This is a big Erich Wolfgang Korngold year, marking both the 120th anniversary of the composer's birth and the 60th of his death. Not that you'd know it from anyone's programming around here. But Michael Haas, director of research at the Jewish Music Institute's International Centre of Suppressed Music at Royal Holloway College, has just written a valuable article about Das Wunder der Heliane, the composer's fourth, largest and most controversial opera. (Read it here.)
Premiered in 1927, Heliane is a strange, mystical, dystopian tale of redemption through love. Our hero is a nameless Stranger who has been jailed for attempting to bring love to a loveless realm. Our heroine is Queen Heliane, the sole named character, wife of the cruel and apparently impotent Ruler. Heliane and the Stranger fall in love...
Ten years ago the opera received its only UK performance to date, in concert. It didn't go well. The Royal Festival Hall platform was too small to accommodate both the vast orchestra and all the vocal soloists, so the singers were placed in the choir above and behind the orchestra, but the less-than-ideal demands this created seemed challenging for all concerned. It was a pity, to say the least, because I was at the rehearsals and it sounded a great deal better. Those at the performance weren't to know that, though. The opera celebrates the sanctity of sexual consummation between people who really love one another, something you'd think would scarcely raise hackles. Yet one critic condemned the work for being blasphemous (yes, really) and dismissed it as "Entartete Musik": a nefarious Nazi-coined term that Korngold himself would have known all too well.
It's slightly sad to observe that the British, in tribal musical-taste terms, appear to have problems with Korngold that don't apply quite as universally elsewhere. In other countries his third opera, Die tote Stadt has become standard repertoire. In the UK, it has once more vanished into obscurity after one short run at Covent Garden. As for Heliane, it basically doesn't stand a chance in Brexit Island. Yet with wonderful irony, Haas points out some strong similarities between the scenarios of this opera and a recent UK smash hit: George Benjamin's Written on Skin.
I became interested in Korngold so long ago that I didn't know you weren't meant to like him. Back then, indeed, hardly anyone in this country had heard of him. One of my teachers - American - played me part of Die tote Stadt when I was about 19. I was hooked at once. A year later, deciding on a dissertation topic at Cambridge, I came across the LP of the Erich Leinsdorf recording on a table in Dr Derrick Puffett's rooms and mentioned my enthusiasm to him. Dr Puffett - who was one of the most acute and positively terrifying musical intellectuals in the faculty - encouraged me to go ahead with a study of the piece and offered to be my supervisor for it.
Some years later I had the chance to write a short biography of a 20th-century composer and suggested Korngold because I was fascinated by his life story. A child prodigy in Mahler's Vienna. His appalling relationship with his father - what composer could be unlucky enough to be the son of a powerful critic? The rise of the Nazis; the controversies his father caused; the split in musical style of the times. The escape to Hollywood; Warner Brothers, Errol Flynn, Bette Davis; and the attempted, but hopeless, return to Vienna. What a life. What an emblem of the 20th century.
One didn't imagine things could get worse still for Korngold's reputation after all that. But I can't begin to tell you about the quantity of flak I've taken over the years simply for liking this composer's generous-spirited and lavishly beautiful music and finding his story worth telling.
Not all music is for everyone. Composers' voices speak to us, or don't. There are some unfortunate souls who don't like Brahms. There are a few very popular composers to whose music I'm fairly allergic; some whose language I have grown into and come to love with the years (notably Bartók and Boulez); others, like Monteverdi, who stand out like Mount Ararat amid flatlands of other stuff that possibly is considered more interesting than it really is. It isn't a matter of life or death if you don't happen to get along with a particular compositional personality.
But I do think you need to pause for thought, now and then, and look at where our cultural conditioning comes from and, to some degree, how our tastes might be formed.
Another example: I'm still struck by the ease with which some dismiss Mendelssohn as glib, shallow and too happy. His apparent ease of style came from obsessive hard work and continual revision; as for too happy, he worked himself first into the ground and then into a premature grave. Those criticisms were actually deliberate anti-Semitic slurs promulgated against him as the Nazis attempted to poison public opinion over the most popular violin concerto in Germany, prior to banning it. Yet their "arguments" can still sometimes be heard in concert hall foyers, repeated almost as if by rote. Evidence of Mendelssohn's working patterns, his life and intellectual breadth of knowledge, his emotional state, and so forth, all go against such a judgement. But few stop to consider what they're saying and why.
Korngold had the luck to find himself exiled in Hollywood, rather than being murdered in a concentration camp after Hitler's Anschluss, which would almost certainly have befallen him had he been in Vienna on 12 March 1938. Nevertheless, his world was destroyed, his colleagues killed or ruined and his career in Europe torn to shreds; and his family and friends who survived did so by the skin of their teeth. Because he did survive, because he was therefore one of the "lucky" ones, his story is generally portrayed as one of good fortune. But having your life, livelihood and reputation shattered by racism, dictatorship and war is, if you think about it enough, not very "lucky" at all. Korngold died too young - 60 - and it's clear that his death was hastened by the stress resulting from his historical fate.
The hideous situation faced by those in such a position - any refugees and oppressed peoples, born in the wrong place at the wrong time - is still brushed aside by the millions of more fortunate majority-population individuals who have no clue what others have been through, yet who are themselves no different except by virtue of luck.
It appears that even today we can't cope with the fact that Korngold landed up in Hollywood, even though that was the only way he and his family could survive the destruction of their own world and make ends meet in a new one. The ugly fashion of today's ugly world is to bash refugees. It's still happening to Korngold.
Fortunately, though, there are people who love his music. Many are actual musicians. Many of them are violinists who fall in love with the concerto and related pieces. Here's Nicky Benedetti and friends:
Heliane is being performed several times in Europe this year and next. The Volksoper in Vienna has already done it, about six months ago, and now those eager to see it can go to:
In case you haven't yet seen it, this is the beautiful tribute from Opera Holland Park in memory of the victims of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, in which one of their staff members, Debbie Lamprell, was among those who lost their lives. It's an encore from Puccini's La Rondine, 'Bevo al tuo fresco sorriso' and the singers are Elizabeth Llewellyn, Matteo Lippi, Tereza Gevorgyan and Stephen Aviss, with the company.
Opera Holland Park has announced that it will give a memorial performance of Verdi's Requiem on 1 August in aid of the Rugby Portobello Trust to help the community in the aftermath of the fire, which took place less than a mile from OHP's base. Please book tickets (hurry - they're going fast) or make a donation here: http://www.operahollandpark.com/memorial-concert-verdi-requiem/
The best way we know to commemorate and help the victims of this disaster is to make music and so that is what we will do. There has been a lot of emotion in the company since the events of that day, and our friend and colleague is mourned deeply. RPT deserve respect and admiration for everything they have been doing in the aftermath and we hope this event will provide the funds to help them continue their work in supporting the community.’ – Director of Opera, James Clutton and General Director, Michael Volpe Addendum: I'm told that the Verdi Requiem is now sold out, but you can a) still donate - please! - and b) sit in Holland Park with a picnic and still hear the performance because, as one of the singers promises us, "We'll be loud!"
The American tenor Michael Spyres has taken an impressive and unusual highway through the operatic world. Hailing from a musical family in Laura Ingalls Wilder's little town on the prairie, he is 38 yet has already tackled 64 different roles, from baroque to bel canto to Berlioz. He is convinced he has sung the latter's Faust more than anyone else alive. And it's not exactly that he doesn't like Puccini, but...
Michael Spyres as Mitridate at the Royal Opera House. Photo ROH/Bill Cooper
JD: Michael, lovely to meet you. How are
you enjoying Mitridate?
MS: The role itself is absolutely incredible.
People don’t realise, simply because it’s not done enough in repertory, but
it’s so difficult. As a character
it’s comparable to Otello, or to any of the truly great characters in the
repertoire. The real Mithridate was one of the most mythic people who ever
lived. He was 72 when he died and he thwarted the Roman army for 39 years –
which is 39 years more than most people ever did! He was a famous polyglot and
spoke 22 languages: he owned the Black Sea and everything around it, there were
22 different regions and he made it a point to learn all the languages.
There’s also a word in French and high
English – “mithridisation” and “mithridatism” – which means to take small
amounts of poison in order to be immune to it. He believed that if you take
small amounts of poison every day then as you get older you do become immune.
One of the main dangers for kings was patricide or death by poisoning – nearly
everyone died of poison! – so he grew up in a strict regimen of taking poison
every day so he would be immune. But when the Romans were finally
defeating him, he tried to poison himself and couldn’t die from that, so he
either stabbed himself or had a friend do it so that the Romans couldn’t. He was
this epic, amazing person and even if some of his story is exaggerated nowadays,
it doesn’t matter; he was a real king and was able to hold off and defeat the
Roman army.
(Here, a different interpretation: Save Pontus, Change Europe)
JD: Mozart’s portrayal of him is
extraordinarily sophisticated.
MS: From the beginning you get to see the heart
and the beauty of him, but in the recitatives you can also see this cunning,
brilliant man who would pit people against each other. In his first aria, he
says: “Thank God I’m back home – I thought I’d never see this place again. It’s
OK to lose but I still hold my head high…” And you find out just afterwards, in
the recitative, that this is totally a ruse, because he’s sent false information
to his sons to test if they’re loyal or not. In the recit you hear him say he
faked his own death just to see if they were traitors. Wooah!
About half way through you start to see his
inner turmoil and the anger he feels because he knows he’s ageing. He
died when he was 72 and usually kings died when they were about 30, killed by
their brothers or their sons. But the way Mozart and Metastasio wrote the
character, based on the Racine play, it shows he’s an old man used to
conquering everything, but the worst thing for him is not losing the battle but
losing his heart, losing his love. You see this throughout the opera. He’s
scared, just like all of us, that nobody’s going to love him again…
There’s a
wonderful scene between him and the queen in which she says, “Yes, I’ll go to
the alter as your slave and do whatever you want.” He's so incensed: “So I
have to drag you to the altar – you don’t want to marry me, you’re just going
to do it out of spite?” And you see this crazy rage and jealousy in him. But
then at the end he gives his sons freedom and says that at the end of his life
he wants to be again the great lion that he is. “Please marry her, and I’m
sorry I’m a terrible person, but I’m showing you how to live. This is how a real
person should live - no regrets…” At the end he says “I can die happy now because
I’ve done what I need to” – and he just dies. I can’t think of a more complex
character. You’re a god among men, a god personified. Hoffmann or Otello would
be comparable, but there’s only a handful of characters who run the gamut of
what a Shakespearean character is and this is definitely one of them.
JD: Mozart was only 14 when he wrote it –
what an astounding thought…
MS: Mozart had three major influences: Mysliveček,
JC Bach and another I only found out about because I did an obscure
baroque opera in Lisbon called Antigono,
by Antonio Mazzoni. I did the modern revival a few years ago and we made a
recording. The only time people had ever heard it was three performances
in 1755 – it’s an incredible piece, but it was lost because of the terrible
fire in 1755 in Lisbon. When Mozart, aged 12, was travelling through Italy with
his father, Mazzoni taught the boy counterpoint in Bologna. Antigono was almost
the same kind of story as Mitridate – it’s a formulaic thing but a large
character. But the fact that Mozart was able to write such touching and
beautiful music was just beyond compare. To anyone who thinks it fails in comparison
to his later works I’d say: no, it’s something completely different. You can’t
compare it and you shouldn’t, because it’s raw, amazing emotion. Some of his
duets, Aspasia’s arias and the vocal writing with the recitatives – there’s
nothing like it.
At the last full rehearsal before we went
on the stage, Graham Vick, who’s one of the greatest directors I’ve had the
pleasure of working with, got us all round and said: I want you to realise that
26 years ago I premiered this here, and now I see this in a completely
different light and I see the absolute genius of Mozart – this little boy who
was shuffled around and hauled out by his father all over Europe. You can see
the animosity in the letters, you can see his wish to be just a normal boy –
all the angst and the problems between father and son is written into the music.
He was a mature being already at that age, because he was forced to be and he
had the genius to do it.
JD: Your particular type of tenor is
something unusual and special. What was your path towards finding your true
voice?
MS: Everyone finds their own path, but I had a
different path than anybody! I started as a baritone. And I wanted to be Mel
Blanc, who was the voice-over person for all the Loony Tunes cartoons. When I
was young I’d imitate everything, all the time and growing up I sang with my family
every kind of music there was – church music, bluegrass, folk. Then when I was
in college I made money by doing commercials and I was a radio DJ and I would
do commercials in different characters – and then I started getting into the
idea that “Oh, you can make a living being an opera singer, that’s weird…” Obviously
I couldn’t do what they were doing, so I thought “I’ll just take the recordings
and start imitating the best”.
The big thing happened when I was 20 years
old – and it was with this production of Mitridate. In my two years of vocal
study, 18-21, we had a VHS of this production and I heard Bruce Ford for the
first time. I didn’t know you could sound like this as a tenor. I’d never heard
a sound like it – it’s like a baritone, but it’s obviously a tenor role, and
that’s what I want to do. Low notes were the easiest things in the world – high
notes, ugh, they were so hard! But this was totally different from anything I
heard in Verdi and Puccini.
In the US, everyone said you can’t make a
career out of this, you just cannot – and that’s still true if you’re in the sticks.
So I decided that if I really wanted to learn to sing I needed to go to Europe
and try to figure out this weird baritenor kind of repertoire. It took another six
years of auditioning to think OK, I can do this weird trick of different mixed
techniques, so I started doing a lot of Rossini roles.
Michael Spyres. Photo: Dax Bedell
JD: It sounds like it wasn’t an easy
beginning?
MS: I was in Vienna for two years at the
conservatory, and it’s a very Mozart-heavy town, so it was an invaluable
experience. That was the first time I got to sing these arias in public and I
crashed and burned. It was so hard! I was 26 and it just didn’t work. I went
back to the drawing board and started doing lots of Rossini again. This is my
third time doing Mitridate in the last year and only now is it starting to feel
good and right.
This is one of the most difficult fachs of
tenor, because you have to do a real mix of baritonal and tenor sounds, but you
have to keep it up in the extreme highs, the same kind of colour as a baritone
but not using the full voice. It’s a voix
mixte and it’s really tricky to navigate and very technical, but you don’t
want people to know you’re doing it! So that’s how I got into it: years and
years of practice and failure and finally things started to click. And now,
depending on repertoire, I change my technique. You have to, because it was
written for different people with different techniques.
JD: Next up, you’re singing Berlioz’s La
Damnation de Faust at the Proms?
MS: There’s a huge misconception about Berlioz!
He was a big admirer of the tenor Adolphe Nourrit, he admired Rossini and you
can hear it constantly in his music. Everyone thinks of Berlioz as these
unimaginable, gigantic pieces that are ultimately verismo – and it’s absolutely
false. In order to sing Berlioz, you have to be able to sing full voice, high,
and get over the orchestra, but the majority of his writing is for a lyrical
voice. He had Nourrit, who was known for doing a lot of voix mixte and had various kinds of colour-changing sounds, not
full-voice high Cs. He had him in mind for Benvenuto Cellini. But Nourrit was
having vocal problems and tragically then killed himself that year and Berlioz wrote it for Gilbert Duprez instead. But a work like Lélio is so lyrical and
beautiful, I can’t imagine some Puccini singer trying to sing it: it’s all
lightness and is based completely on the text.
There’s a great quote from Berlioz. He used
to say: “Above all, resonate”. He meant that both literally and figuratively. I
sang the Grande Messe des Morts in this massive cathedral that it was intended
for [Les Invalides], and in there Berlioz had realised that he needed more
people, it was too big a place, so the choir’s about 180-200 people and the
orchestra’s 120. I had friends at the performance and they said when I opened
up and started singing they could feel the sound resonating.
Berlioz was this great artist and dreamer
but although he had a giant ego, it was all about the art for him and he connected
everything to the text. He believed in art permeating society and being an
infectious thing, but it always has to be for a reason, it’s not just
superfluous. He was unlike anybody else and I love him!
JD: This isn’t entirely your Proms debut?
MS: I did the Beethoven Missa Solemnis with John
Eliot Gardiner two years ago. I’ve never done solo stuff there before, though,
so I’m excited. I love the Proms because it’s an awakening of classical music
for ‘everyperson’. I’m not saying that opera isn’t an elitist thing – because
it is, as it takes so much money to be able to put on an opera. But the coolest
thing about the Proms is that for many people this is their only possibility
that they might see something that’ll change their lives. So that’s why I love
the Proms. And I’ll give ‘em a good show, because now I’ve done Faust more
than, as far as I know, any other living person. I could conduct it with my
eyes closed – but all I have to do is sing, so it’s great! I love the piece so
much, mainly because I did the production with Terry Gilliam in the original
French in Belgium and that changed my life.
JD: What’s it like to work with Gilliam?
MS: He’s a madman and he’s wonderful! He seriously
reminds me of my uncle. We’ve kept in really good touch. We’re very much of the
same kind of mind – we’d start talking and still be there four hours later. We
have similar ideas and that’s also why he’s taken a liking, like me too, to
Berlioz. There are so many accounts of Berlioz being a true artist – ‘I don’t
care what you think of me, I’m going to do this because the art demands it’ – and
I’ve done that many times in my life. Of course I’ve failed – but I’ve
succeeded too!
As Faust in Gilliam's production
JD: The production was brilliant, but quite
controversial, involving a concentration camp…
MS: To me it’s one of the most poignant
productions I’ve ever been a part of. I have many friends and colleagues who
say ‘Oh, opera’s going in such a bad direction, all these director things that
kill the production’ – but you have a choice to take that or not, and we have
to do the projects we believe in. I’ve been fortunate that out of my 64 operas
I’ve done, there have only been two or three that I haven’t been really
thrilled about.
JD: You don’t mind ‘Regietheater’, then?
MS: It depends on the director and the ideas.
I’m a director myself, I have my own opera company in the States that I run
with my family. We’re basically the von Trapps – we put on the shows, my
brother helps run the company and my sister’s a Broadway singer. I take it very
seriously, I can see when a director is just doing something for their own ego and
I choose not to be around those kinds of people.
It’s a difficult thing, being a director. Today
they’re in a weird position where these are major decisions, it takes huge
amounts of money to put on a project and everybody’s under pressure to do a
brand-new, original idea. Many people have an idea, but it doesn’t necessarily
work with the music. Many directors are not musicians to start out with –
they’re dramatists, which is a great concept on paper, but if you have to listen
to a piece for four hours and you don’t take into account the audience – you’re
gonna die! So I’m fine with any project as long as it’s well thought out and it
makes sense with the music. Because the whole reason you’re there is because of the music.
It’s gone crazy in certain places. I won’t
name names, but there was one instance where L’Italiana in Algeri was being
produced and the director wanted to have his name bigger on the poster than the
composer’s name or the opera’s title. Fortunately the festival director said no.
That’s how crazy people get!
JD: Do you see yourself moving more into directing
in the future?
MS: Yes, absolutely. I’m so inspired, the more
I read about the origins of opera. From Jacopo Peri, who wrote the first opera,
until the late 19th century, all singers were actors and directors. Nowadays
things are so specialised that people say “I’m just a singer” and some don’t
even act! It’s completely the opposite of what it should be. All of us need to
be acting, dancing, singing, learning as much as we can. That is why opera
created this wave of art because it was the first artform where everyone came
together, with the idea that we’re all part of it, we all need to be able to do
a little bit of everything.
Michael Spyres
That was the great thing, growing up in my
family. We built our own amphitheatre. We built the stage first and everyone
sat on hay bales. I’m from a famous little town called Mansfield, Missouri – it
was the home of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House of the Prairie books. Because of the books, we have
many visitors come through there. My mother wrote a musical about Laura Ingalls
Wilder when we were growing up and it’s now in its 28th year. At its biggest we
had about 120 people involved, which was 10 per cent of the town! So I’ve grown
up around this and I’ve been so vindicated reading about the origins of opera, what
got me into opera and how it split from its origins.
JD: The idea that you can do just do one
thing and the world owes you a living, that’s going nowhere fast…
MS: Of course! And people are tired of that.
One of my favourite futurist speakers is Michio Kaku, a fantastic theoretical
physicist. A big subject now is what’s going to happen when people become obsolete
in jobs. In the next 30-50 years half the people are going to be cut out
because of robots, so what’s going to happen? What are the jobs that will be
left? You’ve got to be an artist, a musician, someone who comes up with new ideas.
For a long time everyone wanted to have a good stable job, but now people are
being replaced by robots. But a robot will never be able to be an artist or a
musician – that’s what’s so exciting.
JD: I hope you’re right!
MS: They can try! But we are such complex
creatures in music. You can hear a piece that’s done by a robot and it doesn’t
feel right, it’s just algorithms. That’s why I’m so excited about the future of
music and art. I feel I came at the right time because by the time I’m in my
later years more and more people will be coming to art, because that’s where
the ideas come from. The same thing applies to the computer programmers – they
have the technicality and the vision for what needs to be done. Opera is
basically the computer of the art world.
JD: You sing, you act, you direct: are you
also tempted to write an opera?
A few years ago my brother wrote a
libretto, my mum helped – we took the music from The Magic Flute and created a
story based on Alice in Wonderland to take to all the kids in the area who’d
never seen opera before, in 32 schools that were among the poorest in the
community. Yes, someday I want to write an opera – that’s what I’m leaning
towards.
JD: What about future roles to sing? Any
big dreams?
MS: I’ve basically done every role I wanted to
do, except Verdi’s Otello. I’ll do that someday – but like Kaufmann, I’m smart and
I’ll wait. I’ll wait until I’m 50 for that, so I’ve got over a decade – but the
other dream roles are Monteverdi’s Orfeo and a lot of Rameau and Gluck, great
epic works on Greek stories. But modern opera for the most part is not as
appealing to me as a singer.
I like Puccini. I love Puccini. But it’s
like he put down pure gold on paper and if you want to do him justice you’ve
got to do what he wrote – and if you live within the characters that he wrote
there’s not a lot of freedom. I’ve taken a lot of flack for saying that – people
say, ‘Oh you just don’t like Puccini because you can’t sing it’ – but actually
I can sing it, I just don’t like it, because I believe in doing what
the composer wanted you to do and for my character there’s very little in Puccini
that I find interesting as an actor and singer. I love it when other people do
it, but for me personally I get angry because I want to do my own thing, but I
shouldn’t – he wrote it so perfectly and beautifully that it’s just right! So
that’s why most of the verismo period doesn’t appeal to me – there’s not enough
freedom for me,
As far as dream roles go, I’ve done most of
them and I know it’s crazy to say that. But I’ve done 64 already and I’m 38:
operas from modern to the earliest stuff, and a range from the lowest operas
written for a tenor voice to the highest, so I’ve lived out all my major
fantasies as far as roles are concerned. Now I’m just looking for true content and
characterisation. I find many of the more obscure things much more rewarding.
I’d love to do Die tote Stadt – that’s
a dream. I love Die tote Stadt – Korngold
was one of the greatest. The same with Massenet: he came on the heels of
verismo and was able to marry the two, and Korngold did the same thing. Korngold
is so overlooked, just because he went into film. But have you listened to his
film scores? They’re better than anything! Come on, you can’t write better than
that.
JD: You just made this Korngold biographer
very happy! Thank you, Michael, and toitoitoi for the final Mitridate.
And – as Loony Tunes would say – that’s
all, folks!
The final performance of Mitridate is on
Friday 7 July at the Royal Opera House – booking here. Michael Spyres sings
Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust at the Proms on 8 August – booking here.
As so many of you enjoyed the JDCMB Summer Cooler, here's another recipe, this time for a cheering cuppa on a less sweltering sort of day. This was given to me by the spouse of one of my recent interviewees and I am very grateful to her because it cheers me up every time I make it. And goodness knows we all need cheering influences at the moment.
JDCMB Happy Antioxidant Tea
Remove the peel from, and chop up into smallish pieces, in quantities depending on your taste for nippy ginger:
A piece of turmeric root
A piece of ginger root
Put the pieces in a saucepan with a teapotful of water. Add a pinch of black pepper. Bring to the boil, put on a lid and simmer for about ten minutes.
Strain into teapot, or straight into mugs, and sweeten as much or as little as you like with some vanilla bean paste (I use about a quarter of a teaspoon per mug) or a bit of honey.
Apparently turmeric is full of anti-oxidants and is a splendid anti-inflammatory, said to be particularly good against arthritis. It and ginger are also reputedly excellent for the digestion. The pepper is supposed to have an activating influence on them both. The deep golden colour is gorgeous and the vanilla just makes the tea taste even nicer than it does already.
After making this tea, you may need to scrub your fingers clean of the bright turmeric juice before playing your piano, or you'll have yellow patches on the keys.
I hope you find it as warming, calming and cheering as I do.
Lise Davidsen as the Prima Donna, Nicholas Folwell as the Major Domo
Glyndebourne's Ariadne auf Naxos, directed by Katharina Thoma, has taken a lot of flak for its updating to the British 1940s. But it's actually rather good. It's been tightened up since the first run in 2013, the action flowing more slickly and convincingly; the air raid that finishes the first half does not seem incongruous at all. Part 2, in which the house is transformed into a hospital with shell-shocked patients and a suicidal Ariadne, has the aspect of a concussion-dream for the Composer, who does not vanish despite having nothing to sing. He/she appears to learn, watching Ariadne and Bacchus's final duet, that it is love that saves us, not death. This message is very much all right with me.
Moreover, with Cornelius Meister's lively, affectionate conducting, leader Peter Schoemann on great form in the violin solos and a very special cast, the score seemed to take wing and fly. Given the chance to change something about the production, I personally would cut only the straightjacketing of poor Zerbinetta, simply because it's too visually busy while we're trying to listen to all the dazzle.
Yes, that cast: plaudits are more than due to Angela Brower as a heartfelt Composer, Erin Morley as a vivid Zerbinetta, AJ Glueckert as a full-throated Bacchus (an injured daredevil pilot, in case you wondered) and the three nymphs-turned-nurses, along with Björn Bürger as an adorable Harlequin, Nicholas Folwell as the bossy little Major Domo and, of course, Thomas Allen as the Music Master, a role from which he's become indivisible. But there's no way this could be termed that critical favourite, a 'uniformly strong cast' - because there was nothing uniform whatsoever about our Ariadne.
From Norway, aged 30, please welcome the winner of Plácido Domingo's Operalia 2015, the utterly astounding Lise Davidsen. She also won the Queen Sonja Music Competition 2015 and this extract from Tannhäuser was filmed there. Just have a listen...
Vocally megawatted, toweringly tall, expressively direct, Davidsen is blessed with top notes that could ping us all the way to the moon, an eloquent middle range and a dark velvety lower register that virtually says 'Isolde' the moment you hear it. (In this interview with the Observer's Fiona Maddocks, she explains that she started off as a mezzo and wanted to be Joni Mitchell...).
Thinking of the few singers who have made a similar effect on first hearing, at least on me, I can only compare the thrill of disbelief and wild joy that her voice inspires to initial, never-forgotten encounters with the sonic glories of Anja Harteros and Nina Stemme. If she can do this at 30, imagine where she could go from here. Please, dear world, take good care of her.
And I'd appreciate it if good old Autocorrect would stop changing her name to Davidson whenever I type it, because I expect to be writing about her a good deal more in the future.
A word of warning: Southern Trains is having another work-to-rule and there are many cancellations for those trying to get to Lewes. Check before you set out, and leave plenty of time.
