ENO 2016-17: a half-good season

It came as a bit of a shock to see the full list of English National Opera productions for the coming season and realise, as one blogger put it, that the ones you'd heard promising rumours about amount to just about all there is. This is what the reduced schedule looks like in practice, and it's not right for a national opera company. Another commenter pointed out that it's chorus-lite: none for Lulu or Partenope, a big Te Deum in Tosca, the least good bits of The Pearl Fishers, very little in Don Giovanni, men only in Rigoletto. No Britten or Tippett. In fact no opera on the big scale for which ENO was made. The only familiar works offering much chorus presence are The Pirates of Penzance (photo of Mike Leigh's production below by Tristram Kenton) and The Mikado, the latter touring to Blackpool in what looks like a patronising gesture to The Regions (English Touring Opera serves there, of course). Of course if Miller's dazzling-white production turns more people on to opera, so much the better.

Only compare this with Opera North's far more enterprising season: much the best of the major companies from my perspective: plenty for the chorus to do in Billy Budd (men only plus boys, but what choruses), Suor Angelica (women only, but smaller roles, too), The Snow Maiden (oh, if only we got it down here!) and Turandot.

The unknown quantities at ENO are the new operas. Daniel Schnyder's Charlie Parker's YARDBIRD at the Hackney Empire gives us the promise of a very fine American tenor, Lawrence Brownlee - though as everyone is well aware it's time to balance transatlantic visitors with building up a UK-centric ensemble of soloists again. I wouldn't put much money on Ryan Wigglesworth's The Winter's Tale from the few full-scale works of his I've heard - and when I saw him conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he was the second worst non-maestro I've seen there or anywhere else (the worst has to be China-approved Long Yu). How ironic when he bears the same surname as Mighty Mark, one of the world's BEST conductors. I hope, of course, for better on both RW fronts.

The forthcoming Don Giovanni I had the huge pleasure of learning more about at Lilian Baylis House (pictured up top; it's in West Hampstead, a hell of a cycle from West Kensington) when I interviewed Richard Jones, our only visionary opera director (let's say it again in case the message hasn't sunk in), and the wholly delightful and natural Christine Rice (singing Donna Elvira, one of our great three homegrown mezzos - Sarah Connolly and Alice Coote being the other two). This was a selective event for patrons and would-be patrons, and I think we had fun. The period will be, if I remember Richard's words aright '1946-2007' (very specific!), a closed society, deeply religious like the original Spanish milieu.

Richard is giving DVDs to the cast at the first meeting - I forget some of the choices, but Clive Bayley, the Leporello, is getting Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy, which may well be referenced (a certain freeze-frame of Robert De Niro's character greeting Jerry Lewis in a car was mentioned - the two pictured below in another scene). Christopher Purves's protagonist will have no redeeming features about him. RJ recalled a narcissist he met on one ill-fated venture overseas - no naming of either here, for obvious reasons.

It will be Richard's first major Mozart - he took on a Cosi for Scottish Opera during his trainee years at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre, but recalls it with horror. Funny that both Christine and Richard think Cosi tougher than Don G to pull off (I've seen at least three good productions of the former, only one so far of the latter - Deborah Warner's at Glyndebourne). The problem with Don G, our director finds, is how to keep the flow, especially in the second act where you have to hear both Don Ottavio's 'Il mio tesoro' - Don O will not be a wimp, since he's being played by Allan Clayton - and Elvira's 'Mi tradi'.

I imagine Mark Wigglesworth, working with RJ for the first time, will not make that feel a problem, to judge from his pace-perfect Magic Flute. Heading off tonight to hear another who, I'm sure, will keep Flute lively in concert - the inspiring Ivan Fischer, whose Budapest Festival Orchestra has just had its municipal budget cut by three quarters. And we think we have problems with the philistines here in London...

In the meantime, one piece of good news for next season: Ivo van Hove, my new-found hero, is back for three Toneelgroep Amsterdam spectaculars at the Barbican next season, as well as Hedda Gabler at the National and an opera which I can't mention scheduled for a later Royal Opera season. I'm delighted that Toneelgroep's Roman Plays, which I didn't see first time round, will be back, and while I lament missing out on their Scenes from a Marriage, another Bergman-scripted double, of After the Rehearsal and Persona, looks very promising indeed.

Richard Jones had been to see Kings of War, not sure whether on my ardent recommendation or not, and loved it, especially the take on Henry VI (another image from designer Jan Versweyveld, von Hove's long-term partner, shows a bespectacled Eelco Smits surrounded by Janni Goslinga's Queen Margaret, Fred Goessens' Cardinal and Robert de Hoog's Suffolk). Why did they all seem so real, I asked? Because, he said, they've  mostly worked with van Hove since they were 18, and because KoW had a six-month rehearsal period. Utopia in the theatre, if the talent and genius are right.

Cabbages and kings

Or rather, onions and emperors...



all in last Thursday's stately progress from Borough Market via the British Library to Ivan Fischer's exhilarating performance of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Food and drink first: that little row of trendy eateries on the edge of the expensive but still unique Borough Market which so appeals to us BoBos (= Bohemian Bourgeois; it could equally well be BohBous). Second only to St John, where we took my blogging New Best Friend Will and his partner Laurent after a Barbican concert for pig's spleen, snails and Eccles cakes, is the Wright Brothers Port and Oyster Bar. It was full up on a Thursday lunchtime, however, so we found a pure Boh organic burger space along the same street where we sat in the semi cold and watched life passing like that seasons-alter scene in Notting Hill. Then to two-thirds of the usual ritual: a cake from Conditorei and Cook, a latte (J's; mine is an espresso but doesn't photograph so picturesquely) at the Monmouth Coffee Company.


Next I became a snapping tourist in the market. Couldn't resist reminders that somewhere in Kent, albeit forcibly, something - rhubarb - is growing


and there are plenty of fish in the sea, as yet


though probably not this one, not in these waters, at any rate.


I've already waxed about the Alice cases at the British Library. But we also stumbled across a cast of Chopin's hand


and, only connect, moved from daguerreotypes, of which this portrait of a none too happy looking Chopin shortly before his death is one of the earliest,


to the photography exhibition. Although I've been to Lacock Abbey, I'd forgotten how artistic a picture-taker was Fox Talbot. I especially love this homage to a Dutch domestic scene, captured at Lacock.


After killing time in bookshops and cafes, we slumped in the RFH and wandered over to the QEH for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment's latest instalment in their Beethoven cycle, this time with the inspiring, always unpredictable Ivan Fischer (photo by Marco Borggreve).


The Second Symphony had its surprises - the wild coda of the first movement, which given this band's shock of the new, one could understand first-time listeners being discomforted by; and the way Fischer turned the last of the slow movement's clutch of themes into a bouncing little Landler. But of course it was the Eroica which was bound to astonish.


The Funeral March became a private utterance, with overheard upbeats from the splendid double-basses led by the ever-expressive Chi-Chi Nwanoku; and I think I found loveliest of all that moment in the Prometheus variations when the tune very briefly turns bucolic after a patch of turbulence. The horns held fast, and of course produced a sound no modern equivalent can match; besides, the valveless originals give a competely different meaning to Beethoven's line and choice of strong/weak notes.

There are, of course, heaven-storming sounds you don't get with a period-instrument band, but by way of compensation how much colour can be shifted in a single chord. And it was all as invigorating as I'd hoped, my mood having been occluded by personal grief and a harrowing sit through Maw's Sophie's Choice on DVD (which does work for me, ultimately, in the last act, touched by grace). I'd wanted more of the same brio on Saturday from the BBCSO/Minkowski Pergolesi and Stravinsky double bill, found myself exiled to the Bavarian RSO/Jansons concert but discovered it to be equally uplifting, thanks to Mariss's dancing mobility and a rather unusual, buoyant view of Shostakovich Ten, duly noted in detail in my Arts Desk review. And, yes, the BRSO IS one of the world's best orchestras, no doubt about that.