Michael Tanner

Le nozze di Figaro Royal Opera House The first night of the latest revival of the Royal Opera House’s Le nozze di Figaro I count among the dozen, or perhaps fewer than that, most glorious evenings I have spent in the theatre. Figaro is the opera that a critic sees most often, and it is right that it should be, since it is not only an incomparably great work, but also one which can survive performances of very different levels of achievement. What one hopes for from the Royal Opera, and on this occasion gets in fullest measure, is a superb amalgamation of the arts of singing, acting, producing, conducting. The cast is almost flawless, and so are the other ingredients, but what matters is not perfection but inspiration, and we had that above all from Sir Charles Mackerras.

Ariadne auf Naxos Royal Opera House The Pilgrim’s Progress Sadler’s Wells One of the odd things about the Strauss–Hofmannsthal collaboration is that while the literary half was endlessly aspiring, writing works which might serve the high function which Wagner saw for music–drama, even if Hofmannsthal didn’t much care for Wagner’s works, the musical half was the most perfect embodiment of the homme moyen sensuel in the history of music, most at home when he was at home, astonishingly industrious yet seeming to celebrate above all the virtues of a relaxed domestic existence. Their correspondence shows how ill-suited they were to one another in crucial ways, and it can’t exactly be said that each curbed the other’s excesses.

A Midsummer Night's Dream Opera North, Manchester Powder Her Face Royal Opera, Linbury At certain times all conditions seem to conspire to favour some opera composers, and to make others seem virtually impossible to produce satisfying accounts of. At present everything is going Britten’s way; every time I see a production of almost any opera by him my opinion both of it and of him rises; while I can hardly remember when I was last really satisfied by a performance of a work by Wagner or Verdi. A lot of that is due, no doubt, to the comparatively undemanding nature of Britten’s vocal writing, and to the consequent lack of need for stars.

Don Carlo Royal Opera House Verdi’s Don Carlo is as much of an obsession for me as one of my favourite operas. Though it isn’t perfect, and can’t be made perfect, whatever you include or eliminate from the extraordinary number of options available (including two languages), it has so many prolonged scenes of incontrovertible greatness, and their density increases as the opera proceeds, so that the last 80 minutes or so are all magnificent (ignoring the perfunctory endings of both the last two acts), that it seems to me obvious that it ranks with the Requiem as Verdi’s finest work. Yet this richness brings the inevitable problem of casting a large number of roles from strength.

L’incoronazione di Poppea (Glyndebourne), Der Rosenkavalier (English National Opera) Monteverdi’s last opera L’incoronazione di Poppea was the first opera I saw at Glyndebourne, in 1962. I saw it there again in 1984, once more ‘realised’ by Raymond Leppard, but in a version more complete and somewhat more austerely orchestrated than the first time. And now it has its third production, with Emmanuelle Haim conducting (presumably she is responsible, too, for the fairly lavish orchestration) and Robert Carsen directing. In 1962 the opera itself was a revelation, one of the most thrilling evenings I have spent in an opera house.

Tosca Royal Opera House Idomeneo Barbican Carmen Bernie Grant Arts Centre The latest revival of Tosca at the Royal Opera, with many changes in production by Stephen Barlow, shows signs of taking the work seriously, though they are contradicted by the corporate- and bar-friendly intervals, of a length to dissipate tension and momentum. Antonio Pappano’s conducting, too, displays a passion for the opera, every orchestral masterstroke being held up as a trophy; while it also moves towards one ponderous pause after another, so that Act II, which when conducted coarsely enough is a terrifying vortex of violence and lust, seemed languorous and torpid. It all gave the excellent cast a chance to show their gifts, and they took it.

Macbeth Opera North Punch and Judy Young Vic The Minotaur Covent Garden Don Giovanni English Touring Opera, Cambridge In a hectic and heterogeneous operatic week, three out of four of the things I saw were successful or even triumphant, so you couldn’t call it typical. Opera North’s new production of Verdi’s Macbeth largely erased memories of last year’s deplorable effort at Glyndebourne, and was therefore a matter for gratitude. Unlike that production, it wholly de-tartanised the opera, which is all to the good. Tim Albery presented it as a study in the pathology of political ambition and of the guilt to which acting on ambition leads. If that left quite a lot of the opera dangling, I think that is more Verdi’s than Albery’s fault.

The Minotaur Royal Opera For the first time in the 12 years that I have been reviewing opera weekly, I have been to the first performance of a masterpiece. The Minotaur, so far as I can tell from one intense experience, has all of Harrison Birtwistle’s strengths and none of his weaknesses. He likes to take on big themes, and that leads him to mythology, whether domestic, as in the brilliant early Punch and Judy, or cosmic, as in The Mask of Orpheus and Gawain. Though both those operas have great passages, the former is sunk by prolix pretentiousness, the latter is damaged by diffuseness, even in its revised version. By contrast, The Minotaur is compact, lasting for about two and a quarter hours, and without a superfluous moment, gesture or note.

Ainadamar Birmingham Symphony Hall Der Rosenkavalier Royal Festival Hall In a series of concerts in Symphony Hall with the perhaps unlikely title Passion from Birmingham, Osvaldo Golijov’s opera Ainadamar was given a semi-staged performance with the cast that made the bestselling DG recording three years ago. It’s repeated at the Barbican. With few genuine expectations and a fairly large dose of prejudice, I have to admit that the 80 minutes the piece takes were mesmerising, though I suspect that that might not happen a second time. The Argentinian composer operates in what is invariably called an eclectic idiom, and uses it to serve a strongly political and humanitarian agenda, with religious overtones — are they different from undertones?

Lost Highway Young Vic Aci, Galathea e Polifemo Middle Temple Olga Neuwirth’s Lost Highway, which was first performed in October 2003 in Graz, gets its first UK outing at the Young Vic in a production by ENO. It is impossible to imagine it being better done, and the roar of applause which greeted it at the end of its unbroken 90 minutes was, I hope, mainly evoked by the perfection of the execution. So many things could have gone wrong, and none of them did. The set consists of a black strip reaching from one side of the auditorium to the other, wide enough to cope with a car, as it does; and above it a large Plexiglass cube, containing a spiral staircase which is lowered for the characters to descend to the lost highway, or raised so other characters can intrude.

Carmen Royal Opera House What is an opera house for? The question would sound silly if it weren’t being asked in a particular and, in this case, rather peculiar context: that of the latest press release from the Royal Opera, which lists productions of opera and ballet for next season, but begins by excitedly letting us know about a new ‘initiative’, the idea of which is to attract a new audience to the opera house: it seems that the management is more concerned to get people inside the building itself than to attend any performances of the kind that normally take place there.

Punch and Judy Linbury Studio La vie parisienne Guildhall School of Music and Drama Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy is very much a piece of its time, the late 1960s, but returning to it after many years I was pleasantly surprised to find how much of it remains fresh and invigorating. Music Theatre Wales mounted three performances at the Linbury, and in a few weeks there will be a new production of it by ENO. It seemed to fit perfectly into the limited space of the Linbury, the orchestra behind the stage, and it has enough of the feel of a fairground entertainment to make the idea of it in a large and more formal setting odd, but we can only hope for a fascinating transformation. I had remembered it as a pretty relentlessly strident work, but my memory was agreeably wrong.

Eugene Onegin Royal Opera House Fiesque Bloomsbury Theatre When the late Steven Pimlott’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin was first staged at the Royal Opera two years ago, it had a frosty critical reception, largely because too much of it seemed either routine or irrelevant. Why, for instance, do we get Flandrin’s famous painting of a nude lad in profile as a front-drop for the first part of the work? Try as anyone might, it would be hard work to find any gay subtext in this opera. The composer clearly identified with Tatyana, and as always wrote his best love music when the object of passion is a man, but what has that to do with the blow-up?

Falstaff WNO Paradise Moscow Royal Academy of Music Verdi’s last opera Falstaff is also for many people his greatest. I went to see it in Cardiff this week, having heard Radio Three’s broadcast of his previous opera Otello from the New York Met a couple of evenings before. Otello I found, as I always do in a good performance, and that was, thanks to Semyon Bychkov’s conducting, an outstanding one, a work which puts me into a greater state of agony about the limitless human capacity for self-torment than almost any other. Falstaff, also admirably performed, left me, as again it nearly always does, impressed by its brilliance but otherwise unaffected.

Lucia di Lammermoor Coliseum Gentle Giant Linbury Studio Despite two attempts, I haven’t managed to see ENO’s new production of Lucia di Lammermoor with its announced cast. My first try was sabotaged, as so many plans are, by Network Rail, which is still after 12 years working on ‘essential maintenance’ of a ten-mile stretch of track between Stevenage and Cambridge, so that the last train from King’s Cross leaves at 21.52, compelling me to leave before Act III. On my second try the Lucia and Enrico were both too ill to sing, and indeed the replacement Lucia was ill too, but womanfully sang despite that. Operatic love-duet singing is a high-risk occupation when there are chest infections around.

Salome Royal Opera House Salome Royal Opera House What is a producer, or, as they more often like to be called these days, director, to do if he is asked to produce/direct a work about which he has no interesting ideas and none comes along during the production process, and the invitation comes from a prestigious ‘centre of excellence’ for which money is no object? Clearly, he teams up with a designer who enjoys putting lots of hardware on the stage and shunting it around, even having it moving rapidly from left to right, making the characters run to keep up, so that the production may easily cost as much as a provincial company would require in a whole year to keep going, had it not recently been axed by the ACE.

Salome Bridgewater Hall Peter Grimes Nottingham Die Zauberflöte Royal Opera House Salome Bridgewater Hall Peter Grimes Nottingham Die Zauberflöte Royal Opera House Does Richard Strauss’s Salome still have the power to shock, as the writers of programme notes like to claim? Not, anyway, in a concert performance, such as was given in the Bridgewater Hall last Saturday, the BBC Philharmonic on unusual territory, with soloists from the production that will soon be seen at the Teatro Regio, Turin. The uniting factor was the conductor, Gianandrea Noseda.