Kaufmann as Otello, Vratogna as Iago.
All photos by Catherine Ashmore/Royal Opera House
One of the first rules of reviewing is: do not start by talking about the weather. So to start on the Royal Opera's new Otello by pointing out that it was the hottest first night of the year - Jonas Kaufmann's role debut - as well as the hottest June day since 1976 just isn't on. Nevertheless, it was both. In the auditorium one experienced Keith Warner's postmodern new production and Verdi's sizzling score through the gentle rattling of ladies' fans, the flapping of tickets and programmes mimicking their effect, and the upping and downing of light on rogue mobiles as certain people in my row checked Facebook every ten minutes. (Why couldn't they just have donated their ticket to a fan who would have fully appreciated the performance?)
If the audience was finding it difficult to settle, the same couldn't be said of the music. Tony Pappano, first of all, is in his element in this opera. His shaping and pacing of the drama is breathtaking: mercurial, clear, enormously energetic and deeply intelligent. The building up of the scene where Iago gets Cassio increasingly drunk is just one example, beginning almost as a pub song, joshing about, before spiralling through a queasy mephistophelian intensification into violence. The chorus's staging is often static and stylised, very far from naturalistic, but they sound simply glorious.
Again, canny pacing is everything in Kaufmann's characterisation of Otello: confident and tender until Iago plants the seed of doubt, but thereafter tumbling in stages from loss of faith through cool, calculating and controlled resolve, into increasing torment and ultimate dissolution. At ease taking command, but tentative with his new wife as she leads him to the bedroom, this Otello is a man of war first and foremost, perhaps unable to cope with the shock of his own emotions. His progress towards murder for once makes considerable sense.
Deeply convincing and vocally gorgeous, full of careful shading with brilliance reserved for the moments it most counted, this was singing in 3D. If some people expected more volume, one can only reiterate that Kaufmann doesn't do volume for the sake of it and has never been the biggest voice on the stage, just the most beautiful and intelligent one (hmm, this is my second time this year writing that). It is no reason to reject the most complex and satisfying interpretation of this role that I've yet experienced.
Marco Vratogna, replacing the originally announced Ludovic Tézier as Iago, was the wild card of the evening, bursting into our consciousnesses in impressive style. Warner's production makes him explicitly the puppet master, controlling not only those around him but the symbols of Venice, the carnival mask, the winged lion, setting the hideous process in motion with ice-cold, psychopathic glee and resembling nothing so much as a Shakespearean version of Dracula with shaven head and bat-like cloak. He could scarcely lean on a wall without making it move. Yet his raven-dark, demonically powerful voice made Iago more than merely a copybook villain. Meanwhile, as Desdemona Maria Agresta sounded vocally effortless and presented the hapless heroine as a straightforward, uncomplicated, loving young woman, trapped in a tragic situation beyond control.
Agresta as Desdemona, Kaufmann as Otello in the final scene
Visually the production has some seriously striking moments. The set design, by Boris Kudlička, involves sliding panels that shift to show us blazes of light through glass, the bedroom through latticework, Otello's face highlighted in a window frame before the final scene, and Cassio's vertiginous descent into drunkenness, amid much else. The contrast between the public and the private moments is convincingly achieved, with Iago and Otello experiencing their oppressive solitary reflections in the darkest isolation. The aptly named Bruno Poet's lighting is, throughout, not only masterful, but often magical.
However, reflecting Otello as a tragic-faced lion-caricature in a mirror, smothering him with a carnival mask and bringing on a giant dismembered lion statue are gestures that seem to over-egg the Venetian pudding in a production that otherwise mixes and mismatches its eras to occasional ill effect. The tall ship rigged with beautiful sails arriving at the back in scene 1 is far indeed from the apparently contemporary hotel-style bedroom in which the murder takes place. And the costume designs by Kaspar Glarner, while offering flowing robes for Desdemona and that splendid cloak for Iago, experience occasional misjudgments. Emilia - the excellent Kai Rüütel - is encumbered by an impossibly stiff and outsize fake-Renaissance wig, and as for Otello's gigantic harem-style leather trousers (eh?) and the blue sparkly robe - think variety-act pseudo-magician - in which he arrives to kill his wife, these did few favours to either singer or character. If the point is that the story is timeless, we know that already and this doesn't help.
There's always some plonker who has to boo the production team, of course, and despite those few weaknesses they really didn't deserve it. It's a powerful, moving account of a towering masterpiece, with musical performances of a calibre that you won't find improved upon anywhere.
Otello is in cinemas next Wednesday, 28 June, so if you can't get to the ROH, do try and catch it on screen.
The powerful and uncompromising Welsh tenor
Gwyn Hughes Jones sings Walther von Stolzing in the Royal Opera House’s new
production of Die Meistersinger von
Nürnberg, alongside his fellow countryman Sir Bryn Terfel as Hans Sachs. I
went backstage to meet him…
Hughes Jones (left) and Terfel (right) in the rehearsal room (c) Royal Opera House, photo by Clive Barda
Jessica
Duchen: Gwyn, can you tell us about Kasper Holten’s new production, without
giving the game away?
Gwyn Hughes Jones: No! Haha… I think people
already know that it’s set in a club, a sort of music club.
It reflects that idea of the application of rules to art and expression and
how, if they’re not applied conscientiously, they hamstring the expressive
sense of spontaneity, that creative evolution in art. We have to have rules in
art because human beings have to have structure. Two plus two has to make four:
we do need some kind of balance in nature and in the world. We can’t help
ourselves. But it’s when rules take over and exist for their own
sake that there’s trouble. I think this works for the piece: it doesn’t
compromise it in any way. It’s always interesting to see the path directors
take in their concepts of how to make a piece relevant to today. I’m sure that, as always, some people will like it and some people will not. We’ll see…
JD:
You sang Walther at English National Opera not so long ago, in English, so this
is your second Walther, but your first in German. What’s it like to make that
change?
GHJ:In a way, you start all over again. You can’t take anything for granted.
The structure of the language is different, the inflection of the stresses are
different, the way the language is used is slightly different too, so you have
to be mindful of those things in preparation and delivery. I think singing
these pieces in English is incredibly useful because you end up with a really broad
palette of colour choice. Instead of having maybe one to three colours for a
word, you have six or seven. Of course you still have to choose the right ones.
But as someone who works in, if you like, the discipline of sound-painting, to
have that choice of palette is always a very important weapon.
JD:
Walther is a notoriously difficult role. What are the biggest challenges?
GHJ: It’s long. It’s high in some places.
It’s not written in a friendly way. Nevertheless, you can look
at some works of Puccini and Verdi and you see they, too, are writing for the kind of
singer they have a right to expect. They don’t think we arrive without
having had any kind of vocal education. These pieces play a part in stretching
singers and not compromising them. I think the bel canto style was a
hugely important influence on Wagner and this is reflected in all his works to
some extent, but particularly in this piece. So it’s about having that elegance,
it’s having the youthfulness – and one of the biggest challenges is remaining
fresh to the very end.
One difficulty is
this paradox that characters like Walther are young, but in real life you have
to wait until you’re a fair bit older, a mature singer and a very physically strong
and sophisticated singer, to be able to sing these roles to their potential.
There is no other way. You will not find a 20-year old-who will sing Walther to
its potential. So one of the challenges in this kind of repertoire is to keep
the voice young, fresh and vibrant, so that when you come to
your potential you can fulfil it for as long as possible. That’s why singers
like Gigli, Björling and Pavarotti could keep that youthfulness and vibrancy in
their voices for a very long time and that’s what made them convincing
exponents.
Gwyn Hughes Jones as Walther with Rachel Willis-Sørensen as Eva in the new Meistersinger.
(c) ROH, photo by Clive Barda
JD: Do
you have a regime for looking after your voice?
GHJ: It’s a lot to do with choosing the
right kind of repertoire and I think the root of it goes to the beginning of my
learning about singing. You have to be fortunate enough to work with good
teachers, you need to work with people who know what they’re talking about and
you need to be incredibly patient in your development. By all means, have
targets along the way, have a long journey, but also work hard within a sense of
context. You need to be sensible about repertoire choices and understand that
if you do aspire to sing Wagner, if you aspire to sing the Verdi and Puccini
spinto roles, then in the same way Wagner was inspired by Bellini, you have to
sing that repertoire too: you have to immerse yourself in the bel canto style.
You have to sing everything, but it is a process of building by small bricks.
You build a very solid foundation, then build on that. You don’t just wake up
one morning and find you’re a Heldentenor. It doesn’t work like that – and if
people do do that, they don’t last very long.
JD: So
it takes 30 years to be an overnight success…
GHJ: Yes, and to remain an overnight
success, that’s the thing. It’s not about that initial splash. Spotting
potential is the easiest thing in the world; allowing it to develop is something totally different. The onus is on us as individuals, but on the
people we work with as well. So it is very challenging and you have to be
incredibly patient too.
JD:
How did you start to sing?
GHJ: My parents were not academically
musical, but they loved opera, my father loved singing and there was always plenty of music in
the house. Also coming from Wales there was always plenty of
great culture around, so I was never far away from great literature and great
poetry in English and in Welsh, and great music too. It was a very common thing
for me to hear operatic arias when I was very young, sung by schoolteachers or
farmers. In Eisteddfods these are competition arias, so you’d turn up to an
Eisteddfod competition and there’d be people singing the ‘Prize Song’ and ‘Vissi d’arte'... So there’s a sense that, yes,
they’re great, great art, but also that it wasn’t an elitist thing by
any means: they were extremely reachable. You saw people who were having
a singing lesson once a week or once a month, singing these arias as well as
they’d be sung at some of the greatest opera houses in the world. That always
for me was an example to say, ‘Yes, why not?’.
As someone who comes from
Anglesey, whose father is an engineer, whose mother is a housewife, some people
would say I have no business whatsoever doing this. And yet all these
influences I had in my upbringing gave me the privilege and the opportunity to
be able to pick these things, experience them, enjoy them and find a path.
JD: People
always think there’s a mystique about the Welsh and singing, but is it perhaps more
down to this musical tradition that is very egalitarian?
GHJ: I think it’s a big part of it. Our
historical, cultural tradition involves hundreds of thousands of years of
storytelling. In this culture before the Romans came to Britain, we didn’t
write. And that oral tradition has always been incredibly strong – the old
tales in Welsh are thousands of years old and he oldest piece of poetry in the
Welsh language comes from the 6th century. As a nation that
struggled for its existence, you keep these things very close to you and
they’re the things that keep you believing, keep you defending your culture and
your language. They are incredbily important to us along with the sense of
struggle and telling the story of the struggle. We love our heroes, yet
we’re extremely melancholic too. There is that range of expressive colour in
our culture that all goes to arm this huge weapon we have, called
singing or storytelling.
As Walther in the new production.
(c) Royal Opera House, photo by Clive Barda
JD: This is quite a Welsh dominated Meistersinger:
you are Walther and the freshly-knighted Sir Bryn Terfel is Hans Sachs…
GHJ: I think it’s a great achievement for
the background we come from: the Eistefodd tradition, the amateur tradition. It shows how incredibly rich that
was. We both were given a kind of unofficial education outside school: we were
being taught some of the most amazing ideas and shown some of the most amazing
art and weren’t really aware that it was happening. That’s the most wonderful
thing and it’s easy to take it for granted. But it’s not just the musical
aspect, it’s the literary aspect too, it’s the poetry, the understanding of how
people use words and why people choose certain words to describe something. Being
immersed in that – this is the consequence! I think it’s something worth
reinvesting in: not just keeping it alive but allowing it to go from strength
to strength. And it’s difficult, because Wales is economically poor. So it
needs as much support as it can get.
JD: Have
you worked with Bryn much before?
GHJ: We did some concerts together in Wales
years ago, and we did Falstaff together in Chicago, which was my American debut
in 1999. But we haven’t sung together for a very long time. I could have had
the chance to sing Walther with him as Sachs when Welsh National Opera did Meistersinger, but it so happened with
that season that I was debuting two big Verdi operas and one Puccini within the
six months previously and I didn’t think it was wise to take on the part. But
then ENO asked me to take on the role and it came at just the right time. It’s
about having the longer journey, seeing the bigger picture – you don’t
compromise yourself. For every Meistersinger,
you need to do a Tosca, a Butterfly, pieces that don’t put you out
there to the same extent. It’s good sense.
JD: Do
you see yourself doing more Wagner soon?
GHJ: I think so... Ironically, the
first opera I ever saw was the Patrice Chéreau production of the Ring cycle on
TV, when I was nine or ten years old. It
was Dame Gwyneth Jones and it was something amazing. Even on TV,
you could tell how amazing it was. Those costumes! Those giants! It made a huge
impression. Also, the first classical music tape I bought was 'Ten Tenors sing
20 Arias', which included plenty of Wagner. I enjoyed listening to it,
but it didn’t appeal to me anywhere near as much as the Italian repertoire, Verdi
and Puccini – that was what I really wanted to do and the kind of singer I
wanted to be. So I didn’t really entertain the idea of being a Wagnerian
singer. I started out as a baritone and when I became a tenor there’s an idea
of the kind of colour you carry through from being a baritone: people
immediately say, “Oh, you’ll sing Florestan, you’ll do Walther and Lohengrin…”
But I was thinking about Rodolfo, Cavaradossi, Chénier, all these pieces, and I
didn’t see myself as being a Wagnerian singer.
As Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly
I listened to snippets of Wagner over the
years and it didn’t appeal to me. Also the way it was performed didn’t appeal to me,
because it seemed that everything I believed in was being compromised. There’s
no point working to make the voice as expressive and beautiful a communicative
instrument as possible when you’re battling against an orchestra and a conductor
who don’t acknowledge that actually they’re accompanying, And in some instances,
too, you find that not necessarily the actual decibel volume, but the colour of the volume can be overwhelming
to voices, so you have to be incredibly careful with the way that you
accompany. Even when they’re
expressing emotions that are not beautiful, there still has to be a sense of
continuity in that character and that expression. You mustn’t compromise that in
order to be heard, because then it totally defeats the purpose. You miss the
potential of the work in the first place. So I was reluctant, from hearing the
way people were singing Wagner’s music, to entertain the idea of doing that.
But then I found people were saying, “Well,
Walther is a lyric part, it’s an Italianate part,” and your ears prick up
because you realise it can be done that way and actually it should be done that way. If you go back and
listen to people at the beginning of the 20th century, they sing this
music in a lyrical, Italiante way – Walther, Lohengrin, they have line, beauty,
harmony. You realise that somehow, in the last 50 years of performing this
music, something has been allowed to fall into the shadows. And the idea that
it can be, needs to be beautiful, it
needs to be expressive in the right way, that made me incredibly interested in
doing it. So when Welsh National Opera did put on Meistersinger in Cardiff, I
went to see it and finally thought that, yes, I could see myself singing it. When the offer did come to sing Walther, I jumped at it, because it had come at
the right time.
Now I’m going to be doing Lohengrin in
about three years in the US. Parsifal and Siegmund are certainly roles I’d do
as well. I do regard myself as an Italianate singer, though, so they’re not my
main mission. There is so much to do... I’m not really interested in saying I
have done 200 roles. I don’t think you achieve anything except marks on the
post that way. The more you do a piece, the more you realise that you actually
don’t know it and the more you discover about it. To do the iconic roles that
are the mainstream in every opera house in the world, to work those pieces to
their potential – not just getting through them but producing work that is
significant – that interests me a lot more than tallying the numbers. I’m far
more interested in doing 350-400 performances of Tosca than having 200 roles under my belt.
JD:
How did you turn into a tenor from being a baritone?
GHJ: I think it’s about the colours you
have in your voice. It’s funny – learning how to sing is like forgetting
everything you learned between infancy and adulthood. You have to go back to
that point where you find the voice works at its most efficient. One of the
biggest traps that young singers fall into is that they try to create a voice
colour well beyond their years. You have to allow the voice to develop
into these colours. It’s OK to sound young, it’s OK to sound not ready – it’s
part of that long journey. So in the pursuit of that idea, I sang as a baritone
because baritone music was what suited my voice.
I wanted to sing Verdi and verismo
baritones, but I always suspected I didn’t have that baritonal colour of all
the singers I admired – people like Piero Cappuccilli, Leonard Warren,
Robert Merrill had this beautiful round colour. Even at that age I wasn’t interested
in being a lighter baritone singing Verdi’s music because I didn’t think it was
honest. It wouldn’t have the gravitas, that noble colour, that these lines demanded.
I came to study in London at the Guildhall when
I was 18, with David Pollard. He said to me, “I won’t tell you you’re a tenor
or you’re a baritone, I have my suspicions of where you’ll go but what we have
to do is work to the potential. We have to get you singing, we have to find out
where your voice is most comfortable.” So I started singing as a baritone,
because that was the music that fitted my voice. I sang a lot of
song repertoire, so even though I didn’t have to make any cast-iron decisions
about the kind of voice I was going to be, I was getting an incredibly rich and
intense education in repertoire. I sang everything from the beginning, Verdi
from the beginning, to get the vocal culture in place.
Then I won the Kathleen Ferrier Prize in
1992, as a baritone, and people started asking if I was
interested in working on contract at various companies. The repertoire I was
offered, though, was far too challenging. It was understudy
work, but it’s one thing to learn a role and quite another to go on stage and perform it, which as an understudy you
would have to do, and it wasn’t a good idea.
Meanwhile with my teacher we were starting
to look at excerpts of very iconic
tenor music – the third act of La Bohème,
the first duet between Cavaradossi and Tosca, part of Manon Lescaut, parts that could show unequivocally whether I was a
tenor for that sort of repertoire. One day David sent me to William McAlpine down
the corridor, a very brilliant Scottish tenor who was also a teacher at
Guildhall, to see what he would say. I sang him one aria and he
said: “Yep, no doubt!”
But as I’d won the Ferrier as a baritone, a
lot of people refused to accept that it was a good idea. I’d also won a lot of
scholarships to allow me to study and those were as a baritone as well. But
the way I saw it, I was awarded them because of the singer I was, not because
of the voice type I was. That’s the point: you have to be allowed to discover
and develop. People will always have opinions about the kind of singer you are,
but in the end you have to decide where you want to go. And David said, “You
have to make a decision: you can be a very, very good baritone, or you can be a
better tenor. It’s up to you.” For me there was no question: this
was the time to study, to make those decisions, as opposed to
waiting another ten years when I might be already established in my career.
As Cavaradossi in WNO's Tosca. Photo: Robert Workman
JD: And
you’ve never looked back...
GHJ: No – there’s too much to look forward
to! But you do look back, of course, because this is a career that requires absolute discipline: it requires you to
be able to work right at the coalface, work in detail at things and not shirk
those challenges. It’s correcting those weaknesses that allow you to build. You
don’t want to take a step forward and then realise that the very thing your house
is built on isn’t sturdy. So you have to work in that way, while at the same
tine being able to step back and see how far you’ve come, and never lose
sight of that. It’s difficult to strike that balance. We’re trying to be as
good as we can be, and that’s always exciting.
JD: Is
Wales still home?
GHJ: Yes indeed. It is my home and I’m
obligated as a Welsh professional to work for Welsh National Opera. It’s a
fantastic company. You have the potential to produce world-class opera there –
you have a great orchestra, world class technical staff, a fantastic 2000 seat
theatre, the opportunity to work with Carlo Rizzi, you have the opportunity to
work with people who are at the best opera houses in the world and are regarded
as the best in their field in the world.
JD:
What’s next after Walther?
GHJ: Next I have some concerts between now and
the summer at the National Eisteddfod – there are some works I’ve commissioned and
as a Welsh artist I think it’s incredibly important to stimulate new compositions
in Wales. In the autumn I do my first Radames in Aida and then the new year
brings Forza. Next year is heavy on the Verdi and the Puccini, and then I come
back to Lohengrin. You have to find a balance between the stuff that stretches and
stimulates you and the stuff that stimulates you, but allows you to rest.
JD:
I should let you rest too... Thank you very much for talking to us, Gwyn, and
we’re looking forward to opening night.
Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg opens at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on 11 March. Kasper Holten directs, Sir Antonio Pappano conducts and besides Hughes Jones and Terfel the cast includes Johannes Martin Kränzle as Beckmesser, Rachel Willis-Søresnsen as Eva and Allan Clayton as David. Details and booking here.
Farewell? Renée Fleming as the Marschallin.
Photo: ROH Catherine Ashmore
When Der Rosenkavalier turns into a piece for our own times, you know two things: first, the director has a classic production in the making; secondly, we ourselves are in a lot of trouble.
Robert Carsen's staging at the Royal Opera House sets the action in the year Strauss composed the work, 1911. The empire is imploding in slow motion. Arms dealers are the moneyed arrivistes. Violence simmers under the surface, sometimes explodes. The Field Marshall's palace boasts crimson walls and giant, imperial-era paintings. Outwardly, all is elegance, beauty and shiny show, the Marschallin choosing Klimtesque gowns from a fashion parade and a troupe of "house-trained dogs" drawing oohs and ahhs (especially the bulldog and the borzois); and the silver rose is massive, not only a ton of silver but full of crystal sparkles. It's an artificial rose of the future, set against the living, delicate but doomed red ones the Marschallin cradles and sniffs. For underneath there lurks "degeneracy": a brothel-load of prostitutes in Schiele-like revelations, an Octavian who knows a lot more than he lets on, and sexual danger looming around Sophie from Ochs's troops (Sophie nevertheless startles her father and the importunate Ochs with new-found defiance). The palace reveals doors within doors within doors; every level conceals another.
Matthew Rose as Baron Ochs and Sophie Bevan as Sophie
Photo: ROH Catherine Ashmore
But this is a world on the brink. As the Marschallin delivers her reflections on the passage of time, a shudder of recognition goes through us. She is talking not only about ageing, but about the world itself, about everything that surrounds her. Yes, this is Renée Fleming's likely farewell to London's operatic stage, and yes, the Marschallin is no spring chicken, however fabulous she looks and sounds. The implications are much wider, though. At the end the place disintegrates, showing us the battlefield horrors of World War I - and soldiers aim a gun at a drunken child named Mohammed. The veracity of this imagery hits home so hard that one becomes fearful in earnest for where we are all going now. Remember, historical fiction isn't only about the past; its task is to be about today.
Big plaudits, then, to Carsen and his designers Paul Steinberg (sets) and Brigitte Reiffenstuel (costumes). The lighting is by Carsen and Peter von Praet. Musically, too, this performance couldn't be much more memorable if it tried; even if not every singer precisely matches every listener's ideal, the quality of insight, the excellence of the singers and the chemistry between them could scarcely be bettered.
Fleming's Marschallin is the incarnation of olde-worlde glamour. Her voice still has its amber-mellow beauty, if perhaps scaled down from its full glory, and her singing communicates with profundity accentuated by its directness and poise. As Octavian, Alice Coote brings oodles of character to her tone as well as her acting; this lad is awkward and stiff in army uniform, yet abrupt liberation follows in Act III when, dazzling in drag in a brothel, he/she displays a startling understanding of how to tantalise and torment the justifiably muddled Ochs - and whether Octavian has learned all this from the Marschallin or acquired it elsewhere is perhaps a moot point. Sophie Bevan as her namesake sounds warm and golden rather than cool and silver, yet her high notes at the presentation of the rose seem to reach heaven itself.
Matthew Rose's Ochs is no mere bumpkiny boor, but a powerful man out for a good time that doesn't please those around him and tramples - Trumples? - over societal norms with disruptive relish. It's almost impossible not to feel vaguely sorry for him as "Mariandel" delivers him her nasty dose of over-worldly Viennoiserie. Luxury casting for Annina and Valzacchi in the shape of Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke and Helene Schneiderman, as well as Faninal - the many-dimensional voice of Jochen Schmeckenbecher.
The greatest magic of all: Andris Nelsons, red-shirted, open-armed and open-hearted, unleashing the music and letting it fly out of the orchestra's players, hushing the levels for Fleming and allowing the visual marvels to be cradled in a sensual richesse of sound.
It's hard to believe that this could be Fleming's farewell - but then, there's a lot that's hard to comprehend right now. She may be departing together with our golden age of opera. That's a topic for another time, but reinforces an important message: let's never forget we were lucky enough to have and hear this.
On a lighter note, a special little plaudit for a startling appearance in the onstage band of two characters that apparently reference "Geraldine" and "Josephine" from Some Like It Hot. A very endearing anachronism.
Meanwhile I may get up in the night and stop the clocks.
I am running a new occasional series of exclusive star interviews on JDCMB. Here is the first... Matthew Rose takes centre stage, appropriately enough, in the Royal Opera's new production of Der Rosenkavalier - and it's not going to be a pink, fluffy one. The British bass talks to me about Baron Ochs, Bottom and Brexit...
Matthew Rose rehearsing for Der Rosenkavalier, with Helene Schneiderman as Annina. Photo: Catherine Ashmore
If I’ve arrived at the Royal Opera House
stage door expecting the kindly, bearded presence of a King Marke, I’m in for a
surprise. The new version of Matthew Rose instead boasts sideburns, a hefty moustache
and a military demeanour. The British bass may be as imposing as the Wagnerian monarch he sang last summer at ENO, but today he is still virtually in character from ongoing intense
rehearsals for Covent Garden's new Der Rosenkavalier. Singing
Baron Ochs, he remarks, settling into the tallest chair we can find, is “like
doing seven operas at once”.
“Robert
Carsen, our director, said just now that Baron Ochs is probably the most
brilliant character ever invented in opera, with such bravado and such belief
in himself,” Rose declares. People often see Ochs as a bit of a buffoon, he adds, but it’s not
necessarily so: “He speaks French and Italian, he knows about the world, he’s
very educated – but he happens to act in a way that is very different from
everyone else in Vienna. He’s from a house in the middle of nowhere where he
can behave as he wants, so that’s what he does and he comes to Vienna thinking
he can get away with it there too: meeting his bride-to-be, with the
Marschallin, who’s his cousin, he just says exactly what he wants to say. This
staging has him as a soldier as well, though, so there must be some kind of
discipline there. And he’s very entertained by himself. He’s a very entertaining
character.”
Matthew Rose, with the former look
Entertaining the opera may be, and Ochs
with it, but this time we can expect something a little edgier on stage. “I’ve
done the role just once before, in Chicago, so I was trying to get all the
words into my head,” Rose says. “That was a very traditional Rosenkavalier, very fluffy. Many of the
productions you see are fluffy, very pink and lovely. This isn’t like that.
This is definitely not fluffy.”
Carsen has set the production in 1911, the
year of the opera’s composition, rather than the Mozartian era envisaged by
Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. “It’s pre World War
I, pre change of everything, Austria before everything went tits-up there: a
very important time both historically and artistically,” says Rose. “It fits in
very well with how things are here.”
Indeed, the primary purpose of historical
fiction is arguably not only to explore a bygone era, but to reflect back
crucial elements of our own through its prism – and this opera is no exception.
Rose has little doubt that “things here” are about to go very tits-up indeed.
On the morning the Brexit decision was announced, he made for Westminster with
a takeaway coffee, expecting a demonstration in protest to materialise. He was
astonished when it didn’t. “Why are we allowing this to happen?” he growls. “Brexit
is going to ruin this country in a way I think people don’t understand. I don’t
see how anybody could think any good could come out of it.”
Rose as Sparafucile in the ROH's Rigoletto
Photo: Johan Persson/ROH
At a recent press event Alex Beard,
chief executive of the Royal Opera House, explained that Brexit has already hit
the organisation hard because of the fall in value of the pound: the cost of
paying many people in other currencies has risen 20 per cent. “It’s obvious how
it’s going to affect us in the arts – it puts everything in peril that we do,”
says Rose. “Our industry is in a terrible situation. This opera house thrives
on people coming in and out internationally, very freely and easily, and doing
things often on a very ad-hoc basis. Who knows what’s going to happen to that,
and who knows what the pound is going to do? All these knock-on effects… In the
US Trump can be voted out after four years, but I think the UK is in worse
shape, as we’re stuck with the referendum result forever.”
Rose has a foot in both countries: he has been living more or less in
mid-Atlantic, between New York and Blackheath, south-east London, for some
years. Though he grew up in Seaford, five miles down the road from
Glyndebourne, he came to the idea of professional singing relatively late.
“Singing has always been part of my life,
though I didn’t take it seriously at first,” he says. “In my last year at
school I was singing in the choir, but there were lots of other people doing
things seriously and I wasn’t one of them. A new music teacher arrived at the
school and he was the first person who suggested to me that I might consider
becoming a professional opera singer. I’d never even thought about it before.
Then I went to university at Canterbury and Benjamin Luxon and his wife were
there and they took me to the next step.”
As Bottom in Glyndebourne's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Photo: Robert Workman
Attending a summer course in Italy, he met
Mikael Eliasen, artistic director of the Curtis Opera Theatre at the Curtis
Institute, who invited him to Philadelphia to audition. He spent five years
there, though at first, he remarks, “it was quite embarrassing. I think I went
in the same year as Lang Lang. He went in being already this world-class star
and I was starting from scratch, so it was quite an intimidating situation.”
The department was relatively small, with
around 25 singers, yet put on five operas a year, Rose recounts – a preparation
for stage life more hands-on and intensive than most. His teacher was Marlena
Malas, who was based at the Juilliard School in New York, and whom he still
consults. “I had my lessons every Monday at five o’clock, looking straight
across to the Met,” he remembers, “and whenever I did something wrong, she’d
say: ‘Do you wanna sing thereor not?’”
He certainly did, especially after he
started attending performances every week after his lesson. “The Met has always
been a shrine to me,” he remarks. “Now I do two or three operas there a season
and it’s a wonderful family to be part of. There are lots of friends around,
people in the orchestra with whom I went to college, and I feel very at home there.”
His most recent Met stint was as Leporello
in Don Giovanni: “Leporello is my favourite role in the world,” he declares.
“He’s an amazing character. Da Ponte wrote some of the greatest librettos in
history – as did Hofmannsthal – and Leporello’s journey through the opera,
especially the second half, is just miraculous.”
After five years at Curtis, Rose felt “ready
to go out and have a career”. Back in London he auditioned, and was accepted,
for the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme at the Royal Opera House. Next
thing he knew, he was on stage with Angela Gheorghiu, Roberto Alagna and Bryn
Terfel in David McVicar’s production of Faust. “At that point you have to up
your game,” he considers, “and there’s no better way to do it than standing on
stage with these people.”
Rehearsing the ROH's La Bohème. Photo: Yuri Vorobiev
Coming back to Covent Garden some 14 years
later, he notes, it is hard to shake off the association – “up to a point I’m
still ‘Matthew Rose who was on the Young Artists’ Programme…’” But now he has
travelled full circle and himself coaches the young singers on the scheme:
“It’s a nice role reversal. I feel so grateful for things that have been passed
to me. We all absorb these things that we distill within ourselves and
hopefully can pass them on again. I’ve done lots of teaching these past few
years and I really enjoy that.”
To various teaching activities, Rose adds a
strong commitment to the Blackheath Concert Halls near his London home: “I’ve
been heavily involved in activities there for ten years – we’ve done wonderful
community projects, started a children’s choir and have a new children’s opera
commissioned for next year from Kate Whitley. I’d love to be part of making it
into a really wonderful centre for the arts in south-east London, though of
course it’s easier said than done…”
Another favourite London location is the
Wigmore Hall: here he sings Schubert’s Winterreise
in February 2017. And then there’s Schwanengesang
a few months later at Carnegie Hall, New York. “How lucky am I to do that!” he
remarks. “Schubert was my first great passion that really got me into singing,
when I went to a Schubert Day at the Royal College of Music in his bicentenary
year, 1997.
“I love Lieder, making music with one
pianist, being in control of what one wants to do – whereas in opera one is
told by many people what to do. And I love orchestral concerts. Of course I also
love being on stage, but you’re compromising so much when you sing opera:
you’re trying to do 17 different things at once and you’re rarely going to be satisfied.
But I love standing there with an orchestra, making music. At the end of the
day, I’m a musician and I love to make music. And if there’s a bit of acting or
being a bit silly involved,” he adds, “that’s OK.”
Rose certainly has risen to fame with in
roles that are comic, yet with an undertow of complexity: “I’m quite a silly
person, so being on stage being silly comes quite naturally,” he suggests. Besides
Leporello, he has been particularly lauded as Bottom in Britten’s A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, at Glyndebourne and beyond; he will be singing the role at a new
Aldeburgh Festival staging by Netia Jones in summer 2017. He is a long-standing
devotee of Aldeburgh, having attended many courses there as a student and
nursing a passion for the musicality and dramatic excellence of Britten’s
operas. “Bottom in particular has been very good to me,” he notes.
One does sense, though, that underneath
there is little about this perceptive and down-to-earth artist that is remotely
silly. Even golf is a serious matter for him: “It’s not for unwinding,”
he says. “It’s something I love to do well and in many ways it is like singing:
concentrating hard, switching that concentration on and off.”
As for his dream roles that remain, those
aren’t so silly either. “I’d love to have a crack at Philip II,” he says.
“Gurnemanz in Parsifal will hopefully happen next year, and certain other
Wagnery things would be nice… But I’m having the most incredible year at the
moment, doing Leporello, Bottom and Baron Ochs, and the song recitals. I
probably ought to retire after it! What I’ve done so far has far surpassed
everything I ever dreamed of and I’m so lucky to have done what I’ve done. If I
stop now, I’ve had a very nice time and a very nice career and maybe it’s time
to go and have a very nice sleep.”
Now he really is being silly, or so one
hopes. There is the whole of Der Rosenkavalier
to look forward to, with a dream cast and Andris Nelsons in the pit: “There’s
no one classier in the world than Renée Fleming,” Rose enthuses. “Alice Coote
and Sophie Bevan I know very well, and it’s nice to be reunited with Jochen
Schmeckenbecher [singing Faninal], who was in the first opera I ever did as a
student in Philadelphia – it was The
Magic Flute, I was a priest and he was Papageno.” As for Nelsons, “The
orchestra sounds unbelievable with him. He’s got it all. This is the hardest
role I’ll ever do,” he adds, “and everyone’s being so nice to me. It’s a huge
honour and I’m very grateful for this situation.”
Curtain up is this Saturday at 6pm: and the
appropriately-named Rose is set to be a cavalier of a whole new kind. Beg,
borrow, or ninja a ticket.
Der
Rosenkavalier, Royal Opera House, from 17 December. Book
here.
