bernhard Kontarsky. Production: Pet Halmen. L’Homme, Görg: Gilles Ragon. Faust: Arnold Bezuyen. Méphistophélès: Robert Bork. Wagner, Le Moine: Gregory Reinhart. Le Forgeron: Bartlomiej Misiuda. Le Duc, Le Capitaine: Eric Huchet. La Femme du forgeron, La Princesse: Marie-Adeline Henry. Annette: Karolina Andersson. Kurt: Johan Christensson. Hans: Stanislas de Barbeyrac. Guillaume: Antoine Michel. Kathe: Zoé Nicolaidou. Suschen: Ilona Krzywicka. Lieschen: Aude Extrémo. Quatre Matelots: Hyun-Jung Roh, David Fernandez-Gainza, Chae Wook Lim, Shin Jae Kim. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Seeing a new opera, Charles Jennens might, if he were around today, be tempted to turn around his famous remark about Semele: "no oratorio, but a bawdy opera." Many of today's works are, in my experience, "no opera, but a dreary oratorio." I usually take one or two contemporary pieces each season, but make my way to the theatre fearing the worst (another L'Amour de Loin, say).

Philippe Fénelon's Faust doesn't entirely break the mould: the text, in German and based on a version of the myth by Nicolas Lenau, is wordy and philosophical and consistently grim, though a good deal less exasperating than Maalouf's corny effort. There's so much of it you don't always have time to read the supertitles. But, even if the work isn't action packed - rather a series of tableaux - it tells the Faust story (or part of it) and the music and singing are unmistakeably opera.

The score is definitely post-serial and not at all trying – indeed suspiciously likeable - with often countable metres, recognisable arias, ensembles and choruses, some good noises (including frequent recourse, Prokofiev-style, to the contra-bass end of the orchestra) and standard forms: Ländler, for example, or a near-classic chorale. There are some splendid, lush interludes that brushed close to film music (and I wonderd if a suite might be made of them, like Britten’s Sea Interludes). The vocal style was close to Berg and made similar, hair-raising demands, not always met. On the whole the men were better than the women - particularly low in volume even at Garnier - but it would be interesting to hear the work with the likes of a Natalie Dessay as Annette and someone capable of singing, say, Der Zwerg (i.e. a new David Kuebler) in the role of Faust.

The underlying production concept was vanity, in its baroque (or here neo-baroque) sense, symbolised above all by giant skulls, but drawing on a variety of “ghoulish” references: The Addams Family cum Tim Burton - white faces, sunken eyes, a red gash for a mouth, shaven heads with tousled topknots… and even a touch of Constructivism in some of the costumes.

It was an elaborate staging in several tableaux, too many to describe in full. It opened with Faust bloodily dissecting a realistic-looking corpse atop the first giant skull, this one with a snake crawling out of an eye socket. It continued with corpses in vertical glass tubes and hanging from the rafters, and then what looked like a highly stylised Bavarian wedding feast or Maypole dance (the Ländler), all in white, with exaggerated Oktoberfest costumes, doll-like, mechanical dancing (and lovemaking) and some of those frightening, shaggy creatures you find in country mythology in various countries. There was a funereal scene involving, this time, a black skull with elaborate silver trimmings, topped with a baroque crucifix; the princess wore a wide, Las Meninas type dress in deep plum silk, while the opera ballet, stiff in ruffs, performed a slow, eerie court dance below and giant silver reliquaries and other church ornaments filled the stage. The “ship” (to be wrecked) was a library manned by ghostly sailors in flapping trousers and cleverly enlarged by mirrors. Faust rode a skeletal horse round the stage. His comical shaggy dog was manned by two extras like a pantomime horse. Mephisto was sharply-suited in black, but with an all red face and head. You get the idea, and that’s about all I can recall… The odd thing was, it was hard to imagine the production dated from 2007. It had an “older” feel to it, 90s or even 80s.

Of the three of us there, one left at half time: “After a hard day at work the last thing I want is a course in philosophy.” The second said it wasn’t bad and that if I was staying he would. And I wanted to stay because, to be honest, I was quite enjoying it, dated though the production seemed and weak as were some of the singers. I wouldn’t mind seeing it again, and if it was with a stronger cast, so much the better.

Mozart - Idomeneo

2010-03-22T22:04:00.000+01:00

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday March 21 2010

Conductor: Jérémie Rhorer. Production: Ivo van Hove. Sets and lighting: Jan Versweyveld. Costumes: Lies Van Assche. Video: Tal Yarden. Idomeneo: Gregory Kunde. Idamante: Malena Ernman. Ilia: Sophie Karthäuser. Elettra: Alexandrina Pendatchanska. Arbace: Kenneth Tarver. Gran Sacerdote di Nettuno: Nigel Robson. Orchestra and Chorus of La Monnaie.

The quotation from The Economist was about poets and their poetry, not singers and their warbling, but reading it the morning after Idomeneo in Brussels I was struck by its relevance to what we’d heard: “… teasing, finicky word players who often write in disappointingly short lines and seem to lack the ambition, the emotional force, the rhetorical reach, and even the range of subject matter of great poets of the past. Where to go these days to find the real thing?” Just change a few words here and there…

Our complaint, or more particularly the frequent complaint of one of my French friends, is that too many singers these days “finassent.” If you look “finasser” up in the dictionary you’ll probably find it means “to nitpick.” What this friend means is that too many of today’s singers seem to focus parsimoniously on sweetness of timbre and shaping of phrase, and too few open up their throats and let rip (“sing frankly” is how he puts it in French) à la Del Monaco or Dame Gwyneth.

On paper the cast of Idomeneo looked promising. In the theatre it turned out to be patchy. Some of that might have been due to the set design, at times wide open to the rear of the stage, but the acoustics at La Monnaie are usually good and the house is comfortably small. No, in the case of Alexandrina Pendatchanska at least, this was definitely a case of “finassing” when something more overtly thrilling was needed. She had a very sweet voice and shaped it carefully and tastefully. Now, I’m not suggesting Elettra demands a Gwyneth Jones (supposing one were available). But the higher she sang, the quieter, apparently by design, so just when you hoped you might be thrilled you weren’t. The climax of her big Act 1 set piece was simply inaudible over the orchestra. Yet I’m almost certain she had reserves of power and volume to spare; she was just using them too sparingly.

This tendency towards vocal mimsiness is in addition to the general downsizing of voices per repertoire. Time was we were so used to Margaret Price and Dame Tin Knickers as the Countess that we turned our noses up at Lella Cuberli. There was nothing inherently wrong with Sophie Karthäuser yesterday, but I wonder if she’d have had a leading Mozart role on a major stage in the 70s. What was most remarkable about Malena Ernman was her ability to act a man – something she’s had a lot of practice at, it’s true (e.g. in Agrippina in the same house). Indeed, it took the old lady to my left some time to realise that, with her long sideburns, natty dark suit and mannish movements, Ernman wasn’t the real thing. But the acting was fairly good overall, that wasn’t the trouble…

Kenneth Tarver’s voice was a touch green or tart and his intonation was sometimes hazy, but he was more generous with his sound and took more risks than the girls; and Gregory Kunde went the whole hog, which was a relief after so much vocal mincing around (and come to think of it proved that there was no problem with the sets or acoustics) and actually woke the audience up and got some proper applause. Other than Kunde, the real stars were the orchestra under Rohrer, who seems to be in the pit every where we go these days, and above all the chorus.

The acting, as I said, was good, but overall the production was not. It was a standard update to the present day in contemporary warring states, opening with film footage of Idomeneo raising his young son and watching Al Qaeda on the TV news. After that it was set mainly in the perfectly reproduced ugliness of a Crowne Plaza conference room with gloomy, sage green wallpaper, cheap, flat, dull-gold aluminium mouldings, a nasty fitted carpet and stackable plastic chairs (that got kicked and thrown around a great deal in moments of drama). The walls rose from time to time to reveal the bare stage behind and giant video projections: scenes of war, a cargo plane discharging armoured cars, the arrival of a coffin draped in the stars and stripes… It was a staging could have been used for any number of updates, including but not limited to (as they say in the US) Händel and Rossini.

That it was somehow fidgety – e.g. characters going out through doors between verses in mid-scene and coming back in again, or Idomeneo forever putting down and taking up the notes for a speech – was a minor irritation. But for tragedy to work we need to believe in the dignity and nobility of the key players, and one problem with these updates is that by portraying the heroes as sleazy or potentially sleazy (or just plain ordinary) modern politicians (think Berlusconi, Clinton or, for the plain ordinary, Gordon Brown ) they seriously limit our sympathy with their plight. Another is that if you aim to show the full awfulness of modern politics and the full horror of war, you have to do it very well indeed; that is tough when your material is singers and chorus members and opera extras. This particular production failed to make much of what, as written, should be moments of hair-raising drama, e.g. when a son recognises a beloved father he thought dead, while the father knows he has promised to sacrifice the son; and failed to bring off other such moments introduced as part of the konzept: there was no sea serpent at the end of act 2, but a terrorist attack in the conference room, in the presence of cameras, killing innocent children present. This was so weakly handled it took a while for us poor spectators to grasp (thanks mostly to close-ups of the dead, bloodied children on the screen) what was happening.

There were two intervals, so the show ran for nearly four hours in total (“It’s very long and a bit repetitive,” as the usherette put it). As we had a train back to Paris, we left before act 3, but with no regrets.

Grétry - L'amant jaloux

2010-03-18T21:01:00.000+01:00

Opéra Comique, Paris, Wednesday March 17 2010

Conductor: Jérémie Rhorer. Production, Pierre-Emmanuel Rousseau. Sets: Thibaut Welchlin. Costumes: Pierre-Emmanuel Rousseau and Claudine Crauland. Léonore: Magali Léger. Isabelle: Daphné Touchais: Jacinte: Maryline Fallot. Florival: Frédéric Antoun. Don Alonze: Brad Cooper. Don Lopez: Vincent Billier. Le Cercle de l’Harmonie.

L'amant jaloux, ou Les fausses apparences, is a classic, inconsequential three-act comedy involving an ageing father, his eligible daughter and her best friend, a crafty servant, two penniless suitors, a serenade with mandolin accompaniment, people hiding behind doors by day or at night in gazebos, and mistaken identities (“les fausses apparences”).

According to Wikipedia: “The rich merchant Don Lopez does not want his young, widowed daughter Léonore to remarry. However, she is in love with [… note from Nigel: several lines cut …] Alonze finally recognises his sister. Alonze has just come into an inheritance which allows him to marry Léonore, and Florival marries Isabelle.” You get the gist.

It contains a hint of Cosi and a fair foretaste of Le Nozze: “The musicologist David Charlton," says Wikipedia again, "claims Lorenzo da Ponte knew Grétry's opera and Mozart and his librettist were influenced by its ensembles when they wrote The Marriage of Figaro.” Grétry’s light-hearted piece only lasts a reasonable 80 minutes, however; having weightier questions to raise, Mozart and his librettist weren’t influenced at all by its length.

It’s the French version of a Singspiel, having lively and - still today - funny spoken dialogues interspersed with “ariettes,” and musically it mostly brings to mind Mozart in his popular, Papageno, “ditty” mode, or the Rossini of “Quando mi sei vicina, amabile Rosina.” I say mostly, however, as it also contains some set-piece arias of the “Come scoglio” kind and on the whole can’t be any easier to sing than Cosi fan tutte.

The youngish cast at the Salle Favart (in a production first aired last year in Versailles, where the work premiered in 1778 – I read somewhere it was a favourite of Marie-Antoinette’s) acted and sang with conviction, making it a good evening’s entertainment, so I won’t complain if the sopranos weren’t actually up to Cosi, the contemporary equivalents, say, of a Rita Streich - or Mady Mesplé, who appears to have recorded this piece some years back. Alagna has also recorded an aria.

The best of the bunch was Frédéric Antoun. I’ve been told he’s good in Rameau; I wonder if he can handle Rossini’s Lindoro? There was something of the Florez in his timbre last night and he has looks and swashbuckling presence. The orchestra was a touch ropey, but again, we were all having a good time so why complain?

It was a simple, pretty production, with flat, lightly-coloured engravings of Louis XVI interiors (lots of fluted columns, cartouches and garlands) for sets and a trellised summer house for the last act, at night in the garden. The costumes were good too, especially the girls’: embroidered silk over masses of fuchsia and tangerine tulle.

My first Grétry and, so long as they don’t get any longer, I wouldn’t mind some more.

Wagner - Das Rheingold

2010-03-14T19:02:00.000+01:00

ONP Bastille, Wednesday March 10 2010

Conductor: Philippe Jordan. Production: Günter Krämer. Sets: Jürgen Bäckmann. Costumes: Falk Bauer. Lighting: Diego Leetz. Wotan: Falk Struckmann. Donner: Samuel Youn. Froh: Marcel Reijans: Froh. Loge: Kim Begley. Alberich: Peter Sidhom. Mime: Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke. Fasolt: Iain Paterson. Fafner: Günther Groissböck. Fricka: Sophie Koch. Freia: Ann Petersen. Erda: Qiu Lin Zhang. Woglinde: Caroline Stein. Wellgunde: Daniela Sindram. Flosshilde: Nicole Piccolomini. Orchestra of the Opéra National de Paris.

It doesn’t take long to sink in. You’re sitting there in the dark with the orchestra scraping away, singers tootling about on stage in a smudge of lights and colours and movements, your neighbours are coughing and sneezing and rooting around for tissues or sweets, and it dawns on you: I’m bored. So it was with Das Rheingold on Wednesday night. Now I know it’s a matter of taste and some people hated Bob Wilson’s Ring. But for me, at the Châtelet, with so little apparently happening, time flew; at the Bastille, with so much variety and activity on stage, it dragged. And as with Das R. you can’t escape for over 2 hours, I even found myself thinking back to the excruciating L’Amour de Loin, my all-time reference in matters of aching bums. Though an experienced friend rightly pointed out you can’t judge a Ring from its prologue – things that seem silly at first might make more sense later in the series – this bodes ill for the longer evenings to come, even if they offer escape at half time.

My conclusion re the production was: under-rehearsed, unconvincing and unconvinced. The critics keep saying it’s all déjà vu and I see what they mean: not carbon-copy déjà vu, but a kind of compendium of (often good) ideas already seen in productions over the years, from producers as diverse as Kokkos, Sellars, Serban, Zambello or Fura dels Baus, rehashed in brighter colours and clever lighting but with less conviction and to less effect. It was one of those shows where you wonder if with more rehearsal time and better acting, thanks to a different director, it might have been got to work.

It opened in the Rhine. In it. Well, actually not, but in a lot of dry-ice steam in clever lighting and with one of the evening’s several striking images (only a few striking images don’t necessarily make a coherent staging): a shoal of red-gloved hands, brightly lit from beneath, writhing about behind the Rhine maidens like hyperactive goldfish. The maidens were in slinky, flesh-coloured, sequinned mermaid dresses, trimmed with pink down and lined in red, with red sequinned nipples and pubes, frolicking on long-roped swings. Alberich looked more or less like a miner just up from the pit, which is normal; but the shenanigans with the maidens set the unconvincing, not-quite-well-done-enough tone of the whole show. The large sphere of gold made its appearance in a giant, inclined mirror. The déjà vu had already clicked in: the swings, oddly but inevitably, recalled the Bastille’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The mirror, if you replaced the golden ball with a horse’s head, the Châtelet’s Les Troyens. And on it went…

The gods, when they appeared, were lounging on and around a giant globe of the Earth, ribbed with bright green strip lighting and accessible by a steel ladder or stairs, eating golden apples. Male and female, they wore pink plastic torsos, buxom for the women, muscular for the men – an ideal form hiding a more decadent reality, I guessed* (they took their torsos off when drooping for want of apples). There was nothing remotely heroic about them (Donner frequently brandished a ridiculous little silver hammer to no effect at all), a fact that undermined Wotan’s character all evening. Climbing up and down the globe was tricky, letting slip lack of rehearsal again. On the right were vertical white banners marked “Germania” in gothicky letters. In the distance, men in dark overalls were polishing up a gigantic metal structure: Valhalla. The giants were got up like guerrillas in dark fatigues; when payment was refused, the house was invaded by more guerrillas in balaclavas, builder’s tools sprouting from their backpacks, waving red flags while red tracts showered down from the roof. Loge, the most successful, best-acted character of the show, was a kind of nutty professor in clownish makeup who sprang out of a trapdoor in the globe.

This is getting long, I must get a move on… The Nibelungen were besmirched, bare-chested miners with pit helmets and "knee-boots" to help them get around. By this stage a giant, serrated pendulum had worn its way through a fair bit of the golden globe and the lads, kneeling in serried ranks to right and left, swung back en masse as the blade approached. They played the dragon, which might have made more sense if they hadn’t crept in from both sides instead of one. They played the toad, too – all of them hopping around like kids at Kindergarten. That didn’t work either. Nor really, did the raising, on red ropes, of a giant silk curtain, covered in sky, that, released, became a sea of clouds (I couldn’t see a rainbow, though there’s one in the photos of the set designs) as Valahalla advanced in a blaze of light and the gods ascended its steps, gingerly.

Just as you must be careful not to judge a Ring from the trailer, so must you be careful not to condemn the music from the patchy acoustics of the stalls of the Bastille. Also, the sets were not designed to reflect sound back at the audience: often the singers had nothing behind them but the (amazingly) vast stage. But certainly the Rhinemaidens were weak (“even” the Rhinemaidens, as Le Monde put it, while my neighbour remarked that it must be possible to find people able to sing them). Struckmann was disappointing until the final scenes – saving his voice till the end? Mime was a good deal better than Alberich, whose curse fell flat. Sophie Koch was alright but not exactly sock-popping (but perhaps later in the series, when she has better stuff to sing?). Ann Petersen was unconvincing… Peter Sidhom was very good ("a discovery," said one of my friends), but only Kim Begley and Qiu Lin Zhang (who seems to sing nothing else but Erda) were really up to scratch.

The whole show, singing and acting, lacked conviction; and while I agree that Jordan had the orchestra playing transparently and full of internal detail and all that… I do wish (as I often do, I admit) he’d injected more energy into it. Those droopy Rhine maidens... It may not, however, have been his fault if there was no deafening, Berlin-style “wall of sound” brass effect as the gods moved into their new house: we were in the stalls, where orchestral noise has trouble reaching over the edge of the pit. It may well have been a good deal more impressive upstairs.

To sum up, a Rheingold in which the “best bits” are Loge, Erda and the lighting is a shaky start to a Ring in a house that hasn’t had one since 1957. I fear for my bum in the coming episodes...

*It would certainly be the case if I myself unbuckled a plastic he-man torso.

Strauss - Elektra

2010-02-01T19:38:00.000+01:00

Sunday January 31 2010

Conductor: Lothar Koenigs. Production: Guy Joosten. Sets & costumes: Patrick Kinmonth. Lighting: Manfred Voss. Klytämnestra: Natascha Petrinsky. Elektra: Nadine Secunde. Chrysothemis: Annalena Persson. Aegisth: Donald Kaasch. Orest: Gerd Grochowski. Der Pfleger des Orest: Franz Mazura. La Monnaie orchestra and chorus.

I don’t usually do favourites, but even I can unhesitatingly say Elektra is one of my favourite operas. The trouble these days could be I’ve been too lucky with it in the past. I’ve heard Gwyneth Jones (“heard” is too feeble a word for such awe-inspiring volume) and Deborah Polaski (at the right stage in her career and the wrong) in the leading role, Deborah Voigt at her absolute peak as Chrysothemis, without a doubt the best, and, of course, Rysanek as Klytemnestra, not to mention Helga Dernesch and her peculiarly memorable cleavage. I was even present at a famous (in Paris at any rate, among operagoers of my age) Radio France concert performance at the Champs Elysées in which Maureen Forrester, Ute Vinzing and Rysanek (then singing Chrysothemis) screamed at each other breathtakingly in expensive, ample evening gowns, prodigious jewels and big hair (Hanna Schaer was a mere maidservant). As for recordings (of which that, incidentally, is one), we’re spoilt for choice, aren’t we?

I haven’t had such luck of late; or else the luck I’ve had has made me picky. I was looking forward to Elektra at La Monnaie, hoping to be suitably harrowed, but in the end I was underwhelmed: it was fair enough, but not harrowing.

Nadine Secunde’s Elektra had waited for her brother a bit too long. She threw herself into it alright, it was a game performance and well acted. But, as often happens as careers advance, experience, artfulness and ingenuity had to be mustered to make up for lost range: nearly all of her top notes were flat, the higher the flatter, while a broad vibrato strove to give the illusion they were achieved. As I mentioned to a friend, much as you respect the singer and admire her cunning (OK, artistry would be a kinder word), you eventually get fed up and long for the real thing. “A shipwreck,” said my neighbour on the right at the end. Not really, I thought; the real shipwreck was Polaski’s last outing at the Bastille. No, Secunde was still a fair Elektra, working hard at it, but the problem is, with Elektra that isn’t what you come for.

The Swedish Chrysothemis (Annalena Persson) had a younger, brighter voice, lots of volume and all the notes, but it was metallic ("acide," according to that neighbour), and when she and Secunde sang together it was a festival of vibrato, a tangle of notes. We both preferred the glamorous Klytemnestra (Natascha Petrinsky) and above all Orest (Gerd Grochowski), though as an actor he lacked charisma. The only time I was really stirred all afternoon was when he was around. His tutor was visibly a veteran, and lo and behold when I looked him up, believe it or not it was Franz Mazura, born in Austria in 1924 (!), erstwhile Wotan and Chéreau’s Doktor Schön!
The orchestra (though La Monnaie doesn’t have as big a pit as Strauss might have liked: room for only 6 double basses, for example) was at its best in the kind of performance that goes for balance and clarity rather than deafening volume, more Alpine Symphony than expressionist modern. Personally, as I like noise I’d have preferred being deafened, at least at “Orest!”

I sometimes wonder why opera houses change productions so soon. Apart from the fact that the Paris Opera has already had three different versions of St François d’Assise, the Werther brought in from Germany last year has already been ousted by an even duller one from Covent Garden. Why, I wondered aloud to the regulars afterwards, has La Monnaie already got rid of Braunschweig’s Elektra? I don’t remember anything much wrong with it and it isn’t as if we’ve had much chance of getting bored with it.

After his Werther (better than either of those Paris ones) and excellent Lucia at the Cirque Royal, Guy Joosten’s Elektra struck me as, in the end, not so striking. Modern productions now have their conventions, and in that sense it was somehow conventional. The maids, for example, as the curtain rose, were in a locker room, changing into their uniforms: grey for guards, with caps and machine guns, and white for nurses, with caps and aprons. Aegisth returned from what had clearly been a louche party, in SS uniform and with SS guards in carnival masks, one of them young and handsome and half-naked.

The single main set showed a dark courtyard where either building or renovation works had stopped some time ago: the corrugated iron sheeting at the back, the scaffolding bearing gangways at first-floor level and the amber industrial lights were all rusty against the crumbling, blind-arched palace walls. Temporary wooden stairs on the left led up to a single door; the only other way on or off stage was through an open trap in the floor. Much of the space was cluttered with oil drums, one of them converted to a brazier. Elektra’s “lair” was a space under a low, guarded watch-tower, curtained at the back, with a tatty Empire chaise longue, a mirror, and belongings (including the axe) stored in a cardboard suitcase under the bed.

There were some good ideas, especially Elektra and Klytemnestra getting squiffy together on whisky (served on a tray by a nurse) and both pealing with laughter at the idea of Aegisth being manly. At the end of the scene, when Klytemnestra, after some serious grappling with her daughter, started her manic cackling, Elektra at first joined in till she realised something was wrong. Also good was Elektra, as the murders went ahead and all hell broke loose in the palace, calmly dressing and making up as a princess again and burning her dirty old things in the brazier before entering the palace. But it was less good, for that reason, to have no dancing at all, though the libretto mentions it so often throughout; and less good still, during the final bars, for the backdrop to rise to reveal Elektra dead in seated Orestes’ arms, Pietà-like, amidst a heap of bloody bodies on a broken, blood-stained balcony.

Still, as I told my critical young neighbour on the left, most productions of Elektra are worse, and musically if this wasn’t absolutely top-notch, it wasn’t rock-bottom either. Trouble is, faint praise sounds so damning…

Massenet - Werther

2010-01-29T23:18:00.000+01:00

Opéra National de Paris Bastille, Tuesday January 26 2010

Conductor: Michel Plasson. Production: Benoît Jacquot. Sets: Charles Edwards. Costumes: Christian Gasc. Werther: Jonas Kaufmann. Albert: Ludovic Tézier. Le Bailli: Alain Vernhes. Charlotte: Sophie Koch. Sophie: Anne-Catherine Gillet. Orchestre de l’Opéra national de Paris. Maîtrise des hauts-de-seine ⁄ chœur d’enfants de l’Opéra national de Paris.

Is Jonas Kaufmann the greatest living tenor? It certainly sounded that way the other evening. The first two acts of Werther may be a waste of time* (those drunkards! You might as well stay at the bar yourself), but things pick up considerably after the break and not for nothing is "Pourquoi me réveiller" a famous aria. His rendering (the word is appropriate in its painterliness) was magnificent. To be honest, as I don't listen much to recordings and though of course I'd heard of him many times, I'd never actually heard him before at all (which is why I bought tickets: this Werther wasn't in my subscription). His voice is, to say the least, interesting. Not a "solar" tenor like Pavarotti, but a dark, baritonal one with a rich, smoky timbre ("ambered," wrote one critic) and a phenomenal dynamic range that allows him to spend most of his time not bawling out his lines but just "speaking" gently to the audience ("Werther as Lied" wrote another). Yet when he wants he can let rip with glorious high notes, spot on, open and full-bodied, still with that depth and richness of timbre. Definitely an exceptional singer, so much so that he had me thinking back to the (rare) likes of Margaret Price and Pavarotti. Not because his voice is in any way similar to Pavarotti's; but the same mysterious, "physico-acoustic" phenomenon enables Kaufmann to project his superb, crisp diction quite audibly and wholly understandably into a vast auditorium at ranges from pianissimo to mezzo forte. That, to me, is a unique quality of the truly greats, like Pavarotti, like Arleen Auger in Händel, like Price in Le Nozze in her prime: the ability to engage in quiet conversation with the audience most of the time, then let rip as required and knock their socks off. That Kaufmann is not short and fat does no harm either, no harm at all.

So Jonas Kaufmann tended to fascinate, dominating the cast. But Sophie Koch, had she had some ordinary tenor opposite, would surely have seemed remarkable too. She has matured into a very, very fine mezzo. Tézier, it seemed to me (and my neighbour, who remarked on it afterwards) was not at his finest, a slight disappointment only because he has set such high standards. Anne-Catherine Gillet's is a small voice for the Bastille, and somewhat girlish - but that, of course, fits the part, though the stage director did have the poor woman do some childish twirling around, too silly for her age.

Which was just about the full extent of his directing. This was another (I'm thinking of Mireille) total, apparently deliberate non-production, basically just leaving the singers to themselves. Nicolas Joël, the new boss of the Paris opera, is said to believe that casting - singing quality - should take precedence over the production. OK, why not? But it seems to me perverse to go to the trouble of assembling the best possible cast and not carry the project through by also going for the best possible production. Paris already had, only last season, one bad production (so I heard: I missed it) of Werther brought in from Germany. Why go to London and fetch a worse one (at who knows what cost)? And when people complain that "modern" productions are ugly, they should see the tacky sets for this "traditional" one: a high, papier-mâché wall (nothing sweet or lovely about this one) covered in dusty fake ivy, with a gate and fountain, for act one; a bare, paved terrace with a parapet and fallen leaves for act two; a grim, grey room with a window, a desk and a harpsichord, otherwise vast and empty, for act three. And then, after two hours or so of nothing at all (other than some comical lighting effets: an abrupt change of light and a spot thrown on the hero as he sang "soleil"; a self-igniting candle on the harpsichord...), suddenly we have an obvious and unnecessary pistol-shot from behind the curtain between acts three and four, Charlotte racing through the auditorium to find the dying Werther, and the handsome lad himself in a tiny, shoebox, La Bohème garret that advanced slowly through the falling snow. And, though the singers had had to do nothing at all beforehand, they were now instructed to end the opera lying face down on the boards. Incomprehensible. But I fear we will have more of this perversity under Joël: excellent casts in (I've used the words before) aggressively provincial productions. "Neutral," a friend of mine said; but I disagree: this looks to me like a deliberate denial of the contribution a production is supposed to make and, as far as I'm concerned, shows a lack of respect for the singers, to whom it does a disservice.

This is probably not the place to start a discussion on the merits or otherwise of roping in film directors to stage operas, but the subject would make for an interesting article by someone clever enough to write it. Jacquot is apparently a well-known cineast. As usual in these cases, we find him admitting quite freely that, "complètement néophyte," he knows nothing about opera or the work in question. "I didn't know the piece, apart from two arias my grandmother used to sing to me when I was a child. Even then I didn't know at the time that they were from Werther! But I accepted (the offer from Pappano to direct Werther in London) knowing that the experience would be rich in suprises." If only the result had been so for the public. That an opera production by a film-maker would be a dud was no surprise at all, so often have we seen it before.

Plasson, now a sort of living national treasure alongside Prêtre and Boulez, lingered somewhat over the preliminaries and went, overall, for Romantic melancholy. The orchestra clearly love him (this matters at the Paris Opera) and were on their absolute best behaviour, even to the extent of staying in the pit to applaud instead of dashing off for a drink as the curtain still falls. That, at the Bastille, is a sign.

*Not so much this time, of course: there was Kaufmann to discover, and from his first notes my hair was on end.

Purcell - The Fairy Queen

2010-01-23T13:47:00.000+01:00

Opéra Comique, Paris, Thursday January 21 2010

Conductor: William Christie. Production: Jonathan Kent. Sets & costumes: Paul Brown. Lighting: Mark Henderson. Choreography: Kim Brandstrup. Soprano, Juno: Lucy Crowe. Bass, Coridon, Winter, Hymen, Sleep: Andrew Foster-Williams. Mystery, 1st Fairy, Nymph, Spring: Claire Debono. Fairies: Miriam Allan, Anna Devin, Maud Gnidzaz. Tenor, Adam, Secrecy: Ed Lyon. Tenor, Summer: Sean Clayton. Bass: Callum Thorpe. Soprano, Night, the Plaint: Emmanuelle de Negri. Mopsa: Robert Burt. Phoebus: Andrew Davies. Autumn: David Webb. Eve: Helen Jane Howells. Theseus: William Gaunt. Egeus: Robert East. Hermia: Alice Haig. Lysander: Nicholas Shaw. Demetrius: Gwilym Lee. Helena: Jo Herbert. Starveling: Roger Sloman. Flute: Robert Burt. Bottom: Desmond Barrit. Quince: Paul McCleary. Snug: Brian Pettifer. Snout: Jack Chissick. Titania: Sally Dexter. Puck: Jotham Annan. Oberon: Finbar Lynch. Les Arts Florissants.

It's all very well, I've said it before, writing up an ordinary evening at the opera, but as an amateur, how do you do justice to an extraordinary one? Among the first three reviews I read after this performance (I don't usually read any before), two had the word "miracle" in their headline and another one "théâtre total." By the interval, it was clear to me that we were witnessing something rare and I was fumbling for that awkward and in the circumstances inappropriately ugly and German word Gesamtkunstwerk...

It wasn't clear immediately, though. The first thing you do on arrival at the theatre is check what time the show finishes. In this case, don't ask me why, the Opéra Comique had scheduled an 8 pm start for a piece lasting four hours. So naturally I was thinking "If this turns out to be a bore we'll be out for dinner at half time." After a bad-tempered start, with Christie glaring at the restless audience and crying out "Quand vous voulez!" (he would swivel round to shoot black looks at coughers all evening, as usual, even mouthing "Shut up!" at them; it makes no difference, though) the curtain went up on what might have been a relatively good night at the Comédie Française. That isn't saying much, so my hopes for dinner at a reasonable hour were raised. We saw a handsome 17th-century room in what might be Wren's London, panelled and floored in forest green with gilded mouldings and cartouches, concentric gold circles set in the parquet, three high, many-paned windows at the rear and, to the sides, walls of glass cabinets filled with curiosities: ostrich eggs, bones, coral, Chinese vases and so on. There were high-backed chairs, and the actors wore cream-coloured period costumes and powdered, Purcellian wigs. So far so-so...

Things started to pick up when the 17th century left the room and in came the 21st: the "rude mechanicals," a team of retirement-age cleaners in blue boiler suits, complete with vacuum cleaner, window spray and a yellow, "Caution wet floor" sign, soon waltzing to the music with their brooms and with Desmond Barrit, thick Welsh accent and all, instantly dominating what would be the highest comedy all evening from a team of veterans versed in every trick of their trade. But again, we're all used to the mechanicals stealing the show, so so far it was all pretty normal, though clearly well directed. It was after they pulled the plug on the vaccum cleaner, fusing the lights in a burst of sparks, that in the darkness the magic began. The walls moved apart (they would only close again at the very end), the glass cases swung open, and out of every nook and cranny, from behind the curios, from under the walls and floors, came fairies: sleek, chic (and slightly sinister) London fairies all in black with mourning-black angel wings, dressed for a Notting Hill cocktail party (or was it Spitalfields, in such a Wren parlour?), the men in dark, narrow suits and long Italian shoes, the women in cocktail dreses.

From this point on, Jonathan Kent seemed to take the libretto to heart: "A thousand thousand ways we'll find to entertain the hours." So he and his team did, in a directorial tour de force in which acting and singing, baroque machinery and plausible modern dance merged seamlessly into a coherent whole. We had the 1600s, the 50s and now. We had a golden Phoebus emerging from the clouds on a golden, winged horse; Sally Dexter's husky, commanding yet slightly batty Titania sleeping suspended from a giant spider, wrapped lovingly by her servants in a cobweb shroud; we had lovers - saucy Mopsa a tall, hefty man in drag - emerging from haystacks; the chorus in white bunny suits with pink bibs copulating joyously; Titania and Bottom in a peapod boat (on a circular lake formed by raising the gold rings in the floor) punted by a fish; an Arcimboldo autumn followed by a wondeful, quaking Jack Frost winter with long, twiggy fingers; Cranach's Adam and Eve under a golden tree, gradually losing their innocence and clambering shamefully into clothes at the end; of course a hilarious Pyramus and Thisbe, the best I've ever seen, in which the old troopers pulled out all the stops (and Snug the joiner handed out his business cards to the guests); and a Plaint that reduced even Paris's determined January coughers to a long, moved silence. What might have been a rag-bag of ideas, one after the other, was not: it formed a whole - the Gesamtkunstwerk I mentioned above: Kent carried it off, making semi-opera work anew as total theatre.

It was nice to be reminded how good English acting is and nice to hear so many sweet, open, artfully natural-sounding English voices, trained no doubt first in colleges and cathedrals before moving on to opera. Some, from the chorus, were weaker than others, but in a team piece like this with so much else going on it mattered less, and some were outstanding - I think in particular of the quintessentially English tenor Ed Lyon and the bright, crisp bass Andrew Foster-Williams. Les Arts Florissants in the pit played with a relaxed fluency that sounded as if they, not the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, had already done the Glyndebourne run, and Christie, though looking grim all evening, gave them unusually free rein and, during continuos, didn't conduct at all. And grim though he was, he lightened up for the curtain calls, conducting, as usual, a reprise from the stage, grinning - though not, as he's reported to have done in Glyndebourne, wearing bunny pants.

There are copious numbered excerpts on YouTube and - excellent news - Glyndebourne is due to issue a DVD in the spring of 2010.

Rodgers & Hammerstein - South Pacific

2010-01-17T09:42:00.000+01:00

Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont, Friday January 8 2010

Conductor: Fred Lassen. Director: Bartlett Sher. Sets: Michael Yeargan. Costumes: Catherine Zuber. Lighting: Donald Holder. Ensign Nellie Forbush: Laura Osnes. Emile de Becque: Paulo Szot. Luther Billis: Danny Burstein. Bloody Mary: Loretta Ables Sayre. Lt. Joseph Cable: Andrew Samonsky. Capt. George Brackett: Murphy Guyer. Cmdr. William Harbison: Sean Cullen.

It’s always interesting for me, as a regular operagoer, to see a musical. "Opera, when everything comes together […] (which, as we all know, is rare) becomes the greatest invention on earth." So writes a friend of an acquaintance on Facebook. It’s rare for it all to come together and as the lights go down we can’t even be sure the principals will be able to sing the notes. Yet on Broadway (yes, of course, it’s another business and there are other factors) not only can you be sure they’ll be able to sing their parts (I was once told they are fined if ever out of tune by someone I claimed, no doubt wrongly, had done so), but they’ll also be able to act and dance as well. It may sound naive but I remain amazed by the way, in musicals, everyone down to the last extra is in character and uncannily natural-looking from start to finish. They smile, for example, not as if they’ve been ordered to smile or else, but as if they’re having a good time. It amazed me even more in this South Pacific which, in the Vivian Beaumont Theater, is very nearly in the round and there they are, singing, acting and dancing (or in the case of the men, leaping and cartwheeling) up a storm right under your nose, yet apparently as if you weren’t there, gawping, a yard or so away.

This was made possible by a large, round stage apron that slid out from the "normal" stage almost to cover the orchestra, Bayreuth-style. The "sets" as such were simple: slatted wooden blinds, or a wall of French windows for de Becque’s house, in front of a beach, a tall palm tree and a distant view of Bali Hai. The props were, on the other hand, large and realistic: a warplane, plenty of oil barrels and Billis’s laundry; the shower; the Thanksgiving stage made from two flatbed trucks rear-to-rear… plus a few smaller items like desks and chairs and filing cabinets with a backdrop of maps, or a table, chairs and a drinks trolley at de Becque’s. Scene changes were incredibly efficient, helped by multiple exits down stairs leading under the audience. The golden lighting, filtered through the slats, took me instantly back to the Straits of Singapore. The costumes were slick and sleek and beautifully in period (with nurses looking exactly like the Andrews Sisters at the end). And the production, overall, brought out what my New York hosts called the "edginess" that Rodgers & Hammerstein seem always to have wanted in their works: a dark, ambiguous, not altogether likeable Bloody Mary; a Cable strutting and superior at first, brooding and ambivalent later… The chorus members looked mostly like "ordinary folks" and the fun was more natural and casual than in the film (e.g. the hair-washing scene or the guys’ fooling around). There were subtleties in the staging: the black guys were usually together and set apart from the whites. No more heavy-handed than that, but effective. In my neighbour’s view, overall it was "less soppy."

The cast was strong. Early reviewers seem to have found Laura Osnes lacking in acting experience, but at this stage there's no sign of that. She's doll-like and charming, slim and slight in stature and voice, a little lightwieght for the part and with a tendency to attack phrases from just under the note and an overall sound that is, to my ear, pop-influenced; but then I hear the same in Kiri Te Kanawa or Renée Fleming. Paulo Szot was flawless. Andrew Samonsky had one of those piercing, Broadway tenor voices that could do with a bit more rondeur, but all in all there was nothing or no-one to complain about. The contrast with Turandot right next door, four nights before, couldn't have been more bewildering.

The show was followed by a decent dinner at Boulud's just opposite with good cocktails, a great Pommard and great friends. It would be corny to say it was an "enchanted evening" and I certainly didn't fall in love with a stranger even in that crowded room, but it was a great deal better by far than Monday at the Met followed by Fiorello's...

Puccini - Turandot

2010-01-06T23:47:00.000+01:00

Metropolitan Opera, New York, Monday January 4 2010

Conductor: Andris Nelsons. Production, sets: Franco Zeffirelli. Turandot: Maria Guleghina. Liu: Maija Kovalevska. Calaf: Salvatore Licitra. Timur: Hao Jiang Tian. Ping: Joshua Hopkins. Pang: Tony Stevenson. Pong: Eduardo Valdes. Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus.

If it had ever reached the stage with such a cast (unlikely), this performance of Turandot, applauded, albeit not rapturously, in New York would have been booed in Europe. It seems to me that this is the only major house where an evening of this kind is possible and I believe there's a Met "system" that makes it so. But I know how risky it is for us trashy Europeans to criticise the Met and for that reason, before daring to do so, went to parterre.com, where they seem to know their stuff, to check what was being said there. Here's a much abbreviated sample: "I was in the house Monday, and this was, bar none, some of the worst singing I’ve ever heard in the house [...] Licitra [...] was beyond painful. Guleghina at least attempted to be musical [...] This was one of the most disconcerting performances I’ve sat through in a long time. The Met should be beyond embarrassed to allow either of these singers to perform these roles..."

"Disconcerting" was the word most in my mind at the end. Maria Guleghina, excellent in Puccini 15 years ago, did indeed make efforts to nuance her part, resorting gamely but laboriously to every trick in the trade, including unfortunate whimpering or mewing in attempts to sing pianissimo, the one thing her voice still unmistakeably has being volume. My companion and I wondered what roles she should be singing; we hit on nothing in particular but as her top is unreliable and her bottom even more so and short-winded to boot, it seemed clear she should be aiming for parts in the middle, where she might still excel. I should add that she also had a stab at acting, but as there rarely seems to be anyone around at the Met to help singers in this department, the result was a throwback to silent movies and Sarah Bernhardt.

Salvatore Licitra made no attempt at acting; on the contrary his absence of presence, if I might put it that way, was striking. But I imagine he was very much preoccupied with struggling through the evening, and a struggle it was, as that evening wore on, even to come in at the right moments, let alone sing with even timbre or projection or the right notes. Here I'll quote another contribution to parterre.com, just to show it wasn't only me: “'Nessun Dorma' was a disaster [...] It wasn’t simply a minor slip-up that the Parterre cognoscenti are capable of picking up [...] This was a horrendous botching of the piece that somebody off the street would have noticed. I couldn’t believe it." Neither could I.

Yet Guleghina and Licitra have voices, if only they were put to better use. As I've said before in writing up Met performances, I don't think the fault lies entirely, if at all, with the singers. I found myself wondering what it must be like to be up there in America's greatest house in front of 3,000 people just knowing you're making a total hash of it yet having to grind on to the end. I'm sure I'd just want to disappear through a hole in the stage. Why does the Met invite or allow its "stars" to do it, whichever is the case? And why doesn't the Met audience let the singers know, instead of applauding politely come what may? It would be doing them a service. I honestly believe there's something in the way the Met operates that leads inevitably to these disconcerting evenings, and as honestly believe they are unique to the Met. I see that is also being debated on the web following Monday evening's performance and radio broadcasts.

Maija Kovaleska's straightforward singing, maybe a touch shrill and monotonous, came as a relief after her partners' audible travails and that's no doubt why she got the most applause. Ping, Pang and Pong ("Pif, Paf, Pouf" as my French neighbour called them, getting mixed up with Offenbach) were better than usual and perhaps the best in the show, though the Met website surprisingly doesn't say who they were. But what sort of Turandot is it where Ping, Pang and Pong are the highlights? What often happens in such circumstances is that the orchestra and chorus "rise to the occasion," saving the day by ringing out gloriously and blasting our tiaras off, but that was not the case, either, on Monday evening, which was simply "unworthy of New York," to quote my neighbour again.

I don't think I need dwell on Zeffirelli's production as many people have seen it live or in photos. It is lavish and spectacular and actually a good deal better than his Tosca, and would have worked well with better singers. Zeffirelli throws in every Chinese cliché but the kitchen sink: acrobats, dragons, dancing maidens with trailing sleeves, girls twirling ribbons, men parading banners... there may even have been kitchen sinks in there somewhere, silver ones with glitter and gold ones with pearls, so crowded was the Met's narrow stage. Extras had to step over the grovelling populace, crawling around all over the place like rats. It was all show and, apart from crowd movements, not much directing, as we saw above.

"Great Opera is Great Theater" says the Met's advertising. I agree, but I have never seen much of either at the Lincoln Center so far. My bad luck, maybe, but if so it's been a long run.

Rodgers & Hammerstein - The Sound of Music

2009-12-31T15:31:00.000+01:00

Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, Wednesday December 30 2009.

Conductor: Kevin Farrell. Production: Emilio Sagi. Sets: Daniel Bianco. Choreography: Sarah Miles. Costumes: Jesús Ruiz. Lighting: Caetano Vilela. Maria Rainer: Sylvia Schwartz. Captain Georg von Trapp: Rod Gilfry. Mother Abbess: Kim Criswell. The Baroness Elsa Schraeder: Christine Arand. Max Detweiler: Laurent Alvaro. Rolf Gruber: James McOran-Campbell. Liesl Von Trapp: Carin Gilfry. Orchestre Pasdeloup. Châtelet Chorus.

There isn't a strong tradition of musicals in Paris (apart from awful "Pop Idol" type ones) so this was the first stage production of The Sound of Music in France and possibly the best performance, here, of any musical I've seen. I was told, last night, that some American visitors have claimed it would have been ten times better on Broadway. Maybe they didn't get the best cast; and maybe it wouldn't have been ten times better (it couldn't be) but just ten times different: this is a wholly European production, dealing with the work as an opera would be dealt with.

Not, however, in any "Eurotrash" way. It might have been set in Afghanistan, but wasn't. When we took our seats we were faced with an impressive painting (in fact, as we would soon see, a gauze) of a magnificent, blue, snow-capped mountain. The nuns became visible through it, and it eventually rose to reveal in full what would be a single basic set: on each side, two baroque portals and cornices painted in the blue-and-white "mountain" motif, serving equally well as convent walls and the Captain's house. Flagstones on the stage apron gave way to grass (so the house, in interior scenes, was carpeted with it) rising to the distant horizon and a blue sky, and Maria's bedroom with its famous curtains or a wall of French doors descended when needed, as did a whole bunch of big chandeliers for the ball, though it took place outside. So did the wedding, the whole lawn covered by Maria's giant, white train. For the festival concert, a grand "opera curtain" gauze was lowered, and it was a chilling moment, in a city that hasn't forgotten it was occupied in the last war, when Nazi guards and officers appeared in spotlights around the auditorium to keep an eye on proceedings. The family hid, in the convent garden, under a Nazi flag as vast as Maria's train that disappeared down a hole as the final chorus rang out. Costumes were all excellent under flattering, peaches-and-cream lighting.

The audience loved it, and rightly so. The cast was very strong indeed, starting with the excellent Sylvia Schwartz, whose voice was rounder and a good deal more interesting than Julie Andrews' and whose look was a good deal more feminine. Rod [sic] Gilfrey scowled at the end as if not satisfied with his performance, but he was fine, and Kim Criswell was unmistakeably Kim Criswell, though now a touch short-winded. I must put in a special word for Laurent Alvaro; if I don't, his friends, some of whom I know, will complain. It was good to have the full orchestra Pasdeloup in the pit and a pity Kevin Farrell didn't push for some less placid tempi: we might have got out for dinner earlier.

Overall a very entertaining evening, much more so than Dialogues des Carmélites would have been, albeit both end with the protagonists getting what they deserve.

Messager - Fortunio

2009-12-19T17:07:00.000+01:00

Opéra Comique, Paris, Wednesday December 16 2009

Conductor: Louis Langrée. Production: Denis Podalydès. Sets: Eric Ruf. Costumes: Christian Lacroix. Lighting: Stéphanie Daniel. Fortunio : Joseph Kaiser. Jacqueline : Virginie Pochon. Maître André: Jean-Marie Frémeau. Clavaroche: Jean-Sébastien Bou. Landry: Jean-François Lapointe. Lieutenant d’Azincourt: Philippe Talbot. Lieutenant de Verbois: Jean Teitgen. Madelon: Sarah Jouffroy. Maître Subtil: Jérôme Varnier. Guillaume: Eric Martin-Bonnet. Gertrude: Clémentine Margaine. Les Eléments chorus. Orchestre de Paris.

Whatever it takes to grasp Messager, I haven’t got it. “C’est une musique facile” - easy music – said a man in the row in front as we gathered our coats to leave. Well it might have been easy for him but, on the contrary, I find it very hard indeed to bring into focus and impossible to recall. The first two acts seemed to witter on aimlessly, with distinct Debussy undertones; in acts three and four the music had more definite shape and when the hero got worked up there was a fine aria. But otherwise it did nothing for me (and the off-beat accentuation of the antiquated libretto often got on my wick; so much for the FT critic's praise for "Messager’s extraordinary facility at putting words to music." He must have cloth ears and probably likes Debussy). As with Véronique at the Châtelet, to me it was well-made but unmemorable. Clearly I’m not cut out for what the French might call “un art tout en demi-teintes,” art that’s all half-tints (Messager premiered Pelléas, a bad omen), and a hybrid genre neither comedy nor tragedy - though absolutely French: the usual tale of casual adultery - just light-hearted fluff.

The critics seem to have been very pleased with Denis Podalydès’ production. It reminded me, however, of the one season when, fed up with four-hour Latin-American Marxist plays staged without an interval at the Théâtre National de La Colline, we decided to try the Comédie Française, where Podalydès usually hangs out. Not once, in that season, did we stay after the break, and we didn’t renew our subscriptions. It was like visiting a theatre museum, not a theatre. I’ve been back only once since, for Bob Wilson’s witty staging of Lafontaine’s Fables. This decidedly un-witty Fortunio was the kind of production in which a soldier can’t sing a note without putting a foot on a chair and leaning forward with a wry smile: totally conventional in ideas and gestures. The costumes were by Christian Lacroix but might have been anyone’s (mostly brown) designs for La Bohème and certainly hadn’t been tailored in his haute couture workshops: Jean-Sébastien Bou would have cut a much more dashing military figure in a properly-cut uniform (though in long johns and black-toed crimson socks he looked perfect).

The sets were flimsy and somewhere between plain ordinary and plain ugly. Act one was a misty, snowy courtyard, surrounded by a kind of veranda, with three puzzlingly scraggy trees and the Opéra Comique’s by now famous stage walls visible through gauzes. The bedroom was mainly a pair of narrow beds, a wardrobe, a stove and a smoking chimney. Act three involved some wooden walls and piles of logs, and for act four the bedroom was back, but this time open to the courtyard through net curtains.

The orchestre de Paris, under Langrée, was heavy-handed but the cast was absolutely perfect for this kind of work, not one weak link. If only I found it more interesting. My problem, I know, not Messager’s…

Gluck - Iphigénie en Aulide and Iphigénie en Tauride

2009-12-12T16:27:00.000+01:00

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday December 6 2009.

Conductor: Christophe Rousset. Production: Pierre Audi. Dramaturge: Klaus Bertisch. Sets: Michael Simon. Costumes: Anna Eiermann. Lighting: Jean Kalman.

En Aulide: Agamemnon: Andrew Schroeder. Clytemnestre: Charlotte Hellekant. Iphigénie: Véronique Gens. Achille: Avi Klemberg. Patrocle: Henk Neven. Calchas: Gilles Cachemaille. Arcas: Werner Van Mechelen. Diane: Violet Serena Noorduyn.

En Tauride: Iphigénie: Nadja Michael. Oreste: Stéphane Degout. Pylade: Topi Lehtipuu. Thoas: Werner Van Mechelen. Diane: Violet Serena Noorduyn.

Orchestra and chorus of La Monnaie.

Bad Gluck can be very tedious. Two in a row would be a serious trial, so I had misgivings at finding both Iphigénies scheduled together this season. But when the singing and acting are first rate we are reminded what a great composer of musical tragedy Gluck is. Topi Lehtipuu and Stéphane Degout must be today’s ideal pairing as Pylade and Oreste. Lehtipuu is, as anyone familiar with the DVD of Les Paladins knows, one of the best available high French (albeit Finnish) tenors. Degout is one of France’s best middleweight baritones. Together they sang and acted magnificently and movingly, forming a great dramatic trio with Nadja Michael. She was Medea in La Monnaie’s Warlikowski production that I sadly missed. The critics have not been too keen on her Iphigénie (in part on account of her plummy diction: not a single “s” is heard) but I admired her commitment and – when she turned it up – surprising volume for such a slight figure.

The second part of the afternoon was, therefore, gripping. The first half was less so, with a more variable cast. Avi Klemberg made an unheroic Achille, partly because the production had him so and partly because his voice was feeble. Gilles Cachemaille’s voice is now partly over the hill. I was more interested in Charlotte Hellekant’s vehement Clytemnestre, despite her weak French. The critics' choice (the audience’s too, by the sound of the applause) was Véronique Gens; her voice sounded silvery and sweet and her French was of course perfect, but from where I sat at the front of the second balcony, the stage arrangement meant it tended to get lost “downstairs.” I’ll explain…

There’s a certain gentle, reasonable, noble simplicity, or simple nobility, about Gluck that calls, I think, for simple stagings. In any case, when his works are raised to the level of Sunday’s Tauride, they hardly need staging at all. As I mentioned, the acting in Pierre Audi’s production was excellent and committed; the staging was, however, something like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut (in this case, a very good nut indeed).

Audi went to all the trouble of turning La Monnaie into a theatre in the round – a curious thing to do when, in Brussels, the opera sometimes decamps to the Royal Circus (as last season for Lucia) which is in the round anyway. The square stage, set askew, was where the pit usually is, the orchestra was on stage and there were rows of seats rising up at the rear for the chorus and part of the audience. An elaborate arrangement of scaffolding, at all angles like a game of spillikins, held up steel staircases and platforms leading out from the stage-side boxes and arched over the new stage – for Aulide bearing a “cloud” of silver mesh. In other words, a gigantic structure, swamping the action and pushing the singers well forward into the auditorium, which is why some voices didn’t quite make it up to the second balcony, as mentioned above.

The overall atmosphere was of countries at war, which is legitimate enough. And soldiers in full camouflage battledress, boots and balaclavas, though we’ve seen them often enough, can still work well in the right hands (e.g. Sellars’); but they risk being déjà vu and here were simply irrelevant, adding nothing. (Even Clytemnestre’s trained evening gown was in camouflage print, by the way, an odd touch.) In Tauride, perhaps inspired by the quirky “Turkish” chorus “Les dieux apaisent leur courroux,” the soldiers were got up like extras from a very low-budget spin-off of Mad Max: long hair, big sunglasses and Gautier kilts (Thoas was our old "friend" the corrupt and lubricious police chief). Iphigénie and her fellow pristesses wore Playtex-pink shifts, buttoning on pink housecoats and taking up axes when sacrifice was in the air. Characters climbed up and down the steel stairs, and Diane prowled slowly around whether required to by the score or not – at one stage equipped with another very déjà vu item, a single white wing strapped to her right arm and wielded hieratically.

“Trop compliqué” was something I heard more than once during the interval, and the critics seemed to agree. This was an afternoon of excellently played Gluck, far better heard (under Christophe Rousset, characteristically bouncy and energetic with some very zippy tempi) than seen.

Gounod - Mireille

2009-10-26T20:03:00.000+01:00

ONP Garnier, Wednesday October 7 2009

Conductor: Marc Minkowski. Production: Nicolas Joel. Sets: Ezio Frigerio. Costumes: Franca Squarciapino. Mireille: Inva Mula. Vincent: Charles Castronovo. Ourrias: Franck Ferrari. Ramon: Alain Vernhes. Taven: Sylvie Brunet. Vincenette: Anne-Catherine Gillet. Orchestra and chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.
Nicolas Joel's production of Mireille left me with no wish ever to see or hear the work again, so what a thankless task it must be for a perfectly decent cast to slog through it ten times without any help from the producer, and with only resounding boos on the opening night and tepid applause since as their reward. By mid-series, the orchestra played and the singers sang as if they'd long since wished they'd never got involved. The work itself needed help too if it were to succeed (Mireille ends in a mawkish orgy of Catholic Kitsch; the score, meanwhile, had me wondering if I hadn't always underrated Arthur Sullivan), and didn't get it from a staging that seemed (in the context of the change of management at the ONP, from Mortier to Joel) to be almost aggressively outdated and provincial.

On the whole, the press have panned the production but praised the cast. So Inva Mula was disappointing on Wednesday night, and as she was sipping discreetly from a stage beaker at one point, she may not have been on peak form (or she may just have needed a stiff martini to face another evening's ordeal). Mireille is supposed to be hard to sing, and she made it sound so: you could hear the revving-up and the crunching of gears. The medium was very good indeed, but the top notes were either barely-audible pianissimi or, if loud, problematic. Her being done up with braided hair and in frumpish frocks didn't help: she could have been Vincent's dowdy mother. She was, however, noticeably stronger in the last part: perhaps the martinis had by then kicked in.

Charles Castronovo made a handsome, elegant Vincent, visually and vocally, though even at Garnier his voice is not loud (and come to think of it, nobody's voice really rang out in this performance; as I said, they all seemed to be fed up). In the absence of any direction, his acting was reduced to hands in pockets or clenched fists, but we know he can act if helped; we saw that in L'Elisir d'amore, where he radiated boyish charm. So it wasn't his fault.

Sylvie Brunet was far better cast here than as Carmen at the Châtelet. Hers was probably the most interesting sound of the evening, very bronzy, great diction and no hamming things up with Azucena-like chest notes. The rest of the cast would have been perfectly adequate in a production that made more of the piece, apart from the "Passeur" boatman, who was from the classic feeble-voiced, wobbly school of bit-part singers.

Minkowski pretended still to be enthusiastic, although he must have noticed how little applause he and the unruly orchestra got before the last round. The chorus, under its new chorus-master, who came from Toulouse in Joel's luggage, was unusually ragged and off-beat: an inauspicious start to a new era?

That's the fear you get from the whole unmemorable enterprise, as you can't help seeing it as a manifesto proclaiming radical change (for the worse, so you can only think at this stage) at the ONP. OK, this is only the opening show and Joel has promised not to abuse his position by staging his own productions, so things may turn out for the good; we have to wait and see. And a team like Ezio Frigerio and Franca Squarciapino are really not radical change at all, more a return to the distant past: Frigerio was already the set designer for Paris's near-legendary Strehler production of Le Nozze, which must have premiered in the 70s I guess. But as I think we all know, there's no way to bring back a golden age (supposing there really was one), and "taking the same and starting again," as the French call it, is no way to see in a new one.

Frigerio's sets were simple and, I use the word again, unmemorable: a field of wheat; the same field plus a waggon decorated with flowers; a long provençal farmouse behind a hillock; a plastic river in the moonlight; a stone wall; a flight of steps up to a cross on a column. The characters were all dressed (and the set was lit) for Millet's Angelus. The choreography of the farandole was absurdly amateurish. Taven brandishing her twisted stick as the curtains closed was Met-standard corny. The boatman scene by the river (I could hardly believe my eyes when dry-ice "smoke" appeared in twin streams from the sides) ended in ridicule as the boat sank too fast into the stage. Nobody moved to help the dying Mireille as she climbed the stone steps on her knees to embrace the column.

"Limoges 1930" said my elderly neighbour, who would know. She couldn't get over the farandole, imitating it in the foyer. I don't know why my friends decided to stay to the bitter end. I'd gladly have left earlier. A very dull start to a new season under new management, but as I just said, we have to wait and see. Die tote Stadt is next, so there may be light on the horizon...

Korngold - Die tote Stadt

2009-10-26T19:54:00.000+01:00

ONP Paris - Thursday October 22 2009

Conductor: Pinchas Steinberg. Production: Willy Decker. Sets and costumes: Wolfgang Gussmann. Lighting: Wolfgang Goebbel. Paul: Robert Dean Smith. Marietta: Ricarda Merbeth. Frank/Fritz: Stéphane Degout. Brigitta: Doris Lamprecht. Juliette: Elisa Cenni. Lucienne: Letitia Singleton. Victorin: Alain Gabriel. Graf Albert: Alexander Kravets. Orchestra and chorus of the Opéra National de Paris. Maîtrise des Hauts-de-Seine⁄children’s chorus of the Opéra National de Paris. Coproduction with the Vienna Staatsoper and the Salzburg Festival.

It’s a rare enough treat for those who like Die tote Stadt to have it staged at all. And it’s a wonder any leading couple can be found to sing it, let alone give us a stunning third act performance like Thursday night’s. These facts, plus near-universal praise in the press (apart from one French sourpuss dubbing it a mere “curiosity for the curious”) have made me dither over writing it up, not wanting to seem ungrateful or nit-picking by admitting I was still left wanting more: “Sur ma faim,” as they say here.

However, having discussed it with friends and heard the live broadcast, I’ve concluded that the Bastille’s peculiar acoustics are probably mostly to blame. To cut a long story short, for several years I always had the same seats, on the front row of one of the projecting side-sections of the second balcony. This year, unexplained chaos at the box office has meant that, despite being a long-standing subscriber and despite asking for the most expensive tickets for all performances, we have ended up with a mixed bag of seats in various categories, not even at the dates we wanted. As a result, on Thursday evening we were, for the first time, in the very middle of the first balcony meaning, at the Bastille, further from the stage than in the side sections, which jut forward. And in case you didn’t know, acoustics at the Bastille are patchy and can play odd tricks. (Yes, that was the short story.) So…

Robert Dean Smith is not the clarion or bull-in-a-china-shop kind of Heldentenor. His is a softer, grainier timbre, though still powerful enough (what fool dismissed him as a “tenorino” on one of the French opera fora?), more human and better-suited to Paul’s troubled persona. He navigated his way through this crippling role, not only without a wrong note but with moving, musical phrasing thrown in. Ricarda Merbeth, meanwhile, was perhaps an even more remarkable Marie, making the highest notes in the score sound (and resound) easy. Some critics mentioned a worrying wobble. It wasn’t in evidence on Thursday evening - and I might urge them, when they then say they preferred Angela Denoke, to listen to the latter’s Salzburg recording, though it’s true Denoke is a more natural actress and, especially, dancer. The last act was, as I said above, stunning. However, grateful though I am for that, they (understandably, I freely admit) held their voices back somewhat during the whole of act one and half of act two and, as a result, from these new seats sounded disappointingly distant – a fact not helped by the staging (see below). It was only when they started to let their hair down in the second half of act two that I realised the evening wouldn’t be a washout after all.

Stéphane Degout was, as you might expect, a super Frank/Fritz and the rest of the cast was just fine.

Now, the orchestra. The press have tended to praise Pinchas Steinberg for avoiding Schmaltz. To me, the performance seemed to take the score note-by-note and lack overall “sweep,” if that makes any sense. It didn’t sound joined up, and I sat there thinking “I must get to see this in Vienna one day and hear the VPO in the Staatsoper acoustics.” In other words, I could have done with at least a touch of that missing Schmaltz. I could also, as is often the case (so maybe it’s just an obsession of mine) have done with a bit more drive (something the singers might have been grateful for too: the slow tempi must have made their breathing that much harder). But on the radio the orchestra sounded wonderful, throwing up a mass of gorgeous detail in the potentially overblown score. So again, I now put it down to the new seats.

The production has been around and is in rep in Vienna, so many of you will have at least seen photos of it – and very photogenic it is. On the Bastille’s huge stage it was framed in black to make a smaller proscenium, set so far back from the pit that I assumed Marietta’s pals’ antics and the religious parade would take place in front, on the apron. They didn’t, but the effect was to distance the singers even more than usual (the Bastille auditorium is vast) from the audience.

The main set was a large, gloomy, ugly room in Paul’s house: brown parquet floor; two brown club armchairs (much climbed-upon as the action progressed, especially by Marietta, who tended to perch on the arms); white ceiling with mouldings; black walls with some scribbling near the ceiling (couldn’t see what it was about); big, double doors to the left; and one large and many small canvases of a particularly unattractive, doe-eyed Marie (though not as blatantly unattractive as the giant, porcine Madonna that used to hover over Paris’s Tosca). The atmosphere generated – authentically Belgian - brought to mind the surrealists Magritte and (worse still) Paul Delvaux, definitely one of my least favourite painters.

So I thought we were in for a visually grim evening, but once Paul started having his visions things perked up: the room fell apart to reveal various livelier novelties at the rear: a smaller version of the same room for his vision of Marie; a cluster of white-robed beguines bearing a white cross and a crucified Doris Lamprecht (that was dangerously close to laughable); dancing houses with lit windows for the scene where he’s supposed to be on the quayside (it was clever making everything come to him rather than the other way round, meaning he had his visions without ever leaving his room); Marietta’s troupe in all-white commedia dell’arte costumes; the Fellini-esque religious procession.

The acting seemed to me a touch stiff, but only a touch, and Ricarda Merbeth isn’t really built for twirling gaily round like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music: she's more like Deborah Polaski as Elektra. The production didn’t knock my socks off, but it handled the themes well and I wouldn’t mind, as I said, seeing it again in Vienna and having it on DVD. In fact, musically (I say this now having heard the radio broadcast) it might just be the best recent version available.

Händel - Semele

2009-09-30T16:25:00.000+02:00

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday September 27 2009

Conductor: Christophe Rousset. Production and sets: Zhang Huan. Costumes: Han Feng. Lighting: Wolfgang Göbbel. Jupiter: Jeremy Ovenden. Cadmus, King of Thebes/Priest: Nathan Berg. Semele, Daughter of Cadmus: Ying Huang. Juno/Ino, Sister of Semele: Ning Liang. Athamas, a Prince of Boeotia: David Hansen. Somnus: Kurt Gysen. Iris: Sarah Tynan. Les Talens Lyriques. Chorus of La Monnaie.

Familiarity is supposed to breed contempt, but I wonder if, conversely, unfamiliarity breeds awe. Quite often when "controversial" artists from other media are brought in to direct opera while knowing nothing about it, the result is surprisingly tame. Such was the case with this Brussels production of Semele by Zhang Huan: though he’s known for nudity and bestiality and dressing up in raw meat, once you accepted that it was set in China his staging was remarkably conventional.

As usual these days, it required some reading up beforehand. Zhang bought a Ming temple from a widow whose husband was executed by firing squad after (if I understood correctly) murdering her lover. As it happens, in the temple he (Zhang) found a diary chronicling the husband’s jealousy and drunkenness. It occurred to him that this made the temple an apt setting for Semele, and that if he shipped it lock, stock and barrel (not to mention its owner, the widow, who made several appearances sweeping the stage) to Brussels, the Qi that came with it would lend a special urgency to the production.

Well, it certainly looked gorgeous in the excellent lighting, but as the Sunday Times reviewer rightly concluded (and again, as is often the case when artists are asked to direct): “The visual ideas, while beautiful to look at, [were] undermined by minimal direction and clumsy execution.“

Only occasionally were we reminded that Zhang is a contemporary artist. During the overture we watched a black and white documentary, subtitled in English, about the temple, the family that lived in it and its dismantling and reconstruction in Zhang’s studio in Shanghai. The final still shot gave way to the real thing, with its beams and rafters bare to leave sightlines clear and allow objects to be lifted in and out.

The ancient temple was, understandably, the only set. A bronze bell came down for the opening temple scene and burst into flames not quite as required by the libretto. Jupiter and Semele’s Citheron love-nest saw it overgrown with bamboo for the chorus to fornicate in when not singing. Somnus snoozed on a vast, red, flowery quilt askew on the roof, dreaming of the naked Chinese girl beside him and doubled up by a slowly unfolding inflatable giant. The mirror scene was spectacular: a wall of mirror filled the proscenium from top to bottom and side to side, reflecting La Monnaie’s gaudy, gilded auditorium back at the audience.

The costumes, a mix of Ming-period western with ballooning breeches and ruffs (as in the wonderful Japanese screens in Lisbon’s fine arts museum) and colourful Chinese silks and headdresses, were sumptuous. There were some elements of Chinese theatre: a pantomime horse in act one, a priapic pantomime donkey in the fornication scene, and a long, white dragon, inexpertly handled by European technicans and breathing incense smoke, in whose coils Semele anticlimactically expired. Sumo wrestlers made an incongruous and baffling appearance at one point. A Mongolian singer made another at another. And there was a Mongolian recital out on the square, under a three-legged, copper Buddha statue by Zhang, during the interval. The opera ended with Semele’s death and the chorus “Oh, terror,” followed by an odd humming chorus of the Internationale socialist hymn and, finally, the sound of rain as a series of Zhang’s ash portraits were washed away on video.

The story was not totally out of place in this setting, but I felt all the way through that it would have been better to find an experienced director willing to work in partnership with Zhang to make the singers act and the ideas work (“minimal direction and clumsy execution” is spot-on).

I also agree with most of the Sunday Times reviewer’s take on the performance.

“What might have been an outstanding musical performance - led by Christophe Rousset, one of the world’s outstanding Handelians, and his wonderful period band, Les Talens Lyriques - was compromised by some B-list casting. Ning Liang, one of the most experienced classical singers from China, with a career in the West of more than 25 years behind her, now struggles with the range and bravura of Juno’s fulminations…”

Yes. Hard to imagine her singing Octavian in New York.

“… and the Athamas of the young Australian countertenor David Hansen was barely audible in this medium-sized house.”

Barely audible, yes, but he would have been very good indeed in a smaller place. The old lady next to me also found him strikingly cute, though he was clearly not at ease in tights.

“As Jupiter, the British tenor Jeremy Ovenden sang a stylish, but tonally unalluring, ‘Where E’er You Walk…”

Mmm... I didn't find it all that unalluring; I was glad to hear someone singing relatively well.

“Another Brit, Sarah Tynan, scored a personal triumph with her bright-toned, sparky Iris.”

OK.

“Ying Huang, the Semele, compensated for some less than dazzling coloratura flourishes…”

Yes, every long run on the word “alarm” in “No, no, I’ll take no less” was marred by a deep breath in the middle.

“… with excellent diction - Chinese-trained, she now lives in New York - and much charm.”

Neither of those struck me I’m afraid. With all due respect, Ms Ying was not up to singing Semele on the Brussels stage. And an alto who makes a hash of “Iris, hence away” is about as unnecessary a piece of casting as an Eboli who makes one of “O Don fatale.” So this was, as the reviewer (who might also have mentioned Nathan Berg’s comfortably idiomatic contribution) also wrote, from the musical point of view, Rousset’s Semele.

Szymanowski - King Roger

2009-06-27T19:17:00.000+02:00

ONP Paris Bastille - Thursday June 25 2009

Conductor : Kazushi Ono. Production : Krzysztof Warlikowski. Sets and costumes : Malgorzata Szczesniak. Video design : Denis Guéguin. Lighting : Felice Ross. King Roger II : Scott Hendricks. Roxana : Margarita de Arellano. Edrisi : Stefan Margita. Shepherd : Eric Cutler. Archbishop : Wojtek Smilek. Abbess : Jadwiga Rappe. Orchestra and chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Some people may find Bruckner’s symphonies or Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels all much of a muchness, but if you’re hooked, you’re hooked and can never get too much of the same. A friend of mine described Warlikowski’s latest Bastille production as “very lazy recycling” and for all I know what seems clever about it may only be pseudo-intellectual. Maybe the king is in the altogether, in both senses; maybe I’m just a sucker for superficial gloss. But to me this was another momentous evening’s theatre.

It isn’t even as if I “got” everything. I still haven’t worked out why a strikingly handsome young man in boxer shorts was injected at the start, making the king vomit, and dragged off; and why, at the end of the work, Roger took his place, in the same white shorts, to be injected in turn by Edrisi (though I have ideas). Or why there was a second Roxana floating dead in the tanks in front of the swimming pool throughout. Nor, never having taken any interest in cinema, was I able to pick up references others tell me were to Warhol/Morrissey films or Pasolini’s Theorem. But with Warlikoswki you expect layers and you expect to be puzzled, and I was satisfied enough to suppose that his staging (a) was in part – though by no means only - about a homosexual awakening and (b) took a sardonic swipe at various illusory utopias: religion, drugs, today’s obsession with physical beauty and staving off old age, Disney…

Visually it was at times magnificent. The single set was simple enough: a gymnasium-like space with wall-bars against walls that changed colour with the lighting, and dark, polished parquet. At the rear, a fairground-type archway with a neon sunburst and the word “sun” picked out in lights, waiting for the finale scene. The parquet could slide open, slowly broadening the space, and closed over a blue swimming pool. Act 1 was especially lavish, with the court men in dinner suits and the ladies marvellous, made-up harridans in various shades of gold lame and big, Mrs Thatcher wigs (my neighbour, not being British, thought of Nancy Reagan instead). They were filmed in real time by a hand-held camera: grotesque close-ups of their snarling features were projected on a giant gauze as the action took place behind and in front of it.

At the start, the King and Roxana were in their underwear, getting dressed – possibly after sex - for the ceremony. The shepherd was a sort of camp hippy with Michael Jackson hair and red-varnished fingernails (but had handsome doubles in white imitating his every move among the crowd). The bacchanalia was choreographed as an aquatic gym session for the very old. And what got some people’s goat was that, at the end, the shepherd emerged, like Michael Jackson (whose demise we were to hear of the next morning) with a gang of children in Mickey Mouse heads and little black velvet suits; he too had a mouse-head (which muffled his singing rather) and big, spangled Minnie Mouse shoes. As my annoyed friend put it this was “the extravagant tangent [Warlikowski] went off on, a sort of didactic exposure of the Shepherd’s worthless philosophy as no more than a lead-in to US commercial values.” Yes, I get the point. But it was so well acted and lit and sung… and as one critic put it, you may not understand everything, it may not all make sense, but Warlikowski has a gift, even so, for creating a complex, uneasy atmosphere that somehow works. At any rate, it works for me.

Unless I’m mistaken, I didn’t hear Krol Roger in concert at the Châtelet some years back, so this was my first encounter with the sumptuous score. I realise it’s always dangerous, when hearing pieces for the first time, to seek comparisons as later, when you know the composer better, he will sound like no-one but himself. But as the shepherd’s part calls for a high and elegiac tenor, I couldn’t help thinking of Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg, with occasional hints of Ravel, Stravinsky’s Firebird, and even (though not enough to ruin the whole evening) Vaughan-Williams.

We had a strong cast of men. Indeed, they all made themselves heard over the row from the pit, and I doubt they could have been better. Eric Cutler soared radiantly through the difficult part, with remarkable ease; Scott Hendricks was a very powerful high baritone; and Stefan Margita was Stefan Margita, which is perfectly fine by me. Unfortunately (this is understudy month in Paris) the scheduled soprano dropped out, sick; her stand-in seemed to be doing a sterling job as far as we could hear, but her efforts, however fruitful they may have been, remained mostly inaudible in the Bastille’s vast spaces. Kazushi Ono also did a great job with the ONP orchestra, who stayed in the pit for the bows at the end, a sign they got on with the conductor for once.

If this comes out on video (the TV production was, after all, by Bel Air) then we’ll get Mariusz Kwiecien and Olga Pasichnyk, so all will be well and, having had a preview on Internet, I’ll buy it, for sure. “Eurotrash”-haters, however, should steer clear.

Bizet - Carmen

2009-06-21T15:59:00.000+02:00

Opéra Comique, Paris, Saturday June 20 2009

Conductor: Sir John Eliot Gardiner. Production: Adrian Noble. Sets & Costumes: Mark Thompson. Lighting: Jean Kalman. Carmen: Anna Caterina Antonacci. Don José: ???????*. Micaëla: Anne-Catherine Gillet. Escamillo: Nicolas Cavallier. Le Dancaïre: Françis Dudziak. Le Remendado: Vincent Ordonneau. Zuniga: Matthew Brook. Moralès: Riccardo Novaro. Frasquita: Virginie Pochon. Mercédès: Annie Gill / Louise Innes. Lillas Pastia: Simon Davies. Un guide: Lawrence Wallington. The Monteverdi Choir. Hauts-de-Seine children's choir. Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.

For Le Monde, “Obviously Anna Caterina Antonacci steals the show, embodying a Carmen of icy fire, with impeccable diction and sovereign musicality, ardent but never carried away by her passions. Her vocal projection enables her to murmur what so many of her fellow-singers hammer out.” According to Webthea, “She combines her beauty, sensuality and acting strengths with impeccable diction and the charm of a slight Italian accent, flowing projection and low notes that pierce hearts.” For ConcertClassic.com, “Daughter of the people, sensual and provocative as Sofia Loren or Gina Lollobrigida, with her generous décolleté, wasp waist and flowing hair, Anna Caterina Antonacci is the most sumptuous of Carmens.” For the FT, “She is quite simply extraordinary in her handling of text and song, pulling off subtle inflexions that would be lost in a larger house, but she is also a sexy stage animal with the physical magnetism to explain her appeal.” And as a friend of mine put it in a nutshell: “She just waltzed through the part and that was what was so enjoyable.”

Not finding words to describe Antonacci in the part, I decided, as you see, to borrow other people’s. She was astonishingly at ease, as intelligent and nuanced as Berganza but more animal (not difficult, admittedly) and more natural by miles. Ars est celare artem, so we’re told, and here there was simply no sign of acting. Remarkable, and certainly the best Carmen I’ve ever seen and heard. But she was not the only star of the show…

Gardiner and his revolutionary orchestra did nearly as much for Bizet as for Berlioz, bringing vim and vigour, bite, balance and detail, “dusting off” the score as many reviewers put it and giving us, among other things, a rip-roaring overture and a prelude to act 4 for the annals. The Monteverdi Choir did much the same for the choral parts. As the FT critic, again, put it: “[They] may act like undergraduates on a gap year in Seville” – they were clearly enjoying the romp – “but I doubt if the chorus in Carmen has ever sounded so punchy, clean-cut and articulated.” Again, a wealth of previously unnoticed details and nuance emerged to surprise us.

Then there was the tenor. The one originally scheduled dropped out, practically at the last minute if the announcement was to be believed, and in stepped a young Brazilian. I wouldn’t say that, out of context, he was a star, but after all you always root for the stand-in, especially if he’s young and it’s his big break. He put in a more-than-creditable performance, definitely better than the José I heard in Sydney, and more than that, a genuinely touching flower aria. He had all the notes, falsetto or not, as needed, a feat not guaranteed in this tricky role, and also turned out to be quite an impassioned actor. So at the end he got nearly as warm a reception as Antonacci. Now I just have to find out who he was*.

Nicolas Cavallier was a rough-hewn sort of Escamillo, and Anne-Catherine Gillet a silvery, tremulous Micaëla with a lot more volume than from her timbre, you’d expect and a stiff, protestant sort of stage presence. The rest of the cast were as good as they ought to be – and the children’s chorus slightly better than usual.

Some reviews have said the production aimed to avoid cliché. They must have meant the single, ugly set: our, by now, old friend the bare Opéra Comique stage, and in it a sort of circular ramp on radial concrete piers, reminiscent to me of the old Fiat factory at Lingotto in Turin, in looks part broken amphitheatre, part multi-storey car park. In act one there was a kind of oval cistern in the floor from which the cigarette girls (not John the Baptist) emerged; in act two, oriental carpets and Moroccan lanterns; in act three, ladders and a faintly ridiculous giant moon; in act four, wooden fences between the piers and red and yellow banners hanging down. No horses, donkeys or chickens. But the ladies of the chorus spread their legs, lifted their skirts and fanned themselves to cool off as usual: clichés if ever I saw them; and there were some pretty corny theatrical ideas like dropping the (mainly golden, sometimes red) lights at key moments to leave only a spot on the soloist, or slow-motion crowd movements during orchestral passages. The costumes were mostly ill-fitting, though Carmen’s Act 4 Goya-like dress and bolero, in black and gold brocades, made up in the end for the others. It was, to me (and others) a disappointingly conventional show for one blessed with such a great Carmen and such sounds from orchestra and chorus.

*Got him, thanks to the friend quoted above: "The tenor Fabiano Cordeiro was born in Brazil. He first discovered an interest in music through buying a CD of Joan Sutherland and Carlo Bergonzi's La Traviata at a car boot sale."
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Mozart - Le Nozze di Figaro

2009-06-20T15:36:00.000+02:00

La Monnaie, Brussels, Sunday June 14 2009

Conductor: Jérémie Rhorer. Production: Christof Loy (reprise by Dagmar Pischel). Sets and costumes: Herbert Murauer. Conte Almaviva: Stéphane Degout. Contessa: Andrea Rost. Susanna: Ingela Bohlin. Figaro: Alex Esposito. Cherubino: Sophie Marilley. Marcellina: Helen Field. Bartolo: Jan-Hendrik Rootering. Don Basilio: John Graham-Hall. Don Curzio: Enrico Casari. Antonio: Frédéric Caton. Barbarina: Fflur Wyn. La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra and Chorus.

Too often I forget the advice of an old friend in the UK: expect nothing and you’ll never be disappointed.

I’d been looking forward to this Sunday. One of our regular co-subscribers was off at a christening or some such nonsense, so it was a chance to show Brussels and La Monnaie to someone else, on what was supposed to be a warm, sunny day. On paper the cast of Le Nozze looked alright. Christoph Loy can be an interesting director. In the end, however, it was mostly what the French call “un jour sans” – an off day.

Not that we missed the train or even, despite a handful of union protesters letting off sirens at the Gare du Nord (don’t ask me why; nothing better to do on a Sunday I imagine) that it was cancelled or delayed. But roughly at the Belgian border it started to rain - something Google, at 8 a.m., hadn’t anticipated. We hadn’t brought umbrellas (wimpish things I hate anyway), in Brussels the rain was quite heavy, and seeing the excellent summer weather in Paris our guest had rashly put on white espadrilles (more wimpish things I hate, though I imagine wiry Mediterranean peasants would deny the wimpishness). So we had to skip the sights, sounds and smells (hot dogs mostly) of the bazaar-like Sunday market outside the station and take a taxi to the centre. There, after picking up some gingerbread at Dandoy's, it was too wet to linger on the famous square, so we ducked into the arcades for lunch.

I suppose if we ate too much it was our fault. Then it was hot and stuffy at the Métropole over coffee, and of course it was hot and stuffy up in the gods at La Monnaie. But a zippy Nozze (Jacobs-style) in an exciting production (the posters looked promising) might have perked us up. No way. It was soon clear that (a) Jérémie Rhorer is no René Jacobs and (b) as is often the case these days (I wonder why) the posters bore no relation to the staging, which was simply uninteresting. A dull set: broken parquet and three doors. Dull lighting and dusty-looking props. Ill-fitting, unflattering costumes (why did the countess wear red high heels with an apricot satin slip and robe? Why didn't the count's clothes fit better?). The direction (this production is over ten years old; I don’t think Loy was there in person to revive it) emptied the work of its nobility and reduced the acting to something approaching boulevard farce, which Le Nozze is not. The singers worked hard at it, but didn’t seem convinced or convincing. To be honest, more than one professional critic has proclaimed it was a theatrical triumph, but I don’t see why.

The men sang best – some of them at any rate. But even the usually excellent Stéphane Degout seemed miscast as the count: too youthful and lacking in authority, vocally and dramatically. Beside him, Andrea Rost looked almost matronly. She had a far bigger voice than the rest of the cast (“a sore thumb” were words that came to mind) with an unpleasantly tart edge to it. La Libre Belgique perhaps went too far in saying Helen Field had “no more voice at all,” but it certainly was wobbly. This may be par for the course with Marcellinas, but was disconcerting when you read in the programme notes that she’s a Salome specialist. Alex Esposito had a certain Maurizio-Benigni-like, arm-waving charm as Figaro. The rest of the cast was unexciting, apart from the real star of the show: John Graham-Hall, this season’s Aschenbach, back as Don Basilio. But of course, a luxury Don Basilio doesn’t rescue a dull Nozze.

So at the interval we trooped off to the place des Sablons for a drink on a café terrace. It rained.

Janacek - Vec Makropoulos

2009-05-08T08:28:00.000+02:00

ONP Bastille, Thursday May 7 2009

Conductor: Tomas Hanus. Production: Krzysztof Warlikowski. Sets and costumes Malgorzata Szczesniak. Emilia Marty: Angela Denoke. Albert Gregor: Charles Workman. Jaroslav Prus: Vincent Le Texier. Vítek: David Kuebler. Krista: Karine Deshayes. Janek : Ales Briscein. Kolenaty: Wayne Tigges. Hauk-Sendorf: Ryland Davies. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Same excellent, powerful production as in 2007, same cast except Wayne Tigges as Kolenaty (and very good he was), and Angela Denoke the best I've ever seen and heard her. She really lives the part. The orchestra remains unruly in Janacek, David Kuebler's voice is now pretty much shot and Charles Workman can't hit the killer top notes at all any more, but Vincent Le Texier and, especially, Karine Deshayes were better than ever. Bastille about one quarter full: madness, but perhaps those who were there really wanted to be: nobody coughed. Will this, one of my favourite productions of all time, ever come out on DVD?

Chabrier - Le Roi Mal...

2009-05-03T09:29:00.000+02:00

Opéra Comique, Paris, Wednesday April 29 2009

Conductor: William Lacey. Production & costumes: Laurent Pelly. Henri de Valois, roi de Pologne : Jean-Sébastien Bou. Minka : Magali Léger. Le duc de Fritelli Franck Leguérinel. Alexina, duchesse de Fritelli : Sophie Marin-Degor. Le comte de Nangis : Gordon Gietz. Laski, grand palatin : Nabil Suliman. Chorus of the Opéra national de Lyon. Orchestre de Paris.

I was really enjoying Laurent Pelly’s production of Le Roi Malgré Lui the other night. Pelly’s a favourite of mine – for his Offenbachs, for his Platée… - and here he was at his best: fast, funny and finely-tuned, every step and gesture, every smile and frown and grimace in place. The basic idea wasn’t a new one: the curtain rose to reveal the brickwork and steel doors of the Opéra Comique’s bare stage, familiar already from the recent Zoroastre; and cast, stagehands and chorus arrived for a rehearsal to find, to their amazement, a full house waiting to watch. The period was that of the opera’s premiere (in the same theatre), around 1890, and the dress was a wonderful mixture of mufti and stage costumes: doublet and bowler hat, top hat and breastplate, strait-laced Victorian bodice and medieval helmet. The gags (including a lot of dashing around with scenery by stagehands in grey coats) were clever, not tacky.

Chabrier’s score was, to me, well-made but unmemorable; a friend finds the pointers to Pelléas “fascinating,” but citing Pelléas is no way to get me excited. He also found the conducting heavy-handed, but there’s always a risk that French music will come across limp-wristed, so I was quite happy with the chunky sound coming from the pit. The singers were young and had acceptable, if lightweight, operetta voices, and the texts were suprisingly good. And maybe I was in an indulgent mood, glad to see such a clever production and a new work at the same time.

But the person I went with was tired and irritable and declared, at the end of act one, that the whole affair was “chiant” – literally “shitting,” but French for a deadly bore. So we left for an early dinner. All I can do is hope it will come back another season, in which case I’ll go alone, or come out on DVD, in which case I’ll buy it.

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