Prokofiev: Betrothal in a Monastery

Scottish Opera, 20th January 2012, Kelvin Holdsworth

Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery is seldom staged in this country. This production by Scottish Opera in collaboration with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland worked reasonably well as a showcase for the singing talents of those on stage. However, no persuasive case was made for the piece itself and the staging was sloppy and careless from the outset.

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Mozart: Don Giovanni

The Royal Opera, 21st January 2012, Carla Finesilver

First impressions are important. As the first few seconds – or so we are informed – of a job interview are vital, despite the main body of questioning occurring later, vital also are the first few minutes of an opera’s overture in setting the tone for the drama to come. Unfortunately the people sitting behind me considered their conversation more important than Mozart’s quietly brilliant shifting of harmonies and timbres around traditionally melancholic D minor, already prefiguring themes of death and social destabilisation. There being no time to point out what they were missing, a sharp instruction to desist had to suffice. I hope they then turned their attention to the music and were able to gain some enjoyment from the superb and perfectly controlled dynamic contrasts, almost dizzying in the passage of climbing scales, and the machine-level precision of ensemble playing in terms of timing, intonation and balancing of chords. Clarity and precision are an absolute must for Mozart, and throughout the performance the orchestra’s level was consistently very high indeed; however, conductor Constantinos Carydis carried machinelike precision to the extent of being somewhat robotic in his tempi, with little sense of long-line continuity, and unwilling to accommodate rubato from the singers. Still, perhaps this was a first-night effect and subsequent performances will have greater flow and flexibility.

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Rossini: Il viaggio a Reims

Teatro Comunale di Firenze, 18th January 2012, Nicola Lischi

Listening to Il viaggio a Reims, how can one help wondering: but whatever kind of king could there have been, a king who had a thing like this specially composed for his coronation?  To what kind of throne in what kind of musical-comedy kingdom could have acceded a king who, for his own glorification, chose to have performed such a circus in sound, such a musical joke, such a theatrical absurdity? Were there no longer any sovereigns like Leopold II of Bohemia, who for his own coronation festivities succeeded in engaging Mozart, and persuaded him to write in the style of decades ago, going back so far as to revive Metastasio?  That was a coronation opera if ever there was one.

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Handel: Giulio Cesare

Opera North, 14th January 2012, Faye Courtney

It’s been more than ten years since Opera North last staged a Handel opera, so this intelligent and attractive new production of Giulio Cesare directed by Tim Albery was long overdue but ultimately proved worth the wait.  Boasting a strong cast led by Sarah Tynan’s dazzling Cleopatra there was certainly a great deal to please Handel devotees and general opera-goers alike, although baroque purists will understandably be disappointed that nearly a whole hour of music has been cut from one of Handel’s greatest and most glorious scores.

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WNO announces 2012-14 season

Welsh National Opera announced details of their 2012-2014 seasons at a press conference today, where new Chief Executive and Artistic DirectorDavid Pountney unveiled plans including eight ambitious new productions and emphasised “the importance of risk taking and adventure, in spite of the economic challenges lying ahead”.

Wagner fans will be treated to a new production ofLohengrin to celebrate the bi-centenary of the composer’s birth while bel canto enthusiasts have a Donizetti trilogy to look forward to in autumn 2013 with three new productions of the Tudor operasAnna Bolena, Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux.

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Dvorak: Rusalka (Blu-ray)

Mark Pullinger

Fairy tales usually have dark undercurrents – witches, wolves and wicked stepmothers destined to give children sleepless nights before eventually arriving at a Happily Ever After. There’s no happy ending to Rusalka, but the concept which director Martin Kušej has created is nightmarish in a way Dvorak wouldn’t have anticipated at all and will divide viewers of this 2010 production from the Bavarian State Opera. It is an opera ripe for reinterpretation; David Pountney’s Victorian nursery setting for English National Opera, a Freudian dreamscape exploring an adolescent Rusalka’s sexual awakening, works well, while Robert Carsen’s mirror imagery in Paris (with Renée Fleming in the title role) reflects the duality of Rusalka’s two worlds. I have nothing against updated relocations as long as they respect the composers’ intentions. With this in mind, I was less than enthusiastic to discover that Kušej turns the Water Goblin into a Josef Fritzl figure, who keeps Rusalka and her sisters trapped in a waterlogged basement while subjecting them to systematic sexual abuse.

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Verdi: La traviata

The Royal Opera, 2nd January 2012, Sebastian Petit

Only the second day of the New Year and we were back for the third cast of the Royal Opera’s umpteenth revival of Richard Eyre’s La Traviata. If ever a production earned its money back then it is this reliable showcase. And it is no bad thing for a large house to have this sort of version of the regular warhorses which can happily accommodate portrayals as varied as Gheorghiu, Fleming and Netrebko (although not the latter later this month apparently!). This particular revival was wildly uneven in quality, ranging from an uninvolved and musically trepidatious first act, through an up and down middle act to a last act which stood comparison with the finest of my experience and eclipsed most of them.

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Netrebko pens Traviata sicknote!

Anna Netrebko's two scheduled performances in The Royal Opera's January leg of its La Traviata marathon have been cancelled due to surgery to alleviate pain in her foot. The news has yet to be confirmed by the Royal Opera House, but have been posted on Netrebko's facebook page. She has also cancelled a number of January concerts in Germany with Erwin Schrott (3rd, 6th, 9th). The cancellation of her Traviata dates will be particularly keenly felt given that she missed three of her 2008 performances as Violetta due to a bronchial condition. Ironically, Ermonela Jaho, who stepped in to save the show in 2008, is the Violetta for most of the run and is likely to plug the dates for the ROH on the 17th and 20th. They were Netrebko's only scheduled Covent Garden performances this season.

The German concert dates have been rescheduled.

A Knight at the Opera

Congratulations to Antonio Pappano, music director of The Royal Opera, who was awarded a knighthood for services to music in the 2012 New Year Honours list. Pappano, who celebrated his 52nd birthday yesterday (30th December), has been at the helm at Covent Garden since the 2002-3 season and is also music director of the Orchestra dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome. He has featured on BBC television during recent years, explaining the world of opera to a wider public.t;/span>

Verdi: Rigoletto

Teatro di Verdi, Pisa, 16th December 2011, Nicola Lischi

One year after its debut in Novara, and subsequent revivals in Bergamo, Sassari and Lucca, Ivan Stefanutti’s production of Rigoletto has finally reached the Teatro Verdi of Pisa. It makes sense in this period of economic trouble for opera companies to share productions, particularly if they can guarantee a certain level of professionalism. Mr. Stefanutti’s mise-en-scène, albeit not flawless, provides food for thought within a basically traditional framework. Frame is actually the keyword. Much of the story takes place inside a highly decorated, deliberately garish Baroque giant frame that, while enclosing all the turpitudes of the plot, highlights and magnifies them.

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Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

The Royal Opera, 19th December 2011, Stephen Jay-Taylor

Graham Vick wasn’t on hand to supervise this, the fourth revival of his staging first seen in 1993. It was left to Elaine Kidd, who “appears by kind permission of Scottish Opera”, to supervise matters theatrical. Without ever managing to suggest any great level of penetrating insight into either character or motivation, she at least gave a well-drilled if somewhat tired-looking account of this very strange and unpleasantly designed show. Richard Hudson’s sets amount to little more than a variably raked wooden floor, a vilely-coloured, pus-green false prosceniumrepoussoir some twelve feet upstage of the real one which effectively reduces the stage width by a good fifteen feet, and a selection of plain back cloths, with the same dinky tree doing duty for both Act II’s Flieder (a Lilac, not an Elder as translated here) and Act III’s Festwiese, plus a clutch of miniature buildings, including the cathedral, simply carried on to denote the Nuremberg skyline. The fact that the only scenic interest is all located way upstage, beyond the false proscenium - whose vertical sides double as the walls to Sachs’ and Pogner’s houses in II and Sachs’s “hut” in III, which nonsensically is twice the width of the street scene in the preceding act – means that tracts of the opera play out in a kind of concert limbo down at the front, with the all the voices bouncing off the steeply-raked floor loud and clear, but very harshly.

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Renée Fleming: Strauss - Vier Letzte Lieder

Royal Festival Hall, 14th December 2011, Stephen Jay-Taylor

Christoph Eschenbach seems long-since to have abandoned his once-glittering career as a pianist, and to have settled into the routine of international Maestro-for-hire, as both Barenboim and Ashkenazy have done before him (though both the latter keep a rather more active involvement in things pianistic). His tenure at the Philadelphia Orchestra – now technically in receivership, though revving up for resurrection under Nézet-Séguin – ended both prematurely and acrimoniously a few years back. But Eschenbach’s relationship with the London Philharmonic Orchestra seems an unruffled business, the German Maestro duly reappearing season after season in what one might style core Austro-German repertory, and probably filling the gap left in the schedules by the no-less acrimonious parting of the ways which Kurt Masur’s exit from the orchestra left in its wake. Clearly, he is a great favourite with Renée Fleming, particularly in the Strauss repertory in general, and the Four Last Songs in particular: indeed her first recording of the songs was made under him during his tenure at the Houston Symphony some twelve years ago.

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Gounod: Faust

The Metropolitan Opera, New York, 10th December 2011, Mark Pullinger

‘Whenever science makes a discovery, the devil grabs it while the angels are debating the best way to use it.’ Turn the scientist into Faust – his field of study nuclear physics – the devil into a dapper, white-suited gent and the angels into lab-coated technicians with clipboards and you have the basis of Des McAnuff’s updating of Gounod’s Faust. Nobody was hugely surprised that English National Opera’s recent Eugene Onegin played on the safe side, seeing that it’s destined for the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, New York. Yet this controversial production of Faust, traditionally seen as something of a sturdy Victorian warhorse, is from the same ENO stable. I entirely missed its run at the Coliseum, so came to it afresh via this Met cinema screening. Transported to a mid-20^thcentury laboratory where Faust is an aged atomic scientist, regretting his life’s work, McAnuff’s staging is cold, clinical and ultimately confused, but can still pack a powerful dramatic punch at certain moments.

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Anne Schwanewilms

Wigmore Hall, 8th December 2011, Stephen Jay-Taylor

Strauss and Schoenberg lieder last year, Mahler and Liszt this: in the ongoing and unforgiveable absence of Anne Schwanewilms at the Royal Opera House, we have every reason to be grateful to the Wigmore Hall for such limited exposure to her remarkable artistry as London manages to enjoy. The bulk of this programme was devoted to the early songs written by Mahler based on Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the spurious collection of supposed ancient German folk tales actually largely written by their “collators” Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano in the first decade of the C19th. The group of four in the first half date from the composer’s twenties, the four in the second from his later thirties. As such, this recital could easily have been entitled “The Nightingale and the Cuckoo” – or, I suppose more accurately, Die Nachtigall und Der Kuckuck – given that five of the eight songs selected make extensive mention of either one or indeed both birds. The five Liszt items which rounded out the first half were all written in the 1840s and 50s, and comprised Oh! Quand je dors, the three-song group written to texts from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, and Heinrich Heine’s large-scale narrative drama Die Loreley. The second half then opened with the later Wunderhorn settings, and concluded with Mahler’s five Rückertlieder.

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Anna Caterina Antonacci

Wigmore Hall, 5th December 2011, Sebastian Petit

The word unique is applied far too often by optimistic recording companies and journalists to artists, especially singers.Anna Caterina Antonacci is one of the few artists currently before the public to whom the epithet can be applied with total justification. Seen far too infrequently in London, Antonacci returned to the Wigmore Hall for a lunchtime recital accompanied by her regular musical partner, Donald Sulzen. It remains a mystery why she is not seen in London more often - her Royal Opera Carmen partnered with Jonas Kaufmann and Antonio Pappano made an otherwise dull production incandescent. Her Ermione and Rodelinda at Glyndebourne blazed with an almost unbearable intensity. Yet she has not appeared at either of the above addresses for several years. Fortunately for those of us accustomed to travelling abroad to get our Diva fix she will be bringing her astonishing Cassandre (again partnered by Kaufmann and Pappano) to David McVicar’s new production of Les Troyens at the Royal Opera. And about time say we.

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Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia

Teatro Comunale di Firenze, 1st December 2011, Nicola Lischi

As its last offering of the 2011 season, the Teatro Comunale of Florence has chosen to represent one of its most successful productions of the last two decades, that of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia by the Spanish team of stage director José Carlos Plaza and costume/set designer Sigfrido Martín-Begué.  Although originated in the 1994/95 season and revived four times, Plaza’s mise-en-scène is still vibrant, fresh and, what’s more important, funny.

The main concept of this production is that of a Mediterranean Barbiere, placed in a fanciful, almost imaginary, jocular and light-hearted Spain.  It is set under a bower of growing oranges, the fruits doubling as stars that light up and during the storm flash like disco lights.

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Janacek: Katya Kabanova

Welsh National Opera, Mayflower Theatre, 30th November 2011, Mark Pullinger

‘A breeze would carry her away – let alone the storm that gathers over her!’ Janacek, wrote to Kamila Stösslova, married and 38 years his junior, as much an inspiration for his heroine Katya as the 1859 Ostrovsky play The Storm on which his sixth opera was based. Ostrovsky’s play is a critical study of the Russian merchant classes and in Katya Kabanova, Janacek presents a closed community which stifles the title character, from her weak husband to her bully of a mother-in-law, focusing on her psychological wrestling with her conscience as she submits to temptation outside her unhappy marriage. Guilt claims her in the end, suicide her only release. Katie Mitchell’s 2001 production for Welsh National Opera receives a second revival (the last was in 2004), this time under revival director Robin Tebbutt. Mitchell and set designer Vicki Mortimer use constricting screens to frame the action, which significantly increased the feeling of claustrophobia, rarely opening up to more than a third of the stage. She updates the action from the 1859 setting of Ostrovsky’s original by about a century, which has its pros and cons; whilst it’s not difficult to imagine the scandal an extra-marital affair would still create in a small village community, disbelief that thunderstorms are electrical and not a punishment from God are harder to equate to the 1950s.

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Vivaldi: Griselda

Pinchgut Opera, Sydney, 30th November 2011, Sandra Bowdler

Antonio Vivaldi claimed to have written over ninety operas; about forty five have been identified, and about 23 have surviving, performable scores, of which 20 or so have been recorded, many as part of Naïve’s ongoing project to get them all out on disc.  There have been fewer staged operatic performances around the world, and some consider them as not great material for the modern stage.  It might be suggested that Vivaldi opera is in the same position as Handel opera was, say, thirty or forty years ago:  there was one notable success in Orlando furioso, a Marilyn Horne vehicle in the late 70s, but generally the operas are thought to be dramatically weak and needing lots of massaging. At least today no-one baulks at high male voice roles.  These days also no-one takes it as a given that a Handel opera has to be cut and changed about to make a satisfactory drama, but that was the earlier view.  Are we at the beginning of a new Vivaldi opera era in which his operas can be performed come scritto, or will it continue to be the case that they must be restructured?

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