Ten days of great Zoom visitors

I rely upon the kindness of great performers for adrenalin highs in my Zoom classes, and a recent run has, though I say it myself, been spectacular on both the Opera in Depth and Mahler 1 courses - I might as well drop the names right now: Anna Larsson, Golda Schultz, Robin Ticciati and Mark Wigglesworth. You may need to click to enlarge a lot of these screenshots, and I've tried to reduce them to a cross-section rather than the full crowd, but above, bottom right, is glorious Golda, part of a very special duo of visits. 

Robin Ticciati decided he'd like to see us between final rehearsal and first night of the sensational (opera production of the year?) Dialogues des Carmélites at Glyndebourne, and for it was better since I wouldn't be prone to gushing about the first night, so overwhelming that I took the liberty of snapping a full company bow, Ticciati and director Barrie Kosky included.

I reviewed that here on theartsdesk; you might conversely say I'd drunk the Ticciati kool-aid, but what I think of as the professional relationships I have with the great and good are based on total respect in the first place. Of course I'm at liberty to say if there was a style mismatch, or I didn't think the work was quite as great as the performer did - The Wreckers, prepared at the very highest level, was a case in point. But we know how Poulenc's masterpiece - one of the greatest in all opera - never fails, even if I wasn't prepared for the cruelty and devastation of Kosky's vision. 

After a very excited RT phoning on Thursday to say he was ready to talk, Friday's visitor was very reflective - clearly tired, but so friendly with everyone, and so eloquent as ever. He talked, among other things, of the joy and necessity of being there at the start of rehearsals, how inspiring Kosky was in his first speech to the company, the special nature of silences (something that had struck me when I first met him, sharing a panel at the end of a study day on Jenůfa, which he conducted on the Glyndebourne tour) and finally - very movingly - the nature of home. Which is now, for him and his wife, very much Sussex. Over six years in Berlin, he loved the experience of living in the city but never felt entirely at ease with the level on which he could converse in German. And the Glyndebourne experience is, at its best, the most enriching you can have in the operatic world.

Golda, whose presence was due to another positive spirit who's just joined my course, Julia Noakes, was bright and bouncy on the Monday afternoon. She'd had the day after the first night to come to herself, and the parallels with the down-to-earth, forthright, empathetic and incorruptible Madame Lidoine, the second Prioress, whose arrival brings a breath of air in to the claustrophobic world so emphasised in Kosky's production, are striking. Golda thought of becoming a nun at 17, but her priest-advisor suggested her gifts might be used on other ways. And so they are. A marvellous human being in every way. I'm going to segue to my next guest via two production shots, cropping to emphasise the connections (credits: Glyndebourne image, Richard Hubert Smithl Garsington image, Julien Guidera, I think - I got sent three different sets of photos). It's amazing how strong an image is a reassuring hand laid on another, and Schultz's Lidoine does that in Kosky's production, more than once.

It's also a very moving moment in Bruno Ravella's Garsington production of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos when Young Woo Kim's Bacchus places his right hand on top of the left hand of Natalya Romaniw's Ariadne.

I'd never been more moved by this scene. and never heard a Bacchus as good live. The South Korean tenor is adored by his colleagues, another blithe spirit, as I think one can tell from his performance on stage. In my review for theartsdesk, I suggested that though Carmelites and Ariadne are very different operas, the respective Glyndebourne and Garsington achievements are on the same extraordinary level - thoughtful production, perfect cast, and radical but perfect conducting: in this case from my long-term generous visitor to the classes Mark Wigglesworth. 

I enlisted MW's help in my Mahler 1 course, covering Symphonies 1-5, Das klagende Lied and the earlier songs (the second term, starting in late September, will deal with 6-9, Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied von der Erde). He's conducting the BBC Philharmonic in the First Symphony at the Proms on 18 July, but was heavily involved in Ariadne rehearsals when we covered that. So just before the last of the 10 classes, on movements 3-5 of the Fifth, he visited for a more general discussion, but again with fascinating chapter and verse (I must summarise at some point, but need to watch again).

First of the visitors, and absolutely not least, was the great Anna Larsson. I used a mixture of DVDs for complete movements, and when it came to the Second and Third Symphonies, it had to be Abbado in Lucerne; AL is his mezzo/contralto soloist in both, on stage from the beginning and engaging directly with the audience sans score. and she confirmed that these performances were beyond any others. 

I'm glad my New York student Alan compared her with Christa Ludwig and asked if they'd met, because we had a fascinating chronicle of how Abbado, having first heard Larsson in audition, told Ludwig she must hear her. Intense sessions followed. Here's another performer with feet firmly on the ground, colleagial and warm (we'd become friendly when I visited the musically excellent Rheingold she facilitated in the barn of the family farm in Dalarna, in which she sang both Fricka and Erda). But then I think it's true of (nearly) all artists who are truly at the top of their profession: they are secure in what they do, and generosity flows from that. 

Finally, a sadness. Sondra Arning's son gave his mother the present of joining these classes. She has been a vibrant contributor, with so much to say about all the music she experienced and - as a singer - participated in while living in New York. Soon her husband Patrick also joined up; they both attended both courses this term, sometimes on separate screens, sometimes together (as pictured above). Having made some pithy observations as usual, Patrick had to leave the last Mahler class early to go to see his doctor. On the Friday he felt il in an interval at the Wigmore Hall, where they were regular visitors. He died of a massive heart attack on the Saturday. A huge shock to everyone, above all to Sondra - they had been married for 51 years - but in one way, since he'd reached a great age, a blessing, as there was a lot wrong with him and cancer had just been detected. 

Patrick will be with us in spirit when we embark on the summer course, Wagner's Parsifal, in association with the Wagner Society of Scotland (it's a while back that I began an adventure which began with the first two Ring operas up in the Trossachs, the last two online, followed by Tristan and Meistersinger). More on that, and the season proper, anon.

After Pelléas, Ariadne and Tito

'Ah! I breathe at last!...I thought for a moment that I was going to be ill in those enormous vaults.' Following Pelléas's cue as he emerges onto a sunlit terrace after a terrifying time in the depths of the gloomy old castle, I think most of us in my Opera in Depth course at the Frontline Club were glad to get out into the sunny streets of Paddington after the last of four and a half Monday afternoon immersed in the world of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. Some of us will be staying in the light for Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos next Monday. Pelléas was hard emotional work, though. It's probably the most exquisitely refined and orchestrally ravishing operatic score ever written, but as a drama more cruel and harsh than it is soft and beautiful.

We've been aware of its multiple meanings, but above all how it functions both as the most straightforward triangle - as Richard Jones put it to me when I first met him as he was working on the ENO production, 'two men fall in love with the same woman, with disastrous results' - and as so much more, partly intimated by Arthur Symons: 'we have two innocent lovers, to whom love is guilt; we have blind vengeance, aged and helpless wisdom; we have the conflict of passions fighting in the dark, destroying what they most desire in the world'.

Ascribe that first to Maeterlinck's nightmarish play, following his obsession with the destruction of the young by the old. Of course Debussy completely transfigures it with his music of nature, reaching its most dreamlike, minimalist, barely-audible apogee in the scene at the grotto by the sea. But he knows how to unleash the full harshness  - at the end of Act Three and in Act Four, in the scenes of the insanely jealous Golaud's abusive cruelty to his son and wife, the musical violence is extreme. This made an interesting comparison with the pathology of the protagonist in Verdi's Otello, on which we'd spent the first five and a half weeks of the summer term - the difference being that Golaud has real cause for his jealousy, whereas Otello does not.

As well as snippeting sound recordings by Désormière - the classic and text-unsurpassable 1941 recording with Irène Joachim and Jacques Jansen - and by Karajan, featuring an superb José Van Dam and Frederica von Stade, we stuck for visuals with the 1999 Glyndebourne production by Graham Vick on DVD. I'm kicking myself that I never saw it at the time; apart from possibly being the most visually arresting production ever seen at the Sussex house, with its flowers under the floor, spiral staircase and peeling gold walls, the focus on nuance from John Tomlinson, Christiane Oelze and Richard Croft is ideal for video close-up. We came away devastated from the tower scene (Mélisande actually hangs backwards from a huge deco light, as you can see in the DVD cover up top) and, yesterday, from the disturbing death of Act 5, as quiet and strange as the lovers' unaccompanied 'je t'aime'/'je t'aime aussi'.

Much more to say on this, but the advertising point here is that we move on and for the next two Mondays, I've added two extra one-off classes on Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos (24 July) and Mozart's La clemenza di Tito (31 July), tying in with the Glyndebourne productions (scene from the Ariadne opera in the 2017 revival, image by Robert Workman). Same time, 2.30pm-4.30pm, location a private house generously loaned by a friend just down the road from our usual venue. the superb Frontline Club. If you're interested in coming along - or indeed if you're interested in next season's course, which will start with La bohème, including (I hope) another visit from Richard Jones, he director of the new production due at the Royal Opera - leave a message here with your email. I won't publish it but I promise to reply.

Why Glyndebourne's Ariadne works for me

It's not fared well in the press, but Katharina Thoma's production of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos adds up. At least it did for me when after all that talking about it I finally got to see this very original take on my desert island opera at Glyndebourne on Sunday. The cynical might say I was primed to like it by Thoma and the very intense mezzo singing the pivotal role of the Composer, Kate Lindsey (in the first of Alastair Muir's production photos above), when I spoke to them a week before the opening for The Arts Desk. It's true that everything Thoma explained about Ariadne's longing for death along with Bacchus's emergence from a life-threatening experience made sense as applied to traumatised victims of the Second World War in a makeshift country-house sanatorium who move from darkness to light. But it could have remained just a concept.

Instead, what ultimately materialised was what I'd most expected to miss - poet Hofmannsthal's essential 'mystery of transformation' - as Vladimir Jurowski gave the last half-hour wings and two very fine singers rose to the challenge. Soile Isokoski is no great shakes as a mover, but she acts with the voice, and what an ideally Straussian one it is for the most part, opulently riding the composer's 37 piece orchestra when it wants to become a hundred-headed hydra for Bacchus's arrival. I believed in her attempted suicide as she awaits the messenger of death; and, though it was all a little quick, in her capitulation to an almost equally befuddled Bacchus. Yes, it did indeed bring tears to the eyes and that sense of heightened emotion we so rarely find in this tricky and usually less than plausible love duet.

Sergey Skorokhodov had been under the weather on the first night, according to reviews, but yesterday evening we got the most convincing heroic-tenor god/hero on both dramatic and vocal fronts I've ever seen and heard in this usually thankless role. Anticipation of his turning up at Convalescence House, heralded not by three nymphs but keyed-up nurses drooling over a newspaper report, was decked out in all the glow the trio had earlier missed in their more Rhinemaidenish scene, the one blip where co-ordination with the London Philharmonic was less than spot-on.

All the more amazing, then, that the Prologue never dropped a stitch. Even the anti-Regietheater hordes surely couldn't have faulted Thoma's close lining-up of every little detail with the febrile clarity of Jurowski's absolutely fresh interpretation. One of many felicitous touches was to add to the four commedia dell'arte (read ENSA) gents - deft lindyhoppers and jitterbuggers in the opera's intermezzo - a fifth, playing the pianist which Strauss so often uses to accompany their antics. He twiddles assent to the Dancing Master's pirouette, and in the opera strikes his little top note on Zerbinetta's 'Verwandlungen' before zipping off to avoid any more of her touching-up.

Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke as said 'choreographer' to the comic troupe is Glyndebourne's character tenor of choice - how I'd love to see him as Mime - and spars well with Thomas Allen's consummate Music Master, still in absolutely top form vocally (above left with Ablinger-Sperrhacke). All the bit parts are taken with the detail only seven weeks of rehearsal at Glyndebourne can allow; among them there's a promising turn from Frederick Long as the Lackey who's knocked over and takes his bullying out on the Composer. Lindsey burns and rages, the boy wonder to the life; if the voice might be a bit slimline for a bigger house, it's perfect here - and indeed, a first-time acquaintance with this most sophisticated of 'little entertainments' in a theatre exactly the right size is a revelation, especially given all that orchestral cleverness.

Is the curtain to the backstage shenanigans one step too far? I think not, given that the music fulminates so and really leaves the action nowhere to go otherwise. A suicide, as in Claus Guth's Zürich production, is no solution, so I reckon Thoma got it right in her given context. We had a bonus, by all accounts, last night: an indisposed Laura Claycomb* - the Zerbinetta pictured below, obviously - was replaced by her cover, Ukrainian soprano Ulyana Aleksyuk. The swelling on the right notes to more than tweety-pie brilliance gave the love-scene of the Prologue a real extra frisson.

In the opera, it turned out Aleksyuk is no spot-on coloratura, but she still carried it off and managed all the top notes. And here I do think the stage business, confining Zerbinetta at her most Lucia-ish to an injection and a straitjacket, is one step too far. At least it cues an hallucinogenic second instalment of the Harlequinade, three of the four boys dragged up as the nurses; a plausible substitute for more of the same, which usually palls. And how dull, brainless and obscure, despite a surprisingly radiant performance from Renée Fleming and a very promising one from Jane Archibald as Zerbinetta, is Philippe Arlaud's Baden-Baden production which I've just reviewed on its DVD release for the BBC Music Magazine.

Anyway, I was duty bound to post this tonight, since tomorrow (Tuesday) is the live screening in cinemas across the country and the livestream via Glyndebourne's own website, both starting at 6.45pm (UPDATE: the whole thing is available to view when you want on the Guardian's website until 31 August). Don't miss one or the other - and stay with the experience to the very end even if you don't at first like what you see of the opera; it really is crowned with the mother of all transcendent finales. A reminder, too, that if you want to mug up on the basics of the elaborate high-art vs low-art drama, the Glyndebourne podcast presented by Peggy Reynolds with some rather alarming interpolations from self is worth a listen or a download here.

So, not quite a perfect view of Ariadne, but when good, great. And there were hardly enough false notes to strip the afternoon and evening of their perfection. I had an especially happy time with the pre-performance talk, and was delighted to welcome in the audience a stylish DJd gentleman with an excellent green mohican and some very classily dressed ladies in shalwar kemises of delicious hues. They were not shy with their thanks afterwards, either.

We also found a fabulous new spot of pleasing remoteness for the picnic. The gardeners have cut green paths through the meadow above the lake and below the sheep field that goes uphill towards the wind turbine. Here the sun warmed us all the way through the long supper interval as we tucked into substantial fare not from Bill's - the old regime of salad boxes is no more - but from a promising cafe/deli closer to the station. A few quick garden shots: most varieties of tulip are over, but not these in the formal garden

and diverse irises are now in their prime.

The cycads shoot out their ferns at last,

the much-loved mulberry near the house is finally leafing - will we be back to enjoy its delicious fruits? - 

and a ceanothus alongside alliums frames the lawn ensembles.

I mentioned Sean Henry's painted bronze sculptures in an earlier entry - any reservations on artistic merit may be offset by the fact that the figures are certainly good theatre - but I fancy Bryn as 'The Wanderer' wasn't there the week before the season started. He certainly is now, and dwarfs a tall admirer of his (this for both our blogging Wanderer and Lottie in Zurich).

Only one sour reminder spoiled the Sussex summer idyll. Every time the train from London to Lewes hits the viaduct at Balcombe, I instinctively look up from whatever I'm reading. It might be the sudden extra light from an abundance of sky, but in any case this is the loveliest part of the journey as you look down on the Ouse valley from a great height. I've never seen the viaduct from below but it enhances rather than spoils the landscape, I think.

Unlike the proposals to frack in the Balcombe area, the thin end of the exploitable wedge. France and Bulgaria won't allow fracking, swathes of America are against it, the evidence of potential damage is mounting all the time, so what motivates our greedy Conservatives -among them Balcombe MP Francis Maude, who appointed Lord Browne, a director of the firm Cuadrilla which intends to exploit these Sussex resources, to the Cabinet Office three years ago?

The gasdrillinginbalcombe Wordpress site which uses the above as its banner (read the inscription and much more here) will keep us all in the picture. And when the local people hold their next protest, I for one hope to be there with them.

*Tuesday evening - so much for the Berglund piece I was supposed to finish tonight. I succumbed to the opera - ie post-interval - partly because I wanted to see Claycomb. And she made more sense of the move from entertainer to crazed nympho: I understand now how it's used as a fulcrum to shift the balance from Ariadne's problems to the ones Zerbinetta turns out to have, too. No injection tonight, by the way. And this time really accurate coloratura which Claycomb could carry out while doing and having done to her all manner of things. 

The duet moved me as before, though for the film they'll have to use Sunday night's take of Bacchus's final phrase; Skorokhodov wasn't quite on the same top form tonight. Now - comments, anyone? Do say if you hated it and we'll argue it out.

Talkabout: Strauss, Prokofiev, Stravinsky

Put a week's silence here down to busy talk scheduling - crazy, in fact, but the subjects were desert island pieces (original 1912 design for the domain of Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Ariadne above by Ernst Stern), so I wanted to do them all. Sunday was the first mad day. Having to be at Glyndebourne for a 10.30am talk, with a sound test well in advance, meant it was worth staying over on Saturday night to avoid a very early start from London. I was also able to fit in an interview the previous lunchtime with Katharina Thoma, director of the Ariadne auf Naxos which has just opened, and Kate Lindsey, the mezzo singing the Composer. Delightful company, as you can glean from the way-too-long but I hope interesting Arts Desk Q&A. I get to see the show when I talk again at Glyndebourne on 2 June.

Thoma took her central production idea from the fact that Glyndebourne was used as a wartime home for evacuee children. It looks idyllic as they run gay through green meadows, but no doubt the trauma always lurked.

Though it seems from another archive photo that there was no lake in the 1940s, and of course no new opera house, otherwise not a great deal has changed. Of course a smooth lawn now takes the place of the meadow, but the goalposts suggested that fun and games were still to be had before the season opened last Saturday.

The relatively new garden regime takes time to have its full effect: there aren't nearly as many varieties of exotic tulips as there used to be, but enough to make a pre-season May visit special.

The tree peony in the formal garden used to be in full spate on study days, but this year's slow progress means it's only budding, ready to burst.

Notoriously variable in its featured artists - remember the dreadful 'portraits' by Adam 'Son of Harry' Birtwistle? - Glyndebourne has made an odd choice this year. You'll be taken aback by Sean Henry's standing or sitting lifesize figures in polychrome/bronze dotted about the place (Bryn as Wanderer is the one I didn't see), and generally I don't mind them, but I'm not at all sure about 'Catafalque', the recumbent man out on the lawn. He certainly changes perspectives like this one from the Ebert Room where the talks take place.

So I took the audience on a whistlestop tour of Strauss and Hofmannsthal's three Molière projects, starting with Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme as Der Bürger als Edelmann in 1912. On the downloadable Glyndebourne podcast the plot's the thing, shorn of the Sunday talk's background complexities. It's very likeably presented by Margaret (aka Peggy) Reynolds and has been well edited by the delightful Mair Bosworth. I talk on it alongside an expert on commedia dell'arte and that great gentleman Michael Kennedy, whose Master Musicians book led my teenage self deeper into Strauss.

On Sunday, playing Pavarotti as the Rosenkavalier tenor singing 'Di rigori armato il seno' seemed like a good place to start alongside the same text delivered by an Italian Singer(ess, so it's armata) in Lully/Molière's Ballet des Nations. Hopping between Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Version 1 and the more familiar 1916 all-operatic Ariadne meant some fun in comparing Zerbinetta's whole-tone-higher, longer original crazy coloratura aria with the one we usually get.

There wasn't time to feature the cod-Turkish ceremony of Hofmannsthal's 1917 Bürger-minus-Ariadne (I'll never forget the late Peter Allen's take on it in his Edinburgh University staging of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme for Les Escogriffes, which involved a swimming pool and actors in Kermit and Fozzy Bear masks: genius, it seemed at the time). But the first musical programme which Glyndebourne dramaturg Cori Ellison had devised, under the aegis of the lovely people in the Education Department, made amends with the Madrigal alongside two numbers from the 1912 incidental music - Monsieur Jourdain's little doggerel song, which I'd played in sequence with the original composer's aria 'Du, Venus' Sohn', and the pretty neoclassical duet for shepherd and shepherdess - as well as, from the opera, Harlequin's serenade and, from the Prologue, the Composer's ode to music.

As always with the young singers involved, you think, if the covers are this good, can the artists they're covering be better? That was true of all three singers, accompanied by repetiteur Helen Collyer: soprano Lucy Hall, mezzo Carla Dirlikov (pictured above by John Myers) - who pulled out all the stops for her big number, acting and all - and a fine young baritone, Daniel Shelvey.

I'd have loved to stay and hear Hall and Collyer in two Zemlinsky songs with Hofmannsthal texts, as well as Margaret/Peggy's 'mythical sisters' talks - the afternoon was devoted to the other new production, Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie - but a taxi was waiting at 11.55 to whisk me to Lewes station and the train back to London for a 3pm event.

This one was unmissable: Denis Kozhukhin playing all three of Prokofiev's titanic so-called 'War' Sonatas (6-8, composed between 1938 and 1944). Because the feat required a bigger rest-up time during the interval between the Seventh and Eighth Sonatas, the Southbank's The Rest is Noise team, having liked what they heard of my Paris 1910-1930 taster, enlisted me to talk for about 15 minutes while Denis prepared for the final hurdle. Classical Music Programme Manager Ben Larpent took the following photos; obviously the pianist could only be snapped after his performances.

Kozhukhin's interpretations were much as I'd found them when I reviewed his Onyx CD for the BBC Music Magazine's May issue: fabulously nuanced and with an uncanny skill in bringing out the tone-colours of different simultaneous lines. For me there was too much sustaining pedal in developments - not at all Prokofiev the pianist's style - and something reined in about the outer movements of the Sixth and Seventh Sonatas, though the latter's central Andante caloroso moved me to tears.

Just as well, perhaps, because my talk started - with credit to friend and so-collegial fellow Prokofievian Daniel Jaffé, whose singing-teacher then-wife Frith spotted the correspondence - with its obvious-when-you-hear-it resemblance to Schumann's 'Wehmut' from the Op. 39 Liederkreis. And of course this is one of those coded references to suffering which we used to think were exclusive to Shostakovich. Eichendorff's text begins 'I can sometimes sing/As if I were happy,/But secretly tears well up/Which free my heart', and ends 'no one can truly feel the anguish of my song's deep sorrow'. I don't need to add any more about the context except to repeat what I've written elsewhere, that according to his older son Sviatoslav, Prokofiev never talked about the terrible years 1936 and '37 to anyone, at least in the children's hearing.

Anyway, having a captive audience in the middle of a concert opened me up to a taste of my own reviewing medicine, so it was a relief to find that Colin Clarke on MusicWeb's Seen and Heard International approved. Quite a few enthusiastic listeners were unusually willing to come up and chat at the end of the concert, perhaps because they could see where I was sitting. And I got to meet the ever so nice Roger Vignoles, who said he'd heard Schumann when Kozhukhin played the movement, but couldn't place what exactly until I did it for him.

The glory, of course, was the pianist's: the end crowned the mighty work with the best of the three performances, as on the disc, of the Eighth, with its huge tarantella-cum-march finale majestically tying up the pain with the biting humour. Here's Kozhukhin introducing the sonatas.

My desert island disc of that, by the way, is the incomparable Sviatoslav Richter's, but this interpretation was very fine indeed. And Kozhukhin's way of terracing the sound came across beautifully in the only possible encore - Bach, but arranged by Ziloti (the B minor Prelude). There's certainly no harm in featuring the pianist who gave the premiere of the Eighth Sonata, Emil Gilels, in this ineffable lowering of temperatures.

Actually Kozhukhin's own performance of this gem, also to be heard but not seen on YouTube, is just as magical in its way.

With only a couple of days in London - more talking, this time in the Gloriana class - I flew up to Glasgow on Wednesday afternoon and back on Thursday night, since I had to be off to my beloved Göttingen and its Handel Festival the following morning. This way I didn't get to stay for the concert in which Matthias Pintscher conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which I was discussing earlier in the evening; another quick whizz after another talk was again the order of the day. But I did get to see Scottish Opera's new G&S, The Pirates of Penzance, to which I took godson Alexander on Wednesday night and which I reviewed for The Arts Desk. Here's the consummate Richard Suart's Major-General pirated, picture for Scottish Opera by KK Dundas.

In short, although the cast and orchestra were mostly excellent, the Savoy wit and wisdom drowned in a stream of gags by a director who didn't trust his material. I enjoyed rather more my haggis and chips sitting in warm sun on Sauciehall Street before the show. Ah well; Alexander got the point that the text is dazzlingly witty - who but Gilbert would rhyme 'Aristophanes' with 'Zoffanies'? - and the music stronger, quite often, than the Italian opera it spoofs.

Thursday was mostly spent indoors working on the Glyndebourne interview transcription and brushing up the material for the talk. But I did have an hour off walking from the ever-welcome aBode Hotel in Bath Street to City Halls. En route I had a plate of oysters fried in polenta

sitting outside at Glasgow's oldest established restaurant, Rogano, inspired design-wise by the art deco of the Queen Mary back in 1935.

The Duke of Wellington outside the Gallery of Modern Art, traditional target for Glaswegian malarkey, is no longer traffic-coned as he was in February but sports a rather sinister face mask (representing what I couldn't make out).

I took in some rather remarkable Victorian/Edwardian architecture around the City Halls in Candleriggs, all nicely tarted up for this fashionable zone. Again, I'd love to know more about what I was seeing, though I've just identified the eccentric turret in the middle as part of a former warehouse in Brunswick Street 'designed in the baronial style by architect RW Billings in 1854 for J and W Campbell'. The City Chambers are seen in the centre of the bottom picture.

Then I ensconced myself in a dressing room backstage at the City Halls to work, courtesy of Douglas Templeton and Andrew Trinick,

popping out for Pintscher's rehearsal of The Rite. Such efficient use of the time available, such professional dovetailing, such clarity and character; the firm basis would have allowed for any amount of extra intensity in the performance. Must set aside time to listen to the broadcast of the event proper available on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer (a more than usually generous three weeks left to catch it).

In the talk, I tried to offset the perceived modernism of Stravinsky's score and Nijinsky's choreography at the premiere 100 years ago this month with the music's roots in folk music and Musorgsky (the opening piping - I love Saint-Saens's remark in 1913, 'if that's a bassoon, I'm a baboon' - is a reworking of shepherd Gritsko's reed-playing at the end of the Sorochintsy Fair version of Night on a Bare Mountain).

So, after the most stressy of the week's travels, on to a more relaxing ambience in Göttingen where I wasn't required to hold forth and concert treasures - if not this year's opera - offered plenty of soul food. More on that anon, but let's connect by having William IV less stylishly debunked by the students of the university he so splendidly enriched just before his death in 1837 than the Duke of Wellington is by the Glaswegians.

 

23/5 Oh yes, and Wagner was a nifty four times 50 on the day of posting. How could I have forgotten? Anyway, I'm not in the mood at the moment (and a concert conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, of all people, hardly seemed like the best way to celebrate). There will be nothing but Wagner for me at the end of the year, for reasons I'm still not at liberty to divulge.

Before the little black dress

Shouldn't be pre-empting my BBC Music Magazine review of the Met's 2003 Ariadne on DVD, but I did want to say how it made me do a volte-face on Deborah Voigt. I'd always thought of her as a useful dramatic-lyric with a rich middle range but a rather frayed sound up top. Not here, where she is as good a certain type of Ariadne - the statuesque post-Jessye Norman variety, rather than a psychologically interesting one a la Anne Schwanewilms or Petra Lang - as I've seen.

This was, of course, in the days of the big Prima Donna before all the kerfuffle about fitting into the little black dress demanded by Christof Loy's production at Covent Garden. She lost weight and came back four years later, supposedly in triumph (though at that stage I was too sniffy to go and see for myself). I guess just about every opera queen/lover has seen the very witty little film about the situation, but here it is for good measure.



Yes, Debbie does comedy. And she did it superbly back in 2003 throughout Strauss's desert island opera (my own, too, perhaps, when the singing's as good as this), looking like some Dickens comic caricature in the Prologue and rolling her Buzz Lightyear orbs at the brilliant business of Natalie Dessay's perfect (and perfectly human) Zerbinetta. I haven't encountered Voigt much since, but I have heard that the sound has lost its luminosity, which would raise the big question: would you rather see a fat lady sing superbly, or a thin lady more realistic on stage even if a bit less lustrous vocally? I used to think the latter, then I changed my mind when I saw Jane Eaglen's Tosca in her heyday - Robbie Coltrane in a hideous orange wig, but such sound, and such acting with the voice alone. For Ariadne c.2003, anyway, Voigt was ideal. And she always could act, and hold the stage, and make people laugh.

Another tenuous link, but since it's heading the Met's way, I should add a word or two about Des McAnuff's new ENO production of Gounod's Faust. My sharp-witted colleague Igor Toronyi-Lalic on The Arts Desk said it all for me: no point expending Relevance on an operatic treatment of the Faust story which has all the probing intelligence to be found in an episode of Sunset Beach. And it was a mess, and it didn't read, and mostly (apart from the video projections, especially the flowers, seen in the below production image by Catherine Ashmore) it looked horrid.


But it was well sung and conducted. The chorus, as good as the orchestra given Ed Gardner's inspiring lead, raised a few goosebumps. The heft that I noticed in Toby Spence's brilliant concert performance of Don Ottavio's 'Il mio tesoro' a few years ago continues, with all the tricky top notes ringingly intact. I liked Melody Moore's Marguerite, convincingly developing from chaste young girl to tragic single mum, and the sound is warm, if not quite blossoming above the stave. And Iain Patterson is a fine singer, though as a baritone miscast as Mephistopheles. Goddaughter Evi got it in a nutshell, too: wasn't the music all too pretty? Where was the demonism her mum so loved in the Berlioz? What did all that science stuff have to do with this opera? So we agreed: it was an OK evening, just not great.