Oscars & Raspberries: Looking back on 2010

Gnarly and disappointing is the best description I can offer when looking back on 2010 and its operatic offerings.  Truthfully, there were a few shining moments, but on the whole it was a year to forget, with The Royal Opera offering some very rum plums when it came to casting decisions, whilst the ENO offered us the occasional winning production amongst a sea of experimental offerings.  Stephen Jay-Taylor has provided such an excellent analysis of some of the key productions and performances of 2010 (most of which I agree with and only occasionally diverge from), that it would be somewhat repetitive for me to merely echo his opinions.  Instead I will proffer my own meagre opinions in the form of a glib awards list.

Best soprano:  Christine Brewer, for her radiant performance of Joseph Marx songs at the Barbican.

Best Mezzo: Susan Bickley, for her poisonous portrayal of the mother-in-law from hell Kabaincha, in ENO’s wonderful staging of Kat’a Kabanova.

Best counter-tenor: David Daniels at the Wigmore Hall.

Best Tenor: Vittorio Grigolo as Le Chevalier des Grieux in Massenet’s Manon at The Royal Opera

Best Baritone: Roderick Williams in the title role of Eugene Onegin at the St Endellion Festival

Best pretend baritone: Placido Domingo as Simon Boccanegra.

Best Bass: Ferruccio Furlanetto as Fiesco in Simon Boccanegra at The Royal Opera.

Best Newcomer: Elisabeth Meister (Jette Parker Young Artists Programme at The Royal Opera), whose incisive dramatic soprano showed enormous potential in the Verdi Requiem at Cadogan Hall, as well stepping in last minute for an ailing Emma Bell in The Cunning Little Vixen at The Royal Opera.

Commended: Amanda Roocroft’s fabulous Emilia Marty in Janacek’s The Makropulos Case at the ENO (intense and masterful); Susan Gritton for her wonderful Countess in Capriccio at Grange Park Opera; and Inga Kalna as Alcina at the Barbican.

Biggest disappointment in a leading role:  Potty-mouthed Anna Netrebko in Massenet’s Manon at The Royal Opera - A triumph of chiffon over technique and diction.

Most egregious singing: Micaela Carosi as Aida at The Royal Opera – A shocking voice with nothing to recommend it.

Runner’s-up: Angela Denoke for her vocally insubstantial and flat as a pancake interpretation of Salome at The Royal Opera; Rolando Villazon for a truly dire Handel concert at the Royal Festival Hall (a lesson to all who may be contemplating reckless fach choices); and Jeanne-Michele Charbonnet for her two sizes too small Elektra at the Barbican.

Best Production: Stephen Medcalf’s production of Capriccio at Grange Park Opera.  A magnificent performance and staging of Strauss’s rarely performed opera in the UK.

Commended: L’elisir d’amore by Jonathan Miller at the ENO, and David Alden’s memorable Kat’a Kabanova also at the ENO.

Worst production:  Unquestionably the low-light of 2010 was Rufus Wainwright’s shatteringly awful Prima Donna.  A vanity project so ineptly constructed and performed, it is unlikely to be rivalled for sheer mediocrity.

Best concert performance of an opera:  Eugene Onegin at the St Endellion Festival.

Best vocal recital: Christine Brewer for her programme of Marx songs at the Barbican (see also best soprano).  Also, Sarah Connolly and Rosemary Joshua for as fine an account of Handelian singing as can be heard today, with a truly delightful joint recital at the Wigmore Hall.

Confessions of a Bow Street Runner

When originally asked to provide some thoughts about the year’s operatic offerings, I felt that it might provide a forum allowing for some discreet riding of hobby horses in respect of stagings which I didn’t review here, but about which I entertained strong opinions. In the event, though I did genuinely loathe the ROH’s new Aida and Tannhäuser (almost as much as ENO’s miserably wretched Faust and execrable Don Giovanni) I’m not at all sure that reading an extended exposition of every visual horror variously contained therein would make for particularly gratifying reading. Or even writing (I mean, it’s not like I don’t already know exactly what I think of them, and why: and you can doubtless guess the rest…).

Then there are the middling cases, virtually normative nowadays, whereby the givens of the setting as specified by the creators are ignored as if by reflex response, and replaced by an invariably arbitrary and no less temporally remote period, usually on the spurious grounds of “relevance”. Such a case is the ROH’s new Manon, which exchanges the C18th for the C19th and then sets it all in designs of such visually undistinguished, poverty-stricken, yawning dullness as to vitiate any possible increment in meaning, even if one accepted that the Victorian period somehow retains greater resonance today than that of the Enlightenment (which I don’t). And the nigh-on automatic directorial decision to re-set any work, irrespective of the author(s)’ intention, in the period of its composition usually strikes me as utterly unhelpful as well as insultingly disrespectful to the creators for whom historical and/or mythological settings presumably – and often demonstrably - had some determining dramatic significance. Indeed, so rare has it become for an opera to be left in period that on the pitifully few occasions on which they are – such as the ROH’s Adriana Lecouvreur - the general outpouring of gratitude is so great no-one notices that the four different and socially distinct milieus of each act are meaninglessly mashed together visually by the utilisation of that most desperate of inventions, the unit set, blurring vital distinctions of class and relative scale and intimacy of location in a one-set-fits-all ineffective compromise.

So: the one new production that impressed me unreservedly this year – and the exception that proves the rule concerning relocation to the period of the work’s composition - was that of Prokofiev’s The Gambler at Covent Garden, expertly directed by Richard Jones, exquisitely designed by Antony McDonald (who clearly saw Peter Stein’s jaw-dropping Berlin staging of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape) and fabulously conducted by Antonio Pappano, who managed to bring about that rare thing, a major reconsideration of a hitherto largely dismissed score. I remember the ENO, UK premiere, performances in the 1980s: absolute death-on-wheels, and a guaranteed cure for insomnia. And yet at the ROH, even with an inadequate Paulina in the shape of Angela Denoke (how does this woman get the gigs? Her Salome had no top and managed to look older than the Herodias) the work not only convinced but actually gripped. All credit to Roberto Saccà as Alexei, who carried the whole show both fearlessly and tirelessly, and singing in English translation to boot (perpetrators of the current Hänsel und Gretel, please note). And John Tomlinson found the perfect role for his latter-day vocal condition, the love-struck fake “General” always pining for “Blongsh”, here an unrecognisably tarty Jurgita Adamonytè. And Susan Bickley had a high time as a no-fools-suffered, been there/done that grand-matriarch, as did Kurt Streit as an oily lounge-lizard.

Unlike everyone else, it seems, I really liked the Tamerlano, too, which I thought had most elegant and exquisitely tasteful designs – Richard Hudson – and direction from Graham Vick that very cleverly animated the da capos without over-imposing business or betraying a lack of faith in the material. The latter was left to the critics, especially the fine turncoats who had found the identical Madrid staging so very satisfying and revelatory, now to be found bemoaning its inadequacies.  Admittedly, the singing should have been stronger, though I had far less reservations about the London Critical Mafia’s latest unanimous whipping-boy, Christine Schäfer, than I did abut their perennial darling, Sara Mingardo, who, at the three performances I saw her, I could never actually hear. And Kurt Streit performed manfully in the absent Domingo’s stead as Bajazet, without ever being given the chance to play to his greatest asset(s) by having to keep his clothes on (those who saw his stark naked Jupiter in Semele will need no reminding, believe me). But I should dearly love to know who was responsible for casting Christianne Stotijn in the title role, something so totally beyond her capacity to perform, either musically or dramatically, that I would have started to think she had to be someone’s girlfriend if I didn’t know ROH casting better. I caught Tara Venditti as Tamerlano when Stotijn finally bowed to the inevitable withdrawal, and though any thought of physique-du-role went out the window – Venditti must be a clear foot and more shorter - her performance was infinitely finer and quite the technical tour-de-force that had been missing hitherto. Assemble a stronger, more even cast – we may not have a single Aida of any significance today, but the world of opera is positively awash with Handelians – and revive it as soon as you like (in anticipation of which however I am not proposing to hold my breath).

Talking of Aida and casting – neat link, huh? – how did Micaela Carosi wind up singing (I use the term very loosely) the title role here? And even more unbelievably, in the light of the reviews she received - not to mention the evidence of my own ears - how is it that she is still scheduled for the first revival later this season? Increasingly, if it’s not the general haphazard bizarrerie that informs their productions, it’s the casting decisions at Covent Garden that continuously astonish and perplex. After all, it’s scarcely quantum mechanics to decide to mount, say, Adriana Lecouvreur and then cast Gheorghiu and Kaufmann as the principals, or Manon with Netrebko and Villazon (and then cap that by effectively launching Vittorio Grigolo’s international career as his replacement, the “overnight”, coup-de-foudre success of the whole year). But to cast this season’s openers, Don Pasquale and Così fan tutte, as they were, or last season’s Bohèmes and Carmen – the very bread-and-butter staple fare by which any house’s international reputation either stands or falls – in such lacklustre fashion is to my mind very worrying, suggesting either cynicism (believing that the punters won’t notice the difference) or incompetence (suggesting that the House itself doesn’t).

Though there was nothing I liked about the new staging of Tannhäuser, including – uniquely as far as I can tell – Bychkov’s conducting, the whole dreary, inert mess did contain the year’s single greatest performance: Christian Gerhaher’s Wolfram, a piece of work conceived and delivered at a level entirely above and (way) beyond everything and everybody around him. Botha seems to have escaped any serious criticism on the grounds that he at least has the notes: but it’s not enough, in fact, given what little he then does with them, and I would willingly sacrifice just a few if it meant having someone who could inhabit the role, like Klaus Florian Vogt, or Robert Gambill. As for Michaela Schuster’s wretched singing of Venus, words (just about) fail me.

Schuster was also the major blot on Cilea’s landscape too, giving a woefully inadequate account of the Princesse de Bouillon in Adriana, alongside Kaufmann’s oddly calculated and overly-crooned Maurizio and Morticia’s mimsy, simpering, lightweight diva. Even so, it was Elder’s bloodless, dragging, etiolated conducting that did for the drama, something a stately force of nature like Borodina only just about managed to overcome. Oddly enough, it was left to the heroically dreadful Angeles Blancas Gulin, an ear-shredding, flapping foghorn of a voice, to achieve the impossible in context: on the last night, in stark contrast to Morticia’s self-regarding exercises in poses plastiques which left every audience dry-eyed, Gulin’s death scene was rendered almost inaudible where I was sitting at the back of the Stalls by the sheer volume of barely-suppressed snuffling and sobbing emanating from all the tiers behind. Gulin may not be able to sing properly, but she can certainly penetrate to the emotional heart of the work (well, to be fair, so did Corbelli’s Michonnet, but his singing was scarcely any better than hers, a fact you would be hard pressed to deduce from the ridiculous reviews. The King of the New York-based Pirates said to me “Alright, I heard Milnes and MacNeill in their prime in the role, so I’m spoiled, but you can’t cast it with such a dried-out wobbler as Corbelli and hope to get away with it”. Well, not in New York evidently, where the opera enjoys repertory status. But in London….)

People seemed to like the Niobe staging whilst waxing very wan about Steffani’s actual work. Conversely, I thought the work very interesting musically-speaking, but found the show modish and silly. More important than either viewpoint, however, is the fact that Covent Garden chose to mount an obscure C17th opera by someone nobody has ever heard of - not so long after its first foray into the early Baroque with Cavalli’s La Calisto - yet has never, ever, mounted any of Monteverdi’s three surviving masterpieces in the genre. Until the ROH stages at least either Ulisse (preferably) or the multi-authored Poppea, I would think it positively irresponsible for them to mount any more Baroque arcana, tout court.

And on the wider topic of repertory, what is it with the last two seasons’ obsession with trivia and tat, when masterpieces of historical significance and/or musical substance are ignored? Why in God’s name are we being subjected to Massenet’s wafer-thin Cendrillon, not to mention Rimsky’s feeble Tsar’s Bride or Niobe? What prompted last year’s dismal Cherevichki, surely Tchaikovsky’s weakest effort? This is a house in which Idomeneo hasn’t been seen for over twenty years (ENO’s trashy show this year hardly counting as a staging of the work at all). The Royal Opera hasn’t staged Die Frau ohne Schatten in over a decade, Capriccio in nearer twenty, and shows no signs of ever doing so in the foreseeable future. This is a house with stagings of Lucia di Lammermoor and Nabucco so abysmally bad that they have never been revived (Loy and Albery respectively) and presumably never will be. This is a house that has never staged either The Makropoulos Case or From the House of the Dead, the latter-day ubiquity of which in Chéreau’s much-travelled Salzburg staging makes Covent Garden’s virginity on the subject seem positively pathetic. This is a house that has never staged Semiramide, Il pirata or Ernani. This is a house without a Boris Godunov or Khovanshchina. Yet room is found for a high-profile, all-star Cendrillon.

Ah well, we did have Schrott, incomparable as Figaro: and the missus as Manon, not notably (for which read, remotely) Gallic, but such a force of nature on stage and such a generous singer and colleague (I watched one night from the side Stalls Circle and was astonished to see her standing in the wings, screaming and clapping like a maniac when Grigolo came out) that I can’t find it in me to raise any objections. We did have Gheorghiu back as Violetta, sporadically, though it’s clear to me - if no-one else - that the voice is now in decline, having lost bloom, volume and integration of registers, whilst ever more prone to some quite hair-raising memory lapses, more than any other singer I’ve ever encountered (which is what presumably accounts for the appearance of a designed prompt-box built into the Adriana set, in a house that has long-since otherwise scrapped them in all new productions). The woman who not so very long ago was talking about Norma is now in positive retreat on the repertoire front, ill-advisedly recycling roles that no longer show her off to best advantage, or tackling “retirement rep” like Adriana, and then making absolutely nothing of it. But we did have Dessay and Florez in finest estate romping through La fille du régiment again to universal ecstasy, including mine (though Dawn French’s Duchesse remains well beyond my threshold of endurance, as does Pelly’s whole staging of Act II).

I was disappointed with Aleksandra Kurzak’s Fiorilla in the first revival of Il Turco in Italia - after her blinding form in the Mathilde di Shabran I was expecting all manner of delights – in which she never quite seemed to come to vocal grips with the role. And for all his dashing appearance as Selim – sort of Schrott-lite – Ildebrando d’Arcangelo has none of the Uruguayan’s stage flair or charisma. In the event, this was Corbelli’s show, his worn tones here making no difference in a welter of craftily dispatched buffo patter and droll shtick as the cuckolded Don Geronio. Sadly, Sir Charles Mackerras’ last performances in the house, conducting The Cunning Little Vixen, caught him at less than his best, I felt, very inconsiderate of his singers, as if determined to really let the music have its head knowing it would be the last time he ever heard it, and encouraging a plainly besotted band to give of their rumbustious noisiest, no matter what the vocal cost. I ended up enjoying the production more than anything else, one of Bill Dudley’s greatest and cleverest shows, for all that it makes relatively little visually of the changes of the seasons that underpin the succession of scenes. But then, it is twenty years old now, and practically belongs to a lost operatic age, one where what the work actually said mattered more than what the director thinks it should have been trying to say.

And then, of course, there is that wonder of our – and his, whatever it is – age, Domingo who may have let a little thing like cancer surgery get in the way of his Bajazet, but was back within a few months making his local debut as a baritone, in the revival of Moshinsky’s Piero della Francesca- inspired Simon Boccanegra. Everyone observes that Domingo doesn’t actually sound like a baritone: but it’s a truism he himself is the first to acknowledge; and I have certainly heard authentic baritones a fraction of his age with less than half his voice, in far more worn condition, and with none of his stage authority in the role (last year’s Lucio Gallo, for one). The rest of the cast was much fêted too, though personally I didn’t care for any of them, disliking Calleja’s voice more and more, finding Furlanetto increasingly wobbly and worn, and thinking that Poplavskaya is entirely miscast in the Italian repertory, with a cold, hard, squeezed tone and shockingly short-breathed, choppy phrasing. No, the real star-turn next to Domingo was Pappano, who here made the first unreservedly positive impression I have had of him in Verdi since he took over, and inspired the sometimes patchy band to extraordinarily expressive and affecting heights. In truth, if anything at all gives me hope for the ROH’s future, it is the fact that Gelb’s alleged attempts to lure him Stateside met with absolutely no success; so the news that, at a time when he has finally become the master of his operatic craft, he is actually planning to stay here rather than immediately whizz off somewhere else having passed his driving test is both gratifying and inspiriting.

Perhaps the two starriest, larger-than-life divas in terms of audience-sucking both appeared at the Barbican, in Handel: Danielle de Niese as the “heroine” in Semele (all of it); and Cecila Bartoli as Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare (bits of it). Hard to say which of them works an audience more thoroughly, though both come across as the operatic equivalent of lap dancers in terms of taste and style. Personally, I find such calculated onslaughts of neon-lit personality exhausting, but that’s just me (I much preferred Scholl and Jaroussky duetting together in Purcell, though I was surprised at how much bigger the latter’s instrument is, and what a contrast there is between Scholl’s cool, almost scholarly diffidence and Jaroussky’s hip-swinging, sparkling theatricality). And the Barbican continued, both through the LSO’s series and its own Great Performers, to offer top-quality concert performances of opera, including a memorable Ottone in Villa, and the loudest, most remorseless Elektra I have ever heard (Gergiev and 112 players taking absolutely no prisoners, least of all the singers). Even so, the palm for this, or any other, year’s “concert” performance must go to the Royal Festival Hall and the Philharmonia for their immaculate presentation of Tristan und Isolde, an experience I shall never forget (and with Urmana finally convincing me unequivocally of her credentials as a supreme and natural-sounding Hochdramatisch).

I suppose I should mention ENO in all this, but to be truthful, there’s something about the Coliseum I find so very depressing simply as a building, and I go there with such grim foreboding, to be “treated” to such pitifully inadequate, piffling and ignorant stagings – is there some in-house directorial test-cum-job description the rubric of which reads “Must have absolutely no prior experience in the operatic medium, and be pugnaciously vociferous in its dislike”? – that I can’t bear the thought of reliving any of them, not least when word seeping out from the Lucrezia Borgia rehearsals suggests yet more of the squalid same is well on the way. Still, I did like Amanda Echalaz’s Tosca and Julian Gavin's Cavaradossi earlier in the year - alas both much afflicted by the English translation - in a pretty blameless staging by Catherine Malfitano that needless to say upset the critical fellow-travellers who actually dislike opera houses and especially their audiences, and only attend in the certain, slobbering expectation of épater-les-bourgeois outrage, which was duly denied them. To them I dedicate this little epistle in the sincere but doubtless vain hope that 2011 will give them no cause for cackling at all….

Stephen Jay-Taylor
Opera Britannia

The First Annual Diamonds and Rust Awards (US)

Best Major Opera Production of the Year: The Met’s production of Shostakovich’s The Nose. Everything was just about perfect, including the production elements (which showed that Met audiences don’t need literalism when given a valid alternative), and a stunning performance by Paolo Szot, first among equals in a wonderful cast. Completely sold out. Of course, it’s not on the horizon for the foreseeable future.

Worst Production of the Year: The Met’s Attila. It would have made a Hun weep.

Greatest Dignity Under Adverse Circumstances:  Sam Ramey, in the cameo as the Pope in Attila. Ten minutes of a great Attila on stage had more dignity than the entire production team could muster with millions of dollars.

Biggest Waste of Talent of the Year: Ricardo Muti for the Attila.

Most Pointless Revival of the Year: Tie: City Opera A Quiet Place and Metropolitan Opera: Hamlet.

Most Passive-Aggressive Casting of the Year: The Met’s Simon Boccanegra, which surrounded Plácido Domingo with such miscasting as Adrianne Pieczonka as Maria and James Morris as Fiesco.

Worst Opera of the Year:  Thomas Pasatieri’s The Seagull, mounted by the otherwise fine Amato Opera, which is inexplicably having a year of his work.

Most Eagerly Awaited Production of the Year: The next Met Ring.

The Blind Leading the Blind Award: To City Opera Artistic Director and General Manager George Steel, who announced that Rufus Wainwright’s opera, Prima Donna, would be part of the City Opera’s 2012 Spring Season.

Lorin Maazel Award: See Above.

The Deaf Leading the Deaf Award:  The Met, for its announcement of a February 2011 concert by Andrea Bocelli.

We’re Not As Dumb As We Look Award: The Met, which has announced that press tickets would not be available for the above.

Best Conductor of the Year: Benjamin Shwartz at Curtis Opera’s very fine Sonnambula.

Most Handsome Conductor of the Year: Benjamin Schwartz, anywhere.

Worst Conductor of the Year: Plácido Domingo.

Least Attractive Conductor of the Year: You didn’t think I was that stupid, did you?

Two Finest Shoestrings Of The Year:  The first New York stage production of Korngold’s Konigskinder in almost a century, by Dell’ Arte Opera, and the Gotham Chamber Opera’s production of  the American premier of Montsalvartge’s Puss’ n Boots (see my year in review above).

Best Choral Performance of the Year: Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610, in a glowing performance by Artex.

The Henry Miller Award: Opera News, for its interview with Anna Netrebko.

Most Important Impressive Breakthrough Performance: Angela Meade as Norma at The Caramoor Festival.

Most Impressive Debut Overlooked By This Reviewer: Michael Fabiano as Raffaele in the Met revival of Stiffelio. I thought him unimpressive in the small part, although I have since revised my opinion of his work considerably.

This Time I Have It Right Award: Deanne Breiwick, young American coloratura who has been featured at Juilliard by William Christie and in a production there of Les Mamelles de Tiresias: an alluring, charming young singer with considerable flexibility and range.

Most Important And Unheralded Debut of the Year: Alexander Tsymbalyuk as Ferrando in the Met’s production of Trovatore.

Go Away, Little Sheba Award:  June Anderson, on her New York return in a joint recital at the Morgan Museum with young tenor Sean Panniker. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be there; it’s that she wasn’t. Check your pitch pipe at the door, please.

Most Enigmatic Singer Of The Year: Shenyang, who seems to convey no idea what he is doing.

Most Annoying  Singer Of The Year: Eric Owens, whose blustering sound and insensitive performances make an essentially fine instrument seem unrelenting.

Two Most Promising Performances of the Year: Tenor Taylor Stayton of The Academy of Vocal Arts, and Soprano Siân Davies, in Chicago Opera Theatre’s Mosè in Egitto

Most Important Singer Not Appearing At The Metropolitan Opera: Mariella Devia, who may still outlast us all.

Richard Garmise
Opera Britannia