Seeing 'The Minotaur'

A revival at Covent Garden of Birtwistle's most recent opera, The Minotaur? Time to take the bull by the horns and see it.

I'm still reeling.

The Minotaur seems to spring from a very deep, dark place and takes us back there with it. The power it packs perhaps concerns the primal nature of the myth and the archetypal imagery that it dramatises, but there is more to it than that. Whatever it says to us, whatever it does to us - from the moment the first notes growl and surge from the pit, with the film of endless swelling sea to match - it hits us at such a profound gut level that it is flummoxing to attempt quantifying it. Most astonishing of all, perhaps, is that this is an evening of gore, ferocity and claustrophobia, yet at its core is an almost superhuman compassion and empathy.

There have been some complaints in other quarters about David Harsent's libretto, but that seems a bizarre response. It's not only sterling-quality poetry, full of images that would flare at high voltage even without the music, but it also has indubitable advantages of strong structure, absolute clarity, concentration and concision that many libretti lack, and that the genre absolutely needs. Every word carries the weight of a hundred, and that's as it should be. It is light years away from the verbose pretentiousness of The Death of Klinghoffer, the extended tracts of book that weighed down Sophie's Choice, the mundane cosy prose of Miss Fortune.


It's loud. Very loud. The percussion spills over on both sides of the stalls circle. The orchestration is remarkable - despite the volume and depth of the music, its is so well written that there is never any problem of balance between singers and instrumentalists. Birtwistle's sonic imagination was what stayed with me most strongly after seeing The Second Mrs Kong about 20 years ago and in this quality The Minotaur doesn't disappoint, however different it is. One of the most inspired touches is the use of the cimbalom, its hard-edged fury jangling the nerves and cutting into the monolithic textures.

This performance was one of those rare occasions when music, text, design and performance fuse into one: it's hard to imagine it staged any differently, or sung any better. John Tomlinson, Christine Rice and Johann Reiter are the original trio of Asterios, Ariadne and Theseus, each a masterful interpretation with a timbre that encapsulates his/her character and offsets the others. Elizabeth Meister is a terrifying coloratura Ker, the steely-winged vulture. Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, taking over a very tall order from Tony Pappano, who's off with tendonitis, did a magnificent job with it. Grand plaudits to the whole team - director Stephen Langridge, designer Alison Chitty, video company 59 Productions, movement director Philippe Giraudeau, lighting designer Paul Pyant.

I've spent much time in the past few days writing about The Rite of Spring (watch this space). Seeing The Minotaur with The Rite in my ears and mind was intriguing in itself. It seems to me that they share a certain wellspring, dragging us through something subconscious, something mesmerising concerning ritual, mortality, cruelty and that crucial compassion.

It's tempting to wonder what makes someone create an opera like this. Why would anyone attempt to write the last scene of the first half, death after sacrificial death in the bullring, the Keres descending to devour the flesh? I can just imagine asking Sir Harry about it, though, and receiving a response not unlike that of Jerome Kern when someone asked him what made him write 'Ol' Man River', which was originally in Showboat. He's supposed to have said: "I needed something to end Act 1 Scene 3."

Twelve hours after curtain-down I need serious coffee and I need it now.

Everything you wanted to know about French 19th-century grand opera but were afraid to ask

Robert le Diable opened last night and I think we can expect a few divisions on the topic.

The singing is phenomenal - and the demands of the leading roles every bit as difficult as Bryan Hymel said. He deserves a raft of gold medals. So does soprano Patrizia Ciofi - stepping in at the last minute to replace Jennifer Rowley - as well as Marina Poplavskaya, John Relyea and a newcomer,  Jean-Francois Borras, making an impressive house debut as Raimbaut: a high French tenor of another kind, with effortless projection, bel canto-ish legato and a bright, appealing stage presence.

The production, by Laurent Pelly, is very, very Pelly: plenty of irony, humour (intentional and maybe not) and wacky designs - sets by Chantal Thomas, costumes by Pelly himself: a stylised storybook complete with Spamalot knights, kooky princess, bright painted horses, sketched mountain scenery and a man-in-a-bear-suit. And those vengeful dead nuns. Doing what such beings do when they're allowed out of their tombs. A few spectacular coups-de-theatre help matters along.

It's a sterling effort by all concerned. But the big question is this: is the opera worth it? Just think of all the hard work and expertise that went into it. Think of how much it must have cost. And wonder what planet Covent Garden was on. It's Springtime for Meyerbeer...some of us hadn't laughed so much since we saw The Producers.

Try to be serious. This opera is important. Really, seriously important. It was performed around 750 times across the middle of the 19th century and to see it is to begin to understand all those matters about that time that you read about, and sort of know about, but don't usually have the chance to experience viscerally.

You see where many subsequent, much better works originated. Giselle, for instance - as Alice clings to the cross, or as the not-very-willi-like dancers gear up for action. And also Carmen - no kidding. Alice is a foreshadow of Micaela: molested by soldiers on her first appearance, trying to find Robert to bring him news that his mother has died; later, searching alone and fearful for her lover in the mountains, while we know he has been led astray by the demon Bertram. Bizet's audience, familiar with Robert le Diable, was being set up to identify Carmen herself with the devil.

"A masterpiece," said Chopin, who was 21 at the time of the premiere. Really? Remember, it was 1831 and nobody had ever heard anything like this before. It was four years since Beethoven died, three years since Schubert. The great romantics - Mendelssohn, Schumann, Wagner, Verdi as well as Chopin - were aged between 17 and 22. An off-stage orchestra and chorus suggesting hell! A real workout for the brass section! Imaginative instrumentation, as brightly coloured as Pelly's costumes, including mega-solos for flute, for lead cello and so on. Absolutely dizzying vocal display. Foot-tapping rhythms (someone in the row behind me did so every time an oom-chah passage started up, which said much). Oh yes, and more people believed in Destiny, the hell thing, the devil thing and the ghost thing than do so today, so the suspension of disbelief may not have been so difficult and it might all have been scary instead of hilarious.

As for the libretto, I know you have to suspend disbelief and so forth, but - well, it makes most other clunky opera stories look like flippin' Dickens. How do you sympathise with a hero who lets everyone down and can't see that his beloved companion is evil incarnate even though everyone else can? Was he the ill-fated romantic hero, like Byron's Manfred, eternally cursed and cast out? If so, how come he gets to live happily ever after? And there's a wonderful moment when he faces Isabelle to try to make up, and she wants him to take part in the tournament, but he's lost his weapons. "Here's one I made earlier," she says (sort of), producing a sword for him from nowhere. Pelly's vision of hell, meanwhile, involved fiery screen projections in which a little demon figure tipped cartoon stickmen into a tumbly abyssy pit with a pitchfork. This can do terrible things to a girl's mascara.

Over the years I've read reams about what Faure and co were fighting against - being expected to become composers of super-popular grand opera to make their fortune, when it was the last thing they wanted to write. It's only now that I realise exactly what they had to contend with. Imagine being Faure, with all his sensitivity and intuition and passion for Schumann and early church music and intimate songs and chamber music - but the French loved this? Oh, my ears and whiskers.

This opera sums up much that was characteristic of its day, and perhaps a good deal that was wrong with the mindset. Because of this, I'm pleased they've done it: it fills in our musical education in a very particular way and provides some real perspective on, er, the good stuff.

What works of the 20th-century and the early 21st, I wonder, will be exhumed from deserved burial in 122 years' time and allowed their auto-erotic hour of dancing to show bemused people what was characteristic of, and wrong with, our life and attitudes?

A Diable of a tenor: meet Bryan Hymel

You have to hear Bryan Hymel, the American French-style "heroic tenor" who's about to sing the title role of Robert le Diable at the Royal Opera House. He has already become the darling of Covent Garden, stepping in to replace an indisposed Jonas Kaufmann for Les Troyens earlier this year and earning out-and-out raves. I've had a good chat with him about Robert - especially about the particular quality of voice that is required for it, and that he has, and that is a rare marvel today: in a way, the white tiger of the tenor jungle. Just listen to this, from Rossini's Guillaume Tell.

JD: So, Bryan, how’s it going? 

BH: Really well! Each act has its own feeling and mood - it’s good to get into each one. I’ve done the opera before, but only in concert. With this production it’s exciting to see the possibilities, and the stylised way that Laurent [Pelly] envisions the piece is great. It’s a lot of fun.

JD: What are the special challenges that you face in this role? 

BH: First, it’s really high. The range and the majority of the notes lie in a very high part of the voice. This range and the length of the opera are the biggest challenges: my approach is to take it in little chunks, digest them and make sure I’m singing as efficiently as possible. Fortunately I had the chance to do it in concert, just concentrating on the singing and the music, so I was ahead of the game, knowing what to expect of that. What’s going to make it exciting for the audience is also what’s exciting and challenging for us, because all the four main characters’ roles are written that way. They use the whole range, well over two octaves - and the soprano has almost two and a half octaves. You don’t hear that very often, even in things like Lucia. It's extremely virtuosic singing, but the interaction between the characters, especially Robert and Isabelle, is also very dramatic. He thinks she’s left him for another knight and he’s the scorned lover; and in Act 4 he has to fight away the crazy nuns in the ballet. I think the spectacle and the drama will be very exciting in the house. 

JD: Do you think the melodramatic quality and the virtuosity is what made it such an incredible success in its time? 

BH: I do, and I think you have to have the singers and actors that can pull it off. And there are some wonderful moments – that’s an integral factor for any piece to stand the test of time. Maybe it’s 30 seconds or one aria that the audience is waiting for - and there's at least one such bit in every act. There are some really beautiful stand-alone pieces. I hope it will be a reawakening of this repertoire. But it’s hard, especially when times are tough and there’s not a lot of money; a lot of forces are involved in this opera, a big orchestra, the chorus and the ballet. 

JD: How would you account for its neglect?

BH: I think it’s really hard to cast! It’s difficult to get four singers together at the same time who can sing these parts. They contacted me about this over three years ago - it was planned that far in advance. At the time everyone was the same [as the concert performance] except Diana Damrau who’s just had a baby – she’s the only one not here from the original team. It’s not standard repertoire and none of us knew the roles before that. The last time it was done on stage was in Paris in the late 1990s. You need the time to learn the role and get it into your body because it’s not just about singing the notes. You have to be able to do it in an artistic way while still giving the illusion it’s easy. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to sing, by a good bit! 

[UPDATE, 3 December 12 noon: the ROH has just announced that the role of Isabelle will not now be sung by Jennifer Rowley, but instead by Patricia Ciofi and Sofia Fomina.]

JD: Wagner was hugely influenced by Meyerbeer...

BH: I’ve never sung any Wagner – it's a different voice type – but I can certainly see how Meyerbeer’s writing would have influenced Wagner's, especially in the ballet. The music uses very progressive tonalities for the time and it’s great writing. It’s what probably gave Wagner the idea to make the orchestra an equal part of the opera, as opposed to just accompanying the singers - I think Meyerbeer’s already started to do that here. The ballet is almost the most famous thing in the opera, not just because it’s great, but also because it’s shocking to the audience – and not just because it’s nuns behaving badly. I don't think the audience was used to hearing music that was so much part of telling the story. It’s doing much more than setting the mood. There are lots of little solos between instruments that I haven’t heard in operas written before that time. I can see how Meyerbeer influenced Wagner in that way.

JD: Some people suggest that Meyerbeer is too "kitsch" to be convincing today...

BH: If you want to be that way about it, you can – because there are some silly moments. But if you're a Wagner person I think it’s hard to look down your nose too much at anyone else, because the way the drama moves - slow and laboured - that’s part of the style you see in Wagner. And in general, you have to suspend disbelief in opera to enjoy it. I mean, look at L'Elisir! If you buy into Wagner being six hour long, then when you walk into the theatre you approach it from a different place - and I think if an audience doesn’t do that, then they’re not going to enjoy it. 

Laurent Pelly has shrewedly set the audience up for this. Act 1 is set in a tavern, everyone’s drinking and I think that’s an easy way to open the piece. In Act 2 we have the jousting and the tournament: the horses are red, yellow, green and blue, and the chorus singers supporting each horse are painted the same colour, even their arms and faces. I think he has a way of easing the audience into the opera and saying 'This is not what you might expect, but let us lead you there'... so by the end, people will really appreciate it. We’ve made some cuts that I think help to move things along. The French, for grand opera, wanted a long evening in the theatre – they went along for that! It might be a little far for modern audiences to go there right away, but I think we’re going to give it a good shot.

JD: Yout high tenor role is something particularly characteristic of French opera? 

BH: Yes. I would say that Berlioz, Meyerbeer, Auber, etc, were writing for a specific kind of tenor voice – it’s a very different style from the Italian and it involves another approach to the high notes. Italians often throw in a high note out of the blue and I think it was written in that way so that if a tenor had that note he could put it in, and if he didn’t - and probably most of them didn’t! - you could just go on without it and unless people knew the music well, it wouldn’t strike them as funny. Here, though, there’s no way not to do the high notes and that’s what makes it really tricky. Being a tenor who sings this repertoire, I know that if I’m not feeling 95 per cent, the note’s just not going to come out! Rossini wrote Guillaume Tell in a similar fashion. The term at the time was 'heroic tenor', because though it was high it’s still very visceral. 

Meyerbeer and these guys were writing for a specific kind of singer; those tenors were just starting to sing the high notes in their full chest voice right before this was written. Some of them still would go into the voix mixte. That wouldn’t work today: the theatres are too big and the orchestras are too loud for those sounds to be heard. 

When they first sent [the score] to me I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it. Three years down the line you think hopefully your vocal progress will have continued to grow, but even though I could sing it at the time, I wasn’t comfortable enough about saying 'OK let’s do the title role in this opera at Covent Garden'. It’s been three years that this has been looming over my head! Now that I’m here, thank goodness I feel in the best shape I can be in. Coming from Les Troyens I feel I have the confidence and a kind of support and relationship with the audience here in London. I think we’re going to present something they’ll look forward to. I feel strongly about the piece, I’m excited aboutit and through the rehearsals I've felt I’m in a good place. 

JD: Well, if you guys can't pull this off, then nobody can.

BH: I think that’s probably true! 

[Production photos: Bill Cooper/ROH] 

Socks for the Lilac Fairy?

The other day the Royal Opera House held a Q&A session on Twitter with two of the Royal Ballet's top stars, husband and wife team Marianela Nunez and Thiago Soares. Fans tweeted their questions and at 5pm Marianela - everyone's favourite Lilac Fairy and Odette right now - and her lovely resident prince picked a selection and answered them online. The questions ranged from favourite roles/choreographers to issues about dancing around difficult sets to the challenges of a dancer's physical regime. One fan even asked Marianela what her shoe size is... because she wanted to knit her some socks.

It struck me that I've never heard a classical music fan offer to knit socks, or indeed anything else, for a favourite soloist. A test tweet I put out, pondering why nobody's yet offered to provide Lang Lang with home-made gloves, produced a flood of snide witticisms. One person said mittens would do better. Another quipped that perhaps Schumann's hand-stretcher would do him some good.

OK, so perhaps Lang Lang wasn't the best choice... and it was probably a little unfair on our dancers... But the attitudes of ballet fans and music fans to the top practitioners of their art is so different that I started wondering why.

Ballet fans queue outside the stage door for autographs. They send or even throw flowers (well, they used to, pre recession). They offer to knit socks. They want to know what the stars eat, or don't eat. They're disappointed yet concerned when a favourite dancer is off with an injury; they wish them a speedy recovery. They trot back to the same production time and again to test out the different casts and enjoy the compare-and-contrast process (our friends at The Ballet Bag often post about this). There's a high degree of sympathy and rather a lot of love. Ballet fans seem to be seriously nice about their enthusiasm.

And classical music fans? Be too successful a musician and they start to hate you. Be a woman and you risk having to fight a patronising, sexist atmosphere. Bring out a recording and someone will tear it to bits online if not in print. Give a concert and someone will bring in a recording device without your agreement - and the halls won't even stop them. Hold a political opinion and someone tells you to shut up and play, or shreds your musicianship because they don't happen to like your views. Suffer injury or be ill - especially if you're a singer - and you get a reputation for cancelling and letting people down. Hey, they've paid a lot of money for their seats and that apparently means you can't lose your voice even if you have. And you don't get true adulation until you're over 60. Our fans not only don't like their soloists; it often seems they don't even respect them. If you're a fan, be enthusiastic about a favourite performer and you're regarded as a non-critical idiot who's over-impressed, or suffering a post-teenage crush, or second only to a stalker.

Why this discrepancy? Looking at the questions for Marianela and Thiago on Twitter (hashtag #askthedancers), it seems that many come from people who themselves dance, professionally or semi-professionally or just for fun (like me), or did so as kids. They're concerned with issues of daily life: how do you eat, manage injury, spend your spare time if there is any? Ballet fans identify with the dancers. There's always someone they'd like to be, given the chance. They understand the processes better because they do it themselves, or have done at some point.

Now, I'm not saying that concert and opera-goers don't play and sing, because a lot do. Yet the degree of ignorance about what it takes to be a top-flight musician is much more extreme. Anyone can see how devoted, indeed possessed by the profession, a dancer must be; but some concert-goers don't even realise that a pianist has to practise every day ("Do you have a piano at home, then, love?" someone asked a well-known soloist friend of mine. "What's your day job? D'you work in a bank?").

The sheer physicality of musical performance is frequently downplayed in favour of the high-falutin' issues of poetry, philosophy, historically informed whatever, artistic fulfilment and so forth. That means that little consideration is given to, for example, performing conditions. The number of excellent musicians who have to face their craft being hobbled by the effects of freezing cold venues, lack of food or even tea, or lousy, badly-maintained pianos doesn't bear thinking about. International soloists travel much more than star dancers. Nobody seems eager to make air travel any pleasanter anytime soon, but the toll it takes on the body and mind can be severe. Why do we still expect soloists to function like automatons and regard them as unprofessional if they're unable to give 500% in an unheated venue on a snowy day after a long, stressful journey? Our lack of understanding of the profession means that we often don't let them do their best, even though that is all that they want to do.

Perhaps it is time to start communicating a little better regarding the absolute slog involved in a high-level musical career. Injury may not be quite as hefty an issue as it is for dancers, but it is really not that different. Being a professional musician involves intense physical labour, yet the number of performers who suffer serious injury or illness yet are simply denigrated for their own absence is quite alarming.

How to tackle these issues? Ideally, more people should learn to play musical instruments themselves. We need to identify more with the people who perform the music we love, and that means learning their craft from inside. Meanwhile, maybe we need to hold knitting lessons for classical music fans. My first pair of gloves will probably go to Benjamin Grosvenor.

A last-minute trip to Valhalla

Where do you sit for Die Walküre? In the Gods, of course. And the single best thing about going to Wagner? No queue in the Ladies' Room. Though apparently there was a massive queue in the Gents. Now they know what it's like for us at almost everything else.

I managed, with the help of an eagle-eyed and quick-moused pal, to get a last-minute return for the Wagner at Covent Garden last night. Amid all our yadda yesterday about dressing-down, seat prices et al, I can report that a) the amphitheatre of the Royal Opera House was very dressed-down indeed - Wagner is a long haul flight and you need to go for comfort rather than style; b) the rest of the audience didn't look excessively flash either; and c) you can see nearly six hours of opera with a world-beating cast like this one, a clear view of the complete stage and an excellent take on the house acoustic, for £61. I don't think that is overpriced, under the circumstances. Most people I spoke to had booked a year in advance. Everyone up there was a total Wagner nut, and the hush and stillness through the performance was something to marvel at.

Highlights of the evening appeared in unusual places. First of all, Sarah Connolly's Fricka: a nuanced, heart-rending, ruby-toned performance, exceptionally sophisticated and classy. Another call for someone, please, to award a recording contract, scandalously absent at present. Come on, people - Connolly is a national treasure. She's on disc. But not enough.  

This, too, was the production's one real masterstroke: the tortured relationship between her and Bryn Terfel's Wotan is the heart of the story. Often Fricka is portrayed as little more than a backroom bully, a fundamental ideologist forcing Wotan's hand over a point of malign principle (it's a common enough problem) and you always wonder why he's weak enough to cave in (a common enough problem too). Here, though, there is still a great love between this long-married couple, on both sides. Connolly made you feel every twist of Fricka's shredded heart as the faithless Wotan cradles her with tremendous tenderness. Wotan lets her win because his love for her ultimately overrides his other amours. It makes sense out of the whole story.

It was more or less the only sense we got out of Keith Warner's production, which I have not attended before. It's cluttered, fussy and occasionally worrying: there's a distinct tendency for characters to trip over the red rope that is doing goodness knows what across the stage, and over the metal thingummyjig that rears up in the middle of the set, and then there's the ladder, from which Susan Bullock apparently had to be unhooked by a stage-hand on the first night - and will something elsewhere in the cycle make sense of the three-pronged fan under which Brunnhilde falls asleep? What's it for - repelling mosquitoes? On the top of a mountain? Most of the action appears to take place in a disused storeroom or perhaps a very messy study (a bit like mine) with a black office table, a leather chaise-longue and a huge heap of discarded books. I was constantly alarmed in case someone decided to do a Nazi-reference thing by setting light to it, though fortunately they didn't. If you're going to offer a concept Walküre, then clarity of that concept helps. This one, if it exists, eludes me. And according to Fiona Maddocks, the production has actually been streamlined since last time. 

The other unforgettable performance was Sir John Tomlinson's Hunding, who could dominate the stage with his first swing of the axe and the auditorium with his first note and all thereafter. A marvellous moment when he and Terfel's Wotan come face to face - these two legends together are not something you see every day. Marvels too from Terfel himself, of course, a Wotan incarnate; and Eva-Maria Westbroek as Sieglinde, creamy-toned, all-giving and ultimately transcendental as she blesses Brunnhilde. As the latter, a feisty Susan Bullock, tiny and ferocious. Simon O'Neill as Siegmund started strong, but threatened to fade out as Act 1 wrestled him and nearly won. Luxury singing from the Valkyrie gang and, below, Tony Pappano presided over a rich-toned and rhapsodic orchestra augmented by six harps plucking away in the stalls circle. 

At the risk of sounding heretical, though, I'm not convinced Wagner is Pappano's finest six hours. He has become incomparable in Italian repertoire - Il Trittico a year ago was one of the greatest evenings I've ever had in the ROH, and I mean it. But this was rather gentle Wagner: an interpretation that roused and glowed but didn't transfigure. It needs an extra hard-edge of ecstasy that simply wasn't there, despite the glories of the singing. 

Let's face it: we go to Wagner to get high. That's why people get addicted. And if you don't get the high, something isn't quite working. And the place it needs to be generated is in the pit. It's legal. But it shouldn't necessarily sound it.

Operalia Winners and Placido Domingo, Royal Opera House

Here's my review of last night's absolutely unbelievable night at the ROH for The Independent. It may seem a bit effusive, but it's all true. Are we in a golden age of operatic voices? If this isn't one, then what is?
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/reviews/plcido-domingos-operalia-winners-royal-opera-house-london-7979048.html

Fate is...a counter-tenor?

The UK premiere of Judith Weir's new opera  Miss Fortune, a co-commission with the Bregenz Festival, was indeed a blend of the ups and downs its story suggests. Life is a roller-coaster, its protagonists point out. But whatever happened to free will?

If Fate is a counter-tenor, then we're all doomed. It's a Sartre-esque choice of a voice, inescapable as it shadows the powerful lead soprano, Emma Bell, in the most claustrophobia-inducing way. The psychological, or psychiatric, implications of his presence as the voice inside Miss Fortune's head could have been the most interesting thing about this opera, had they been explored a lot more. But they weren't. The implications of her awful relationship with her ghastly parents, too, could have been explored a lot more, but... yes, exactly. And is her supposed saviour, a nice, very rich boy called Simon, actually that nice? Come off it - he wants to pull down Donna's laundromat and build pied-a-terres for his City chums! Amid many uncomfortable dramatic choices, some of which are more uncomfortable than ever inside a place as plush as the ROH, Miss Fortune offers a tantalising glimpse of what might have been.

Miss Fortune's personal Fate - Andrew Watts - isn't to blame for that. He, his colleagues and the dazzling breakdancers of Soul Mavericks made the show a treat in its own way; so, too, the designs and its special effects (set: Tom Pye, lighting/projections: Scott Zielinski, Leigh Sachwitz, Flora and Faunavisions) - projected video effects are clearly flavour of the operatic zeigeist at the moment. The orchestra, under Paul Daniel, and the chorus provided all the sympathetic backup you should expect from a top international opera house.

Bell held the stage throughout, a scarlet flame in voice as well as costume. The men in her life - the American rising star tenor Noah Stewart as Hassan, the man with the kebab van, and the South African baritone Jacques Imbrailo as Simon - should have been a tough choice for her at the end, although she apparently doesn't even consider the penniless Hassan. I'd have wished she'd gone off with him had Imbrailo's gorgeous, luminous voice not beguiled heart and mind every bit as much. And had it not been for the quality of the singing, the breakdancers would have had a walkover triumph (though walking is perhaps the only thing that doesn't happen in breakdancing).

I wonder if the Bregenz request for an opera "for an entirely normal audience" became perhaps a shackle to one of British music's most enticing imaginations? Weir's story is linear, told "from A to Z", but supposing it wasn't? Supposing there'd been carte blanche for her to turn more fantastical, to go deeper, to go wild with all the possibilities that music, drama, stage technology and fabulous musicians can offer? One way or another, that didn't happen. The music felt as hamstrung as the drama. It just doesn't get off the ground - not even when Noah Stewart sings his Aubade from the roof of kebab-van-ex-machina.

The trouble with updating folk stories about Fate to the modern world is that we have to believe that that is how things work. Covent Garden's programme uses a quorum of chopped-down trees trying to convince us: among several essays on the topic, there's even a fascinating one about chaos, randomness and astrophysics. But what happened to the fact that the financial crash - which sparks the entire story - was entirely man-made? It is a miserable history of cause, effect, ideological idiocy and the seven deadly sins, a true tragedy that unfurls the fatal flaws in human nature - Greek in more ways than one. That in itself would make a much better story. Yes, things do happen to us that we don't plan. But sometimes, somewhere, some of those things are the result of someone else's stupidity, greed or megalomania. You can't entirely avoid cancer or multiple sclerosis. But financial crashes can be prevented by sensible economic management. And this opera is about a financial crash.

Here's my alternative scenario for Tina and her missed fortunes.

* The sweat-shop workers join forces with the breakdancers and organise themselves into a powerful protest lobby. They hold Lord Fortune's bossy wife to ransom and remind him of those modest, hardworking roots of which he boasts so copiously. His conscience is swayed.

* Instead of losing what remains of his offshore riches to pirates, he gives his daughter a trust-fund so that she doesn't have to work in the laundromat but can devote herself to becoming Director of Communications for the protest lobby. He then agrees to stand as an independent MP to fight the cause of liberty, siblinghood, equality.

* Simon, instead of telling her to throw her winning lottery ticket away, uses his portion of the proceeds (because Tina's going to share it all out) to chuck in his horrid City job and become a full-time baritone, donating the income from his first album to an inner-city regeneration project.

* He and Tina and Hassan can't choose between one another, so they set up as a menage-a-trois and finish the opera by singing All You Need Is Love.

* Somebody seizes Fate by the throat and chucks him into the orchestra pit.

If you want to see it - and you should, for the singing and dancing at the very least - there's a special offer from the ROH for 23 March, when you can get the best available seat, a kebab and a beer for £45. More details here.

(Photos: Bill Cooper/Royal Opera House)

Girl Power

Hooray for music's powerful women! 

1. JUDITH WEIR AND EMMA BELL ON MISS FORTUNE


Judith Weir's latest full-length opera is heading for Covent Garden, opening on 12 March, and it's the first opera ever to finish (as far as I'm aware) with the heroine winning the lottery. Emma Bell is in the leading role of Tina, conquering a number of different stratospheres (left, Emma atop "the shape"). I talked to them both about creating what Bregenz Festival director David Pountney called "an opera for an entirely normal audience". See my feature in today's Independent, here.





2. DANIELLE DE NIESE TO STAR IN OPERA OF ANN PATCHETT's BEL CANTO


The Lyric Opera of Chicago has commissioned the young Peruvian composer Jimmy Lopez to write the work, which is scheduled for the 2015-16 season. Ann Patchett's novel describes a terrorist attack in a South American jungle in which a group of opera lovers, politicians and a singer, Roxanne Coss, are taken hostage: over the months, attackers and hostages form unexpected alliances. RENEE FLEMING, Lyric's creative consultant, chose the book as the perfect topic for the opera. The libretto is by playwright Nilo Cruz, the director is Stephen Wadworth and Sir Andrew Davis conducts. And Danni, who's much more than Glyndebourne's fabled Cleopatra, takes the lead as Roxanne. More here.

“It’s about terrorism on one level, but it’s also about what happens when people are forced to live together for a long time, and how art can raise their level of humanity as a group,” Fleming said. “Most of us crave a cathartic emotional experience when we’re at the theater, and I believe Bel Canto has the components to do that... I was struck by Jimmy Lopez's intelligence and the way he understands both the problems in bringing this piece to the stage, but also the possibilities that opera as a medium offers for illuminating a story. For example, the orchestra can accentuate the dramatic situation onstage, but it can also convey the underlying turmoil that one might not see. This is something that many composers miss and that Jimmy understands completely.” 

3. JD TO SPEAK AT CLASSICAL:NEXT


The new classical music trade fair Classical:Next, taking place in Munich from 30 May to 1 June, has announced its initial line-up of events and speakers, and I am happy to report that JD is to be on a panel discussing the future of music journalism, along with BBC Music Magazine editor Oliver Condy and the editor of the German magazine PIANONews, Carsten Durer. Classical:Next is a sister production to WOMEX, and if that event is anything to go by, we want to be there.

4. DON'T FORGET TAZ AND ROX's BIG NIGHT

Tonight at the Anvil, Basingstoke, and tomorrow night at the Fairfield Halls, Croydon, the London Mozart Players and TASMIN LITTLE (left) give the world premiere of the complete Four World Seasons by ROXANNA PANUFNIK. Having had a sneak peek for Classical Music magazine, I reckon Vivaldi wouldn't know what's hit him. Rox writes:

"In early 2008, the violinist Tasmin Little rang me to ask whether I’d write a series of short pieces for her, accompanied by chamber orchestra. Considering a world where global concern for climate change and seismic shifts in international political landscapes affect us all, we decided to take Antonio Vivaldi’s much-loved 1725 Four Seasons and give the concept a 21st-century twist, creating an entirely new work with each season (lasting approximately 5 minutes) influenced by a country that has become culturally associated with it."  Spring in Japan, an Indian Summer, Autumn in Albania and a Tibetan Winter form the music in this celebration of music across the world, reflecting the many cultures that descend on London for the 2012 Olympic Games." 

5. JUST FOR THE HECK OF IT, HERE'S DARCEY BUSSELL AS SYLVIA


Ahead of her time, Frederick Ashton's Sylvia was created for Margot Fonteyn in the 1950s. Diana's top nymph is not exactly your typical 1950s ideal housewife. I love the power, joy and freedom in Darcey Bussell's interpretation, filmed at the ROH in 2005. Girl Power if ever we saw it! Roberto Bolle is her lovestruck swain. Enjoy.

Director Sergio Morabito talks about THAT PRODUCTION of Rusalka

The Wieler-Morabito production of Rusalka at Covent Garden has proved a lot more controversial in terms of critical response than The Death of Klinghoffer at ENO. Some critics, including my Independent colleague Ed Seckerson, have given it just one star out of five - though often there's a proviso of four for the musical performance and universal plaudits for Yannick Nezet-Seguin. The Telegraph has turned it into a salacious "oo-er, opera set in brothel gets booed" story, which is on the front page of the paper's website (still, you'd more or less expect that from the Telly). Mark Berry, over at Boulezian, is a voice of strong approval. And the Financial Times gives it five stars. I guess that means it has "divided opinion"...

My article previewing the production last week was based on a wide-ranging interview with Sergio Morabito, one of its duo of directors, and revival director Samantha Seymour. I thought it might be interesting, in the light of all this fuss, to revisit the original transcript for more detail. It's longish, and Sergio's English is quite Germanic, so get yourself a cuppa...
(Images: Royal Opera House/Clive Barda)

JD: Sergio, how and why did you decide to give Rusalka this very modern type of production, full of symbols? 

SM: Jossi Wieler, my directing partner and I, always try not to impose something, not to force something – we try to develop the aesthetic of a production out of the interpretation of the written and the musical text. What was decisive for this experience was that we discover that we need to find a balance, to balance it very carefully and not neglect the fairytale moments, which of course are important. Everybody knows the Andersen tale of The Little Mermaid and we try to go with it and play with it. But we decided together with the stage designer not to have a naturalistic setting, but we try to evoke this summer night’s dream kind of atmosphere, which is part of the score that you can’t just overrule. So we have a simple space which can transform and as a second layer we have the video projections which are conveying much of this fairytale atmosphere. Even in the costumes we play with it with these moments – we went back to Andersen and Rusalka really has this fish tail and tries to get rid of it and turn it into human legs. I think everything lies in a certain playfulness. 

But it’s important to realise the opera is a very dark fin-de-siecle reworking of this ancient story. This is crucial: it’s really dark fairy tale. It’s really desperate – without any hope. The ending is one of the most hopeless endings until now in opera, because of what she’s experiencing. This incredible development of Rusalka from a young woman, almost a girl, who tries to break out and find her own way and leave her father, risking everything in order to live this love, but then gradually becoming aware that she cannot live in this cold human world: she’s fooled by the society, humiliated by them and betrayed by the prince of course. Then the third act is very desperate. It’s not so much about an intact natural world - but one of the first lines is  that Vodnik the water goblin says "You are selling yourself," bartering – like The Bartered Bride, in Czech it's the same word – so it is also about the violation of the natural world. Then she realises that the human kind of utopia she dreamed of discovering with her prince becomes a trap more and more. We end up – it’s sort of inspired element, very strange, maybe it has some fin-de-siecle elements, but it is really a brothel, with sofas and couches...

SS: An American brothel!

SM: We end up in a very sad situation where she has no escape any more and so she decides in our production to commit suicide - which is an important element of the Rusalka story. Pushkin wrote a drama which he didn’t complete and later Dargomyszky transformed it into an opera – it’s the East European Rusalka myth, about a woman or children also who were not baptised or were expelled from Christian society, so they had no burial and they are doomed to live not living, not being dead, expelled by this Christian world. In the Pushkin she commits suicide and transforms into a rusalka - she comes back as a kind of vampire and drags him to his death. This goes perfectly not only with the music but also the text of this opera. It’s a horror ending: the prince goes mad and crazy, begging she gives him the mortal kiss, so it's not a love reconciliation, but she’s really kissing him to death. She comes back from the dead and revenges herself. She knows that she never will be granted salvation because she’s been told from the very beginning 

SS: She can save the prince but she can’t save herself. 

SM: Her last words to him when she kills him are "May God be merciful to you," but she knows that she herself is doomed to haunt this place. 

SS: In this undead state 

SM: exactly. We tried to find the right balance, and it's very sophisticated and playful, but also a sophisticated game of the authors of the text. It has much to do with this fin de siècle melancholy and sadness.

JD: When Dvorak wrote the work, around 1900, Freud's work was already current and it strikes me that the Freudian symbolism is very clear - do you think that is a deliberate element in the opera?

SS: I think that was partly the spirit of the times – the decadence of turn-of-the-century Vienna. 

SM: It’s not so far away...it started around the same time. There's a strange structure to the story with the Foreign Princess: we don’t know what the relationship with the prince is, where does she suddenly come from – this very violent, destructive female character. And of course it’s also the madness of the prince at the end, he goes crazy.

SS: He really does despair - and he’s in a pretty rocky state at the beginning! 

SM: One can assume he tried to fall in love with Rusalka: already he’s trying to liberate himself from the spell from the foreign princess, it could be an explanation. Then he realises he can't cope with the other woman – the foreign princess is a bit much for him and he tries to conform to his society and their expectations when he meets Rusalka, but her idea of love is too different. He has not the strength to fight for it, in a way. He’s so fragile – and he is very brutal to Rusalka in the second act, when he falls completely under the power of the Foreign Princess.

JD: The story seems full of echoes of Giselle and Swan Lake... 

SM: Yes, the Wilis, the women who were abandoned before the wedding...it’s exactly this tradition. That’s what we have to make concrete, this journey by Rusalka...

JD: Will you make many changes from your original production in Salzburg? (This interview was on the first day of ROH rehearsals).

SM: Two of the main parts are the same singers – Camilla Nylund was crucial because she is so charming on the one side and has so many colours she can convey vocally and with her acting. She’s able to have this playfulness, but she faces also the catastrophes of this character and the final scene is really chilling. But of course we try to react, not just to fit in the new singers. We have to find it and adapt it and it’s a great chance to work over some details. 

SS: There's an element that involves the Austrian Empire - bringing the production to England, we have to make sure the wedding party wouldn’t be construed as being German because they’re in dirndls and lederhosen. It’s not about germany, it’s about Austria. If you just picked 30 people outside the Salzburg Festspielhaus they’d look like our chorus! 

SM: Of course the Habsburgs and Czechoslovakia was part of it - the national opera was a manifestation of the Czech identity. We have on stage a little fountain with the famous statue of the Little Mermaid, but she wears a sort of halo: she's a pagan being, but she dreams of having sanctity and being granted a soul and being safe. That’s the background of the folklore motifs: these gods, goddesses, wood nymphs and sea nymphs that were demonised under Christianity. It’s not that their existence is denied, but it was thought that the devil was behind these elemental spirits, so this plays a certain role that we see these fairytale characters – in a way, they are in exile. They don’t live in the Bohemian woods, but they've had to retreat. They got pushed out to the edges of society. What we try to have is space for imagination – in the third act you might have this association that it’s a brothel because you see how people are dressed and how they act, but its just one moment of the story. We didn’t want to define it in one way, but to leave it open to different interpretations.

JD: You're mixing the references to the late Habsburg Empire with something much more 21st-century...

SM: Yes, it’s not that you can say OK, we put it in the 1960s or 1980s – we are coming from different sources, so we have a very beautiful traditional Czech wedding dress for Rusalka. It’s an invented world on stage – if you have documentary realism it wouldn’t work. 

JD: What do you make of Jezibaba? 

SM: She’s terrifying. Rusalka addresses her really as an ancient goddess - maybe Hecate, who was a benign goddess thousands of years ago, but now she’s reduced to a very miserable existence and she’s frustrated, of course, because she lost her dignity and people forgot her and think she’s just the old witch. So we see an old woman who can hardly walk - but she has some skills. It’s a mixture, so we don’t have just a classical fairytale, but this is a woman like those you can see on the streets nowadays. A bag lady. But she has a very special cat, which she addresses in the text also – it’s a very frightening, big cat, played by a dancer. 

JD: (remembering with alarm what happened in the Glyndebourne production) It doesn’t get its paw chopped off when they make the potion, does it....?

SM: No, this is a bit more playful! The little Rusalka we see at the beginning has a toy cat and it’s funny this fishwoman loves this toy cat; and suddenly in the scene with the witch it transforms into a cruel monster. And this cat transforms her and gives her legs.

SS: It’s very ambivalent: it has sexual elements and it’s quite horrific, but at the same time Rusalka really wants this to happen to her. 

SM: Everybody wants her, but she’s relentless, she really fights for her dream and does everything...and at the very end, in the third act in this brothel situation, there is the cat of Madame Jezibaba, a real one, sitting next to her – it is privileged to sit next to the Madame – and that is when Rusalka realises she is really trapped and she commits suicide. She asks "How can I come back to my former existence?". Jezibaba says "You have to stab the prince," and gives her a knife. In Dvorak she’s supposed to throw the knife into the lake and in our production, with the same words - it makes perfect sense - she says "he shall be happy, whatever happens to me" and she kills herself. 

SS: The alternative is that the world of the nymphs is also the world of the brothel so if she decided to stay there, she’d become one of the girls.

JD: What do you say to people who say "but this is a fairytale and we want a mermaid"? 

SM: But we have one! We have also the nymphs! We have a giant cat! They are right – you shouldn’t negate this abstractly, but you also shouldn’t reduce the fairy story because it’s much more than that. 

SS: I think fairytales have got a bad name – a lot of them are very psychologically dark, not harmless little stories for children. We do have fairy tale elements and the video projections to create that kind of ambience. SM: I’ve often seen beautiful films which are also playing with fairy tales, transposing them to a more contemporary world of experience. Children, when they hear fairy tales, they have concrete associations, they connect it to their real world. They don’t analyse them, but I remember how you link to certain persons or certain objects - so, you try to understand through the symbols when you don’t know the real meaning of old words. 

SS: There’s a lot of cruelty in them. I once went to a children’s performance of Cinderella where the Ugly Sisters had their feet chopped off to fit into the slippers. A friend of mine who’s a kindergarten teacher said you have to have this because children have an innate sense of right and wrong and if the bad sisters aren’t punished fittingly then they go out with this sense that it was unjust! So the cruelty is justified. That was an interesting insight.

JD: This is the first time Rusalka has been done here. Is that maybe why people have fought shy of it, because it is so dark? 

SM: It’s hard to say, but it could be one reason. 

SS: There’s a sort of renaissance of it going on – since we did our production in Salzburg there’ve been several others that have been very successful. 

SM: Also the Czech language...Especially in Germany, we have this repertory sustem and it’s not so easy to fill the houses... I think it’s partly due to the language, which also affects the musical language in an interesting way. I could imagine for some people this makes it difficult. [Morabito is currently based in Stuttgart.]

JD: You work very much in tandem with another director, Jossi Wieler – this is interesting, because in my experience some directors tend to be a tad despotic? 

SM: We’ve done opera together since 1994 and it’s a collective art work per se. You are not free – you have to respond from moment to moment to so many decisions the composer made. When you stage a play you have carte blanche to give the text a new structure and make a collage, etc, to create an exciting and interesting production. But in opera you have to contend with the grid of the score. And so that’s what we try to do: for us it’s all about the common process between the two of us and also the designer and the singers We really believe that you have to free the singers, you have to coach them in the best possible way... You are not just reacting: there are many decisions to take in advance before the rehearsal process starts. But the most beautiful thing is when the singers take over more and more responsibility. We’re not directors who expect singers to fill the form we’re defining; we try to stimulate their own fantasy. 

SS: What you often do is tell the singers what the situation is and what you want them to communicate, but not how you want them to communicate it. I think that’s a big difference. 

SM: So often you see opera where everybody is trying to make a remake of the film that was already made in their head, whereas for us the great thing is when they become freer and freer and have their own life - it's not like being marionettes. You find so much more that you couldn’t anticipate. It’s a living process – we are trying to hand over our ideas and input and then see. It gives you the possibility to step back and discover new dimensions. We have this dialogue. invent these productions and involve every collaborator. It’s fun! And when you have singers like Camilla – singers can do so much nowadays, they are so keen, they want to know, they want to play, they want to be asked. 

Often in opera, because it's so hierachical, you have a huge responsibility - and maybe it makes it easier if there are two of you, because you can afford to rely on the other and we find out together how to go on. This takes away a lot of stress, because the institution assumes you know what you want and it can be a difficult dynamic in opera theatre. 

SS: A lot of people have a similar relationship with their set designer and consult them about what they think SM: The stage designer created a space from which this world can unfold. We take the risk, even if we don’t know how it will unfold – it’s about process and it’s much more productive when you don’t know from the very beginning what you want to see. You start and you have long discussions; it’s important to have very specific fixed points and start around those. It’s so beautiful when the conductor, the singers, everyone is really working together and it’s not this power game...

JD: Audiences in some European countries, especially Germany and Austria, have come to expect productions that shock and challenge, whereas Americans tend to prefer traditional narrative stagings. Do you worry about how this production is going to go over here in the UK, which is kind of in the middle? 

SM: It’s hard to say, but of course I hope that the audience will see that no one of the singers is forced to do something awkward, but that they really play with huge intensity. So even if it’s unexpected or even disturbing in some moments, my hope is that nobody can really resist the presence of the singers and the commitment that they have. 

SS: There's nothing gratuitous about it. 

JD: If you were speaking to someone who's never seen Rusalka before, how would you persuade them to come and see it? 

SM: It’s not the answer to your question, but we try to work in a way that everyone, even someone who doesn’t know anything about the opera or the story, is able to step in and understand it. So it's not that we are simplifying – on the contrary, the more colour and detail, the more concrete it is. We don’t like the idea that we are making abstract aesthetic statements and people must swallow it or die! We think and hope that people wouldn’t have preconceived expectations. One hopes one can seduce even people who know the opera in another production to experience it anew. I would say it’s a very sad, modern fairy tale with wonderful late-romantic music – not just the Song to the Moon which everyone knows but a lot of pieces everyone should know...It’s an incredibly colourful score, but permeated by this deep, deep sadness and all the folk elements – it brings together a lot of different musical styles. 

JD: It strikes me that there’s a lot of Wagner in there. 

SM: That’s true – Alberich and the Rhinemaidens and some of the sounds and styles are melded in Dvorak's own style.

JD: And here’s an opera where the heroine is mute for most of the 2^nd act! 

SM: Yes, that’s funny! It's an amazing risk to take – she doesn’t sing for half an hour and then this amazing aria bursts out of her. But you’ll see how Camilla is moving this whole second act – it’s so touching. And in the first act we think we need the love duet, but it never happens, Rusalka doesn’t join in! That's quite daring.

JD: Do you like working with Yannick Nezet-Seguin?

SM: I’m very happy he is conducting. When we did this in 2008 in Salzburg, he was there conducting Romeo and Juliet, and it’s a nice coincidence we are brought together now in this opera.

JD: Is it possible to quantify why the working relationship is so strong between you and Jossi?

SM: He was already an established theatre director when then he was asked by the artistic manager of the Stuttgart Opera to direct opera. He hesitated, he loves classical music and opera, but he thought it’s not his profession – and so we came together and started to do our first production, I as dramaturg and he as director, and it developed its own dynamic. After our third production - it was Alcina by Handel, it was invited to the Edinbuirgh Festival for several performances around 2000 or 01 - we started to stage things together. I am coming more from the dramaturgical approach, but what we share is an analytical passion, so Jossi for the 'soul and being' and me for dramaturgy, text and literature. Of course we change, sometimes he is leading, sometimes I can take over and show a direction, but we can hardly say who had which idea. It comes out of the dialogue - but that’s his great quality, that he lets it be. It’s great serenity. We are now at the Stuttgart Opera and we had a wonderful La Sonnambula premiere last Sunday. It’s fantastic because normally in opera you can’t choose - you are asked whether or not you want to stage a particular opera - but now we can decide ourselves.