Six bests in nine days

Namely as good as it can get in theatre (Simon Stone's radical adaptation and production of Medea for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam at the Barbican); in concerts (the two London Symphony Orchestra stunners to celebrate Bernard Haitink's 90th birthday - Mozart and Bruckner on Sunday, Dvořák and Mahler on Thursday); in fiction (putting my thoughts together on Robert Menasse's polyphonic masterpiece The Capital as well as meeting him last Friday); and in opera, stupendous results at the highest level of performance in Birmingham Opera Company's site-specific Shostakovich Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in the Tower Ballroom on the edge of Edgbaston Reservoir. To which I should add the perfection of a small gallery - major collection, handsome surroundings - in the shape of the Barber Institute on Birmingham University's campus. The below is merely the atrium to the superb deco concert hall; most of the masterpieces are in the rooms on the next floor, but even here we have a famous Rodin and a Chola bronze of Natarajan.

Much to say about the Barber collection, but now now. I need to take a break and simply digest after all that writing for The Arts Desk, and as there were too many good production/concert/rehearsal pics around that would otherwise go to waste, why not use some of them? The one below by Sanne Peper, of the stupendous Marieke Heebink as Anna, a contemporary Medea of excess vitality, and Aus Greidanus Jr as Lukas (Jason) with their two sons, is one I couldn't use in the review because the boys were different. And perhaps it's a bit of a spoiler as to how the ash which starts falling on the blindingly white stage two thirds of the way through gets deployed.

Haitink was photographed at the first of the two 90th birthday concerts by Robert Allan. You'd need to watch the film formerly on the LSO website to observe his superb control and vigilance - my friend Joe Smouha beautifully described 'the architecture spun from those tiny movements at the end of the baton' - but there's a sense of that here, albeit in a more genial moment.

The Khovanskygate experience of 2014 told me that Graham Vick's Lady Macbeth would be opera at its communicative best. Sure, every production of it I've seen - Pountney's twice at ENO, followed by Tcherniakov's, Jones's twice at the Royal Opera - has hit hard; but the closeness of one's promenading self to the action, the involvement of all strands of Birmingham society in the chorus and acting group, make this an unrepeatable experience. I got there early because they'd asked if I would prep a group of young volunteers on how to blog their experience (it actually turned out to be how they'd present their enthusiasms about the project on camera, but we quickly adapted and I got something very different out of each - to be blogged about here very soon). This shot I took of a warm-up gives some idea of the venue, which they'd further deconstructed. The orchestra platform is left, the first stage for the action, the Izmailov kitchen, to the right.

And we need a couple more production photos, by Adam Fradgley/Exposure, of the amazing Chrystal E Williams as Katerina/'The Wife'. Up top, she's despatching her inopportunely arrived husband Boris (Joshua Stuart). Here she is again, first liberated,

then deserted by that shit Sergey/'The Lover' (Brenden Gunnell).

I'm more and more drawn to Birmingham, even if it did vote for Brexit by a narrow margin (would it now, I wonder?) , and however messed up the city centre. There are so many hidden delights, and each time I go I discover one or two more. It has one of our most vibrant cultural scenes, that's to be sure. Now, if only BOC could think of Prokofiev's War and Peace...problematic, I know, because Part One is largely chorus-free. Maybe that could be done in a smallish theatre and then Part Two could be theirs in another extraordinary big venue, both with the CBSO. Or perhaps The Fiery Angel with Williams, whose upper range could certainly handle the crazy role of Renata. Anything is possible with this company.

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.

Close and Byrne

That’s Glenn and Rose as Patty Hewes and Ellen Parsons, dodgy old hand and incorruptible novice-who-grows. They make a magnificent double act in one of the best TV legal thrillers I’ve ever seen, if not the best. Yes, I’ve come late as usual to a classic American series, Damages, and we weren’t sure if we would stick to it after the first few episodes, where some of the characters (not least Ellen’s doomed boyfriend – and that’s not a spoiler owing to the singular shaping of each ‘season’) seemed seriously undercharacterised.There was also a distractingly, unintentionally funny attempt by Slovenian-American actor Željko Ivanek, compelling enough as the troubled Ray Fiske, to do a deep-south accent that lurched all over the place to English and Australian, among others.

Now I think Damages is the most skillfully plotted of crime dramas. Its structure has held good for the first four series: reveal something of the denouement at the start – which in the case of 1 and 3 means you know in episode one who’s going to get murdered  – but baffle your viewers as to how it got to that point. Of course I can’t say much more without giving essential details away, but I will say that I never guessed any of the details in the outcomes.

The brilliance of the scriptwriters is to keep so many strands in play before tying them more or less together. The masterpiece so far is Season 3, all about dysfunctional families. The central group under surveillance are the nearest and dearest of massive fraudster Louis Tobin (Len Cariou, creator of the role of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd). Campbell Scott gives an incredibly nuanced performance as the son; you just don’t notice how a seemingly good man goes bad out of desperation.

Lily Tomlin is his mother; the relatively small air time she occupies earns her a mention only in the closing credits as a 'special guest', but she’s central and compelling. The lawyer who thinks he’s family is also masterfully played by Martin Short. Kept in play with this are the dodgy behaviour of Ellen’s sister and Patty’s disastrous relationship with her only son.

There’s also the question hanging over the fate of the weak, vain demi-villain of the first series Arthur Frobisher, an amazingly good performance from Ted Danson which swings between making you laugh at the man’s cravenness and despise his corruption.

Series Three is consummate in swinging from pure comedy in the reintroduction of the Frobisher strain – there's been precious little humour in the first phase of Season One -  to the nastier side. And the upshot of the family tragedy is pure House of Atreus stuff.

So strong performances flank the two leads (in Season Two William Hurt, pictured above with Close, was central; in Season Four John Goodman is one of the two nasties to get, though I’m less gripped so far*). Rose Byrne I thought at first was destined to play the pretty cipher, but the follow-up on her grief over her boyfriend’s murder and rage at who tried to kill her – no spoilers there – has her running a range of melancholy and tired expressions, and it’s no mean feat to make essential decency interesting. Working with the senior actress must have been a masterclass which certainly produced strong results.

Close is so brilliant that you’re tempted to think she must be Patty Hewes, a woman of infinite complexity, a terrifying mixture of ice and red-hot rage, prepared to do bad to get good results. This is one of the great screen performances, no doubt, and it uses all the acting skills it takes to play a character you often can’t tell is acting. Would I go and see her next year in Sunset Boulevard at the Coli? Probably not, given that it's Lloyd Webber penetrating the walls of that holy sanctum (Sondheim, fine, though the ENO Sweeney was not one of their best shows). But I should point out that these money-spinning annual musicals don't eat into ENO's standard rep time; they appear around Easter when there used to be ballet.

We snatch the odd episode between or after evening commitments. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was, as anticipated, the stand-out triumph, fully vindicating a massive interview with conductor Mark Wigglesworth I put up on The Arts Desk more or less in its entirety (pictured above by Clive Barda: the phenomenally various Patricia Racette as Katerina with rat-poisoned dad in law Boris as sung by Robert Hayward). But I also enjoyed an exceptionally rich parade of contrasts in late September – the most vital entertainment possible in baroque violinist with a difference Bjarte Eike’s Alehouse romp after his Image of Melancholy programme at the delicious Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, “the Trocks” dancing classics to Petipa-perfection followed by a Ukrainian Don Juan, perfect chamber music at the Wigmore, two great performances of Mahler symphonies on consecutive nights.

*Just finished a Sunday evening's worth of that series to the bitter end, and though for the first time I guessed the outcome of what we see in the first episode as usual - halfway through, at least - it was as intricately plotted and resolved as the others. 

Domestic strife at the Frontline

A cup of coffee helps to put things right in the turbulent household of Robert and Christine Storch (aka Richard and Pauline Strauss – played above in the recent Garsington production of Strauss's Intermezzo by Mark Stone and Mary Dunleavy, photo by Mike Hoban). It takes mushrooms sprinkled with rat poison, and then a good old-fashioned strangling to solve the problem among the Izmailovs of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk when bored and abused housewife Katerina wants a real man (my thanks to Eduard Straub for allowing me to reproduce two images from the ever-fascinating Dmitri Tcherniakov's production as first staged for Deutsche Oper am Rhein, heading for ENO on 26 September).

We've had several summer months to put between the Strauss comedy and Shostakovich's compassionate shocker - to which I'm devoting five weeks from Monday 28 September  - in my Opera in Depth course at the Frontline Club (update: Mark Wiggleworth, with whom I recently had a true conversation for an Arts Desk Q&A, has agreed to come and talk on both Lady Macbeth and Verdi's The Force of Destiny on 2 November).

Back in mid-July we wound up in double-quick time with the happy ending of Strauss’s autobiographical marriage opera, and after doubts seeped in with Dunleavy’s less than sympathetic Christine at Garsington, and for that matter with the only half-realised production from Bruno Ravella, Felicity Lott and John Cox in the Glyndebourne production of the 1980s – the only one, I think, on DVD – won even hardened sceptics round.

It was Elisabeth Söderström who sang the first Christine at Glyndebourne, and a half-good Chandos recording exists to testify to her own doughtier charms. Flott simply owned the role, as they say: she’d figure as a great comedienne if Strauss’s excellent libretto were merely read out. With both physical glamour – which presumably the real Pauline didn’t possess – and nervous perplexity and perversity – which clearly she did - she suspends all disbelief.

Even so questions need to be asked about one crucial issue: why, when Strauss put in nearly all his real wife’s bon mots and her less attractive qualities to boot, didn’t he mention that the wife had been a superb prima donna who gave up her singing career to look after husband and son? Clearly the flighty temperament was always there, but wouldn’t it have been exacerbated by dissatisfaction that she had sacrificed her career. Christine in Intermezzo is merely a spoilt housewife with charm, if you're lucky with the performer, and that’s unfair to the autobiographical roots.

The other question that bugs me is where Christine’s presumably naïve flirtation with the young Baron Lummer – a comic take on the Marschallin-Octavian relationship deliberately evoked in fleeting moments – had its roots in real life. Everyone who loves Strauss knows the anecdote of the mistaken telegram which nearly led to divorce on grounds of infidelity. But I, for one, would like to know about the Baron Lummer saga. The point here, though, is that it mostly shows the heroine in her most attractive and even generous lights.

We will probably never know. All I can say is that with the very first class I was back in love with the score and (most of) the situations. It was also a pleasure to get to know the splendid vocabulary of Strauss's original German libretto (both the Glyndebourne and Garsington productions were sung in Andrew Porter's fine English translation - right under the circumstances, I think). That was thanks to other supreme interpreters – Lucia Popp and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on the Sawallisch recording, more recently the wonderfully characterful and humorous Simone Schneider on a new CD set taken from a semi-staged Munich performance.

And Jeffrey Tate’s Rotterdam Philharmonic recording of the Four Interludes embraces a desert island track of mine in his very leisurely but glowing account of the “Reverie by the Fireside” – perhaps Strauss’s greatest slow movement.

Four of next season’s operatic choices for the course leaped out when English National Opera announced Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk as its opening production (second image of original Deutsche Oper am Rhein production above), Verdi’s La forza del destino to follow  and Tristan und Isolde as its big show of next summer, while the Royal Opera’s Boris Godunov, directed by Richard Jones and conducted by Antonio Pappano, ought to be among their best successes. I knew I couldn’t justify a whole half-term on Enescu’s Oedipe or Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest, so why not spend three Mondays on the tragedy and two on the groundbreaking operatic comedy? Mark Wigglesworth has promised to come and talk about the first two new productions he'll be conducting in his first season as ENO's Music Director, and I hope Richard will return for Boris. Join us at the wonderful Frontline from 28 September - Mondays 2-4pm; contact me for details on david.nice@usa.net. Oh, and yes, I admit it, this is a 'shop-window' entry.