More Opera in Depth cross-dressing

Hardly surprising if I love the above image by Bill Knight of the sexy-in-any-wear Régis Mengus in Poulenc's Les Mamelles de Tirésias. Laurent Pelly's Glyndebourne double bill kicks off with the most unusual and powerful staging of La Voix humaine I've seen; little surprise if it was one of my top performances of the year in the 2022 Arts Desk 'Best of Opera'. So was the English Concert semi-staging of Handel's Serse at St Martin-in-the-Fields with five classy women (Emily D'Angelo pictured below by Paul Marc Mitchell, Lucy Crowe, Paula Murrihy, Daniela Mack and Mary Bevan) and vivid playing under Harry Bicket.

So I've chosen these three operas along with Poulenc's masterpiece, Dialogues des Carmélites, for summer's Opera in Depth classes. Not least because I hope Robin Ticciati, steeped in Poulenc at Glyndebourne over two seasons, will join us along with some of the singers and Bicket from the EC Serse. The Glyndebourne Carmélites opens on 10 June.

We certainly did well over the seven Rosenkavalier classes. First came Paula Murrihy, one of the best Octavians in the world today, and conductor Fergus Sheil, giving us quality time after a day's rehearsal ahead of the Irish National Opera spectacular.

Then, in the last class, a Marschallin and Ochs for the ages, Dame Felicity Lott and Sir  John Tomlinson, appeared TOGETHER (quite a dream come true; you'll have to click for the bigger picture but I wanted the two to appear as we all saw them - FLott is top left and JT on the right of the second row). 

Students have agreed that FLott's characterisation is the most moving and gracefully real of all; it's a shame there's not more of John Tom's Ochs to be seen.

And in a last-minute bonus, Richard Jones and his inspiring choreographer/movement director Sarah Fahie, whose Glyndebourne Rosenkavalier was the most meticulous and inventive movement-wise of just about any opera production I've seen, were able to join us once their stupendous ENO Rhinegold was up and running, so we got quite a bit on that from them too. 

What had to be cut out of the chat on Richard's request - that Bertie Carvel will be taking the role of Henry Higgins in his (RJ's) Pygmalion at the Old Vic - can now be revealed as it's official. Shaw's play, fascinatingly, was premiered only two years after Rosenkavalier, in 1913, and (very surprising, this) at the Hofburg Theatre, Vienna, in a German translation. 

Anyway, full details of the new term, which starts on Monday (17 April) below - click to enlarge (do join us, from anywhere in the world - if you can't make the live class I always send a video).

Once more into the flames with Wotan

I did it - sent Brünnhilde to sleep on the rock surrounded by fire after nearly 20 hours of lectures and screenings for the Wagner Society of Scotland at crumbling but magnificent Gartmore House in the Trossachs near Stirling. For that greatest of final scenes - possibly the richest in all opera - it had to be Donald McIntyre (pictured above) and Gwyneth Jones within the surprising glow of Boulez's interpretation  and Patrice Chéreau's lacerating direction. Die Walküre is the most flawless of his four Ring stagings, starting with pure heat between the best-looking Volsung twins you'll ever see on a stage (Peter Hoffmann and Jeanine Altmeyer; Kaufmann and Westbroek, looking too glossy in Lepage's Met production, don't begin to compare, even though they're second best).

Steeped as I was in Bartók quartets, having finished off the last of the notes for the LSO St Luke's series just before I took the train for Scotland, I wondered if I'd get back into the Wagner world mentally and emotionally. It only took a class... And this year's group, with many faces from last year, was a joy, constantly enquiring and giving back a great deal in their comments - starting with stalwart Joy Millar, who after I'd played Goodall's Sadler's Wells recording of Siegfried's Funeral March (to set up all the Volsung themes) told me that she and friends had arranged to take the first trombonist on that recording to Bayreuth this summer, since he'd never been.

I had a prime view over the grounds from my three-windowed room. Each morning was different, and somehow chimed with Wagner's nature-pictures (how much more so will that be the case when we go into the woods with Siegfried next September). Following on from my end-of-August sojourn in Edinburgh, the Borders and Perthshire/Fife, it was HOT again for the first two days. Morning mists set up the magic

and after breakfast, with 10 minutes to go to the first lecture of the day at 9.15am (ouch!), had withdrawn to this:

We were prepared for rain on the Sunday, but that meant red sky in the morning, a very different and equally captivating scene.

And the Trossachs in the wet have their magic too (Monday morning, just before leaving).

Back in town, Hunding's Watch from Götterdämmerung was the last thing I expected in a charity gala to raise funds for St John's Smith Square in peril. I'll say we got our moneysworth in a stocking full of plums, outstandingly so from my New Best Friend Anush Hovhannisyan and true mezzo-contralto Angharad Lyddon (idiomatic in French songs and arias). Sir John Tomlinson had to, shall we say, crank up his vintage bass to Liza Lehman's 'Myself When Young' in the first half, but the beginning of the second was somewhat more idiomatic, and inky-black scary as one would expect from one of the finest Hagens probably ever. Malcolm Martineau intensified the atmosphere: boy, did he need to be versatile that night.

Dame Felicity Lott only had to extend an arm to exude her natural charm duetting with JT in a nicely pitched 'I Remember It Well', and the evening ended officially with the bass previewing his Mikado, which will be a star attraction of ENO's umpteenth Miller revival. Here are the golden oldies with Anush.

The laurels of the new season so far seem to have been going not to ENO, with fell reports of its first two Orpheus productions, but to English Touring Opera. As I'm spending two Mondays of my Opera in Depth class on it, I had to catch the second Hackney Empire performance last night of The Silver Lake, Kurt Weill's third collaboration with George Kaiser - not quite a Brecht, to put it mildly. The 'singspiel', originally four hours text to 85 minutes' music, didn't work, and even in a better production than James Conway's, which made the mistake of going back to Brechtian Verfremdunseffekt with way too many banners and placards, I don't think one would be totally gripped. In that respect, I'm in agreement with Boyd Tonkin, who went to see it with proper consideration, as always, while I was heading back from Estonia, and wrote it up for us on The Arts Desk. Production images by Richard Hubert Smith.

Weill's music, though, is uniformly magnificent, and I guess he sussed that, Nazi ban or not, the score wasn't going to take hold, and repackaged a lot of the style and substance into an unquestionable masterpiece, The Seven Deadly Sins.

Even so, there are quite a few numbers which are very much sui generis, and they were all well delivered by a uniformly strong cast including three very different tenors (David Webb as Severin, Ronald Samm as alter ego Olim, pictured above, and James Kryshaw, a Jimmy Mahoney in the making, surely, doubling Lottery Agent, pictured below, and corrupt Baron).

Amazing results, too, from the small orchestra under a master of this music, James Holmes, with special credit to the first trumpet (Ruth Ross, I think). Thanks at least for the opportunity, ETO.

Monday afternoon Rakefest

It was the best possible conclusion to an Opera in Depth term where I'd taken students through five Monday afternoons on Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress - around an excellent concert staging conducted by Vladimir Jurowski - and four on Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades (Herheim's wacky Royal Opera take in the offing). Two of my guests, Dame Felicity Lott and Nicky Spence, had already been generous visitors to the class, and the trajectory of what became a modest fundraiser all flowed serendipitously from FLott's urging me to see the latest Rake from British Youth Opera, of which she is President. It was a beautifully prepared and staged experience, and our former Anne Trulove certainly wasn't wrong about the latest, young Australian Samantha Clarke, ready to sing this and other roles in any opera house around the world.

Sam crowned our afternoon with a superlative performance of the big aria and cabaletta 'No word from Tom', including a spine-tingling messa di voce on 'it cannot be thou art'. Perfect meaning in every phrase, perfect technique. The singers and conductors I've spoken to who know her all speak so well of her. Tall and beautiful, she really could be the next FLott. Her next role is one of that lady's specialities, Helena in Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, at the Guildhall, where she's still studying.

Nicky Spence kicked off our afternoon with Tom's two surprisingly emotional arias, 'Love, too frequently betrayed' (I.ii) and 'Vary the song' (II.i - click on the programme above to see the details better), followed by the plangent II.ii trio (effectively a Donizettian duet punctuated by Baba's indignant commentary from within her sedan chair). Having flown in from Brussels, where he'd been reprising his role in the extraordinary production of Janacek's From the House of the Dead we'd seen at the Royal Opera, Nicky had to be off after an hour, which is why he's not in the top pic (left to right, his partner, superb pianist Dylan Perez, Susie Self, Sam, FLott and Debbie York. Thanks to David Thompson for that photo, David Zell for the other church shots).

Tom is a tough role, not for the average 'pipsqueak English cathedral tenor' - a phrase I once used for which one of its targets, rightly, will never forgive me - so Nicky's casting in the BYO production of 10 years ago was astute (his first major Wagner role, Parsifal, is scheduled for York Minister this coming Easter, with Mark Elder conducting). The company, as Execuitve Director David Balcombe told us in his speech at the end, had more than 400 auditionees for the principle roles this year, and they never plan an opera they know they can't adequately cast. Glad to have raise a goodish sum to hand over to them from this event.

I wish I'd recorded the chats, because I can't remember all the details. But Susie was certainly amusing about how she dealt with David Freeman's penchant for asking his singers to take off their clothes in auditions. She was a wonderful, hairy-chested Baba in his Opera Factory's 1994 production of Rake, and delivered her patter-and-vengeance aria with aplomb.

Debbie York was plunged in to John Eliot Gardiner's 1997 LSO concert Rake with very little preparation, and the recording followed frighteningly close on its heels. I only revisited the performance recently, and the freshness of her Anne is so touching (wonderful account of the big aria, too). As she, too, had arrived from elsewhere - her home city of Berlin - and at the crack of dawn, she preferred to have the Lullaby played, which gave the infinite benefit of the flutes which accompany it and those heart-rending choral interjections.

We also watched the whole of the Anne-Tom scene with FLott and Leo Goeke in the 1979 Glyndebourne film (praise be to Thames TV for filming so much in those early days of televised opera). FLott had worn a dress appropriate to Hockney's cross-hatching and brought along a photo taken just after the filming featuring her, director John Cox and Hockney. Talking with her was a delight, as it always is - such a generous and supportive person.

And, of course, there was something very touching about the legacy of two Annes and the handing-on to the next, an almost Rosenkavalierish acceptance, as one of the students later wrote. We had a jolly final panel, and after a lot of friendly after-chat, went our separate ways. The chances of getting that group together again are thin indeed, but we did it. Warmest thanks to all for giving so generously of their time, and to the very helpful folk at St James's Sussex Gardens, Father Owen Dobson and Sue Silkstone.

Another ultimately happy chance that led us to St James's was the  Frontline Club powers' decision that they needed the room we use in 'the run-up to Christmas', which suddenly included the whole of November. So I booked St James's for the concert and Pushkin House in Bloomsbury for the other two classes concerned. Now the corporate-hungry new 'look' at the Frontline has determined that, in spite of the fact that I pay them very good money for my weekly two hours, they might be able to make more, so one-third of the way through the 'academic year', I was told to find somewhere else.

Fortunately the staff at Pushkin House were so obliging, the equipment so good, that I've relocated there. I shall miss the bar folk at the Frontline and the pleasure of the venue, but things went downhill administratively after the departure of Ian Tesh, for whom nothing was too much trouble. So, onwards to ten Monday afternoons on Die Walküre in the second year of our Ring journey. If you feel like joining us, click on the above for details.

Rake afternoon reminder

Click on the above for better detail and come along if you can. What would normally be the last class of my Opera in Depth term has turned into a little gala with excerpts from Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress to raise funds for British Youth Opera. I'm confident that Spence, Nicky will match Spence, Toby, who gave a total performance on Saturday night as Vladimir Jurowski's Tom Rakewell. Our Rake people span productions from 1977 (Dame Felicity Lott, who will speak but not sing, at least live) to this year (Samantha Clarke, a stupendous Anne Trulove in British Youth Opera's fine production). It's been a joy dealing with the folk at St James's Sussex Gardens - total pros.

Meanwhile the last two of four classes on Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades will be, very appropriately, at Pushkin House, since the Frontline, 'gone corporate' as founder member Ed Vulliamy puts it, decided that they needed to have the room available to make more dosh - and I pay them quite a sum already - in 'the run-up to Christmas', which they regard as the whole of November. Well, the bonus is that the students also get to see a fine exhibition of Laura Footes's imaginative artwork inspired by Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. I was at Pushkin House last Tuesday for a talk by my New Best Friend from a Bromsgrove Shostakovich Quartets weekend, Elizabeth Wilson, on the extraordinary pianist Maria Yudina. Which has led to a whole investigation of great playing. But more on that anon.

Rake and Spades at the Frontline: do join us

Yes, that's the great Dame Felicity Lott as our Opera in Depth end-of-term lunch guest last term, before she went on to talk with her usual natural charm, wit and insight on Britten (we were covering A Midsummer Night's Dream over five Monday afternoons, using the Peter Hall Glyndebourne DVD in which she plays an appropriately tall Helena. Yesterday she was a very impressed onlooker at the celebrations of the great director's life). There are, incidentally, many more of us than you see in the Frontline club room shot above.

For the coming term, which starts next Monday, I'll be covering Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress and Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, two operas which climax in a crucial game of cards. Pikovaya Dama, to give it the proper Russian name (Pique Dame, incidentally, is nonsensical) will be staged at the Royal Opera in Stefan Herheim's Tchaikovskycentric production; having reviewed the DVD of its Dutch incarnation for the BBC Music Magazine, I can say you're in for a treat, a concept that's actually followed through, so let's forget that dramatically abysmal Pelléas et Mélisande at Glyndebourne.

Vladimir Jurowski will conduct The Rake's Progress at the Royal Festival Hall (no idea yet how semi-staged it's going to be). He made such poignant and light-of-touch work of it at ENO years back, in a quirky production by Annabel Arden with a profoundly moving Bedlam scene. Back to the Garden of Eden below in the recent British Youth Orchestra production I found so effective: Pedro Ometto as Trulove, Samantha Clarke as Anne and Frederick Jones as Tom Rakewell (image by Bill Knight).

Meanwhile, a Rake extravaganza linked to the above has already taken some shape for our last class on 17 November. As the Frontline Club flummoxed me a couple of months ago by telling me that they regard the 'run-up to Christmas' as including the whole of November, when they hope to make more than the substantial amount I pay them for my weekly two hours, I've had to find other homes for the last three Mondays. Which, it now seems, will be St James's Church Sussex Gardens, with its avowedly fine audio-visual set-up - I'm going to check it out on Monday - and its new Steinway Boston Concert Grand.

The idea for the proposed event took shape quickly after I'd been to see the BYO Rake. FLott, as Madame la Patronne of BYO (as she is of the Poulenc Society), had recommended I go, and I'm glad I did. So she has agreed to preside, a lovely connection back to the famous Hockney-designed Glyndebourne Rake in which she sang the role of Anne Trulove, happily preserved on DVD (the Bedlam scene above with Leo Goerke). Samantha Clarke, already a world-class Anne, will, we hope, reprise the aria.

Nicky Spence - who sang Tom Rakewell for BYO a decade ago, pictured above - will join with his pianist partner Dylan Perez, and Susie Self, a hairy-chested Baba the Turk for Opera Factory back in the 1990s, has agreed to come along too.

Students for the term will have this as part of their package, but we hope others will come along too, to help us raise money for BYO. A unique event - put it in your diaries, and leave a message here with your contact details (I won't publish it) if you want to join us either for that or for the entire term.