Opera

The way the director James Conway sees it, Monteverdi’s last opera L’incoronazione di Poppea is about that most delicate of subjects, adult abuse by youngsters. That isn’t what he says in his programme note for his production at the Royal College of Music, where he claims that the opera is about power, ‘love, yes, but love’s power’. That is tendentious: you might as well say that Otello is about the power of jealousy, which is true, but that doesn’t make it ‘really’ about power; or that Wozzeck is about the power of powerlessness, etc. Poppea is about several things, power among them, but also love, jealousy, ambition, ruthlessness, the abuse of power.

The Guildhall School of Music and Drama is outdoing itself in putting on a triple bill of little-known operas, two by Massenet and one by Martinu. What is still more remarkable is that GSMD has put them all on before, though I think in different productions. This time round the designer Yannis Thavoris has produced a set of which the main ingredient, a heap of miscellaneous broken or discarded objects, remains throughout the evening, while other props are introduced that are sufficiently striking to create a quite different mood as the curtain rises on the three little operas. The first, Massenet’s La Navarraise, goes so against everything we associate with the composer that it must have been written partly in order to demonstrate how wide his range was.

I thought my 27th Wexford Opera Festival since 1972 was going to be one of the best. I had seen and enjoyed the Cilea and Chabrier operas on the bill at Holland Park and Opera North in the 1990s, and I was intrigued whether Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet was viable music theatre. Wexford veterans are used to disappointment and surprise success. We know why Glyndebourne audiences go with the flow and enjoy themselves, there being dinner, gardens, atmosphere and ticket prices to dissolve criticism. Wexford is cheaper: €25 to €130 a night for the main operas, less for sideshows. But most visitors make a three-night excursion with b&b as minimum. In the old days, it was a drinking as well as an opera festival — a tradition started by Compton Mackenzie.

The Met Live in HD series for 2012–13 got off to a brilliant start with a new production of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, the most warm-hearted of comedies — in fact, a work so genial that I’m always surprised it doesn’t lapse into insipidity. This production by Bartlett Sher made that seem less of a danger than usual, because although it would be an exaggeration to say he had rethought the piece, he did make it into a more three-dimensional work than usual, Donizetti edging more towards Bellini and away from Rossini, whereas Don Pasquale is the other way round. There are fewer laughs in Sher’s production than you might expect, but far more involvement with the characters.

What begins with the borrowing of some capital ends 14 hours later with cataclysmic disaster. It is a drama thousands and thousands in the western hemisphere watch these days — from Seattle to New York, from London to Milan, and from Munich to St Petersburg. Ticket prices are high, although sponsorship money flows in luxuriant quantities hand-in-hand with public subsidies; after all, the show (which originally was intended to be produced only once, the set consumed for ever in the last scene’s flames) is notoriously expensive to produce. The show in question is, of course, Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, arguably the greatest and surely the longest piece in the repertoire that the opera houses of the world have to stage in order to be taken seriously.

As any regular opera-goer knows, next year is uniquely one for three major operatic centenaries, two of them, Verdi’s and Wagner’s, bicentenaries, while Britten was born only 100 years ago, but seems to have been dead for a very long time. So we can expect numerous series — of performances, recordings, broadcast radio and TV features — and probably quite a few biographies and critical studies.

Going to the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith for the annual season of Tête à Tête is a chancy affair, though one can be sure of a very high standard of performance, both vocally and instrumentally. It helps, of course, that none of the studios is large, so the singers can produce their voices at conversational level, though many of them choose not to. As always, there is a big range of operas to choose from, so the choice of the pair I shall be discussing was based on no principle other than that the subject of one of them intrigued me, and while I was about it I saw another. In fact, I saw two more, but they were very brief, about ten minutes each, and performed in the Riverside Studios foyer, as a warm-up for the audience.

My first visit to Dorset Opera, last year, left me very impressed. If anything this year was even better, though I found one of the three operas dull. In last year’s programme, I seem to remember, we were promised an Olympically themed opera, Jesse Owens, but that didn’t materialise, nor was there any mention of it.  As usual, after ten intensive days of rehearsal, with all concerned living in Bryanston School, Dorset Opera puts on one opera the first night, another one (this year two) the second, the first on the third, and on the last day the first is a matinée. This year’s mainstay was Il Trovatore, an opera that I have never seen satisfactorily performed, despite its musical unsinkability.

The Royal Opera season concluded, as is now customary, with an evening in which the participants in what used to be the Vilar Young Artists programme, in the light of events renamed the Jette Parker Young Artists, are paraded to show their progress. They make a truly international team, as the slip inside the programme indicated: ‘Ji-Min Park has withdrawn...the role of Il Conte di Libenskof will be sung by Ji Hyun Kim...the role of Zefirino...will now be sung by ZhengZhong Zhou.’ For the first time the programme consisted of a single work; previously it has been made up of excerpts from several.