Michael Tanner

Die Zauberflöte Royal Opera House A Midsummer Night’s Dream Linbury There is a hard core of central works which any major opera house needs to have, in a production that can survive many changes of cast and conductor, even of obtrusive revival director. Die Zauberflöte is unquestionably among them, a work that we constantly need to remind us of those easily mocked truths about what we should do with our lives, how high we should aspire and what the cost of aspiration may be. David McVicar’s production seems to serve the purpose, if not ideally: the overpowering settings of John Macfarlane are more notable than anything that we see the characters doing.

Peter Grimes Opera North Of all Britten’s operas Peter Grimes is the one I have seen most often, and it remains not only the one that I find it hardest to make up my mind about, but also the one which I still don’t feel I know especially well. There are the famous passages, not only the sea interludes but also Grimes’s monologues, ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’ and his big tune, sung first to the words ‘What harbour shelters peace?’, there is Ellen Orford’s touching, rather less famous Embroidery aria in Act III, which is a passage of genuine repose in this restless and often angry score; and there are the famous set choral pieces, ‘Grimes is at his exercise’ and the terrifying shouts of the villagers in hot pursuit of him.

Something I didn’t think was possible has happened this last week: I have been strongly moved by a performance of La traviata. That was due very largely, of course, to the way the title role was performed. Anna Netrebko may not have the perfect voice for the part, her vocal technique might be lacking in this or that respect, but she was amazing, and was recognised by the audience to be so. She got a reception befitting a great artist who had just delivered a classic account of a major role. My surprise is the greater because I find the hype about her, much of it cleverly auto-generated, incredibly annoying, and I was on the verge of relegating her to that category of fairly gifted singers who are ruined by the contemporary celebrity-making machine.

The Adventures of Pinocchio Grand Theatre, Leeds It’s odd how, even if you try to ignore Christmas, it still manages to determine the shape of your end-of-year experiences. Three weeks ago, four days before Christmas Day, Opera North enterprisingly mounted the world première of Jonathan Dove’s 21st opera, Pinocchio. I haven’t seen any opera since, except on TV and DVD, yet my memories of it are alarmingly faint. I have a pretty clear impression of what much of it looked like, but very little of what it sounded like. I’m not being snide at Dove’s expense, just wondering how far what seems like the interminable sequence of fragmented days is responsible for my failure of recall.

Presumably Bernard Haitink took, or was administered, a huge overdose of Valium before he began conducting Parsifal at the Royal Opera last week. What else could explain this fairly experienced Wagnerian’s conducting so featureless an account of Wagner’s last, most subtle and all told perhaps greatest score? Even the opening bars, unaccompanied melody with telling inflections which prefigure what will happen to it later, gave the impression of being a first run-through by players who had been told just to perform the notes — the exact opposite of how it sounded six years ago, when Simon Rattle inflected virtually every note separately. And because there was no emphasis, colouring or the faintest hint of rubato, there was no tension.

The Rake’s Progress, Royal College of Music; The Turn of the Screw, English National Opera The Royal College of Music’s Britten Theatre is the ideal size for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, indeed the ideal size for almost every opera I can think of until the first third of the 19th century. What must make it appealing for young singers is that they can sing without straining, that every word can be heard, and that their expressions are visible to everyone in the audience — but of course that deprives them of excuses, too. Not that there was much need of excuses for the second cast of the Rake.

Le Nozze di FigaroThe Royal Academy of MusicL’elisir d’amore; Albert Herring Glyndebourne on Tour in Norwich It seems that every opera company that thought it might be a bit naff to stage Le Nozze di Figaro last year has decided that it would be smart to put it on this year, so that I have never seen any opera so often as Figaro during the past ten months — and, if there is any that it’s a good idea to see that often, this is surely the one. The scurry of those opening bars of the overture lifts the spirits as surely as the grandeur of the first bars of the Meistersinger prelude, each of them promising in its own way a period of bliss ahead, each of them a comedy which, however disruptive some of its constituent elements, is finally reassuring.

Reinhard Keiser is not a name that triggers many associations in most opera lovers’ minds, even the most frenzied devotees of the Baroque. He was a big figure in his time, though, and there have been odd recordings of his works, so he ranks with Traetta and Cimarosa from later in the 18th century as someone to arouse curiosity. With each of these composers, as with many others, I have had the experience of turning on the radio and hearing a stretch of their works without knowing what the music was, and finding I had to listen to the end because what I was hearing was impressive enough for me to want to hear more.

‘Transformed into a lavish pleasure-dome in the heart of Birmingham this dazzling event, with a spectacular design from Vick’s regular collaborator, Paul Brown, will make the auditorium shimmer with all the opulence and decadence of celebrity excess. The timeless story of call-girl Violetta is one of passion, money, sex and death. Having clawed her way out of the gutter, can she maintain her place in the celebrity fast lane with her health wrecked by excess and risky sex?’ That is how Birmingham Opera Company advertised its latest venture, La Traviata, in the gigantic National Interior Arena. Central and lavish the NIA may be, but for a stranger trying to walk there after dark it is a nightmare of underground passages, walkways, canal bridges and clubland.

Opera: Das Rheingold; Die Walküre Halfway through the second cycle of the Ring at the Royal Opera, I’m feeling far more positive than I could have expected. When I saw the separate parts of the work I found Keith Warner’s direction cluttered and confusing, Stefanos Lazaridis’s sets ugly and evidently unsafe, Antonio Pappano’s conducting wayward and sacrificing the grand design to fussing with details, and much, even most of the singing barely adequate, sometimes calamitous.

As I sat contentedly watching the latest, and supposedly last, revival of Nicholas Hytner’s production of The Magic Flute last week at the Coliseum, I wondered why, when something is as serviceable and as flexible as that, it need ever be retired and replaced by another — which, to judge from recent experiences, especially ones at ENO, is almost certain to be vastly inferior to what it’s replacing. Only two evenings before I had suffered rage and contempt sitting in the same seat and watching the new Carmen, which will no doubt be dubbed ‘controversial’ by the management, on the basis of one idiotically favourable review.

The opera season at ENO began with a new production of Carmen. It was an occasion so dispiriting that I’ve been toying with the idea that the management had decided on provoking a mass act of critical suicide in order to solve the seemingly endless crisis that the house has been in for several years, with one decent production being forgotten in the welter of catastrophes, either in choice of repertoire or execution or both. Carmen can seem to be a work that is too well known, but only inside a fairly hermetic fraternity, not to the whole theatre-going world, and it is the latter to which ENO is now addressing itself. Opera is the most difficult to produce of all performance arts, the one which is least tolerant of amateurism.

British Youth Opera celebrates its 21st birthday season with its annual two productions at the Peacock Theatre: this year one is reasonably successful and one a triumph. The moderate success is The Magic Flute, in Jeremy Sams’s sharp translation. Flute is a work which students and young singers go for whenever possible (this is the fourth production BYO has mounted), yet it is extremely taxing, in several ways. At least three of the roles are almost impossible for anyone to sing very well, and the reams of spoken dialogue, in whichever language the opera is being performed in, seem to present a challenge few singers can rise to. The differences of tone, incessant and insistent, between the most lofty seriousness and matey comedy, present a test for a producer which is rarely passed.

For its final operatic offering, this year’s Edinburgh Festival presented what it billed as ‘World première of a new production’ of Richard Strauss’s last opera Capriccio. I suppose every new production is a ‘world première’ but they don’t need to say so. Anyway, this turned out to be a dismal affair, part infuriating and part just inadequate, the only redeeming feature being the conducting of Markus Stenz and the playing of the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne. As soon as anyone mentions this inspired product of Strauss’s old age they seem to need to carry on at length about its relation to the time and place in which it was written, Germany in the first two years of the second world war.