Opera

Visits by English Touring Opera are always to be looked forward to, but this autumn it has surpassed itself with three baroque works, two of them masterpieces and the third a fascinating rarity, all performed by casts of astonishingly high calibre, and produced helpfully, resourcefully, with simple elegant sets, which are all that is needed, though they probably cost a thousandth as much as the eye-catching splurges that we often see in London. First up, anyway at the Arts Theatre Cambridge, was the rarity: Cavalli’s Jason (intelligent to translate the titles where possible, since all the operas are sung in English). Apparently, it was the 17th century’s most popular opera, though that must be hard to determine.

A new production of The Magic Flute is something to look forward to, if with apprehension. How many aspects of this protean masterpiece will it encompass, and how many will be neglected or distorted? The answer, in the case of Simon McBurney’s effort at the Coliseum, is that almost everything that contributes to the work’s greatness is ignored or reduced, so that an evening that should be spent in a state of growing elation merely induces irritation deepening to rage, with patches of life-draining boredom. Not that the first-night audience shared my view, to judge from the roar of applause that greeted the final curtain, and the frequent guffaws and outbursts of clapping during the work.

This year’s live relays of New York Met performances have a markedly Slav flavour, with Shostakovich’s rare The Nose next up, and later Dvorak’s Rusalka and, most interestingly, Borodin’s Prince Igor. It kicked off with Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, the most popular though not the finest of his operas. On the first night there were sustained protests both outside and inside the Met, against the Putin crony Valery Gergiev and against Anna Netrebko, a supporter of the plutocrat dictator. Odd that there aren’t more protests, when you think that people still get heated and even write books about musicians who stayed in the Third Reich, often acting courageously. There were no protests, alas, before the matinée that was broadcast.

Yorkshire, says William Cook, is the sculpture capital of Britain. It was the birthplace of ‘Britain’s greatest sculptors, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore’ – but is this just coincidence, or ‘is there something about Yorkshire that makes great sculpture happen here?’ In this week’s lead Arts feature, he visits the ‘stunning, 500 acre’ Yorkshire Sculpture Park, ‘adorned with works by every sculptor you can think of’, which, on a sunny day, is ‘a great artwork in its own right’. It’s one thing to produce a biopic. It’s another to produce a hagiography.

‘Shakespeare’s Globe’, as the theatre has been called since it was founded in 1997, is unusual for a theatre in that it makes a large annual profit, without receiving public funding. How? Its unique angle means it has no need to market itself – what’s more attractive to an American audience than Shakespeare, in London, in a reconstructed Shakespearean theatre? But its decision to put all Shakespearean productions on hold to make way for another dramatist is a decision which Lloyd Evans isn’t too sure about. Samuel Adamson’s Gabriel may be accompanied by some lovely Purcell music, but the actual play’s content leaves much to be desired. Theoretically, there’s nothing more delightful than evening at Glyndebourne.

There are no two ways about it: Wagner’s Ring cycle, the biggest challenge that any opera company can face, has been mounted with triumphant success in Longborough, and now presumably has been laid to rest. Nine years ago, at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, I saw the first attempt to stage it, in Jonathan Dove’s drastically cut version, and with skeletonic orchestration, and though there was some decent singing, on the whole I was unimpressed.

Deborah Ross reviews two films for us this week. The first is Pacific Rim, a ‘giant monsters v. giant robots’ film, and to be perfectly honest, that’s about all she has to say on the matter. If you do want to find out more, here’s the trailer: Her second film this week is ‘The Moo Man’, which is almost the opposite of Pacific Rim. ‘Instead of being a big, noisy film with nothing to say, it’s a small, quiet film with quite a lot to say’. A documentary following a dairy farmer around his East Sussex farm, it is ‘beautifully and lovingly and discreetly filmed’, it says everything it has to say about British agriculture, in its own quiet way. The inside of our British palaces used to be almost a state secret, .

Sir Alfred Munnings lived his life in true bohemian style, ‘carousing with gypsies and horse-trainers, living rough and constantly on the road’. Summer in February is based on his early life living in Cornwall, with Munnings played by Dominic Cooper: ‘Irrepressible as an electric eel, and twice as dangerous’. But does the film live up to Munnings’ art – and, of course, to the hype? The problem with films about artists is, says Andrew Lambirth, the art. But Summer in February is ‘as vivid and visually complex as a Munnings masterpiece’ – in fact, almost as good as the book.

One of ‘the great operatic artists of the present’ sips coffee in his quiet Oxford kitchen. The artist is Christopher Purves, the description Michael Tanner’s (Arts, 13 March). In recent years, Purves’s fluid, eloquent baritone and considered acting have received rolling acclaim: Glyndebourne, La Scala, Teatro Real Madrid; Falstaff, Mephistopheles, Beckmesser and more. This year has seen his psychotic Protector in Written on Skin at Covent Garden, and now Walt Disney in Philip Glass’s The Perfect American at English National Opera. But first we talk about his children, whose pictures mosaic the kitchen cabinets, and mine. Purves is my cousin Edwina’s husband, and my son Benedict’s godfather.