Michael Tanner

The Damnation of Faust Barbican Rigoletto ENO Berlioz called La Damnation de Faust ‘an opera without decor or costumes’, which is what I quite often wish all operas were. But as David Cairns writes in his characteristically illuminating but tendentious programme notes, ‘It is an opera of the mind’s eye performed on an ideal stage of the imagination; we see it more vividly than any visual medium could depict it, except the cinema (which it at times anticipates).’ That last interesting thought apart, I wonder if my visual imagination is defective — I suspect that it is. Anyway, I don’t find, on the whole, that I do have vivid images during Damnation, and certainly not of a Hungarian plain, Auerbach’s cellar, and so forth.

Le Grand Macabre English National Opera Don Carlo Royal Opera House Ligeti’s opera Le Grand Macabre has opened the season at ENO in a production of spectacular, amazing brilliance. Every aspect of the piece, visual, musical, dramatic, is dispatched with such panache that it seems a pity to enter any reservations at all, and for anyone in two minds about getting a ticket I’d unhesitatingly say ‘Go!’ The reservation is that the work itself is so feeble a piece, and by Ligeti’s standards shockingly thin, that one is forced to regret directorial and designer’s inventiveness amounting to genius for so unworthy a cause. Anarchy in art, as in life, is a wonderful concept but is a bitter disappointment when realised.

Linda di Chamounix Royal Opera Così fan tutte Opera North Four years ago the Royal Opera opened its season with concert performances of Donizetti’s Dom Sébastien, which came as a near-revelation to many of us, and subsequently appeared on Opera Rara. This year it opened with the scarcely better-known Linda di Chamounix, which was no revelation at all. In both cases Mark Elder conducted, and manifested his passionate devotion to the scores. While Dom Sébastien is a serious work, Linda is a melodramma semiserio, which means not only that it ends happily, but also that it conjoins, sometimes disconcertingly, serious and comic elements: not like Don Giovanni, say, but in a more clumsy way.

The Rake’s Progress; Il signor Bruschino Peacock Theatre Just before the opera season gets under way each year, British Youth Opera puts on a couple of operas, or this year three, with three performances each, at the newly comfortable Peacock Theatre, off Kingsway. Few people go, since BYO treats the enterprise as a jealously guarded secret, and makes sure that you need detective skills to discover what and when, and never tells you, even if you’re as well disposed a critic as I am. This year the show which is really outstanding is their production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, at least the equal of any that I have seen of this problematic work, and in some respects superior.

Exactly ten years ago I visited Battersea Arts Centre to see eight short operas performed by Tête à Tête. Exactly ten years ago I visited Battersea Arts Centre to see eight short operas performed by Tête à Tête. It was a memorable evening, and showed what a good idea it is to encourage young composers to write quarter-hour-long pieces, instead of making a whole evening of their first attempt at opera. Inevitably, of course, there is a workshop aspect to these occasions, and anyone who feels understandably suspicious of workshops is likely to give them a wide berth — and thereby to miss a good deal of hit-and-miss pleasure.

Fidelio; Samson The Proms The visits to the Proms of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra under their co-founder and conductor Daniel Barenboim have become, already, something more than an artistic event — or, this year, four artistic events in two days. It is immensely moving to see young people from endlessly embattled states making music together, and doing it with such panache and precision. By the time of the last concert, an unstaged performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio, with a starry cast of soloists, it was possible to feel, however, that Barenboim’s hyper-Gergievean rate of work was taking a toll, both on him and on his orchestra.

Katya Kabanova Opera Holland Park The Mask of Orpheus, Act II Proms I took yet another amazed Londoner to the Opera Holland Park production of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova — he was amazed not only by the pleasant comfort of the place, but also by the standard of the performance, which would have been a credit to any opera house in the world. Why are opera-goers so uninquisitive? It’s an inevitable but useless question. It isn’t that one sees empty seats at OHP, but the audience strikes me as being, to a large extent, composed of people who wouldn’t normally go to opera, but rather are having an evening out.

Tristan und Isolde Glyndebourne Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is a work of stark oppositions, which are overcome, or seem to be, in the final bars, as Isolde sinks lifeless over Tristan’s body, in a state of (her last words) ‘unconsciousness, highest bliss’. Well, which? you might ask. If you’re unconscious you can’t be in a state of highest bliss, and vice versa. But it is essential to this work that that central paradox is maintained throughout. Passion must lead to death.

Die Walküre Mariinsky Opera at Covent Garden When the Mariinsky Opera, under its ultra-hyperactive chief Valery Gergiev, brought its touring Ring to Cardiff in 2006, it was the low point of my life as an opera-goer, with, it is fair to say, no redeeming feature. After strong criticism from many people in many places, the production has been considerably altered, but since Gergiev makes a point of performing the cycle in four days, there are still many changes of cast for the main roles, and the singers involved are not, mainly, Wagnerians, nor German speakers. They have to live at the hectic pace that Gergiev insists on, decisions as to who will sing in which performance are left till late in the day, and the whole thing has an improvised feel.

The Fairy Queen The Proms Gluck double bill Wigmore Hall Purcell’s The Fairy Queen has been a big success at Glyndebourne this year, in a production by Jonathan Kent, and with William Christie conducting. I decided to wait till it came to the Proms, where it was presumably a very different experience. In the Royal Albert Hall you’re almost bound to be so far away from the singers that you have to look at their mouths to see which one is performing, especially if, as here, all the sopranos seemed, for much of the time, to be emulating the bird-like tones of Emma Kirkby. Nor was any of the scenery brought from Glyndebourne, and this is supposed to be a visual as much as an aural feast.

Jette Parker Young Artists Royal Opera Partenope The Proms The Royal Opera ended its season looking to the future, with its Young Artists Summer Concert on Sunday afternoon. Part I was most of Act I of Don Giovanni, and Part II two lengthy excerpts from Massenet’s Werther and Manon. I was only able to stay for the first half, having to get to the Prom performance of Handel’s Partenope, which began at 6 p.m. and went on for ever. Rory Macdonald conducted, and seemed anxious to show his authentic credentials, with the orchestra of Welsh National Opera, by taking the opening of the overture as unportentously as possible: you’d never guess that this music was going to accompany the entry of the Stone Guest.

Il barbiere di Siviglia; Tosca Royal Opera House The Royal Opera hasn’t had much luck or judgment in recent years in presenting Verdi, though, for various reasons, some of them interesting, his operas do seem to be at the present time recalcitrant to great productions, or for that matter good recordings. Pre- and post-Verdi Italian opera, or to be accurate Rossini and Puccini, have been faring rather better, and the round-up of Italians with which the season has concluded has landed one triumph and another near-triumph, though both have the disability of annoying sets and not particularly helpful producers. The first night of the revival of Il barbiere di Siviglia has already passed, and rightly, into operatic history.

Rusalka Glyndebourne L’Amour de loin ENO The new production of Dvorak’s Rusalka at Glyndebourne is an unmitigated triumph, a perfect demonstration of all the elements in opera fusing to create a bewitching experience. Any qualifications can only be about the piece itself, not about any of the performers or the direction. I had some anxiety about Melly Still as director when I read that this was her first essay in operatic production, since that is usually a warning that the quite extraordinary difficulties of the genre are going to be overlooked, with results as dire as recent Bayreuth Ring cycles or ENO’s Carmen.

The Abduction from the Seraglio Opera North Un Ballo in Maschera Royal Opera House As I took my seat for Act II of Opera North’s new production of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio, the woman sitting next to me — we hadn’t met — said, ‘Have you any idea what’s going on in this opera?’ and I said I hadn’t, at any rate in this production. Everyone agrees that Mozart’s dramatic sense deserted him quite extensively in Seraglio, but it was left to the director Tim Hopkins, who was also responsible for the designs, to remove whatever dramatic impetus the work has and to come up with something that is as hopelessly messy to follow as it is to look at.

Fidelio Garsington Parthenogenesis Linbury Beethoven’s Fidelio is one of the most moving operas in the repertoire, but I’ve usually been more moved by it in concert than on stage. The gaucheries of its plot, which include, really, hardly having any plot — we encounter, after the relatively light opening, the embodiment of noble feminine determination, then the embodiment of powerful male malevolence, and in Act II when one confronts the other the result is instant victory for the Good, thanks to the convenient intervention of an oft-invoked Providence. It is hard to credit as drama, much more evidently convincing as a cantata of celebration, in which the intensely affecting main message stands out against the quotidian bickerings.

Lulu Royal Opera House It’s not often that I have felt so disinclined to write a piece about the past week’s opera-going, especially when it was an occasion I had looked forward to so much: Berg’s second opera Lulu, one of the strangest works in the repertoire, but even if not a masterpiece — it’s very hard to say what it is — a work of enduring fascination. However, if you had the misfortune to encounter it for the first time in the Royal Opera’s new production by Christof Loy you would be entitled to wonder whether it was a work of any fascination at all, and not just a long-winded and perhaps unsavoury bore.

Così fan tutte English National Opera After many productions of Mozart’s bleak comedy Così fan tutte, there has been a hiatus, welcomely brought to an end by ENO, which brought the first operatic production of the great Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami from Aix-en-Provence. Denied a visa by the imbecilic British embassy in Tehran, he had his work restaged by Elaine Tyler-Hall. I have no idea what it was like originally, but it is hard to believe that it was quite as blank as what we saw at the Coliseum, which really was not a production at all, but merely costumed characters strutting around in the way they would if there was no one to tell them what to do. The staging, however, was a treat to look at.

Falstaff Glyndebourne There was an interesting, startled article in the Independent a couple of weeks ago in which the writer recorded that, contrary to the expectations of everyone in ‘the media’, as the credit crisis squeezes harder, its victims, instead of turning to ever more feather-brained sources of enjoyment and consolation, are bewilderingly trying an escape into seriousness, with ‘heavy’ plays and operas, long taxing books, etc., being what they are headed for, rather than the jolly irrelevant frolics that they might have been expected to favour.

Peter Grimes English National Opera L’elisir d’amore Royal Opera House Norma English Touring Opera, in Cambridge ENO’s advertisement for its new production of Peter Grimes under David Alden, and the front of the programme, is of a surly, even aggressive youth with ropes coiled behind him. I wondered whether Alden had decided, in characteristic fashion, that the Apprentice, a silent role, was the malevolent centre of the work, manipulating Grimes and the townspeople into regarding him as a victim. No such luck. The Apprentice we get is considerably older than usual, as tall as anyone on the stage, and certainly sullen, displaying his bruise to Ellen with defiant hostility.