King of the high Cs? Better believe it...

I'm high as a kite. Universal Classics held a little 'do' today for one of their best and starriest stars: Juan Diego Florez (above, photo credit: Decca / Johannes Ifkovits). Savoy Hotel; a collection of press & industry colleagues; and he sang three arias - the big whacks from Rigoletto and La fille du regiment (the one with nine high Cs) plus 'Granada' from his Sentimento Latino album, and I was standing 4 metres from him throughout. I nearly died of joy.

It's unbelievable. The security of that technique is, as far as I can tell, more comparable to Jascha Heifetz than any other singer I can think of. There's no shadow of doubt, but also no flaw in the pouring of the honey, just utter beauty and wonder and a hell of a lot of oomph, at least close to. Florez's voice is sometimes said to be 'small' or, better, 'small is beautiful', but it certainly didn't sound that way (beautiful, yes; small, no!) from 4 metres... It was hard to get the press & industry to stop applauding afterwards, and that takes a little doing.

I shook his hand afterwards. Yes, alas, I have washed since. But tomorrow I get to interview him (at least, 98% sure that I will), so maybe I can replenish that supply of wonder. And yes, he's drop-dead gorgeous - but with a voice like that, who even needs those sultry eyes?

He opens in La fille du regiment at Covent Garden in January.

An Independent Carmen

Here's my piece about Carmen which appears in The Independent today. Enjoy. The show opens at Covent Garden tonight, and someone who saw the dress rehearsal told me that Jonas Kaufmann as Don Jose was so marvellous that his big aria alone would be worth the price of the ticket. (I'm not going tonight, but will see it later in the run and report back then.)

Donna Anna

My piece about Anna Netrebko has a centrefold in The Independent's arts bit today. Will post a link to the online version as soon as it's available, but you don't get the photos with that.

UPDATE, 7.11.06: it's still not on the Indy site, but my wonderful webmaster has scanned the pages and added them to my archive, here.

Wow

The Guardian today has a LEADER about Janacek's Jenufa! And jolly good it is.

Lest anyone mistake this for a sudden cultural shift in favour of opera in the UK, I should probably add a reminder that that won't be indicated unless the Daily Mail follows suit.

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, 1916-2006

The great soprano has died at the age of 90. An iconic figure without whom opera in the 20th century would not have been the same.

I never met her, but when I was a kid, she and her husband Walter Legge lived in the next street from us in Hampstead. The complex of back gardens adjoined. And sometimes, when the weather was fine and all the windows were open, one could hear the sound of singing across the leaves...

UPDATE: Saturday 5 August, 10.25am: read obituary from The Independent here.

Fun at the opera? Heaven forfend!

I'm going to start eating those Sussex hats: The Guardian has only given 3 stars (out of 5) to 'Betrothal in a Monastery'. The objection is that the work itself isn't political enough. This opera commits the cardinal sin of being FUN. Come to think of it, with the Guardian one could perhaps predict this attitude.

The Times offers pretty much the same view, only without the politics. 'To what end? Entertainment, obviously...'

Entertainment in the opera house? How utterly, utterly dreadful! What a horrendous thought! You take an afternoon off work, spend all that money on a ticket and hiring your tux, pay for champagne & dinner & the ruinous programme, and then the company has the affrontery to ENTERTAIN you?! In Russian? Oy vay!!!

I predict deep suffering amongst the critics at tonight's Prom, where Juan Diego Florez is singing bel canto arias and Latin American songs that might just be enjoyable.

UPDATE 26 July 9am: The Daily Telegraph joins the killjoys. I suppose most of my colleagues would rather force us all to listen to 4 hours of Birtwistle. No wonder classical music is said to be dying...

UPDATE 26 July, 1.30pm Hooray for The Independent: Edward Seckerson got the point and catches the spirit.

UPDATE 31 July, 2.15pm: Hugh Canning of The Sunday Times must have been in a very, very bad mood. Perhaps a combination of the ridiculously high summer temperatures we've been having and an overdose of Russian?

Wow

Just back from dress rehearsal of Prokofiev's 'Betrothal in a Monastery' at Glyndebourne. If it isn't the hottest ticket in the country by this time next week, I will eat every hat in Sussex.

Grab a ticket while you can, if you can. Bust every gut to get there. And if you know anybody in the highest echelons of the BBC or Channel 4, twist their arms until they send in the cameras.

Seriously, where has this thing been hiding all these decades? I don't know for certain, but this may be the first time it's been performed in this country. So what other treasure-troves stayed hidden behind the Iron Curtain?

I will write about it more fully once the show has opened.

Feeling the heat

Heatwave and associated electrical stormy stuff has been having far-reaching results. Yesterday one was electrical trouble at Glyndebourne. The air-conditioning was one of the casualties; Tom & colleagues played in their shirt-sleeves. And my cousin found herself temporarily stuck in the lift. Hope all will be well today for the dress rehearsal of Prokofiev's 'Betrothal in a Monastery'.

Meanwhile I went to Paris for the day to interview a Russian conductor, ended up cradling in my lap an object that had once belonged to Rachmaninov and returned home with a bag of French cheeses that, though wrapped in layer upon layer of cooling, sniff-proof material, still attracted a few interesting glances on the train.

Fact of the week: Bertillon, the classiest ice-cream joint in Paris, is closed for the summer. Marketing logic, anyone?

There's only one thing better than a violin...

...and it's a tenor voice like this.

Juan Diego Florez's latest album, Sentimento Latino, is out on Monday. If you like sun-drenched South American songs dressed up a bit and sung by a voice so honeyed and radiant that it's like magnetised massage oil for the soul, order it now.

Do you know this man?

My latest package of CDs to review has turned up quite a treasure: a young German tenor named Jonas Kaufmann singing Strauss songs, accompanied by the matchless Helmut Deutsch. I hadn't come across Kaufmann before, but the focus and fibre of his voice knocked me off my chair in the very first phrase of 'Zueignung'. Next, he seems to sing Strauss from the inside, with attention to every word. And thirdly, the voice is very powerful indeed - apparently he has sung Parsifal and one wonders whether he'll be a fabulous Siegmund or Tristan in years to come.

Some internet research revealed that he received a great deal of attention here three years ago at the Edinburgh Festival and he'll be back there on 24 August. And he's just made his debut at the Met in NY. I hope that The Guardian didn't do him too much damage, bless its cotton socks, by entitling its 2003 interview 'I don't mind my sexy image' - most singers don't get far these days without one (and yes, anyone looking for a pin-up won't be disappointed). But Strauss has provided him with his most consistently good reviews so far and if this disc is anything to go by, that's not surprising. It will be out soon on the harmonia mundi label.

Spring(ish)

First of all, a big thank-you to All About Opera, which has kindly made this blog its Featured Site for the month of March. Quite apart from that, it's a useful, informative resource and all opera buffs should check in and explore it.

Brilliant sunshine here in London today. Perhaps spring is on the way at last, despite the snow in the north. Solti saw fit to leave the bed this morning and went outside for a whole two hours, so something must be changing.

Figaro on freedom of speech

The programme for Le nozze di Figaro at the Royal Opera House includes a meaty extract from Beaumarchaias's original: Figaro's controversial speech from the last act. It includes not only the part Da Ponte used, re fickle women, but also several passages which are more than topical at the moment. Such as this:

"The idiocies that appear in print don't mean a jot until someone tries to block them. Without the freedom to criticise, there can be no such thing as praise. Only little men are fearful of little scribblings."
-- Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais

PS - on a totally unrelated matter, I have just come across the blog of composer Alex Shapiro, which has convinced me I live in the wrong place.

Figaroooooohhhhh

Looks like David McVicar's Figaro is going over rather well. I'm going to see it on Tuesday and will report back then, but for the time being here's Ed Seckerson in The Independent, Tim Ashley in The Guardian and the marvellous Richard Morrison in The Times, comparing Gerald Finley's Count to 'a cornered dinosaur who senses the impending Ice Age...' and pointing out pithily that Rinat Shaham (Cherubino)'s future 'probably doesn't lie in impersonating boys' (we well remember the shapely Rini as a simply sensational Carmen at Glyndebourne). David McV meanwhile has proved himself the sort of person who does win things - namely, the South Bank Show Award for Opera - and I bet there'll be more to come.

Meanwhile, less happy news from New York: a farewell note from the erstwhile editor of the online magazine at Andante.com, which has been killed by its new owners, the French record label Naive. How naive. How daft. How pointless. It will be sorely, sorely missed by its many readers.

No holds barred

Here's my piece about David McVicar in today's Independent. He has plenty to say, on the day of the State of the Union address, about the State of the Art of opera here in the UK and he doesn't mince his words. How some of his comments got past my editor, I'll never know. So far there hasn't been nuclear fallout...not yet...

You can also read/download a PDF the article at my online archive on main website.

I'm going to see the resulting production next week & will report back then.

Meanwhile computer nightmares continue, but there are some exciting things happening later this week...more soon...

Meet Sally Matthews

Sally Matthews
Originally uploaded by Duchenj.

Apologies for lack of blog posts this week...it took a little time to recover from this particular birthday, never mind the associated hangover.

Having introduced one of the finest young pianists on the planet a few posts back, I'd now like to introduce one of the great sopranos of the century ahead. Sally Matthews sang Mahler 4 with the LPO yesterday (and is doing so again even as I write). She's been through some of the finest Young Artists schemes in the UK, including the Royal Opera House's, and was a huge hit in Gianni Schicchi at Glyndebourne last year. She tends to receive rave reviews wherever she goes and I think she's not yet out of her twenties. Last night was a prime example of why she is already so celebrated and why I reckon she will be even more so in ten years' time.

The voice is dark for a soprano - the richest vanilla ice cream swirled with dessert wine - and the clarity of the enunciation is exceptional. My German isn't brilliant, but I could hear the text and comprehend it quite well without even glancing at the words in the programme (I don't know this exquisite symphony intimately enough). Most magical of all, although her tone can be bright, large and glorious, were the soft passages: for a singer to create such absolute magic at PP level, while retaining all that beauty of tone and clarity of diction, is something special, unusual and marvellous. Given Sally's range and the richly romantic hue of her tone, I suspect that in a decade, or maybe sooner depending on her stamina and inclination, she might be Korngold's ideal Marietta...

The photo above is downloaded from her website.

It was just as well that Sally sang last night...Tom has threatened to have me assassinated if I say what I really thought about the conductor and the first half's piano soloist. Suffice it to say that there's a very, very kind review here, at Classical Souce.com.

Rome, sweet Rome

There's been a good reason for my blogland silence this week. I've been in Rome. Almost didn't come back.

When Dorothy taps her ruby slippers together and says the magic words, I reckon we all misheard her. What she should be saying is "there's no place like Rome..." That city has an atmosphere like nowhere else on earth. Part of it is the climate, part the history, part sheer beauty. Yes, the traffic is crazy - basically anarchy - and you take your life in your hands whenever you cross a road. But after dark, you're in another world, entirely gold and black and floodlit and shining. Who wants to go to sleep when you can be out in warm, fresh air, gazing at gleaming Roman ruins, enjoying the finest Italian food and sipping Chianti with friends? Not many Romans, it would seem, because the place buzzes until the wee hours.

I somehow associate Rome with freedom, revival, renewal and some kind of inner release that, when I was last there years & years ago, allowed me to get on the back of a Vespa with a strange Italian man and ride through the city's cobbled roads past the floodlit Colosseum at 1am...those were the days...

I went to the Eternal City this time to interview Signora Bartoli about her new album of Italian baroque arias, Opera Probita. The launch event began with a concert in an extraordinary church in the Forum; later, dinner on a roof terrace by candlelight. We did the interview in a building that looks out across the ruins of the Forum, knowing that Handel could have stood on the same spot, drinking in the same sight, nearly 300 years ago.

The album will be out at the end of next month & Cecilia will be giving a concert of this repertoire in London, at the Barbican, in December, for which I recommend begging, borrowing or even buying a ticket at your first possible opportunity. Before then, she'll be in the States, so I urge everyone across the Pond to run to hear her as well. There's a touch of genius about this woman. What a voice. What a personality. What musicianship.

There'd probably be a touch of genius about anyone who could make me rave about an evening of Italian baroque opera accompanied by period instruments. Normally I run a mile from such things, probably because I had it rammed down my throat ad nauseam at university. The other night, however, I was on the edge of my seat all the way through and afterwards was almost ready to go and hug Marc Minkowski and all his Musiciens du Louvre as well. I even elected, later on, to listen to a recording of a counter-tenor (Scholl, naturally), and liked it when I did. This is getting serious!

But would it sound the same away from Rome? South West London is a bit short of ruins and even the antipasti in our local supermarket ain't quite the same......

"2005", the opera

My post about "1984" seems to have generated quite a noise (if a blog can be said to be noisy), not least from Clive Davis (hi Clive, I sense a kindred spirit there!), 'Pliable' at The Overgrown Path and Tim Worstall, who kindly credits me with a touch of class. Among other things, I find I've been praised for having the courage to change my view about this opera.

This got me thinking:

1. I didn't change my view, because I didn't have one. I'd read the libretto and thought it excellent; I'd ploughed through all the background material provided by the ROH, which told me that the team involved were thoroughly professional; but I had had no access to even a note of the music. So I didn't make a judgement in my Indy article, because I had nothing to judge.

2. That's the problem with writing about world premieres before they happen. Nobody can guarantee what they're going to sound like.

3. What really 'narked' me about some of the writing in the British press was that some of my respected colleagues decided to trash the thing BEFORE they'd heard a note, simply because a) Maazel was paying for some of it himself, b) he'd never written an opera before, c) some unnamed source in the ROH had told The Guardian that it was 'crap' (unnamed sources are so useful, aren't they?! I've only ever used one once - years ago, in a piece for The Guardian... Long story for another occasion). The tone of these writers were such that anyone would have thought Prince Charles had tried his hand at writing an opera - not someone who has been highly respected in the musical world for nearly half a century and is currently musical director of the NY Philharmonic. I seem to remember that once upon a time someone accused of a crime used to be innocent until proven guilty. That's a principle I like to uphold. OK, so the outcome wasn't so great, but it did look like it was worth giving the thing a chance.

Anyway, I'm not really a critic. I am now - oh yes yes yes - a NOVELIST! At the kitchen table I am currently surrounded by piles of pages from Novel No.1, just back from the copy-editor. I've got two weeks to finalise the text before it goes to be typeset. Anything I don't change now will outlive me on a shelf somewhere. In between wondering whether a reference to cafe latte has to be italicised, whether the cat really says 'miaow', not 'meow' and whether the Russian character is still too much like - oh, never mind who - I've been pinching myself and wondering how this happened at all. Someone has EDITED my NOVEL??? Someone actually agreed to publish it? I am dreaming, aren't I?

Perhaps one day it'll be a good source for an opera called "2005". If so, I shall choose the composer myself.

Don't give up the day job, Maestro

After interviewing Maazel about "1984" for the Indy and then reading the clutch of appalling reviews that followed the premiere, I wanted to give the poor thing a chance and make up my own mind. So Tom and I went to see it last night.

The staging was brilliant. The singing and acting were stunning. The orchestra sounded marvellous. The libretto is well written and well constructed and you could hear all the words, rendering the surtitles (yes, for an opera in English) redundant. We even had the voice of Jeremy Irons doing the telescreen propaganda. Yes, the quality of the performance and the production were absolutely world class, Royal Opera House at its very finest. But the music....oh deariedeariedear.

When I read the libretto, when writing that mega-article, I'd visualised the whole thing in my head and my ears. Unfortunately, what I imagined turned out to be rather more exciting and moving than the sounds that assailed us yesterday. A few of my gripes are that sensitivity to words was non-existant (silly repetitions, amateurish stresses, lack of imagination), colouristic imagination was equally lacking (one thing I liked - the single coloratura singer over a few phrases of the Big Brother chorus - but that was it), dramatic moments that should have been moving or at least touching were not, because the music was so ineffective, the pace never seemed to vary and when it did it was unbelievably crass (build up to climax of scene two by getting faster and raising the pitch. Yawn.) Etceteraetceteraetcetera.... I must concede that my various colleagues who panned this thing were dead right: it should NOT have been put on at Covent Garden.

Tom nodded off after the first 15 minutes. The only time he began to look interested was when he thought the leading lady was going to get her kit off, but she didn't.

Didn't anyone tell Maazel how 'Oranges and Lemons, Say the Bells of St Clement's' goes? He could have got the correct tune from any ice-cream van. Or is it perhaps under copyright?

Big Brother is listening to you...or not

Here's the Guardian's take on 1984 at Covent Garden, which has been less than well reviewed today. The gist of this report is that the whole thing is basically a vanity project because Maazel has put his own money into it and that someone (unnamed) within the ROH has described the opera as 'crap'. The cost to the ROH has been about £500,000, the cost of a normal opera like Rigoletto, or half of a normal 'non vanity' premiere.

I can't help reflecting that the vast majority of new operas are actually crap. As they always have been. The immortal strains of La Boheme, Die Meistersinger and even Don Giovanni were always the tip of the iceberg. For every successful and enduring opera, there must be at least 20 that bite the dust the minute they are aired. As they say, you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince, and you have to listen to a lot of contemporary crap before you find something that really is worth the money that its company has devoted to it. Tom Ades's operas do so well that I've never yet been able to get into one, so I can't judge them. But in the meantime, I was less than thrilled by Nicholas Maw's 'Sophie's Choice', a Covent Garden commission which had its moments but which I would be quite happy never to hear again. As for Birtwistle - well, really, the amount of money that must have gone into HIS operas really doesn't bear thinking about. Critics love them, for some reason best known to themselves; but I have never yet met one member of the general public who regarded them as anything but 'crap'. Other works I remember sitting through include 'Golem' by John Casken (at the QEH, admittedly) and Robin Holloway's 'Clarissa', hampered by a fearful production at ENO donkey's years ago; both could usefully have been left in peace in someone's bottom drawer. All of these together must have cost the public purse a lot more than £0.5m and frankly Maazel's work has as good a chance as any of them of making an impact or, more likely, not. Does the Guardian really think that it's better to have Covent Garden fork out the full subsidised whack for officially approved, establishment-accepted crap? Crap is still crap, whoever foots the bill.

Meanwhile Andrew Lovett writes to me from Cambridge about his new opera with digital video, 'Abraham on Trial' , which DOES sound interesting. World premiere is at The Junction, Cambridge, on 20 May. Full details here. As usual, the really creative stuff does not take place within the establishment heartlands.

Fiddlesticks...

Ilka Talvi has some marvellous reminiscences about his studies with violin professors who seem to have had a penchant for breaking their pupils' bows, intentionally or not. At least Heifetz gave the poor Japanese girl he victimised in this way a new one. There's been a fair bit of controversy about Mr Talvi's blog - various forums ask what he hopes to achieve - but as someone who is a little too close for comfort to orchestral life, not to mention the violin in the front room, I find what he has to say fascinating. And I love stories about those Golden Age fiddlers.

I met another fiddler the other day - one with a difference. This one grew up to be a conductor. And the conductor turned into a composer. Now 75, he is about to have his first opera performed at Covent Garden and very scarey it sounds too. I got an emergency call last week asking me to interview him the same afternoon...well, I dropped everything and legged it to the Royal Opera House. The maestro was singularly charming (rather more so than a certain other gentleman I interviewed not long ago who answered questions monosyllabically - usually with "no" - before I'd finished asking them) and I read the libretto with hair standing on end. "1984" doesn't sound like an obvious subject for an opera, but the dramatists have certainly done Orwell proud; now we'll have to wait and see what the music is like... My article should be in the Independent on Friday or Saturday. Meanwhile, the Royal Opera House website has more details. Lorin Maazel's 1984 opens on 3 May.

Afterwards, I told Tom that this is what a violinist can achieve if he puts his mind to it. I don't think he was too pleased.

ADDENDUM, 21 APRIL 9.30am: here's another view on Maazel's 1984 from the inimitable Norman Lebrecht. He's concerned with rather different matters, but I agree with him that there should be far more of a buzz surrounding this event than there has been so far. Not sure exactly when my Indy piece will appear - it may not be tomorrow after all, since they are running something else of mine.....