To say whether Jonathan Mills has been an operatically successful director of the Edinburgh Festival is as difficult as to say if he has been a failure. What is easier to assert is that - in comparison with the festival’s great operatic years - those of Lord Harewood and Peter Diamand - he has not staged nearly enough opera - which is, after all, the mainstay of every great international festival, and has not always chosen carefully enough.
Strauss’s Capriccio, hideously transferred to the Nazi years, was a total disaster, but Die Frau ohne Schatten, staged by Valery Gergiev and his Mariinsky company, was deservedly a hit. Too many other things - not that there have been that many of them - have fallen between these extremes.
Both Harewood and Diamand ensured that, of the festival’s 21 nights, eighteen were filled by opera, Mills’s tally, even with a proper opera house at his disposal, has been nothing like that.
But the deciding factor - success or otherwise - will surely be Berlioz’s the Trojans. Scottish Opera did it thrillingly in the days when our national company was a real feature of the festival, which it no longer is. But The Trojans presented by the Mariinsky augurs well. Mills’s operatic reputation hangs in the balance.
28 August 2013
Peter Diamand's often reserved, gentle, cigarette-in-hand approach to running the Festival sometimes gave the impression of a relative lack of spark and determination. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
ReplyDeleteHis operatic masterstroke was, of course, persuading the great Teresa Berganza to sing her first Carmen and then surrounding her with immaculate colleagues, including Claudio Abbado and the LSO, Placido Domingo, Tom Krause, Scottish Opera's fine chorus - even Mirella Freni who flew over to sing Micaela at the premiere to support her friend Ms. Berganza.
As the production team, he selected two regulars at La Scala, Piero Faggioni as director and Ezio Frigerio as designer. What is not generally known is that Frigerio's first design was way over budget and almost impossible to fit on to the tiny King's Theatre stage where it would also have to play in repertoire with other operas - Scottish Opera's Mary Queen of Scots in 1977 and the Zurich Harnoncourt/Ponelle Monteverdi cycle in 1978.
Following a production meeting I attended in Vienna's Sacher Hotel less than 4 months before the set had to be ready for the start of technical rehearsals and with still no resolution to the technical and budget problems, in some exasperation I asked Peter what he planned to do about it. He took a short puff of his cigarette, turned to me and said: "It's quite simple. Either Signor Frigerio provides me with a new set that is within the budget and will work in the context of the Festival's limitations . . . or I will fire him." He got his way! The wonderful new design arrived just two weeks later.