Royal Opera House  13 September 2016

This version of Rossini’s 200 year old comedy is (originally directed by Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier, now revived by Thomas Guthrie) is fresh and crisp. There’s a lot of bright colour both in costume and lighting with much of the action set in a candy striped inner stage box to represent Rosina’s “prison” in Dr Bartolo’s house. Of course windows and doors open within it as characters enter often clandestinely – this is comic opera after all. There are also some imaginative ideas such as raising the inner box of the set several feet above stage level and rocking it with the entire cast on board to suggest confusion although I couldn’t help wondering what such a gimmick/coup de theatre (depending on your point of view) added to production costs.

The chorus of guards (reminiscent of the policemen in The Pirates of Penzance) exposed upstage is fun too, especially when they dance with their truncheons. And the translation of the Italian libretto for the surtitles by Kenneth Chalmers is good value. “The cheese has landed on the macaroni” declares Figaro gleefully at one point.

Il barbiere di Siviglia dates from 1816 when Rossini was only 24 and weaving charismatic musical magic around intrigue, trickery and witty dialogue. Sung here in Italian, as usual at the Royal Opera House, it employs a full range of appropriate musical vowel sounds – a strand in the sound texture which disappears as soon as you start translating the words.

It’s a familiar and pretty simple story. Count Almaviva (Javier Camarena) is in Seville to court a beautiful girl Rosina (Daniela Mack) who is due to be married to her guardian Doctor Bartolo (Jose Fardilha). Three hours of shenanigans and misunderstandings later, led by the local barber, Figaro (Vito Priante) we arrive at a happy ending of a sort. Those who know Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, based, a generation earlier, on the second play in Beaumarchais’s trilogy will be sceptical. And of course you have to take at face value this world in which  passionate – randy, even – women are imprisoned by buffoonish manipulative men until they are rescued by other rather sexier manipulative men. There’s a lot of it in classical opera.

Camarena is a show-stopper as Almaviva. His sapphire-sharp tenor voice sustains some astonishingly long notes and his dynamic control is top notch.  He’s also an accomplished actor and his music lesson scene with Mack is very funny. A wide register mezzo, some of Mack’s top notes threaten to break glasses while at other moments she plumbs rich claret depths. She too is warmly convincing in character, petulantly throwing darts at the set walls and flouncing about in pent-up frustration in her first real scene, for example. And Vito Priante provides an enjoyable mercurial Figaro for balance. He sings his act one entrance patter number – always tricky because it’s so well known – by coming in from the back and flirting with audience members on his way to the stage which works beautifully. And his comic timing is perfect.

All this is accompanied by the magnificent Orchestra of the Royal Opera House in the pit under youthful-looking Henrik Nanasi. He really brings out the colour and detail in the music. The fortepiano continuo from Christopher Willis is especially fine in its accuracy and responsive sensitivity.

The Royal Opera House claims to be “world class” and of course it is – working here with an outstanding cast of principals from all over the world.  It’s a very enjoyable production which I am happy to recommend enthusiastically although the fly in the ointment – as always at ROH – is that the stalls seat I sat in on press night would have cost over £150.

Susan Elkin

Royal Albert Hall, 30 August 2016

Two works which could be considered spiritual but in very different ways. Bach’s Cantata No82 Ich habe genug has a text many today may find difficult with its insistence on the hope of death in the face of the pains of living in this world. All three arias, beautifully and sensitively sung by Christian Gerhaher, yearn for the moment of escape from life, and the third, Ich freue mich is positively confident of the joys of heaven. It is easy to be swept away by such beauty and indicates the depth of Bach’s faith as he was writing. The small instrumental ensemble from the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester were joined by Bernhard Heinrichs whose mellifluous oboe playing did much to heighten the occasion.

After the interval we heard Bruckner’s 9^th Symphony. The work may be incomplete but there is no sense of that in performance and especially when the playing is as good as it was from these young players. Philipps Jordan brought a delicacy and clarity to the opening sections which made the climaxes even more telling. The passages at full throttle had a fizzing excitement which is rare even for Bruckner. The scherzo had a steely cutting edge to its attack making the silences even more electric. Where the Adagio can sometimes seem introvert and even claustrophobic, here it was optimistic in its warmth and radiant in its climaxes, not the least of which was the final dissonant moments which had an intensity which reached into the twentieth century.

The Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester are always warmly welcomed to the Proms and this year it was most certainly deserved.

 Royal Albert Hall, Sunday 14 August 2016

Haydn’s Symphony No 34 in D minor is so rarely heard this was its first Proms outing. Strange, when one comes to consider the work, as it is a fascinating link between earlier baroque structures and the later romantic movement. It is almost as if the composer poured himself into the first movement then reverted to the more conventional for the rest of the symphony. The third movement has a lovely gentle trio before a rather folksy finale.

One of the reasons for its inclusion was the parallel with Mahler’s 5^th Symphony both in terms of key – D minor – and the movement from angst to sunny optimism. This was certainly true of Sakari Oramo’s approach. There was nothing cynical or nasty about the joy of the final movement which blazed with authority and vigour. The brass section of the BBC Symphony Orchestra had excelled itself throughout and brought the final pages to a thrilling intensity. The Adagietto was given a hushed sensitivity which may have come across better on the wireless for the frequent uncovered coughs were an irritant to an approach which even the RAH can take if the audience is on its side. There used to be a note in the programme about coughing – maybe it needs to return.

Between these two masterpieces we heard a new commission from Charlotte Bray. Entitled Falling in the Fire it was envisaged as a Cello Concerto and Guy Johnston was the soloist last night. I accept it may have come across better on the radio but in the hall the cello was frequently inaudible beneath the battery of brass and percussion. It only really surfaced in the quieter reflective moments where there seemed to be the makings of a distinctive solo voice, only to vanish again as the orchestra returned. If this was intentional it is hardly a concerto; if it was not, then the composer needs to reconsider the internal balance of the work.

London Coliseum, Thursday 11 August 2016

In a world of instant communications and video links we may think we have a good understanding of culture across the planet but there are times when actually encountering the unfamiliar can be a shock. Last night Shanghai Opera House brought Mo Fan’s Thunderstorm for its first performance in the United Kingdom. Written in 2007, it is billed as a modern opera – a term frequently used to warn any potential audience that it will probably be discordant and contain high levels of discomfort and challenge. This is not however the way the word is used by the Chinese company. It simply means this is a contemporary composition but here any idea of modernity ends. Mo Fan is a wide ranging composer with many film scores to his name and his style is relentlessly tuneful. To give a flavour of what we encountered may I suggest an episode of Eastenders set to a score based on Star Wars. If that seems unduly dismissive it will give some understanding of why many in the audience around me found it difficult to control their laughter as the evening progressed. There was a total mismatch between the constant tunefulness of the score and the supposed emotional interaction of the characters.

Based on a play by Cao Yu, the plot revolves around a family overseen by a dictatorial father who has had an illegitimate son who in turn is now in love with a maid who turns out to be his sister, as her mother is still alive. As a plot this has operatic potential but for a western audience it needs a score which supports the emotional content. While the writing is highly lyrical it does not aid the emotional nuances, seeking rather to bombard its listeners with volume rather than subtlety. The only music which really fitted the character was the sailor songs for Chong at the opening of each act. Beautifully sung and well-crafted these stood out and were appreciated by the audience. For much of the rest of the evening there was a wash of emotional mood setting with little sense of direction. It did not help that the composer had added in a chorus who stood at the sides and emoted, or worse still sang off-stage to heighten the tension at key moments – an effect lost by over-use.

The key role of the mother, Fanyi, comes across with the intensity of Klytemnestra but the vocal line of a second rate musical, her histrionics hurled across the foot lights whenever she became excited.

The stage design was conventional and while the projections worked well it was poorly lit for most of the evening, with banks of front-of-house lighting cutting through any hope of sensitivity.

While it was fascinating to encounter this live – and many thanks to those who brought it to us – I doubt if works of this type could ever survive within the current western cultural environment. Where we have moved on, and modern means challenge if nothing else, Shanghai seems stuck in a 1950s time-warp.

Royal Albert Hall, Tuesday 26 July 2016

A very strange programme, bringing together two choral works, a little known piece by Tchaikovsky and the world’s favourite violin concerto. This latter may account for the very full house, many of whom were obviously having difficulty with Anthony Payne’s BBC commission Of Land, Sea and Sky.

The evening opened with Tchaikovsky’s Symphonic Fantasy The Tempest. Written after Romeo & Juliet it is hard to credit that the composer should have reverted to such a pedantic approach to the narrative. Episodes are introduced, given some slight development and then passed over. Only the opening and closing sea sections have any real musical interest and there is much generalised romantic wash in between. The BBC Symphony Orchestra did their best under Sir Andrew Davis but it was very much a case of silk purses and sows’ ears.

Thankfully Anthony Payne’s Of Land, Sea and Sky was both more demanding and more rewarding. He had written his own text for the work which, if uneven, is a workmanlike vehicle for the score which obviously came first. It draws together a number of different images which reflect on the battle of the Somme, all hinging on Arthur Streeton’s enigmatic painting of the Somme Valley. This sense of illusion, of things half seen and half understood is very well captured in the score itself with fleeting images of horses, storms and eventually the obliteration of everything by the sheer force of nature – whether released by man himself or by the planet in answer.

The spoken passages are not as effective as the choral settings where he deliberately keeps the textures light, moving frequently between male and female voices, without complex harmony.

The orchestral score has reflections of Britten in the earlier passages but the underlying influence here seems to be Alban Berg at his most romantic. It is a work that will certainly be worth re-hearing and it is good it will be available for the next 30 days via the internet.

Ray Chen was the soloist in Bruch’s First Violin Concerto, bringing an easy charm to its familiar pages. Given the enthusiasm of the reception it was inevitable that he would provide an encore which gave him a chance to demonstrate his technique in Paganini’s Caprice Op21. The concert ended with Vaughan Williams’ Toward the Unknown Region. The young composer studied with Bruch in Berlin but developed a style very different from the German Romantic. Toward the Unknown Region was his first major choral work and its spiritual depth in the setting of words by Walt Whitman was to set a pattern for much that was to come. It was, for me, the highlight of the evening, beautifully crafted by both singers and conductor.

Royal Albert Hall, Saturday 23 July 2016

Wagner and Tippett may not seem an obvious combination but, in the event, certainly made sense. Chunks of Wagner are equally rare these days, where we have got used to whole evenings given over to complete works. There is however some mileage in whole scenes, as this was, giving us the final half of the third act of Die Walkure. I did wonder if we were going to get the whole of the opening to the act as we launched into the Ride of the Valkyries though the subtle seque into the final scene was successfully accomplished without any obvious change of gear.

Tamara Wilson had impressed last season at ENO and proved her worth here as Brunnhilde. The voice is large when it really needs to be but she showed great sensitivity to the text and the growing relationship with Wotan in the final minutes. James Creswell is a familiar Wotan, his often gravelly tones mellowing as he gives in to his daughter.

Mark Wigglesworth’s approach to the score was remarkably fleet, making the magic fire music at the end crackle with intensity. A fine reading – and it would be good to hear more Wagner from him.

Tippet’s A Child of Our Time drew on the BBC National Chorus of Wales as well as the Orchestra. Both were on fine form for a work which has constant dynamic challenges. James Creswell and Tamara Wilson returned as soloists and were joined by Peter Hoare as the Boy and Susan Bickley for the mezzo roles. Though the work has been staged, its psychological shifts seem to work better in the concert hall and the use of spirituals is particularly moving. More so than when it was first conceived, the yearning of the displaced, the pain of the stigmatised was all too uncomfortably relevant to the news today. The work seemed to draw together our own pain and sense of impotence, and set it alongside both the ancient Israelites and the slave communities of the 19^th century United States. It was very moving.

Garsington Opera @ Wormsley, Sunday 17 July

Last year Garsington Opera linked up with the RSC for A Midsummer Night’s Dream; this year brought us a more complex presentation when they were joined by Ballet Rambert in Haydn’s The Creation. As Haydn’s text has a strong narrative line it would have been too easy to simply demonstrate the story in dance and Mark Baldwin used his dancers to reflect on and help us to see other aspects of the score as it progressed. Just occasionally the long lines of dancers – there were forty in total from the company – could be seen as fluid reflections of the elements, but for most of the time the dance seemed a more abstract emotional reflection on the unfolding descriptions. This was often highly effective. Awake the Lyre and the final chorus were particularly apt, as were the gently enfolded duos which seemed to lie at the heart of the interpretation. To take just one example – at the creation of Adam two male dancers gave us a sense of Adam awaking to the possibility of his own soul. It was very moving.

If I have started with the dance it is because the stage layout encouraged us to engage with it first. The large stage area was split by a vast gothic rood screen. Behind it the orchestra was placed, and the chorus were in raised galleries on either side. The gothic arches allowed the soloists to appear when they needed to sing, and Douglas Boyd was literally the centre of things under the central arch. As a result the musical impact was splendid throughout. James Glichrist was a thrilling and impactful narrator in the earlier scenes while Neal Davies and Sarah Tynan came into their own as Adam and Eve.

The chorus were obviously loving it and sang with fresh enthusiasm throughout. I can’t recall The Heavens are telling ever before sounding quite so much like Beethoven in its nobility and impact.

Douglas Boyd drove the score swiftly throughout though there was never any problem with diction or clarity for the text.

This was the last night of a fine season at Wormsley. Next year sees a another new departure for Garsington with plans to work with the Philharmonia Orchestra in a new production of Pelleas et Melisande, and a new community opera.