Leonora at the Frontline

That's the Leonora of Verdi's La Forza del destino, as sung at English National Opera by a phenomenal new American soprano on the block. I've already written a little about Tamara Wilson, London debutante of the year, but not about the visit she so freely agreed to make to my Opera in Depth course at the Frontline Club. One of my students, Robin Weiss, took both the class pictures.

Well, maybe I was daft not to ask if I could record it, because there was so much in those two hours that neither I nor the students had heard about before. As when I steered the 'Brunch with Brünnhildes' Sue Bullock and Catherine Foster, we heard all about the practicalities of singing, the slog of staying on form and making sure you're not sick for the performances, in which case you don't get a penny for all that preparation, what it's like for a woman in opera if the monthly occurrence messes up or changes the voice, and how it can; plus plenty about the technique, the perfect placement and keeping the voice even-toned and well connected throughout the range in spite of the two passaggios in the female voice where the breaks can occur; who was so good at it, like Sutherland, the queen of technicians, who rarely moved the position of her head in performance and how far you can compromise that when a director asks so much of you.

It was also fascinating to learn of the way Tamara approaches text - most singers only 'do' a literal translation from the original, but she adds one in which what's really being meaningfully expressed can be scribbled on with all kinds of profanities, if helpful (viz Donna Anna's underlying fury in her reaction to her would-be rapist). And she cried, or at least shed tears, all the way through the Verdi - how on earth could she manage that without it affecting the voice? One way is to focus on revisiting a childhood scene (if, presumably, happy) - that brings tears of the right sort. Though she found it difficult recently when her grandfather died.

Which, of course, Calixto Bieito did, and Tamara (pictured above as Leonora by Clive Barda for ENO) seemed genuinely happy about what he'd put her through. The artists all arrived at the first rehearsal expecting to sing things through, but in they went to the production straight away, going through each scene over a number of days. Some adjustments would have to be made - Gwyn Hughes Jones, for instance, wasn't happy about his placement on a ramp at one point - but the results seem to have been harmonious. And having lived in terror of Bieito's reputation, our soprano found that he was a 'real pussycat' face to face.

How different all this, then, from when she stepped in for an indisposed Latonia Moore as Aida at the Met. Just one walk around the stage for entrances and exits and positions - nothing too complicated - and then the performances. Great Violeta Urmana, the Amneris, was a help, but you can't always depend upon it. The kindness of colleagues usually saves the day, though. Tamara's best pal in the business is Christine Goerke, only now making a breakthrough with roles like Brünnhilde, Elektra and the Dyer's Wife, and partly through Goerke she knows she won't even be thinking about those pinnacles for another 10 years at least. We can wait. I was surprised to learn she made her own first breakthrough with roles like Konstanze in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and Norma is now a comfortable sing.

Which is why I suppose the bit of coloratura in the Empress's Awakening Scene of Die Frau ohne Schatten comes easily to her. Having reviewed the live Frankfurt CD set for BBC Music Magazine - the review is in the January issue along with a whopping piece on Stravinsky - I asked in advance if she'd mind if we played the whole 'Judgment of Solomon' scene in the class; as with everything else, she was easy and gracious about it and pointed out details in the sequence that helped us understand what she was doing technically. It was only a couple of weeks before the ENO opening that I heard this phenomenal and dramatically expressive voice for the first time, and wondered why we hadn't come across her before. Now we have, and there are talks afoot for more at ENO, though I wouldn't be surprised if the Royal Opera leaps in with role offers that are usually so hard to fill well.

Our five weeks on Forza inevitably filled up with a range of great recordings and performances. Dusolina Giannini and Callas give the best and most expressive interpretations of Leonora's arias, with a special spotlight for another American soprano, this time one who didn't last too well, Susan Dunn, singing 'Pace, pace, mio dio' with a youthful gleam and such ardour on her one and only arias disc. When we came to the big duets and arias for Alvaro and Carlo, we were spoilt for choice: Carreras and Bruson on CD, De Luca and Martinelli for the last duet, Carreras and Cappuccilli on a 1978 DVD from La Scala which only showed, too, what happens when you do nothing with the tricky non-conflicting Leonore-Padre Guardiano duet, even given two of the greatest singers ever (Caballé and Ghiaurov). The scene-stealers, though, were Domingo and Milnes in a Met concert with James Levine so perfectly attuned to them. Here they are, albeit in much poorer picture quality than on my Met DVD, singing 'Solenne in quest'ora'.

That's star quality for you. It still seems that the cornucopia of Forza remains most easily realisable in concert. I still wait for a staging that convinces throughout. Anyway, we've put it uneasily to bed now. On next term to Boris Godunov in six weeks with Enescu's Oedipe and Gerald Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest in the remaining four. If you'd like to come along, do contact me at david.nice@usa.net.

Stop press: reports of bad things ahead for ENO have been confirmed; more anon. Disaster lurks if the inexperienced management doesn't listen to reason. And all this started with such a piece of stupidity from the Arts Council that it makes my blood boil just to think about it.  Can it be possible that one of the very best of years for the company, artistically - one fine MD setting the seal on his achievements, another weighing in with electrifying performances - could be followed by the worst, potentially from next September on?

Farewell Katerina, welcome Leonora

Prefatory note: this was mostly written before I heard the news today. Not that there's anything to say except, thoughts not just to Paris but to the families of everyone blown up or mown down indiscriminately in tens and thousands around the world so far this terrible century. It's almost too much to bear..

As on the stage of the London Coliseum, so in my Opera in Depth course - we've said our goodbyes to Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (ENO production image by Clive Barda) after six Monday afternoons and found ourselves hooked by Verdi's La Forza del destino (or rather "Force" as they have to call it at ENO, though I'd be happier with The Power of Fate as an English title. All ENO photos by Robert Workman). We had a very distinguished transitioner, new ENO chief conductor Mark Wigglesworth, to talk us through a retrospective on Lady M and what to expect from his second opera of the season. He's generous with his time, candid and of course absolutely the best thing that could have happened to ENO after Edward Gardner, able to apply his own deep sound to an orchestra (and chorus, too) in top shape.

Even more amazing is that I asked him if he'd mind mentioning to American soprano Tamara Wilson, making her London debut and giving possibly the operatic performance of the year as Verdi's Leonora, that we'd like her to visit us at the Frontline. She said she'd come, with wit and verve, and so Monday 23 November will be a love-in with La Wilson. If you'd like to attend this one-off, contact me at david.nice@usa.net. I've even been able to schedule an extra class at the end of term so we don't miss out on going through the opera (and four two-hour sessions still aren't enough).

I'm able to divulge what I thought of Force now that my Radio 3 Music Matters chat with Tom Service, who was very much on the same wavelength, has been broadcast; it's up on the iPlayer and as podcast here*. As expected, Calixto Bieito's production was a maddening mix of woolly, repetitive grimness and the odd scene of penetrating brilliance. Certainly I wept and was left shaken when our pitiable heroine seeks consolation in a monastery and meets - wrench of Verdi's intention, this, I know - only sadism and brutality. But as this is the Spanish Catholic church, is it that surprising? Coincidentally, I've just been reading in Glenn Watkins' beautifully written The Gesualdo Hex a document testifying to Spanish monks' infinite misogyny (we're talking Civil War with Bieito, though it's too much to the fore rather than providing a context for the private pursuit of revenge).

Bieito, as usual, overstates that misogyny; there's hardly a scene where a woman isn't on her knees having her hair pulled, or worse - and the expensive set on the revolve isn't usually as effective as it looks above, though the video projections are always impressive. But thanks to Wilson's magnetic acting with voice, face and body, and her fusion with Wigglesworth's phenomenally dramatic and stage-attuned conducting, pity and terror were the keynotes at the end of ENO's first half. There are plenty of hallucinatory moments, like 'Piu tranquillo l'alma sento' and the ghostly clarinet and violin solo reprises of the big phrase in the preceding aria. James Cresswell played his metallic-grim bass part in this superbly: could he play Wotan to Wilson's Brünnhilde, if she stays the course and develops as expected? Mark MUST do a new Ring at ENO, and Richard Jones has said he's willing to look at it again after one and a half productions, so how about it?

We have, of course, to wait another act and a half for Leonora to return, whereupon the tension levels rise again, and the floating of the lines in the great trio of Verdi's revision banish regrets that Bieito didn't go with the first version, very much his line with two corpses and Alvaro throwing himself off a rock cursing God. The other payoff is the most intensely quiet of pianissimos from the ENO Orchestra. Heck, they could all do Aida *now*.

For me, neither of the genre scenes works. Bieito insists on decontextualising them, replacing the old messes of his Don Giovanni et al with chorus stock still in lines; the patchy lighting means you can't often see who's singing when. Predictably, every moment is brutal here, no light and shade (though I wouldn't condone a completely cosy Preziosilla either). Andrew Shore was presumably engaged to make a funny Melitone, but he's just horrid according to Bieito.

The two principal men don't blend well, though each is good. Gwyn Hughes Jones, as we know from his Walther in the ENO Mastersingers, is tireless but a bit bright and underballasted for a tenor of his build; Anthony Michaels-Moore is now merely solid in middle range, inaudible below - I used to like him a lot. Still, he plays the war-crazed veteran compellingly in a Klaus Kinski kind of way. Bieito doesn't help the two stagewise, keeping them apart until Alvaro rants about pulling a knife on Carlo when he's pinioned under him with no chance of doing so. GHJ does fire on all cylinders in the last act, though.

Mark prepared us well the Monday before. Interestingly he had been engaged, before his big appointment, to conduct the opening opera of the season, but that had changed to Carmen. And he was already down to return for another Lady Macbeth. I can't remember everything he said - should have recorded the talk - but among the most interesting observations was one in which he said that while singers will do anything a director asks - because they've come from a musical, rather than a theatrical training, and lack the confidence to speak out - they won't take notes from the conductor half so readily. Though I imagine Wilson did both, so closely bound to her orchestra in sense and intensity, so committed to the sometimes cruel hoops through which Bieito put her, did she seem.

In the first hour of that class, we finished off Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk - or rather Katerina Izmailova, since it was Shostakovich's revision, further cut, which Mikhail Shapiro used in his 1964 film. Mark came in to see the very end, Vishnevskaya so devoted as Katerina that she was prepared not to have a body double for her character drowning self and fellow convict Sonyetka in the Volga.

Memorably she spoke about it some years back - 'weather very cold, water very wet' - and writes in Galina: A Russian Story of how because a reel had been lost the scene had to be re-filmed, not in warm water near Odessa but in the much chillier Gulf of Finland. Well, it was worth it. We also used scenes from Martin Kušej's Amsterdam production with Eva-Maria Westbroek and Christopher Ventris; the class agreed that the wedding scene was more convincing than it had been in Tcherniakov's ENO staging. Otherwise, I beg to differ with some of them that his Act Four was unsatisfactory; for me, that was pure genius.

In the meantime, Georg Friedrich Haas's Morgen und Abend really worked for me at its Royal Opera world premiere last night (we're back to the great Clive Barda for the last image, of Sarah Wegener as Signe and Christoph Pohl as her dead, or departing, father Johannes). Wish we could have asked Graham Vick back to talk about it; apparently he adores the music, and I can well see how it would get under one's skin. Haas is fascinating talking to Tom on that same Music Matters episode: the notion that if you love something enough, there will aways be people in the audience who love it too is beautifully put.

*And/or you might like to listen to Tom Jones interviewed by Cerys Matthews on the BBC World Service. Total tonic on a day bleak in more ways than one.