Very sad to hear of the passing of Elisabeth Söderström, aged 82.

Swedish soprano, un-diva-ish diva, full of fun and laughter, great star of Glyndebourne when I was there in the 1970s. The definitive Countess in Richard Strauss’s Capriccio, sang all three leading female roles in Der Rosenkavalier (once all three on the same night!), pioneering exponent of Janacek (especially Emilia Marty in The Makropulos Case); a very moving Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio; also sang Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, Melisande in Debussy’s opera, and many more. Champion of songs and lieder in a surprising number of languages! Her last role on stage was the Countess in Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades.

Thank you, Elisabeth, for brightening all our lives.

more here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/6629452/Elisabeth-Soderstrom.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/21/AR2009112102168.html

Wilfred Owen:  Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Happy Halloween!
This is from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra…

picture from Geoff Browne — thanks!

A very sad announcement from one of my favourite opera companies:

THE GARDEN OPERA COMPANY ANNOUNCEMENT

The Trustees of Greensong Productions, the charity which owns and operates Garden Opera, regret to announce that they have decided that it is no longer financially viable for Garden Opera to continue its operations.  Two summers of wet weather in 2007 and 2008, combined with the recession, took a significant toll on our performance bookings for this year. Notwithstanding the reduction in salaries and fees to staff, singers and musicians, for which we thank them, and the generosity of friends and supporters, we are without reserves to sustain the loss suffered in 2008 and the substantial loss now forecast for 2009.  With no improvement in sight, we simply cannot afford to carry on and we will now effect an orderly and prompt run-down of our affairs.

The Trustees and Peter Bridges, who has run Garden Opera for the last 14 years, thank everyone who has been associated with the company: all our singers, musicians, directors, costume and set designers, back stage crews and many others; Lucy de Castro, who, as general manager, has so patiently sorted out all conceivable problems over the last seven years; our friends and supporters, particularly those who have helped us with donations; and, of course, our hosts who have been fantastic and without whom there would have been no Garden Opera.

Over the years, Garden Opera has brought a lot of fun and happiness (and good music) to a huge audience across the country and overseas, including a great Barber this summer which was really well-received. Furthermore, through our performances we have helped many of our hosts over the years to raise several hundred thousand pounds for their many different charities.
So, it is with considerable sadness that we bring down the curtain.

However, Peter has informed the Trustees that he would like to have the opportunity to re-establish Garden Opera in a new guise.  Should that prove to be possible, they wish him all good fortune.  

Ray Miles

Chairman

9 October 2009

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Commiserations to Peter and to Lucy and to all the members of the company past and present, and thanks for some of the greatest operatic experiences ever.  Let us hope the phoenix will find a way to rise again.

Any millionaires out there??

More info on their website: http://www.gardenopera.co.uk/

Well!  The Royal Opera’s new production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde has really set the cat among the pigeons.  I couldn’t possibly comment myself, being closely involved with it (I wrote and edited the surtitles).

The critics’ reaction has been generally more than favourable (four or five stars) – the audience’s markedly less so (one seasoned witness said ‘I’ve never heard booing like it in the Opera House’)…

If you really want to see the fur flying, check out Charlotte Higgins’ blog on the Guardian website, and (especially) all the follow-up comments.  Most interesting.

Were you there?  What did you think?  Let me know — add a comment below.

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DISCLAIMER
Please note — all views expressed on this site are my own (or those of other contributors or persons quoted) and do not represent the views or policy of The Royal Opera or any other employer or organisation mentioned.

* * * *

 photo (uncredited) stolen from Charlotte Higgins’s blog

On Friday 11 September, to Garden Opera at Ravenscourt Park, London W6 – the very last performance of their summer-long season, and the only one we could get to!

The weather was kind – not too chilly, and it didn’t rain.  The setting was a lovely peaceful enclosed space, disturbed only by the occasional District Line train and the enthusiastic intervention of some local parakeets.  Handy tea-shop before the performance, loos rather a long dash in the interval…  The audience we presume were mostly local:  pretty much a full house, appreciative and animated.

The opera was Rossini’s BARBER OF SEVILLE, in a very simple, slick and extremely funny production by Katharina Wienecke.  The action was set in ‘Dr Bartolo’s Circus’, seemingly an odd idea but it worked very well, with Rosina ‘The Singing Bird’ (in a cage, of course) as the star attraction, her disgruntled guardian Dr Bartolo a retired animal-tamer, and Basilio an unlikely magician, forever producing scarves, flowers and magic wands from a variety of orifices.  Count Almaviva and Figaro the barber survived relatively unscathed from Rossini’s (or his librettist’s) original conception.  Occasional inconsistencies (Dr Bartolo was required to be a physician after all, to match the text of his patter-aria) either didn’t impinge or were turned into sources of comedy.  And, as in the best Barber performances, there were moments of (almost) genuine pathos.

The show took forever to get going, partly because of interminable if well-intentioned announcements from a distinguished local worthy (over incessant pre-recorded fairground organ music);  then the Overture started as another fairground organ piece, gradually morphing into the ‘live’ orchestra of Peter Bridges and his small but perfectly formed circus band (flute doubling clarinet, trumpet doubling flugelhorn – David Clewlow, no less – plus two violins, cello and the maestro himself on piano).  At long last the opera itself began;  the first scene (even without the chorus) does seem interminable, but that is Rossini’s fault. 

Once the show got up steam, there was no stopping it:  the profusion of sight gags, jokes, hilarious dialogue and text (busked up from Amanda and Anthony Holden’s old ENO singing translation, though with some changes, not always for the better?) kept the show bouncing along in high spirits.  I particularly enjoyed some of the in-jokes:  ‘Somebody’s knocking, who can it be?  (The cast’s all here!)’

Despite the exigencies of such a small company, musical standards were extremely high and without compromise:  apart from the excision of the chorus and some minor characters, remarkably few cuts were made.  As always, the show was double-cast, so I can only comment on the version we saw.  I’d guess that some other performances must have been distinctly different!

Alexander Anderson-Hall was Almaviva;  though his voice at first sounded unpromising, he could certainly deliver the notes, and he disclosed an unsuspected vein of comedy, especially in his Les-Dawson-inspired ‘granny’ disguise as the singing teacher ‘Donna Alonsa’ in Act II, with her knitting and tin of corned beef. 

Figaro was Simon Lobelson, a singer I had not encountered before:  a natural communicator with a fine voice and a quick wit, he commanded the stage whenever he was on it (in spivvy black leather, looking disconcertingly like David McVicar).

Serena Kay as Rosina was a delight, wide-eyed and bubbly, evidently having a whale of a time despite her colourful but somehow un-sexy costume.  (Mercifully she jettisoned the awful ‘singing bird’ wig at the earliest opportunity.)  And she sang some impressive coloratura too.

Bartolo was Adam Miller (who on other nights had been singing Figaro:  there’s versatile!)  Another fine performer, with splendid diction and a great line in irritated helplessness.

And Deryck Hamon as Don Basilio – last seen as Garden Opera’s Don Pasquale a year ago – was a hoot, all arms and legs and magical surprises despite his lugubrious Scots delivery.

A special mention for Nick Ash, who began the show as an impressively uniformed but hangdog programme seller (and remover of unwanted ladders), and reappeared as the Chief of Police, a pivotal role (the answer to ‘Somebody’s knocking, who can it be?’…) – speaking his few lines instead of singing them, but very effective and funny, especially in his simpering grovel when he learns Count Almaviva’s true identity.  He was nowhere mentioned in the programme, apparently because he was booked after they had gone to press (one of the perils of a long season fixed well in advance, I guess).  Well done that man!

I haven’t done justice to all the fun and games and the sheer enjoyment of the evening – another triumph for Garden Opera.  Long may they continue!  Here’s to next season…

Many thanks to Lucy for fixing the tickets, and to Diana for her company again (and the picnic!)

So… the circus came to town last week, and now it has departed in a cloud of dust and a hail of booing (some of it mine – never done that before!) amid the storms of applause.

Valery Gergiev, the Ossetian wizard, attempted the impossible – all four operas of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in four days, with his Mariinsky company from St Petersburg (formerly the Kirov) at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

I can’t really comment on all four, since for two of them I was behind the glass, working.  But my friend Diana did come to all four and took me to the other two (thank you, D!) so I got the general idea.

Did Gergiev succeed?  No.  Over-hyped, over-conducted, mostly beautifully played;  under-cast and under-sung, with very few honourable exceptions (it does not bode well for a Götterdämmerung when the loudest applause is for the Alberich);  over-designed, over-lit, under-rehearsed;  and, above all, under-directed.

This is surely Gergiev’s fault:  my feeling is that he doesn’t think anything is important except what he thinks is important, namely his conducting and the fact that he has ‘achieved’ this impossible feat at all.  He is quoted in interviews as saying that he wants to get away from the tyranny of the opera director:  having evolved his overall concept with designer George Tsypin (master of the enormous stage-cluttering useless object:  remember the giant cracked glass bottles in his Theodora from Glyndebourne?), Gergiev proceeded to sack or alienate at least four directors along the way (including Johannes Schaaf – ‘too German’ – and Opera Factory’s brilliant David Freeman). 

Finally he has brought in a fifth director, Alexander Zeldin, who has a Russian name but is British and as far as I can tell speaks not much Russian;  worst of all, he is only 24.  With the best will in the world, nobody aged 24 can have more then the haziest notion of how to direct this Everest of the operatic repertoire, which countless directors, conductors, scholars and analysts have spent whole lifetimes trying to understand.

I fear he is not really a director, but a ‘crisis manager’ and director of traffic, brought in to salvage what is left of previous attempts to make the original concept work.  By the time we got to the end of Götterdämmerung, it was impossible to discern any attempt at understanding the piece or the drama, or even listening to the music, for heaven’s sake.  Of all composers, Wagner tells you in every bar precisely what is going on, dramatically and emotionally;  just open your ears and listen (and read his stage directions!).  And please, try sitting out front and reading the surtitles, and then you will understand why the audience sniggered at things that were clearly in the text but were not happening on stage.  Ho hum.

Gergiev’s original concept was a fascinating one:  finding parallels between the Nordic myths that Wagner drew on and his own native Ossetian Nart sagas, he gets Tsypin to fill the stage with 30-foot effigies of Nart gods, and tries to get away from conventional Teutonic readings of the cycle by finding links with other mythologies.  Well yes, fine.  But (as my boss, Judi Palmer, said) it might have been a nice concept if anyone had done anything with it.  There were interesting ideas, such as making the ‘gold’ and the ‘Rhine’ out of shimmering masses of actors’ bodies;  but these ideas were not thought through or related to Wagner’s text, so failed to take off. 

Moreover, the stage was constantly invaded by troupes of meaningless ‘supers’ who wombled about, performing mysterious rituals or generally getting in the way of the action.  No, please!  When will they ever learn? – more means less.  The more ‘extras’ you have on the stage, the more you dilute the tension and drama of the principal characters.

Talking of which, any sense of Personenregie (the meaningful psychological interaction between the characters, which is where a decent director earns his wage) was almost non-existent.  Critics complained of the 1930s silent-film arm-waving and static out-front poses (which, not incidentally, meant they were facing the prompt box) which were all that most of the singers could muster by way of ‘acting’.  Honourable exceptions again:  Wotan and Fricka in their confrontations;  Wotan and Brünnhilde (mostly) in theirs;  the character of Mime;  and once again the magnificently sung and acted Alberich (Nikolai Putilin:  Gergiev tries to make the enterprise survivable by double-casting principal roles on different nights, but Putilin got to sing all the Alberichs).

So I’m sorry, Mr Gergiev – you do need a director.  Please, engage someone who has a sense of theatre and some decent operatic experience, and a grasp of the broad picture:  David Freeman would have been good, as would David Pountney or Francesca Zambello (but please, Francesca, no supers).  Even Graham Vick or Peter Hall, who knows?  John Cox?  John Copley?

And don’t tour this production on no rehearsals (it was beyond belief that it has already been seen around the world, in the Far East, the USA and Europe, including Cardiff);  I know for a fact that at Covent Garden only Rheingold had a complete play-through, and the other three received only technical rehearsals with piano or brief top-and-tail sessions with the orchestra (and the Brünnhilde was asking the director how she should act the final scene of Götterdämmerung only two hours before the show started;  had she really never done it before?). 

And although the orchestra played their hearts out – (amazing brass and woodwind sounds particularly, but the short-measure strings were sometimes scrawny, and Wagner’s six harps would have been nice rather than two, which used to be all very well for the old Sadler’s Wells tours but is inexcusable for a major international company) – ensemble was understandably not always as precise as it should have been.  (As one of the reviewers tactfully put it, ‘The players did not seem to have this music in their blood’.) 

Gergiev’s conducting, despite occasional manic bursts of exciting fast tempi, tended towards the slow if not downright catatonic.  So often the music almost ground to a halt, with one broken phrase after another limping along between pauses – which cannot work unless you have a John Tomlinson, or dare I say Bryn Terfel, to carry a long line at such a dangerously slow pace.

I could go on, but you get the idea, especially if you have read the reviews.  Please, Mr G, don’t try this again, at least not until it has been decently directed and rehearsed.  It was really an insult to put this shambles on the stage of one of the world’s great opera houses and expect to get away with it. 

Oh, and it’s also an insult to stretch your intervals, late starts and slow tempi so that the evening ends almost an hour later than advertised – with the result that people missed their trains, audience members (including us!) had their interval dining arrangements messed up, and one ROH usher was mugged on the way home because it was so late.

What a pity.  Expectations were so high, and it could have been so good.  No use telling Valery Gergiev to slow down and take more time to put a decent show together (as Wotan says, ‘How can I stop a rolling wheel?’);  but maybe the promoters, Victor and Lillian Hochhauser, could think twice before taking so much money off so many unsuspecting punters to import this appalling mess. 

Wagner’s music (and what amazing things there are, especially in Götterdämmerung!) deserves better, and gets it in just about any other production than this one.  A depressing and infuriating experience. 

BOO!!

photo by Natasha Razina, borrowed from The Independent – thanks!

Hey fellas! Less than two years after launching this website, I see I have now had over 20,000 hits — despite having rather ground to a halt over the last few months.

Many thanks to all of you for dropping by. There will be new things coming when I have time to get my breath back and get my act together!

Meanwhile, best wishes to everyone for a happy summer.

Jonathan

 Greetings from Wales, where I am ensconced with the BBC putting several thousand subtitles on the broadcast items for the CARDIFF SINGER OF THE WORLD Competition, 2009, coming from St David’s Hall in Cardiff.  Very exciting contest, some terrific singing and wonderful music.  A great privilege to be part of it.  

For me, the fruits of several weeks’ hard work (slotted in between all the other things I have been doing lately!) commissioning and preparing the subtitle translations and editing the titles. 

Halfway through the week at the moment, Round 4 (out of 5) this evening… The Rosenblatt Song Prize Final (a separate competition) is on Friday, the main Final on Sunday.  Day-to-day coverage on BBC4, BBC Wales and Radio 3;  Sunday’s Final is broadcast on BBC2 at 5.30 – don’t miss it!

To the Barbican on Friday 27 March for a concert performance of Martinů’s opera Julietta, or rather ‘Juliette’, as it was given in Martinů’s own French (re-) translation – a slightly odd decision given that the conductor and some of the cast were Czech. Still, the effect of the French vocal declamation was to make the music more than usually reminiscent of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Comprehension was ensured thanks to my friend Paula Kennedy’s scrupulous surtitles – which she would have been just as happy to do from Czech!

Kenneth Richardson provided a slick and effective ‘semi-staging’; singers basically wore evening dress and sang from scores, but the action was spiced up with minimal costumes and props, carefully thought out entrances and exits, and subtle lighting. American tenor William Burden was the tireless protagonist, the hapless Michel, who finds himself adrift in a land where no one can remember anything.  Magdalena Kožená was the appropriately distant and mysterious Julietta, looking lovely and vaguely 1930s in a floral frock.

Great character roles from a large cast including Jean Rigby and Rosalind Plowright, Roderick Williams and (outstanding) Andreas Jäggi.

Jiří Bělohlávek conducted the BBC SO in coruscating form – amazing colours and atmosphere. What an extraordinary score! I remember it from ENO in the 1970s (and from my Supraphon LPs), and its hypnotic power remains undimmed. It struck me as an amazing achievement to have written a full-length opera which is uniquely in his own idiom and no one else’s: apart from the echoes of Pelléas and the fact that the spooky opening bars are reminiscent of Stravinsky’s Les noces, one almost never felt ‘Oh yes, that bit’s Puccini, or Verdi, or Richard Strauss…’ as one does with all too many 20th century operas (including Britten!).

Martinů wrote the opera in 1936-7, to a play by his friend the French surrealist Georges Neveux. Martinů is probably an acquired taste, but I love his music. It’s the 50th anniversary of his death, so we are fortunate in getting more of it this year than we usually do.

Great to see a packed hall and so many luminaries in the audience – including, I was happy to see, Chris Hogwood, hotfoot from conducting the dress rehearsal of Dido and Aeneas + Acis and Galatea at the Royal Opera House only a few hours earlier (yes it was a long day).  I reminded Chris that it was he who introduced me to Martinů all those years ago (39 actually) at Cambridge Tech…

There’s a nice review here: http://thoroughlygood.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/juliette-bbcso-belohlavek-martinu/

picture: front cloth from a Czech production of the opera