Michael Tanner

Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor is something I have been longing to see for the whole of my opera-going life. No one, surely, can fail to fall in love with the overture, which used to be the opening item of very many concerts when they began in that kind of way. Such irresistible tunes are bound to come round again later in the work, and I found, when I first got a recording of it, that they all do apart from the most gorgeous, which only recurs in Meistersinger (as Wagner smilingly acknowledged). So I was happy to make the long trek for the first time to Buxton, hoping that the production would be so good that some other operatic companies might be encouraged to stage it. And it was.

Of the Royal Opera’s Verdi productions of recent years, David McVicar’s seems likely to be the most durable. It evokes and sustains an atmosphere which is entirely suited to the particular tinta of the music that pervades this work, a combination of levity and desperation, glamour and sleaziness, ardent love and lechery.

I read an interview last week with David McVicar, director of Glyndebourne’s new production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare, in which he stated that he is ‘very intense’. For the span of this production, he seems to have been seized by a ‘very intense’ fit of the giggles, which has led him to a quite hateful betrayal, of the most comprehensive kind, and with no avenue left unexplored, of this great opera. McVicar, who has shown himself intermittently to be a producer of genius, on this occasion has exercised his talent for gauging exactly what his audience wants, and giving it to them with compound interest.

It’s a good thing that the Royal Opera keeps its revivals of standard Italian repertoire in good shape, considering the many acute disappointments we have had this season from new productions, Italian, German, French. John Copley’s La Bohème was first staged in 1974, but the latest revival, with a fair number of fresh touches added by the associate director Richard Gregson, and with Mark Elder conducting, is welcome, even if not quite ranking with the finest of its previous runs. It has an almost uniformly excellent cast, but some of these performers are mildly miscast; and for all the lucidity and careful climax-building of the conducting, it may suffer from being slightly too refined.

While the Grand Theatre in Leeds is being refurbished, Opera North is doing concert performances of operas, though in the case of Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle the semi-staging amounts to quite as much action as one needs in this work, while the purely visual side of things is best left to the imagination. Unfortunately, Opera North doesn’t quite do that: there’s a large screen hanging above the orchestra on which abstract shapes are projected, not very distracting but unnecessary, and not even lurid.

A collaboration between Jean Cocteau and Philip Glass, even though it necessarily had to be posthumous, sounds like a bad idea, and so it proved to be in an admirable production by the Royal Opera of Orphée at the Linbury Studio. This two-act opera played continuously for 100 minutes, so there was no escape. I think it is the only work of Glass’s that I have sat the whole way through, and I don’t intend to repeat the experience. During Glass’s operatic heyday — I take it that has now passed — I went to a couple of his operas at the Coliseum, but left relatively early on in each of them, convinced that there would be only more of the same. It seemed to me to begin with that Orphée was surprisingly charming, if at the same time irritatingly fey.

Glyndebourne began in what is now the traditional manner: high winds and driving rain. This year there was the further discouragement of being kept out of the theatre until 15 minutes after the performance should have begun, which seemed wantonly unprofessional. Then the overture to Rossini’s La Cenerentola began, and we were in whatever kind of paradise it is — a decidedly equivocal one — that Rossini provides. Vladimir Jurowski conducted with sovereign skill throughout, the rhythms gloriously crisp, the actual sounds of the piece often disconcertingly modern, every witty comment from the orchestra pointed but never overstressed.

It seems a strange way to celebrate the centenary of Michael Tippett’s birth, as many people have remarked, to have multiple productions of his third opera The Knot Garden, while neglecting the more approachable first two, though the Royal Opera will be mounting The Midsummer Marriage next season. Yet for those who have been to each of the productions of The Knot Garden, the first by Scottish Opera, the second by Music Theatre Wales, and now the third, a one-night ‘concert staging’ at the Barbican, all of them excellent in quite different ways, the work is likely to have grown in stature, and I for one would welcome the chance to see it several times more in the near future.

The distinction between operas and oratorios in Handel’s output is to a large degree an academic affair, depending on such contingencies as whether a work could be staged at a certain point in the ecclesiastical calendar. Glyndebourne showed that Theodora, an oratorio, could be staged with spectacular success, thanks to Peter Sellars’s intermittent genius. A couple of years ago, Welsh National Opera mounted Jephtha, Theodora’s immediate successor, to great acclaim, and that production, by Katie Mitchell, has now reached the Coliseum. If it hasn’t been changed much, I am at a loss to understand why it made such a strong impression in Wales, for it seems to be fundamentally and pervasively flawed in both conception and execution.

There has been a lot of tut-tutting about the Royal Opera being ‘bought’ by Lorin Maazel for him to put on his first opera, 1984. I don’t really see why, considering the number of foolish or fairly disgraceful things that it gets up to there anyway. Admittedly, it would be nice for someone visiting London for 25 days to have the chance of seeing another opera there, but that’s just the way it organises its schedule now. And so far as the work itself goes, though it is open to criticism on almost every relevant count, at least it makes for a much less boring evening than Sophie’s Choice did, and in fact than most new operas that I have seen in recent years — not that the Royal Opera specialises in mounting them on its main stage.

How should opera, and particular operas, be made ‘relevant’? And what kind of relevance, anyway, should they try to achieve? The questions are too big to answer in a brief review, but Birmingham Opera Company’s largely magnificent production of Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria heroically attempts to cope with them. Using the highly individual space of Planet Ice, they divide the building down the middle with a floor-to-ceiling wire fence with a few doors in it, and for the 110-minute-long Act I have the audience standing on one side, while the performers appear at various points on either side, and assorted people, including some audience members, have light shone in their faces and are pushed through gates, etc.

While the ENO Ring was in preparation, and we were seeing semi-staged performances of the dramas at the old Coliseum and the Barbican, there were plenty of grounds for hope. With action reduced to almost a minimum, we could concentrate on the real action, which needs, I have increasingly come to feel, very little in the way of setting and movement to make its crucial points. That view is starkly opposed to contemporary dramaturgical dogma, which is that the production of dramatic works, especially those of Wagner (for assorted reasons), should contain within itself a critique of the work, just in case we get carried away by what is ideologically objectionable, or allow ourselves to wallow instead of thinking as well as experiencing.

At the Berlin Staatsoper, the evening after he conducted Parsifal Daniel Barenboim conducted Carmen, a sequence that would have had a strong appeal for Nietzsche, who advertised the Mediterranean virtues of the latter’s music over the ‘tragic grunts’ of the former. Whether Nietzsche would have approved of Barenboim’s way with Carmen is more doubtful. Though it wasn’t slow and turgid à la Bernstein, it was performed, orchestrally, in an exaggerated style. Barenboim must be, too, the most ostentatious operatic conductor since Karajan. Sitting in the stalls, one couldn’t avoid seeing his figure high above the orchestra, gesticulating melodramatically and probably unnecessarily.

For its spring season, English Touring Opera has chosen an ambitious pair of operas, Mozart’s Cos.

Monteverdi’s last and greatest secular masterpiece, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, is an opera we get far too few chances to see. The last time it was performed on stage in London was in the largely brilliant ENO production of 2000, which has never been revived. That does have the consequence, however, that one is always pleasurably shocked by it anew, and though the Zurich Opera’s one-night stand at the Royal Festival Hall was only a partly acted concert performance, the impact was undimmed.

The Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg paid a concentrated visit to the Barbican last week, performing four theatre pieces on three evenings. I failed to see the first, a concert performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s meretricious opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, so my palate was clear for the second evening, a double bill of Stravinsky, two of his supreme masterpieces, both dense, compact, overpowering in the energy and intensity they conveyed.

The new production of Mozart’s penultimate opera La Clemenza di Tito (why is the title not translated?) by ENO generates an atmosphere of resigned, dignified and respectful boredom. That is hardly at all the fault of anyone but Metastasio and Mozart, the latter of whom was pouring almost all his genius into The Magic Flute. As Tovey writes, ‘The score of Clemenza di Tito as a whole gives one a nightmare impression of the Zauberflöte having dried up and gone wrong.’ Actually, most of the score is amazingly remote from its sublime contemporary, sharing with it only harmonic simplicity. Metastasio’s ludicrously incredible characters, especially Tito himself, defy vivification.

This is the time of year when the Royal Opera aims to keep people happy by providing standard fare, usually, it almost goes without saying, about people who are very unhappy indeed. True to form, it is alternating La Traviata and Turandot for almost a month before rising to Mozart. All the more important that these perennials should be kept fresh, and on the whole they are. There are quite a lot of odd things about both productions, especially from the musical standpoint, but no signs of inert reliance on routine. In Traviata the most controversial thing is the conducting of Maurizio Benini, now a Royal Opera favourite, though some people find that strange. He launches the prelude with extreme quietness and pretty slowly, which I found effective.

Somehow I missed A Nitro at the Opera when it was first put on at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Studio in 2003. Last week it was revived for four performances. The title — the most irritating feature of the evening — means nothing to me, but it is a collective one for songs and music-theatrical pieces by nine young black composers, some of them making their first essay into classical music. The evening began with ‘Arias’, six songs by six composers, performed by Mary Plazas and Rodney Clarke, Stephen Higgins at the piano. Plazas is a singing actress of great intensity, and, standing on the empty stage, she was the most dramatic presence of the whole occasion.