Don Giovanni and Falstaff: choices

So you may have listened to the BBC Radio 3 Building a Library on Elgar's Falstaff by now, but if you haven't, it would be unkind of me to blazon the front runner amongst a mostly fine selection to the rooftops. Which is why I've chosen an image of Elgar the conductor, historical choice from 1930, above, after Klemperer and Mackerras, whose recordings of Mozart's Don Giovanni have so far been my lynchpins in the first three of five Opera in Depth classes I'm devoting to the opera.

And of course I'm in seventh heaven, living and breathing Mozart for so much of the week. I must also say that for all its skewered brilliance, Richard Jones's ENO production didn't affect me as deeply as revisiting Deborah Warner's take for Glyndebourne. I've always admired it the most for taking what I'm convinced is Mozart's and Da Ponte's line in the first scene that when a girl says no she means no. Does it have to be a woman director who has the courage to accept this? Besides which, the students agreed that Gilles Cachemaille is a very convincing seducer with an edge.

We all loved the first scene with Zerlina, so softly persuasive with the bizarre on-the-spot suggestion that she marry him; so convincing that Juliane Banse's gorgeous virgin feels like she's in a dream; so clever to have Giovanni dress her rather than undress her, putting on the wedding accoutrements instead of taking anything off.

As for Klemperer, I ordered up his recording thinking I'd want an extreme opposite to Mackerras's perfect and mostly brisk pacing. But I ended up mostly convinced: when I talked it over with Stephen Johnson, who was staying here on Wednesday night before we travelled up to my old workplace the Freud Museum to record for a Radio 3 documentary on  Freud and music, he pointed out the energy of Klemperer's rhythmic articulation, which means that slow rarely feels slow (he used the example of playing OK's Fidelio, and his wife Kate being smitten and surprised that it felt faster than it actually was). Of course there are exceptions rather beyond the pale - his late Mahler Seventh and Cosi, for instance - but this Giovanni brims with energy. And I love the battle of two intelligent basses, Nicolai Ghiaurov and the great, underrated Walter Berry as Leporello, rising to three when the statue of the Commendatore (Franz Crass, also magnificent) comes to dinner.

Here, too, we 'bought' a mezzo Elvira, Christa Ludwig, and Mirella Freni is at her youthful best as Zerlina. Curious that there are two married couples featured - Ludwig and Berry were still together when the recording was made, Ghiaurov was yet to wed Freni (I wonder if the wooing began in the studio here). So, paraphrasing RuPaul, it's a case of 'Klemperer's Don Giovanni - bringing couples together'.

Berry even trumps the superb Alessandro Corbelli, Mackerras's Leporello, in the Catalogue Aria. And the recits are no less brilliant, though of course Mackerras has the greater sense of theatrical pace. We'll be turning to Giulini for the great Quartet and the most ineffable Trio in the middle of the Act One finale. Otherwise, curious how simply wrong early Don Gs were in the conductors' approach to tempi - Andante should never mean Adagio, and Mozart's Andante is brisker than, say, Brahms's (another Johnson apercu).

So, two more weeks and then on to The Nose, with an interpolated visit from Mark Wigglesworth. Seeing Shostakovich's first opera last night reminded me that quite a lot of it doesn't pass muster without the visuals, and Barrie Kosky failed to lift a couple of rather otiose scenes. But there are certainly flashes of genius like the dancing multiple noses (pictured above by Bill Cooper for the Royal Opera). My current earworm, though, is Britten's Billy Budd, which Opera North did so clearly and unforgettably. That was a worthwhile trip to Leeds.

By happy coincidence after we'd finished recording at the Freud Museum yesterday, we walked up to Hampstead and passed the site of Severn House, where Elgar composed Falstaff inter alia. The plaque is getting tatty; how about a proper light blue roundel? Freud has one, after all.

Final teaser with spoiler warning: this is how the Building a Library top choice looked when I first bought it on LP. If you don't want to know whose the performance is, don't read the small print.

Brave new world

Could you think of a better use for Buoso Donati's money than the rosy future of these two incandescent young things - Ekaterina Siurina's Lauretta and Francesco Demuro's Rinuccio as pictured by Bill Cooper for the Royal Opera - in one of my desert island operas, Puccini's Gianni Schicchi? Wouldn't you put them on top of a wedding cake and eat them? And, yes, they sang as spiritedly as they acted.

If we've learnt one new thing about Schicchi in the past few years, it's that the comic payoff is so much richer if it comes after the Seineside hell of Il tabarro and the foolproof pathos of Suor Angelica, a true trittico indeed. And on Monday night Richard Jones, the only visionary director of our times (I've said it before and I'll say it again), pulled off the feat of connecting the three operas in far from obvious ways, using three of our best set designers, no less. Perhaps I was over-subtle in what I detected they had in common, since these things - the bedclothes, the shadows and - in Tabarro and Schicchi - the impersonation of a dead figure wrapped in a sheet/cloak by the same singer (Lucio Gallo) - weren't picked up by others. Read all about it on The Arts Desk.


Some bloke accused me of lacking objectivity in saying that I might have warmed to Ermonela Jaho's pharmaceutical nun if I'd been able to see her face better - and, yes, doesn't she look lovely in the above photo? But I thought it WAS objective to announce where I'd been sat (in the balcony, seemingly demoted by RO press after swanning in the stalls). And what you can or can't see does make a difference. In any case, the problem with Jaho is the tight, vibrato-y voice which just won't open up for the crucial 'Senza mamma'. Here's the greatest performance of it I've ever heard, Callas included: Scotto's on the Maazel recording.



People who said they usually squirm at Suor Angelica - I never have in the opera house, always wept buckets - found they warmed to the Royal Opera take, Jaho included, but that was Pappano, Jones and Puccini all doing their stuff, surely. The kid business as radically rethought here was, I reckon, more rather than less moving than usual.


Love the Mimi-seamstresses at work on the quay in Il tabarro. One, I noticed from the cast list, was Jones regular Michelle Wade of Maison Bertaux fame (how's it doing? Our Bertaux phase seems to have passed - it just got too ludicrously expensive). And the set design put Ultz absolutely on a par with current (well-deserved) darling Miriam Buether's kiddies' hospital and John Macfarlane's floral-wallpapered Florentine apartment. Love, too, those dayglo costumes by Nicky Gillibrand (one constant throughout).


It would take a really bad Schicchi for me not to chuckle indulgently at every jot and tittle; this one, staging-wise, was as taut and perceptive as it gets. As I've written before, we put it on at City Lit 23 years ago; David Edwards, who graduated to bigger things at the Royal Opera and elsewhere, gave it a Sicilian-mafia look with lots of scrumpled pieces of newspaper as decor. I was Marco, a relative who can't really stand out (Robert Poulton at the Garden didn't; though Alan Oke's Gherardo, thanks to nightmare-retro costuming, certainly did) but has as much fun as anyone being on stage nearly the whole time.

The fabulous Vasiliki Fikaris, dear Vassa (where is she now?), was la mia moglie. The diplo-mate, subsequently the best of Escamillos at City Lit before moving up the register to be the greatest Florestan at St John's Smith Square (I kid you not, but then you could say I'm partial), sang Maestro Spinelloccio. Our relationship began in the enchanted air of a summery Edinburgh - my city - when we took it to the fringe with the Rehearsal Orchesta.

So it's 'our opera', and I've loved it irrationally ever since, though I'm still convinced that Puccini's comic timing is extraordinary - if anything even better than Verdi's in Falstaff - and as Pappano proved, the score never stops yielding up more secrets (that bassoon for the bowel movement!). Though Bryn was his usual charismatic self as Schicchi when the Jones production first appeared, il maestro has to be Alessandro Corbelli, who plays the cunning peasant as an extra member of the Marx Brothers (watch for gookies).

Corbelli was good in a messy Met production, but incomparably better for Annabel Arden at Glyndebourne, Jurowski conducting. Watch this segment - sorry about the Japanese subtitles - for Rinuccio (Massimo Giordano) setting up his entrance and Lauretta (Sally Matthews) persuading him to stay and sort it. Jones treated 'O mio babbino caro' rather seriously: maybe Lauretta really will throw herself in the Arno if she can't marry her Rino, clearly Gallo's Schicchi cares for her more than life itself. In the Glyndebourne Schicchi, she's the sweetest of manipulators. Battleaxe cousin Zita is, of course, Felicity Palmer, playing her rather elegant, though Elena Zilio at Covent Garden is my favourite (her solo 'lllllladrrrrrrro' to Schicchi once the lawyer's gone brings the house down). Enjoy - and don't forget to listen to the Radio 3 broadcast of the Royal Opera production on Saturday.