Britten: Curlew River – A Parable for Church Performance, Op.71. Ian Bostridge tenor, Willard White baritone, Duncan Rook bass-baritone; Marcus Farnsworth., baritone Chorus of Britten Pears Young Artists, Deborah Warner director; Audrey Hyland music director; Christof Heter, designer.

This was the first of two performances to mark the 60th birthday of the work, first seen in Orford Church in 1964. The wide space of Blythburgh church seemed equally suited to the work, and, in addition to its internal medieval features, particularly the carved angels, the fact that it is situated near a river and fens helps with the placing of the work in this church. The BBC was present at this performance to film it, hoping to show the work on TV in the Autumn.

The whole space of the church was used – singing actors entered by the south door and processed up the central aisle of the nave towards the chancel. There was a raised platform at the front of the chancel, facing towards the audience, but the aisle and indeed the western end of the nave near the font was also a performing area. In addition, a gradually ascending series of three rough planks started at the west end of the aisle, moving upwards to the chancel platform, and people acted and sang on this too.  There was a sail that could be raised, hitched to the rood screen,  a clever device.The music ensemble were over to the right as you looked at the stage, and from where I was sitting  you couldn’t see them

I realised I hadn’t been thinking straight about how this work would be performed at one of the Aldeburgh Festival churches – I had assumed a darkened space and spotlights, but of course that is impossible to achieve in the middle of a sunny summer evening in a light and airy church, and so the performance was mainly lit by natural light, possibly aided by some artificial spots streaming through the west windows through a large BBC gantry positioned outside. There was some additional lighting for the chancel platform at points, particularly as the sun began to set.

Again, I had no programme notes with me, and though I’m aware of the connections with Noh plays, it seemed to ne the connections were not that clearcut. The use of male performers only, I assume is part of that, and of course there is a Japanese tinge to some of the music. But there are no masks, and no stylised movements – though I suppose the positioning of the musicians, and the slow movement of the story might also be aspects relevant to Noh. It is more the English medieval mystery plays that to me formed the background to the work – ordinary people coming on stage at the beginning in ordinary modern clothes singing plainchant and gradually changing to a different ‘workers’ smock, and setting up the stage, surrounded by the audience.  The ferryman and traveller also looked vaguely medieval in their costume as did the Abbot and the monks/workers. The mad woman was more singularly dressed, coming on stage with a turned-inside-out umbrella and a yellow ball gown plus a man’s jacket, and clutching a thick quilt.

Deborah Warner has created a production that was entirely natural in movement, and there were no false steps. The coup de theatre of the clanging of the bell at the climax and the singing of the dead boy was beautifully realised and very moving. There was no imposition of a directorial vision at odds with the work. The only slightly controversial aspect of her direction was having one of the three boys involved in the singing walk down the central aisle after his voice has been heard because of the Mad Woman’s prayer, but that seemed to me perfectly legitimate .

I had been very much looking forward to going to see this, and I was not disappointed – this was a wonderful performance. There were, to my mind, several reasons for this:

• it’s more difficult to listen to this work just through an audio recording. Seeing as well as hearing it makes it come alive in an entirely new way. I heard music I had never really heard before – eg the swish of the oars, the bird song – because it is paralleled by actors’ movements and what’s happening on stage. I realised, listening to the Mad Woman, that the characteristic upward ending to her musical phrases is meant to echo the curlew’s song. Curiously diction on the whole was better in this live performance than on the Decca original recording.
• it was utterly riveting to be so close to great singers like Ian Bostridge and Willard White and see their consummate acting and see and hear their artistry – at times I was less than 5 feet away from them
• Ian Bostridge’s performance was quite remarkable. Obviously Pears has a unique status in this role, but it is difficult to imagine anyone else doing this better than Bostridge – he produced some beautiful singing that was very moving, and he acted with utter conviction, in a part which I can imagine others might exaggerate too much in. He did indeed throughout look haunted, with a distant look in his eyes.
• Hearing the work in this location was also important – you could feel, and almost see, the presence of the river and the fens beyond the stained glass windows
• Listening with concentration as you do in a live performance means you become immersed in the work’s sound world. It is utterly different to pieces written around the same time such as Midsummer Night’s Dream and the War Requiem, and yet you realise what a compelling and beautiful work it is. It makes me want to hear the other Church Parables, which I don’t know at all.

Unsuk Chin: Cello Concerto; Bruckner: Symphony No.7 in E . BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra: Alban Gerhardt cello, Ryan Wigglesworth conductor

I have never been to the Aldeburgh Festival before – ever – and the last time I went to Snape Maltings was late October 1990 for a chamber music concert. I don’t wear this as a badge of honour  – rather, Snape is just highly inconvenient to get to by public transport from where I live in the Peak District, and relatively expensive, in terms of pubs and B&B’s. I do have fond memories of the Maltings in the 1970’s – Reggie Goodall conducting Act 1 of Walkure with the ENO in 1974, and Peter Pears singing the Evangelist in the St Matthew Passion in 1975. Probably I might have gone on not going to the festival, but this year I saw a must-see item – Curlew River, performed as it was at its premiere in an Aldeburgh Festival Church. In order to make sense of an 8-hour trek across England, I also decided to go to this concert.

Bruckner 7 I have heard many fine performances over the years of – conducted by Jochum, Solti, Goodall, Kempe, Haitink and more recently Rattle come to mind. I did also almost hear Klemperer conduct it – but he fell ill (and subsequently died- a great might-have-been). In the normal run of things, I would probably have given this concert a miss, but decided to make it a package with Curlew River.

 The Unsuk Chin piece I approached without a programme note, so I was a bit unclear on its structure, though I think it was in four movements. I thought at first it might be a relatively dignified conversation between cello and orchestra, with a mournful, thoughtful contribution from the cello in the first movement. But the orchestral comments become increasingly violent – short stabbing surges by the 4th movement and in response to this the cello bristled with angry splashy runs. So more of a battle than a dialogue. There were some amazing orchestral sounds – wonderful combinations of bells and woodwind, and whizzing firework sounds! Such was the bristling nature of Gerhardt’s playing in the final movement that he broke a string, and had to grab an orchestral player’s cello to finish the work. All in all I found this heavy-going on a first listen, but would welcome an opportunity to hear it again.

Listening to Bruckner 7 in the Maltings is a curious experience. It is a building constructed for smaller forces and though a warm acoustic it is not particularly resonant, and it’s therefore not an ideal place for a spacious approach to Bruckner – the silences seem a little dead, and the climaxes can sound coarse. Whether because of the conductor’s approach or the acoustics (but certainly the splitting of the violins helped), one of the most enjoyable aspects of this performance was listening to the inner voices of the score, and the sometimes-extraordinary harmonies the woodwind and strings produce. This was a performance that by timing was brisk – certainly less than the advertised and standard 70 mins – but never seemed rushed. It was tightly controlled, but also with time for lyrical grace. Wigglesworth is clearly of the school that believes in speeding up rather than slowing down for Bruckner climaxes and so the big one in the slow movement was certainly exciting but not overwhelming – and, sadly, without a cymbal crash. On the other hand, the postlude to the slow movement, the scherzo and the finale were all extremely well done. Throughout there was some lithe sweet string playing and some excellent horns/Wagner tubas, and also occasions of extreme clarity – I’m not sure I’ve ever heard the final bars of the finale so clearly laid out. Maybe at the end of the day not one for the ages, but this was a very enjoyable performance.

The Aldeburgh audience was slightly curious – there were people who, I suppose, like me, go to lots of concerts like this, but there were also a number of people (maybe local to Ipswich and surrounding Suffolk towns) who clearly were hearing this work for the first time, and who sounded (in the snatches of conversation I heard afterwards) a bit non-plussed by the length of the work and the noise!!

Director, David Mcvicar; Set Designer, Robert Jones; Costume Designer, Jenny Tiramani; Lighting Designer, Adam Silverman.  Andrea Chénier, Jonas Kaufmann; Maddalena Di Coigny, Sondra Radvanovsky; Carlo Gérard, Amartuvshin Enkhbat; Bersi, Katia Ledoux; The Incredibile, Alexander Kravets; Roucher, Ashley Riches; Contessa Di Coigny, Rosalind Plowright; Pietro Fléville, William Dazeley; The Abbé, Aled Hall

Since my posting about seeing Salome in Paris, general pressures on other parts of my life, particularly the General Election, and also an unexpected family visit, have meant that several concerts I had planned to go to I couldn’t make – Mark Elder’s last concert in Manchester as Music Director of the Halle, a recital by Angela Hewitt on a fortepiano, and a performance of Shostakovich and Weinberg string quartets by the Quatuor Danel. Hopefully I’ll catch up with the Mahler 5 at the Proms.

Andrea Chenier is another opera which I have not heard a note of before and doubt if I will ever again. I gather from Wikipedia that it was premiered in 1896 and so contemporary with the earlier Puccini operas. Nicholas Kenyon in The Telegraph described it in his review of this set of performances as “ a feeble, creaky opera based on events around the French Revolution, with little to recommend it except opportunities for top singers to shine at top volume.”. So there…………….

I arrived at the cinema to find that in a screen room of 100 seats, I was the only person there. My sole interaction of the evening was with a double gin and tonic, and the girl who sold it to me. This did not set me in a good frame of mind for the evening…….it led me to reflect generally on the decline of audiences and funding for classical music and the collapse of that impulse so prominent in the post WW2 era to bring “high culture” to as many people as possible.  But then of course I wondered about the extent to which Andrea Chenier could be regarded as “high culture” anyway……I wonder what it’s equivalent would be today? I guess a kind of serious musical, but few would be as heart-on -sleeve as Italian verismo.

The work is about 2 hours 15 minutes long and in 4 acts. David MacVicar’s production unsurprisingly was utterly realistic in conception – specialist expertise had been hired to ensure that every detail seen on the stage – furniture, costumes, room design and props – was historically accurate. Not only the aristocratic house in Act 1 but also the various revolutionary interiors in the other acts were highly convincing.  I did wonder if there was any other way you could stage this work. Had the French Revolution been anything more than a frame to hang a very traditional opera story on – soprano and tenor get together, a baritone gets in the way, soprano and tenor die together – there could be some variant staging scenarios, but, as it is, being realistic is perhaps the only way that makes sense of it.

Dramatically it is hard not to agree with Nicholas Kenyon – there’s not much about the work that’s beyond a display vehicle for star singers. The French Revolutionary elements are, as I have intimated, merely a backdrop. It’s interesting that Illica wrote the libretto for Chenier and then Tosca a few years later. There are things in common – Gerard is Scarpia, tenor and soprano get killed at the end. But Tosca, however you view it, is more engaging than Chenier – that’s partly because the characters are more clearly drawn in Tosca and partly because Puccini’s music is just so much better. In fact though much of Giordano’s music sounds sub-Puccini, there are some passages that are quite different – some decidedly Tristan-esque passages in Act 4, for instance. It is strange though how unmemorable most of the music is – I had a higher opinion of Fedora in that respect – with very little striking melodic content at a first listen. Having said that, while Acts 1 and 2 had me squirming in my seat for anyone coming to an opera for the first time, Acts 3 and 4 have more coherence and they do grip you – the orchestral explosions as Chenier and Maddalena go to their deaths are thrilling. But even then a glance at this Youtube extract from a Munich performance, again with Kaufmann but with Harteros as Maddalena demonstrates a whole dimension of visceral impact which is simply missing from the ROHCG performance – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2Q4-_0ufaA

Almost everything seems to rest in this work on the relationship between Chenier and Maddalena and the chemistry in this performance just wasn’t right. Kaufmann is Kaufmann, looking much the same as he has for the last 15 years, and thoroughly credible in the role. But Sondra Radvanovsky, in the cruel close-up of film, is just NOT a teenage girl and looks faintly absurd – I am sure she would have come over better at a distance live in the theatre. But these two hardly looked at each other and both seemed unengaged.

In terms of singing and acting, the undoubted star of the performance was Amartuvshin Enkhbat as Gerard, who has a glorious voice and knows how to keep still and use his considerable presence sparingly. He was the best performer of the evening. It was wonderful too to hear Rosalind Plowright, in fantastic voice and acting with every ounce of her being, aged 75 – plus another veteran, Elena Zilio, as Madelon: equally impressive. Kaufmann was in good voice – only a bit of wavering on the ascent to top notes at time, but some lovely quiet singing with his glorious baritonal tenor. All his big arias came over well. Radvanovsky some critics were a bit sniffy about but I found her in good voice though she did less with it than Kaufmann does. The other person who was a stand-out was Ashley Riches as Roucher – I have only ever seen him in concert/oratorio-type roles, but he was very impressive here, with his deep rich bass and alert stage presence.

Of course, in many ways the hero of the evening was Pappano, and certainly the orchestra sounded glorious. What a pity I can’ t quite share his enthusiasm for this work

Mark Wigglesworth. Conductor; Lydia Steier, Director; Momme Hinrichs, Set design and video; Andy Besuch, Costume design; Olaf Freese, Lighting design. Lise Davidsen, Salome; Johan Reuter, Jochanaan; Gerhard Siegel, Herodes; Ekaterina Gubanova, Herodias; Pavol Breslik, Narraboth

I have never been to an opera in Paris before, and don’t have a clear idea of how the set-up of ‘The Paris Opera’ works. The Bastille building is new, massive and prominent in the life of the city – its steep steps outside seem to be a major hanging out space for Parisians, The auditorium is large, but the acoustics from where I was sitting were good (in the back of the stalls – however I did wonder how a Mozart opera would feel and sound here. Maybe they do them somewhere else). After an afternoon spent at the Pere Lachaise cemetery, saying hello to Oscar (appropriately given that his play is the basis for Salome), I did wonder how full the auditorium would be as I entered this large building. Absolutely packed is the answer!  Clearly Parisians saw this as a major event, and in addition around me I could hear English, Australian, US, Dutch and German voices – people from all over the place coming to hear Ms Davidsen in this new role – and the cast as you can see doesn’t only offer star quality in Lise Davidsen – Johann Reuter I saw singing Sachs in Berlin in November and Edita Guberova is singing Venus and Kundry this year in Bayreuth. Gerhard Siegel, too, is distinguished – a Bayreuth Mime but also with heldentenor roles in his repertoire. One newspaper article likened Lise Davidsen’s singing Salome in Paris to Taylor Swift singing in a Parisian stadium nearby in terns of both being mega-events!

I may have heard Salome at ROHCG with Grace Bumbry or Hildegard Behrens in the title role and Solti/Mehta and others conducting, in the 70’s. If so I have no memory of the performances. The Salome I remember from my youth is the ENO one, with Josephine Barstow and Mackerras, which I chiefly remember for Barstow’s acting. Many years then followed when I never saw a performance – until ?2018 when I saw a disastrous production at ENO (the one with the bloody headless pink pony – say no more) which I don’t want to recall, and now this…….. 

I thought this was a marvellous performance, dramatically as well as musically. The set was of a large stone-like wall with an upper room above it where some sort of orgiastic event is happening. Part of the wall moves away just before Salome’s dance and in its place there’s a series of steps down which Herod’s courtiers tumble to watch the fun. Costumes are basically fantastical with a mad Afro wig and short skirt for Herodias. Narraboth and other guards wear black special forces gear and have automatic weapons – and Narraboth and Herod both die by pistol. Dead bodies in body bags regularly appear hauled down the steps from the upper room steps and are carried off by 3 persons in Hazmat gear. Occasionally a skimpily clothed young woman is dragged up to the upper room. All in all an oppressive utterly amoral culture is being portrayed.  Salome in the earlier part of the opera is the fairly conventional difficult teenager. Her encounter with Jokanaan takes place with him in a cage that is lifted from the cistern. After their encounter Salome writhes on the ground in a fairly obviously sexual way. The point at which this production became very interesting was the Dance of the Seven Veils. I had been wondering how this would be done – Lise Davidsen is a fairly statuesque figure whom it would be difficult to envisage racing round the stage shedding veils. It may of course by now be a standard way of handling this sequence, but I found the approach in this production very convincing – essentially the Dance is turned into a slow motion sexual assault by Herod on Salome, slowly removing her clothing at first (pocketing her knickers) and as the music grows faster and louder the rest of the court join in, performing a choreographed orgasm – one critic suggests she ravishes Herod but I’m not sure that’s how it felt for me. It’s not clear what’s happening to Salome, but she emerges at the end with her dress blood-stained. The other interesting aspect of the production is the last 5 minutes or so: a second Salome is on the ground kissing the head and writhing; the ‘real’ Salome suddenly emerges from the ground in the cage with Jokanaan, in loving embrace. I am not quite sure what the director is intending to ‘say’ here, but it gives far more weight to what Salome is singing and is a far better ‘objective correlative’ to what is happening on stage than the normal way (albeit the ‘normal’ way is what’s outlined in the stage directions. To me the way this is handled (a) makes Salome more of a victim of a terrible culture and less a product of it; (b) gives Salome a stature she doesn’t have when she’s simply rolling around the stage with a bloody head. I’d not come across the director before – she’s an American who’s worked mainly in Germany, initially with the Komische Oper.

Lise Davidsen was quite remarkable as Salome. She has a natural stage presence, which she used very effectively as the grand but demanding princess. Her singing was extraordinary – sailing over the orchestra in the climatic moments, with also many beautifully and softly sung phrases. I really don’t think I’ve ever heard it better sung, not even by Nilsson. Johann Reuter sounded fuller and warmer than I remember from Berlin – a nuanced and utterly appropriate rendering. Edita Gubanova has a powerful voice and projected well into the auditorium, even in the loudest passages. Gerhard Siegel didn’t overdo it and absolutely came across as the slimy unpleasant individual Herod is, with a strong bright tone to his voice.

Mark Wigglesworth, now going to the Bournemouth Symphony as chief conductor, was an excellent conductor of this work – not a Solti reading, but grand, loud and frenetic where it needed to be and while maybe a bit on the slow side never lost focus. He had an excellent orchestra too

I would be very surprised if this did not feature as one of my top ten performances of the year….The audience went bonkers at the end……

Very generously, Paris Opera have put these trailer videos up on YouTube. They do give a very good flavour of the excellence of singing and acting

[EXTRAIT] SALOME by Richard Strauss (Lise Davidsen – “Dein lieb war eine Elfenbeinsanle”) (youtube.com)

[EXTRAIT] SALOME by Richard Strauss (Lise Davidsen, Johann Reuter – “Wer ist dies weib”) – YouTube

Note the guys in the HazMat suits in the second video, resting from picking up the dead bodies in Herod’s court

[EXTRAIT] SALOMÉ by Richard Strauss (youtube.com)

[EXTRAIT] SALOME by Richard Strauss (Lise Davidsen – “Es ist kein laut zu vernehmen”) – YouTube

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………..