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!!!

The Lighthouse and Dido and Aeneas at Royal Academy of Music

16/05/13

The Lighthouse is a curious opera, but one that gets better as it goes through. The force of attention required to actually keep up with the text through the orchestration and unpredictable vocal lines is extreme, and in a performance without surtitles I must admit that I found the story difficult to follow, even though diction was good. The beginning I don't think works - three men all attempt to give an account of the their discovery of an abandoned light house to their boss. The interest here is in the disparities of their accounts, but as I say it's hard to keep up with each of them, let alone compare them - I'm just not sure that opera is the ideal medium for this sort of thing. The score is standard Peter Maxwell Davies - mildly modernist, gently atonal, loosely constructed, quirkily but underwhelmingly orchestrated. Things get much better in the second half where we see some sort of actual version of what went on. Three lighthouse keepers feel trapped in each other's company in the confines of a lighthouse. At first they attempt to pass their incarceration with some singing. The first is a sort of sea shanty folk song pastiche, a horrible account of a nasty childhood, amusingly and gruesomely retold by the slightly unhinged Blazes (baritone). The second keeper, the gentle and nervous Sandy (tenor), sings a sentimental Victorian ballad, again a wonderful pastiche which reveals the character superbly, and is so generous in the context that it can't help but bring a smile to the face. The final keeper Arthur (bass) sings a salvation army song with sonorous aplomb, agony and hardship transformed into a twisted religious ecstacy, again brilliantly in keeping with the character. Then a mysterious event occurs and each character gets a substantial dramatic scena - Blazes a madscene, terrifyingly dispatched by Samuel Queen, Sandy a wistful memory of his family, and Arthur a disturbing pseudo Christian ritual. (afterwards I read the synopsis and found out that the three lighthouse keepers were killed by the officers we met in the first act, though this wasn't obvious to me at the time. Maybe I was still dazed by the lighthouse keepers' scenes. I probably should have read it before hand: lesson learned.)

The vocal performances of the three leads were unstintingly brilliant in a difficult score that requires total commitment from the performers. It would be impossible to mark out one above the others - they were all individually great and worked brilliantly together as an ensemble. Iain Milne's exciting tenor sailed effortlessly through his music, his ballad an embarrassment of tenorial riches. The way he captured the timidity and sentimental innocence of the character was extremely endearing. Samuel Queen brings the requisite intensity for the baritone role of Blazes, singing with nuance, precision and splendid tone. He bravely and rightly pares down the voice for the folk song. Andri Björn Róbertsson seemed not so dark voiced in his recent RAM Gremin but here reveals that the true bass repertoire is well within his grasp, and though it is not yet huge in scale, there is a satisfying depth and evenness across all registers. Occasionally the vowel modification suggested he might be artificially darkening the voice a bit, but it worked for the character. Again the characterisation is strong and lucid - his sententious moralising, disapproving sobriety, visionary fear of god. All three roles require surprising excursions into falsetto, and all three sounded very good here. Particularly impressive at this was the Róbertsson who brought a fully supported sound right up into the high notes which meant that they were richer and more beautifully resonant than many a counter tenor that I have heard. Maybe a second career option!?

I thought John Ramster's production was very successful in presenting this tricky piece - he leaves plenty of ambiguity for the imagination and intellect to latch onto (surely the composer and librettist's intention) but at the same time I felt gripped throughout, even when it wasn't entirely clear what was going on. Somehow the simplicity of the setting and cutting away of the extraneous was also entirely in keeping with the music. There was impressive but understated detail in the characterisation too - the acting was simple but wholly believable and therefore engaging, even at the most farfetched moments in the plot. It wasn't quite as overwhelmingly superb as the RAM Onegin earlier this year, but then this opera does not offer anything like the riches of that masterpiece. Still, an enjoyable and wholly worthwhile evening and it was such a pleasure to see young singers rise so fully to a challenge and succeed so admirably. Contemporary English opera is in very good hands.


Dido and Aeneas, Purcell's evergreen one acter, has an arresting simplicity without paucity of effect, an emotional impact and richness of content that it is hard to fully explain. Director John Ramster realises this and presents the piece stripped down and bare, with Brechtian resonances that avoid us getting too deeply involved in the characters so that we instead reflect more abstractly on what the meaning of this work might be. I'm not sure I liked it overall, as much of the personal drama and clarity of the story was lost in this abstracted, choreographed, slightly clownish setting, but the concept at least is carried through logically. Perhaps the problem was that it didn't go far enough into strangeness, but perhaps the cast also weren't quite strong enough to carry it, though almost all sang nicely and accurately, with Sónia Grané a particularly sweet voiced Belinda. Rozanna Madylus caught my ear the most however and stood out for me as the Sorceress. The voice is not yet the finished article, but she seems able to draw on a pleasing range of vocal colours (an excellent sign at this early stage) some already fully formed, others clearly still works in progress, and I think she has enormous potential as a performer.

all photos (c) Sara Shorter

Two BBCSO concerts: Ravel, Poulenc, Martinu, Lindberg

Poulenc Les animaux modèles (suite with readings)
Ravel L’enfant et les sortilèges
BBCSO with Royal Academy of Music Students and Stephen Mangan, conducted by Stéphane Denève
26/04/13

Martinu Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra
Lindberg Clarinet Concerto
BBCSO with Apollon Musagete Quartet and Mark Simpson, conducted by Baldur Brönnimann
30/04/13

I wasn't going to review either of these concerts but a train of thought that linked them was swirling around in my mind so I thought I'd exorcise it by setting some ideas down. The first concert I went to primarily for the Ravel opera, a score I sometimes still struggle with, despite its delights. This was not the most orchestrally luxurious reading but the young RAM soloists did well, nicely articulating the French, though none fully technically mastered these tiny roles. It must be said though that having to establish a character (and establish stability in the voice) in such a short time is a real challenge for any singer, and no one did a disservice to Ravel's music. Jean-Baptiste Barriére provided a video accompaniment on a screen behind the singers that was rather literal and not hugely alluring in its primary colours and photoshop effects. It would surely have been more enjoyable for the kids (this was billed as a "family concert") to see the opera semi-staged.

Poulenc's lavish ballet suite Les animaux modèles (1941-3), amusingly and engagingly narrated by actor Stephen Mangan, was a nice rarity to experience, though it is hardly vintage Poulenc. I've talked before about Poulenc's thieving but in this piece the thefts are so blatant and the score so inflated beyond its means that as soon as we notice what's going on, boredom rears its ugly head and it's impossible to ignore the lack of inspiration. The thefts are the usual suspects - Stravinsky, Ravel, Chabrier, Canteloube - and it would be possible to point not just to particular works, but particular bars that Poulenc is sourcing his material from - the end of Ravel's left hand piano concerto for instance is plundered mercilessly. The swooning strings and jungle like density of the orchestration (Villa-Lobos, only pleasant) over the plodding and dutifully sentimental harmony, point to Hollywood as the fundamental "Ur-theft", already an idiom where borrowing and imitation is the order of the day. (Indeed, having just checked, it seems he was concurrently writing for the silver screen at this time). The result, though lovely moment by moment, ends up being curiously bland in the long range and unworthy of Poulenc's best, because although his fundamental technique hasn't changed, it feels by rote and lacks his peculiar piquancy.

Lindberg's ebullient and lush clarinet concerto (2002) is also marked by flagrant borrowing and is an enjoyable romp, especially when played so entirely dazzlingly by Mark Simpson, replete with partially improvised cadenza (the best portion of the performance!). Again, Hollywood schmaltz is a clear point of contact but it's made fuzzy and "serious" by filtration through Lutoslawski. The result is cartoonish in its eclecticism, which can be fun, and though Lindberg moves surprisingly smoothly between the two, and does lots of beautiful things, the self conscious juxtaposition of these disparate elements feels dilettantish in not really being fully committed to either and so the final impression is one of superficiality because the musical materials aren't being taken entirely seriously by their composer. Or to put it another way, their integration and synthesis feels incomplete. Perhaps it was just in this performance that Baldur Brönnimann was underlining these contrasts, and I will recant totally if I hear another performance? Corigliano's famous clarinet concerto of 1977 suffers in an analogous way - though it's enjoyable when taken as pure entertainment, the huge dramatic gestures come out as total melodrama in the post modern context of the piece because they don't derive from musical logic and so it's difficult to take seriously in terms of what it Corigliano claims he is trying to express.

Martinu's Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra is typical of his earliest phase in being a classic example of motorically spiky 1920's neoclassicism and also depressingly grey in colour - the Dvorakian luminosity and lyrical gift was not to appear for another few years.

Ann Murray Masterclass at the Royal Academy

18/09/2012
Royal Academy

Ann Murray is one of those singers who you can trust will always give a good performance, where there's simply no question about dramatic commitment or mastery of the notes. In that she reminds me of John Tomlinson - it's not that they are perfect singing actors, but neither seem capable of doing anything on stage that would for a moment suspend your belief in the character that is being presented in front of you at that moment. Which is probably a large part of why I admire both so intensely. They are as natural on stage as you can be in the unnatural world of opera.

With her brightly flashing eyes, Irish wit, and rapid fire way of talking and moving she is easy to like in the masterclass situation. You can't imagine that she could ever be idle for very long - she's too interested in people and her art form - everything seems urgent and important, and communication and intent seem to be the things that most excite her and where her focus is in instruction. Technique was never mentioned, but how to use the notes to say something musically along with the words certainly was. She's funny too, but only to dispel worries and create an atmosphere conducive to risk taking; she has no interest in regaling us with witty anecdotes about famous conductor X or Tenor Y. She demonstrated occasionally, and we got to hear her toss off some Donna Anna coloratura(!), not to show off of course, but only to better explain when a student was finding it difficult to make expressive these difficult passages and where demonstration seemed to be a better way of showing than words. She still has a lot of voice left, and the strength of intent is palpable in her sound and her body every time, even in the smallest phrase.

As is so often the case, the young students found it difficult to take on her suggestions even when they were relatively simple like where to accent a phrase. It always seems so surprising sitting in the audience of a masterclass when the teacher keeps asking a student to change something like for instance singing something with more forward momentum, and the adjustment the student makes each time is so negligible as to seem almost laughable. Presumably the student is really trying and thinks they are being wildly different, but it shows you how difficult is to truly listen to yourself as a musician, and also how much muscle memory plays a part in singing a phrase, and why changing bad technique, let alone an interpretation is so difficult for so many singers. These things take repetition over days and weeks and months to change, but really it is the freedom that an excellent technique provides that is the ultimate key - technique is as much about having options with regard to singing a phrase than it is about singing faster or in becoming efficient in terms of muscle and energy usage.

On one occasion at least though, Murray helped the student to go from a moderately good piece of Handel singing, to a breathtaking moment of drama as Caeser pictures his father while realising what he must become at the beginning of the eponymous opera. By focussing and guiding the student's gestures and emotion not only did her acting improve but miraculously the singing too - it's this sort of intensity that separates the big time singers from those that are merely competent.

I wasn't so impressed with the young singers this time, though I did manage to hear Sarah-Jane Lewis again, this time in French repertoire, which seemed to be living up to its reputation as the hardest language to sing in. The voice was still wonderfully lustrous (especially in Duparc's La vie antérieure), but she seemed to sing with greater ease and fluency in the Italian Mozart arias I heard last time.

A worthwhile and enjoyable few hours.