Opera Today

Brahms A German Requiem, Fabio Luisi, Barbican London

The Barbican Centre is built over the remains of a much older London, which still exists in hidden corners. During the week, the metropolis is manic, but on a Sunday night, a quiet calm descends, and once more you can feel the presence of the past amid the high tech towers and traffic. Under the Barbican Hall itself was Three Herring Court, where my companion's ancestors lived in extreme poverty. An atmospheric way in which to experience Brahms German Requiem, which commemorates the endurance of the human spirit across boundaries of time and place. Not for nothing did Brahms blend together verses from the Old and New Testaments, evidence of an upbringing steeped in North German Lutheran tradition, even though he rejected conventional piety, and lived much of his life in staunchly Catholic Vienna. .

The voices of the London Symphony Chorus rose beautifully from the hushed opening chords. "Selig sind, die da Lied tragen", for those who go forth weeping bearing precious seed will return "Mit Freuden und bringen ihre Garben". Death is a not an end, but a process. With Sir Simon Rattle as Music Director of the LSO, Londoners get another advantage : Simon Halsey, Rattle's choral counterpart through the years at Birmingham and in Berlin. The LSO Chorus sounded luminous, voices carefully blended. If anything, the LSO Chorus sounded even richer in the second movement Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras though this brought the orchestra to the fore. The "march" theme was particularly well defined, with a good sense of surge underlying the solemn, deliberate pace, so when the lyrical motif appeared, it suggested light and hope. The fanfare at the end of the movement was understated but confident.

Simon Keenlyside sang the baritone part, which he has taken many times before. Experience showed. Brahms quotes Psalm 9 (verses 4 to 7), where a man contemplates his fate : humility is of the essence, surrounded as he is by the tumult in the orchestra. Yet the assured, unforced timbre of Keenlyside's singing highlighted the inner strength that comes from faith, whatever the source of that faith. When the chorus joined in, the protagonist was no longer alone, in every sense. Perhaps for this reason the song with soprano (Julia Kleiter) Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit was added, for it is a moment of illumination, before the mood turns sombre yet again. The solemn processional of the second movement echoes in the sixth. Forceful chords from the orchestra, and a blazing fanfare of brass, strings and percussion, and the chorus in full swell , for momentous changes are to come. The trumpets rang out, as in the Book of Revelation, a trumpet will herald the End of Time, when the dead of past ages will be raised to life again. Keenlyside's voice rang out "Wir werden verwandelt werden" and the chorus entered, forcefully "Hölle, wo ist dein Sieg!" A thunderous finale, after which it took some moments to recover.

Fabio Luisi and the London Symphony Orchestra were impressive, and their Schubert Symphony no 8 was excellent, well poised and stylish. But the full honours went to the London Symphony Chorus, for Brahms's German Requiem is one of the high points in the choral repertoire. "Selig sind die Toten.....daß sie ruhen von ihrer Arbeit". Rich, fulsome playing from the LSO, luminous singing from the LSO Chorus. The German Requiem concluded in transcendance.

Anne Ozorio

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product_title= Schubert:Symphony no 8 "The Unfinished", Brahms A German Requiem, Fabio Luisi, London Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Chorus, Simon Keenlyside, Julia Kleiter, Barbican Hall London, 19th March 2017
product_by=A review by Anne Ozorio
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Káťa Kabanová in its Seattle début

The immediately preceding production of Seattle Opera’s 2016-17 season had been the much-traveled Traviata from the atelier of Peter Konwitschny, and the show’s rather coarse updating and arbitrary dramaturgy had not gone down at all well with the company’s conservative but sophisticated audience. Was this to be another evening of mannered, second-hand Regietheater? The immense bare black box confronting the house as we entered was not promising: even the supertitle screen looked more like a stage-wide guillotine than a refuge for the eyes of the Czech-impaired among us.

Nicky Spence (Tichon) and Maya Lahyani (Varvara)

Well, Regietheater it was, but of the engaged, engaging audience-friendly kind. As the music began, the marvelous American dramatic soprano Melody Moore stood center-stage, impaled in a column of searing white light. Then around her, images familiar to most of the audience began to fill the box: the rosy brown basalt cliffs of an Eastern Washingotn river valley; a white picket fence complete with red-flagged mailbox by the gate; townsfolk strolling in high-1940’s Sunday-go-to-meeting gear; finally, a broadspread American flag descending to complete the thoroughly Normal Rockwell picture.

The visuals of Mark Howett and Genevieve Blanchett’s deft production did not remain so Grant-Woody American Gothic (though the tschochke-choked home the heroine shares with her cringing husband and horrible mother-in-law could easily host that master’s Daughters of the American Revolution). Projections of roiling waters, clouds of crows began to invade the scene as the dream of childish bliss Kàt’a recounts to her bobby-soxer sister-in-law fade away. Stark lighting contrasts both isolate and link the performers.

Victoria Livengood (Kabanicha)

Kàt’a’s dreams are the key to look and dramaturgy of Patrick Nolan’s production. The danger for an updated, Americanized Kàt’a is implausibility: how can the love even of a timid small-town girl and a feckless rich boy be thwarted so thoroughly the era when Rosalind Russell, Ginger Rogers, and Betty Grable are setting the tone for young American girls’ behavior every weekend at the movie palace?

But this Kàt’a isn’t just a dreamer: she’s all dreamer. When life hands her lemons like mom-in-law Kabanicha (Victoria Livengood, a church lady who doesn’t mind a smoke, drink, or cuddle behind closed doors) and husband Tichon (Nicky Spence, a boozy bullpup without a bite) she incorporates them as dream enemies, and finds a dream prince handy in the form of Boris, (Joseph Dennis), lollygagging and at loose ends in the provinces

Ms. Moore is a mature woman and Dennis is a young man, but the mismatch in ages only accents the absurd of their relationship, while their voices, more sumptuous and powerful than those of the second cast’s Corinne Winters and Scott Quinn give them ever greater emotional clout as the drama deepens.

Joseph Dennis (Boris) and Melody Moore (Katya)

The power of the production is mightily enhanced from the pit. When a show is this well sung and acted throughout, it’s easy to forget the challenge for non-Czech singers in this repertory. I have no idea if a Czech speaker would find their delivery “authentic,” but they convinced me completely, and their attack and confidence can only be the result of the conducting of Oliver von Dohnànyi.

His is one of the proudest names of the last century in Central Europe. I do not know if Von Dohnànyi is related to the great musicians and statesmen whose name he shares, but his artistry is worthy of his name. Seattle Opera and Seattle audiences are lucky to have him.

They are also fortunate in the rest of the cast. The thoughtless young lovers Varvara and Kudrjas are taken in both casts by Maya Lahyani and Joshua Kohl in rather genre-generic musical-comedy second-couple fashion, but both sing very well; Nicky Spence and Stefan Skafarowsky make the most of their tiny roles. look forward to seeing them all in future productions.

Above all, let’s have Janacek Bring back: It’s been more than 25 year since we saw Cunning Little Vixen. Thanks to this fine show and above all to maestro von Dohnanyi, we’re prapared for The Macropolos Affair and From the House of the Dead!

Roger Downey

Cast and production information:

Conductor: Oliver von Dohnanyi. Kàt’a: Melody Moore/Corinne Winters; Boris: Joseph Dennis/Scott Quinn; Kabanicha: Victoria Livengood; Kudrjas: Joshua Kohl; Varvara: Maya Lahyani; Tichon: Nicky Spence; Dikoi: Stefan Skafarowsky; Glasha: Jennifer Cross; Feklusha: Susan Salas; Kuligin: Joseph Lattanzi. Seattle Opera chorus and Orchestra. Director: Patrick Nolan; Production design: Genevieve Blanchett; Lighting and digital effects: Mark Howett.

Bampton Classical Opera Young Singers’ Competition 2017

The previous winners were mezzo-soprano Anna Starushkevych (2013) and soprano Galina Averina (2015). Bampton Classical Opera has a reputation for its commitment to young talent and a number of singers who have appeared on the Bampton stage have gone on to work with national companies such as The Royal Opera, English National Opera and Opera North.

The first round of the Bampton Classical Opera Young Singers’ Competition 2017 (closed sessions) will take place on 28 and 29 October in London. The public final will take place in the Holywell Music Room, Oxford, on Sunday 19 November at 6pm. Judges for the competition will be two renowned British singers: tenor Bonaventura Bottone and mezzo-soprano Jean Rigby.

Competitors can apply by downloading an application form and information document from www.bamptonopera.org or on request by emailing ysc@bamptonopera.org

Applications opened on 1 March 2017 and the entry deadline is 11 August 2017.

First prize £1,500 - Second prize £500. For the first time there will also be a £500 Accompanists’ Prize.

The winner of the first Young Singers’ Competition in 2013 was Ukrainian mezzo-soprano Anna Starushkevych and British soprano Rosalind Coad was the runner-up.

Since then Anna Starushkevych performed the role of Erato in Gluck’s Il Parnaso confuso and the title role in Bertoni’s Orfeo (UK première) for Bampton Classical Opera, both during summer 2014. In summer 2015 she sang the role of Ofelia in Salieri’s La grotta di Trofonio , also for the company. She is one of the soloists on a new Resonus Classics CD of song cycles by Pavel Haas, including the world première recording of Fata Morgana. Later this year Anna will sing the role of Matilda in Handel’s Ottone at both the Beaune Festival and Theater an der Wien.

Rosalind Coad was a Scottish Opera Emerging Artist from 2014-15 and sang a number of roles for the company. Currently she is covering the role of Mélisande in Pelléas et Mélisande for Scottish Opera. Other performances have included Gianetta (L’Elisir d’Amore) and Clotilde (Norma) for Opera Holland Park. She sang the role of Daughter in the Bampton Classical Opera concert performance of Maurice Greene’s Jephtha in 2014.

In the Young Singers’ Competition 2015 Russian soprano Galina Averina won first prize and Welsh soprano Céline Forrest was the runner-up.

Since the competition Galina Averina sang the role of Atalanta ( Serse) for English Touring Opera in 2016. She is currently singing Pamina for Mid-Wales Opera, and will be performing at the London Handel Festival. She will be taking part in the young artists programme at this year’s Aix-en-Provence Festival and will return to English Touring Opera for next season’s autumn and spring tours.

Céline Forrest studied at the National Opera Studio in 2015/2016. Her opera training took her to Opera North and Welsh National Opera, where she worked with Graham Vick and Elaine Kidd. Recently she covered the role of Jessica in Welsh National Opera’s The Merchant of Venice by Tchaikowsky. She is currently working on the role of Mina in Verdi’s Aroldo for UCOpera.

This competition is open UK residents aged between 21 and 32 on 19 November, 2017.

www.bamptonopera.org

Festival Mémoires in Lyon

Le Couronnement de Poppée

Klaus Michael Grüber's production of L'incoronazione di Poppea comes from the Aix Festival of 2000. The design was by visual artist/painter Gilles Aillaud (1928-2005), Grüber's frequent collaborator at West Berlin's Schaubühne (and opera houses in Berlin and elsewhere). It was a prestigious cast, Grenoble's Les Musiciens du Louvre in the pit with Marc Minkowski.

I remember being bored, very bored. For me, then, there was no hint of mythic-in-the-making.

Just now in Lyon's 870 seat Théâtre National Populaire it indeed became mythic, brought there not solely by messieurs Gruber and Aillaud, but also and possibly because of the Les Nouveaux Caractères (a French early music ensemble) and principally its conductor Sébastien d'Hérin, and the fourteen Solistes du Studio de l'Opéra de Lyon (its young artists program). We, all of us -- the cast and audience -- were enthralled.

Conductor d'Hérin drove the music of the words, Monteverdi's dramatic genius bursting into dramatic phrases, with the double continuo of Les Nouveaux Caractères melding a myriad of colors into the Monteverdi's unfettered catalogue of affects. It was never mere musical color, it was always word and phrase, a relentless concentration of affects from beginning to end.

Conductor d'Héron evoked a flowing sensuality of sound, and an obsessive drive that never allowed Poppea and Nerone's ambitions to falter, culminating in the sublime love duet where Grüber's actors cross and cross and finally line-up on the most abrupt and corrupt ending of all opera.

Josefine Göhmann as Poppea [Poppea photos copyright Jean-Louis Fernandez, courtesy of the Opera de Lyon]

Director Grüber was a disciple of Giorgio Strehler. He bases much of what he does on Strehler's minimalistic principles and physical theater convictions. Gruber creates a theatrical language of abstractions, both in positioning and posturing. It is entirely presentational, eschewing all sense of an actual world, remaining always an imaginary, artistic world where the word itself is the only reality. Designer Aillaud's flat scenery visually embraces Grüber's artistic spaces to the fullest.

Without the distraction of famous artists attempting to realize such arcane abstractions, we entered this theatrical world through the willing young singers of the Opéra de Lyon's studio, who without exception gave total performances. Especially effective were the Nerone of Lithuanian mezzo Laura Zigmantaite and German/Chilean soprano Josefine Göhmann who were the only of Grüber's actors required to realize a constant plasticity of simultaneous gestural and musical movement -- a kind of emotional puppetry. Both were consummate performers.

Laura Zigmantaite as Nerone, Oliver Johnston as Lucano

Excellent as well were the Seneca of Polish bass Pawel Kolodziej and the Ottavia of Finnish mezzo Elli Vallinoja. There were many memorable scenes, among them the spellbinding duet as Nerone expounds the sensual splendors of Poppea to his poet friend Lucano, sung by English tenor Oliver Johnston. And as well every scene with Poppea's nurse Arnalta, sung by French tenor André Gass.

Much praise for the success of this revival must be attributed to stage director Ellen Hammer, a directorial collaborator of Klaus Michael Grüber throughout his career. Mme. Hammer however in her program booklet remarks reveals herself needlessly pretentious as well as condescending to these superb young artists.

Cast and Production Information Poppea: Josefine Göhmann; Drusilla / Virtu: Emilie Rose Bry; Nerone: Laura Zigmantaite; Ottone: Aline Kostrewa; Arnalta: André Gass; Damigella: Amore Rocio Perez; Fortuna / Valletto: Katherine Aitken; Famigliare / Pallade: James Hall; Famigliare / Mercurio / Soldato: Brenton Spiteri; Littore / Liberto: Pierre Héritier; Ottavia: Elli Vallinoja; Seneca: Pawel Kolodziej; Lucano / Soldato Oliver Johnston; Famigliare Aaron O'Hare. Orchestra: Les Nouveaux Caractères. Conductor: Sébastien d'Hérin; Mise en scène: Klaus Michael Grüber; Revival director: Ellen Hammer; Décors: Gilles Aillaud; Re-creater of sets: Bernard Michel; Costumes: Rudy Sabounghi; Lighting: Dominique Borrini. Théâtre National Populaire, Lyon, France, March 16, 2017.

Elektra

By definition any Ruth Berghaus production is mythic, and not just because this mega famous stage director was intimately associated with Bertolt Brecht's Berliner Ensemble and his (and East Germany's) didactic Epic Theater. Mme. Berghaus thinks and acts in epically scaled proportions.

Like her early mentor Walter Felsenstein (founder of East Berlin's Komische Oper), Mme. Berghaus insisted on an equal balance of the musical and theatrical elements of opera. This in the light of "regietheater" (which she more or less founded) wherein the director is free to modify period, locale, even the story itself to didactic ends. At the same time the music and text (usually) are sacrosanct, and must not be altered.

All this plays out brilliantly in this 1986 production of Elektra from Dresden's Semperoper, where it remained in the repertoire until 2012. The orchestra sits, dramatically, on the stage! The Semperoper pit simply could not accommodate Strauss's 49 winds and percussion players, plus strings (only 50 in Lyon -- a minimum number, and certainly the Opéra Nouvel's pit would burst even with that number). [Note that there exists a much used reduced orchestration of Elektra for approximately 70 total players.]

Strauss deemed that an expanded orchestra is necessary to create the colors necessary to his telling of this Greek tragedy, thus it becomes an absolute necessity for a Berghaus production. With this outsized orchestra needing to sit on the stage Elektra's cellar could only perch above the orchestra. So Mme. Berghaus simply transforms Elektra's prison into a perch from which the sisters see a world beyond their imprisonment and terror, and from which they search their salvation in the person of their brother Oreste who will murder his and their mother.

It becomes therefore perfect Brechtian Epic Theater -- theater as a catalyst for change and renewal. With the orchestra on yhe stage displacing traditional operatic staging convention the primary Brechtian precept was present -- distancing the spectator (and I indeed struggled with this distance) from the work of art in order that he might understand, and presumably act on its message rather than to be absorbed into its world.

These many years later, and in a different and far advanced social and political structure I struggled to transform such didactic theater into contemporary art. For me however it remained very much a period piece, evoking impotent nostalgia for the avant-garde of the ephemeral ideals of a failed world, and a longing for real, contemporary avant-garde operatic art.

This Lyon revival was very well cast, and convincingly conducted. It was a quite powerful if cold experience.

Cast and Production Information Elektra: Elena Pankratova; Clytemnestre: Lioba Braun; Chrysothémis: Katrin Kapplusch; Egisthe: Thomas Piffka; Oreste: Christof Fischesser; Le précepteur d'Oreste: Bernd Hofmann; La confidente de Clytemnestre: Pascale Obrecht; La porteuse de traine: Marie Cognard; Un Jeune serviteur: Patrick Grahl; Un Vieux serviteur: Paul-Henry Vila; La Surveillante Christina Nilsson. Orchestra of the Opera de Lyon; Solistes du Studio de l'Opera de Lyon. Conductor: Hartmut Haenchen; Mise en scène: Ruth Berghaus; Revival stage director: Katharina Lang; Décors: Hans Dieter Schaal; Costumes: Marie-Luise Strandt; Lumières: Ulrich Niepel. Opera Nouvel, Lyon, France, March 17, 2017.

Tristan et Isolde

East Germany's and now Germany's most famous playwright after Bertold Brecht is Heiner Müller. His staging of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde was a part of the 1993 Bayreuth Festival, and is his only staging of an opera. Though a prolific playwright and dramaturg becoming finally the artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble, he himself staged few plays and then only in the last 15 years of his life.

Unlike Brecht or Ruth Berghaus theater for Müller is not didactic, nor does he promote social or political agenda (though it may be referenced). Rather he introduced multiple perspectives into his theater works, destroying linear storytelling and, in fact, drama itself in search of abstracted associations. In this sense Müller defined theatrical post-modernism for his generation.

It is no surprise then that Müller chose to stage Tristan und Isolde, composed as it is of three protagonists (including King Mark) whose life situations intersect only at brief moments of action, but whose personal dramas, or traumas are powerful and poetic, and associate only by chance.

Müller's collaborator for the Tristan production was avant-garde designer Erick Wonder who with Müller locked the opera's lengthy monologues in a huge, closed box. Theater's "fourth wall" was in fact an often visible scrim, referenced early in the evening by Isolde placing her hands directly on the [not merely imaginable, but quite real] fourth wall to indicate its boundary and, in fact, significantly, the box's separation from the audience itself.

The famed love scene of the second act was realized as two simultaneous monologues, the lovers met by placing their hands on an imaginary wall that isolated each from the other. The dreamy intensity of the love duet was rendered by the protagonists kneeling side by side, in separate prayers to love.

Ann Petersen sings the "Liebestod"

The stage box became Tristan's decaying chateau in the delirium, its floor now strewn with dead leaves, Tristan resting in a dilapidated easy chair. Blocks of intense color, first red then gold heralded Isolde who shed several cloaks to deliver, finally her "Liebestod" in a golden gown, motionless, breaking through the fourth wall at last, singing directly to us.

The squares of color, large and small, throughout the opera -- on the walls, floor and ceiling -- visually created the suggestion of separated emotional spaces, reinforcing the abstractions of the dramatic spaces of the protagonists. The staging itself kept each of the protagonists in oblique, abstractly linear movement, intersecting only in the rare moments of action. If nothing else the production itself made a splendid evening of abstract visual art, and this alone was sufficient to propel it to mythic status.

Separating the protagonists, isolating each in a unique space placed enormous responsibility on its artists to create individual theatrical and musical worlds -- it is certainly a very difficult requirement, and it may simply have demanded too much. If hopefully this responsibility was fulfilled in Bayreuth back in 1993 it was not just now in Lyon. On the stage the singers were left helplessly on their own, conductor Hartman Haenchen absorbed in a quite detailed reading of Wagner's score, a reading that excluded the sweep of sensual poetry, the dynamic force of poetic delirium and the depth of tragic, Romantic love.

After the orchestral excesses of Ruth Bergman's Elektra, the Opéra de Lyon opted for 69 players in the pit (who indeed sounded like many more), whose apparent artistry was welcome indeed in this otherwise frustrating evening.

Cast and Production Information Tristan: Daniel Kirch; Isolde: Ann Petersen; Roi Marke: Christof Fischesser; Kurwenal: Alejandro Marco-Buhrmester; Melot: Thomas Piffka; Brangäne: Eve-Maud Hubeaux; Le Jeune Matelot / Le Berger: Patrick Grahl; Un timonier: Paolo Stupenengo. Chorus and Orchestra of the Opera de Lyon. Direction musicale: Hartmut Haenchen; Mise en scène: Heiner Müller; Réalisation de la mise en scène: Stephan Suschke; Décors: Erich Wonder; Recréation des décors: Kaspar Glarner; Costumes: Yohji Yamamoto; Lumières: Manfred Voss; Recréation des lumières: Ulrich Niepel. Opera Nouvel, Lyon, France, March 18, 2017.

Michael Milenski

image=http://www.operatoday.com/Elektra_Lyon1.png

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product_title=Festival Mémoires (Poppea, Elektra, Tristan) in Lyon
product_by=A review by Michael Milenski
product_id=Above: Elena Pankratova as Elektra, Christof Fischesser as Oreste [Elektra and Tristan photos copyright Stofleth, courtesy of the Opéra de Lyon]

Handel's Partenope: surrealism and sensuality at English National Opera

Silvio Stampiglia’s libretto contains the requisite amorous knots endured by classical kings and queens. Partenope, the founding Queen of Naples, is courted by three royal lovers: Arsace, Prince of Corinth, who is first in line for Partenope’s affections; the affectatious Armindo, Prince of Rhodes; and Emilio, Prince of Cumae, who, spurned by the Queen, determines to make war not love. Arsace’s abandoned fiancée, Rosmira, disguises herself as Eurimene in order to pursue her betrayer, and becomes Partenope’s fourth suitor.

Director Christopher Alden largely ignores the historic context and plumps instead for ‘Partenope the sailor-serenading siren’ who, so the myth goes, cast ashore on the Neapolitan coast after throwing herself into the sea in her despair at not having been able to sing Ulysses to his death. Alden and his excellent design team - Andrew Lieberman (set), Jon Morrell (costume), Adam Silverman (lighting) - set the action in a Parisian salon of the 1920s at the height of Surrealism. Ironically, ‘Partenope’ means ‘virgin’ in Greek, for it’s the bedroom which is the battleground here.

The Surrealists sought to overthrow society’s ‘rules’ and demolish its reliance on ‘rational thought’. Their philosophy - as summed up by artist-at-the-helm, André Breton - might seem potentially risky for a director seeking to untangle the libretto and offer a credible context: ‘thought expressed in the absence of any control exerted by reason, and outside all moral and aesthetic considerations.’

Tapping the subconscious and liberating the creative power of the unconscious mind could prove profitable though. Alden turns Partenope into Nancy Cunard, in whose art deco apartment various artists gather to drink, play cards, tap dance, twirl batons, distastefully prat about with gas marks and bayonets, graffiti the pristine white walls with Matisse-squiggles and lewd symbols, and pay ardent homage to their hostess. A spectacular sweeping staircase is a death-trap to the inebriated, and if the hedonists don’t slip on the banana skins that are literally thrown around the stage then there’s the risk of getting locked in the lavatory (toilets dominate the second Act, complementing the smutty colloquialisms of Amanda Holden’s translation). By Act 3, the sharp suits of Act 1 have been abandoned for pyjamas and various states-of-undress.

Emilio is now photographer Man Ray. I presume that the photographs that he obsessively snaps - of artfully piled bodies and kinky indulgences - are designed to ‘expose’ the protagonists to reality. In Act 3 Emilio climbs a ladder and slowly assembles a collage-mural: what starts off looking like a monochrome of Matisse’s ‘The Snail’ is revealed as Man Ray’s 1934 ‘Nude Bent Forward’.

The design is certainly chic and Silverman’s chameleon-like lighting is superbly evocative. But, there’s no clear raison d’être. Handel’s humour is underpinned by honesty: even Partenope’s desire is sincere, if itinerant, and Armindo values fidelity - as he sings (in Holden’s words), in ‘Nobil core, che ben ama’: ‘Faithful lovers wisely ponder/ that if fancy never wanders,/ they’ll achieve a life sublime./ Constancy’s a thing to cherish;/ truthful love need never perish/ e’en until the end of time.’

Alden’s concept is not true to such avowals. His is a world of artifice: sophisticated but superficial. There’s a lack of emotional engagement between his characters, and twixt them and us: we simply don’t care about their urbane game-playing.

But, the superb performances of the ENO cast offer a compensating allure. As the eponymous Queen, Sarah Tynan poses and struts, preens and sings with classy aplomb: whether sporting the jangling bangles of a trouser-suited Nancy Cunard, or the natty top hat and tails of Marlene Dietrich, Tynan convey’s Partenope’s Amazonian self-belief and spirited sensuality: she’s in love with Love. Her soprano is quite light, but flexible and clear, sparkling but never hard-edged. After a slightly hesitant opening aria (conductor Christian Curnyn pushes the pace throughout) she crafted the phrases with style and hit the hemi-demi-semi-quavers with panache - even when asked to stoke an old stove during the florid ‘Qual farfalletta’ (Act 2) to imitate the flaming passion of Cupid about whom she sings.

Given that this opera requires its cast to sing their arias dangling from staircases, balancing astride toilet seats and while climbing ladders, it seems sadly ironic that tenor Robert Murray was forced to withdraw from the role of Emilia following a fall which left him with severe concussion (of course, we wish Murray a swift recovery). Rupert Charlesworth was an admirable last-minute replacement: his firm tenor raged and ranted with indignant wrath in ‘Barabaro Fato si’ - an extravagant diatribe against fate - when he found himself imprisoned in Partenope’s toilet.

As Armindo, James Laing survived the Chaplin-esque clowning required of him without physical or vocal mishap - ‘Volio dire al mio tesoro’ was sung while swinging perilously from the curving staircase. Laing was rewarded for enduring the ‘funny business’: Armindo gets his girl in the end.

Looking like Lytton Strachey, bass Matthew Durkan was effective as Partenope’s chief guard, Ormonte, dispatching the coloratura cleanly and firmly. The role of Rosmira was sung impressively by rising star Stephanie Windsor Lewis; the ENO orchestra’s horn section made a colourful contribution to her aria, ‘Io seguo sol fiero’.

It was Patricia Bardon, though, as the pompous chancer Arsace, who stole the show. During the first run of the production in 2008, Bardon sang Rosmira; here she was a lustrous Arsace whose humiliation and sorrow were heartbreakingly conveyed in the slow, affecting ‘Ch’io parta? Sì crudele’ (Act 3).

Charles Burney judged Partenope to be ‘among the best of Handel’s dramatic productions’ and on the evidence of the score and the singing enjoyed here it’s hard not to agree. But, while Alden gives us luxury, lightness and louche-ness, the pleasures and pains of love - something of Così’s paradoxes? - are replaced by a Surrealist dream which doesn’t quite satisfy.

Claire Seymour

Handel: Partenope

Sarah Tynan - Partenope, Patricia Bardon - Arsace, James Laing - Armindo, Rupert Charlesworth - Emilio, Stephanie Windsor Lewis - Rosmira, Matthew Durkan - Ormonte; Christopher Alden - Director, Christian Curnyn - Conductor, Andrew Lieberman - Set Designer, Jon Morrell - Costume Designer, Adam Silverman - Lighting Designer, Orchestra of English National Opera.

English National Opera, Coliseum; Wednesday 15^th March 2017.

Christoph Prégardien and Julius Drake at the Wigmore Hall

Prégardien and Drake’s November 2015 release Poetisches Tagebuch - which comprises lieder to poems by Ernst Konrad Friedrich Schulze (1789-1817), followed by settings of poems that are drawn together by their shared imagery of absence, aging, winter and death - received Grammy Award nomination for Best Classical Vocal Solo and received the German Critics Award in 2016. The programme presented at the Wigmore Hall essentially reprised this disc, with the addition of a single extra song in the second half of the recital.

The performers’ consummate musicianship and professionalism was evident throughout. Prégardien cuts a noble figure on stage, immaculately dressed, stylish but unshowy in manner - the embodiment of dignified poise. But, such self-composure, and the singer’s use of a score, at times distanced the tenor from the audience - I do not think that my location at the rear of the Hall was a factor, as I have not previously found this to be an impediment to strong, direct communication.

There were many musical compensations for the occasional absence of dramatic intensity, however, not least Prégardien’s even, dulcet tone and graceful phrasing. The musical details were unfailingly observed but articulated with subtlety. Naturally, the German singer’s diction is excellent, but at times he seemed satisfied to rely upon precise and careful enunciation to convey meaning, and did not use his voice to explore the inferences inherent in textual detail - the sounds and rhythms of the words. And, the soothing evenness, though alluring, can be a limitation: as the recital progressed I longed for more contrast of colour, dynamics and weight.

Technically assured, Prégardien demonstrated impressive vocal control, employing rubato and flexibility with confidence and discernment. He found the higher lying lines more challenging, however, and made more extensive use of the head-voice than I would have expected, with the result that at the top his tenor lacked roundness. Such ethereality may be a fine vehicle for embodying yearning and absence - frequent moods within these texts - but became rather monotonous and, when repeated, the expressive weight of such gestures diminished.

Also, while I admit that it’s a matter of personal preference, I found that the tempi adopted in several songs was a little on the slow side. In the slower lieder there was a danger that unhurried probing or reflective quietude would lapse into dreamy oblivion, and the more agitated items did not acquire the compelling momentum that the diverse, heightened and unpredictable emotions of their dramatic narratives demand.

Perhaps it’s just the case that I prefer the extreme anguish that Ian Bostridge brings to these lieder, or the probing intensity of Mark Padmore. And, it should be noted that Julius Drake was alert to every nuance and suggestion in the piano parts, always astonishing sensitive in supporting Prégardien but also colouring and dramatizing.

Schubert’s nine settings of poems by Ernst Schulze were composed shortly before Winterreise (1827). They form a quasi-cycle of loss and obsessive longing; indeed, when including the songs in Vol.18 of Hyperion’s Complete Schubert Edition, pianist Graham Johnson proposed titling them as a group,Auf den wilden Wegen. The songs have their origin in Schulze’s unrequited passion for two sisters, Cäcilie (who died of tuberculosis) and Adelheid Tychsen. His ‘poetic imaginings’ were brought together in Schulze’s Poetisches Tagebuch, before he himself died of tuberculosis at the age of 28.

Schubert’s Schulze settings are not his best-known lieder, but the first song, ‘Auf der Bruck’ (On the bridge) is one of two - the other being ‘Im Frühling’ - which appear frequently on recital programmes. Drake’s opening bars were stirring and energised. His control and crafting of the dynamic contrasts - the resonant octaves in the bass veer wildly from loud to soft, while fully voiced, quiet chords reiterate in the right-hand - created urgency and agitation. These turned to excitement in the second stanza, as Prégardien imagined the wondrous sights to be viewed from the saddle of his galloping horse, and Drake’s sparkling trill underpinned his ‘joy’.

The evenness of Prégardien’s tenor was an asset in ‘Der liebliche Stern’ (The lovely star), creating a sense of the poet-speaker’s distance from the heavens above, the calm broken only by the slightest enrichening: ‘So wird mir von Wohl und Wehe’ (weal and woe trouble my heart). The major-minor fluctuations of ‘Im Walde’ (D834) (In the forest) brought unrest to the poet-speaker’s journeying and, without ever noticeably quickening the tempo the performers evoked an accelerating force which pushed the frustrated traveller onwards in search of a never-to-be-regained love. Prégardien showed sensitivity to the text here, in the repetition of ‘nimmer’ - ‘Wohl hing ich nimmer so an euch!’ (I never drew so close to you) - and in the subsequent ‘Um Mitternacht’, where his soft head-voice captured the radiance of the night stars which sparkled in Drake’s beautifully delicate accompaniment. Later, an injection of strength conveyed the poet-speaker’s pride and self-confidence as he prepared to brave any storm or tempest to see his beloved’s image once again.

Schulze, recognising that his obsession was pathological, occasionally issued a poetic cry for ‘courage’, and ‘Lebensmut’ calls for a renewal of youthful strength - a bold defiance of mental frailty which Drake’s springing rhythmic counter-forces duly delivered, confirming the voice’s firm assertion ‘O, wie dringt das junge Leben/Kräftig mir durch Sinn und Herz! (How vigorously young life pulses through my mind and heart!). The piano’s insouciant postlude suggested, however, that the poet-speaker’s confidence was self-deceiving. ‘Lebensmut’ was written one day after ‘Im Frühling’, and one cannot think of a greater contrast than between the former’s surging vigour and the latter’s wistful introspection. Indeed, initially I found ‘Im Frühling’ almost too meditative, in danger of slipping into a dream in which the gleams of spring that the poet describes would lose substance and presence. But, the unusual harmonies which accompany the poet-speaker’s thoughts of strife and sorrowful solitude created greater movement towards the end of the lied, making place and mood more palpable.

The ‘deep sorrow’ of ‘Tiefes Leid’ was followed by the ‘dark delusions’ (‘dunklen Wahn’) of ‘Über Wildemann’ but in the latter Prégardien’s tenor had neither the strength nor range of colour to suggest a Byronic embracing of the roaring winds and wintry snow such as characterises Schulze’s frenzied poem. Moreover, prudence perhaps led Prégardien to pull back from the slightly faster tempo that might have conjured the desperate urgency of the vocal lines as the phrases crescendo to their climactic peaks.

The three Rückert settings that opened the second half of the recital introduced a fresh and absorbing complexity. ‘Daß sie hier gewesen’ (That she was here) demonstrated the sheer sweetness of Prégardien’s tenor, evoking the fragrant scents with which the wind teases the poet-speaker. In ‘Greisengesang’ (Old man’s song) the singer used the text more effectively and moved well between registers. The poignant simplicity of Drake’s introduction to ‘Du bist die Ruh’ captured the poem’s blend of peace and longing. Prégardien shaped the melody with poise and constancy, but, while the voice was secure at the challenging rise in the final stanza, ‘Dies Augenzelt/Von deinem Glanz/Allein erhellt’ (This temple of my eyes is lit by your radiance along), he held back from delivering the crescendo of ardour for which Schubert asks.

At this point, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ interrupted the sequence of recorded Poetisches Tagebuch songs, following almost segue; were Drake and Prégardien suggesting that the maiden summoned by the poet-speaker in ‘Du bist die Ruh’ rejects her obsessive admirer, ‘Vorüber! Ach, vorüber!/ Geh, wilder Knochenmann!’ (Away! Ah, away! Away, fierce man of bones!’), or that he will lose her to Death?

After the lingering pathos of these opening songs, the surging ripples of ‘Im Walde’ (D708) were a welcome rush of vigour and the narrative structure of this lied was well articulated. ‘Nacht und Träume’ was fittingly reverential and pensive, but again the slow tempo and Prégardien’s prioritising of melodic lyricism lessened the impact of the inferences carried by the sounds of the words themselves. The tenor was an engaging story-teller in ‘Fischerweise’ but this brief window of lightness was rapidly pushed aside by the angry despair of the grave-digger in ‘Totengräbers Heimweh’ (Gravedigger’s longing) - a powerful monologue of existential yearning. The final lied, ‘Winterabend’ (The winter evening), seemed to return us to the spirit of Schulze’s fervent poet-speaker, assured that he will attain his heart’s desire and thus content to ‘Denk’an sie, an das Glück der Minne,/ Seufze still, und sinne und sinne’ (Think of her and love’s happiness, sigh in silence, and muse and muse).

This was not a lieder recital to leave one feeling emotionally wrought, having shared the pain and wretchedness of Schubert’s lovers and wanderers, but it was a recital to prompt reflection. Returning home, my conversation with my German-speaking guest turned to diverse concerns: the skill with which Rückert manipulates language; the disturbing image of the grave-digger’s self-destructive denial of the world; the German concept of Bildung - the cultivation of the ‘self’. So, this was a recital to inspire one to muse.

Claire Seymour

Christoph Prégardien (tenor), Julius Drake (piano)

Franz Schubert: ‘Auf der Brücke’ D853, ‘Der liebliche’ Stern D861, ‘Im Walde’ D834, ‘Um Mitternacht’ D862, ‘Lebensmut’ D883, ‘Im Frühling’ D882, ‘An mein Herz’ D860, ‘Tiefes Leid’ D876, ‘Über Wildemann’ D884, ‘Dass sie hier gewesen’ D775, ‘Greisengesang’ D778, ‘Du bist die Ruh’ D776, ‘Der Tod und das Mädchen’ D531, ‘Im Walde’ D708, ‘Nacht und Träume’ D827, ‘Fischerweise’ D881, ‘Totengräbers Heimweh’ D842, ‘Der Winterabend’ D938.

Wigmore Hall, London; Tuesday 14^th March 2017.

La Tragédie de Carmen at San Diego

In 1983 Stage Director Peter Brook, in collaboration with writer Jean-Claude Carrière and composer Marius Constant, pared down the French grand opera to its bare essentials and presented La Tragédie de Carmen, a ninety-minute version of the story.

Rather then enumerate all the characters and musical numbers omitted, I will simply list the main characters and mention much of the music we heard at the Balboa Theatre on Friday evening. The characters were Carmen, Don José, Zuniga, Micaela, Escamillo, Garcia, and Lillas Pastia. If you are wondering who Garcia is, he is Carmen’s husband. He is mentioned in the Proper Merimée’s original book but not in the opera. Brook’s Carmen was no longer a glamorous gypsy and she had lost her factory job. However, she still managed to divert José’s attention from Micaela even though the latter sang with lustrous tones. The country girl put up a fight, however, and in this version of the story she had more spunk than in the grand opera.

Adrian Kramer as Don Jose

With no chorus of soldiers in the background and no children imitating them, the focus was on the rivalry and its results. Carmen fascinated José with the "Habanera" but the orchestra had been pared down to a fifteen-member chamber ensemble. Thus, she did not need to have the big operatic voice we normally hear singing over a full orchestra. Peabody Southwell sang Carmen with a sultry sound and played up her intense sexuality. Her "Seguidilla' was delightful, her "Gypsy Song" enchanting, and there were no extra soldiers to harass her.

The memento she gave José, sung by tenor Adrian Kramer, was a red knitted stocking, not a flower. Nevertheless, he held it as he sang a beautifully lyrical "Flower Song." When the story moved to the inn, we met Max Cadillac as Lillas Pastia, an amusing female impersonator and hostess extraordinaire. At one point, Carmen was involved in a threesome with José and Lillas. Then we understood that the soldier’s thoughts had long since left his elderly mother and the village girl who expected to marry him.

Of course with a chamber orchestra and many fewer characters, there were no ensembles in the La Tragédie. Gone were the smugglers and their wonderful quintet. Instead we saw raw emotion, love and hate. Carmen had become theater. A fine actor as well as a singer, Adrian Kramer painted pictures with the colors in his voice. José, his possessive, psychotic character, was as essential to the story as Carmen herself. His tragedy grew out of his own actions, however. If only José had not left his village, he and Micaela might have had a chance at happiness, but after his trip to the big city, he, like many others, would never go back.

Adrian Karmer (Don Jose) and Andriana Chuchman (Micaela)

Bass baritone Ryan Kuster gave a thoroughly pleasing performance of Escamillo with a full orchestra at Arizona Opera not too long ago. In San Diego his vocal range seemed to be a bit restricted, but it may be that some of the Toreador's notes are written lower in La Tragédie. He was a spectacular matador, however, and for a while it seemed as though Carmen belonged on his arm. Unfortunately, the bull killed him early on and his bloody corpse left the ring in an open cart.

Brook’s Carmen is a young girl eager to make money any way she can in the early scenes but she believes in fate and, for that reason, she understands that sooner or later she will meet her destiny. She is younger and much less of a glamor girl than Bizet’s Carmen, but she will intrigue patrons who are more interested in character and conflict than in the spectacle offered by grand opera.

Maria Nockin

Kasper Holten's farewell production at the ROH: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

It is also an opera that performs, rather than theorises, Wagner’s claim that his operas will fulfil his revolutionary concept of a teleological art: an art that would save the future world from the philistinism and barbarism of the present. So, Wagner might have said that Meistersinger is an opera about ‘me, authority and tradition’.

Holten’s new production is ‘revolutionary’ in its own way, turning the opera inside out, back to front and even (literally) upside down in one climactic vignette of cultural anarchy. Wagner’s own words, ‘Kinder, schafft Neues!’ (Children, create new things!) preface the programme-book synopsis that Holten has penned - and, later, reappear as graffiti on a toppling wall - so, is Holten telling us that he is taking up Wagner’s cause?

Wagner transports the audience back to the guild culture of 16th-century Nuremberg, opening Act 1 inside St. Catherine's Church where a service is just ending. Holten and his designer Mia Stensgaard shun historical and geographical authenticity and create a single set - albeit one which revolves to destroy its own theatrical illusion of veracity - which is well-suited to the opera’s scenes of pomp and ceremony but less apt for the more intimate episodes which probe into the hearts, minds, homes and streets of the citizens of Nuremberg.

We find ourselves in a grand, panelled room - a gentlemen’s club or Masonic hall - in the early decades of the 20^th century. Glamorous and sophisticated, this stately chamber is a homage to art deco geometric angularity, with its polished parquet floor, decorative plinths topped with lyres, birds and statuettes, and ornamental indoor trees. It’s certainly handsome to look at and, as the ROH Chorus launched into their lusty rendition of a Lutheran pastiche, the flashes of chrome and nickel momentarily suggested vast organ pipes - which helped to push aside the question of what a church choir was doing in a private members’ club. The centrepiece is a huge raised ‘throne’ of burnished copper, which put me in mind of, alternately, an outsized beer tankard and the F.A. Cup.

When a team of waiters arrives to set up, under the supervision of Major Domo David and Stewardess Magdalene, dinner tables for the arriving club members, we slip back a decade or two into the Edwardian opulence of Downton Abbey. The tables are laden with flickering candles, glittering goblets and red floral decorations. Indeed, everyone seems more interested in what’s for dinner - Beckmesser picks at melon and serrano ham - than the essential aesthetic dilemma which troubles Wagner’s guildsmen, ‘what is beautiful?’

And, herein lies a problem with Holten’s conception. The real 16 ^th-century Meistersingers, having created an idealised lineage stretching back to the twelve great masters who represented the first flowering of German culture in the 13^th century, were now concerned that their traditions were falling into disrepair. Sachs and Beckmesser tussle how these traditions might be saved and maintained; Veit Pogner addresses the decaying state of art in his presentation to the Guild Meeting, offering his daughter as a prize that can inject new life into a dying art form.

In Holten’s theatrical world, however, the prize-song competition seems irrelevant, even incongruous: when Pogner ‘sells’ his daughter, Eva is more a trophy Eve than a muse of Parnassus. When a greasy looking Walther arrives, his rock-band t-shirt, out-sized coat and cool shades are an eyesore amid the formal regalia of the club, as Holten reverses the class-relationship between Wagner’s courtly knight and the guildsmen.

Act 2 does not take us out into the streets and among the people: Sachs seems to have set up shop in the club dining-room, and the ornamental planters have to do service for fragrant lime trees and verdant meadows. Given the incompatibility between set and action, stronger stagecraft is needed if we are to appreciate the Nurembergers’ lives and minds. Moreover, the end-of-act fracas between David and Beckmesser mushrooms into a vision of apocalypse worthy of Hieronymus Bosch: a riot of beasts and devils swarms the stage - Signe Fabricius’ movement direction is masterly - and the throne, already on a tilt, is ripped from its pedestal and spun aloft, as a tattooed, torch-bearing, cloven-hoofed Pan ineffectually calls the hour.

Act 3 appears to tell us that what we have just seen is ‘a dream’, of a theatrical kind, as the set swivels back to reveal its own ‘back-stage’. A slow revolve takes us full circle and by the end of the Act we are back in the gentlemen’s club for the Feast of St. John. Costume Designer Anja Vang Kragh indulges in hyperbolic pageantry: while the guildsmen, who perch on raked seating as if watching a dramatic performance, wear modern dress, the ‘mastersingers’ are an explosion of richly coloured finery and frippery, topped with pavement-slab mortar-boards. Again, the attention to detail is notable: Sachs even has a boot atop his golden staff. But, surely the vagrant-like Walther would not get past the doormen?

If there are some question marks over the logic and consistency of Holten’s concept, the cast score full marks all round for stamina. Byrn Terfel took a little while to get into his stride - his is quite a subdued Sachs - but by Act 2 he had the measure of Beckmesser, cobbling with sly insouciance during his serenade. And, though the relationships between Sachs, Walther and Eva at times lack clarity, Terfel skilfully conjured pathos in his scene with Eva. Sachs’ paean to ‘Holy German Art’ can seem like an unsettling volte-face, but Terfel’s imperious explanation of the need to preserve and continue the mastersingers’ art smoothed over the swerve.

American soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen is a creamy-voiced Eva; the richness and radiance of her voice conveys Eva’s surprising feistiness, as does Willis-Sørensen’s nuanced acting - even though she is saddled with a series of ghastly, unflattering costumes including a dress as sturdy as a battleship. If only her diction had been clearer; this was a weakness that was exacerbated by the clarity of Terfel, and that of Gwyn Hughes Jones as Walther von Stolzing.

Hughes Jones’ tenor was characteristically warm and honeyed, and he did not flag once during the long, demanding performance, as he honed his prize song to expressive perfection over four and a half hours. But, while unwaveringly lyrical, Hughes Jones sometimes lacked brightness in the middle register where he was occasionally obscured by the rich brass orchestrations. It was also hard for the Welsh tenor to establish Walther’s nobility, given that he looked like a bristly, boorish rocker.

Johann Martin Kränzle was outstanding as Beckmesser, preening and prim, and oozing smug self-satisfaction. He pulled off the ‘singing badly well’ paradox, and acted superbly with his voice. After his final humiliation, he lurked in the shadows, his peacock robes replaced by a grubby white vest; a troubling figure of pathos.

Allan Clayton was confident and exuberant as David; the role was exceptionally well characterised and Clayton was a persuasive presence, even when some of the business around him was not. He struck a good rapport with Hanna Hip’s bright-toned Magdalene. Stephen Milling as Veit Pogner and Sebastian Holeck as Fritz Kothner also stood out for the authoritativeness of their singing.

The ROH Chorus were in hearty voice and chorus master William Spaulding enjoyed his moment in the spotlight, conducting the chorale singers, in Act 1. Antonio Pappano drove the action swiftly on - Meistersinger can run to five hours, this performance was barely four and a half - and the ROH Orchestra got better and better. If the overture lacked the full quota of both gravity and gleam, then the Act 3 prelude was particularly beautiful - and may have seemed especially touching given the unalleviated high temperature of the playing preceding.

Holten saves his best trick until last. When the club members arrive for dinner in Act 1, the female guests are banished: they are clearly just arm candy. But, when Eva sees both Sachs and Walther acquiesce to the power of tradition, she’s having none of it. That said, surely Wagner’s message is that ‘true’ art depends as much on tradition as it does innovation.

Claire Seymour

Richard Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Hans Sachs - Bryn Terfel, Sixtus Beckmesser - Johannes Martin Kränzle, Walther von Stolzing - Gwyn Hughes Jones, Eva - Rachel Willis-Sørensen, Veit Pogner - Stephen Milling, David - Allan Clayton, Magdalene - Hanna Hipp, Fritz Kothner - Sebastian Holecek, Kunz Vogelgesang - Andrew Tortise, Balthasar Zorn - Alasdair Elliott, Konrad Nachtigal - Gyula Nagy, Ulrich Eisslinger - Samuel Sakker, Augustin Moser - David Junghoon Kim, Hermann Ortel - John Cunningham, Hans Schwarz - Jeremy White, Hans Foltz - Brian Bannatyne-Scott, Nightwatchman -David Shipley, Apprentices (Jeanette Ager, Maria Brown, Maria Jones, Clare McCaldin, Simon Biazeck, Phillip Brown, Edmond Choo, Freddie De Tommaso, Andrew Friedhoff, James Geer, James Scarlett, David Woodward,

Director - Kasper Holten, Conductor - Antonio Pappano, Set designer - Mia Stensgaard, Costume designer - Anja Vang Kragh, Lighting designer - Jesper Kongshaug, Choreography and movement - Signe Fabricius, Fight director - Kate Waters, Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Opera House.

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London; Saturday 11^th March 2017.

AZ Musicfest Presents Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci

Although the original story may have been French, the libretto as acted out in Scottsdale was as hot as the Calabrian sun.

Felix Mendelssohn visited Italy on a tour of the continent that lasted from 1829 to 1831 At that time he wrote, “This is Italy! ... and I am loving it.” Later, he wrote his sister Fanny saying, “The Italian symphony is making great progress. It will be the jolliest piece I have ever done, especially the last movement.”

Scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings, Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 4, the Italian, has four movements. The opening A Major Allegro Vivace is light, airy and joyful, but it leads into a Bach-like D Minor second movement that reminded me that it was Mendelssohn who had done so much to revive interest in the music of Johan Sebastian Bach. Listening to Robert Moody and the Arizona Musicfest Orchestra play that second movement could bring tears to the coldest eyes. The following Con Moto Moderato is again in A Major but the final movement, marked Presto, is in A Minor and it gives the conductor license to drive his orchestra as fast as possible. With an excellent orchestra containing the first chairs of many other orchestras, Maestro Moody played it Prestissimo and it brought down the house.

Since the Musicfest Orchestra took up most of the stage area, there was only a narrow platform at the back for Stage Director Michael Scarola and his Pagliacci cast to use in staging the opera's action. Composer and librettist Ruggiero Leoncavallo said his story of raw sexuality was based on a case that his father, a judge, handled when the composer was a child. Although that is possible, French author Catulle Mendès thought it resembled his 1887 play La Femme de Tabarin. The French author sued Leoncavallo, only to drop the charges when he, himself, was sued for copying a Spanish play.

The dramatic strength that Scarola drew from his Pagliacci cast was absolutely amazing. He gave us a sizzling rendition of the libretto, pointing out every bit of foreshadowing built into the plot. Although the original story may have been French, the libretto as acted out in Scottsdale was as hot as the Calabrian sun. Although no costumer was credited, the cast wore clothing from the second half of the twentieth century.

Arizona Musicfest’s choristers were raucous townspeople with children who loved being part of the show. Conductor Robert Moody maintained tight control of his players and never let them drown out a singer while he moved the dramatic aspect of the work forward without a nanosecond’s pause. This performance was a thriller.

Gordon Hawkins was a voluminous voiced Tonio who sang the prologue from the middle of the audience. It worked well in that rotund church and he sang “Incominciate” on his way to the stage. Tonio is often played as a hunchback but here he was good-looking bully.

Canio, played by tenor Carl Tanner, was a suave circus owner whose hair trigger temper quickly turned to violence. He considered Nedda his property and he did not intend to share her with anyone. Singing with a huge enveloping voice, he told us the story of the unhappy clown with resonant dramatic tones that flowed like waves over the audience. Jonathan Blalock sang Beppe, Canio’s drinking partner, with easy lyric tenor tones.

Nedda knows she is tied to Canio for life even though she is unhappy as his wife. At the beginning of the opera she reclines on a trunk looking up at the sky and envying the freedom of the birds. Elisabeth Caballero allowed us to be part of Nedda’s dream world as the birds she loved flew into the ether. Her golden middle tones and opulent high notes bloomed above the audience as she sang her lyrical aria. She made listeners sympathize with Nedda but she did not let her her situation control her.

Smooth voiced baritone Alexy Lavrov played Nedda's lover, Silvio, a stable young man with a job in the town. The fact that he was not a member of the touring circus attracted Canio' wife, but she knew she and Silvio could never settle down safely in a town where Canio could find them. Her marriage vows would be not only her death sentence, but his as well. This was one of the most thrilling renditions of Pagliacci I have ever seen.

Maria Nockin

Cast and production information:

Robert Moody, Conductor; Carl Tanner, Canio; Elizabeth Caballero, Nedda; Gordon Hawkins, Tonio; Alexey Lavrov, Silvio; Jonathan Blalock, Beppe; Arizona Musicfest Chorus; Michael Lewis, Chorus Master; Members of Phoenix Children's Chorus; Michael Scarola, Stage Director.

image=http://www.operatoday.com/Pagliacci-5.png
image_description=Carl Tanner as Canio and Elisabeth Caballero as Nedda [Photo by Tim Trumble]

product=yes
product_title=AZ Musicfest Presents Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci
product_by=A review by Maria Nockin
product_id=Above: Carl Tanner as Canio and Elisabeth Caballero as Nedda [Photo by Tim Trumble]

English Touring Opera Spring 2017: a lesson in Patience

Ever since an anonymous first-night critic in 1881 attempted to identify Gilbert’s ‘idyllic’ poet Archibald Grosvenor with Arthur Swinburne speculation has associated Grosvenor and his rival versifier, the ‘fleshly’ Reginald Bunthorne, with prominent aesthetes of the 1860s such as Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler and of, course, the most glorious fop of them all, Oscar Wilde.

Interestingly, when impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte sent Wilde to the US on a lecture tour to illustrate the target of Patience’s satire, the resulting positive reception led to D’Oyly Carte’s wry observation that, ‘Inscrutable are the ways of the American public and absurd as it may appear, it seems that Oscar Wilde’s advent here has caused a regular craze and given the business a fillip up.’

But, today G&S is very much a matter of individual taste. And, then there’s the question of updating: if the creators were lampooning their contemporaries, should a present-day director turn the sardonic spotlight on modern mores and manners? While Jonathan Miller may have successfully excised Japan from the Mikado, there are many ‘modernisations’ which trip themselves up on the pedantry of ‘relevance’.

Director Liam Steel plays it straight in this ETO production, and the cast perform with the regimental conformity of good executants performing a work of genius. The knee-bends, handkerchief flourishes, fan-flapping, goose-stepping etc. are timed to perfection; but neat choreography does not a comedy make. There was a danger that the show would lapse into the clichés of pantomime or soap opera, and I longed for dramaturgy which sharpened the satirical edge and gave the performers greater freedom to ‘feel’ the dramatic moment. Perhaps such licence will blossom during the spring tour.

In 1882, Oscar Wilde visited Woodstock, Canada where he gave a lecture entitled ‘The House Beautiful’. Designer Florence de Maré’s set doesn’t quite call to mind the gilded stylisation of ‘ornamental aesthetic’ bravura, but she does give us the flora and fauna of a William Morris arts-and-crafts textile pattern - abundant in detail if lacking intensity of colour. De Maré’s muted green and pallid taupe may not conjure a synesthetic sensuousness fitting for a cult of beauty, but she does offer peacock feathers and vine-tracery aplenty. And, there is a match of visual motif and music, in the juxtaposition of the lethargic pallor of the languishing maidens’ ugly dresses and languorous refrain with the red-breasted dragoon’s robustness and readiness.

Patience is subtitled ‘Bunthorne’s Bride’ but in fact the eponymous ingénue dairymaid is not the leading character. Instead, the show is dominated by the rival poets Bunthorne himself and Archibald Grosvenor, who compete for the affections of the aforesaid maidens and Patience. Indeed, at the close, Bunthorne is singularly single, lacking a bride, despite the erstwhile attentions of the ‘love-sick’ maidens, who spurn their formerly affianced Dragoon Guards and their manly commander, Colonel Calverly, in his favour. When, by the end of Act 1, Bunthorne seems destined to wed Patience, one wonders if the musical entertainment is about to run into the ground; but, the arrival of the bookish Archibald Grosvenor re-directs the feminine gaze and the axe hovering over Act 2 is circumvented.

Arthur Sullivan’s score equals Gilbert’s text for playful parody and pointedness, and the ETO principals and chorus produced a charming performance that would make even the most G&S-phobic audience-member smile, if not guffaw. The young cast and the ETO chorus of ‘twenty [necessity resulting in the substitution, ‘several’] love-sick maidens’ and stiffly uniformed Dragoons proved well-versed in the idiom, both spoken and sung.

Though the overture lacked sprightliness, subsequently conductor Timothy Burke paced the drama effectively. Donizetti would have been proud of the Act 1 Finale.

Bradley Travis’s Bunthorne was an extravagant concoction of cerise and orange velvet, floral stockings lilies and peacock feathers, topped with an extravagant beret. Travis postured, posed and attitudinised with grace, gallantry and gentility, and stayed just the right side of camp droopiness. His ironically drowsy patter number, ‘Am I Alone and Unobserved, I Am’, got the show on the road, characterised by RP diction and effortless singing; and, Bunthorne’s ‘Oh Hollow! Hollow! Hollow!’ was delivered in a honeyed baritone not lacking a splattering of hypocrisy and humbug. The swift ‘If you’re anxious for to shine’ was deftly delivered. Travis has superb theatrical timing and knows when to turn up the comic thermometer: his ham-fisted attempts to fix the raffle to ensure that Patience is his bride almost came deliciously unstuck when Bunthorne wedged his elbow in the urn containing the ticket stubs.

Ross Ramgobin evinced star quality as Archibald Grosvenor: Ramgobin’s beguiling baritone was powerful and clean, and gave substance to Grosvenor’s insipid amiability and mild-mannered, holier-than-thou-ness. Ramgobin’s Grosvenor was confident but sheered shy of smugness.

Lauren Zolezzi’s Patience sparkled with diamond-cut precision from her entrance aria, ‘I cannot tell what this love may be’. Her diction - indeed that of the entire cast - was so clear that, for once, surtitles might easily have been dispensed with. Zolezzi was a paragon of no-nonsense pragmatism; and she swung a laden milk-churn aloft with the same effortless ease with which she despatched the soprano’s lofty flights.

As Colonel Calverley, Andrew Slater was paradoxically blustering of spirit and nimble of voice in his patter number, ‘If you want a receipt’. Valerie Reid evoked sympathy for the pining Lady Jane, despite Gilbert’s unkind misogyny, in ‘Silver’d is the raven hair’, clutching her double bass trenchantly, and striking an adroit balance between gravity and comedy.

On the whole, Steel, too, struck the right balance between comedy and opera. In 1900, when a revival was being considered, Gilbert himself questioned whether Patience would appeal to then-contemporary tastes. His doubts proved unnecessary and Patience triumphed once more. And, why would it not? By the 1880s Aestheticism was no longer new: Gilbert was poking fun at more than while lilies and japanoiserie. His lampooning of those who starve life to feast on art speaks across the ages; one needs beauty and a square meal - and this production delivers both.

Claire Seymour

Gilbert and Sullivan: Patience

Patience - Lauren Zolezzi, Reginald Bunthorne - Bradley Travis, Archibald Grosvenor - Ross Ramgobin, The Lady Jane - Valerie Reid, The Lady Saphir - Suzanne Fischer, The Lady Angela - Gaynor Keeble, Colonel Calverley - Andrew Slater, Major Murgatroyd - Jan Capiński, Lieutenant The Duke of Dunstable - Aled Hall; Director - Liam Steel, Conductor - Timothy Burke, Designer - Florence de Maré, Lighting Designer - Mark Howland, ETO Ensemble and Orchestra.

Hackney Empire, London; Wednesday 8^th March 2017.

Tara Erraught: mezzo and clarinet in partnership at the Wigmore Hall

Once the slight, and forgivable, tension of the opening couple of items had been banished, Erraught revealed a full, gleaming mezzo which was bright at the top, honeyed in the middle and strong and characterful at the bottom. She moved easily between and across the registers, slipping silkily through coloratura passages, soaring warmly in more expansive episodes, and nailing every leap, twist, turn and flourish that was required of her.

In the concert arias with obliggato clarinet, however, she was matched, and on occasion outshone, by Pluta. A former principal clarinettist with the Staatskapelle Dresden and guest principal with many orchestras including the Bayerische Staatsope, Pluta’s innate musicality was winningly beguiling.

The use of obbligato - usually wind - instruments to complement and converse with the voice was a common practice in the oratorios and operas of the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, the obbligato instrument moved from the orchestra ranks and took its place in the concert aria and it was four of the latter that were presented here.

Louis Spohr’s Sechs Deutsche Lieder Op.103 were first performed in 1838; the solo part was written for the virtuoso instrumentalist Johann Simon Hermstedt, who asked Spohr to composer the work at the request of Princess Sondershausen. Piano and clarinet painted a bucolic mood-picture at the opening of ‘Zwiegesang’ (Duet song), conjuring the sweet scents and sounds of dusk: ‘In a lilac bush sat a little bird/ in the quiet, lovely May night.’ Erraught’s German diction was precise though her diligent attention to the text resulted at times in a lack of strong character-painting. However, the revelation that ‘Von Frühlingssonne da Vöglein saß/ Von Liebeswonne das Mägdelein’ (Of spring sunshine sang the little bird,/of love’s delight sang the young girl) was winsomely conspiratorial in tone, and her mezzo blossomed beautifully with the last line, ‘Vergeß ich nimmer mein Lebelang’ (I shall never forget my whole life long). The second Op.103 song, ‘Das heimliche Lied’ (The secret song), began with a clarinet flourish - a wincing spasm of pained lament which Baillieu transformed magically at the close into a gentle vision of hope and love.

Schubert’s Der Hirt auf dem Felsen played a large part in the elevation of the obbligato to the concert platform, but the composer’s disciples, including Franz Paul Lachner, were not slow to follow his example. The piano’s propulsive accompaniment at the opening of Lachner’s ‘Wach auf’ (Awaken!) were a rallying cry to live and act: ‘Was stehst du bange/ Und sinnest nach?’ (Why do you stand there/ brooding with fear?) sang Erraught, her dark lower register urgent and compelling. The second of two songs from Lacher’s Frauenliebe und Leben Op.82, ‘Seit ich ihn gesehen’ (Since I saw him), was similarly fervent; here, though, the rich and energised accompanying parts occasionally overwhelmed the vocal line when it fell to lower realms. The instrumentalists’ wonderfully modulated rallentando at the close was beautifully delicate.

Erraught seemed to shift up a gear in Schubert’s Der Hilt auf dem Felsen, relishing the operatic dimensions of this more substantial, and more accomplished, composition and its progression through intense emotions. She really engaged with the audience here, creating an absorbing characterisation. The tense drama of the instrumental introduction - the piano’s subtle rubato, the slightest of expressive delays on the first of the repeated chords, and a sleepy clarinet fermata - issued a challenge to the voice, to match the openness and smoothness of the clarinet’s opening melody, but Erraught equalled Pluta for mellifluous allure, evincing both power and clarity through the undulating phrases. The repeating triplets of Baillieu’s accompaniment were, as ever, judiciously weighed, and both instrumentalists were simultaneously dramatic and sensitive. The tempo of the minor-key central section of the aria, in which the shepherd reflects on his grief and loneliness, seemed quite deliberate and slow, but this only served to highlight the steady, icy flow of tears in the piano’s right hand and the quiet pain of Erraught’s gently decorated plaint, ‘Ich hier so einsam bin’ (I am so alone here). Soon, though, the exuberant final section, in which the protagonist celebrates the spring to come, chased away wintering melancholy.

In the four operatic numbers that comprised the second half of the programme, Erraught revealed the extent of her expressive range and a stalwart technique. She seemed more comfortable in this dramatic mode, more naturally accommodating her large mezzo to the intimate Wigmore Hall while hiding none of its power and palette.

Erraught captured all of Sifare’s pathos and hauteur in ‘Soffre il mio cor con pace’ (My heart endures calmly) from the adolescent Mozart’s opera seria, Mitridate, re di Ponto, nailing, in the opening phrase, the sustained note that expresses Sifare’s forbearance and the wide leaps that convey his inner agitation. With Mitridate away fighting a war against Pompey the Great, his two sons, Farnace and Sifare battle for the love of their father’s new bride, Aspasia. She, afraid of Farnace’s passionate advances, issues a despairing appeal to Sifare and he, after agreeing to protect her, exclaims in this aria that while he can withstand a woman’s beauty, a man’s pride cannot be abided - thereby offering Mozart two opposing emotions to comply with the conventions and structure of the da capo form.

Mozart’s vocal writing is demanding: the fifteen-year-old relied more on coloratura flamboyance than the emotional mood-painting of his mature operas to capture the wild ups and downs of love. Erraught was untroubled by the wide leaps, flourishes and extensive scalic runs that traverse the full range of the voice. The sudden transitions were convincing, and the lyricism of the slow, triple time ‘b’ section offered a quiet anguish to counter the statuesque indignation of the opening section.

Adolescent ardour and self-belief of a different kind were on display in Cherubino’s ‘Voi che sapete’ from Le nozze di Figaro, where the richness of the plummeting final phrases suggested the young page’s candidness and incipient maturity.

Erraught offered two rarely heard works by Rossini to close the programme. Rosina’s frequently cut ‘alternative’ aria, ‘Ah se è ver che in tal momento’ (Ah, if it is the truth), from Il barbiere di Siviglia -that Rossini composed for the soprano Josephine Fodor Mainvielle - was impressive for the delicacy of the coloratura, which leapt lightly and fully captured the vulnerable Rosina’s fears that Lindoro has betrayed her. The floating lyricism of ‘Ah se è ver’ was effectively balanced by the later bravura, as Rosina declares her faith in Lindoro’s innocence and rejoices in his ‘compassionate love’.

Erraught’s technical security was similarly impressive in the composer’s solo cantata Giovanna d’Arco (Joan of Arc). The first recitative, in which the protagonist reflects on the mission before him, is followed by an aria devoted to her mother. The second part interrupts such reflections with thoughts of war and the summons of an angel of death. Erraught conveyed Joan’s extraordinary emotional capacity, from the force of the protagonist’s patriotic fervour - ‘O patria! O re! Novella un’aita verrà’ (O my country! My king! A new source of help will come) - to the lilting grace of maternal adoration. She effectively controlled and shaped the growing intensity, culminating in the proud rhetoric and majesty pride in the second part of the cantata, which was heightened by Baillieu’s characterful accompaniment.

The Wigmore Hall audience was warmly appreciative, and Erraught was keen to encore. I felt, though, that Sesto’s ‘Parto, parto’ from La clemenza di Tito, Mozart’s final opera seria, might have been included as a conclusion to the ‘main programme’; a substantial work - and finely performed by Pluta and Erraught - it seemed to demand a ‘full billing’, and it would have neatly complemented the opening work. Two more short encores followed - Percy French’s ‘Long, long ago in the woods of Gornamona’ and Aaron Copland’s ‘Long time ago’ - which allowed us to appreciate the gentle sweetness of Erraught’s mezzo but which seemed unnecessary adjuncts to what was a rewarding, thoughtful and well-conceived programme.

Claire Seymour

Tara Erraught (mezzo-soprano), James Baillieu (piano), Ulrich Pluta (clarinet)

Louis Spohr: ‘Zwiegesang’ Op.103 No.2, ‘Das heimliche Lied’ Op.103 No.5, ‘Wach auf’ Op.103 No.6; Franz Paul Lachner: ‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’, ‘Seit ich ihn gesehen’ Op.82; Franz Schubert:Der Hirt auf dem Felsen D965; Mozart:Mitridate, re di Ponto K87 - ‘Soffre il mio cor con pace’, Le nozze di Figaro K492 - ‘Voi che sapete che cosa e amor’; Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia - ‘Ah s'e ver’, ‘Giovanna d’Arco’.

Wigmore Hall, London; Monday 6^th March 2017.

Berliner Philharmoniker’s Ruhr Residency (I): Camilla Tilling charms in the Childhood delights of Mahler’s Fourth

Pairing Ligeti with Mahler may seem odd at first, but they both shared the suffering of great family losses. Mahler mourned the deaths of several of his children, while the Hungarian Jew lost more than twenty family members during the Holocaust,. Those trauma’s resonate within the sorrows and horrors of their creative output. Where Mahler’s grandiose symphonies portray humanity and nature through beauty, Ligeti’s microtonal excursions seem attempts at unravelling the quantum fabric of the universe, as well as reflecting the capacity of horror in human beings.

For those lured by Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 in G major and unfamiliar with Ligeti’s extremes, his Violin Concerto must have been a nerve wracking confrontation. Though not immediately easy on the ears, Ligeti’s strangeness grows on you. Even with its extra-terrestrial tones, which the musicians bring to life through wild techniques, this concerto never alienates likes some of Ligeti’s other works.

A late work, Ligeti’s concerto is laced with hints of unexpected optimism. Through unsettling vibrations and microtonal subtleties, Ligeti’s journey alternates from dense to nearly transparent textures, culminating in an otherworldly musical realm. In search of nostalgia, acerbic passages pop out throughout the unsettling current, perhaps Ligeti’s wicked humor in his music helped with his coping. Rattle sustained a grounded focus; I never felt lost in Ligeti’s extremes.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja in Ligeti's wildly dramatic Violin Concerto

With the look of a poor fiddler, the French tomboy violinist performed barefooted in a shredded tuxedo that made her seem like a vagabond perhaps the most fitting for a Ligeti adventure. With dazzling virtuosity and a technical mastery, her raw theatricality played right into Mr. Rattle’s love for unconventional dramatic performances. The two had great chemistry. After she launched into the riveting cadenza, Sir Simon threw up his hands and left the stage, as if to say what do you still need me for? He returned later and conducted from the percussion section. Her Kurtag encore with the concertmaster was another delight.

In Mahler’s Fourth, Rattle’s supercharged intensity left me untouched till the final movement. He tackled it without score, and enforced Mahler’s frenzied tempos, while steadily slowing down in the quieter passages that often stirred in their romance. Skidding and slipping through the Viennese styles, Rattle’s fast-paced momentum reminded me of a highspeed merry-go round on the verge of spinning out of control. The complicated solo passages by the concertmaster were delivered with the illusion of perfect ease. Rattle fleshed out Mahler’s melodies with illuminating clarity.

Full of heart, Camilla Tilling sang “Das himmlische Leben” from Mahler’s Knaben Wunderhorn Songs. With resonance determined by a naive hope, she evoked the innocence Mahler intended. Towards the end her tone hinted at the threat of the end of childhood. She made a deep connection to the other musicians. In few instances, Mr Rattle’s volume drained out her voice.

After the adventurous thrills of Ligeti, Mahler’s Fourth felt more like an extravagant dessert than a main course. The symphonic ode to childhood innocence on the verge of being corrupted, had nothing on the horrors of Ligeti. The next day in Essen at Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre, behind me two giddy ladies recounted their surprised joy of Ligeti: “Ah, aber das war sehr toll!”.

David Pinedo

Cast and production information:

Soprano: Camilla Tilling; Solo VIolinist: Patricia Kopatchinskaja; Berliner Philharmoniker; Conductor: Simon Rattle; February 24, 2017, Dortmund, Germany.

image=http://www.operatoday.com/maxresdefault.jpg
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product_title=Ruhr Residency with Mahler and Ligeti
product_by=A review by David Pinedo
product_id=Above: Camilla Tilling and Berlin Philharmoniker [All photos by Monika Ritterhaus]

Premiere: Riders of the Purple Sage

Bohmler’s one-time teacher, Carlisle Floyd, was present at the Phoenix opening. At the pre-performance lecture, Bohmler recalled some advice that Floyd had once given him, “If an audience has a vocabulary of 200 words, give them those 200 words plus 200 they don’t know.” With this opera he gave the audience what they knew and a great deal more in beautiful, original music.

Conductor Joseph Mechavich brought out Bohmler’s suave melodies and the distinctive motives that will hopefully become more familiar when we get to hear this well constructed music drama a second time. I, for one, hope the chance to hear it again happens very soon. Riders is a fascinating work that deserves to be heard often.

Kohn based his libretto on the Zane Grey novel of the same name and there is conflict in every scene of this work. When a woman inherits important land with herds of cattle and a spring on it, leaders of her church want to control it and her. However, she will not marry the husband they have chosen for her and she refuses to let them control her or her property. This opera even contains a major aria about a man's place in the American West and his perception of value of a gun.

Amanda Opuszynski and Joshua Dennis as Bess and Bern Venters

One of the lines on the supertitle screen described the white-hot intensity of the characters, “Maybe we all got scraped raw by the world.” The opera’s opposing views are as old as the Bible and as new as the latest Facebook page. Bohmler told AZ Central.com, “I wouldn’t have adapted Riders if I didn’t think that it spoke directly to what is going on today—which is religious fundamentalism, women’s rights, guns, and society.”

Stage Director Fenlon Lamb told the story in a realistic manner and the gorgeous skies behind Ed Mell’s distinctive, stylized sets blazed with an intensity that matched the heat of the drama. Kathleen Trott’s plain, functional costumes set the action in rural Utah at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Bohmler’s expansive score and its detailed orchestration called for dramatic voices and Arizona Opera answered with finely skilled artists who probably should be better known than they are at the moment. As Jane Withersteen, Karin Wolverton’s opulent voice flowed into the hall with golden radiance and she never seemed to tire, even though she had very little time off stage.

As her helper, the gunslinger Lassiter, Morgan Smith gave us a stunning performance of a role in which the character’s personality gradually unfolds and grows in complexity. These two artists played off each other and made exquisite music together. The younger couple, Joshua Dennis as Bern Venters and Amanda Opuszynski as Bess, sang with lighter, more lyrical voices that floated seamlessly above the audience.

As “bad guys” Elder Tull and Bishop Dyer, bass-baritone Kritopher Irmiter and baritone Keith Phares provided more than enough dark tones and evil opposition to contrast with the love of both couples. Hugo Vera was a capable Judkins and Henri Venanzi’s choristers provided small groups of harmonic townspeople. At the end of the evening the sound of the applause and the cheers for this important new work was deafening and it lasted for several minutes.

Maria Nockin

Cast and production information:

Conductor, Joseph Mechavich; Stage Director, Fenlon Lamb; Scenic Designer, Ed Mell; Costume Designer, Kathleen Trott; Lighting Designer, Gregory Allen Hirsch; Projection Designers, Jake Pinholster and Michael Batemen; Chorus Master, Henri Venanzi; Fight Director, Andrea Robertson; Jane Witherteen, Karin Wolverton; Lassiter, Morgan Smith; Bern Venters, Joshua Dennis; Bes, Amanda Opuszynski; Bishop Dyer, Kristopher Irmiter; Elder Tull, Keith Phares; Judkins, Hugo Vera; Co-producer, Kristin Atwell Ford.

English Touring Opera Spring 2017: a disappointing Tosca

Recent productions have inventively explored classical myth ( Xerses and La Calisto/Return of Ulysses ), offered Donizetti rarities ( Pia de'Tolomei and The Siege of Calais/The Wild Man of the West Indies ) and taken us to the moon ( Haydn ).

So, I arrived in expectant mood at the Hackney Empire for the first instalment of ETO’s slightly disconcerting pairing of Puccini’s ‘shabby little shocker’, Tosca, and G&S’s satirical romp, Patience (first night, Wednesday 8^th May). The company’s website offers little illumination concerning the programming: ‘our two operas in Spring 2017 have absolutely nothing in common (except they are very, very good).’

Given that these ETO productions have to survive the trials of touring to multiple and diverse venues, the company cannot be chastised for embracing minimalism; but Florence de Maré’s designs are not simply functional, or even limiting, they are treacherous. A steep ramp and sharply raking steps are a singer’s potential graveyard. What is director Blanche McIntyre to do? Inevitably, there is a reluctance to commit, which translates from the physical to the emotional.

Moreover, there is little sense of the spiritual reality of the Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle: just a little trellised lattice-work, a judgmental statue of the Madonna, a trap-door (which later leads to Scarpia’s Room 101), and an easel whose representation we never see. With the cast too afraid to put one foot in front of the other, the overall effect is one of stasis. There is no sense of musico-dramatic unity; whatever is going on in the pit, the protagonists are standing/sitting still. There are bureaus and tables, and at times these offer dramatic possibilities - Tosca can pick up a knife from Scarpia’s desk - but also encourage the individuals to become entrenched in individual obsessions rather than to interact.

As Tosca, Paula Sides plays a huge part in redeeming this production; when she performed the role of Eleonora, Aurelia’s wife, in Donizetti’s The Siege of Calais I admired Sides’ ‘beautiful tone and shining vibrancy at the emotional climaxes’ remarking that ‘this was plush and thrilling singing’. This held true on this occasion: draped in Celtic green silk she was an embodiment of dignity and sincerity. Her ‘Vissi d’arte’ rightfully won applause; even if it felt more Handelian - in its statuesque nobility - than verismo.

And, individual roles do not lack stature: Matthew Stiff is an upright Sacristan, and Alexander James Edwards’ Cavaradossi is free of heart, though sometimes wayward of intonation.

Crucially, though, the villain of the piece is disappointingly muted. I praised Craig Smith’s performance as Eustachio in Donizetti’s Siege of Calais, enjoying his ‘Verdian intensity’, and stamina and accuracy - but the lovely smooth lower register I noted on that occasion seemed to have developed a few cracks and fissures. And, most importantly, there is simply no menace to Smith’s Scarpia; his knife-edge has been blunted.

The only singer who really makes his mark is Aled Hall as Spoletta, who in just a few seconds can register a supercilious contempt which chills the blood. As Tosca climbs the ladder of self-sacrifice, Spoletta follows her, and his ghastly grimace as the curtain falls contains all the hatred, anguish, fury and frustration that the production has failed to communicate.

Conductor Michael Rosewell whips through the business in unfussy fashion. But, I was not sure whether to describe this as a semi-staged performance. There was certainly little sense of unity of musical and physical movement. Perhaps G&S’s Patience will try the said forbearance less, and offer the requisite satirical bite.

Claire Seymour

Puccini: Tosca

Paula Sides - Floria Tosca, Alexander James Edwards - Mario Cavaradossi, Craig Smith - Baron Scarpia, Timothy Connor - Cesare Angelotti, Aled Hall - Spoletta, Matthew Stiff - Sacristan; Director - Blanche McIntyre, Conductor - Michael Rosewell, Designer - Florence de Maré, Lighting Designer - Mark Howland.

Hackney Empire, London; Saturday 4^th March, 2017.