Don Giovanni disturbs and dazzles at ENO

Wanted... Mary Bevan as Zerlina and Christopher Purves as Don Giovanni
Photo: Robert Workman

WANTED. A huge poster of Christopher Purves as a gangster-like, shaven-headed Don Giovanni, states as much. He's wanted for murder...but also, for other things, by every woman who crosses his path, to say nothing of the occasional bloke. Sensuality, magnetism, confidence and the knowhow of the older man, backed up by threat, are working their illogical yet eternal magic.

In an age in which subtlety is not generally much valued, Mozart's operas seem to be getting harder to stage. They defy easy classification. Just when you think one of them will be tragic, it makes you laugh; and you decide something is a comedy of manners, only to have it kick out your guts. So what to do with Don Giovanni, that peerless "dramatic comedy" about sex, violence and hellfires, in a 21st century inured to the first two and disbelieving of the third?

Whatever you think about that, you may not have foreseen the utterly brilliant twist that the director Richard Jones brings to the denouement in his new production for English National Opera. It's tempting to spill the beans, but suffice it to say that whatever puzzles you in Act I, such as the presence of a Leporello look-alike, may come home to roost after the interval; and that the dizzy episodes of mistaken identity assume a more important position in the drama than usual. Problem: the meaning of the end is changed. But one can puzzle over that conundrum only to decide (as I did) that it's so flipping clever you just don't mind.

Clive Bayley (Leporello), Christopher Purves (Don Giovanni), Caitlin Lynch (Donna Anna)

Jones's set designer, Paul Steinberg, offers a gloomy, impersonal scene full of doors, resembling a dingy hotel sometime before mobile phones were invented; a phone box has a vital role to play. Looming yellow streetlights and a desultory party scene do little to liven it up. Act I begins with Giovanni rapidly servicing a stream of black-clad female clients (plus a man); the attack on Anna is transformed into a sex game, the sounds interrupting her father's session with a hooker in the room opposite. Derangement soon seeps in around the edges - perhaps the result of the constant hot-cold manipulation Giovanni foists on those around him. Elvira is basically nuts, as are strange shivering, gyrating dancers at the party; by the start of the final scene, Leporello too is losing it a bit.

If that feels glum and confusing, don't worry: most of what's going on is setting up what's to follow in part II - a key moment of which involves Giovanni's Serenade as a phone call, the effect of which upon Elvira's infatuated maid almost exceeds John Cleese's Russian in A Fish Called Wanda. Jones astutely counters this with Anna's 'Non mi dir' likewise delivered to Ottavio at a distance - however tangled in the wire you are, it's still a sorry way to chuck your fiancé for a year, especially when he is as wonderful a singer as Allan Clayton.

Allan Clayton as Don Ottavio. His expression was common to many of us by the end.
Photo: Robert Workman

Mark Wigglesworth is back in the pit he recently elected to leave when he resigned as ENO's music director. His Mozart certainly shows us what the management has lost with his departure. He's a rare, self-effacing conductor, modestly picking (mostly) excellent tempi, accompanying (mostly) ideally and leading a light-stepping, supple account of the score. One tricky moment when the stage and pit parted company will probably vanish with the first-night nerves. Meanwhile we wish, wish, wish he was staying.

The cast is very fine, with Clayton outstanding in the two tenor arias and the American soprano Caitlin Lynch as a characterful and precise Donna Anna. Christine Rice is quite a surprise as Donna Elvira; we more associate her with mezzo roles, yet her voice seems to be growing in both range and amplitude. And even if I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea that Elvira is off her trolley - she is far too subtle and fascinating a character for that - Rice brings her a convincing sense of desperation as the love she loathes simply refuses to die. Zerlina is Mary Bevan, pure-toned and full of warmth, clad in white while all around wear black. Nicholas Crawley is a strong, bitter Masetto and James Creswell as the Commendatore delivers a magisterial cameo.

But it is the double-act of Christopher Purves and Clive Bayley as Giovanni and Leporello on which the show hinges, and they don't disappoint. Purves's soft, velvety, sensually nuanced singing brings an edge of sinister magic to the Don; Bayley, as professional sidekick, is deeper and louder, yet meshes beautifully. The relationship is splendidly worked, full of details such as a much-lived-in drinks-serving ritual; and even if their modus vivendi seems balanced and settled, the master's more than callous treatment of the servant proves that any suspected affection is in fact non existent. You can be left wondering how many Leporellos the Don gets through, each one perhaps presented with the same glasses and red wig.

Would one really be irresistibly seduced by this Don Giovanni? Personally I wouldn't buy a second-hand cat-basket from him, let alone a car. But ahhh...there's the voice, that voice... He can call my landline any time.

Don Giovanni, ENO, to 26 October. https://www.eno.org/whats-on/don-giovanni/

Disaster at ENO: Wigglesworth has resigned

A press release from Mark Wigglesworth's PR has just hit my in-box bearing the following information. Wigglesworth seemed to be the only good thing that had happened to ENO of late and I am very worried indeed that his departure spells the beginning of worse times still. 

Mark Wigglesworth has today resigned as Music Director of English National Opera, effective from the end of the current season. He will continue to honour his contractual commitments as a conductor and looks forward to continuing to work with the wonderful musicians of ENO.

Mark Wigglesworth is not commenting further at this time.

A statement from ENO says:

We regret to confirm that Mark Wigglesworth feels unable to continue as Music Director despite the best efforts of the Board and Senior Management to persuade him to remain. We are disappointed that he will not be staying to lead the artistic forces through this particularly challenging period. 

Mark has agreed to complete this season as Music Director including conducting Jenufa and to return as a guest conductor for two scheduled productions in the 2016/17 season. Mark is a world class conductor and we look forward to welcoming him back as guest conductor in future years. 

Find your voices?

The announcement of ENO's new season got off to a slightly flummoxed start yesterday at a press conference in which questions from the floor were short-circuited before they could begin. There was a determined speech from artistic director John Berry about leaving the past behind and looking to the future; a thoughtful and convincing defence of opera in English from the incoming music director Mark Wigglesworth; a few words from the acting CEO Cressida Pollock; and a short introductory film that began with blood being daubed upon someone's forehead, whether on or off I'm not sure. Then we were ushered out for tea and questions in corners. Berry was mobbed; the wonderful Wigglesworth was left hovering. Innovations for the season include price reductions on 50 per cent of tickets - some 60,000 seats priced at £20 or under - and a new partnership with Streetwise Opera, which works closely with vulnerable adults and community groups; and, of course, the new music director.

It's a fine spread of repertoire, beginning with a revival of The Magic Flute and featuring new productions of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov, La forza del destino directed by Calixto Bieito, Glass's Akhnaten from Phelim McDermott, a new Boheme with Benedict Andrews in the driving seat and, best of all, a new Tristan (more of which in a moment). Revivals include Jenufa, The Mikado, Madam Butterfly, The Barber of Seville and an import of Opera North's Norma.

In a new season in which 88 per cent of the singers and conductors are either British, British trained or British resident, the 12 per cent who are not have attracted rather a lot of attention. Putting aside the reasons for which some people might consider this such a bad thing (mainly because I'm not sure what they are) I'm more curious about the match of operatic repertoire with the sort of voices that might be booked to sing in it, and how those voices come into being in the first place.

For me, the season highlight is the new Tristan and Isolde, in June 2016, to be conducted by Ed Gardner, designed by Anish Kapoor, directed by Daniel Kramer and starring Stuart Skelton (Australian) and Heidi Melton (American). Please forgive me if I'm missing something, but I would pretty much kill to hear Skelton sing Tristan and I don't give a four-x about where he comes from. Karen Cargill is Brangane and Matthew Rose King Marke, besides Gardner back in the pit, so it's not like no Brits are represented.

Besides, why should it be a bad thing to hear Xian Zhang conducting, or the glorious Corinne Winters as Mimi in La Boheme, or to explore the ever-controversial Bieito's concept for Forza (it's set, we're told, in the Spanish Civil War and features brilliant Rinat Shaham, liberated from her serial Carmens, as the mezzo-soprano who takes on that crazy war aria)? Opera is an international art. It always was, it always will be - deity-of-choice willing.

There are unquestionably some fine British singers who could take those roles. It's just that there don't appear to be very many of them. Longborough has been enjoying the voices of two remarkable British spinto-dramatic sopranos, Lee Bisset and Rachel Nicholls, in their Wagner productions; both are singing Isolde there this summer. I was lucky enough to hear a lovely young soprano with Wagnerian leanings, Lauren Fielder, in the Royal Northern College of Music's Gold Medal Competition last year, but she is still in her twenties and may not be ready for a full-blown Isolde for a while.

Ditto Ed Lyon and David Butt Philip, two notable and fantastic emerging voices, but ones who maybe could use more years under the belt before tackling a vocal marathon of that ilk, if indeed they ever grow to suit it. Longborough's Tristans are Peter Wedd (who had a fine impact as Lohengrin at WNO a couple of years ago) and Neal Cooper, whose uncle was apparently a heavyweight boxing champion. But to take on a whole run of Tristan in the biggest theatre in London, a singer has to be (a) ready, (b) willing and (c) free at the right time. Longborough is another story: a theatre that seats a modest 500-or-so, with a covered pit not quite a-la-Bayreuth and a reduced orchestra, puts less potential strain on the voice.

Dramatic-voiced singers don't grow on trees and not many appear to be growing in our indigenous woodland just now. A huge proportion of the advanced students - indeed, postgrads in general - in our conservatoires are from overseas. Meanwhile, young singers going through school and university are likely to be honed in the good old British choral tradition. This entails a pure, streamlined and rather small sound, with passion quelled in favour of spirituality and individuality in favour of blendability. It takes a very long time for a singer to get this tradition out of his/her system (usually 'his', because that's how the choirs are set up). Many British tenors seem to have started out this way, whether as boy choristers or choral scholars at Oxbridge.

Note that the really great British Wagnerites don't have that background. Bryn Terfel spent his childhood in farm gear rather than a cassock; Sir John Tomlinson was never exactly a choirboy type, training as a construction engineer before turning to singing at 21. Most of the other UK nationals who made a serious name in this repertoire are female - Anne Evans, Gwyneth Jones, Jane Eaglen...Today Catherine Foster, who sings leading Wagner roles at Bayreuth yet remains virtually unknown in her native UK, was a nurse and midwife for some 15 years before switching to music.

We do need more opportunities for young British singers, but we can't expect them to appear as if by magic, or to suit every opera that comes their way - and besides, having done our level best at conservatoire level to attract fine students from overseas to our expensive UK training, we can't then shut them out when it comes to professional engagements. And why should opera-lovers be denied the chance to hear singers such as Melton and Skelton just because they're not British? Perhaps we need to look at the entire picture of how our singers are raised and trained.

Back at ENO, more worth worrying about is the shortage of actual British repertoire in the new season. Beyond the ever-popular Gilbert and Sullivan, there's no other opera by a UK composer in the schedule. Not a Britten, a Delius, a Tippett. a Birtwistle, a Turnage, an Ades, an anything. If there really is an omission in the season, that is the one to grumble about. It's not like there's nothing out there to choose. If ENO is to continue to hold its own as British International Opera they could do worse than consistently support actual British music.

[update, 1.42pm: please see my post here for more on the British music programming - the situation is unfortunately worse than we thought...]

Here's Skelton in an extract from Britten's Peter Grimes.

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.