Requiem for ENO?

I sincerely hope not, and I still want to keep the flame of hope alive by continuing to help fight where possible for the survival of a full company as well as a full season. It seems from what chorus members told me on Friday night after their stunning third performance of Brahms's A German Requiem at St John's Waterloo - my colleague Alexandra Coghlan captured the atmosphere of the first event beautifully here - that new Artistic Director Daniel Kramer wants a full season too. I've stated as much in an article on The Arts Desk giving a cautious welcome. Sincere good luck to him if he, too, is sincere - I'd be amazed if he succeeded where Mark Wigglesworth failed in persuading the intransigent CEO that only by such means can a true English National Opera keep up its superlative, award-winning work.

This German Requiem, performed in the version in English with two pianists at one keyboard - the form it took at its 1871 London premiere - transfigured a work which can seem too gloomy and gloopy in the wrong hands. It still felt a bit that way to J, hearing it for the first time, but I assured him that no-one could have done more to strip away the layers of thick paint than Wigglesworth. Yes, the fugal passages were fast, the last stupendously so, but it never felt rushed even though it clocked in at around the 55 minute mark.

The harmonic relationships between movements were helped by no long pauses; the text was clear and meaningful - with the exception of Eleanor Dennis's radiant but more or less wordless solo; Benedict Nelson's contribution was of a piece with the chorus - simply because Wigglesworth made sure his chorus shaped each phrase towards its natural stress. Nothing could have been more momentous than the 'joy everlasting's of the second movement. Everything was tied together most movingly in the final 'Blessed are the dead', emphasising the sheer strength of the individual sections and with some spectacularly powerful unisons. And one hardly missed the orchestra in the flawless piano duo of ENO music staff treasures Kate Golla and Chris Hopkins (bowing with their bouquets in the second image from the gallery above).

Emotional meetings afterwards. I met up with Jane Livingston, the best of press officers during her long years of service for ENO, to collect my rose oil from Kashan (I'd asked her to get one for me on her recent trip to Iran; my tiny bottle of purest attar from the Kashan bazaar long having been used up, and a replacement not found in any of London's Iranian shops). It might have been a bit de trop of me to make Richard Jones, Mark and his wife Annemieke sniff it ('Turkish delight?' guessed Richard - close, of course). Was also delighted to see the chorus members who had helped me put their side of the argument on The Arts Desk, and to meet face to face at last the joint recipients of the Mackerras Conducting Fellowship I'd helped to adjudicate, Toby Purser and Matthew Waldren.

One familiar face from the chorus said that he'd never before encountered a conductor who could change the entire sound with a flick of the wrist. As postscript to return the compliment, I want to include some wonderful lines from two conductors. From Mark Wigglesworth, first in the programme, following carefully-selected observations on the work being performed:

An opera chorus spend their working lives revealing the full range of humanity on the stage. I know no finer exponents of this than the Chorus of English National Opera. I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to them and to thank especially their manager David Dyer and their Chorus Master Stephen Harris. It was their ideas that were the inspiration for these concerts and it is their leadership that continues to inspire us all.

And in private, reproduced with his consent, he wrote that he was

Conscious of what we have lost but right now even more conscious of the extraordinary relationship that has developed between the choristers and me. No-one can or will take that away from us.

Finally, from Toby Purser, again made privately and given with his consent:

To see a chorus in tears of emotion at the end of a performance, with a level of communication, respect and integrity almost impossible to imagine, is breathtakingly inspiring, but also a genuine torture - like having a glimpse of the ultimate artistic potential, only to see it withdrawn afterwards. 

Amen to that, and let's live in hope that the knight on his white charger mentioned by one of the chorus members and quoted in the Kramer piece will come riding back in glory. We can dream, can't we?

In the footsteps of Mackerras

It was hard sitting on the news for so long: the six of us privileged to spend a long but rewarding day adjudicating the final for English National Opera's Mackerras Fellowship, which offers a promising conductor a chance to work in depth with the company for two years, more or less made up our minds at 6pm that evening. Details and approval needed thrashing out by Mark Wigglesworth and the trustees of the Fellowship, but my suggestion that since we couldn't agree between us on two, we should split it, was essentially adopted. Thus the two were chosen, still young by conducting standards - Toby Purser, enterprising founder of the Orion Orchestra,

and Matthew Waldren, whose conducting of Delibes's Lakmé at Opera Holland Park I'd already admired, with only a qualification about pace (photo by Fritz Curzon).

They're no spring chickens, and I suppose we might have hoped for a) younger talent and b) a woman or two, at least in earlier rounds, but you have to choose the best. I also had a soft spot for Christopher Stark, co-ordinator of the Multi-Story Orchestra which gives concerts in a Camberwell car park (I have yet to hear one). He spoke very eloquently and clearly - we could hear every word right at the back, from where we were sitting just behind the brass and alongside the percussion - and showed flashes of brilliance, especially for Tom's first aria in The Rake's Progress, which he's conducted.

The snag with the morning's three competitors was that they didn't really seem to take into account the singers, standing on a platform just to the conductor's left, and slightly behind him. This was the first time any of them had got their hands on the ENO Orchestra, sounding rich and lovely from the start, so it was perhaps understandable that most of the work went on orchestral detail. And I wondered if there had been more liaising with soprano Eleanor Dennis, mezzo Rachael Lloyd, tenor Rupert Charlesworth and baritone Matthew Durkin in the piano sessions the day before, but apparently not.

So it was hardly surprising that, when Waldren got Charlesworth to come and stand right in front of the orchestra, my vivacious fellow-outsider whom I already know and like a lot through a mutual friend, Phillip Thomas, and from our Brunch with Brünnhildes, that great Wagnerian soprano Susan Bullock, exclaimed 'thank you, God!' Sue and I were additions to a panel that already included ENO Head of Music Martin Fitzpatrick, Senior Artistic Advisor John McMurray, Head of Casting Sophie Joyce and of course Mark himself.

Waldren was the only one we witnessed to make true music-theatre with both singers and orchestra; the Dorabella-Guglielmo duet from Cosi really changed and developed as a result. Invidious to say too much about the other conductors, but here's the weirdest thing: the one who baffled us the most was the players' favourite, adduced from a questionnaire they'd been given. And yet from the minute he stood up in front of them, the orchestra suddenly lost all its tonal beauty and sounded a bit like a brass band. It may just be that this was in the dead spot of the day, mid-afternoon, but I remembered John Carewe's comment that the sound of an orchestra adapts to a conductor the minute he or she first raises the baton.

The main point is that, as I've already written in replies to comments on previous posts, I found it one of the most exhilarating if exhausting days of my professional life, and I learnt a huge amount (never noticed, to take one small example, that a harp softens the processional theme of the Mastersingers - two of the competitors drew attention to it). Discussions at lunchtime and afterwards were very lively, and I found the perspective of leader Janice Graham - she who played Leonora's theme in Act Two of The Force of Destiny so seraphically - especially fascinating. I must have been nuts to go on to the first of Dudamel's concerts with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela - by the time I reached the Festival Hall I just wanted to sleep. But there's no kipping through Stravinsky's Petrushka or The Rite of Spring, even in erratic performances.

This is perhaps the right moment to hail a by all accounts fabulous new Music Director for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, 29-year-old Lithuanian Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla. I haven't caught Gražinytė-Tyla in action yet but Richard Bratby, who heard a specially scheduled CBSO concert with her in January, is someone whose opinion I trust completely. I asked him if he'd react on the morning of the announcement for The Arts Desk and he did so, beautifully. It's especially felicitous for another potentially great Balt to follow Latvian Andris Nelsons.

Bad times, not artistically but financially, for ENO just got worse with the Board's proposal to cut salaries for the chorus by 25 per cent. As last year's Mastersingers triumph showed most powerfully at a similarly vital time, they are a backbone of the company; I know Richard Jones especially adores them. If morale drops just at the time when Mark Wigglesworth is invigorating, by all accounts, everyone who works there, it could be the beginning of the end. I don't know the figures - I must find out - but bearing in mind something has to give, I wonder whether it shouldn't be in the very large administration. Why are the artists always the first to suffer? If you want to defend the company, you should sign both the petition set up by 'the Spirit of Lilian Baylis' and the one on Equity's site.

As with Mastersingers last year, one in the eye for the ludicrous Arts Council 'punishment' which had just been meted out, along came a first night yesterday of such brilliance that one could only wish to fight the proposed cuts with fiercest might (pictured above, ENO principal flautist Claire Wicks in the first of production photos by Robbie Jack). I hadn't much enjoyed Simon McBurney of Complicite's production of The Magic Flute the first time round; this revival was as different from the ENO premiere as day from night. Much of that must be ascribed to the electrification of Mark Wigglesworth and his players, raised up virtually to stage level as before so that the interaction between singers and orchestra could only be the stronger (and there was no problem at all hearing just about every word).

It's a truism that pace is everything in Mozart, but I hadn't really taken that on board until I heard Jonathan Cohen conducting a Glyndebourne on Tour Marriage of Figaro that just zinged; you thought, especially in the first two acts, 'how on earth does Mozart keep it up?'

Here you could only feel the cumulative effect at an incandescent lick, which is probably why I found myself weeping with sheer pleasure just into the Act One Quintet. But there was plenty of space for Tamino's and Pamina's great arias to breathe. And I doubt if I''ll ever see a better, and certainly never a more sympathetic, pair than Allan Clayton and Lucy Crowe.

Clayton (pictured above with the Three Ladies, Eleanor Dennis, Catherine Young and Rachael Lloyd, and also of course above that with Sarastro's brotherhood) has a flawless technique and a fearless sense of engagement; what joy to hear a real tenor in the role after all those choral-scholar ombre pallide.

I wept again at lovely Lucy's 'Ach, ich fühl's' and almost sobbed out loud at 'Tamino mein' - as one should. The buzz in the house at the end was palpable. I won't go into further detail - my colleague Alexandra Coghlan has said it all on The Arts Desk - except to give a special accolade to the Three Boys (Jayden Tejuoso, Fabian Tindale Greene and Louis Lodder), perfectly together with the orchestra throughout,

and to say that the production which had left me cold first time round now seemed near-perfect; I laughed a lot. So, a huge triumph again for ENO. And Wigglesworth has now proved his versatility with Shostakovich, Verdi and Mozart in the first half of the season.