Theodora at Glyndebourne

What’s this?  Amid TV cameras, excited young supporters are assembling to hear a persuasive politician, with armed bodyguards on each side of him, deliver his message. In the course of his speech he fakes a heart attack, is revived by medics, leaps back to his feet, and continues his harangue.

The reinvention of Handel’s tragic oratorio by the American director Peter Sellars is underway. The singers employ Sellars’s own private, distracting sign language, also used by him in other productions, to convey their emotions. At Glyndebourne in the 1990s, with Wiilliam Christie conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the transformation of this late, long neglected masterpiece was a hit. Dawn Upshaw, Loraine Hunt Lieberson, and the robust counter tenor David Daniels represented Christian morality. The Scandinavian baritone Frode Olsen was the dictatorial voice of evil. It was not the first time a Handel oratorio had been staged  as an opera, but it was done with supreme conviction, as this  three-disc DVD - where it is joined by a no less arresting renovation of the opera  seria  Rodelinda and a jeu d’esprit concocted under the title of A Night with Handel, with the composer’s modern biographer Jonathan Keates as narrator, strikingly continues to confirm.

Rodelinda, directed by Jean Marie Villegier in terms of a 1920s Hollywood monochrome film, again with Christie as the most perceptive of conductors and with the superb  Anna Caterina Antonacci in the title role,   offers similar evidence that Handel updates more satisfyingly than anyone else.

Each aria and ensemble is like a scene from a great silent movie brought to vivid vocal life, complete with subtitles. The plot profits from its melodramatisation as an episode from fascist Italy. The slow unfurling of the story, both emotional and witty, remains as riveting as it must have been when Glyndebourne unveiled  its take on baroque costume drama in the 1990s.

If you do not already possess it in your DVD  collection, buy it now from Amazon at bargain price.
30 May 2015

Handel in Miniature

As a gateway to opera on DVD, Handel has all the qualities that matter - an intimacy of scale even in his most dramatic works, roles that gain new vividness in DVD close-up, plots that can be strikingly (rather than pointlessly) updated, melodies that blossom afresh in their renovated surroundings.

But above all it is the intimacy that counts. This hit me first, long before DVD was invented, at Ledlanet Nights in Kinross-shire, where John Calder’s little opera festival half a century ago staged pioneering productions of Partenope and Agrippina, the first in Scotland and among the first in modern times, which displayed Handel’s sublimity in a way that the annual Messiah in the Usher Hall has never managed to do.

Crammed into that postage-stamp theatre-in-the-round, with the instrumentalists of Leonard Friedman’s Scottish Baroque Ensemble tucked into what seemed little more than a cupboard at the side, the works sprang instantly to life in a manner that Handel seldom did in big surroundings.

Years ahead of today’s great international Handel revival, the performances were triumphs of the most ingenious sort. Seeing these works again on DVD, in stagings from all over Europe, it is exhilarating to rejoice in them anew, in admittedly larger-scale productions but ones that DVD can bring into our homes at far less than opera-house prices.

From time to time this blog will be recommending DVDs worth buying, starting inevitably with David McVicar’s perfectly poised, inspiringly voiced Julius Caesar at Glyndebourne, made possible by the festival’s astute general manager, David Pickard, before anyone had thought of his becoming director (as was announced earlier this week) of the BBC Proms in London.

As the three-disc DVD reveals, McVicar’s was a Handel production that had everything - wit, anguish, the right pace, the right space, beauty, perception, fancy, resourcefulness, and William Christie conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment  (an outfit which, as it happened, David Pickard helped to create).

Sarah Connolly sings Caesar with a brilliance suggestive of the impeccable Claude Rains acting the part in the film of Caesar and Cleopatra. Angelika  Kirchschlager and Patricia Bardon are Pompey’s grieving son and widow.  Christophe Dumaux, that most seemingly eccentric of counter tenors, is the evil Tolomeo with Christopher Maltman as his lascivious henchman. Danielle De Nese is the bewitchingly saucy Cleopatra.

It is an ideal cast  and the updating of the plot, which transforms Caesar’s troops into a sort of kilted Victorian garrison regiment, is superbly conceived.  If you do not already possess a Handel DVD, this is unquestionably the one to start with. I shall be suggesting a few more in future blogs.
27 May 2015

A Carmen Round-up

An upsurge in productions of Carmen usually means that opera companies are worried about revenue. Are last week’s revivals at Glyndebourne and at the London Coliseum a good sign or a bad?

 We can see for ourselves when the ENO version is streamed live to cinemas around Britain on July 1 - we plan to see it in Castle Douglas, when we happen to be in the vicinity.

This morning the two productions prompted the Daily Telegraph to nominate its ten greatest exponents of the role, which rightly included the wonderful Conchita Supervia and, in 1977, Teresa Berganza in the famous Edinburgh Festival production.

In comparison with so many of her rivals, Berganza’s was a  subdued but memorably precise  Carmen - “mysterious and introspective” was how the Telegraph aptly described her in that great performance conducted in the intimacy of the King’s Theatre  by Claudio Abbado with Placido Domingo as Don Jose and Mirella Freni as Micaela.

That was certainly not a Carmen produced on a shoestring, and was probably the most expensive event Edinburgh (with Peter Diamand  as director) ever staged, but in quality it was worth every penny and has stuck strongly in the memory. I feel glad it was here that it happened.

Among recent productions, the most fascinating in my view was the one at the Opera Comique in Paris, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner with Anna Caterina Antonacci in the title role - not at all flashy but attentive, like the production as a whole, to the spoken dialogue (which Bieito’s Coliseum version largely omits) and to scrupulous characterisation  even if the Micaela was a a little too fluttey and the Escamillo lacking in incisiveness.

But Carmen is a far from easy piece. You can buy this performance on DVD and, for its atmosphere, it is well worth acquiring, certainly more so than Herbert von Karajan’s staid performance at the Salzburg Festival. But what a pity Berganza’s portrayal was never filmed on DVD.
25 May 2015

Another season

Scottish Opera’s announcement of its 2015-16 season - proclaimed from the company’s flamboyant new annexe in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal - has brought with it, among some good things, the familiar whiff of expedience, cutback, and cheese-paring.

Handel’s Ariodante, it’s true, is one of his greatest and most poignant operas, brought to the Edinburgh Festival by the Piccola Scala company with a glorious array of counter-tenors  many years ago. The new production, from the team that recently gave us Orlando,  certainly looks promising.

A new Scottish work shared with Music Theatre Wales - Stuart MacRae’s The Devil Inside, with a libretto by Louise Welsh based on a supernatural story by Robert Louis Stevenson - also looks like good news. But a pocket production of Cosi Fan Tutte, destined to tour the Highlands and Lowlands, and co-productions of The Mikado (in conjunction with the D’Oyly Carte), Dvorak’s Rusalka (snared with Grange Park Opera) and Bizet’s Carmen (with Welsh National) make originality seem like a lost cause.

Coming from a company that once staged Cosi with Janet Baker, the small-scale touring production of Mozart’s masterpiece sounds like utilitarian padding - or what Lord Harewood used to describe as spending money to save money. Dvorak’s mermaid opera is a lovely piece, but should the company’s new music director Stuart Stratford be making his debut with an imported production of it?

As for Carmen, it is being done everywhere at the moment, a sure sign that playing safe is prevalent in Britain at present.

Is this really the sort of unadventurous programming that the SNP should feel proud to preside over? With every year that passes, Scottish Opera as we used to know it seems further and further away.
21 May 2015

Travels with a Chorus

As a chronicling critic, I have travelled three times with the  RSNO Chorus - once to Israel  and twice to the United States - in the days when John Currie was chorus master and the schedules were  hugely ambitious.  For me, all three trips required the blessing of Eric Mackay, The Scotsman editor of the period, and he took pains to remind me on each occasion that I was not only a critic but a journalist.  Rightly he recognised that adventures involving some two hundred singers might have their dangers and it was my duty to report them if problems arose.

The tour of Israel in 1972, for example, meant landing in a heavily protected El Al aircraft at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport, where there had recently been a massacre by Japanese terrorists. In short, I was to keep my eyes peeled even when reviewing a concert of classical music.

But the main trouble in those days was simply getting a phone line to The Scotsman and raising enough cash for the dictating of long and expensive reviews. Most of the hazards in Israel proved to be minor ones, such as attacks of food poisoning in the halls of residence where the choristers were staying or of sunstroke during a day off on the heights of Masada beside the Dead Sea. The concerts themselves, with performances of Brahms’s German Requiem with the Israel Philharmonic conducted by Daniel Barenboim as if it were a vast Mahler symphony, were in comparison trouble-free, even although Currie warned his choristers that a Barenboim performance could be very different from a Barenboim rehearsal.

Nor was there trouble on the first long American tour, a greatly intricate affair which the singers, from the start, were determined to enjoy rather than grumble about, as the RSNO itself traditionally did on such occasions.

It began in the picnic atmosphere of Hollywood Bowl and moved eastwards to Philadelphia via St Louis and a sensational flight over the Grand Canyon. Alexander Gibson, not yet knighted, conducted Belshazzar’s Feast and some Charles Ives with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Danny Kaye dropped by to direct - up to a point - one of the rehearsals. Verdi’s Requiem and Haydn’s Creation, both under Gibson, were sung in the open air in sultry St Louis, in a park beside the Mississippi.

Choristers on such tours turn every concert into a party, but danger was not averted on the next trip to America, and Currie was forewarned of it before take-off from Prestwick. Taking me aside in the departure lounge, he told me that the Cleveland Orchestra was on strike and the first week of concerts looked like being in jeopardy. With the opportunity to back out, if I so wished, I phoned Eric Mackay, who instantly rose to the occasion. Two hundred choristers adrift in America would be a news story in itself, he said, and I should have no hesitation about going.

Immediately after take-off, John Currie went to the front of the cabin in the chartered Boeing 707 to announce  that “something terrible had happened.” The choristers, fearing that  the plane was about to crash on Goat Fell, were relieved to find that nothing worse than a week of cancellations lay ahead. Nevertheless there was an occasional mugging - Cleveland, though the home of a great orchestra, was a perilous city to stay in - and even a hold-up at gunpoint to give me something to write about, even if it distressed the folks back home when they read about what had been happening to beloved relatives.

But in fact nobody was actually injured and matters  were resolved when the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with which the chorus was to appear later in the tour, offered some extra dates before the culminating concert - Carlo Maria Giulini conducting Verdi’s Four Sacred Pieces - was reached. America, in the end, had resourcefully sorted out a tour that could have been a disaster.
19 May 2015
   

This Week’s Wine: Lay of the Land

The name may look a bit ungrammatical and the label brings no explanation, buy this is rather a good 2014 New Zealand sauvignon blanc, not too aggressive in its flavour of gooseberries and as attractive as an aperitif as an accompaniment to seafood or pasta.

 What the label does tell us is that “Lay of the Land wines have been a long time coming” but that after ten years their Marlborough-based producer, Mike Paterson, has got them right. Since “lay,” among other things, can mean “song,” I like to think that these are singing wines, and a good example of what young outfits, encouraged by Naked Wines of Norfolk (now operating in conjunction with Majestic Wines), are producing.

This one at £8.99 a bottle fits nicely into its price bracket. Though Marlborough wines are not renowned for variations in flavour, it is a happy specimen of its kind.
17 May 2015

Troubles with Tosca

After its disappointingly routine  predecessor, Donna Leon’s new novel Falling in Love, out this month, brings her back up to standard with a thriller set in and around Venice’s Fenice Theatre, where her chain of Guido Brunetti novels began more than twenty books ago.

As she has already proved, she knows enough about opera to steer a story through the intricacies of such a subject and, though this one did not disclose anything I did not already know, it sustains its plot - about a star soprano pursued by a creepy stalker, the way Elisabeth Soderstrom famously was in real life - to enjoyably melodramatic effect.

Since the book concerns a series of performances of Puccini’s Tosca, a work thoroughly despised by Brunetti’s wife Paola, an authority on the novels of Henry James, melodrama is the appropriate word. But since the tale starts with a touching Italian quotation from Handel, and one of its crucial episodes involves the backstage singing of a Handel aria, it is easy to see where the author’s sympathies really lie.

It’s a theme, not irrelevant to this latest of her books, which she could develop further in future. But the passing  references to Handelian sexual deviation do this present book a subtly subversive service.  It is Puccini who gets a little in the way as the story moves into its final scene, though this, admittedly, does it no great harm.
13 May 2015

Rosenkavalier in Close-Up

Glyndebourne’s most recent production of Der Rosenkavalier, conducted last summer by young Robin Ticciati of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, is to be released on DVD on June 1. Though The Scotsman in the old days encouraged me to make the trip to Sussex each year, the festival is now beyond my reach. But the chance to see its best productions - for a tiny fraction of the cost - in domestic surroundings is a great boon. Though the atmosphere of Glyndebourne itself is missing, the compensations are plentiful, and the chance to see Berg’s Lulu, Handel’s Rodelinda and Theodora, Tchaikovsky’s Onegin and masses of Mozart whenever I wish is one of the assets of my seniority.

The Rosenkavalier, it’s true, was undermined for some critics by its supposedly “fat” Octavian, which caused some controversy when the production opened. But looking at pictures of Tara Erraught in the role I could not see what the fuss was about. Octavians come in different shapes - the role, after all, is that of an adolescent boy played by a mezzo-soprano - and two of the best in modern times have been sung by women not famed for their good looks.

The voice and the personality are what count, and though Octavian does not need to be fat to be convincing, she does need to be priggish in Act Two, as Strauss’s characterisation of her suggests, just as she needs to be able to put on a show of vulgar tipsiness in Act Three.

So we shall see how things turn out in the ruthless close-up which DVD brings to all opera. Let me say that I am greatly looking forward to seeing the fine detail of the sublime Richard Jones’s production and do not expect to be disappointed.

As for Robin Ticciati, as Glyndebourne’s new music director he will be conducting a new production of Mozart’s Seraglio this year. That’s something else I look forward to buying on DVD when the time comes.
11 May 2015

This Week's Wine: Vinho Verde

Like Pinot Grigio, only more so, Portugal’s Vinho Verde is one of those risky white wines that fail more often than they triumph. Even half a century ago, when it was quite fashionable to drink it, this sour, fizzy wine summed up what the French like to call vin ordinaire. But whereas plenty of vin ordinaire is perfectly drinkable, the trouble with Vinho Verde was that so much of it wasn’t.

It was never a reason for going to Portugal - the red wines were usually better - though they did sometimes (not often) seem to enhance the salty food. I  have only once been on a Portuguese wine-tasting trip, up the Douro valley, where the scenery was as wonderful as it needed to be. A  distinguished colleague, whom I shall not name, spent much of his time mixing his wines and swirling the result, to see if he could make them taste better. The improvement, he claimed, was marginal.

Today, circumstances have changed, though not, on the evidence of Marks and Spencer’s Tapada de Villar, very beneficially. The fizz is still there - other producers have reduced it to a mere prickle - but with its low alcohol content (ten and a half per cent) the effect is like mineral water, with instant cut-off in terms of after-taste.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with low-alcohol wines - the Germans know how to make delicious ones - but this one, not cheap at £8 a bottle, seems to me to have  little to offer.
6 May 2015

Le Carre without the spies

I have been re-reading The Naive and Sentimental Lover, John Le Carre’s solitary “straight” novel, which rather flopped when it was first published in 1971, with the result that he never produced another of its kind. Yet it is an impressive book, with autobiographical features based on his relationship with his friend and fellow novelist James Kennaway and Kennaway’s wife Susan, with whom he had what appears to have been a mysterious affair around the time of the break-up of his first marriage.

The story begins somewhat gothically in an old dark house near Bath, lit only by lantern, and proceeds to a big central scene in Paris, perhaps faintly Joycean, and more than a little laboured, I thought.  But the book recovers strongly in the succeeding London chapters, one of them at the Savoy Hotel, followed by a climax in the Swiss Alps.

In a way it is like an espionage novel without the spies, much of it gripping, intricate, and sometimes hilarious. It’s a long book, undeniably exasperating at times, though I was never  in danger of giving up.

Kennaway, who was schooled  at Glenalmond in Perthshire but whose reputation nosedived after his death in a car accident at the age of forty, plays a star role in the book.

As I have mentioned in a previous blog, I once interviewed him in his study in his London home near the Thames embankment, but the subject of his private life - about which I knew little at the time - never came up. I knew and admired him simply as the author of the brilliant army novel Tunes of Glory and other early successes, though his illuminating final novel, Silence, preceded by Some Gorgeous Accident, were still to come. He was an inspired screen writer, whose death - seemingly of a heart attack - took place when he was driving to his country home in Gloucestershire.

His wife Susan, in the 1980s, wrote what was evidently a fascinating memoir of him, which Allan Massie reviewed  in the London Review of Books and which (having tracked it down on Amazon) I am now about to read. Happily his qualities as a novelist are showing signs of rediscovery. Thanks to Le Carre, I cannot wait to renew my acquaintance with this maverick novelist. The London Review of Books, by the way, has just placed its massive archive on line for six months. This, along with the next dozen printed copies of the magazine itself, seems  a snip at £12.
3 May 2015.

A Critic's Friends

While readers are frequently a music critic’s enemies, musicians are not necessarily his friends. In my experience, if they are composers or performers, they can be as disdainful of critics as anybody else. But if friendship is possible, or indeed desirable, it can be worth cultivating.

The days when music critics, as a matter of principle, refrained from getting to know, or even speaking to, performers because it might supposedly influence their judgement are far in the past. It is something that used to be said of old-school critics such as Ernest Newman, whose presence would strike fear into orchestral players and whose shiny bald head could be easily spotted in the audience.  The tenor Ian Bostridge, in his latest book, has written that he can always see who is sitting down below when he is giving a recital in the Wigmore Hall and recalls the time he noticed a distinguished pianist with the music on his knee, visibly jabbing his finger on a page of a Schubert song and nudging the fellow musician who was sitting next to him.

The art of the newspaper interview, anathema to people like Ernest Newman, is not now something automatically shunned by serious critics. Indeed, from the start of my career, I have happily practised it and regarded it as part of my job, enabling me sometimes to make new friends - though occasionally enemies. Yet my predecessor on The Scotsman never “did” interviews, and it would never have occurred to him to do so.

Befriending performers admittedly has its risks. Sir Charles Mackerras, before starting lunch, invariably asked, “Who is paying?”  At least it instantly cleared up what could have been an awkward problem of etiquette. More difficult can be the interview which turns out, when printed, to seem in some way insulting.

A single even faintly critical reference and the relationship can be severed forever. It has happened to me more than once, and it is no good telling the outraged composer or performer that one’s mild rebuke has come in the wake of many glowing appraisals. The criticism, however slight, can be unforgiven. The drama critic Kenneth Tynan used to say that he was ready to flinch every time he entered a theatre for fear that an offended playwright or actor might be sitting in the audience.

The literary agent Giles Gordon, who sometimes reviewed for the Evening Standard, used to be a wary member of the same London club as the novelist Kingsley Amis. One day, having given Amis’s latest novel the thumbs down, he was horrified to find himself lunching with a friend a few tables away from the celebrated author. Trying not to catch Amis’s eye, he asked his friend to tell him if Amis was looking at him. His friend gave him the all clear. Giles thereupon looked up from his plate to find Amis glaring directly at him and giving him, in full view of everybody, an enormous “V” sign. Such is a critic’s life.
1 May 2015