Richard Bratby

A classical concert programme is like a set menu, and for this palate the most tempting orchestral offering in the UK this January came from the Slaithwaite Philharmonic under its conductor Benjamin Ellin. They opened with a suite from Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo, and the inclusion of Hollywood film music in a ‘straight’ classical programme was interesting in itself. Film music has been around for more than a century now. Many scores are fully as effective in concert as (say) Schubert’s Rosamunde or Beethoven’s Egmont, and yet this almost never happens. Film scores (unless by a big beast of the classical world) are generally hived off into ‘pops’ nights. Snobbery is the most adaptable of vices.

Daniel Barenboim was supposed to perform with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra earlier this month. His recent health concerns made that impossible, but it was a reminder that for the first time since the appointment of the late Libor Pesek in 1987, the RLPO is under the direction of a conductor soaked in the German tradition. Domingo Hindoyan, the orchestra’s chief conductor since autumn 2021, was born in Venezuela and has a soft spot for French music, but Barenboim is his mentor and there’s a gravity – an intellectual centre – to his conducting that made me eager to hear him get to grips with the sacred monsters of German romanticism. It’s something of an RLPO tradition, after all.

‘The rays of the sun conquer the night’ sings Sarastro, at the end of Mozart and Schikaneder’s Die Zauberflöte. It was the Royal Opera’s first performance of January 2023 and there’s something profoundly consoling about seeing this of all operas at the midnight of the year. The lights dim; five chords ring out and that first triplet from the violins falls quietly into place as Mozart engages the gears and together we move off on our long, sweet journey towards light. In David McVicar’s staging, robed figures process down the auditorium bearing glowing orbs, while Tamino, in late 18th-century frock-coat and knee-boots, clambers out from the boxes and vanishes through a portal in the front-cloth. There is a world elsewhere. And then we’re off.

Playing under the baton of Arturo Toscanini must have felt a bit like fighting in the trenches. There are recordings of him rehearsing in the 1930s or ’40s. The orchestra is bowling along; there’s a low muttering, and then suddenly, out of nothing, the explosion. A scream of rage: a huge, operatic, animalistic roar. There’s a barrage of Italian profanities and what sounds like a fist smashing repeatedly on wood. Bernard Shore, who played under Toscanini in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, witnessed him hurling his baton at a cowering viola section. With the NBC Symphony, Toscanini threw his gold pocket watch to the floor and stamped on it.

Temperature records for Los Angeles in the summer of 1945 are patchy, but 90 in the shade seems to have been the norm. It was during one such scorcher, presumably, that the songwriters Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn pulled up at a red light on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Cahn suggested going to the beach. Styne had a better idea: ‘Let’s go write a winter song.’ Driving over to the offices of their publisher Edwin H. Morris, Cahn commandeered a typewriter, glanced out the window and typed the exact opposite of what he saw: ‘The weather outside is frightful.’ The Great American Songbook had acquired another Christmas classic. And ‘Let it Snow!’ is no less classic – and all the more American – for omitting any mention of Christmas.

Only boring people are bored by Ravel’s Boléro. True, the composer – the slyest of wits – left his share of booby traps for the uncomprehending; take his comment, in a letter to Paul Dukas, that ‘I have written only one masterpiece, Boléro. Unfortunately there is no music in it.’ Yet Ravel was a sublime colourist; a master of the instrumental palette who makes Stravinsky’s orchestration sound coarse by comparison, and Boléro is one long twist of a fabulous kaleidoscope. Even its notorious repetitions are a red herring. Take the full score as a whole and you’ll struggle to find two bars that are identical (there are a couple at the start and a couple near the very end, but that’s basically it).

Whoosh! A digital starburst, a sweep of orchestral sound and the stage of the Coliseum is alive with dancing, whirling snowflakes. Floating in the heavens is the soprano Danielle de Niese; below her in the darkness, the truss bridge that we all know – because we’ve all seen It’s a Wonderful Life – is where the turning point of the story will occur, a couple of hours from now. That being the case, the only question is how composer Jake Heggie, librettist Gene Scheer and director Aletta Collins are going to close the circle and get us there. It’s evident from the off that they’re not going to stint either on spectacle or on sentiment. And quite right too: this is a Christmas opera, and there aren’t too many of those about.

A hotel bellboy, the story goes, discovered George Best in a luxury suite surrounded by scantily clad lovelies and empty champagne bottles. ‘George, George’, he sighed. ‘Where did it all go wrong?’. It’s the same deal, essentially, with Ruggiero, hero of Handel’s Alcina. As the curtain rises he’s in the boudoir of Alcina, a smokin’ hot love-witch who lives on a paradise island with her minxy little sister, Morgana, and whose only serious failing – and who are we, really, to judge? – is a fondness for transforming her enemies into animals. This being an epic tale of chivalry, and this being 1735, it’s universally understood that having this much fun simply isn’t on.

The screw may twist and the rack may turn: the Tower of London, in Jo Davies’s new production of The Yeomen of the Guard, is a dark place indeed, and that’s as it should be. ‘Men may bleed and men may burn,’ intones Dame Carruthers, as she delivers a magic lantern show about the history of the Tower, complete with colour slides of famous beheadings. In The Mikado Gilbert uses capital punishment as a particularly spiky punchline, but in The Yeomen of the Guard, sentence of death has been passed before the curtain has even risen. The shadows are lengthening from the off, and even Sullivan’s cheeriest melodies have a dying fall.

Do you remember Osvaldo Golijov? Two decades ago he was classical music’s Next Big Thing: a credible postmodernist with a lush and listenable tonal flair, and an Argentinian with an interestingly complex European heritage in a millennium where everyone agreed – for a while, anyway – that the future was Latin American. Major labels recorded his music as soon as it was premièred; he was popular. Too popular for some – I remember a contemporary music promoter lamenting, with the demeanour of a housemaster who’s just found the head boy smoking behind the bins, that Golijov ‘hadn’t developed as we’d hoped’. Anyhow, Golijov was big, and then something stalled. Commissions failed to materialise, there were rumours of creative block, and the parade moved on.

You wouldn’t like Tamerlano when he’s angry. ‘My heart seethes with rage,’ he sings, in Act III of Handel’s opera – spraying coloratura about the stage like Silly String on a 1980s kids’ TV show. That’s the deal with baroque opera: the emotional register is extreme and you’re either in the moment or you might as well leave the theatre. Literal realism, clearly, is not the point – making it even more necessary for a modern director to sketch in some hint of a social or cultural framework in which we can locate and comprehend these hyper-real characters. The music is too hot and too strong to work as drama in a purely abstract setting. Pare it back too far and you’re left with five maniacs screaming at each other in a black box.

Imagine a folk dance without music. Actually, you don’t have to: poke about on YouTube and you’ll find footage from 1912 (there’s music dubbed on, but it’s a silent film) of Vaughan Williams’s friend George Butterworth in full Morris fig, going through the moves with Cecil Sharp and a pair of pinafore-wearing gals. Note the precision of his movements, that big Kitchener moustache: how seriously Butterworth is taking it, four years before he stopped a bullet on the Somme. And they really were sincere, those folk song pioneers.

Grey. More grey. So very, very grey. That’s the main visual impression left by Robert Carsen’s new production of Verdi’s Aida. Possibly a few older operagoers still think of Aida as a fabulous spectacle: horses, temples, caparisoned elephants and all the gilded splendour of the Pharaohs. But if you cut your opera-going teeth more recently than 1990 – and unless you’re going to one of the more lavish Ellen Kent efforts – you’ll know by now to expect nothing of the sort. Carsen places the drama within the towering walls of a government bunker in some unspecified modern military dictatorship, with the cast (even Aida and Amneris) dressed almost entirely in shades of khaki.

Leos Janacek disliked long operas, and the first act of The Makropulos Affair is a masterclass in how to set up a drama without an ounce of fat. There’s a prelude: driving motor-rhythms, surges of emotion, and somewhere in the distance – far away (or long ago) – the sound of trumpets. The curtain rises and we’re tipped brusquely into a lawyers’ office in the early 20th century. The lawsuit they’re discussing is long-winded and complex: aren’t they always? No matter. By the end of the act, these blustering professional men have been interrupted by the magnetic and imperious diva Emilia Marty, who knows things about the century-old case of Gregor vs Prus that no living person could possibly know. We’re intrigued. End of Act One.

The first night of the new season at Covent Garden was cancelled when the solemn news came through. The second opened with a short, respectful speech from Oliver Mears, the director of opera, and a minute’s silence in which the houselights were lowered and we could gaze at the curtains, from which the huge gold-embroidered EIIR cypher had already been removed. For the first time in King Charles’s reign, we sang the national anthem to unfamiliar new words. There were shouts of ‘God Save the King!’And then the lights dimmed once more and we proceeded with the business of the evening, and the life of the Royal Opera.

One swallow might not make a summer, but it certainly helps rounds the season off. ‘Perhaps, like the swallow, you will migrate towards a bright land, towards love,’ sings the poet Prunier to Magda, the heroine of La Rondine, but love itself is the real bird of passage in Puccini’s gorgeous Viennese operetta-manqué. Magda trades in her old lover for a younger, cuter model and after a summer of happiness leaves him too, without undue regret. That’s basically it. No death leaps from battlements, no ritual disembowelling; none of that stuff that we’re meant to find so regressive and problematic in an opera house, and so visceral and cool in an HBO drama. Just a simple, plausible romance, played out to glowing waltz melodies.

In the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes, a Broadway hoofer is forced to work at a community college, teaching classical music like some kind of square. He picks out a melody on the piano: ‘Whom was this written by?’ ‘By Caesar Frank!’ chorus the students. ‘Pronounce it Fronk,’ he corrects them; and the audience, presumably, laughed in recognition. This was 1936, and César Franck’s Symphony in D minor was a hugely popular concert hall warhorse. Now: not so much. According to the stats in the programme book for this BBC Prom, it was performed 36 times in 50 years at the Proms, before falling off a cliff in 1959. This performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Fabien Gabel was only its seventh Proms outing in as many decades.

The first part of the adventure was getting there. Out of the subway, past the tower blocks and under the motorway flyover. A quick glance at Google Maps and into a patch of litter-blown scrub. Someone bustles up alongside me: ‘Are you looking for the opera?’ I am, yes: and my guess is that the cluster of clipboard-y types in high-vis tabards next to that warehouse probably marks the entrance. We’re waved in: ‘Big Cock’ proclaims a graffiti-covered wall.

One morning in the 20th century, Thérèse wakes up next to her husband and announces that she’s a feminist. Hubby, who’s been in either of two world wars, just wants his bacon for breakfast. Too bad: declaring herself male, Thérèse has already detached her breasts and hurled them spinning into the middle-distance. But they keep hanging around, great pink wobbly orbs floating just above her head. She takes out a gun and blasts them to shreds. Renaming herself Tirésias, and with her husband trussed into a moob-enhancing corset, she sets out to run the world, leaving the men to work out how to make babies alone. Babies (we’ve been told by an evening-suited Prologue) being an urgent national requirement. More fizz, anyone?

Delius and Puccini: how’s that for an operatic odd couple? Delius, that most faded of British masters, now remembered largely as a purveyor of wistful aquarelles. And…well, and Puccini. Early, neglected Puccini, true, but this is Opera Holland Park, where they make it their mission to rescue the waifs and strays of Italian late romanticism, and see how they scrub up. Demonstrable dud by unfashionable Englishman vs youthful ambition from Italian opera’s ultimate marquee name. We all knew, in advance, how that was likely to play out. And we were all wrong. It turns out that both Puccini’s Le Villi (1884) and Delius’s Margot la Rouge (1902) were written for the same long-running competition that gave us Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana.