Director, Adele Thomas; Set and costume designer, Molly O’Cathain, conductor, Peter Whelan; orchestra: Irish Baroque Orchestra. Cast: –  Bajazet: Gianluca Margheri; Tamerlano: James Laing; Asteria: Niamh O’Sullivan; Andronicus: Eric Jurenas; Irene: Claire Booth; Idaspe: Aoife Miskelly

Director, Adele Thomas; Set and costume designer, Molly O’Cathain, conductor, Peter Whelan; orchestra: Irish Baroque Orchestra. Cast: –  Bajazet: Gianluca Margheri; Tamerlano: James Laing; Asteria: Niamh O’Sullivan; Andronicus: Eric Jurenas; Irene: Claire Booth; Idaspe: Aoife Miskelly

This was a stunning evening of music drama, if ultimately a bit wearing….! Again, it’s quite an interesting question to ask – what would an early 18^th century Italian audience have expected from a performance of this work. I am sure that they would not be that interested in the silly plot, and that their main focus would have been on their favourite singers performing set-piece arias and on their favourite tunes (this is a pasticciato opera, meaning that it strings together arias from different operas that were popular at the time, as well as some original music by Vivaldi). This performance focused on strong singing and spectacularly good playing, all of which hopefully would have been to the taste of the original audience.  The fact that it was being performed in the Linbury Theatre, hollowed out of the depths below the Covent Garden building, meant it all felt very close and personal – a wonderful space to hear singers perform these taxing roles. There’s a nice trailer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_iwm7SSD0Q

I have in the past in this blog grumbled about rushed over-emphatic period instrument performances, but this really needed the bite and snap, the propulsive beat, which the Irish Baroque Orchestra provided. The 11 players offered rasping Baroque strings, whooping Baroque horns, and the deep growls of the strummed theorbo, giving therefore a huge bounce and zest to each aria, with an outstanding rhythmic punch that made the fastish ones among them almost danceable – and indeed the crazy Tamerlano did cavort to some of them! Many of the arias moved with whiplash energy, and had the characteristically Vivaldi flurries of strings we’ve heard from his concertos, with Richard Whelan bouncing up and down, directing the performance from his harpsichord, to add to the energy.

The set – there was only one – was a wooden walled set of boxes, essentially a prison cell but which, with light, could also be a palace and which could turn from grey to gold with lighting combinations. The only props were a large chain and ball attached to the ceiling, for the imprisoned Bajazet at various points, a tray of glasses, and a hypothermic syringe to sedate Tamerlano with from time to time (and eventually kill him!)

Stand out star was James Laing as a psychopathic ruler of the first magnitude, limping and lurching crazily across the stage until sedated or collapsing in a seizure. Goodness knows what he was doing to his counter-tenor voice in the process but the results were thrilling. The other strong performers on stage were the Asteria, Niamh O’Sullivan, the spectacular Irene, Claire Booth, who had the most gob-stoppingly difficult aria of the evening (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSzctuPiNWM where someone else performs this), while Aoife Miskelly had a delightful stage presence as the watchful and faintly disapproving Iaspe, with the every-ready syringe to hand.  As Bajazet, Gianluca Margheri doesn’t have to do much apart from sound noble, and Eric Jurenas made the best he could of the part given to the feeble Andronicus.

For the first hour and a half, I bounced along with the cast, foot-tapping and feeling energised. Ultimately it got too much and I just felt exhausted by this thriller of an opera by the end – but a great evening with some remarkable singing!

Director, Jonathan Kent; Revival Director, Amy Lane; Designer, Paul Brown, conductor Marco Amiliato. Cast – Floria Tosca: Angela Gheorghiu; Mario Cavaradossi: Stefan Pop; Baron Scarpia: Michael Volle; Spoletta: Aled Hall; Cesare Angelotti: Chuma Sijeqa

I last saw this production about 4 years ago. Like Rigoletto, there is only a limited amount a production team can do (with? to?) Tosca – you basically have to ensure the story is told well. In this production, the sets are realistic, heavy and built to last. They are dimly lit, but I suppose that’s OK in a church, a candle lit house and a fort before dawn…There’s not much sense of interventionist directing but all three of the principals knew their way well enough around their roles for this not to be bothering, and were all very credible. Everything on stage seemed very smooth and nothing was out of place.

I haven’t seen Angela Gheorgiou live before, and, given that her ROHCG debut was 30 years ago, I wanted to be sure I had had the chance to see and hear her live before it was too late, putting it delicately. I have to say I was very impressed. While loud top notes can now sound a bit frayed and wobbly, a lot of her soft singing is beautiful, and she has a wonderful way of articulating the text and pointing her words. Vissi d’Arte sounded very good indeed. She also has the passion and fire for the role in how she moves, how she projects the text and how she sings it – she has that indefinable sense of presence on stage that all great singers have. Tosca is a role I would imagine it is possible to go over the top in, but this was a gripping rendition that could also be quite funny at times in the first act, and never crashed over into melodrama. Stefan Pop, a fellow Rumanian, had a great voice but was not terribly gripping as an actor, conveyed little sense of passion, and didn’t do much out of the ordinary as a singer  – but did very well indeed within the confines of an ‘international – standard Cavaradossi’ presentation. Michael Volle I’ve only heard once live before, as Hans Sachs in Bayreuth in 2017. He seems to be extraordinarily hard-working – I see his name everywhere. He was appropriately dominating and threatening as a presence – maybe not much subtlety of approach to musical nuancing but arguably Scarpia isn’t that kind of guy…..

If I was less than overwhelmed by this performance it was because I thought the conductor was a bit over-leisurely with his tempi. I haven’t come across Marco Amiliato before, but he is clearly a very experienced conductor of the Italian repertory, and has been working at ROHCG and the Met for about 20 years. Some of his tempi brought out shades and aspects of the music I hadn’t remembered, but somehow there wasn’t the vibrancy and the tension that you need in Act 2, and the orchestra sometimes sounded a little genteel, surely inappropriate in this eminently vulgar work (and also not loud enough, but that could be the cushioned Covent Garden acoustics)……Ms Gheorgiou seemed to be having lots of problems in moving around in her dresses and shoes, something I hope the costumes department sorts out. The other slight irritant is the silly habit English audiences have got into over the last decade or so in boo-ing the villain in the curtain calls as though it were a pantomime. No great harm I suppose but it must be very disconcerting for a foreign artist if no-one has explained to them what is happening, and…..where does it stop? – are people going to start booing Klingsor?

I’m glad I went but it wasn’t quite the experience it could have been – all 5 performances are completely sold out, so I hope some more electricity is generated during the run

Director, Katie Mitchell; Set designer, Chloe Lamford; Conductor, Harry Bicket. Cast – Theodora: Julia Bullock; Irene: Joyce DiDonato; Didymus: Jakub Józef Orlinski; Septimius: Ed Lyon; Valens: Gyula Orendt; Marcus: Thando Mjandana

It’s interesting that while we place huge emphasis now on what musical performance practice would sound like for Handel, and what authentic instrumental sounds would be appropriate, directors don’t necessarily consider what (in this case) an 18^th century audience coming to Theodora for the first time would bring with it in terms of expectations and assumptions. Would they bring a Gibbon-ish suspicion of the Christians and feel automatically for the Roman position, or would they be conflicted between – probably-taken-for grant-but-nonetheless–real – Christian faith, and their 18^th century approval of classical Roman values and culture? In fact, my reading of the performance history of Handel’s oratorios is that their audience would have been the solid commercial middle classes, so it is likely probably that the piety angle would have predominated. How well then would Katie Mitchell’s production have served that 18^th century English audience? Pretty well, actually, in the sense of a group of Christians being shown as who they were and under clear oppression – there were scenes of a baptism for Didymus, a wedding with a priest for Didymus and Theodora, some signs of the cross – it was thus clear throughout who the Christians in the opera were, and that they were being oppressed.  

It was less clear how the concept of the ‘Roman Embassy’, with the Christians working as domestic staff and an unpleasant male group of Roman diplomats, really fitted with the overall theme of the opera. It would have been much better to show how the Christians were being oppressed by a brutal regime with obviously wider powers than just an ‘Ambassador’. I guess part of the point was to show the male aggression exhibited by suave suited diplomats, the exploitation of the female Christians, and the feminine resistance to it, but I am not sure that the feminist angle totally worked well alongside the Christian persecution aspect. The programme notes referred to the contemporary Richardson novel, Clarissa, and this was obviously part of the production’s thinking – but I am not sure that Christian martyrdom Is quite as meek and submissive as Clarissa’s personality would suggest……This difficult blend of feminism and Christianity was at its most incoherent and glaring at the end of the opera, where, rather than submitting to martyrdom, the Christians rise up and kill their male Embassy oppressors, rescuing Theodora and Didymus. The reviews, and maybe the programme notes, referred to a Christian fundamentalist terrorist group, but this really didn’t come across clearly in what I saw on stage – one reviewer, I remembered after the performance, had mentioned bomb-making going on in the first scene, but this wasn’t at all obvious from what I saw. The other issue for me was what was happening to Irene – while it was clear enough at every stage what was happening to Theodora, Irene’s fate seemed a bit mixed-up. She was arrested at the same time as Theodora but not subjected to the same penalties and she seemed to be carrying on working in the same kitchen – or was she being hidden away from the male Roman Embassy staff by other Christians in the kitchen? Not clear…

However within the frame of the ultimate feminism/Christianity incoherence I thought the production worked well enough. The set was a series of boxed frames, a set of stages within a stage, representing from left to right, a plush brothel, a sleazy pole-dancing bar, the main reception area, a corridor, the kitchens where the Christians worked, and the utility room-cum-store room, with haunches of meat hanging down and whirring spin-driers. The stage boxes moved so that you could see at any one time two or three of them. The sleazy aspect – red plush seats for the pole dancing bat – was extremely well – but not over-done. The disadvantage of the framed boxes is that they put the singers quite far back on the stage, and to some extent must have cramped their acting style – possibly also boxed in their voices to some extent. There was, perhaps inevitably a lot of ‘business’ going on around the long arias, and some very well-conceived slow-motion movement scenes – not least the killing of the male Embassy staff, which was very effective and convincing.  

There were many gorgeous arias, and a very good group of singers to deliver them. Maybe Julia Bullock came across less well than she might otherwise have done because of the boxed structures – her voice didn’t really soar or have the introspective beauty of Joyce DiDonato or Jakub Józef Orlinski, and I thought occasionally the orchestra over-powered her (maybe in Mitchell’s conception that’s part of Theodora’s struggle). The tenor and bass were good too. All had the vocal agility to deal with Handel’s complex vocal writing. The stand-out moment, perhaps inevitably, was the lovely “As with rosy steps the Morn” – one of Handel’s most beautiful arias and sung by Joyce DiDonato with one of those moments only opera delivered at its best can offer – as her voice floated into the theatre in its higher range, that special form of silence took hold of the auditorium and time stopped……. Very near it in intensity was her unaccompanied singing in ‘Lord, to Thee each night and day’, compellingly intimate and soft. Harry Bicket kept things moving with the orchestra without launching into Baroque scrambles

Director – Bartlett Sher; Designer Michael Yeargan; Quinn Kelsey, Rigoletto; Rosa Feola, Gilda; Piotr Beczała, Duke of Mantua; Sparafucile, Andrea Mastroni;  conductor Daniele Rustioni

This is the first cinema screening from the Met or ROHCG I’ve been to since the start of the pandemic. The last one was a Met performance of Handel’s Agrippina in January 2020. It was lovely to be back in the Curzon in Sheffield, gin and tonic in hand, watching the show, and I find these events really quite exciting – they give a very good sense of a live performance and have some excellent interviews and backstage images

‘Rigoletto’ is one of those operas you can’t do much with, in terms of directoral input – it’s fast moving, with 3 vividly-drawn characters, and your main job as a director is to make it exciting and  dramatic, so that it grips you and doesn’t drag. (although Opera North’s recent new production does seem to have done something different and exciting – but I am afraid the thought of 3 Rigolettos in a single season is more than I can bear. On the whole in this live screening the director achieved a degree of engagement, though the cameras went in relentlessly for close ups and there wasn’t a clear sense of how the crowds were being managed in the scenes where they were present. However, for some not very clear reason, the production team decided to frame the work within the context of the Weimar Republic. This really contributed nothing to the evening – for a start, it would have been preposterous in that context to have so many of the aristocratic, military types we saw on stage. Although the designer got to create some nice art deco sets, there was nothing otherwise Weimar-ish about the production beyond ‘flapper’ wigs and clothes, as  well as a few blokes in leather jackets and coats. The director referred to proto-fascism on stage, in an interval interview, but this didn’t really come across in any meaningful way in what I saw. The sets were massive and looked far too large for the human dramas which they over-arched.

I thought Rosa Feola was an excellent Gilda – maybe not in the Oropesa class, (see October review) but with a very effective stage presence and lots of beautiful singing. She was particularly good in the 3 and 4^th act, in seeming credible in both her sense of loss of, and continued love for, the Duke. Piotr Beczała got off to a slightly strained start but thereafter sounded splendid, in full control, if with not always very shaded or nuanced phrasing – but maybe that is OK for someone who is not a very sensitive individual. Beczala was not a particularly convincing actor – other than in conveying a degree of smugness, but, again, maybe that is right for this role…… Quinn Kelsey as Rigoletto was, I thought, excellent – some sympathetically warm singing, and , critically, not overdoing it in terms of his acting. There was a brilliant cameo from Andrea Mastroni who looked the epitome of evil as Sparafucile! Daniele Rustioni conducted vigorously and pushed the drama along with the right degree of briskness

This was the first time I’ve heard the RLPO live in their home base and, indeed, the first time I’ve heard them at all since the 1970s, when they were, I remember, conducted by Charles Groves. They sounded a bit ropey then – now they sound like an extremely fine band. Their hall lacks reverberation, but is better than the Sheffield equivalent, and has good sightlines, though maybe the acoustic did make the heavy brass sounds of this work a bit unrelenting.

Domingo Hindoyan, their new music director, conducted a fast-ish performance of the symphony – it came in just slightly under 77 minutes, as opposed to, say, Reggie Goodall’s 90 – though the Furtwangler recording from Vienna in 1944 is much the same timing as Hindoyan’s. The RLPO sounded, as I said, in great shape under their new boss, , with a  magnificent string sound and stylish brass. Maybe the woodwind were a bit submerged, but that might be Bruckner, or indeed the version used – this was the Haas edition which includes some music, particularly in the slow movement and finale, that the Nowak one leaves out

The best crafted movement, I felt, was the 3rd (slow) one, where the orchestra played beautifully. It had a magnificently managed climax, with the final roar of exaltation sounding wonderful – the elderly lady next to me muttered audibly to her husband “blooody ‘ell’ as the 2nd cymbal crash reverberated round the hall (they had earlier been grumbling about the noise of the brass in the scherzo….). For me the performance was at its best from the trio of the scherzo to the end of the slow movement. The trio’s sudden move to exaltation was particularly well done.

The first movement didn’t quite offer the sense of menace and terror there can be in this music. I found the pace too brisk – imposing moments of drama like the crashing of the brass and timpani near the end of the first movement didn’t have their full impact. The quiet end of the first movement sounded oddly matter of fact. The Finale was too brisk at the start – the timpanist couldn’t articulate his thwacked repeated double notes clearly or forcibly enough before the repetition of the opening theme, but breathing and spacing got better as things went on, and the ending was well handled. Throughout, occasionally phrasing seemed clipped and insufficiently spacious, but the characteristic ticking sound in Bruckner which seems to be signifying world weariness came across well just before the coda in the finale.

Stephen Johnson had provided a very interesting video talk on the RLPOs website which stressed Bruckner’s precarious mental health. I had never really thought about this clearly before but it is very obvious in this work – the sudden plunges into darkness and the music occasionally sounding as though it had lost its way…..

Altogether, I thought that Domingo Hindoyan had the Wagner aspect of Bruckner well displayed, but both the Schubert and God aspects were inhibited by his speeds – there was insufficient time for lyricism and contemplation

The house was by no means full  but the performance was very well received

Finally, at something of a tangent, a photograph I have never seen before, of a very frail Bruckner, just before he died, is attached. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Mr Hindoyan and the RLPO performed the newly completed version of Bruckner’s 9th symphony which Simon Rattle recorded? Just saying……

Mahler Symphony No.3: Sir Mark Elder, conductor | Alice Coote, mezzo-soprano | Sopranos and altos of the Hallé Choir | Hallé Children’s Choir

This was a hugely enjoyable performance, all the more special because the massed ranks of orchestral players and choristers present on stage, and the sold-out Bridgewater Hall audience packed in to hear them, were all there despite the pandemic being very far from over. The chances of some key players being knocked out by Covid must have been very high – but anyway they all managed to avoid the plague and played/sung magnificently! Hopefully I also avoided getting infected, resplendent in my FFP2 mask.

Mahler 3 is a work I’ve known for at least 55 years. I know it very well indeed – so much so that I try never hear it from a CD or radio performance, but just wait until the next live performance! Perhaps I almost know it too well – I found myself thinking during the breaks in the movements about the trajectory of the work, and realising I had taken Mahler’s programme notes (‘what the flowers tell me’ etc) for what they said, and a bit for granted, without really thinking and feeling much further about the symphony. It seems to me the movement of the work is from the darkness and melancholy of some of the first movement (which re-emerges at the one of the key climaxes of the last movement), through the ‘optimistic’, but maybe superficial, pastoral of the first three movements (and in the 1^st, the jaunty military band music) to what seems to me to be the turning point of the work, the great roar of brass – calling across fathomless depths  – opening up after the last of the post horn music in the third movement , and then to different forms of profundity in the last three movements, all focusing on Nietzsche’s ‘tiefe, tiefe ewigkeit’ .

I felt this was a very strong performance. One of the great things about a live performance of any Mahler symphony is that there is always so much going on in the orchestra that each time you hear something new, some instrumental undercurrent you’d not picked up on before. Sir Mark Elder’s decision to split the violins, as he normally does, gave even more clarity to some of the inner parts. The concert didn’t finish till just before 6 (ie maybe an hour and 50 mins), so this wasn’t a particularly swift performance, but certainly didn’t seem bogged down at any point. Plus points – truly world-class horn, trombone and trumpet playing; a beautiful post-horn performer (seemingly uncredited in the programme), a wonderful rendition of the Nietzsche verses by Alice Coote; the last movement was extremely well-crafted building up to a range of powerful climaxes that wave by wave increased in intensity (Alice Coote seemed to be in tears at the end, overcome by the power of the music – I think many people in the audience shared that feeling. This was the movement where the performance moved from very good to great). Things that might have gone better – I felt the speed of the 5^th movement was a bit too slow, which had the advantage of the sopranos and mezzos being able to articulate their words very quickly but I think the music lost some of the vivacity it should have. I also felt that the first movement’s jaunty military band music sounded a bit too well-mannered and could have done with more vulgarity and rhythmic punch – again, been a bit faster, maybe. But these are minor cavils – it was wonderful to be hearing a huge Mahler symphony with a packed out audience.

Onwards to Bruckner 8 in Liverpool on Thursday……………….the greatest symphony, post-Beethoven, of the 19th century.

PS The 5th movement featured genuine church bells (borrowed from the Liverpool Philharmonic), apparently the first time these have been used in this work in the UK. Personally I thought they were a bit overwhelming….but definitely a splendid sound!

Bach, Cello suites 1 & 3; Ensemble 360 cellist, Gemma Rosefield,

Gemma Rosefield, in a brief interaction with the audience between the two suites, told us that she was playing on a cello made in Naples in 1704 by Alessandro Gagliano, and was formerly owned and played by George IV. Thus, it had been made before the Cello Suites were composed, and think of how many people have played that cello over its 320 year history! Somehow that summed up the impact the cello suites have on me when I listen to them (though I have never heard them live before, which is always going to be a more intense and concentrated experience) – the sense of time stopping, being outside time, their calm peaceful melancholy being for all time. This came both from the idea of this cello before is having been playing before the music it was playing was created, and the world the suites take you into. The music somehow is timeless, and different from other Bach – less Baroque in sound, somehow more contemporary, and this was emphasised by the contemporary piece (something by David Matthews composed for Ms Rosefield) which almost could have been a 7^th movement of the 3^rd suite. I found it helpful too that Ms Rosefield told us before the concert that the heart of each suite was the Sarabande, always the 4^th movement, not something I had really thought about, and which enabled me to ‘place’ the other movements.

So – a lovely evening and, as far as I could tell, extremely well played

BACH Prelude & Fugue in C from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I; SCHUMANN Ten Impromptus on a Theme by Clara Wieck Op.5; PROKOFIEV Visions fugitives; BYRD Fantasia in A minor; LIGETI Etude No.10 Der Zauberlehrling; SCHUBERT Fantasie in C Wanderer Fantasy. Mishka Rushdie Momen (piano)

This was my first live concert in nearly 6 weeks. I’d decided to cancel some concerts and operas in London because of the surge in Omicron cases before and after Christmas. Three of the shows I missed I’m not that bothered about having not gone to them – the ROHCG dress rehearsal for Nabucco, the Marriage of Figaro there and the LSO /Karabits Mahlder 4, but one – the Barbican Lise Davidsen recital – got very good reviews and I was sorry not to hear it. I’m also missing out on the dress-rehearsal of ENO’s La Boheme and one of the Jerusalem Quartet’s Beethoven quartet cycle concerts at the Wigmore Hall. But other than these it’s back to live performances….!!

This was a clever bit of programming (a common theme being ‘Fantasies’ of one kind or another – and Ms Mome is clearly an up-and-coming artist, now in her late 20’s, and with a lot of international as well as UK experience. I am not a pianist, and some of what I say below should be read with a fair degree of caution. But – as I hear it, and for what it’s worth – she offers very precise, clear and accurate playing, with maybe a smallish tone – not much thundering here  – and presented in particular a quite phenomenal clarity in the upper areas of the keyboard. The most enjoyable playing was the Wanderer Fantasy which is a great enough piece to accommodate a whole range of stylistic approaches, and I thought this went very well – some beautiful playing in the more lyrical song-based parts, and tremendous logic and attack in the final movement. I also thought the Prokofiev Visions Fugitive went well – this was a piece I’d never heard before, which offered 20 short vignettes, many of them sounding like ghostly, splendid, Tsarist balls, the noble dancers gradually fading into nothingness. At times it sounded like Debussy, even though I believe it was written before Prokofiev settled in Paris. I loved too the clarity and freshness of the Ligeti piece, and the quirky Byrd, its different episodes nicely differentiated.

The Schumann, I’m afraid, had me dropping off to sleep (Schumann often does that to me) and I can’t comment. The one piece I thought didn’t go too well was the Mozart. I can’t quite put my finger on the issue – it was something about phrasing and the gaps between the notes. There seemed to be a dull silence between notes rather than the anticipation of the next one and aftertaste of the last. Does that mean she should have used more pedal – I’m not sure, but it seemed somehow to skate over the surface a little and somehow the subtlety wasn’t there – a bit one-dmensional.

Bach Flute Sonata in E flat BWV1031 – II. Siciliano (arranged by Wilhelm Kempff)[ Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin BWV1004 (arranged by Ferruccio Busoni); Prokofiev, Piano Sonata No. 2 in D minor Op. 14; Liszt, Schwanengesang S560 – Ständchen ‘Leise flehen meine Lieder’; Rhapsodie espagnole S254

George Harliono is clearly a very able young artist – this was one of the lunchtime concerts organised by the Young Classical Artists Trust. The Bach Chaconne, in the piano arrangement by Busoni, in particular was very absorbing = grand, but also carefully shaded, with a good dynamic range and with different colours in the piano sound. The Prokofiev was played with accuracy and rhythmic pointedness = in fact it was a likeable, much less spikey piece than I had assumed, and with more of the melodic profile you’d expect from the mature Prokofiev. The Liszt pieces were less interesting, as far as I was concerned – though of course the Schubert song from Schwanengesang is beautiful, but the Spanish Rhapsody seemed fairly empty note-spinning and display (but Mr Harliono did it very well). In many ways the best was last – a beautiful encore of one of the Brahms late intermezzi – 0p 118 no 2.

Anthony Negus, conductor; Matthew Rose (Wotan), Rachel Nicholls (Brünnhilde), Nicky Spence (Siegmund), Emma Bell (Sieglinde), Brindley Sherratt (Hunding), and Susan Bickley (Fricka). Director Richard Jones; design Stewart Laing

After waiting for a long time to see this production, and having been discouraged by the broadly negative responses in the main-stream press (the most positive I saw was in the New York Times – but I wondered who paid for such a trip over to London to see the production!), I was staggered by how good this was – musically and dramatically. Yes, there were a few niggles – the lights didn’t really make the sword shine in the tree in the first act, the pantomime horses owned by the Valkyries got a bit of getting used to (but no sillier than the horse skulls held by Valkyries in the last ROH production), the storm imp in the Ride of the Valkyries was a bit pointless and it was difficult to see why the design team couldn’t have come up with some basic red flames video at the end, the originally conceived fire having been outlawed by Westminster City Council because of horse hair embedded in the stage which caught fire in a rehearsal…….). But the positives were overwhelming – detailed, carefully crafted acting and movement, with the characters on stage really listening and responding to each other, sets that by and large followed Wagner’s stage directions faithfully (though I am glad we didn’t have any rams for Fricka), and some stunning singing. The only real disappointment was John Deathridge’s translation – I can’t see why this was deemed to be more serviceable than the Andrew Porter version of 50 years ago.

Going into more detail, the general atmosphere of the production was dark – no warm colours (maybe that was the reason to block any replacement flame video) and the sparsity of sets on the huge Coliseum stage intensified somehow the focus on the individuals in the drama. Hunding – with the clever introduction of his men, there in the text but not seen before by me in a production – was menacingly and brilliantly sung by Brindley Sherratt. Maybe some of the violence to Siglinde was a bit overdone, but the general menace and brutality was well-portrayed. Emma Bell as Sieglinde was, to me, a revelation – I hadn’t thought that much of her, cast against Stuart Skelton at ROHCG a few years ago, but here in the more sympathetic environment of the Coliseum her voice sounded wonderful – powerful, and beautifully shaded. OK, as the papers went on and on about, her diction wasn’t brilliant, but she was probably the best and most charismatic actor of the evening, conveying clearly the anguish and self-doubt of the role. A marvellous performance. Nicky Spence’s Siegmund was well done, and powerfully sung, but not maybe as well-acted as some of the other roles – he was the only person who at times reverted to the more normal semaphore style of opera performance.

I thought Matthew Rose’s Wotan was tremendous. Rarely can that role have been sung so beautifully, and his diction was impeccable. He also conveyed much of the torment and frustration of the role. I have never been so gripped by Wotan’s Narration in Act 2. Again, the first-night reviewers seemed to be carping at his performance in many ways, particularly in Act 3, but I thought he sustained a long evening incredibly well, with really, really moving singing in the Farewell. Fricka’s of course is relatively a small role, but Susan Bickley made the best of it, and projected a sharply conceived character. Rachel Nicholls was also very convincing as Brunnhilde, making the transition effectively from a teenager to a mature woman in the course of the opera. She pinged out the high top notes with clarity, her diction was good and her voice carried well (I was puzzled by one critic calling it a ‘small voice’)

This was the one performance conducted by Anthony Negus, who had coached the singers. As I am sure they had also for Martyn Brabbins, the orchestra excelled themselves, particularly in Act 3. The pacing of the work seemed just right in Acts 2 and 3 – perhaps slightly on the slow/sluggish side for Act 1, but the great moments of that act were powerfully done nevertheless.

In short, this was a terrific evening. Some of the background to the Scandinavian style of the sets might have been clearer if we had been able to see Rhinegold before Valkyrie, but, as I understand it, the pandemic prevented this. To be frank, yes, of course, old lags like me can refer back to the glory days of the 70’s and the Goodall Ring, and we have the recordings and those are irreplaceable – and few have sung these roles like Bailey, Hunter and Remedios – but in staging and in the overall quality of the singing and acting of many of the roles of the Valkyrie, this was a superior production (there, I’ve said it, may hot coals rain down upon me). And how transformative it is to hear it sung in English

I do hope that the ENO is not put off by the negative press from the first night. It is absolutely essential we see Richard Jones’ vision for the rest of the Ring