ENO at the Oliviers: winners not present

Congratulations to the English National Opera Chorus and Orchestra for winning the Outstanding Achievement in Opera at the Olivier Awards. I'm sure stupendous Tamara Wilson, Leonora in the company's Force of Destiny, and the evergreen Felicity Palmer, the Countess in last season's Queen of Spades, also nominated, will have been cheering them on.

Yet it's baffling that no-one from either chorus or orchestra was present to claim the award, not having been invited. At the very least the spirited co-leader, Janice Graham, should have been there. Isn't this a very symbol of the gulf between the CEO and Board on the one hand and the 'creatives' who have always delivered through thick and thin on the other?

I understand Martin Fitzpatrick of the Music Staff made a perfectly fine speech about treasuring what they have, presumably ironic when you bear in mind that the majority of the administration who attended have been doing their best to dismantle what makes this company great. It's still not too late to make the right kind of changes. Mark Wigglesworth remains to show the ENO in all its glory in the Jenůfa this season and two more productions in the next. As I predicted last month, the artists will all put up a fight to keep him.

Proud of my colleagues on The Arts Desk, chiefly theatre critic Marianka Swain, for tweeting so trenchantly throughout the event and declaring TAD's allegiance to the ENO cause. And there really is only one (cause): to survive and change, but not at the cost of becoming a part-time company.

STOP PRESS (4/4): Our Tamara - as I think I can say after two hours in her grounded, funny company when she visited the opera class at the Frontline Club - has just won the prestigious Richard Tucker Prize for 2016, following in rather distinguished footsteps (Renée Fleming, Lawrence Brownlee, Stephanie Blythe, David Daniels, Angela Meade, Joyce DiDonato, Michael Fabiano and Jamie Barton). ENO casting has been criticised for over-use of American singers, and it does need to get back to promoting a UK ensemble, but I've NEVER heard Verdi singing like hers at the Coli (and Marjorie Owens's Norma was a good call, too). She'll be back here in July, but doing what I can't as yet say*. Photo above by Aaron Gang.

*Update (1/5) - I can now: the soprano part in Tippett's A Child of Our Time and testing out a bit of Brünnhilde in the final scene of Die Walküre Act 3 with James Cresswell as Wotan: my doing, says Mark Wigglesworth, who's conducting the Prom in question.

Why we need The Arts Desk

OK, so picturing arts coverage in print as a sinking ship, and even metaphoring our thriving online Arts Desk as Gericault's struggling Raft of the Medusa, is a bit hyperbolic. But it struck me just how much the set-up to which I've become so devoted has thrown out a lifeline in the sea of sinking arts pages.

The only time I buy papers is for a train trip (sometimes). Otherwise I might just look up the odd colleague's review online and go to the BBC for news. Should have known better than to pick up an Observer for the Sunday journey to King's Lynn. In the colour supplement there was a fatuous piece about the Top 20 cultural 'don't misses' of 2011. Was there a single concert or opera in the whole batch? Of course not. As for the paper's Arts Review, well, I know it's a fallow time for 'classical music' and the regulars were on holiday. But apart from Peter Conrad's piece about the mess that was Anna Nicole - which seemed to be entirely about her Traviata-without-the-redemption life, and not at all about what Turnage and Jones might make of the story at the Royal Opera - nothing.

Not even a bit about Radio 3's twelve-day Mozartfest, which I thought could do with a bit of a Buzz on The Arts Desk today. And, very well, we've not exactly been teeming with concert or opera reviews either. But I did try to fill the breach with an as it turned out ill-advised 1/11/11 trip to the Gabrielis' Wassail at the Globe (not entirely wasted: the initially stumbling thrown-together pottage did pick up in the short second half, when Paul McCreesh engagingly filled us in on the village bands of Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree).


TAD also had its pick of the classical/opera year on the 31st. From tomorrow, the concert scene begins to stir again. But the papers really are floundering, though nowhere near as badly as in the States. Still, the Times does the best coverage and the Telegraph, by all accounts, has an arts editor who's as painstaking with his contributors as our Ismene Brown and Jasper Rees. But when will the more out-of-touch pundits realise that 'classical music and opera' shouldn't be marginalised some way down the line from 'music', and why is it so hard to find them? No, I think we're doing the right thing by featuring each event as and when it appears. Sermon over.

The show's not over...

etc. And even then, I've still one more Prom to go tonight. Would have been quite happy, though, to take my leave with the quite unexpected fireworks of Monday's late-nighter featuring the ravishing-toned Philippe Jaroussky and irrepressible true contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux (pictured above for the Proms by Chris Christodoulou, who also took the below shots and whose copyright they all are. We hope he'll be featuring in an Arts Desk Proms photo retrospective on Saturday).

You can read what I thought about it here. And it seems like an appropriate place to thank the Arts Desk for pushing me in unpredictable directions, since a baroque late-nighter of Vivaldi, Telemann, Handel and Porpora isn't something I'd have chosen to go to myself. Especially after a Prom I truly did want to hear, the RSNO concert of Berlioz, Beethoven, MacMillan and Respighi, because I knew what to expect from the wonderful Stephan Deneve. I stayed on to hear fiery Corsican Jean-Christophe Spinosi and his Ensemble Matheus only because colleague Alexandra had to call off due to the tube strike. And like most, though not all, of the audience, I found Spinosi's febrile intensity irresistible, especially in the final stamping, hollering tziganery of the Corelli Concerto for recorder and flute. Here he is sparring - as I gather he does to the point of fisticuffs - with his players


and with his delightful soloists after an anything-you-can-do adaptation of a Vivaldi aria for rival divo/a/s. One BBC Messageboard contributor even thought that Jaroussky and Lemieux were giving us a Kenneth and Hattie after all that refinement and passion.


Anyway, the Proms are nearly over for the year but the Arts Desk has barely begun. That I hope nourishing source of thought and feeling, which has given me free rein to dip into theatre, ballet, cinema and TV as well as my familiar stamping grounds, celebrates its first birthday today. I'm a little younger than that in TAD terms, but I feel old in contributions. Here's to hoping it continues to take off and finally earn us a crust or two as well as the sheer, sometimes indulgent pleasure of culture-vulturing at length.


Oh - and happy Rosh Hashanah, too!