Showing posts with label ENO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ENO. Show all posts

Thursday, April 23, 2015

More on ENO & British opera

Further to my post this morning, in which I grumbled about the lack of British operas beyond G&S in the new ENO season, I've got some more depressing information. I'm reliably informed that the company was planning to put on a major work by an important living British composer, but that this had to be abandoned at an advanced stage - because of the funding cuts. As you'll remember, the ACE slashed ENO's grant by a shocking 29 per cent and removed it from the national portfolio. And so they can't do a big piece by a big Brit. This seems to me very much like the ACE shooting itself in both feet at the same time.

I'd also like to make it clear that ENO has a terrific track record of supporting British music - just a few of its recent productions have included Vaughan Williams's Pilgrim's Progress, plenty of great Britten but especially that amazing Peter Grimes, the triumph of Julian Anderson's Thebans, and the premiere this month of Tansy Davies's Between Worlds. The list could continue. It's precisely because of that track record that I find it so disappointing that there isn't anything to match it in 2015-16. New opera commissioned from Ryan Wigglesworth is due in 2017.

Sunday, April 12, 2015

Between Worlds: the premiere

I reviewed ENO's world premiere last night of Between Worlds, Tansy Davies's new opera with librettist Nick Drake on the awe-inspiring topic of 9/11. The piece? Quite a lot of problems where different aspects were at odds with each other, but some of us wept anyway. The performance? Superb. My review is in The Arts Desk, here (£).

Thursday, April 02, 2015

9/11 comes to ENO

I had a wonderful talk with the composer Tansy Davies, whose first opera Between Worlds brings a profound take on the Twin Towers attack to the stage of the Barbican, in a co-commission between this centre and ENO. Its world premiere is on 11 April. My piece is in the Independent, here.

Friday, February 13, 2015

ENO: souls, soles and shoestrings

Yesterday's bombshell about ENO arrived wrapped in rose-scented words just in time for Valentine's Day. Some people even fell for the good news story: £30m over two years from ACE, woo-hoo!

Oh dear. It turns out that this money is "special measures" (it's the original core funding that was in place anyway. plus £7m in transition funds, as we understand it). If the company doesn't shape up in a way that the Arts Council England approves, it could then lose all its government funding. And that, you could say, would probably mean tickets. The wrong sort of tickets.

The prospect of ENO vanishing from the planet is devastating for music lovers in London. Thinking of the finest operatic performances I've seen in the last few years, I'd have to point to many things that simply would not have taken place at Covent Garden. John Adams, Vaughan Williams, Terry Gilliam's Berliozes, Rosenkavalier staged by McVicar with Amanda Roocroft, Sarah Connolly, Sophie Bevan and Sir John Tomlinson, and that extraordinary, desperately underrated and undersold Martinu opera Julietta. Calixto Bieito. Peter Sellars. The list could go on. Not so much English National Opera, perhaps, as British International Opera. There have also been a few very big, very expensive mistakes - yet without a willingness to take risks, opera as an art form really would die. And London without all that adventure would be like...well, New York, without New York City Opera.

Which, of course, has gone. Operatic Manhattan now has only the Met. Comparisons are being drawn, even ones predicated as if this is not a bad thing. But it is a very bad thing. NYCO's closure appears to have been the result, as far as one can tell from here, of a gigantic f***-up and could conceivably have been avoided had things been handled differently earlier in the process.

Earlier in the process, as it happens, the ACE's chairman, Peter Bazalgette, was formerly the chairman of ENO. Since his move to the ACE, ENO has been targeted for bigger funding cuts than any other organisation still in the organisation's national 'portfolio'. According to the Guardian Bazalgette has reportedly not been participating in the ACE's discussions this week.

One hopes profoundly that in the two years' grace it's been so, er, kindly granted, the company can pull together and find means to survive. That what might look like cynical attempts to kill it off are not in fact that. That whatever's going on at the micro-level behind the scenes can be put to one side in favour of the macro-level bigger picture. That artistic vision can be respected on the one hand and financial prudence accepted on the other.

Since the resignation of the executive director, Henriette Götz, two weeks ago Anthony Whitworth-Jones, formerly of Glyndebourne and then Garsington, has been brought in to help. It is interesting to reflect that Glyndebourne and Garsington are both privately funded. JDCMB is a passionate believer in the principle of public funding for the arts, but if ENO has to be privatised, it would still be better than losing it altogether. Reduce it to middle-of-the-road potboiler productions - as some would like to - and there's really not much point having it at all; the good news is that neither Glyndebourne nor Garsington has ever resorted to that.

This looks to me like something one step from Shock Doctrine-style brinksmanship - it is certainly quacking like that particular duck - but let's keep fundamental ideas strong. This is a company with a big vision, a big theatre, an expensive art form and not a big budget under those circumstances. The ACE has got them over a barrel and something may have to give. Sacrifice real estate if necessary; find other pricing models and fundraising opportunities, by all means; but whatever happens, whoever leaves, don't jettison the principle of artistic vision that has kept ENO a truly international force. Let's keep ENO BIO.

Monday, October 20, 2014

A debate about Klinghoffer - the British way



This is the civilised debate that ENO held about The Death of Klinghoffer and the nature of art before Tom Morris's staging opened here two years ago. The run itself was generally well received and passed without incident.

Parterre has provided an audio streaming of the opera from its world premiere in 1991 and a link to the libretto, so it is perfectly possible to make yourself well informed about the reality of its content if you so wish. http://parterre.com/2014/10/20/hearing-klinghoffer/

Update, 9.40pm: here is my article on Klinghoffer from The Independent in 2012
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/fear-and-loathing-in-london-the-death-of-klinghoffer-is-staged-in-the-capital-for-the-first-time-6671388.html?origin=internalSearch

Thursday, October 02, 2014

The Girl of the Golden West End

I wrote this for the Indy's 'Observations' section last weekend, but can't find it online, so here it is in full glory...Puccini's The Girl of the Golden West opens at ENO tonight, with Susan Bullock as Minnie. Enjoy.




Sometimes you can wait two decades for a new production of a particular opera, only to find three turning up within a year. Until recently Puccini’s La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) was a relative rarity on these shores. But with stagings this year at Opera North, Opera Holland Park and now English National Opera, where a new one directed by Richard Jones opens on 2 October, it looks as if this entrancing work’s day has arrived.

It is not before time. The composer regarded it as one of his greatest; leading sopranos put its heroine, Minnie, at the top of their role wish-lists. Yet this piece can raise awkward expectations in a movie-drenched public: it’s an operatic western. Puccini gives his all in the service of a story about miners, bandits and a feisty female saloon owner. Maybe opera-goers are more accustomed to tales of consumptive courtesans perishing by inches in 19th-century Paris.

To Puccini himself, though, the Californian gold rush was wildly romantic; as exotic as those topics he tackled elsewhere, such as the Geisha girls of Japan (Madama Butterfly) or rebellion, torture and passion in 18th-century Rome (Tosca). Basing the opera on David Belasco’s play of the same title – and, so the story goes, inspired by an illicit female muse a little way from his home at Torre del Lago, Tuscany – he set to work at fever pitch. The world premiere took place at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in 1910.

In Minnie he created a gigantic leading role, requiring great stamina and strength. It is a dream part for sopranos with the right voice and personality to carry it off; today such stars as Eva-Maria Westbroek and Susan Bullock, who takes the lead at ENO, cite it as a top favourite.

A passionate, complex character, with music to match, the saloon keeper Minnie risks all for love. She falls for the mysterious Dick Johnson, only to discover that he is a bandit in disguise. Despite the deception, she is willing to save him – with her own life, if need be – and the opera offers that rare treat: a happy ending.

The Wild West nevertheless may not be its only problem in reaching the modern public’s hearts. It lacks set-pieces that can be plucked out and popularised. There is no show-stopping aria like ‘Nessun dorma’ from Turandot or ‘Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca that can be played time after time on the radio. Instead, the entire score is magnificent, in a whole different way: it is riveting music-drama, a play set to sophisticated, wonderfully orchestrated, through-composed sonic treats. Take on Fanciulla and you take all or nothing.

Perhaps this gold rush of productions shows that finally we are ready for that. Meanwhile, if operatic westerns are having a moment in the sun, it is maybe time for a British company to present the American composer Charles Wuorinen’s recently premiered opera of Brokeback Mountain.

The Girl of the Golden West, English National Opera, from 2 October. Box office: 020 7845 9300


Tuesday, April 29, 2014

ENO turns to musicals

ENO announces its 2014-15 season this morning. Gently buried within is the information that they are going to do... musicals. They have a new partnership with Michael Grade and Michael Linnit to this end.

The latter two say:
"We are delighted with this unique and exciting partnership, which creates an opportunity to embrace the new climate where audiences seem to enjoy the blurring of boundaries between opera, theatre and musicals and clearly they love a first class show. Bringing the considerable creative flair of ENO to bear on modern musicals will bring new audiences to the Coliseum, new revenues to ENO, and a new look at some of the greatest pieces of musical theatre ever written."

OK, so maybe they need the money; who wouldn't these days? But er, modern musicals? Isn't the West End a bit full of commercial theatres doing this already? Major, major hmmm. That is not, repeat NOT, why we need a subsidised English-language opera house. Jerome Kern's Showboat would be great, of course, as would West Side Story, but these are hardly modern...

First reaction to the rest of the season, though, is that it is absolutely yummy scrummy. A few highlights, in no particular order:

Stuart Skelton sings Otello.
First full staging of John Adams's The Gospel According to the Other Mary, directed by Peter Sellers.
Meistersinger with Ed Gardner conducting, directed by Richard Jones. Yes yes yes!
Mike Leigh to make operatic directorial debut in The Pirates of Penzance. (?!)
Richard Jones also directs The Girl of the Golden West, with Susan Bullock as Minnie.
Felicity Palmer as the Countess in The Queen of Spades.
New opera about 9/11 by Tansy Davies.
Joanna Lee writes ENO's first opera for children.
New partnership with Bristol Old Vic => Monteverdi Orfeo directed by Tom Morris.
ENO conducting debuts for Joana Carneiro and Keri-Lynn Wilson.
London Coliseum to open to the public all day, with new foyer cafe & general retweaking of eateries/foyers.
New research project with UCL into the future of the performing arts. (But do see other announcement, top.)

UPDATE: Here is the season trailer, just released...



Thursday, January 23, 2014

Ed is leaving ENO...

Sobs in sunny Sheen today upon the news that Edward Gardner is leaving English National Opera. The highlights of his stint as music director have been many and various - I'd pick out his Der Rosenkavalier, The Flying Dutchman, Wozzeck and The Damnation of Faust, to name but a few, as some of the most exciting operatic treats of the past several years. The vitality, intelligence and sheer electric delight of his music-making have never failed to light up the Coliseum. The job now passes not to another young whizz-kid (Ed was 31 when appointed), but to Mark Wigglesworth: a tried, tested, known, solid, liked and respected British musician, who will probably do a jolly good job. Ed, though, is off to Bergen, which unfortunately is in Norway and not accessible via the District Line. Excuse me while I go and have a howl.


Friday, November 08, 2013

McBurney's Mozart is a Flute for our times

Before we get down to business with Simon McBurney's production of The Magic Flute, here's 2 1/2p about opera in translation. The raison d'etre of ENO is to perform opera in the vernacular. But London today is such a cosmopolitan city that the concept is starting to look outdated. Yesterday The Magic Flute was in English; but the main language in the foyer seemed to be Hungarian.

That was because the holder of ENO's Mackerras Conducting Fellowship was on the podium for a performance for the first time: Gergely Madaras, 28, from Budapest. He has been working at ENO alongside Ed Gardner, being mentored and nurtured. Perhaps The Magic Flute isn't an ideal debut opera - but his conducting was full of vim and whoosh, extremely alive, well-balanced and tender-hearted. It took a little while to "settle" - there were one or two little disagreements over tempo between pit and stage, and a few moments needed a tad more time to breathe. But that will go, in due course, and on the whole Madaras seems a careful accompanist and a fine, full-spirited musician. I look forward to hearing more of him.

So to Flute - a production on which many expectations hang, since it replaces Nicholas Hytner's classic of 25 years or more. It could scarcely be more different. And it could scarcely be more enchanting, more contemporary, more inspired. Flute has been my most-loved opera since childhood, yet I found things in it yesterday that I've never seen or heard before, in the best possible way.

It has been described as the most demanding production ENO has yet staged. Sometimes its effects are stunning: the writhing snake that attacks Tamino is filmed and projected around him; and during the trials the prince and princess swim through a mid-air, hand-drawn spiral, as if starring in Titanic (above). The Temple of Reason emerges from a shelf of giant books; their pages become Papageno's fluttering birds, wielded by 14 actors (below). The Queen of the Night - confined for much of the show to a wheelchair - sings amid a breathing, trembling aura of stars. Moreover, much action takes place on a platform that swings, dips and tips, leaving the singers to balance, pace, slide when necessary and, of course, sing some jolly demanding music throughout - which they managed without the merest flinch.

McBurney was new to opera when he directed the massively successful A Dog's Heart for ENO a few years ago; this is his first classic. A fascinating interview in The Guardian makes the following suggestion: "I want...to take the audience from darkness to light, to make us evolve, to end mystification and embrace reason and rationality. That, as I understand it, is what the opera is about."

It is indeed, and McBurney's staging makes its message one for today, "relevant" in a way that is revelatory and profound rather than contrived. Indeed, we've rarely needed that message as much as we do now. It's as if Mozart himself is speaking to us as spiritual leader, as prophet.

The opera has been divested of its racism and as much of its sexism as possible, and - dare I say - is the better for it. The world that the characters move in is profoundly dangerous, riven by war, delusion, superstition; the plea is for wisdom, love, enlightenment. Everything feels here and now; the crisis of humanity of which Sarastro speaks is our own; everything seems real, the more apparently illogical the truer to life - and, moreover, true to the timeless heart of Mozart's vision.

[Dear Simon, please will you do Parsifal next, then the Ring cycle? Lots of love, Jess x.] 

In this process of "becoming"; everyone evolves, not only Tamino in his quest for initiation or Pamina in her growth from projected image - literally shining onto Tamino's heart while he sings his great aria - to mature and devoted woman. The magic instruments are played by members of the orchestra, the flautist walking on stage to stand alongside Tamino, the magic bells rendered on a keyboard from a corner of the pit where Papageno can interact suitably (the orchestra is raised so that it is just a notch below the stage).

But Papageno gradually learns to play them himself. Unpacking his parcel of food and wine, he creates a row of bottles which he empties - and in one case, er, fills - to reach the right pitch, and uses them to accompany the start of 'Ein mädchen oder weibchen'. "My old friend Chateauneuf du Pape..." he quips, then wonders if his "friend"'s family is present. Sure enough, inside the basket he finds more bottles. "Ahh, here's Auntie Angela and Uncle Roberto. Better keep those two apart!" - with which he places them at either end of the row. (Apologies to my neighbours in the theatre - I may have squawked...) Anyhow, by the time we get to 'Klinge, glöckchen, klinge', Papageno can tickle the ivories perfectly well and the keyboard player, striding on stage to be his sidekick, is put out to find her services aren't required.

Major plaudits to a terrific cast. Ben Johnson is a superb Tamino - his voice better suited to this role than it was to Alfredo in La Traviata - open-toned, focused and deeply musical. Devon Guthrie's feisty, heart-breaking Pamina matched him turn for turn. Roland Wood's Papageno - from Blackburn? - was a delight. McBurney has him carting a ladder around and from time to time he climbs it to escape something that alarms him, as if fleeing from a mouse. The introduction of a cuckoo noise into his first aria is naughty and rather delicious. James Creswell is an ideal Sarastro and Cornelia Götz a mostly strong Queen of the Night - and I love it that she is redeemed at the conclusion. Pamina doesn't often get her mother back.

Just one other perennial bugbear. The orchestra plays in that contemporary, standardised, "listen!-we-play-18th-century-music-without-vibrato" sound that always has been at odds with that of the human voice, and will always remain so.

In 100 years' time, assuming anyone still remembers who Mozart was, some scholar, assuming scholars still exist, may undertake a research project, assuming research still exists, about The Magic Flute. Of course they will be shocked to see the long hushed-up original text. But where the music is concerned, they might try a daring experiment: have the strings play with vibrato, just once, just to see what happens. And they will be astonished by how beautiful it sounds. And they will look at our generations' reasons for stopping the vibrato. And they will laugh.

Saturday, June 01, 2013

Walt Disney and the Wallbangers

Philip Glass's The Perfect American opens tonight at ENO - UK premiere following world premiere in Madrid a few months ago - and I've done a preview for The Independent, which you can read here.

The title role is sung by Christopher Purves, who started off as a choral scholar at King's College, Cambridge - then joined Harvey and the Wallbangers. He's since become one of the best British baritones around, a larger-than-life character with a wonderful warmth to his voice, all of which make him well-suited to roles like Falstaff, Mephistopheles - and Walt Disney. But I well remember the fuss when I started at uni in the mid 80s about the choral scholar who'd run away with a then-very-popular-in-Cambridge band, so I couldn't resist asking him about it.

Listen to a very short clip of them here with Chris singing the lead vocal in Old Man River...



"I knew I wanted to do something in music but I wasn’t sure absolutely what," Chris says. "I’d been in the King's Choir from 80 to 83 so was fairly well steeped in the choral tradition and I knew I didn’t really want to do that after I graduated. So, when Harvey suggested 'Would you like the join the Wallbangers?' I thought 'Why not? It’s different.' 

"If you remember, it was relatively theatrical and therefore slightly akin to what I do now - it’s not so far removed, even if the vocal production is different. I think I always knew deep down that opera was something that suited my character and my musical taste. I’ve always wanted to do something to communicate with music and that’s what I do. Either you do it in a pop way or an operatic way, and I’ve managed to do both, so I think I’m OK!"

Very much OK, Chris. Toitoitoi for this evening.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Wozzeck comes home



"Welcome back, boys." Wozzeck and his captain are centre stage in the pub. The first is nervous, surly, moving too fast, the latter a restless, cruel, distracted druggie. To the right, a coffin draped in a Union Jack doubles up as a table on which to rest beer glasses, plus green toy T-rexes that are being stuffed with bags of drugs. To the left, a staircase; and phantoms, silent ghosts in army gear - not too many, just an occasional reminder, occasionally carrying the corpse of a child. Upstairs, Andres, an amputee in a wheelchair; and Marie in her kitchen, seizing what brightness she can find in the earrings the Drum Major brings her in return for sex.

Wozzeck is based on a play from the early 19th century - an incomplete manuscript that was apparently retrieved from Georg Büchner's coat pocket after the young writer's untimely death, the words in faded ink all but illegible. Yet nearly 200 years later it feels as real as ever. Add a 21st-century perspective on PTSD and the poverty plight that so often faces returning servicemen, many of them deeply scarred physically and mentally, and Wozzeck is a tale of today. ENO's new production by Carrie Cracknell (of the Young Vic) goes for the jugular and twists the knife in it, hard.

So, too, Berg's music. Is this the opera we can't get past? Berg died in 1935, but you can still feel his musical shadow in countless new works; his blend of rigorous structure, contemporary language and heightened emotion has proved - like all the greatest music - both of its time and timeless. Many composers over the decades have wanted to write like Berg. Few have managed to, if any. Ed Gardner and the ENO orchestra, in white-hot form, underscore tragedy with sensitivity, letting the voices shine and the words - a fine, natural-sounding translation by Richard Stokes - come over clear as the daylight that's absent from Wozzeck's world.

Leigh Melrose is a heartbreaking, vulnerable Wozzeck, Sara Jakubiak a strong-voiced, clear-toned Marie. Tom Randle is the Captain, all too believable, and James Morris is inspired casting as the manipulative, sadistic and drug-dealing Doctor. Nobody is sympathetic - yet in this vividly evoked world, everybody is.

Like Anna Picard, writing in the Indy on Sunday, I've met returning ex-servicemen in dire straits. Perhaps by now most of us have. I was waiting for a train in a suburban station a year or two ago when one of them sat down on the bench beside me and started to talk about Afghanistan. It was night, but he was wearing dark glasses. His eyes had been full of sand, and were permanently damaged by it. He took the glasses off to show me, but the image that lingers was not the reddened whites; it was the shattered soul behind them. Hardest part was seeing your best mates killed, he said... His tale was a litany of suffering and destruction. But then, as my train arrived, he told me he'd do it all again. Queen and country, or something like that. He believed they were doing the right thing.

It's one small step from there to Carrie Cracknell's Wozzeck. Get to ENO and see it.


Sunday, April 21, 2013

A Sunday round-up

The trouble with burning the candle at both ends is that while you're out and about, you're not writing. Therefore JDCMB is a little bit late with what follows.

Leif Ove Andsnes gave the same programme twice at the Wigmore Hall last week; I attended on the second night (11 April). Not sure what's with Beethoven Op.101 this season, but this was the fourth time I've bumped into it since October; this time it joined a mixed programme including Beethoven's Op.54, Bartok's Suite Op 14, an all-too-rare rendition of Liszt's 'Pensées des morts' from the Harmonies poetiques et religieuses and Chopin's C minor Nocturne and Fourth Ballade.

Andsnes has one of the most sheerly beautiful sounds to be found on today's pianistic platforms; a super-cool customer, personable and unpretentious, he plays as if in a trance, cocooned at the piano in a world of his own. There's an almost scary perfection about him - a sole wrong note came almost as a relief, as if to say, "ah, this guy is human after all". Yet it can be flummoxing to hear the rugged Op.101 and the ferocious folksiness of the Bartok sounding as smooth as butter and the Chopin Ballade so precisely navigated that there seemed little time to "stop and smell the flowers". That exquisite moment when Chopin enters an hypnotic state of enchantment - spinning out a few bars of melody over four-against-three ripples in an aural-optical illusion - disappeared into its own notes with no time to catch the light and shine.

Nevertheless, the C minor Nocturne, its melody shaped with microscopically precise sensitivity and beauty, giving way to a mingling of chorale and octave storms that sends the cantilena into a fever of overturned emotion, was perhaps the high point of the concert. A treat and a half to hear such playing at close quarters rather than in the huge RFH.

Sunken Garden, ENO's world premiere from Grawemeyer Award-winning composer Michel van der Aa, took over the Barbican Theatre for a week.

Opera in 3D? Korngold once said, when he went to Hollywood, that some day whole operas might be written for the big screen; and here it was, with knobs on; one such knob being 3D specs that can be worn over your normal specs (v useful). As a 21st-century way of conceiving a musical stage work, mingling live performance with pre-recorded film including holograms of several singers who do not appear in the flesh, but with which the on-stage singers must interact, it's a presentation that needs - and received - the slickest and cleverest of integration in performance.

Responses have ranged from "this is the future", downwards. Several concerns. First of all, this opera has much in common with many "traditional" operas in that its story is so convoluted, and the enunciation of the (amplified) singers so unclear (except for the excellent Roderick Williams) that it was next to impossible to work out what was actually going on. Themes of conscience, cot death, euthanasia, afterlife, Dr Who-like self-projections, mystical oneness with the planet (think parachuting - but why?) - all mingle in David Mitchell's imaginative yet overstuffed libretto. We enter the Sunken Garden - actually the Eden Project - through a door under a motorway and find ourselves in limbo with some lost souls and an evil, or not, mastermind, or... hmm.

While the music undoubtedly has its moments - such as some memorable effects achieved by layering repetitive snatches of film and matching soundtracks - the number one requirement for a successful opera is that the music should be the best bit; the words should provide the runway from which it can take off and fly. Perhaps Sunken Garden's chief problem is that it is so busy dazzling us with its special visual effects that the aural element begins, inadvertently, to take second place. It is all hugely inventive and ground-breaking, significant indeed for the future of opera, yet not wholly successful in its own right.

The following night, Rustem Hayroudinoff played at St John's Smith Square, in an evening that had a fraction of the audience yet twice the impact (at least for us pianophiles). Rarely do you see the entire listening assemblage jump to its feet at the final note. This one did. The Rachmaninov Piano Sonata No.1 is rarely performed - probably because it is too difficult. It's a Faust Symphony for one instrument and ten fingers, and there is more extraordinary music in a single bar of it than in certain entire evenings of...well, you get the idea.

Rachmaninov weaves the work from a range of symbolic leitmotifs for different aspects of Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles (helpfully illustrated by Hayroudinoff in his spoken introduction). These pianistic textures would sound as complex on a 100-piece orchestra. As a feat of out-and-out virtuosity it is unremitting, indeed mind-boggling; but to deliver the wild flights of Rachmaninov's imagination with such colour, fidelity, rigour, fire and serious bedazzlement is a phenomenal achievement. Hayroudinoff's performance brought back to life the grand Chaliapin-inflected Russian style, with a depth of perspective in the voicing that was more convincingly 3D than anything we saw in that physically 3D opera.

If someone doesn't frogmarch him into a recording studio and insist that he records this gargantuan piece to add to his impressive roster of benchmark, award-shortlisted Rachmaninov discs, then those of us who were there last Saturday will simply have to throw tantrums until they do. Oh, and he also played some extremely fine Bach and Liszt - the small matter of the Second Partita and the Mephisto Waltz No.1 and more.

What price trouser-pressed perfection? What price technological novelty? All you need is one person, one instrument, music of genius and a performance infused with the fire of absolute inspiration, awareness and understanding. That is worth ten, probably a hundred, of anything else. That's what the musical experience is all about.

And with that little piece of profundity for a Sunday afternoon, I'm off to hear Jonas Kaufmann at the RFH.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Another 2 1/2p on the ENO issue

My interview with English National Opera's artistic director, John Berry, attempted to address a few tough questions. The company has won every award in town. It has also turned out to have a £2.2m deficit for the 2011-12 financial year. The piece is in The Independent, here.



Time to reflect a little...

Reactions to my article via Twitter were intriguing. I have the impression that some read in it only what they wanted to read, which is normal enough, but means that false impressions may have circulated. Right at the start I ask whether ENO has been flying too close to the sun - all those awards, all those new, risky productions. Obviously, the answer is yes. John Berry does acknowledge that perhaps mistakes were made, admitting that with hindsight perhaps they should not have done Weinberg's The Passenger or Glanert's Caligula. He doesn't "blame the audience", as one or two people muttered; he says, of The Passenger, "...but I couldn't sell it." He does acknowledge that there is a price-tag in taking risks, saying that he has no choice now but to "rebalance" the programme; and he also makes the point that the international co-productions that are the chief focus of this article enable the staging of work that ENO could never have afforded on its own.

Naturally the economic climate is nasty and the combination of that with the £1.3m cut in ENO's ACE grant accounts for a large proportion of the problem, but that isn't all there is to it. Some question why ENO has such a big a deficit when other artistic institutions don't. Clearly, a strategy of artistic risk that's then whacked with a massive grant cut is a kind of "perfect storm". But also, sadly, it's only a matter of time - and probably not all that much of it - until other institutions find themselves in the same boat. ENO is merely the first. (I lived through the '80s: been there, seen it all before, bought the t-shirt, now using it as a mop.)

Perhaps ENO is in a kind of double-bind with its international co-productions. Ingrained tastes in audiences vary a great deal from country to country, even from city to city. So, if you're going to produce an opera in collaboration with a place that is used to pushing the boat out in terms of directorial concept, it may not go down especially well with UK audiences, and you can probably forget it in America. (ENO is not the only place that's come up against this: think of "that" Rusalka last year at Covent Garden.) Perhaps that is why the Met is the most frequent of ENO's co-producers; a beautiful Satyagraha; a Klinghoffer that was sensitive and visually striking; but a comparatively dreary Gounod Faust that was not very interesting at all.

I put the question of varying audience tastes to Berry. He defended his decisions, as you'd expect, and it's only fair that he should have the chance to do so. He pointed out that British creative work, this way, is exported and showcased all over the world. Yesterday someone asked where the singers are in all this. They don't usually do the travelling... In that Faust, we had the very fine Toby Spence. At the Met, they had Jonas Kaufmann.

Without those partnerships, and without a strong artistic vision, we might risk being reduced to wall-to-wall Gubbay-style Butterflies and Carmens, because there wouldn't be enough money for anything else. But the fact remains that "Eurotrash" productions have never been favourites with British audiences, yet houses in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Spain and elsewhere want them, expect them, encourage them. Essentially: you could be stuffed if you do them and stuffed if you don't.

On the other hand, even an old favourite like Nicholas Hytner's perennial production of The Magic Flute was not particularly full when I attended a few months ago; it's beautiful, but has been very thoroughly seen. A new one by a top director (there are rumours of Simon McBurney) with performance to match might draw the audience much more.

But here's another thought: as one canny "tweep" mentioned, it's the music that sells opera. Last year's ENO Rosenkavalier, in the staging by David McVicar, was as glorious a performance vocally and musically as anyone could have wished, with Ed Gardner going great guns in the pit and a cast consisting of Amanda Roocroft, Sarah Connolly and Sophie Bevan, with John Tomlinson as Baron Ochs [left: Tomlinson & Connolly]. It was outstanding. It was unforgettable. I've been stirred, shaken and overjoyed by many, many performances I heard there last year. Gardner's conducting in The Flying Dutchman; Peter Hoare singing in Martinu's amazing Julietta; the list could go on and on. Under Gardner's music directorship, the standard has shot up to a whole new level, and there have been some terrific decisions in the casting department.

Are there solutions to the financial woes? As Berry is the first to admit, there will have to be a "rebalancing" of the programme, and one suspects that various structures in the company's operation will need a long, hard look: ticket pricing, website, marketing, message. ENO runs on minimal staff already and it neither likes nor could afford cinecasting. But most of the clangers, to my view, have been in the question of how they get the message across, or don't.

Round the corner from the Coliseum is the Royal Opera House, with its Tosca, its Trittico, its, er, La Sonnambula and its, ooh, Robert le Diable (if you're grumbling about turkeys, I've seen more of them there in the past couple of years than at ENO)... Christmas dinner aside, Covent Garden gets the Great Big Whopping International Names. It's the place you go to see Gheorghiu, Kaufmann, Calleja, Terfel, Stemme, DiDonato, Florez, Beczala, Pappano, Bychkov...

ENO can't compete with that - or so we'd think. Yet ENO has its fair share of stars too: Toby Spence and Sarah Connolly are regulars, Stuart Skelton's rise and rise has happened largely on the boards of the Coli, Sophie Bevan has become a meteor under their auspices, Gerald Finlay brought the house down in Adams's Doctor Atomic [right] - these people are among the best in the world. And of course they pop up frequently at Covent Garden too. As for Gardner, I find him one of the most exciting conductors in the country at the moment. The standard seems to be so high now that that is almost taken for granted. Should we not be told about this a little more often?

But with Covent Garden doing the big traditional productions - Copley's perennial Boheme, Zambello's Carmen - and pulling in the grandest names, ENO needs a different, distinct identity, a defined and individual brand. Now it has one, and it is in these adventurous, internationally-minded productions.The new audience Berry seems to want to reach is not necessarily the one for fabulous star singers, but the one for experimental theatre.

Now, if it is going to keep doing cutting-edge, European-style directors' opera, which people may not "like", and it doesn't mind if not everyone likes them, it has to do a better job of convincing its public that it is OK to go to something and be provoked or stimulated or disturbed by it, rather than necessarily liking every moment This isn't "blaming the public". It's a question of how to speak to them. That will be up to marketing, box office strategy, et al, and will mean cutting out misfiring or patronising schemes like the "Undressed" venture. It's quite a few years since the incident of Aida and the cut-out-and-colour paper dolls, but these things stick in the mind. 

I sympathise with ENO's aims, their integrity, their courage and their musical standards [left: Ed Gardner, who works a lot of magic]. I don't "like" everything they do, but I'd rather be surprised, startled and stirred than bored silly. And if they're boxed into a no-risks, please-the-crowds corner, all that creativity might go down the drain. They deserve support for their vision and their ambition and their achievements. (I mean, that's a lot of awards they've got. Really. It's not just me that's cheering for all this.) That doesn't mean failing to acknowledge that there'll have to be some changes.

In a way, ENO is a little hobbled by its original mission statement. It's gone beyond English or National. It could be better described as British International Opera. That in turn might raise and slightly shift our expectations of what they're about - if it's weren't for the likelihood of such a name being shortened to BIO. And opera in English? That's a topic for another time...