"Mitsuko Uchida played for this milk"

 In this weekend's news:

Valentina Nafornita from Moldova won BBC Cardiff Singer of the World, though there was much stronger support on Twitter for Olesya Petrova and Andrei Bondarenko ("the name's Bond...arenko, Andrei Bondarenko...") for the performances yesterday. Valentina may have excelled in earlier rounds, and scooped the audience prize as well. But in the final she showed a lack of stamina and uncertain intonation. Nevertheless, she is thin, pretty, young and saleable. We wonder why anyone bothered with the singing.

'Max', aka Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Music, has called for fines to be imposed on audience members whose phones go off during performances. As I can report that the LPO fines its players £5 a pop if a phone rings in rehearsal and £20 in a concert, we don't see why the audience should be exempt. It works. In 15 years I've only heard one orchestral phone jangle during full flood. Go get 'em, Max!

In Moscow, the Tchaikovsky Competition is in full swing. Barry Douglas, piano supremo and jury boss - himself a former winner - is tweeting updates. Follow him at @wbarrydouglas.

Here, I'm off for my first visit to Garsington Opera's new home at Wormsley near High Wycombe this afternoon. Yes, dear reader, I am attending a real, live baroque opera - a little-known job by good old Vivaldi. More of that anon.

And finally... welcome to Konzertmilch Dortmund. Perhaps this could only happen in Germany, where classical music is still daily bread...

Brahms for Father's Day

Father's Day is sad for those of us who've lost our dads. But it's also a beautiful reason to play you, in my Dad's memory, part of his favourite symphony. Dad, who died of cancer in 1996 aged 67, used to spend many happy hours in his armchair on Sunday afternoons listening to different recordings of this work and comparing them. If anyone in the family should have been a music critic, it was him. So here are Wilhelm Furtwangler and the Vienna Philharmonic in 1945 in Brahms's Symphony No.2. This is the first installment - for the rest, click through to Youtube and follow the links. I'm off to find my hanky.

Roocroft rides again

My interview with Amanda Roocroft is in The Independent today. In the Royal Opera House's Peter Grimes, opening next week - a revival of Willy Decker's production - she's singing Ellen Orford to Ben Heppner's Grimes, with Andrew Davis conducting. Here's the director's cut, following a spot of Mozart: 'Ah, guarda, sorella' from Cosi fan tutte, with Rosa Mannion and John Eliot Gardiner.

After a long rehearsal for Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, preparing for opening night at the Royal Opera House, AmandaRoocroft seems to have enough energy to start the day all over again. At 45 she is the UK’s top lyric-dramatic soprano; and she’s a sassy northerner at heart, mother of three enthusiastic young football fans. You take her as you find her: with a practical black jacket, killer heels and a crucifix glittering at her throat, all topped with a radiant smile, what you see is what you get. 

Not everything is simple and straightforward where Roocroft is concerned, though. Several years ago, she nearly gave up singing altogether. 

“I wasn’t enjoying it any more,” Roocroft says. “I was too afraid and too self-critical.” She kept going, “because I had to earn money and fulfil contracts,” but at one point her performance as Janacek’s Jenufa at English National Opera looked as if it might be her last role – even though her interpretation won her an Olivier Award. “Being a perfectionist can be a curse,” she admits. “You beat yourself up constantly over the one or two notes you missed and that can wipe out the rewards of the whole evening.” 

Working through some challenging years has left her stronger and happier. “I changed my singing teacher, I sorted my home life out and I believe my baptism was a big part of it,” she says.  “I found a church that offered a loving, safe and accepting environment for me beyond my job, just as a human being who wants to live a good life. And I learned to love difficult times, because you know that you’re going to learn from them.” 

Feeling nurtured and comforted by her faith made all the difference, she says. “It had felt literally as if my voice, my ability to communicate, had been taken away from me. But then, because I felt more relaxed, I could sing – and feeling comfortable with my singing, I started enjoying it again.” Eventually she decided: “I’m lucky! I’m not going to start wishing for what I’ve not got; I’m going to celebrate what I have.”

Roocroft first fell in love with singing and acting when she was a child, growing up in Coppull in Lancashire. “My mum trained as a pianist, then stopped to have her family,” she says. “But in those days everyone sang: there were choirs, competitions and festivals, so she played for them and I always heard her. I learned the piano and the cornet and I played in a brass band.” But it was singing that attracted her most: “I never stopped wanting to do it and it was always classical music – I didn’t want to be the next Britney Spears.” 

She hit the headlines in her early twenties after graduating from the Royal Northern College of Music. She won a slew of important prizes and countless critical plaudits. The Royal Opera House booked her to sing Pamina in Die Zauberflöte when she was only 25 and thereafter engaged her every season for over a decade; and she made a high-profile debut CD with the London Philharmonic under Franz Welser-Möst, released by EMI in 1995. 

Maybe it was almost too much, too young: after the adulation came a backlash. “There was a huge furore those first few years,” Roocroft agrees. “There was this attitude: ‘Who does she think she is, when there are singers around with 20 years more experience?’ I don’t understand the youngsters on The X Factor who want to be famous and want to be in Hello magazine. That wasn’t my intention. I wanted to be respected within my peer group. I didn’t want to be famous, I didn’t want to be rich, I just wanted to sing and I wanted people to think it was great to work with me.”

Last year Roocroft made a triumphant return to ENO, playing the extraordinary role of Emilia Marty in Janácek’s The Makropoulos Case: a heroine who has cheated death for three centuries. “It was great – I got to be bad!” Roocroft grins, with relish. As a blonde lyric soprano, inevitably she used to find herself singing too many “good little girl” heroines. 

Her role as Ellen Orford in Peter Grimes is utterly different. The story, based on the poem by George Crabbe and set on the Suffolk coast where Britten lived, describes the hounding to death of a fisherman whom the locals of the Borough suspect of abusing his apprentices – though nothing is proven against him. Ellen befriends him. 

“The opera’s about that mob mentality,” says Roocroft, “showing what the human race is capable of: that blind hatred, that ability to ruin somebody’s life – in this case to cause a man to commit suicide.” Grimes is an ‘outsider’; Ellen, too, is from beyond the Borough and is held at arms’ length by the community: “The ‘Borough’ views her with suspicion – but standing by Grimes, she has chosen this path. I love her because she’s so strong, strong-minded and strong-willed.” She’s sung Ellen before, but this will be the first time at the ROH. And there’s an extra element for her to enjoy: Grimes’s unfortunate apprentice will be played by her youngest son: “He auditioned like everyone else and earned the part himself.” 

A few months ago Roocroft took the apparently modest step – though in classical terms it’s still rather radical – of talking to the audience during her recital at the hallowed Wigmore Hall, bastion of the highest-level chamber music and Lieder. “I was so anxious to do my best,” she says. “I’d done the same recital in Wigan and because they wanted me to talk – it’s a different set-up there – they loved it. I loved it too and I thought: seriously, why should this be different because it’s in London at the Wigmore Hall? Why can’t I talk to the audience?” 

She tried it, and was pleased to find that only critics objected. “I think it puts the audience at ease, and it certainly put me at ease. I think of pop stars: wouldn’t it be fabulous to go on stage knowing people are there to see you, that we’re all friends together and we’re going to have a really good party? That was the attitude I wanted to take out there, but it was something I definitely lost 20 years ago. It’s kind of beaten out of you. It’s nice to come back and say ‘Look! Isn’t this great?’”

Autumn will bring her back to Janácek: Katya Kabanova at Welsh National Opera. There’s a CD ahead, too: Roocroft has woven songs by composers as diverse as Schubert, Schoenberg and Kurt Weill into an operatic-style story for recital purposes and is planning to record it. Meanwhile she’s looking forward to her debut in one of her vocal fach’s pinnacles: the role of the Marschallin in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at ENO. The character is an unhappily married aristocrat who gracefully gives up her much younger lover to a girl his own age – but Roocroft has other ideas. “Maybe at the end she should run off with the guy that cleans the pool!” she laughs. “That’s the Marschallin I see: a feisty woman who likes sex.” 

Finding God certainly hasn’t diminished the twinkle in Roocroft’s eye: “It seems to be in my nature to swim against the tide,” she admits. “But I know that come the revolution I’m going to do the Marschallin in a different way – and I’m going to talk at the Wigmore Hall.”

Peter Grimes, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, from 21 June. Box office: 020 7304 4000

'Rolls-Royce voice' in Cardiff

It's the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition again, and the preliminary rounds are being screened on BBC4 each evening this week, with other broadcasts on BBC Radio 3. I tuned in yesterday in time to hear what the commentators referred to as a 'Rolls-Royce of a voice': the Russian mezzo Olesya Petrova. Dear reader, her singing blew my socks off.

Apart from the fact that it must take guts to sing Saint-Saens' 'Mon coeur s'ouvre a ta voix' in front of the great Marilyn Horne (who's on the jury), this was one incredible artist with one vast crimson rose of a voice. She scooped the prize of the evening and though there were several other fine performances in the programme, she seemed in a class of her own.

The broadcast from last night is on BBC iPlayer, and here is the Saint-Saens from the contest website. But iPlayer isn't available outside the UK, and I'm not sure about the website either, so I've had a hunt on Youtube and found this from Vienna a couple of years ago. It's an aria from Tchaikovsky's The Maid of Orleans. Enjoy.

Nemorini X 2 for Danni's dazzling Donizetti

Wet, wet, wet. We nearly drowned at Glyndebourne on Sunday - so much for the drought - but I had quite a treat, being assigned to review L'elisir d'amore (photos by Bill Cooper/Glyndebourne): http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/reviews/lrsquoelisir-drsquoamore-glyndebourne-lewes-2297043.html

It's hard to believe this was Danielle de Niese's first Adina - she doesn't half hold the stage, seemed to relish every coloratura whoosh, twirl and ping, and even made the taming of this shrew into a reasonably palatable and believable tale. She's not only a tremendous singer, but a born performer in every respect.

I really have some problems with this production, though, and wouldn't mind explaining why at more length. And now I can also offer you two tenors for the price of one...

The relationship between Adina and Nemorino is beautifully staged, but to counterbalance that dramatically you also need to believe that she could be intending to go off with Belcore. I mean, come on, she nearly marries the guy. She even gets a wedding dress. And in this 1930s take he's a Blackshirt, so the situation shouldn't be all that funny. But that relationship is staged more or less as a comedy revue and tends to be subsumed in all the fussy goings-on around - which rarely stop and, while occasionally amusing, do leave you wishing they'd just keep still even for five seconds (Nemorino does 'Una furtiva lagrima' alone and in comparative quietude beside the water pump. That's about it.) As for Dulcamara's phenomenally annoying mute, tattooed sidekick - what is he for? What's he doing, miming childbirth and other such fun and games? Why? Perhaps some wire extracted from the innards of the recreated authentic fortepiano in the pit would sort him out.

So, what happened to Stephen Costello? He was off with a sore throat and apparently had been poorly for a while. UPDATE: He has just dropped me a line saying this is the first time in his career he's ever had to cancel. I blame our British summertime...certainly on Sunday the best place a singer with a sore throat could possibly be was: tucked up somewhere warm and dry with a steam bowl.

I heard him at the dress rehearsal, though missed the first night (below, Costello as Nemorino, with Danni as Adina). Do have a read of this interview with him.

We expected him not to "sing out" for the dress, but if that wasn't singing out, and he wasn't feeling well, you wonder what it's like when he's on top form. He's an all-out, in-yer-face romantic lyric tenor: big sound, lots of overtones and undertones, bags of character and a predilection for that mannerism that starts a note some way under and swoops up to target, producing an Italian-broken-heart sound-effect while so doing. The trick is pleasingly Golden Age-ish, though it felt over-used. Glyndebourne is a small house, of course, but in this setting Costello's tone, throat problem notwithstanding, comes over as big and reasonably tough - a sound that might be more at home in Verdi than Donizetti, though in scale, projection and vibrato his seemed a more seamless match with Danni's voice than was Lee's lighter, slenderer instrument. Of the two, Costello won in 'Una furtiva lagrima', by a breath-control whisker; Lee won for charm and purity of style. Costello is to sing Alfredo at Covent Garden next season; that should suit him down to the ground. Watch that space. I reckon we'll be hearing a good bit more of both of them in the years ahead.