Director, Daisy Evans; Set Designer, Molly O’cathain; Lighting Designer, Jake Wiltshire; Conductor, Peter Whelan with the Irish Baroque Orchestra. Clistene, Chuma Sijeqa; Aristea, Alexandra Urquiola; Argene, Sarah Richmond; Megacle, Gemma Ní Bhriain; Licida, Meili Li; Aminta, Rachel Redmond; Alcandro, Seán Boylan

Two years or so after Bajazet (an Olivier award-winning production for outstanding achievement in opera), the Irish Baroque Orchestra, Peter Whelan and the Irish National Opera were back in town, at the Linbury, with another hugely enjoyable Vivaldi opera. I’m beginning to have a sense of the difference between Handel and Vivaldi operas: Vivaldi goes on the whole for more medium to fast paced arias, often with intense rhythmic drive, and with exciting string ostinati. Handel seems somehow slower paced, more gentle and melancholy and more nuanced in terms of characterisation for the singers. But the fact that there are about 50 extant Vivaldi operas and I have only heard two of them means I have a lot to explore – very exciting…!!

This was a well-conceived simple production. A bright ring over the stage was suggestive of the Olympics and changed colour as needed, with a floor lit back screen behind the singers, again changing colours. There was also a moveable Amphitheatre used and sometimes split in various ways. The singers were in contemporary gym / sports gear to begin with, and turned into character with the aid of a rack of clothes on either side of the stage – this helps makes the point about assuming identities- not to mention gender – which is the point if the ludicrously complex plot. The singers also function together as a chorus and – given the amount of orchestral only music they also perform actions from the story to fill in some of the gaps. It says something about the way the director managed the action that there were no silly laughs from the audience at the more ludicrous turns of the plot – these sometimes one would imagine cardboard figures really did come across a real people with real emotions, something emphasised by the energy of the young actiong team

People joke about the complexity of Baroque opera plots – l don’t normally have too many problems with the Handel operas I’ve seen but this one did defeat me for a time, so elaborate is the amount of disguise, assumed identities and confusion. There are the usual two couples, though impossibly entangled, and the equally frequent device of getting the right couples together by revealing that two of the four are brother and sister- it all just takes a lot longer and with a lot more chaos before this is worked through, I guess.

The music is very enjoyable. There were at least three stunning numbers   By the side of the sleeping Megacle, Lucida sings a most beautiful aria ‘Mentre dormi amor fomenti” – this is absolutely of the same level of beauty as Handel numbers such as “Piangere” from Julius Caesar. The there’s “Siam navi  all’onde algenti”, which is a fizzing coloratura  aria to end the first half with Aminta (here’s a Cecilia Bartoli Youtube video –https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep987vSTsVc) , and Aristea’s fierce aria expressing rage with Licida in the second half is another cracker. I also enjoyed Licida’s “Gemo in un Punto e Fremo”. But almost every number has a catchy tune- there’s little of the routine here in the arias, though some of the recitative are rather long and tedious. I detected  a violin run which seemed to have been taken from The Four Seasons……

As with Bajazet, in many ways the musical stars are the orchestra – it is extraordinary how much energy they generate, despite being only two players to each type of stringed instrument, plus a theorbo and harpsichord, and Peter Whelan is extraordinarily generous with his engagement in this music. All the singers were good – the standouts for me were the coloratura singer Rachel Redmond as Aminta, who must surely be destined for more important international roles, plus the Chinese counter-tenor Meili Li as Licida – as readers of this blog may have noted, I normally am not too fond of countertenors and their hooting, but this man’s voice was utterly beautiful; world class singing…….Also Alexandra Urquiola as Aristea struck me as having a strong agile voice and good stage presence. But this was a team, and everyone played their part in what was happening on stage and in the music

I found this trailer, which gives a good idea of how the orchestra sounds in this work, as well as more details on costumes and sets – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEI2hZaEJNk

MOZART Ach, ich fühl’s! (from The Magic Flute); MOZART String Quintet No.4 in G minor K516; TRAD. Se solen sjunker (Swedish folksong); SCHUBERT Piano Trio No.2 in E flat. Ella Taylor, Robin Ireland & Ensemble 360

I was listening, with one ear, while waiting for my car’s servicing to be finished, to the music on the radio in the car showroom today……I suddenly heard a song I remembered – the Pet Shop Boys’ ‘You are always on my mind’, dating I suppose from the early 90’s, about the last time when I really had some grasp of what was going on in the pop/rock world.  It has a memorable tune, good lyrics, and the sort of driving crashing accompaniment you get from a Phil Spector arrangement (which for me is a positive thing) , and it put my mind back to the era it was created very quickly. Why don’t I listen to this sort of music more? – I quite like it after all. The answer came to me as I listened to the Schubert piece in the Ensemble 360 concert – works such as the Schubert are just so much longer, more complex emotionally, more engaging, and become something that you return again and again to. Very few pop/rock songs have moved beyond the 5-10 minutes’ duration and lyric format. I just don’t have the time to hear the Pet Shop Boys etc when there is so much classical music to be explored !

This was a concert with Ensemble 360 plus Ella Taylor, a soprano winner of Second Prize at the 2020 Kathleen Ferrier Awards, and Robin Ireland, who used to be the viola player in the Lindsay String Quartet (in the interval I saw a lovely photo of Robin with Peter Cropper and the other quartet members standing with Michael Tippet in 1992!). This was the only concert in Music In the Round’s Spring chamber music festival I could make, unfortunately, but it was one well worth going to. Each half began with an appropriate sung piece by Ella Taylor – ‘Ach, ich fühl’s!’ from the Magic Flute tying in nicely with the Mozart String Quintet, and the Swedish folk song ‘Se solen sjunker’ (‘see the sun is setting’), which Schubert had heard in the Fröhlich sisters’ house, sung by the tenor Isak Albert Berg, and which is used for the main tune of the second movement of the piano trio.

The Mozart piece is one I thought I knew but actually didn’t – I think it’s the K515 and K593 quintets I’ve heard, This is a complex piece – the first movement is more graceful than, and hasn’t quite the same urgency as, the G Minor 40^th symphony; the minuet is distant and not easily approachable, again with a rather far-off vision of some elysian fields alongside the darkness. The adagio I found mysterious and not easily ‘placeable’ in any emotional framework. The finale, after a trudging and intense 3 minute adagio, suddenly veers into a totally different light-filled world. All in all, I found the trajectory of the Mozart piece difficult to follow – I need to listen to it again……… But the performance was excellent…..

The Schubert Piano Trio I am much more familiar with. It was composed around the same time as ‘Winterreise’ and has a similar death-haunted air. The performance was slightly, but only slightly, disrupted by the quest for what was at first thought to be a malfunctioning hearing aid, emitting an intermittent electronic quiet whine, but then turned out to be an errant fitting in the upstairs loo = light or hand-drier. This extended the gap between the first and second movements, but was accepted by the always good-natured MITR crowd with good grace. In the end the performers just ploughed on regardless. The Swedish song’s text makes the emotion explicit – ‘Farewell’; ‘Ere night comes with dark shadows, you flee, sweet hope now bleak’. There are moments where real terror breaks through in this work, and it begins to sound more like Tchaikovsky than Schubert. Maybe the performance slightly underplayed the moments when the music threatens to go off the rails, and emphasised the Schubertian grace, but still, it was delivered with a lot of energy and I liked it very much

Sir Mark Elder conductor, Halle Orchestra, Sir Stephen Hough piano: Dvořák Scherzo capriccioso; Stephen Hough Piano Concerto (The World of Yesterday); Butterworth A Shropshire Lad: Rhapsody for Orchestra; Elgar Variations on an Original Theme, “Enigma”

This was Mark Elder’s last appearance in Sheffield as the Halle’s music director so for once the hall in Sheffield was completely full. The audience has spent years not going to the Halle’s concerts, so that City Hall has rarely been more than half full for their appearances, even when Elder was conducting, so it is deeply ironic they only turn up when he’s leaving¬ There was flimflammery from the leader of Sheffield City Council who rocked up with a cardboard copy of a silver dish of the City Hall as a parting present for Elder – which was to ‘be ready in a few weeks’ time apparently'(clearly they had been bounced into this late in the day) – despite having sat on their hands for years in terms of providing better acoustics for the hall. Oh well…..

The audience as always in Sheffield was a mixture – there was a bloke next to me extolling the virtues of the Kleiber Tristan recording with Margaret Price, and at the same time people clapping after noisy variations in the ‘Enigma’.

The very dry dead acoustics in City Hall can play havoc with how an orchestra sounds – the wide shallow stage seems matched by a kind of compression in the sound, and a lack of richness and depth. It is to the huge credit of the orchestra and Elder that despite the acoustics, they sounded full and rounded in sound, and made use of the clarity that the hall undoubtedly possesses to offer some wonderful insights in the Elgar work.

The performance was prefaced by a much better gift than Sheffield Council’s – the Sheffield Music Academy produced a young composer and string players who performed a short piece called Waves, obviously playing on both waves as in water and waves as in saying goodbye to Mark Elder. This was excellent

When the concert finally got going, the Dvorak piece was pleasant enough, and extremely well played, if a bit inconsequential. Stephen Hough’s piece I liked, though I am not sure that it would bear much repeated listening. In a talk before the concert, Hough has described it as originally a film score he’d been commissioned to write, for a film about a pianist in the 1930’s commissioned to write a piano piece by a duchess. I got the impression the film had fallen by the wayside, so Hough reworked the music. The World of Yesterday, the title of the piece, is also the name of an (excellent) memoir by Stefan Zweig, about pre WW1 Vienna, while Hough’s work is a look back at the piano concertos of the 1920s and 30’s – think Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Bartok, Gershwin etc. The piece was shortish – 22 minutes or so – and didn’t outstay its welcome, with passages both lyrical and glitteringly bright (I seem to remember a duet between the piano and the xylophone at one point).

After the interval, the Halle, and Elder came into its own with the Butterworth and Elgar. The Butterworth provides some sort of link, I suppose, with the Hough piece in terms of nostalgia  – this time for a rural past, though the Butterworth also has anger in its central part, at the waste of young ‘lads’ lives in the Boer War. The Halle produced a glorious sound – wonderful clarinet and horn playing and transforming the usual sound of the hall into something rich and strange.

The Elgar work is a work I have heard Elder conduct several times and my reactions have been the same each time. Up until the finale, the way Elder conducts the piece, and the way the Halle performs it, is remarkably good. There were so many little touches in the orchestration coming out that you never normally hear – some wonderful detail in Ysobel and W.N, and all the tempi well-judged. Elder crafted the climax of Nimrod superbly  -sometimes the horns can blare rather vulgarly, but here they were held back and enveloped in a wonderful mushrooming orchestral sound. Another touch was the more-than-usually audible sound of the side drum in Variation 13 (was it Elgar who talked about a penny rolled around the drum surface?) which coloured the rest of the orchestra’s sadness very effectively. I had the same thought on the finale as when I have heard this team perform it before – that somehow the basic tempo Elder sets for the movement is too slow and becomes flaccid, and not climactic enough; it’s very different from how Elgar himself conducted this movement. I’ll listen again to the radio broadcast on 22 May, and see if I think differently………..

Director, Katie Mitchell; Designer, Vicki Mortimer; Lighting Designer; Jon Clark. Conductor, Giacomo Sagripanti. Lucia, Nadine Sierra; Edgardo, Xabier Anduaga; Enrico Ashton. Artur Ruciński; Raimondo Bidebent, Insung Sim; Arturo Bucklaw, Andrés Presno; Normanno, Michael Gibson; Alisa, Rachael Lloyd

My younger self would have found it fairly unbelievable that I would be voluntarily going to a Donizetti opera, but I had heard such good things about this production, about the Lucia singing in it, and because I admire Katie Mitchell’s work, that I decided to travel down to see it  – from a good Lower Slips seat. And in fact I did go several times in the 70’s to Janet Baker singing Maria Stuarda in the ENO production, so I do know that with the right production and singers Donizetti’s works can be a rewarding experience to see and hear.

So…..what to make of it, after all the years?

The director sets the costumes and general atmosphere as Gothic, maybe 1830’s, when the score was written. This is not when the actual opera is set – late 17th century – nor is it when the novel was written, but it serves well enough as a gloomy backdrop to an undoubtedly dark, even grotesque, work. The lighting is predominantly dim, with the exception of that on Lucia in her mad scene, and her dead mother’s ghost, seemingly in a wedding dress(?) who wanders across the stage at various key points of the action. The set design offers an interesting idea – a split screen, essentially two stage, approach, one usually Lucia’s bedroom or withdrawing room so that when one ‘screen’ offers the ‘main’ staging, the other offers sub plot or commentary – thus, while Edgardo and Enrico are arguing in the wedding celebration, we see a very sexually knowledgeable Lucia first bringing her new husband Arturo to bed and then stabbing him to death in mime. The split screen works well though obviously reduces stage space (so the chorus can look cramped at times) and – if like me you’re sitting in the Lower Slips – it can be more than usually frustrating to see what’s going on. The point of the split screen is obviously to ensure that Lucia is absolutely at the centre of what’s happening, even though the story revolves around the fact that, among all these dominating and manipulative men, she absolutely doesn’t at first sight have any agency at all. The director makes Lucia takes control where she can – e.g in her very full-on sexual advances to Edgardo – and very much shows the mad scene as the only way Lucia CAN retain some agency in her own life. Lucia ends up blood-bespattered in a Victorian bath on one side of the stage while Edgardo declares, rather at length, his intention to kill himself. Even at the end in this production therefore Lucia remains centre-stage.  The sets themselves were straightforwardly realistic and natural. They were also quite solid which then required numerous pauses with curtains down to re-arrange them. This impeded the momentum of the work and I found the pauses unhelpful.

So what did I make of it all?

– Though the work is a model of concision compared to many rambling Verdi plots, I did find it overlong, really. Not only the pauses but on occasion the arias as an opportunity for display made me fidgety. I was not gripped by it.  Even the Mad Scene, sadly with flute accompaniment rather than glass harmonica, just went on, for me, too long. The music somehow doesn’t really excite me even when Edgardo and Enrico are having their set-to in Act 2. There is too much of the auto-pilot, in terms of the stylised ending to arias, and also some of the thematic material just sounds to me banal and not appropriate to the emotions being played out on stage

– Specifically, though Nadine Sierra’s singing as Lucia was remarkable- brilliant coloratura, subtle shading of the voice, pinged out top notes – she somehow never reached out to me with her voice or stage presence. She remained a cypher. I wasn’t sure whether this was a result of the work or the singer. I wondered how I might have reacted to someone like Callas in the role….

– The other two male leads, Edgardo and Enrico were both in very strong hands. At one point they seemed to be almost competing as to who could hold on to their top notes the longest. Edgardo in particular had a very good sense of bel canto line and phrasing

– The orchestra sounded much more on the ball than they had done for Carmen a week early – horns and that flute accompanier being notably fine.

All in all I was glad to have seen this work, with fine singers and an excellent production making the best possible case for it, but I am not planning to see it again……

Conductor, Antonello Manacorda; Carmen, Aigul Akhmetshina; Don José, Piotr Beczala; Escamillo,  Kostas Smoriginas; Micaëla, Olga Kulchynska;  Zuniga, Blaise Malaba; Frasquita, Sarah Dufresne;  Mercédès, Gabrielė Kupšytė; Royal Opera Chorus And Orchestra; Director, Damiano Michieletto; Set Designer, Paolo Fantin; Costume Designer; Carla Teti; Lighting Designer, Alessandro Carletti

I travelled to this screening in a rather gloomy frame of mind: ‘planned engineering works’ meant there were no trains to Sheffield, the car wasn’t sufficiently charged to get me there, and the last bus left Sheffield at 21.22. I knew therefore I could only see the first half and a bit of this new Carmen – I saw in the end the first 60%. Also, I had received the previous day the booklet of the new ROHCG season which looked pretty dire – given the budget cuts they were clearly putting on lots of crowd pleasers, and, left to my own devices, I could only see 5 productions I would really want to go to – the new Walkure, the new Semele, the new Turnage opera ‘Festen’, the Tobias Kratzer production of Fidelio, and a double Bernstein bill at the Linbury. I’ll probably go to a few others as dress rehearsals – eg the new Onegin.

I got to know Carmen in the 70’s in the old Coliseum production, initially conducted by Mackerras, and I have only ever seen one since – the 2019 Barry Kosky one, of which I remember little now except for the steps and the gorilla……..Damiano Michieletto directed the current ROHCG Cav & Pag, and there are several similarities between that and this new Carmen. Both involve a revolving central box which can be turned to represent both inside and outside scenes, both have excellent personen-regie with much detailed work with the main singers to create a real sense of interaction and response. Cav & Pag’s direction also included a lot of work with the chorus to create it as almost a set of quite different individuals, not a stylised group – this was less in evidence in Carmen. In both cases the setting is 60’s / 70’s of the 20^th century, and the general appearance of costumes and sets is bright and colourful – lots of reds, greens, blues and pinks. Michieletto’s big idea is to have Don Jose’s mother on the stage as a gloomy menacing presence, representing the forces of conservatism and sobriety against which Carmen so effectively positions herself, and this, I think, works well, particularly when the heavy brooding 5 note fate melody is played. There’s evidence of careful thought at every stage about how all the major characters move, how they react to each other, and how they dress – Micaela for instance is very much of one mind with Don Jose’s mum, and wears owlish glasses and conservative clothes (however at the end of the day, it has to be the singers themselves who have to realise on the stage the director’s guidance, and there was some variable practice here). The smuggling gang was brilliantly realised as were the characters of Frasquite and Mercedes.

The conducting didn’t to me seem to rise much above the routine, and I didn’t get the sense of springy rhythms that a Pappano would have brought. Not for the first time, I asked myself why someone from the UK would not have been a better choice of conductor. Manacorda drove the music hard and this was probably for the best – it complemented the sense of a gripping story being unfolded by the director.

Of the singers – well, Aigul Akhmetshina was quite extraordinary, particularly when seeing her close up. I have rarely if ever seen a singer so fiercely engaged in a part – every facial nuance, every movement, was meaningful and complemented/added to what the singing and orchestra were offering, giving us ever richer and clearer insights into Carmen’s character.  She’s only 28 – if she can immerse herself in other roles in the same way, she has a sensational career before her. I didn’t know quite what to make of Beczala – he has a fine tenor voice, can spin a line beautifully, can clearly rise over the orchestra thrillingly, and his ‘flower song’ was very well done. But as an actor he seemed a bit stiff and unengaged. Of course, that could be, quite legitimately, his view of Don Jose, and fair enough, then – but I sometimes felt almost as though he didn’t quite know what to do with the demonic energy radiating out of every pore from Akhmetshina.  I have heard more sensitive singing of Micaela’s beautiful Act 1 aria than Olga Kulchynska’s, but overall she was very convincing in the role. The chorus, were not that impressive on stage – their actions and expressions tended towards the routine, and credibility suffered from there being too many middle-aged Anglo-Saxon faces to be seen to be a small-town Spanish group of citizens They were also not very incisive or together in their singing in Act 1. The children were well-drilled and funny at first, but became a little arch and irritating after a while.

I would have liked to have stayed longer, but I was there long enough to realise how extraordinary Akhmetshina is in the title role

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Vladimir Jurowski conductor. PJ Harris director. Burkhard Fritz tenor, Siegfried; Svetlana Sozdateleva soprano, Brünnhilde; Albert Dohman bass, Hagen; Günter Papendell baritone, Gunther; Sinéad Campbell Wallace soprano, Gutrune; Robert Hayward baritone, Alberich; Kai Rüütel-Pajula mezzo-soprano, Waltraute; Claudia Huckle contralto, 1st Norn; Claire Barnett-Jones mezzo-soprano, 2nd Norn; Evelina Dobraceva soprano, 3rd Norn; Alina Adamski soprano, Woglinde; Verity Wingate soprano, Wellgunde; Angharad Lyddon mezzo-soprano, Flosshilde; London Philharmonic Choir and London Voices

This is, I think, the 5^th live Gotterdammerung I’ve heard in the past 16 years – the others being Halle/Elder (concert), ROHCG/Pappano, Opera North/ Farnes (concert) and the 2022 Valentin Schwarz Bayreuth production.  Few of the principals for this performance are singers I’ve come across before – but I have heard Albert Dohman at Bayreuth singing Hagen, and there is the ever-reliable Robert Hayward as Alberich. I never heard Jurowski’s Rheingold and Valkyrie but I did hear him and the LPO performing Siegfried’ in concert form in early February 2020, and had got tickets for what was supposed to be a complete Ring cycle in February 2021- that, as you can tell by the date, never happened. It’s great that Gotterdammerung at least has now been performed. I had much enjoyed the Siegfried performance more than 4 years ago

I enjoyed this performance hugely, and the 4hrs.45 mins or so of performance seemed to speed by – I was barely conscious of time and of anything dragging. When you listen and see this piece live, in one go, you become more aware of how magnificently concise the work is – not at all sprawling   This altogether was a far more intense experience in fact than either of the two theatre performances I’ve seen of this work in recent years. There were several reasons for this.

The setting of course was a concert performance but nevertheless those responsible for staging (and there was a director and lighting designer credited) had managed to create a coherent stage picture – everyone knew their lines and there were no music stands, the videos screened on the back wall behind the organ were effective and not over-the-top, exits and entrances made sense, there were a few props (a nice touch being a jacket to symbolise the dead Siegfried) or agreed ways of demonstrating something with hands, and there was some simple projected narration. All the singers reacted to each other and were fully ‘in’ their roles, even seeming to look the part though not in costume – for instance Waltraute’s glittery long dress aptly signalled a visitor from another world when she comes to see Brunnhilde. Finally, there was intelligent variation in the performing space between the front of the stage and the choir area, and exits and entrances were all unobtrusively managed. There were a few oddities – why no video of water (which was used in the Rhinemaidens’ scene in Act 3) when Siegfried reaches the Rhine in the Prologue, and why no narrative explaining the last 5 minutes of the opera? – but these were minor issues…..

The conducting of Vladimir Jurowski and the playing of the LPO were of a very high standard. I was able to compare the rendition of the ‘Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine journey’ and ‘Immolation’ scene with the Vassily Petrenko (another conductor I admire) performances 6 weeks ago at the RAH and there was no doubting the superiority of Jurowski’s handling of the ebb and flow of the music and bringing out its inner voices. The love duet in the prologue was quite slow and measured, with much sweetness of tone from the violins and some beautiful woodwind playing, with a thrilling Rhine Journey to follow. The last 5 orchestral minutes of the work were again grandly slow – one of the most effectively performed endings I’ve heard of this piece, with the Rhinemaidens’ song paced slowly enough to have a real lilt and the ‘redemption’ theme played at a pace appropriate to achieving its full impact. Throughout Jurowski showed this clear and sensitive response to the music  – Act 2 as it should be was fast and furious in the wedding scene, and really exciting; the funeral march imposing and among the best I’ve heard – critically it was given space to unfold and wasn’t pushed along too quickly . I was also aware in the big orchestral set-pieces that Jurowski had been very effective in holding the volume back earlier when accompanying the singers – there were really only a few moments when they were submerged in the orchestral melee. I was also much taken by the clarity of detail, the pacing and the delicacy of the Act 3 scene between Siegfried and the Rhinemaidens, which I can sometimes get a bit restless in listening to but which in this performance was absorbing . There many other glorious moments I could mention – I’ll just highlight the scene in Act 1 with Waltraute where again the pacing allowed all the beauty and majesty and passion of the music to come through.

All this was complemented by a really excellent group of singers, all of whom were totally convincing in their roles. There were four stand-outs, but no weak links: Siegfried, Brunnhilde, Hagen and Gutrune. Burkhard Fritz as Siegfried was very impressive – he had a strong voice, made more of an attempt than quite a few to encompass the lyrical aspects of the role and he hit the top notes fearlessly. The narration in Act 3 was outstanding. Only at the very end was his voice maybe beginning to flag a bit – but that’s understandable in such a demanding role. He had a good stage presence – maybe a bit inappropriately relaxed at times – and conveyed very effectively the complacent unawareness of the doped Siegfried in Act 2.  Svetlana Sozdateleva as Brunnhilde offered a far more absorbing portrayal of the role than many. She has a beautiful warm voice, very effective in the middle and lower registers, and, in the Waltraute scene and the Immolation was very moving indeed, with some beautiful shadings of her voice for, for instance, Ruhe du Gott’. She was also able to cut through the storm of the wedding scene with some powerful upper notes, and portrayed Brunnhilde very clearly and convincingly in all her different moods – tender, imperious, raging. What she does not have is the ability to ping out the very top notes convincingly – she opted out of the high C at the end of the Prologue love duet and there were a couple of notes in the Immolation scene that were wild grabs at an approximate pitch, almost shouted, rather than anything else. To me, this didn’t matter very much, so convincing, so deeply moving, was her overall performance. Albert Dohman as Hagen was about as good as you can get  – he has the right voice, the diction, the height, to be a great singer in this role, and he was! I doubt if I have seen a better Hagen – at least in recent years. He impressed me also at Bayreuth in 2022. And Sinead Campbell Wallace was very effective as Gutrune – a lovely voice, and a very good actor, getting across very effectively to the audience the vulnerability, the innocence, the tragedy of her character. But also Robert Hayward was an excellent Alberich, and there were creditable Rhinemaidens and Norns – plus the chorus was incisive and thrilling in the wedding scene. Gunther Pappendell I am not sure what I would make of in other contexts – perhaps a bit of an under-projected performance and maybe not particularly distinguished vocally -but of course that makes perfect sense as far as Gunther is concerned. I was also very impressed by Kai Ruutel-Pajula as Waltraute – a comanding presence and a gorgeous voice.  

I see that Jurowski is starting a Ring at his new job in Munich – I suspect we shan’t see in London another attempt at the cycle projected for 2021, sadly. Will I be around in London for the next likely live rendition of this at Covent Garden in ?? 2027 or 2028. Who knows….though there is the Regents Opera slimmed down version of the Ring to look forward to in February 2025………..

Halle Orchestra, Sir Mark Elder conductor. Germán Enrique Alcántara baritone | Simon Boccanegra; Eri Nakamura soprano | Amelia; Iván Ayón-Rivas tenor | Gabriele Adorno; William Thomas bass | Jacopo Fiesco; Sergio Vitale baritone | Paolo Albianil David Shipley bass | Pietro; Beth Moxon mezzo soprano | Amelia’s maid. Chorus of Opera North

Another Verdi opera I’ve never heard a note of before, let alone seen…..I think of the major mature operas it’s really only A Masked Ball, Macbeth and Luisa Miller that I will now not have seen, plus some early ones like Il Due Foscari. This was a collaboration between the Halle and Opera Rara, and is something I guess Sir Mark Elder wanted to do in his final year with the Halle. As you can see from the title this was a performance of the rarer 1857 original version, not the more commonly played 1881 one with dramatic reworkings by Boito – but as I have no knowledge of either version this didn’t really make much impact on me……….

On reflection after performance, this did seem to me to be a work which at least in its 1857 version needed a stage performance to have real impact. The characters seemed for the most part sketchily drawn and it’s not always easy to understand their motivations. Boccanegra for instance doesn’t seem a particularly tyrannical figure – he needs a director’s imagination to surround him with the ‘thugs’ and the “ informers’ who are mentioned in the text – it needed the apparatus of the surveillance state to make the point in a theatre. Likewise I found it difficult to understand what Fiesco was so upset about – after all his daughter, who is Boccanegra’s lover, dies unexpectedly but naturally, not as a result of anything SB does. Adorno seems a cardboard cut out Italian/tenor lover. Paolo is undoubtedly a Macchiavellian figure but nothing seems to happen to him at the end – he gets away with poisoning Boccanegra. Amelia alone seems more fully drawn as a character. Again, the number of male v female singers is striking – apart from Amelia’s maid, who only sings a few lines, Amelia is the only female singer. It makes for a long dark-hued and not fully engaging evening. A lot of the male parts are written in quite a declamatory style, and it’s only Amelia who really offers vocal fireworks during the work – similarly a lot of the music is slow, and there are too few exciting moments with chorus and orchestra at full throttle. There was little attempt during the performance to create any sort of staged interaction between the characters – Fiesco was notably stolid, and others peered at their scores a lot of the time; the only really engaging performances, in terms of stage presence, were by Boccanegra himself and Amelia, though Adorno did his best when not looking at the score.  But I did enjoy some of the music – the end of Scene 2 of the Prelude, with (I think) the RLPO-owned bells making an appearance was notably thrilling; I liked too the finale of Act 1. At other times, it seemed as though a Verdi AI machine was at work, recycling melodies and their accompaniments that are heard to better effect in Traviata or Rigoletto. Sorry……

What I can say more affirmatively is that there was a lot of good singing around. Germán Enrique Alcántara was, I thought, absolutely outstanding as Boccanegra, with a beautiful golden voice, some lovely legato singing and sounding tremendously at home in the role – I would love to hear him sing Mozart (in fact he has sung the Mozart Almaviva at ROHCG).  The Peruvian tenor Iván Ayón-Rivas sounded absolutely idiomatic as Adorno and sung very well. I was very taken by the sonority and depth of William Thomas’ bass voice – he’s clearly going places, though the actual nuancing of what he was singing could do with a bit more work: I wonder if he will be a Hagen or a King Marke in a few years’ time? The Amelia, Eri Nakamura, was good but perhaps less exceptional than some of the men – she dealt with but didn’t sparkle in the (not very many) moments of vocal fireworks; sometimes too her voice felt a bit small for the role, at least in a concert performance, and she had slightly too wide a vibrato at the beginning. The chorus sounded excellent and Mark Elder didn’t – as he had with Force of Destiny at ROHCG –  seem to be taking too slow a pace at any point. The orchestra stumbled a bit at the very beginning but otherwise played very well – it’s interesting how Verdi at this point in his career was moving beyond the bel canto rum-ti-tum accompaniment to create more interesting orchestral sounds, particularly in the strings, which the orchestra and Elder brought out well.

All in all, interesting but I am not sure I will be rushing to repeat the experience. It was interesting to see that the hall was pleasantly full, but certainly not sold out. How ENO can expect to run repeat performances of anything other than 4-5 popular operas (Carmen, Traviata, Butterfly) in Manchester I do not understand

Ruth Gipps Song for Orchestra; Nielsen Violin Concerto; Borodin Symphony No.2. RLPO – Andrew Manze conductor; Johan Dalene violin (Young Artist in Residence)

This was a really good concert. Though it was a far from generous programme, and had at least two works which almost everyone in the audience hadn’t heard live before ( and indeed in my case I had never heard the Borodin live before either) , and which probably they’d be unfamiliar with, the hall was completely full. I sense that even more than with the Halle and Manchester, people in Liverpool are very passionate about ‘their’ orchestra and trust its programming – so will turn out even for the unfamiliar. I have a recording of the Nielsen which I bought a few months ago (the Fabio Luisi one of the complete concertos) but have only heard it once.

I did wonder what the programming logic was here. I thought maybe there was something in the Nielsen related to folk tunes that would correlate to the Gipps and Borodin works. But there isn’t really…and so it was simply an overture/concerto/symphony model.

The orchestra was I thought on outstanding form – they have been extremely well led by Petrenko and now by Hindoyan for a long time – and it shows. There were really sensitive contributions by the first horn and oboe and an impressive sheen to the strings.

The Ruth Gipps piece was very much on ‘cow pat’ territory for the most part, sounding with a plaintive oboe much like Vaughan Williams but there was a central section where the brass stirred and growled from the depths which sounded as though it came from a slightly different voice.

The Nielsen piece I liked a lot – it is formally in two movements, but really there are four – a slow introduction followed by a long movement described as cavalleresco (not quite sure what to make of that, literally ‘chivalrous’ but maybe – ‘swaggering’?)), and then a long slow movement with a quick finale. Its thematic material is good, though it sounded as though Nielsen was overly concerned with making sure the violin wasn’t drowned by the orchestra, and sometimes it was difficult to remember the orchestra was actually present!. There are many touches in the work reminiscent of the symphonies (it was written about the same time as the 3rd) – that Nielsen sense of wide open spaces and a bracing breeze was very much present here. Johan Dalene, a young Swedish violinist aged only 23, was outstanding in giving character to the concerto, from a hushed beginning to great energy in the last movement.  His opening – quiet and gentle – was very different to my recording, though they concurred in their beautiful phrasing of the lovely theme in the opening prelude.  At the end I felt I wanted to listen to this again soon – I’ll put my recording to good use at the weekend. Dalene offered a Bach solo piece as an encore, which again was played with a lot of character (including subtle variations in dynamics and speed.

The Borodin symphony is in one sense a bit of a war horse, with lots of folksy music, very easy on the ear, and with the Polotsvian Dances never far away – yet on the other hand it doesn’t crop up that often in the concert hall (its maybe awkward length, at approx 28 mins, possibly having something to do with this. For me, it was huge fun to hear this live and it made for a genuinely happy experience for everyone – orchestra as well as audience – with lots of smiles. This was the piece that needed the most direction from a conductor and Andrew Manze took up the challenge vigorously – possibly smudging one or two of the lyrical moments on the way, but this was no great matter – it was all very exciting! 

Director, Jude Christian; Designer, Charlotte Henery; Lighting, Ben Ormerod. Conductor, Gerry Cornelius. Manon, Jenny Stafford;  Des Grieux, ? (cover for Gareth Dafydd Morris); Lescaut, Aidan Edwards; Geronte, Edward Hawkins;  Edmondo, Brenton Spiteri

Manon Lescaut is an early work of Puccini’s, composed between 1889 and 1892 (so a very long time before, say, Turandot).This production was truly panned by the critics when it was first put on in London in late February 2024 – I’ve rarely seen such awful reviews, which focused on the incoherence of the production (two stars from the Guardian; The i – “Dump this embarrassing show. The real tragedy in this staging of Puccini’s opera is that it is going on tour” etc etc). Regie-theater, apparently, at its most objectionable and pointless. I have never heard a note of the music or seen a production of this work before, so thought it would still be interesting to go, despite the reviews. And occasionally critics can get things wrong………..However……………..

At a pre-performance talk by the conductor and the in-house staff director, we were told that the director of this production, Jude Christian, was envisaging the setting of the opera as a ‘dystopian nightmare’, dreamed by a young woman who appears sleeping at a desk with angle poise lamp and laptop in front of her at the beginning of the work and at the start of the second half’; she then sings something with a powerpoint projector and screen by her (?) and wanders about the stage for a bit before disappearing and not being seen again. I guess I would have gathered that it was ‘all a dream’, had I not known this beforehand, though of course I will never be sure. The other point that came out was that Ms Christian had not only translated the libretto but had altered some of the wording to give a more feminist perspective – to emphasise that Manon is manipulated by men, is always part of their story rather than having her own. This seems fair enough – Puccini and his librettists’ approach to women is always dubious from a modern perspective and if the opera can be made a bit more real to a contemporary audience by some updating or changing of the language that is fair enough, in my view.

As a work completely new to me, Manon Lescaut didn’t grab me as much as La Rondine had 5 months ago. It has all the Puccini hallmarks – brilliant orchestration, through-composed, plentiful tunes – but doesn’t quite have the immediate impact and the thrill of his later works, which, however manipulative they are, are always moving to see and hear.

So – looking at this from a positive perspective what were the good things about this production?

1. It was sung in what was for the most part sensible contemporary English
2. Three of the principals were excellent, and when the flow of the story enables them to be on their own on stage I was gripped. Jenny Stafford was excellent as Manon – she has a gleaming bright voice which reached top notes effortlessly, she could respond to the text with subtlety, she was able to sing softy and expressively, and, although in a not very flattering dress and having a daft azure/green wig, acted well. She was thoroughly believable. I hope singing this role is an important step in her career. Edward Hawkins as Geronte, tall and with an impressive sonorous bass voice was, despite wearing a completely ridiculous pink sombrero and a pink suit, and given a character (fop with rouge) which minimised his controlling nasty aspect, clearly a very good singer and did his best with the director’s mistaken view of the role. And Aidan Edwards as Lescaut sung out well, and produced an excellent cameo of this ineffective and unhelpful character, manipulating both his sister and Des Grieux for his own advantage. The singer performing Des Grieux was a cover – I think his name was ?Dominic/Desmond Walsh. He took a while to give an impression of feeling comfortable on stage, and his upper range wasn’t really reliable enough  -sometimes he sounded like a true Puccini tenor but at others his voice cracked at the top or sounded strained. His acting was good and his diction clear.  Edmondo, sung by Brenton Spiteri, was good, though again dressed ridiculously – in his case a bright green Mephistophelian costume with a droopy moustache.
3. The small orchestra couldn’t, obviously, produce a really full rich sound given their numbers, but played well and accompanied effectively

I can see that Manon Lescaut presents a problem for directors. It’s either got to be done straight, in 18^th century costume, or some other way found. It is meant to be verismo – what would verismo look like in the 21^st century?  A contemporary dress production could very easily work, in my view. But this production just didn’t provide an alternative to either approach. The colours were garishly technicolour – pink, gold, brilliant green. The chorus, who also played minor roles, were oddly knowing, somehow, rather arch, and were (at least some of them) dressed up in furry onesies, hopping round the stage like bunnies. There was some very clunky symbolism, relating to the fact that Manon dies of thirst in the US desert – the first act is set in an empty swimming pool, and water wasted, while Des Grieux flings around empty water cooler containers at the beginning of the third. There is some bizarre stuff about golden calves (I thought, but reviewers said dogs) being collectibles and currency in the first two acts. Des Grieux, all in white, arrives in the first act riding a statue of a dolphin. It really didn’t add up – which is fair enough I suppose if you’re envisaging it as a nightmare, but this production really didn’t illuminate the actions of the main characters and the overarching theme of men exploiting and controlling women

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Peter Whelan director. Miriam Allan soprano, Rebecca Leggett mezzo-soprano, Ruairi Bowen tenor, Malachy Frame baritone, Choir of the Age of Enlightenment: Bach: Cantata No.66 `Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen’; Cantata No.6 `Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden’; Bach: Easter Oratorio, BWV.249

The QEH was sold out for this concert – I’ve noticed before that the OAE have a very keen following and they also seem to attract a lot of young people. You wouldn’t normally expect an evening of Bach’s church music to be such a crowd-puller……

The three works were all Easter -related  – the Oratorio, obviously placed, in terms of recitatives, arias and choruses on Easter Sunday, and the other two responses to the lectionary reading for Easter Monday in the Lutheran Church, an account of the travellers on the Road to Emmaus.

Replying to the question I’ve asked myself before – why do people listen to these pieces? Whty are they so popular? I guess one reason is that all Bach’s religious pieces are responding to a story which – however little or much people know of the details –  represents the best and worst of humanity, and offers a whole range of emotions people can respond to. Fear, hope, love, joy, anger, anguish – all expressed in great music, and within a story deeply embedded in our culture – are perhaps the reasons for the popularity Bach’s music clearly has for so many.

With 12 hours absence I have to say one piece rather blends into another in my aural memory. There were some lovely arias with solo instruments prominent alongside the singers – oboe, flute (some spectacular playing there) and solo violin; no less than three swirling Baroque trumpets in the Easter Oratorio, which, together with kettle-drums made a splendidly joyful sound. What most stays lodged in my mind was the duet between fear and hope – for tenor and mezzo in BWV 66. almost operatic in form but sung to one of Bach’s dance tunes.

Peter Whelan’s name seems to crop up increasingly – he conducted the highly watchable and listenable -to Bajazet at Covent Garden a couple of years ago and is conducting another Vivaldi opera – L’Olympiade’ – in May there (which I’m going to). He seems to have the virtues and vices of many conductors who focus on authentic performance styles – great vigour and energy (which made Bajazet extremely exciting to watch and listen to), but a tendency to take the music too fast at times, so that some of the arias didn’t really seem to have enough space to breathe and fully reveal the emotions within them (and in the case of the flute-supported aria seemed to interrupt the player’s flow so that breathing pauses sounded too obvious). All the singers and the chorus were impressive but I’d single out particularly Rebecca Leggett, the mezzo, and Ruairi Bowen the tenor as outstanding