War, peace and love

This last post of the year looks forward to 10 hours of War and Peace on Radio 4 tomorrow, but mainly back to the last great treat of 2014. Love is the only way to describe what so many of us feel about Tolstoy's complicated creatures, and how we respond, too, to Prokofiev's gift for homing in on scenes and lines to bring them fully to life in operatic terms. Tough love is how I might define Graham Vick's second interpretation of the opera 23 years on from the groundbreaking 1991 Mariinsky production; as he told us when he came to talk to my Opera in Depth students at the Frontline Club, he'd been romantic and relatively young when he first tacked the epic then, and now he saw both Natasha's near-breaking on the corrupt society wheel as well as Andrey's endless sufferings in a much harsher light. Production shots here of the 2014 Mariinsky War and Peace, starting with Aida Garifullina's Natasha and Andrei Bondarenko's Andrei falling in love at the ball, by Natasha Razina and Valentin Baranovsky.

We got to see this endlessly resourceful and perfectly realised take on Tolstoy and Prokofiev as an extra to my ten classes, making extra space from 12.30 to 4.30pm on a mid-December Monday. It was the final highlight of a year which I and my Arts Desk colleagues have chronicled, live-wise, in as much detail as we could: concerts round-up here, opera top 11 here.

All bar one of the students were knocked for six by Vick's special putting-it-together, even without subtitles (those will, of course, appear, when the DVDs are released some time next year, as they must be). It was going to take a superlative portrayal of Natasha to budge my allegiance to one of the greatest singing actresses of the last three decades, Yelena Prokina, but the less tutored and polished Aida Garifullina's performance is just that, in a slightly different way. Graham had spoken of her being, well, just a natural: even if she doesn't always know what to do with her body and hands, the face speaks every emotion - and her beauty even surpasses Netrebko's back in 2000; we had better beware that an oligarch doesn't lock her up in an ivory tower. Which would be a loss as the voice, too, is a beauty, warm and vibrant, as telling as Prokina's of what she's singing about.

The first part, which Prokofiev was at one point urged to call Natasha Rostova, charts her enchanted falling in love with Andrey followed by the unnatural pressures under which she's put in their year-long separation. Vick gives us the moonshine as wonderfully as Konchalovsky did in 2000, all the more heart-flipping since we first see Andrei Bondarenko's Prince contemplating suicide before the voice in the night air turns his thoughts to spring again. 'One must believe with all one's soul in the possibility of happiness' runs the Tolstoyan line on the blackboard.

In the next scene he's lost years, smiling, rapt in love as who wouldn't be with this Natasha at the ball?

Then the fall. Graham was right: in a contemporary setting, it's all the more disturbing. In today's society, the feckless set led by Helene and Anatol would be off of their faces on cocaine, as we see the lady of the beautiful shoulders in the washroom of Scene Four and the lads in the planned abduction scene.

For Vick, it's all about consumerism, the mores of the I Want It Now generation; fur coats suggested by gypsy Matryosha's sacrifice of hers dangle spookily from the heights, to be predictably replaced by hanging corpses once war begins, a billboard offsets the tank that's mostly present, while Anatol's limo provides a useful prop for Pierre to bang his head against and slam the door into him. It's good to see the rake as a feckless young man: Ilya Selivanov is a superb actor and has a golden tenor voice of the kind the Russians produce in droves.

'War' is harder to pull together, especially if you insist, as Gergiev still does, on the complete score (for me, Tim Albery's ENO production provided the best solution to judicious cuts, shedding most of the later Soviet ballast). Vick's fluent parade wings us brilliantly from suggestions of the Ukrainian conflict - it remains a miracle how in today's Russia he got away with a socialist realist poster of happy peasants in yellow, white and blue, later bespattered  -

- to the canonization of Kutuzov (veteran Gennady Bezzubenkov), unpacked from a museum crate

and holding the council of war at Fili with other Russian commanders in 1812 costume ( '450,000 dead' is chalked up on the blackboard). Compare Vick's tableau with a late 19th century painting.

Natasha's scene with the dying Andrey is fascinating to compare with the 1991 version, which was a proper deathbed scene. One of my students didn't get the Carousel idea of Andrey as spirit trying to communicate with a bewildered Natasha in worker's gear; I thought it was shatteringly moving and gravely beautiful, since both protagonsts are remarkable singer-actors ('I will no longer exist' is the Tolstoy phrase he's chalked up here).

The open door to death is all the more striking now that (2/1) I've heard the radio dramatization, which reminds us that Andrei talks of it in his last days, and how a spiritually exhausted Natasha longs to go through it later in the novel. Here she remains onstage through the final fallout, a further demand successfully carried by Garifullina the actress, to end up sitting opposite Pierre at a bare table in the final moments.

No superlatives are too much for what's been achieved here, least of all in 2014 St Petersburg. In short, Vick's panorama eludes being tied to any one war, any particular era, just as in his Birmingham Khovanskygate (it even has elements of the audience integration so crucial to that once-in-a-lifetime experience). Some see this as faulty vagueness, but it's a lot harder to bring off than one dogged centripetal idea.

I didn't watch the livescreening in the summer simply because I was sure it had to become some sort of nationalistic pageant. But that was to reckon without the trust placed in Vick by Gergiev, who goes a small way towards redeeming his rant against the Ukraine and his unapologetic, unthinking equation of homosexuals with paedophiles (for which, come the end of 2014, he's clearly never going to apologise). Clearly a divided soul who's signed a Faustian pact, but when he conducts well, as he does here, there's still a touch of genius.

At the same time as the first term's classes came to a close, I got to the end of reading my first book of military history, Dominic Lieven's Russia Against Napoleon. The reality probably lies somewhere between Tolstoy's view of history as chaotic flux and Lieven's chessboard, but the facts as Lieven arranges them are an interesting counterbalance.

The biggest importance of the history is that it restores an overview based on research in Russian as well as French archives, one in which the French retreat from Moscow in 1812 is only the first stage in a strategy to push them back as far, as it turned out, to Paris in the campaigns of 1813-14. And the movers behind all this are seen to be Alexander I, whom Tolstoy gave scant credit for planning ahead, and Barclay de Tolly (striking how many non-Russian names figure in the high command of the Russian army - how confusing when they have French names like De Langeron).

Even so, old Kutuzov remains a hero of sorts for his very restraint: a seasoned fighter knew better than to waste soldiers in unnecessary battles and skirmishes. His response was partly pragmatic - without an army, there would be no Russian nation - but it also stands in opposition to the younger hotheads who thought they'd be hailed as heroes for sacrificing whole divisions in impulsive onslaughts. But how like a nursery-room battlefield with toy soldiers Lieven makes so much of it sound: thousands are lost in this or that fight, and if that also means wounded and deserters, it's still shocking in its casualness and frequency.

Ultimately, the real truth lies with the human perspectives of Pierre or Nikolai Rostov on the battlefield: what on earth is all this for? By the way, in looking for images I was surprised to find so many 're-enactments' by Vereshchagin, one of the great war artists, probably most famous for his pyramid of skulls.

This is such a good cue for the Napoleon-at-Borodino scenes in the novel and opera, where by the way the sole survivor of the 1991 cast, Vasily Gerello, was still in splendid voice in 2014 and even more magnetic.

I'll be curious  to hear what remains tomorrow in Timberlake Wertenbaker's 10-hour adaptation on BBC Radio 4*. I slightly baulk at 'dramatisation, since I don't see how you can dispense with Tolstoy's authorial voice. They did that the last time, and I gave up sharpish. I may do so again in the morning, but I've cleared a space and taken a long walk this afternoon in anticipation of being glued to the 'wireless' all New Year's Day. The cast is extraordinary and I'm delighted to note a happy reconciliation. Harriet Walter recommended Joel MacCormack fresh out of RADA for my German Romantic Opera Discovery Day in Birmingham, and wonderful he was too:  they're re-united as Drubetskoy mother and son.

That was a highlight of my year, my first ever 'curatorship', and another was Harriet saying yes to recording chapters of War and Peace for my class, not to mention doing so with such spellbinding sensitivity. On which note I can't resist reproducing the alternative shot (with rather than without flash) of a serendipitous meeting just after one such session: another heroine of mine, Birgitte Hjørt Sorensen 'as seen in' Borgen, had dropped in to see Henry IV and they were as happy to meet each other as I was to snap them both.

Happy 2015/ s novim godom/bonne année a tous

*Review now up on The Arts  Desk here .

Extraordinary women

That's three on a stage in the spooky-spectacular Union Chapel the other week, and about three times that many, all in prison. But let's start with the divas. Courtesy of the Royal Society of Literature and the unfortunately-titled but really rather good magazine Intelligent Life, we were promised The Lives of Others from great dames Harriet Walter and Hilary Mantel, moderated by a less visible genius of the theatre, playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker, productions of whose classic Our Country's Good and of her translation of Gabriela Preissova's Jenufa remain among my theatrical highlights. All shots of the evening courtesy of Mike Massarow via the RSL.

It was perhaps only because I've seen Harriet in action before, rivetingly at the Garrick and - if I'm the right person to judge - achieving miracles of transformation as 'my' Marschallin, Prima Donna, Brünnhilde and Moses in the German Opera Discovery Day up in Birmingham, that the lion's share of my wonder this time goes to Hilary Mantel. In putting the spotlight on her I know I sidestep the theme of inhabiting male characters from the fictional or real past, about which Harriet was so eloquent. But our greatest and most versatile living novelist is also a consummate performer; I hesitate to use the word 'actor' because a lot of what she said seemed spontaneous, a direct response to questions or comments, whereas with Robert Macfarlane in conversation at the East Neuk Festival I found that a lot of his phrases came straight out of his books.

In any case I'm usually sniffy about attending literary events - I have the feeling, possibly unfair, that the writer's life's his/her work, to paraphrase Henry James. But here there was almost a sense of possession, as Mantel made clear in paralleling her work with that of her medium in Beyond Black (the first of her books I read). She began by saying how as she was about to begin Wolf Hall and wasn't sure how to, she heard a voice directly above her saying 'now get up', found herself 'in Thomas Cromwell's body - and then all the decisions about the novel had been made'. And she ended in response to an audience question about how much was imagination and how much 'what you know' in much the same seer's vein:

You may know more than you think, and there's a turning point where you recognise that, you gain authority...People suppose that imagination is an airy quality and that employing it is a genteel act that might be done on a chaise longue. But to imagine properly, you have to imagine strenuously, it involves your whole body, from feet to head.

That was richly embodied in what she said about the novel I found the most shattering of all, A Change of Climate, her Heart of Darkness which transports us back from Norfolk to Africa, in the writing of which she told us how the 'secret' had to be torn out of her.

My gratitude here to good friend and impressive novelist Anthony Gardner, who pointed me in the direction of his write-up in Intelligent Life as I hadn't written down the quotations I found most interesting. It came as no surprise to find he'd selected most of them. Read his article for more from Harriet.

Much later - I'm indebted to the charming folk at the RSL for notifying me when the interview went up on YouTube. It seems unembeddable, so click here for the whole thing.

And then we had to spoil it all by going off to a truly dismal late night Prom with Rufus Wainwright.

There's a parallel here between being so utterly swept off our feet by two whole series of the Netflix prison drama from Jenji Kohan Orange is the New Black that dipping diligently into several supposedly 'arthouse' gay-themed movies has been disappointing. If I could have done, I'd have walked out of Rufus - I couldn't because I had to write about it - and we've given up on the three films since the last Orange episode.

You think, perhaps, it's going to be a campy American equivalent of Prisoner of Cell Block H, but being based on a writer's prison memoir, a mostly less grim version of Dostoyevsky's autobiographical From the House of the Dead, it already has a claim to truthfulness. But then there's the extraordinary script, plotting and acting (every character a winner in one way or another). Our guide, Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), is slammed up for just over a year for having carried drug money 10 years earlier at the request of her charismatic lover Alex (low-voiced Laura Prepon, a woman I can well imagine falling for). So this is the chronicle of Piper's 'time'.

Well, if prison is as full of characters like this, give me a sentence ('you wouldn't last a week', says J scornfully, telling me unrepeatable things about why not). While it teaches you a lot about the American prison system - not least that a cancer sufferer will probably die in prison (Barbara  Rosenblat turns in a terrific performance as 'Miss Rosa')

and an old lady with Alzheimer's will be dumped out on the streets if she becomes too much bother inside - the biggest message is about the waste of talent and creativity. We all love the wit and wisdom of Sophia (Laverne Cox, a transgender actress playing a transgender prisoner). The black group hanging out together - presumably this isn't racism but just how it is - includes characters with a fabulous sense of fantasy and language (gongs, please, for Uzo Aduba, Danielle Brooks and Samira Wiley). So we (I, at least) get really upset when they nearly all come under the sway of one hard-nosed businesswoman, the evil Vee (superb actress Lorraine Toussaint).

I won't provide any spoilers by describing what Vee gets up to, but suffice it to say POSSIBLE SEMI-SPOILER ALERT  that by the penultimate episode of Series Two I was wanting to leave the show alone because it was so upsetting. But whereas Series One ended on a bout of terrifying violence, this one wound up in more of a feelgood way.

Praising the good actors would just turn in to one long list: they include the men, not least the prison counsellor (Michael J Harney) of warped good intentions and the large guard who had us in tears of laughter rapping about his humiliation in a Catholic school to a group of nuns protesting outside the prison. The one I find most consummate of all is Taryn Manning as the appalling hick Pennsatucky; how the hell does that actress keep the gravel in her voice?

She, as much as anyone else, you're allowed to feel for over the course of time. So no-one is there for cheap laughs, at least  not in the long term during which we get flashbacks to their former lives. Absolutely a case of Dostoyevsky's epigraph 'In every human, a spark of God'.

Visceral theatre, bloodless opera

An extremely long culture-vulturey post here, with so much to catch up on: three plays, two musicals, two operas (and passing reiterated paeans of praise for an opera-oratorio and an early Wagner rarity). Still reeling from the welter of emotions stirred up by South African playwright Yael Farber's Strindberg adaptation Mies Julie at the Riverside Studios, I was happy to recollect her stunning production in relative tranquillity by reading the text, published by the admirable Oberon Books (cover illustrated above).

The stage directions of the play, set on a farm out on the bleak, storm-plagued plains of the Karoo, confirm the elusive tenderness that punctuates the recriminations and the violence of a couple who would be right for each other in different circumstances. The human is always to the fore in Bongile Mantsai's angry boot-polisher John and Hilde Cronje as a bewilderingly multi-faceted Julie (if this performance doesn't win her a couple of Best Actress awards, there's no justice; but then there wasn't for Tracie Bennett's Judy Garland in End of the Rainbow). Yet Farber's subtitle - Restitutions of body & soil since the Bantu Land Act No. 27 of 1913 & the Immorality Act No. 5 of 1927 - suggests that socio-political concerns dominate.

They don't, but the play makes it clear that they totally blight these fractured lives. 'What are we staying for?,' asks Julie. 'A pair of boots to polish and an ancestor beneath the floor?...Graves and soil?' Ultimately, familial Xhosa ties precipitate the tragedy. By making Christine not the servant John may or may not marry but his mother, Farber tilts the scales in his favour; he's a much more sympathetic character than Strindberg's arrogant monster Jean. But miraculously we feel even more desperately for Julie (Cronje pictured above with Mantsai by William Burdett-Coutts).

Enough; the rest is in the Arts Desk review. Another high drama of individual stature I knew I had to see at the new, purpose built St. James Theatre in Victoria was Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good (hurry - you only have four days left to catch it). Premiered at the Royal Court in a production by the same director, Max Stafford-Clark in 1988 - J saw it then, I didn't - it originally alternated in rep with  Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, the play which Wertenbaker's Second Lieutenant Ralph Clark gets selected prisoners from his shipful of convicts to act in when they arrive in Australia.

The debates about the transformative possibility of theatre and art in a hostile landscape, and among an initially hostile underclass who've had no exposure to this sort of thing, offers even more insights today, as the programme article about drama in prisons unpretentiously underlines. Stafford-Clark has assembled a magnificent line-up of Dickensian (or, more in keeping with the period, Hogarthian) faces. The production starts with a hint of student theatre in group speaking, but while among the performers the men are mostly more consistently good than the women, all tap into the emotions.

Dominic Thorburn's Ralph is a handsome presence and a good lines-man; Kathryn O'Reilly charts the huge change in violent Liz Morden movingly; there's comedy from Matthew Needham's stagestruck wide-boy Sideways (pictured above with Thorburn by Robert Workman; further up, Thorburn and Laura Dos Santos; below, Dos Santos playreading with Helen Bradbury and O'Reilly); and Ciaran Owens zips convincingly between soft-spoken Irish hangman and bullying major. The adaptable designs by Tim Shortall, originally for the Octagon Theatre Bolton where this Out of Joint production opened, fit the fine new St James's theatre space like an appropriately holey glove.

More creativity in hostile confines appears in Romanian-based Hungarian poet and playwright András Visky's I Killed My Mother, which on the invitation of J's colleague, the play's director Natalia Gleason (nee Nagy), we went to see in the Rosemary Branch pub theatre on - you've guessed it - Mother's Day. I have to point out what a different world we entered - not least at the end of the play, when fellow audience members showed Eastern European politeness by ushering me politely out of my row instead of shoving towards the exit. At the Royal Opera or the Royal Opera House British middle- and upper-class feral behaviour would stampede you flat if you didn't put up a fight.

Orsolya Csiki's Bernadette is a girl left to the mercy of a state orphanage after abandonment by a Roma mother. She forges a friendship with a boy who calls himself Clip, after the steel clips placed on their tongues for 'bad' behaviour. They share 'Clippish' as a secret language and his influence never wanes through Bernadette's later vicissitudes, including a sexual relationship with a woman who turns out to be her sister.

Based on Visky's real-life encounters with the model for Bernadette, the play has a poetic fluidity and the production captures a vivid sense of place (especially the horrifying scene, based on another true incident, in which a busload of would-be Romanian escapees is gunned down by police at the border). It's tough for Hungarian actors to speak in English, and the endings of Csiki's lines were sometimes lost. But she had intensity in spades, and so did the superb Antal Nagy as Clip (pictured with Csiki above), a charismatic actor. Here are director Natalia and author András downstairs after the play.

Hardly visceral in the same way, Dear World still moved me to tears on a second visit - as clearly it did its star, Betty Buckley (pictured below by Eric Richmond), at the curtain calls. I wanted J to see it, and he was delighted, above all with the consummate music-theatre of the three 'madwomen' and their triple-counterpoint scene. This, like so much else, derives closely from the source, Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot; indeed, having now got hold of the play text, I'd say that at least 75 per cent of the lines go into the latest version of the musical. All the more pity that it didn't plunge straight into the skullduggery of the capitalist fat cats and their prospector planning to blow up a cafe to get at oil beneath the streets of Paris. I love the whimsy of both Giraudoux and Jerry Herman; this is a fantasy with its heart very much in the right place, all the more remarkable for both 1943 and 1969.

Sadly, if you want to catch the show, you can't; it finished a week and a half before the official end of the run. Rumour suggests that the American backer who was going to take it to New York pulled the plugs, and director Gillian Lynne ended up having to finance at least a week of performances herself. An undeserving fate for this excellent show, as for the equally wrongly maligned Lend Me a Tenor last year.

Priscilla, Queen of the Desert the musical, on the other hand, could run and run. I love the film, of course, had forgotten about its stronger meat and so took my mother on her 82nd birthday last Friday to see it on tour at the New Wimbledon Theatre. The circumstances were not promising: over lunch, ma told me that the cab driver she'd booked to drive us from Banstead to Wimbledon and back had said 'you'll recognise me when you see me: I'm your local UKIP councillor'.

An odd introduction: does anyone recognise ANY local councillors anywhere, unless they've fought a special cause? I certainly don't. He'd then gone on to harrass her about voting, and tried to pick up on this the minute we got in the car. 'I don't want to discuss politics' said my mother firmly, which didn't stop him sounding off about global warming as a conspiracy of 'those leftie scumbags', large-scale housebuilding on country land as a cure for unemployment and 'disgusting' minarets (as mum opened her mouth about the Morden mosque, I waited for the predictable blow to fall). We sat silently through all this as there was no point arguing with a maniac and it was supposed to be a fun birthday. Still, it was quite good for ma to see the vicious skull beneath the skin of 'friendly' UKIP - not that she'd vote for them, or I hope not anyway, though she doesn't even seem to know why she votes Tory.

All was at last well inside the theatre. The audience? The large majority middle-aged to elderly women (in contrast with the middle-aged to elderly men for the Wagner opera on Sunday, among which group I suppose I must be counted, though I'm not your Wagnerian 'strange single'). The musical? Disco songs subject to coarse amplification that made the dialogue incomprehensible (though some of the attempts at Aussie accents may not have helped). The drag frocks? Sublime, outclassing even the film in that respect. Performances? Not bad, led by Jason Donovan who turned out to be a good crooner and quite a touching actor. I loved the understatement of Richard Grieve's transsexual Bernadette, though Terence Stamp in the film is not to be equalled. Cue a still of the three 'cocks in frocks on a rock' scene (Stamp centre) which is its emotional climax.

Blushed a little for the parental in the scene where an angry Aussie outbacker threatening rape orders Grieve's elegant dame to 'fuck me!'. She sashays over, kicks him in the balls and says 'Now you're fucked'. Mum said she could never quite get used to the f-word, but that it was all good fun. Which indeed it was.

That was the light start to a heavy four days' theatre and opera going. We caught the last, Saturday matinee performance of Charpentier's Medea at English National Opera. It was clearly sold as a star vehicle for mezzo Sarah Connolly, a token of esteem from the director who adores her, David McVicar ('what's up with the mother complex?' said a colleague who shall remain nameless at the interval, adding even more waspishly that McVicar is 'the John Copley de nos jours'. Not a compliment). She was, of course, truly magnificent, pulling out vocal resources I hadn't thought even her capable of in the hellish invocation of Act Three (preceded by a rarity in any of the court operas for Louis XIV, a huge set-piece lament).

Even so, there wasn't as much original stuff here as I found, to my surprise, in the concert performance of Lully's Phaëton the other week. Within unerringly handsome sets by Bunny Christie, beautifully lit by Paule Constable, three of the four divertissements to mostly formulaic music were well enough done, though the breathy witch-nurses were alarmingly close to the zombie nuns of the Royal Opera Robert le Diable, while the second and campest ballet made one long for Glenn Miller and a swing band, not these courtly platitudes. Roderick Williams acted and sang his socks off as a decent, deceived warrior, and true bass Brindley Sherratt is always dependable, but none of the others came close to la Connolly (all production images by Clive Barda for ENO).

I got very irritated with the last act: absolutely no pity and terror here from Charpentier's score. Medea's love rival, Creusa (as a Grace Kelly clone reduplicated in creepy daddy Creon's Act Three deception) was seared to death by her poisoned ball gown with not an inch of 'ouch' in the music. Here are the oddly-cast, rather strenuous American tenor Jeffrey Francis as Jason and Katherine Manley, who came to life as the evening wore on, as Creusa.

Fine: this all left me clear-headed for what I suspected would be a real harrowing from John Adams in his new opera-oratorio The Gospel According to the Other Mary at the Barbican in the evening. And it was, despite the Born Again hysteria of Lazarus's raising (I'm a bit disconcerted to read that Peter Sellars, restrained in his production here, is a fervent Christian). But the Passion plumbed the depths and the meeting of Christ and Mary Magdalene in the garden at the end left me speechless: chapter and verse here on The Arts Desk. Photo with the searing Kelley O'Connor by Keith Sheriff.

Sunday evening was suck-it-and-see time with good old Chelsea Opera Group's concert performance of the 20-year-old Wagner's Die Feen: read about it here on The Arts Desk. Last night I vowed to attend Benjamin's much-vaunted Written on Skin at the Royal Opera last night with an open mind, in spite of the fact that this composer's irreproachably well scored orchestral works have never spoken to me in any way. But very early on it was clear this wasn't going to either.

How strange to approach a horrid story - which hardly has much to offer to us today, surely? - of lust, murder and cannibalism with such ice-cold restraint. Is this the 'cold fascination with disaster' mentioned towards the opera's close? The beginning promised something, though what started out as - we thought- tension-building in long single and double lines just turned to glue after the several stormbreaks (for which Benjamin has only one mode, cliched modernist brass discords; at least the frantic woodwind trills in the killing began to say something for a moment). Photos of Vicki Mortimer's well-lit sets for Katie Mitchell's business-as-usual production by Stephen Cummiskey for the Royal Opera House.

They say there's a strong feminist streak here; but the rebellious woman still ends up killing herself; plus ca change for operatic heroines. The cast were strong and clear of diction, and at least Benjamin mostly lets them be heard; but their roles are hardly clear even as archetypes and as for the music-drama, apart from a moment's haunting in glass harmonica-led sounds towards the end, I was left interested but unstirred. Good production? Yes, though I like the 'angel' clinic no more than Martin Crimp's cringeworthy 21st century framework for the medieval tale. Fine singing? Absolutely, especially from Christopher Purves - despite suffering from uncharacteristic hoarseness last night - and Barbara Hannigan, though her hardly rock-solid soprano wasn't quite as amazing as the hype suggested it ought to be.

Great opera, though? Certainly not. I'm in a minority here, though friend Debbie York, hotfoot from Berlin for more Messiaenic coaching in London, agreed vehemently with me and we echo every word about the score written by my pal Igor on The Arts Desk. Still, it had to be seen, and those £4 standing places were worth every penny.