Zoom courses: from Lucretia to Rosenkavalier

"S'ist mein Leiblied' - 'it's my favourite song' - declares Baron Ochs in Der Rosenkavalier of his signature waltz-tune. By the same token, Rosenkavalier is probably my Leiboper - certainly the one I know best, the intricacies of which, in both Hofmannsthal's libretto and Strauss's music, seem inexhaustible. This coming term's Zoom course, starting tomorrow (9 January) will be my third visit in the opera classes, but since the last time there have been new recordings and new productions on video (including Bruno Ravella's for Garsington, the exquisite and Grace-Kelly-stylish Miah Persson's Marschallin and Hanna Hipp's fine Octavian pictured in it above by Johan Persson; Irish National Opera takes on this staging in March with a fine cast led by Celine Byrne, the fabulous Paula Murrihy and Claudia Boyle). There's always more to discover. And as always when I repeat a classic, I don't look back on old notes. 

Last term ended rather more positively than I was expecting. I'd been reluctant to revisit Britten's The Rape of Lucretia, so whittled it down to three rather than five classes (Rosenkavalier will have seven, Korngold's Die tote Stadt also three). Ronald Duncan's often excruciating libretto troubled me even more in Oliver Mears' production when I saw it at Aldeburgh. 

I'd always wondered about André Obey's play Le viol de Lucrèce - about which all the contributors to the Rape of Lucretia symposium book I picked up are so cagey that an addendum slip had to be printed giving it proper credit. Then I found that Thornton Wilder had translated it in 1933. Surely Eric Crozier, at least, knew this? It's so much better, in every respect, than the drama Duncan fashioned. For a start there's no Christian overlay. There ARE two narrators, a man who follows Tarquin's progress, a woman who reflects Lucrèce, but they don't appear until Obey's second act (the first has two soldiers relay, chorus-like, what's going on in Collatine's tent). The aftermath is much more acceptable today: Lucrèce as powerful tragic heroine, knowing that her divulging of the rape will trigger Collatine's vengeance and a Roman uprising, not some self-disgusted victim. 

At the beginning of the last and third class I continued the comparison between opera and play. But joining us were Jean Rigby, the most moving Lucretia I've ever seen on stage, and her husband Jamie Hayes, who'd directed the work for British Youth Opera. Jean had already instigated a kind of cast reunion of the original Glyndebourne Albert Herring - since I don't seem to have written about it here, I must boast about the other visitors: John Graham Hall, Alan Opie, Felicity Palmer, Alexander Oliver and Felicity Lott (who sang Lady Billows in a revival) - and I knew what a fun and generous person she is. 

Everything Jean had to say about the circumstances around that remarkable Graham Vick Lucretia at ENO back in 1987 informed what we were about to watch - namely Act Two from the moment Tarquinius awakens Lucretia to the end of the opera. And the film itself was testament to how, when every singer has worked on phrasing and meaning so intensively - not just Jean, but everyone else in an extraordinary cast - reservations about the infelicties of the text vanish in the face of such consummate music-making, such singing-acting. The whole film is available on YouTube but in a fuzzy picture, so I recommend you get the DVD. 

We were blessed with our guests this last term. I'm so happy that John Savournin, our most innovative living Savoyard as singer and director, was able to join us for the two classes on The Yeomen of the Guard (I still didn't manage to persuade two students that G&S is worthy of keeping company with the best). John's brilliant re-imagining of Patience for nine singers at Wilton's Music Hall was the big surprise in my operatic 'Best of 2022' for The Arts Desk. When we spoke he was preparing for the last performance of Golijov's Ainadamar at Scottish Opera, a production I long to see; hence, I think, the moustache.

And right at the end of the five classes on Verdi's Aida, I suddenly remembered that Tamara Wilson, one of the most generous of guests way back when I was still giving live classes at the Frontline Club and she was performing Leonora in The Force of Destiny at ENO, had sung the title role all round the world (but not, sadly, in the UK, and after a bad experience in Verona which I think may have had to do with a refusal to sing it in blackface, as the vile Netrebko recently did, she has retired the role from her rep). 

When we met online, Tammy was preparing to revisit the role of Turandot, this time for Barrie Kosky in Amsterdam (I was so hoping we could go and stay with our friends there, and see it, before Christmas, but too many hospital appointments got in the way). I remembered how revelatory she had been on the previous visit about how she marks up the score, and includes intentions, and so requested she did the same here. The 'intention' behind 'straniero, ascolta!', for instance, reads 'feel pleasure that I'm going to kill him'.

So yes, what fun we had. And I'm hoping we'll be able to welcome at least one Marschallin, Octavian, Sophie and Ochs to the Rosenkavalier sessions; watch this space. Still not too late to join if you can - from anywhere in the world, time depending. And if you can't make the class, you get the video. Full details below; click to enlarge.

BBC Proms: talks and events

Frankly, this is first and foremost a shop-window alert to see if anyone else wants to come along to the remaining two talks I'm giving on Proms-related works: on Janáček's The Makropoulos Case tomorrow (10 August) 2.30-4.30pm at an address in Lancaster Gate, and on Mahler's Seventh Symphony, Thursday 18, same time, in St John's Wood. Addresses supplied on enquiry to me at david.nice@usa.net. Tamara Wilson is also due to return to the Frontline some time in the week of 5 September before her guaranteed-amazing performance in the Verdi Requiem on 9 September. She'll get back to me once she knows her rehearsal schedule. And you'd better believe that Tamara is almost as good a talker as she is a singer (only 'almost' because the singing is something superhuman...). There she is below with Mark Wigglesworth and James Creswell in the closing scene of Act Three from Wagner's Die Walküre.

Back in July we covered Mahler 3 and Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette, and I learned a lot more simply retracing familiar territory - there's no end to what you can keep on finding in the great masterpieces. Nor did the performances disappoint - though I felt a little distanced from Haitink's magisterial and at times very slow Mahler and JEG's Roméo would have been perfect if he'd had a Friar Laurence as good and true-bass-y as David Soar for Andrew Davis earlier in the year.

Highlights of the ones I've caught so far? Unquestionably Mark Wigglesworth's converting me almost completely to Tippett's A Child of Our Time, with fabulous soloists alongside Tamara and an apotheosis that really was levitational, and 27-year-old Pavel Kolesnikov as soloist in Tchaikovsky's glorious Second Piano Concerto alongside the superlative National Youth Orchestra of Scotland under Ilan Volkov (who quite transformed the imperial style into something altogether more humanly joyous).

HK Gruber was a star yesterday lunchtime, too.

The NYO experience the previous evening was a little tainted by Ed Gardner's dim view of Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra - no idea what he wanted to say, if anything, with the work - and by my neighbour, who sketched throughout. This, inevitably, I didn't mention in the review, but he started by thinking he was some kind of artistic seismograph attached to Iris ter Schiphorst's Gravitational Waves, pencilling squiggles and zig zags as the music took him. You can imagine the resulting chaos on paper. For Strauss and Holst, he contented himself by drawing the players and clearly thinking this would be the main event of the evening for his neighbours, whom he immediately started showing the results.

Halfway through The Planets, I thought that instead of getting into an altercation with him if I asked him to stop, I'd unostentatiously put my rucksack on my knee so I couldn't see his drawing, but this of course impeded his wide-ranging right hand so he got indignant. Then he and his ferocious wife changed seats. I knew she'd be spoiling for a fight at the end, and determined to avoid one, but she got it by sitting and refusing to move as we and a nice, baffled gentleman behind us wanted to get out. 'You are the rudest audience I've ever encountered!' she blustered - having fidgeted throughout and hummed along out of tune to Holst's 'Jupiter' tune aka 'I vow to thee my country' - whereupon I cried shame on her. Oh dear - these conflicts are not to be stoked, but what can one do? Otherwise, the Proms audiences haven't been bad at all, and it was redeemed the next afternoon by my being able to tell the little girls sitting in front the story of The Firebird before it began. Which meant they enjoyed it enormously, if a little actively, playing princesses and ogres, which I didn't mind at all.

Fondest peripheral memory so far: seeing the huge queue stretching around the block ten minutes before Haitink's Mahler 3 was due to start. Even though it may have been mixed up with another waiting for the late-night Bowie Prom (which I switched on the telly back home to watch live, and off when the rapper came on), it reminded me that nothing has changed since I joined the queue for his 'Resurrection' in 1978. As I recount in the Arts Desk review, it was my first Promming season and I arrived too late to be admitted into the Arena; my one and only Gallery experience taught me never to go up there again. Still, it was the summer of Discovering Mahler and Abbado's Chicago recording was the first symphony recordingr I borrowed from Banstead Library.

Thrilled, too, to take dear friend Chris Gunness's 18-year-old nephew Andrew Lavelle to Proms while he was visiting from Houston. His first experience of the Albert Hall - that was good to get - and as he has a very wise head on young shoulders his responses were all perceptive. He soon takes up a place as a very talented viola-player at the Juilliard: what discoveries lie ahead for him. There he is above with uncles and friend.

And this is the Albert Memorial at c.9.30pm. Darkness on emerging from a Prom is a sure sign that the days are getting shorter again - September visits are always tinged with a certain circumstantial melancholy.

The nearby Serpentine Pavilion is a triumph this year, one of the best, from Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. That will last us well into early Autumn.

And I have still to seek out the smaller projects around Kensington Gardens, though I'm told they're not up to scratch.

Proms photos by Chris Christodoulou except lead image of NYO, by Mark Allan. All courtesy of BBC.

ENO at the Oliviers: winners not present

Congratulations to the English National Opera Chorus and Orchestra for winning the Outstanding Achievement in Opera at the Olivier Awards. I'm sure stupendous Tamara Wilson, Leonora in the company's Force of Destiny, and the evergreen Felicity Palmer, the Countess in last season's Queen of Spades, also nominated, will have been cheering them on.

Yet it's baffling that no-one from either chorus or orchestra was present to claim the award, not having been invited. At the very least the spirited co-leader, Janice Graham, should have been there. Isn't this a very symbol of the gulf between the CEO and Board on the one hand and the 'creatives' who have always delivered through thick and thin on the other?

I understand Martin Fitzpatrick of the Music Staff made a perfectly fine speech about treasuring what they have, presumably ironic when you bear in mind that the majority of the administration who attended have been doing their best to dismantle what makes this company great. It's still not too late to make the right kind of changes. Mark Wigglesworth remains to show the ENO in all its glory in the Jenůfa this season and two more productions in the next. As I predicted last month, the artists will all put up a fight to keep him.

Proud of my colleagues on The Arts Desk, chiefly theatre critic Marianka Swain, for tweeting so trenchantly throughout the event and declaring TAD's allegiance to the ENO cause. And there really is only one (cause): to survive and change, but not at the cost of becoming a part-time company.

STOP PRESS (4/4): Our Tamara - as I think I can say after two hours in her grounded, funny company when she visited the opera class at the Frontline Club - has just won the prestigious Richard Tucker Prize for 2016, following in rather distinguished footsteps (Renée Fleming, Lawrence Brownlee, Stephanie Blythe, David Daniels, Angela Meade, Joyce DiDonato, Michael Fabiano and Jamie Barton). ENO casting has been criticised for over-use of American singers, and it does need to get back to promoting a UK ensemble, but I've NEVER heard Verdi singing like hers at the Coli (and Marjorie Owens's Norma was a good call, too). She'll be back here in July, but doing what I can't as yet say*. Photo above by Aaron Gang.

*Update (1/5) - I can now: the soprano part in Tippett's A Child of Our Time and testing out a bit of Brünnhilde in the final scene of Die Walküre Act 3 with James Cresswell as Wotan: my doing, says Mark Wigglesworth, who's conducting the Prom in question.

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.