Culture

Opera Holland Park has as its speciality little-known Italian operas from the last decade of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th. It’s a period that seems to have been swarming with composers who were eager, somehow, to combine the ardours of Verdi with the larger symphonic constructions that were being created across the Alps. OHP has turned up some worthwhile specimens, of which last year’s Francesca da Rimini by Zandonai was one of the classiest. This year is La Wally by Catalani, of which everyone knew, or still does, the hit number ‘ebben?...N’andro lontana’ thanks to the movie Diva. Alas, that turns out not only to be the best thing in the score, but also to have been composed, as a song, 15 years earlier.

Everything is there – except the central character English Wagnerians really can’t complain about what they’ve been offered this year, so long as they can get around the country, and particularly around the countryside. In London we have only had ENO’S Parsifal, but that was musically magnificent. Many of us found Glyndebourne’s Meistersinger tremendous both musically and as a production, and in the north there have been acclaimed performances, with more to come, of Das Rheingold in concert, a treat I have still in store; and a memorable Walküre, also in concert, in Manchester three weeks ago, which introduced a potentially great Wotan, Egils Silins.

Massenet’s late opera Cendrillon brings the Royal Opera’s low-key season to an effervescent if somewhat vapid close. Massenet’s late opera Cendrillon brings the Royal Opera’s low-key season to an effervescent if somewhat vapid close. I doubt whether a better case could be made for it than in this production, imported from Santa Fe. Laurent Pelly, an expert in contriving ingenious and non-stop action, keeps the first two acts, building up to Cinderella’s enforced departure from the ball, bowling along against an appealing background, designed by Barbara de Limburg, of wall-sized pages of Perrault’s tale, which slide away in favour of, usually, scarlet settings.

What is wrong with Peter Grimes, the central figure of Britten’s eponymous opera? Or should the question be: what is wrong with Peter Grimes? For though there is no question that the opera makes a powerful and disturbing impression in a decent performance, it turns out always to be rather difficult to locate the focus of the work. What is wrong with Peter Grimes, the central figure of Britten’s eponymous opera? Or should the question be: what is wrong with Peter Grimes? For though there is no question that the opera makes a powerful and disturbing impression in a decent performance, it turns out always to be rather difficult to locate the focus of the work.

When the photographer Ida Kar (1908–74) was given an exhibition of more than 100 of her works at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1960, history was made. When the photographer Ida Kar (1908–74) was given an exhibition of more than 100 of her works at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1960, history was made. She was the first photographer to be given such an honour — a substantial solo show in a public gallery — and the presentation of her photographs was carefully considered. This set a precedent for subsequent photography exhibitions and brought the question of whether photography is art firmly to the forefront of debate. The person responsible for all this was the dynamic and innovative director of the Whitechapel, Bryan Robertson.

Fidelio, once regarded as an uncomplicated celebration of what its title suggests, and of freedom, especially political freedom, has become a problem work, and most productions of it amount to uninterestingly complicated attempts to circumvent issues which shouldn’t have been present in the director’s mind in the first place. Fidelio, once regarded as an uncomplicated celebration of what its title suggests, and of freedom, especially political freedom, has become a problem work, and most productions of it amount to uninterestingly complicated attempts to circumvent issues which shouldn’t have been present in the director’s mind in the first place.

The Tsar’s Bride is Rimsky-Korsakov’s tenth opera, give or take various versions of some previous ones, but you’d never guess it. The Tsar’s Bride is Rimsky-Korsakov’s tenth opera, give or take various versions of some previous ones, but you’d never guess it. The production at the Royal Opera, which is exemplary in most respects, suggests a fairly talented newcomer to the genre, who isn’t yet in a position to boss his librettist around in the necessary ways. The Overture sets no scene, and is anyway tiresome and undistinguished; there are lots of stereotypical choral scenes; the central set of characters and their motivations sometimes get submerged in superfluous sidelines.

One of the troubles with opera is that since creating and putting one on involves so many people many composers write as if for eternity, or at least for a sizeable segment of it. It’s been a great boon in recent years that some companies, notably Tête-à-Tête, have encouraged the creation and production of operas-in-progress and of short pieces which enable composers and librettists, and the mainly young performers they recruit, to find out what they might be good at. It’s a great boost for the spirits of the opera-goer to realise that, if he is being bored rigid by a piece, there is only 20 or so minutes of it.

The opening performance of the Royal Opera’s first revival of Fidelio, in the production by Jürgen Flimm which was unwisely imported in 2007, was so dreary that it would be better not to comment on it, except that it seems worth separating the inherently feeble elements from the ones that happened to be present, and which may well have disappeared in later performances. The opening performance of the Royal Opera’s first revival of Fidelio, in the production by Jürgen Flimm which was unwisely imported in 2007, was so dreary that it would be better not to comment on it, except that it seems worth separating the inherently feeble elements from the ones that happened to be present, and which may well have disappeared in later performances.

English Touring Opera continues to be the most heroic of companies. This spring season it is performing at 17 locations, from Exeter to Perth, Belfast to Norwich. And in the many years that I have been going to its productions, there has been no compromise in standards and absolutely no contraction of repertoire to the familiar and the safe, if anything the reverse. Last autumn it premièred Goehr’s tough Promised End, an immense artistic achievement. And now they are putting on Tobias Picker’s Fantastic Mr Fox, an operatic adaptation of Roald Dahl, with young children from each of the relevant towns playing the fox cubs — and having their names printed in the lavish accompanying booklet, with CD attached.

Scene: the Royal Opera House, last Friday, 10.35 p.m. In the last act of Aida, Amneris, in the formidable person of Olga Borodina, has just concluded her magnificent denunciation of priests: ‘Cruel monsters! You will always be thirsty for blood!’ and the final ten minutes remain, the exquisite scene in which the hero and heroine suffocate while singing their farewell to life. Scene: the Royal Opera House, last Friday, 10.35 p.m. In the last act of Aida, Amneris, in the formidable person of Olga Borodina, has just concluded her magnificent denunciation of priests: ‘Cruel monsters! You will always be thirsty for blood!’ and the final ten minutes remain, the exquisite scene in which the hero and heroine suffocate while singing their farewell to life.

It is some time since any of the masterpieces of Wagner’s high maturity has been staged in London, so ENO’s revival of Parsifal was most welcome, despite memories of the irritations and worse of the production in 1999. It is some time since any of the masterpieces of Wagner’s high maturity has been staged in London, so ENO’s revival of Parsifal was most welcome, despite memories of the irritations and worse of the production in 1999. Since then it has toured the world, and achieved contemporary immortality on DVD, a performance recorded in Baden-Baden. The ENO revival is directed by Daniel Dooner, and is quite extensively revised, though not nearly extensively enough for my taste.

The Royal Opera has been both noisy and evasive about Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera, Anna Nicole, with words by Richard Thomas of Jerry Springer: the Opera notoriety. The Royal Opera has been both noisy and evasive about Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera, Anna Nicole, with words by Richard Thomas of Jerry Springer: the Opera notoriety. I have never seen and heard so much advance publicity, for any arts event whatever, and yet, apart from telling us that it was to be about the eponymous celebrity, there was very little about the piece that could actually be called information. There seemed something reflexive about the whole operation, endless articles and interviews, but a void at the centre, which is exactly and obviously what celebrity culture is.

Artistic integrity is the subject of Mieczysław Weinberg’s opera The Portrait, as it is of Gogol’s short story from which it is adapted. Artistic integrity is the subject of Mieczysław Weinberg’s opera The Portrait, as it is of Gogol’s short story from which it is adapted. And whatever one might feel about the work — and I enjoyed it a lot more than most of my colleagues seem to have — Opera North is unquestionably demonstrating artistic integrity by staging relatively or very unknown operas in productions which don’t have as their main selling point that the director has never seen, let alone directed, an opera before.

Someone should write an opera about a once-great opera company, now in artistically suicidal decline. A few decades ago it had great productions and performances of the masterpieces of the repertoire, but it has been scared by successive governments warning about élitism, the need for attracting new, young, opera-hating audiences, and so on. So it has hired a succession of ‘directors’ (adopting the language of cinema), who have never seen an opera, to stage established works and mount new ones, making them look as much as possible like the eternally running musicals it eyes enviously.

The annual collaboration between Scottish Opera and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama is, as the principal of the RSAMD writes, ‘a model...for partnership working between professionals and professionals-in-training’, and it is hard to think of any work more suitable for this partnership than Janácek’s The Cunning Little Vixen. The annual collaboration between Scottish Opera and the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama is, as the principal of the RSAMD writes, ‘a model...for partnership working between professionals and professionals-in-training’, and it is hard to think of any work more suitable for this partnership than Janácek’s The Cunning Little Vixen.

As I sat fuming through the latest absurd production of Carmen, this one directed by the controversial Daniel Kramer for Opera North, it struck me that this opera, like one other of the trio of popular masterpieces set in or around Seville, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, suffers because its central figure leads a separate life of her or his own; though they are most famous in the context of these works.

It’s sometimes intriguing to speculate, as you go to an opera in a fringe production of one kind or another, about how much messing around (used neutrally) this or that popular work can take. It’s sometimes intriguing to speculate, as you go to an opera in a fringe production of one kind or another, about how much messing around (used neutrally) this or that popular work can take. OperaUpClose scored an enormous success with its version of La Bohème in 2009/10 (though its claim to be the longest-ever run of an opera should be balanced by the fact that The Cock Kilburn could seat only about 40 people).