Michael Tanner

L’Heure espagnole; Gianni Schicchi; Ariodante The trouble with perfection, on the extremely rare occasions one encounters it, is that it leaves one discontented with anything less. Now that I have seen Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole in Richard Jones’s new production at the Royal Opera, I only want to see these singers under this conductor repeating it. There aren’t many chances to see this opera, and when I have seen it in the past I’ve felt it to be a bit of a long-winded joke, with too-discreet music, demanding a lot from its performers, without big rewards.

Camacho’s Wedding; Poro An opera by Mendelssohn? It sounds unlikely, but not because you can’t imagine him writing one, as you can’t with Bruckner or Brahms. You’d expect someone with Mendelssohn’s particular gifts to be able to write fine operas, but you’d also expect to have heard about them. And now it turns out that he did write at least one most attractive piece, which has acquired a small reputation as being a mistake. It took University College Opera to put us right about that. They staged four performances of Camacho’s Wedding, a full-length Singspiel, that is to say sung numbers separated by spoken dialogue. Mendelssohn created it when he was 14 to 17, and writing the most astonishing music ever composed by someone of that age.

The first revival of Thomas Adès’s The Tempest showed that, impressive as the first series of performances had been, three years ago, they were sketchy compared with what we see and hear at Covent Garden this time round. Certainly it sounded far more exciting this time: the opening deluge of sound was both more overwhelming and more interesting in its details, and led more naturally, after the opening cry from the shipwrecked Court, into the scene between Miranda and Prospero. One of the few changes of cast from the first run is the recasting of Miranda. Excellent as Christine Rice was last time, Kate Royal has a more suitable voice for the role, and looks just as lovely.

Which language should students at a music college perform an opera in for the public? I’d have thought that, though it’s no doubt very good for them to learn to sing in various non-native languages, it’s at least as important that they practise singing as communicatively as possible. Which does not mean that they should stand squarely at the front of the stage and sing to the audience. The three operas I saw this week, two at the Royal Academy and one at the Guildhall School, were sung in their original languages, two in Italian and one in Russian. The standard of pronunciation was high, especially for Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, and there were surtitles, of which I am an ardent supporter.

Handel’s Orlando, apparently one of his greatest operas, is much more impressive in the first revival of Francisco Negrin’s production at the Royal Opera than it was at its first outing in 2003. Though my visual memory is most unreliable, I remember it as revolving dizzyingly, with characters whipping through door after door as the tripartite set sped round. There seemed then, too, to be far too much business going on during the da capo arias, as if Negrin didn’t trust Handel to command the audience’s attention unless they had something adventitious to watch.

Sunday evening at the Barbican was a revelation, no less gushy word will do. Janacek’s comic opera The Excursions of Mr Broucek is the Cinderella in his operatic output, if you don’t count the very early works, whole or fragmentary; even the weird but kind of wonderful Osud is more likely to turn up these days. Broucek didn’t make it into Decca’s much-lauded Janacek series under Mackerras, though it is he who has supervised the new edition which was used at the Barbican. After the intense exhilaration of this performance, it is difficult to remember what the problem was supposed to be. Admittedly, if you stress ‘comic’ you have to admit that Broucek isn’t very funny, but neither are most comic operas.

Exactly 400 years ago, 24 February 1607, the first great opera received its première in Mantua. It’s a crucial date in the history of the arts in Western Europe, and it would have been agreeable to be able to report that Opera North, in its new production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, did it justice. And musically speaking it would not have been hopelessly wide of the mark. But what we saw was as ferocious an act of sabotage as you are likely to see in a tour of the world’s operatic stages, whatever they may be doing, and the competition for impertinent inanity is intense. Paul Steinberg’s set is an uglily lit room, with empty niches on to which some of the performers jump, and with cheap modern utility furniture.

Agrippina is widely agreed among Handelians to be his first major opera. Constituted, to a large extent, of arias from pre-existing works, it does have a strongly distinctive character, and is as precocious a work as any operatic composer has achieved by the age of 24. What makes it still more striking is that it is pitilessly satirical, a portrayal of relationships among the ruling class of ancient Rome showing them to be determined by gross ambition, with long-term ends even further from its characters’ minds than one expects from politicians, and instant sexual gratification vying with vengeance as the leading motive for action.

I had the unusual opportunity of seeing two productions of Il Trovatore in one day last week, the circumstances of them about as contrasting as could be when they were within a couple of miles of one another. Both were richly rewarding, though naturally in quite different ways. The first, at lunchtime, took place in Brady Community Centre in Tower Hamlets, the annual production of the Children’s Music Workshop. It was attended by about 50 Bangladeshi schoolchildren, aged ten or so. They had been primed in the story and to some degree the music, and were encouraged to join in the choral sections.

The Royal Opera’s new Carmen, which opened last month, is back with different singers in all the most important roles.  The balance among the principals has changed and, rather surprisingly, though Carmen is now clearly the central figure, as she wasn’t in the first run, that hasn’t turned out to the benefit of the show overall. The Hungarian Viktoria Vizin is a considerable improvement on her predecessor, with a richer, sexier voice and persona. There is nothing much individual about her interpretation, but that goes with the general tendency of the production, an all-purpose affair with no intention of making us reconsider to the smallest degree our stereotyped views of a work which has, to adapt Adorno’s phrase, become a series of quotations of itself.

Donizetti’s La fille du régiment is one of his three comedies that retain a place in the repertoire. It is mainly celebrated for its hero Tonio’s aria ‘Pour mon âme’, which has a succession of nine top Cs, a great stunt for a tenor who can pull it, or them, off, but without artistic interest. But the opera is usually revived for the benefit of a prima donna who wants to demonstrate her comic prowess, as expressed largely in reams of coloratura. The famous Covent Garden revival of 1966 was a vehicle for Joan Sutherland to demonstrate a side which she found more congenial than the droopings or rages which she normally had to deliver, though for many of us it was the enchanting singing of the young Pavarotti which provided the main pleasure.

Monteverdi’s last opera, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, is an excellent choice for one of the music colleges to put on, containing as it does a fairly large number of characters, none of them with extremely demanding parts, though they all need to be as good actors as they are singers. The RCM’s cast that I saw, the first, but in its second performance, was mainly as impressive as I have come to expect. What was startling, though, was the hideously out-of-tune playing of the orchestra in the introduction, the cornets especially. Fortunately when the action began the playing improved, though there was less certainty in the performance, under the experienced Michael Rosewell, than usual.

Any article about a production of Wagner’s Ring cycle has to begin by saying that it is the supreme challenge a company can face, and how much more so when the company is based in a remote foreign city, and flies in to mount the tetralogy a few hours after it has been performing something else in its home base. Wagner’s great epic is usually performed, even in Bayreuth, with two breaks of a day each between the second and third and the third and fourth parts.

Glyndebourne on Tour is having a vintage year, and that’s not counting its Die Fledermaus, which, favourite work of mine as it is, I couldn’t bear to see again in that production. Così fan tutte, on the other hand, I couldn’t bear not to see, having been at the first night in Glyndebourne last May, and felt there that, in the face of the hottest competition, it was the finest production of this infinitely subtle and probing comedy that I have ever seen. Not only did Glyndebourne on Tour match the home team, all told it surpassed it, and the result was an evening of simply unparalleled satisfaction — whether the hundreds of pre-teen schoolchildren who, incredibly, were taken to this of all works, felt the same I couldn’t say.

Poulenc’s La voix humaine is a brief, powerful piece, and it’s a matter for gratitude that Opera North has staged a new production of it. It’s a matter for ingratitude, though, that it’s been put on by itself: not just because at 45 minutes it makes for a short evening, but because it would have been so satisfying to couple it with Poulenc’s first opera, Les mamelles de Tirésias, which is only slightly longer, and which is even less well known. It’s not as if La voix humaine is so shattering that one wouldn’t have any resources for anything else, though the other thing would clearly have to precede it. In fact one of the things that makes Voix a striking work is that it’s only moderately upsetting.

Tchaikovsky was interested in states of mind, but not in the people who have them, at least in his operas. That was what I came to feel as I thought about why his most fascinating operas are in some respects so absorbing and in others not, why I tend to be moved by them at various points, but not cumulatively, as I am in the operas of the great masters. It was also the result of wondering why the Royal Opera’s revival of Queen of Spades, while superb in nearly every way, still didn’t leave me shaken. The thing that isn’t superb about it is Francesca Zambello’s production, first seen in 2001. For a fair amount of the time it is decent and straightforward, but it is handicapped by the absurd set designs of Peter J.

Michael Tanner looks forward to the Mariinsky Theatre’s Ring cycle in Cardiff A complete production of Wagner’s Ring cycle is always a major cultural event, especially if it is done on four consecutive evenings, so that the great vision of the work takes possession of the spectators’ consciousness as well as of their waking time — though even the slowest performances of it only last for 15 hours, and not the 19 which is being put about as its length by the propaganda of the Wales Millennium Centre. For it is there that the Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg will be performing the Ring, one cycle only, on the last day of November and the first three of December.

It is a tribute to various things, primarily to Janacek’s genius, that the new production of Jenufa by ENO is a triumph, an overwhelming experience, despite having some fundamental weaknesses. It is of the essence of the work that it takes place in a tightly knit, highly structured and small community, and that there is a feeling of claustrophobia about it almost from the start, reaching a peak or pit in Act II, one of the most hideously intense in opera. What does the director David Alden do?

Opera North’s home at the Grand Theatre Leeds now boasts a resplendent auditorium, with lacquered walls and raked stalls, so that I have now finally seen the stage; and above all greatly improved acoustics. More remains to be done, as the news release grimly informs us, stressing that Phase II of the plan ‘will have a heavy emphasis on maximising the public access to and enjoyment and interpretation of the theatre’s heritage environment’, and thereby incidentally reminding us how much of the £21 million already spent has found its way into the pockets of consultants. The new era has been launched with a production of the most ebullient and tuneful of Verdi’s tragedies, Rigoletto, by Charles Edwards.

Each time I see Shostakovich’s once controversial opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk I am impressed by what brilliant performances it seems to incite, fascinated by it dramatically and musically, but left unsatisfied by its unevenness and what I think is finally its incoherence. As far as productions go, it is hard to imagine that any could be more compelling than Richard Jones’s at the Royal Opera, and what is amazing is that it has improved considerably since its triumphant first run in 2004. There are probably very few operas which so suit Jones’s temperament, offering him every opportunity to juxtapose the hideous and the tender, the grotesque and the painful, high spirits and terminal torpor.