2012-13 Season in review

The end of the season, the time when we all feel starved of opera and are raring to go with the next. But I thought I'd just reflect on the 2012/13 season as I think it has been for me the best season since I started this blog.

Staged Opera

1. Der Ring des Nibelungen, ROH. Flawed as it was, my first Ring in the theatre was a total revelation for me, and after years of liking Wagner but not being able to get past my reservations, I now completely "get it" and love it unabashedly. I was totally transfixed for the whole 14 hours.
Das Rheingold
Die Walküre

Siegfried

Götterdämmerung

2. The Minotaur, ROH. A wonderful production of an extremely exciting contemporary opera, with a truly great cast. What more could you ask for? For me this eclipsed Written on Skin, which I couldn't quite love as much as everyone else.

3. Eugene Onegin The Royal Academy of Music's production directed by John Ramster was quite simply one of the best shows I've ever seen, proving decisively that opera does not require huge budgets to be thrilling, moving drama. We knew that already, but it's good to be reminded. Wonderful stuff: so good I saw it twice.

4. Wozzeck, ENO. It's one of my favourite operas, so what a joy to see it so brilliantly directed by a debut opera director, and with a superb cast too. So good I saw it twice. I'd seen the very good WNO Lulu just before which made for a fascinating comparison. (I'm proud of the reviews I wrote for these two productions so if you read any, read those!)

5. Gloriana, ROH. This show got mixed reviews, and most reviewers took issue with the score, but I found it immensely enjoyable, with Susan Bullock a magnetic central presence, and Richard Jones' production unbeatable. So much beautiful music to be had in this score: so good I saw it twice.

6. Ariadne auf Naxos Glyndebourne. Again, this got very bad reviews from most, but I found this to be the most moving and telling production of Ariadne that I've ever seen, and this is a very cherished opera for me. So good I saw it twice. My review explains why!

7. Billy Budd Glyndebourne. Magical evening where music, stage, singing, acting, conducting, playing were all in perfect accord. So good I saw it twice.

Other notable mentions: Lohengrin with WNO was a good production, with some great singing - my other great Wagner experience this season. Don Carlo at the ROH somehow didn't quite add up for me, but I was lucky enough to see Harteros on opening night, and she was magnificent (as were the rest of the cast). Medea at the ENO had a very nice cast, and was a stunning production, though the score was not quite as thrilling as had been promised by McVicar. Death in Venice at the ENO and The Emperor of Atlantis with ETO were also beautiful to look at, but didn't quite deliver in other respects.

Disappointments: I didn't have any expectations going into Robert Le Diable at the ROH, but I still left disappointed that so much effort and money had been lavished on this piece of flim flam. Some serious reviewers found things to enjoy, but I cannot fathom how. Kasper Holten's fussy, dramatically weak, Eugene Onegin raised alarm bells for the next decade of the ROH, but one has to remain hopeful for the upcoming Don Giovanni. Nabucco and La Rondine were also lowlights.

Concerts

Some of my very best experiences this season were concert/semi staged performances of operas:

1. Knussen double bill, Barbican. Revelatory - overwhelmingly beautiful contemporary operas.
2. Into the Little Hill, Wigmore Hall. George Benjamin's first opera captivated me, where Written on Skin had left me a little cold. Superb piece.
3. Capriccio, ROH. My favourite opera served by an excellent cast. Catnip for Capriccioblog. So good I saw it twice.
4. Britten Canticles, ROH. Britten, Ian Bostridge, Iestyn Davies. Enough said.

5. Other things: At the Royal Festival Hall with Jurowski, Karita Mattila gave an astonishing account of the final scene of Salome, despite some serious vocal issues. Knussen at 60, of which the abovementioned double bill was a part, was a wonderful event. I experienced some truly excellent chamber music too this season. In Belgium I saw Britten's String Quartet no.2 as part of Festival Resonances (not reviewed) in a superlative performance that managed to capture both the extraordinary diamantine beauty of surface of this quartet and the composer's deep pain, manifest as a sort of eerie emptiness at the music's heart. A curious mixture of Apollonian reserve and psychological intensity, both such hallmarks of Britten's oeuvre, was shatteringly conjured by Katharine Gowers, Beatrice Philips, James Boyd and Martijn Vink. Philips and Boyd were again present for the totally extraordinary Lewes Chamber Music Festival concert of Janacek's On an Overgrown Path that reduced me to uncontrollable tears. Violinist Pekka Kuusisto's recital at the Wigmore Hall proved once again that he is one of the few essential artists of the age. The London Haydn Quartet also gave some very interesting late Beethoven at the Conway Hall, played as if an extension of Haydn; but what really sticks in my mind is their Protean performance of Haydn's quartet op.50/4 that made late Beethoven look tame: too explicable, too rounded, too complete next to it!!

Disappointments: Maria Guleghina and Christiane Oelze (neither reviewed) were both great artists in their prime, but I had to leave at the interval for both of their Wigmore recitals (the latter with Pierre Laurant Aimard) because the voices had declined so much. Pretty Yende also made a disappointing Wigmore debut (not reviewed), revealing a shining voice, but totally monotonous musicianship. She's very young still, and so has time to develop, but the intimacy of a solo recital revealed her flaws rather than her strengths. Joyce Didonato's Drama Queens at the Barbican was dispiriting because she was virtually inaudible from the 11th row of the stalls, but at least I discovered the astonishing musicianship of violinist Dmitry Sinkovsky.


All in all a very enjoyable season for me. The complete list of my 2012/13 reviews are available on this handy page (also linked on the right there). Roll on 2013/14!!!

Janáček's The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away at the Lewes Chamber Music Festival

08/05/13
St John's sub Castro, Lewes

Märchenlzählungen (Schumann)
Alasdair Beatson, Matt Hunt, James Boyd

On an Overgrown Path (Janáček)
Beatrice Philips, Timothy Crawford, James Boyd, Hannah Sloane, Matt Hunt, Tom Poster, Samuel West

The church had been decorated with branches, foliage and flowers to look like the Overgrown Path. After a fascinating and wonderful traversal of Schumann's late Märchenlzählungen which drew maximum attention to the oddness and uncomfortable extremity of the music (which I had never expected or imagined based on other performances I had heard of the piece), the stage was set for Janáček's On an Overgrown Path, arranged by violist James Boyd for Clarinet Quintet. I enjoyed it immensely; in this setting the piece quite different from its original piano incarnation, more obviously lyrical and less obviously intimate - the vocal quality of the clarinet and violin certainly a great boon in several movements, wonderfully played and supported by all five musicians - overall an entirely viable and beautiful alternative that doesn't quite displace the original's perfection. In between we heard poems and extracts from Dickens, Berryman, e e cummings, Shakespeare, Byron and others read by the actor Samuel West in beautiful voice; some violent, some funny, some poignant.

But then we arrived at the last number, The barn owl has not flown away, and this new arrangement totally transcended Janáček's original context. It is well documented that the last three numbers of Book I of  On an Overgrown Path were written in the immediate aftermath of his daughter Olga's death. This final piece depicts with incredible economy and vividness a whole community and event in microcosm - the people are gathered festively in the church, singing "the intimate hymn of life", a quietly joyous celebration of togetherness and joint purpose. Meanwhile, in the windy darkness outside, the little barn owl looks on, shifts its weight, flaps its wings, and intones its haunted call; quiet, patient, impassive. She doesn't know it, but she is an ill omen. The rejoicing people can barely hear her, and sing louder, ever more fervently of their happiness. In this, the unbelievably full sonority offered by the four strings in double stops was uncanny in its reminiscence of a real choir and was immeasurably more expressive than the piano original, the clarinet offering a further timbral warmth, a filling out of the overtones resonating in the church (actual and imagined). The barn owl interrupts once more, efficacious and intense on the viola, with low cello harmonics, the clarinet in chalumeau, and a murmur of upper strings. The choir cheerfully explode into another verse, jubilant, and here I was floored, the church's organ unexpectedly entering in the bass, like the rumble of some far off thunder, an affirmation of the works of man, the beauty of everything we have wrought. The sonorous open strings of the cello were by this stage slightly out of tune with the organ: the choir going awry in their ardour, and the effect was truly Ivesian in its fervency, piquancy and expressive depth. But all this wealth of beauty, this wonderful feeling of community and unity is not enough, and the little owl cries out again: inescapable, the patient, eternal call of nature. "All things end" it says. The organ, clarinet and strings are thunderous now, glowingly majestic, overwhelming, a sublime affirmation of life. At last the hymning ends, the echo fades, the church falls silent, and the little owl sits watching, adding again her own song, and finally the people can't help but hear her.

Saying the maximum with the minimum of means, Janacek's music always cuts to the quick with me, and is (with Schubert) perhaps the highest instance in music of the infinite suggestion and shattering power of the minute gesture. It's difficult to describe how moving I found this performance of this work in this church. Maybe the effect was cumulative, as the concert had been exceptional up to this point, but something shook me to my core in this tiny piece, the simultaneous affirmation of the beauty of life and reminder of mortality totally unexpected in this apparently parochial miniature. This is only my account of what happened, my version of events - for each listener it will have had a different meaning, and perhaps for me too this is only a subsequent rationalisation of something that remains too mysterious and too precise for words.

photo Kate Macrae