Opera

When I interviewed Richard Farnes in Leeds six years ago about Opera North’s project of performing the complete Ring, he struck me as the most modest conductor I had met or could imagine, with the possible exception of Reginald Goodall, who actually at a deep level wasn’t modest at all. Everything I had heard Farnes conduct had been on the highest level, but none of it had been Wagner. I wasn’t sceptical of his ability to do a complete Ring cycle, just bemused in a general way about the boundless ambition of the work and the unassertiveness of the man who would lead it. Year by year my highest hopes have been fulfilled, as each of the four parts of the Ring received the best performance that I have heard live for many years, certainly during the present century.

For years I have been telling people that they should listen to, in the absence of staged performances, Enescu’s opera Oedipe, preferably in the marvellous EMI recording from 1990, still available. It only occurred to me when I was preparing to go to the Royal Opera’s new production that I haven’t actually listened to a recording for many years — it seems to belong with its contemporary Busoni’s Doktor Faust as something more admired in the breach than the observance. My feelings now, after seeing the production by La Fura dels Baus, are mixed. There is a lot of lovely music here, and some strong drama. I’m not sure that the music, mostly, supports the drama or indeed that it, the music, has any specific qualities.

‘So you’re going to see the gay sex opera?’ exclaimed my friend, open-mouthed. People certainly seem to have had some odd preconceptions about Mark Simpson’s new chamber opera Pleasure. The distinguished critic of the Daily Telegraph let it be known that he awaited ‘with trepidation, something set in the lavatories of a gay nightclub’. And to be fair, the news that Pleasure was to star Lesley Garrett — last seen in Welsh National Opera’s Chorus! ascending to the heavens aboard an enormous pair of lips — didn’t exactly dampen suspicions that we were about to see some sort of camp spectacular: Adès’s Powder Her Face meets RuPaul’s Drag Race.

You have to be quite silly to take Gilbert and Sullivan seriously. But even sillier not to. G&S is still a litmus test for a particularly British type of operatic snobbery: ‘Is there a place for Gilbert and Sullivan in the 21st century?’ asked a Radio 3 presenter last year, about the time that ENO’s new Pirates of Penzance broke all audience records for live cinema relays in the UK. The Royal Opera, of course, won’t touch it. Which, considering how comprehensively it botched Chabrier’s L’Étoile, is probably just as well. Scottish Opera’s new Mikado is very silly indeed. Nanki-Poo (Nicholas Sharratt) simpers and lisps like Gussie Fink-Nottle. A puppet bird flaps its wings to ‘Willow, titwillow’.

Cursed, or perhaps blessed, with almost no visual memory at all, I had almost completely forgotten what the Royal Opera’s current Tannhäuser, directed by Tim Albery and with set designs by Michael Levine, looks like. Or perhaps it was the natural tendency to repress the memory of unpleasant experiences. Wanting to enjoy the Overture, I closed my eyes until the moment the Venusberg ballet that Wagner composed for the doomed Paris version in 1861 began. However many hundreds of times I hear that Overture, with its wind chorale and weary strings, I still hang on every bar. It was instantly clear that Hartmut Haenchen, the conductor of this first revival, was going to be lighter and fleeter than Semyon Bychkov had been first time round. Mainly, Haenchen’s way is preferable.

Janacek’s Jenufa, his first great opera, had a one-night stand at the Royal Festival Hall last Monday, courtesy of the wonderful Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jiri Belohlavek, the Czech Philharmonic Choir Brno, a large body that had all of five minutes’ singing, and a mainly excellent cast, with Karita Mattila making her transition from the title role, which she has so often performed to powerful effect, to that of the Kostelnicka, the terrifying figure of rectitude who drowns her daughter-in-law’s illegitimate baby rather than bring disgrace on the family.

Disguises and mistaken identities are a staple of opera, but usually as part of the onstage, not the offstage, action. So what are we to make this week of a Handel opera that isn’t by Handel at all, and a Mozart opera that was largely composed in 1990? As usual in the opera house, there are good — if complicated — explanations. Every year the London Handel Festival tests the theory that forgotten operas are forgotten for a reason, rooting around the darkest corners of the composer’s output to find some abstruse treasures for their audience. This year they’ve outdone themselves, with a performance by Opera Settecento of Elpidia — an opera not heard since its initial run in 1725. The reason?

Lucia di Lammermoor is one of the two or three Donizetti operas that have never fallen out of the repertoire, and the more of his operas it’s possible to see, or at least to hear on CD, the less explicable that becomes. The late and rightly venerated Rodney Milnes called Lucia ‘a blazing masterpiece’, but that does seem to be overdoing it, and in fact several of his other works are more worthy of that accolade. Throughout much of its history Lucia was prized primarily for its glorious sextet, and for the maddest of all mad scenes, added to by generations of sopranos until it became the ultimate coloratura showpiece.

Comic opera is no laughing matter. Seriously, when was the last time you laughed out loud in the opera house? The vocal slapstick of Gianni Schicchi, laid on six banana skins deep? The farcical plot convulsions of Il barbiere? What about the arrival of Mozart’s ‘Albanians’ in Così? (Oh, those moustaches! Oh, those naughty boys!) It’s all about as spontaneous as a health-and-safety briefing, and almost as funny. Thank goodness, then, for Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest — an opera that’s dangerously, anarchically hilarious. The project sounds like a joke in itself. Have you heard the one about the Irish composer who tried to improve on Oscar Wilde?

In a remote fishing village a lone figure confronts an unexplained death, standing tormented but unbroken against fate, the community and the elements of sea and wind that surge through every note of the score. No, not Peter Grimes: this is Vaughan Williams’s 1932 operatic setting of Synge’s Riders to the Sea. But Vaughan Williams’s operas are undramatic, runs the received wisdom. There were no great British operas between Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and the premiere of Grimes in 1945, we’re repeatedly told. This student production of Riders to the Sea didn’t just refute those assumptions: it threw them into a riptide and watched them being dragged under and swept away.

The Royal Opera has bitten the bullet so far as Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov goes, and opted to stage the original 1869 version, with no modifications or additions from his revised 1874 edition, which used to be called ‘definitive’ but which seems to be under a cloud nowadays. Rimsky-Korsakov’s version has been pushed right to the back of the doghouse, so that it might soon be revived for its historical interest. Before I launch into my praise of the new production, which is an unqualified triumph, I would like to register some reservations about the work itself, in any of its versions. It’s routinely said that the hero of the opera is not Boris but the Russian people, tormented and downtrodden as they have always been and still are.

A mixed year so far for new opera. A few really dismal things have appeared from people who should know better. Did the world really need an operatic treatment of Dante’s Divine Comedy for orchestra and chorus? Louis Andriessen thought so; his La Commedia (2004–8) luckily only reared its drab head for one night at the Barbican. If you’re going to splurge as much money as opera often has to splurge, you have to ask yourself why. If you don’t, you create a situation in which operas come about merely because they can, often just to continue the tradition in the most inoffensive way possible. ‘Don’t mind me!’ says this kind of zombie opera.

Near the end of Elena Langer’s new opera Figaro Gets a Divorce, as the Almaviva household — now emigrés in an unnamed 1930s police state — prepares to flee, the Countess announces that she intends to leave her trunk behind. It’s not the subtlest moment in David Pountney’s libretto. Any opera that sets itself up as a sequel to The Marriage of Figaro is already courting comparisons that are both completely unavoidable and massively unfair. When the production of Figaro is as good as this one, that baggage can become so heavy that it’s immovable.

The three most moving, transporting death scenes in 19th-century opera all involve the respective heroines mounting a funeral pyre — partly, no doubt, a matter of operatic convention and fashion, but also recalling opera to its duty as a rite of purification. Berlioz’s Didon in Les Troyens, like her creator, is so relentless in her grasp of the truth that she fails to achieve anything but a vision of Carthage overcome by Rome, and ends in despair and execration. Brünnhilde in Götterdämmerung rides into Siegfried’s pyre in a state of ecstasy, imparted to the audience with all Wagner’s unlimited capacity for exaltation.

‘Forget Downton Abbey!’ exhorts David Pountney in the programme for Figaro Forever, Welsh National Opera’s season of Beaumarchais operas, The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro and Elena Langer’s Figaro Gets a Divorce. ‘A televisual age in which the vast narrative panorama of a “series” strung out across many episodes seems to capture people’s imaginations is perhaps exactly the right moment to follow the fortunes of the Count and Rosina, their servant Figaro and his fiancée, Susanna,’ he continues. What WNO’s artistic director means is the opposite of what he says.

Centre stage, there’s an industrial-looking black platform, secured by cables. The Three Ladies snap the unconscious Tamino on a mobile phone. The Three Boys look like Gollum in a fright wig. And Papageno, dressed as an ageing vagrant, simulates urination (at least I hope that’s what it was) into an empty wine bottle. Simon McBurney’s production of The Magic Flute could have been designed to raise the collective blood pressure of Against Modern Opera Productions, the Zeffirelli-worshipping Facebook group that’s opera’s equivalent of the Mail on Sunday letters page.

It’s widely agreed that the most difficult form of opera to bring off is operetta, whether of the Austro-German or the French tradition — interesting that the Italians wisely eschew the genre (so far as I know), while the British stay with G&S and their inviolable traditions, including the audience’s laughing in all the right places. In the past four days I have been to two performances of French operetta, neither of them much of a success, for quite different reasons. Opera Danube is a young company devoted to nurturing singers who recently graduated from one or another of the many music schools. It works with the Orpheus Sinfonia, a small orchestra of players at the same stage of their careers.

Opera North continues to be the most reliable, inspiring, resourceful and enterprising opera company in the United Kingdom, and all that without taking account of its extremely limited budget. From April through July it will be presenting its remarkable interpretation of Wagner’s Ring cycle in various cities, including London, so it may not be surprising that before that it is mounting much more modest fare — as indeed everything else is. Giordano’s Andrea Chénier (1896) seems to be undergoing something of a revival, and this new production in Leeds is the first time it has ever been performed in the north of England.