From our UK edition
Purists might have winced at Opera North’s advertisement for its latest revival of La Bohème. ‘If you see one musical this year,’ it said, ‘see this opera.’ Such rhetoric might invite unhelpful discussion of the relative merits of each genre, but it also reflects the fact that this show is a refreshing, unfusty treat.
From our UK edition
Opera seems almost always to have been acutely concerned with its own future. These days this is most often manifested in occasionally desperate, sometimes patronising attempts to entice new audiences to the art form. A new three-way initiative between Aldeburgh Music, the Royal Opera and Opera North takes a different tack by enabling a new generation of composers and librettists to try its hand in this most exacting art form. The initiative’s first fruit was a double bill premièred in Aldeburgh before being shown at Covent Garden’s Linbury Studio Theatre and Leeds’s Howard Assembly Room.
From our UK edition
I wasn’t going to write about Handel’s Rodelinda, wasn’t even intending to go, but thanks to the kindness of the press office at ENO I did, and it was so marvellous that I can’t resist expressing my delight. Not that it was ideal — no production of Rodelinda is, or, I’m beginning to suspect, can be. The musical side of things, actually, was close to perfect, but Richard Jones seemed to be in several minds about what kind of work it is, and indulged in an orgy of director’s gimmicks, gleefully abetted by the set designer Jeremy Herbert. Set in fascist Milan, the show was redolent of Glyndebourne’s 1998 production, which took its inspiration from silent movies in the exaggerated posturing of its heroes and, especially, villains.
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I’ve been hoping that in this, the last of my weekly columns on opera, I would be able to strike a positive, even cheerful note on the present and future of the art form, but honesty compels me to say that I don’t think it is in very good shape. Not, probably, that it has ever been, or at least only for brief periods. Owing to its mongrel nature, there has usually been a tendency for one or other of its ingredients to lord it over the others, so that the ideal balance of music and drama, spectacle and action, personalised in the collaboration of singers and conductors, stage directors and musicians, has only been rarely achieved.
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This week chanced to give me a fascinating study in contrasts and comparisons: Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Greek at the Linbury Studio, Britten’s Death in Venice at the Grand Theatre Leeds. Two English operas from the latter half of the 20th century, both with mythological undertones and overtones, one of them the noisy announcement of his presence by a young composer, the other the last testament, a dying fall, of the ultimate Establishment figure who contrived also to be seen as an outsider; one full of profanities and vicious humour, the other both subversive and genteel, without a trace of irony or laughter. Death in Venice, the opera, has never much appealed to me.
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Siegfried is, everyone agrees, the hardest of the Ring dramas to bring off. The first and almost insurmountable problem is that the title role is one that almost no one can sing, and one of which even on recordings there are very few wholly satisfactory accounts. Lauritz Melchior, the only tenor with the adequate size and beauty of voice, and the sensitivity, when he could be bothered, to employ them to the full, never recorded the role complete, his only ‘live’ preserved performance being heavily cut. The most one can hope for is a more-or-less decent account, and they are rare.
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Why stage a Handel oratorio, or anyone else’s for that matter? The recent urge to do it, with Bach’s Passions — even, I’m told, with Messiah — suggests a further incursion of TV into our lives, the inability to absorb anything that isn’t partly or primarily visual. At least Handel’s Joshua, which Charles Edwards directs and designs in a new Opera North production, is bellicose so there is a fair amount of action, though the most indelible parts of it are the choruses, some of them, strangely, sung with scores in hand, some not. The setting is post-second world war, yet another production with an excuse for dressing the characters in dowdy clothes suggestive of a Ken Loach movie.
