Elizabeth and Britten

Seven Monday afternoons on Britten's Gloriana were much longer than I'd anticipated for our Opera in Focus chunk at the City Lit.  It's the only major Britten opera other than Owen Wingrave and the three church parables which I hadn't previously examined in detail - Paul Bunyan should go in to that list too, I reckon, since it's a great work we looked at a fair bit in passing - and it comes as no surprise to have found his coronation opera the unmistakeable work of a genius, professional throughout and sometimes inspired.

Richard Jones is coming to talk to us about his production at the Royal Opera, already seen in Hamburg; I love the logo above which promises us much about our own queen's coronation, as well as heaps of cod (and I hope real) Tudory. Strange but true: Jones was born one day before the world premiere on 8 June 1953. Boy, does he have his work cut out, though, given one of the most unforgettable productions of recent years. Not English National Opera's, which introduced so many of us to the opera.

Sarah Walker is magnificent, and has plenty of amplitude for the heroic-sopranoid nodal points, but she's marooned in a frigid Colin Graham production.

Phyllida Lloyd's selective cinematic adaptation of her Opera North production, on the other hand, turns out to be up there with Bergman's Magic Flute as one of the two best opera films I've seen. Chief reason being the camera's unrelenting focus on the kind of performance which, as Tom Randle says in interview, comes along ever 100 years: Dame Jo Barstow IS Elizabeth, just as Callas WAS Tosca, and Gheorghiu, at least close to the start of her career, WAS Violetta. I saw the production when it came to Covent Garden and was impressed, but nowhere near as much as now.

The voice is never beautiful, and more grating than it was on the superlative Mackerras recording* - what a Best of British, from late, much lamented Langridge down to Terfel's Cuffe and Janice Watson's Lady in Waiting - but that's not the point. Yes, this is the very definition of Great Singing Actress, up there with Anja Silja in Janacek.

OK, so you lose the Norwich masque with the mixed blessing of the choral dances, the love duet/conspiracy scene by the Thames and nearly all of the odd rebellion-in-London fiasco, but of those I can only truly regret the absence of the brilliantly concise interplay between Mountjoy, Penelope Rich and the Essexes.

I said yesterday that I was reluctant to use the overworked word 'iconic' with regard to Barstow's queen, but as student Jane pointed out, an icon was what Elizabeth and her advisers set out to create, and what a legacy of portraits we have as a result. My favourite is the dress with eyes and mouths at Hatfield House, which fits with the time of the Essex crisis (1600-1).

The point of the drama, of course, is that we see behind the projected image as the fault-line between duty and feelings swallows up the once-proud Elizabeth. I'd select as great cinema the mask-like image Barstow projects when the Queen, as really happened, encountered a muddy Essex, straight from Irish failure, in her bedchamber without her wig. And there are no ends to the depths Barstow and Lloyd plumb in the final scene; this is a face which can convey several emotions at once.

Lloyd's handling of the last rites is worthy of a scenario which at last joins hands with Billy Budd before it and The Turn of the Screw shortly after (Gloriana as Vere anguishing over the death-sentence, and later as the Governess bringing back the key tune - 'Malo' there, the Second Lute Song here). I wasn't convinced by the backstage layer of the film at first, but it pays off in the later scenes, and above all at the end. Get the DVD, watch it over and over again.

Of course, without the great Lytton Strachey's sometimes hilarious, often poetic Freudian study Elizabeth and Essex, Britten might not have gone so deep in Elizabeth's second encounter with Essex, a tense and dark counterpoint to the first; both are among his greatest operatic scenes. Strachey reasonably points out that much of Elizabeth's trouble may have stemmed from the fact that 'when she was two years and eight months old, her father cut off her mother's head.' Is it surprising if she developed a Turandot complex as a result?

At any rate the conflict of her 'ambiguous nature' with the impetuous, ambitious one of Essex (pictured above by the fabulous Hilliard), her habit when faced with his outbursts of 'relenting as unpleasantly [and as tantalisingly slowly] as possible', could only end in disaster, goading him, as one courtier put it, 'from sorrow and repentance to rage and rebellion'. Further enlightenment comes from Anna Whitelock's pithy new Elizabeth's Bedfellows, with its keen selection of flavoursome quotations. I've read the last five chapters; now I need to go back to the beginning.

Britten the musical dramatist captures the power-play as nakedly as his selective use of the orchestra could possibly allow, and to be fair William Plomer's libretto often goes straght to the nub of the matter. Every prelude to every scene is a masterpiece of orchestral colour, reprised to the action on curtain-up. I just wonder if he had to be quite so rigid with his alternation of public and private; after all, the former intrudes into the latter by steady degrees, and vice versa in the superb ball scene, so that maybe we could, as Lloyd in fact does in her film, do without the progress and rebellion scenes. But let's see how Jones handles them.

*I was there in Swansea's Brangwyn Hall in October 1992 to report on the sessions for Gramophone. I remember a wonderful time with Mackerras, though the casually homophobic jokes during playbacks were a bit off-colour, a reminder of why 'Charlie' became one of Ben and Peter's 'corpses'. Alas, I can only find the first page of the session report among my archives, and Gramophone's online resources are now hidden behind a paywall.

Tchaikovsky's elusive Tempest

Well, have you ever heard this most imaginative of ‘symphonic fantasias’ live in concert? I hadn’t until Sunday, when I reckon a trip to Rome – with which I fell headily back in love with again after a long absence from a city I thought I knew well enough not to swoon over any more – would have been worth it for twenty-odd minutes of Abbado magic alone. The man IS Prospero, for God’s sake, as one of the violinists of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, sharing the concert with Abbado’s Bologna-based Orchestra Mozart, suggested in a roundabout way (‘it is not conducting, it is a Shining’). That the second-half attempted synching of various Shostakovich musics for King Lear with butchered fragments of the masterly Kozintsev film didn’t work is neither here nor there, and certainly not here in this instance because I must hold fire until I’ve got the Arts Desk piece sorted for tomorrow. Anyway, here's an Accademia-furnished photo from the occasion in the interim.


The point is just to say how ashamed I was to have forgotten Tchaikovsky’s most supernaturally beautiful Shakespeare fantasy. Heck, it’s not even on that 60-CD Brilliant set (I wonder if someone got confused with the earlier orchestral work based on Ostrovsky’s play about Katya Kabanova, The Storm?). But it seems to have been a constant in Abbado’s rep: there are two recordings, with the Chicago Symphony and then the Berlin Phil. There’s also a clip on the BPO’s website of a live performance from some time back, sadly not the bit I would have chosen, but worth seeing.



But none of Abbado’s previous performances could quite have had the tear-jerking, jaw-dropping tonal beauty which enveloped us on Sunday in the very first bars within the spectacular panavision space of Renzo Piano’s big hall. That’s a good little snippet to play blindfold to a listener and ask him or her to guess the composer (I think I might have gone for Sibelius, whose own Tempest music is peerless): this is the isle, and the sea around it, full of mysterious noises. Here’s one in the best sound I could find on YouTube – the Toscanini radio broadcast, alas, sounds awful - conducted by Eliahu Inbal



The lovers’ music may be rather more tied up with Tchaikovsky’s sense of yearning for happiness than about the more innocent Ferdinand and Miranda, but how it ravishes on each appearance (such scoring – and we’re talking the youngish Tchaikovsky of 1873 here).


Ariel and Caliban, too, he gets exactly right. Only the development is a bit perfunctory alongside the final, perfected version of Romeo and Juliet. But I salute the composer’s courage in ending where he started, with the island magic. A great piece, worthy to set alongside Sibelius’s late universe of illustrative numbers. I also dug into Sullivan’s incidental music, and there are some winsome dances there.

Tchaikovsky’s genius burned brighter than anyone had led me to believe last night when Neil Bartlett’s production of The Queen of Spades for Opera North played in the Barbican Theatre. Perhaps I was overcompensating for the sheer unfathomable blandness – Toby Spence excepted - of Deborah Warner’s fuzzy, traditional ENO Eugene Onegin; but I did find myself swept up in the tension that takes hold halfway through and, in the right hands, doesn’t let up until the final requiem.

At first I wondered. Richard Farnes’s way, though accomplished, with the doomy Prelude seemed a bit too leisurely: would there be enough narrative sweep in the drama proper? That soon surfaced, but then Kandis Cook’s multipurpose cheapish set with its moveable walls didn’t seem amenable to atmosphere and wasn’t always well lit. It did the opening garden scene a disservice but worked for Lisa’s room, the party


and the Countess’s bedchamber. And soon a not too laboured pattern emerged in Bartlett’s production – a thousand times clearer and more definite with the characters than Warner’s over at ENO. In every little diverting scene or number, somebody’s out of step or mood with the conformist, and usually uniformly costumed, group: a bullied boy soldier, unhappy Lisa when Paulina and the girls try to entertain her, the affianced couple in the party intermezzo, Yeletsky in the gambling room, even Tomsky himself, a bit of a seedy outsider – though not quite as much, of course, as poor Herman.


Whom I pitied, as one should. I know the never over-finessed big tenor of Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts has run into difficulties up top; he needs time out to firm it up with a good coach or teacher, I don’t think it’s too late, and the middle range remains strong as well as diction-clear. Nor are he and statuesque Orla Boylan ever going to be Love’s Young Dream.


But I’m not sure Tchaikovsky, already bending Pushkin’s cynical story overmuch, intended that. The more truthful a production, and the pithier the translation – by unfairly maligned Martin Pickard, as in the Onegin, this time with Bartlett’s collaboration - the more artificial their stock protestations in the first love scene are going to seem.

What the English text does stress is that the third man seeking the Countess’s three-card secret is a lover as well as an obsessive, and this is novelly played through thanks to Jo Barstow’s incredible characterization. She made very little impact in the nothing-doing Zambello production at Covent Garden, but here she moves through a succession of bewigged mannequin poses


to reveal the woman who still thinks she’s beautiful and alluring – and in this case, remarkably, is, as she uses her dancer’s arms to shed the years in the Gretry aria. Its second verse even out-pianissimo’ed the immortal Felicity Palmer in the classic Glyndebourne production. And Herman’s persecution, more a wooing until he pulls his pistol out (make what you will of that), is as compelling as her death and her sensuous ghost-appearance.


As for Orla – well, I adore her. I heard hardly any of the avowed pitching problems last night, and she does the stricken pathos of the Canal Scene better than any soprano I’ve seen on stage (and more on disc, like Gergiev’s Guleghina, tire at this point; Boylan’s strong semi-dramatic voice doesn’t). The smaller roles all mean something, as none did in the ENO Onegin. William Dazeley's very fine Yeletsky (in the shot below right taking on Herman's final challenge) suggests he'd have been a much better choice of Onegin over at ENO. I liked the contraltoid Paulina of Russian-born Alexandra Sherman - though the 'Chloe' to her 'Daphnis' in the pastoral was poor - and wondered who was singing the excellent Gouvernantka telling off her charges so charmingly in Act 1 Scene 2. It turned out to be that veteran characterizer Fiona Kimm.


The final scene maintains the tension Bartlett and Farnes have established from the bedchamber encounter onwards, helped out perhaps by the second of two cuts (bit of a shame to lose some of the only authentic Pushkinian lines in the gambling-den romp, but never mind). Farnes has true music-theatre instinct; though the Opera North violins need a few extra members, the orchestral sound is strong and true and survives the hideously dry Barbican Theatre acoustics. And there was no problem in having most of the brass and the timps on either side of the stage. What a great and inventive opera it is, even in its padding; and Bartlett saw to it that even the extra stuff tied in well. And thank God - after the leaden waits in Warner's Onegin - for fluid scene changes. Can’t wait for Ruddigore tonight.

Production photos of Opera North's Queen of Spades by Bill Cooper