Opera Review: WNO's Anna Bolena and Maria Stuarda by Donizetti

Anna Bolena – Welsh National Opera, Wales Millennium Centre, 7 Sept 2013

Music: Gaetono Donizetti
Libretto: Felice Romani
Conductor: Daniele Rustoni
Director: Alessandro Talevi
Designer: Madeleine Boyd
Lighting Designer: Matthew Haskins
Cast includes: Serena Farrocchia / Katharine Goeldner / Alastair Miles / Robert McPherson / Faith Sherman / Robyn Lyn Evans

Maria Stuarda – Welsh National Opera, Wales Millennium Centre, 13 Sept 2013

Music: Gaetono Donizetti
Libretto: Guiseppe Bardari based on the play by Friedrich Schiller
Conductor: Graeme Jenkins
Director: Rudolf Frey
Designer: Madeleine Boyd
Lighting Designer: Matthew Haskins
Cast includes: Judith Howarth / Adina Nitescu / Alastair Miles / Gary Griffiths / Bruce Sledge / Rebecca Afonwy-Jones


According to Gary Tomlinson, the Italian literary culture of Gaetono Donizetti’s youth was stung into renewal by withering criticism from the controversial French salon hostess and woman of letters Madame de Staël. In an essay that was published in a new Milanese journal in 1816, de Staël reserved her greatest scorn for contemporary opera: ‘You will say to me that in Italy people go to the theatre not to listen, but to meet their close friends in the box and chat. And I will conclude from this that spending five hours a day listening to the so-called words of Italian opera can only dull, through lack of use, the intellect of a nation.’

Of course, far beyond issues of libretto, debates about the intellectual and artistic merits of this or that operatic form relative to others continue to enliven a diverse operatic culture today – not least with regard to Welsh National Opera’s opting to devote (bar a short Tosca revival) its entire autumn season to Donizetti’s so-called ‘Three Queens’ operas set in Tudor times: Anna Bolena (1830), Maria Stuarda (1835) and Roberto Devereaux (1837); a move perhaps less puzzling in that the season is enjoying financial support from long-time Donizetti champions the Peter Moores Foundation among others, as part of their ongoing dual fiftieth anniversary and sponsorship swansong. At any rate, WNO are showing brave commitment in presenting not one, not two, but three works lesser-known to those who are not devotees of Donizetti, or of this particularly febrile period of Italian operatic history.

Donizetti has indeed undergone a revival in recent decades. Whatever his cultural imperative and relative compositional stature, these three operas reveal him as a passionate and – at his best – highly able exponent of the new, Italian operatic ‘romanticism’ which emerged in the wake of de Staël’s critique and the polemical debates which ensued; a romanticism which sought to wed new forms of emotional expression to bold narratives informed by a broader, more Europe-wide historical awareness, but which was intended to bring a more contemporary resonance to the operatic stage. In effect, Donizetti – and his fellow countrymen Giacomo Rossini and Vicenzo Bellini to hugely varying degrees and in different ways – were attempting to divest operatic form with greater literary and dramatic authority. The bloodthirsty history of the English Tudor royals was just one vehicle of many through which Donizetti contributed to the development of opera seria (that is, ‘serious’ as opposed to ‘comic’ opera or opera buffa) in a short but dizzyingly productive career which saw the creation of over seventy operas all told. Anna Bolena was his thirty-fifth and the first to win him international acclaim.

But anyone seeking for historical accuracy in Donizetti’s Tudor series will be disappointed, as Donizetti and librettists Felice Romani (Bolena) and Guiseppe Bardari (Stuarda, with Salvatore Cammarano in Devereaux to come) apply poetic licence in spades for the sake of heightened theatricality. Frustrated, too, will be anyone expecting to see some kind of period spectacle in WNO’s productions this autumn – though I, for one, am relieved that WNO have avoided costume drama cliché. Rather, the company is offering a potentially immersive experience of what these operas are really all about beneath the theatrical conceit; precisely the bel canto or ‘beautiful singing’ unique to this period of Italian opera and which the new, romantic music-dramatic forms of Donizetti and his peers were ultimately intended to showcase. Extreme emotional outpourings are expressed through equally extreme flights of vocal melodic fancy within a framework of stylised musical conventions, and around which everything else revolves – be it plot, backdrop, stage-action, choice of instrumentation or harmonic process (this latter based largely around major keys, lending a bizarrely disjunct quality to the expression of jealousy, hatred and other so-called ‘negative’ emotions).

Which is not to say that the visual design, say, of WNO’s Anna Bolena and Maria Stuarda are unimportant or lacked impact as I will shortly come to (the first performance of Roberto Devereaux will be on 2nd October at the Wales Millennium Centre) – but woe betide any company which attempts to stage a bel canto opera with a sub-standard cast. Thankfully, the royal protagonists and courtiers WNO has assembled thus far were – in the main, and including the reliably tremendous WNO chorus – demonstrative of considerable vocal energy and expertise. To my ears, Anna Bolena had the edge overall with some splendid soloists and exceptionally realised ensemble work, in which, at its height, the singers and orchestra breathed as one – conducted, moreover, with superb pace and tightly articulated flair by Daniele Rustoni, notwithstanding the opera’s inordinate length. Robert McPherson was a little thin at the very top of his range but made for a tender Lord Percy, whilst Faith Sherman brought a touching depth to Smeton in trouser role. Alastair Miles’s Henry VIII needed more vocal and dramatic substance. But he cut a suitably despotic figure in an opera that relies not just on its prima donna – here in the rounded, supple coloratura form of Serena Farnocchia, impressive in a famously demanding title role – but in the convincing pairing of the lead with her guilt-ridden maid Seymour, who is, of course, destined to become wife number three at the falling of the axe. Katharine Goeldner proved equal to the challenge, if perhaps not so subtle of vocal command, and the central duet between the two sopranos was a sumptuous highlight of the evening.

Maria Stuarda also boasted a largely fine, capable lead in Judith Howarth (despite some ungainly top notes) – although I struggled to enjoy what, for me, was an often strident quality of tone from her nemesis, the nonetheless largely secure Adina Nitescu as Elizabeth I. Alastair Miles reappeared in a far more comfortable and, indeed, genuinely moving role as Talbot, whilst Rebecca Afonwy-Jones as Maria’s companion Anna, Gary Griffiths as Lord William Cecil and Bruce Sledge as the Earl of Leicester were solid in support. Here, the conductor’s baton was passed to Graeme Jenkins who made cogent a score that is palpably richer in harmonic and melodic content than the earlier Bolena, as well as being more adroitly structured. For all that, I found myself perhaps too aware of experiencing a ‘number’ opera here in Stuarda, having been better beguiled by Rustoni and his team’s deeper musical sympathy the week before.

Undoubtedly, the Stuarda production was a great deal to blame. All three operas have been effectively designed and lit by Madeleine Boyd and Matthew Haskins respectively, with Bolena and Devereaux directed by Alessandro Talevi and Stuarda by Rudolf Frey. On the evidence of the two operas performed thus far, however, it is a pity that Talevi did not also direct the middle opera (though admittedly, we have yet to see what he will do with Devereaux!). First, the design:
In both Bolena and Stuarda, the sets are uniformly black, grey and minimal, of no fixed historic period. The costumes match this for both royals and servants alike (bar the red cloak in which Bolena exits to the scaffold and Stuarda’s flame-red tartan), referencing the Tudor and a more modern, almost militarist-fetishist oppression. Lighting is stark and monochrome – particularly in Stuarda, where strip lights adorn the ceiling in some scenes – manifesting the no doubt psychological reality of the bleak, unrelenting prison of the Tudor court. Indeed, Stuarda’s prison is a partly perspex cage, prominent centre-stage throughout her opera, in and around which the action unfolds.

In both operas, any real colour emanates quite deliberately from Donizetti’s extreme vocalised emoting and his orchestral palette. The high walls of the set are, in Bolena, adorned with stags’ heads rather than, say, portraits, evidently alluding to Henry VIII’s predilection for hunting – whether it be for game or for women. The sense of entrapment is heightened by the circular rotation of Bolena’s birthing gown at one point on the revolving floor of the stage; she is, after all, merely one in a succession of unfortunate women who fall victim to Henry’s appetites – as it were, around and around. Within this dark ambience, I found the utilitarian design of the costumes worked well; at once, physically unflattering and flattening of the rigid social hierarchies of the court.

However – and here come the major blots on the landscape – the red leather bodice (complete with proto six-pack and pop-up breasts) that the Scots Queen suddenly reveals in her forgiveness aria is ludicrous, and the manner of its revealing sabotages a rare moment of real psychological development. It is a low point in a Stuarda production full of ill-conceived gestures and sham characterisation, but which slips to absurdity in the second half. In contrast to Talevi’s simpler, more natural delivery and more straightforward Bolena production, Frey has opted for exaggerated, tarty flouncing, alternating with a wooden type of ‘stand and deliver’. Bar the frozen tableau scenes with chorus – which do work – individual movement is stiff, with a distinct lack of chemistry between the characters. Alas, the famous ‘vil bastarda’ duet which earns Stuarda her execution – and which earned Donizetti an outright ban by the authorities in two Italian cities – descends to a catfight which not even the combined vocal artistry of Howarth and Nitescu can ameliorate. Here and elsewhere (not least in Stuarda’s bizarre strip-flirt with Talbot), Frey’s production cuts against both the pathos of the drama (such as it is) and – less forgivably in an opera almost wholly reliant upon the sentiment of its arias – even the singing itself. Sadly, whether or not Frey intended to send up his Donizetti, he succeeds in doing so.

This is a great pity as Donizetti clearly developed as a composer in the five years – and some nine-plus operas – that lie between Bolena and Stuarda, and it would have been fascinating to see his now greater musical daring and subtlety reflected on the stage at WNO rather than the kind of flimsiness that might bolster a modern-day de Staël in her opinions. It is a consolation, at least, that Frey was not in charge of Bolena’s ‘mad scene’ from the first opera in the present Tudor series, which was staged – by Talevi – and sung – by Farnocchia and hand-wringing women’s chorus – with equal and tremendous poignancy, in a distinct dramatic highlight of the season so far. There are other ‘mad scenes’ in opera, of course – not least in Donizetti’s own, later and more famous Lucia di Lammermoor; the deeper poignancy being biographical in that he himself was already succumbing to the syphilis-induced symptoms of derangement which would eventually see him locked away for eighteen months from 1846, prior to his death in 1848.

Certainly, even by the time of Lucia in 1839, he was suffering wholesale, with documented symptoms having appeared as far back as 1829 – pre-Bolena and not long after he had married Virginia Vasselli. Perhaps such information makes his adaptation of ‘Home Sweet Home’ in ‘Cielo, a’ miei lunghi spasimi’ all the more wrenching to hear. And perhaps not. For quite possibly, the music itself – arguably amongst his most powerful – suffices in that regard. But knowing of Donizetti’s terrible affliction certainly makes the sheer, prodigious quantity and relentless forward momentum of his output from here until the end of his short life all the more amazing. Hopefully Stuarda is a blip and WNO will be able to embrace more of that development in their production of Devereaux.

Book Review: Entertaining Strangers by Jonathan Taylor

Published By Salt, 2012


What first drew me to Entertaining Strangers was a review note on the back cover suggesting that the novel was a) funny and b) traversed a multitude of topics including ‘landladies, eccentrics, philosophers, bad families, music, degenerates, and ants.’ All of which I have had, as they say, ‘things to do with’ in some way. As it turns out, the plot is as surreal as this list suggests, and the book is funny – but it is also dark and tragic, with glimpses of horror and a narrative that is curiously compelling, given that lengthy passages are given over to the central character’s descriptions of ant behaviour. 
 
Ants are just one of Edwin Prince’s obsessions though, along with (much more to my taste) the music of Krysztof Penderecki and a searching for wider answers in the mutability of consonance and dissonance. There is rhyme here, and reason too of a kind, as we gradually discover through the book’s narrator, Jules; a homeless man who literally falls into Edwin’s (even more) wayward life after ‘I’d sat down for a minute on a dog-piss-soaked doorstep in a dog-piss street in a dog-piss town, when the door I was leaning against gave behind me.’ Not quite Alice down the rabbit-hole – but echoes of that within a colder, meaner cityscape. 

However, there is warmth in the book too, not least because Jules comes to care for Edwin despite his melodramatic ways and defensive arrogance, and tries to help him repair his life against the odds; a thankless task which entails learning to look the mirror in the eye. Indeed, Taylor’s novel contains many touching, and often blackly comic, vignettes, set against a deeper, shadowing history of the terrible ethnic cleansing of the Armenians by the Ottomans, which slowly emerges through analogies of music and of madness. It is also well written and bravely ambitious, with an unforced, sincere compassion and many fine passages of no little anger which settle in unexpected corners of the mind.

Britten 100: Presteigne Festival Britten/Beamish Double-Bill / WNO Youth Opera

Presteigne Festival: 21 August 2013:

Benjamin Britten – Curlew River
Sally Beamish – Hagar in the Wilderness
Nova Music Opera
Conductor – George Vass
Director – Richard Williams

WNO Youth Opera: 23 August 2013, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff:


Benjamin Britten – Paul Bunyan
Conductor – Alice Farnham
Director – Martin Constantin



This November sees the centenary of the birth of Benjamin Britten; the composer who, according to his sometime younger assistant and fellow composer Colin Matthews, ‘singlehandedly established opera in Britain – from a standing start’. Matthews himself has yet to write an opera and may never, but he and many composers who have come after Britten – particularly those who have followed the elder composer into certain mainstreams of English contemporary musical life – continue to feel his strong, lingering presence; arguably, a presence for ill as well as good (which former I am sure Matthews would protest as chairman of the Britten Estate and a trustee of the Britten-Pears Foundation). For Britten’s influence in many respects has been as far-reaching and dominant as his musical and dramatic signatures are individual and distinctive, and the combination has proved tricky to navigate for British composers – ‘post-romantic’ or otherwise (to use a catch-all but broadly evocative description) – who are ambitious to succeed in establishment terms, but also determined to cultivate their own unique compositional voice.

Numerous commentators have been tempted to overstate Britten’s ‘genius’ (and I personally salute WNO’s resistance to following the operatic crowd this year in choosing rather to celebrate his perhaps equal importance as a composer for young people). Undoubtedly, however, Britten has bequeathed us an exceptional body of work across a huge range of genres, quite apart from the many operas at which writing he excelled, and he continues to be the most frequently performed and globally widespread of British 20th century composers* – regardless of the sometimes wildly contrasting perceptions of his music from old-hat to avant-garde, held within his lifetime and beyond. At any rate, in capturing the public imagination, Britten succeeded brilliantly in walking a fine line not just musically but socially, as his left-leaning pacifism and dark operatic explorations of the excluded outsider somehow slipped beneath the ‘acceptability’ radar of an entranced, conservative middle England – often thinly disguising homosexual themes that would no doubt have been deplored if openly stated.

It is the strength of Britten’s musical characterisation and his quietly adept use of narrative pace and tension that continues to make his best operas compelling, far beyond the supposed literary merits of their libretti alone (including those by writers as eminent as William Plomer, who adapted the Japanese Nō play Sumidagawa by Jūrō Motomasa for Curlew River (Op.71, 1964) amongst other libretti for Britten, and W.H. Auden, who wrote the libretto for Paul Bunyan (Op.17, 1941)). Britten’s gift for social observation is acute and often combined with a depth of psychological insight that can be as devastating as it is subtle. Grief is just one of the complex emotions that he explores with intense, understated accuracy in many works, and which, indeed, underpins the story of Curlew River; the first of his three church parables, and performed this year as the first ever opera (in a short, chamber sense) at the Presteigne Festival by the enterprising young company Nova Music Opera under the clear baton of conductor (and Festival Director) George Vass.

Curlew River marked a new stylistic departure for Britten – albeit continuing his preoccupation with ‘outsiders’ (and, indeed, with abused children) – in which an already economical mode of expression was whittled down to truly spare music-dramatic means. Here, the benefits are manifold, as elements of the Nō Theatre Britten encountered in Japan in 1955-6 (and, before that, in 1938 courtesy of Ezra Pound’s English translation of a Nō play) are skillfully combined with a ritual, Christian sensibility to create a work all the more powerful for its leanness of conception. As with most Nō theatre – and, indeed, in common with many of Britten’s operas – there are no clear-cut heroes or villains per se, but rather ‘an attempt to provoke a delirium of wonder’ (as Daniel Albright has described Nō) through the nuanced, stylised telling of a largely abstract but mordantly suggestive tale.

On this occasion, tenor Mark Milhofer proved equal to the task as a convincing Madwoman, tipped into insanity by the unbearable loss of her son. The supporting cast was uniformly solid, with Owen Gilhooly’s Ferryman, Christopher Foster’s Traveller and Stephen Holloway’s Abbot providing a thoughtful – and thought-provoking – foil, together with an instrumental septet of much more subtle hue than might be imagined by the oft-bandied term ‘orientalist’, with percussion, woodwind and heterophonic plainchant melody to the fore (Britten also utilised a self-described ‘controlled floating’ tempo and formal design that he struggled to notate and intended to be unconducted, but which was directed here by Vass with sensitivity and simple aplomb).

The work was ideally programmed for Presteigne’s St Andrew’s Church, (having been premièred at St Orford’s in Suffolk) and just wanted for a tighter, better conceived mise-en-scène; regarding lighting, for instance, the projection of a bright crucifix onto the wall felt somehow odd within the setting of an old church and other effects were partially obscured by the rood screen. But this did not detract from the overall success of the production and the dignity of the final redemption (an alteration by Plomer of Motomasa’s bleakly ending play at the graveside of the Madwoman’s abducted son), which was aided by the pure voice of soprano Kirsty Hopkins (rather than the more usual treble) as the boy’s arising Spirit.

Daunting and perhaps inspiring as Britten may be for younger generations of British composers, it must be challenging indeed, as well as thrilling, to be commissioned to write an opera intended to sit alongside Curlew River in his centenary year; which task Sally Beamish set about with characteristic professionalism in her short, chamber work, Hagar in the Wilderness, given its world première here at Presteigne before the performance of Britten’s parable. Beamish’s work is also a parable of sorts; at least, it too relates an instructive tale concerning an ‘outsider’, with themes common to the Britten of motherhood, loss and redemption. Beamish, too, has chosen a religious framework; indeed, her’s is considerably more overt than Britten’s as, by depicting the story of the outcast Hagar (sung with commendable spirit and clarity by Kirsty Hopkins) and Abraham’s bastard son Ishmael, she and librettist Clara Glynn direct attention squarely onto a figure who is often overlooked, but arguably of critical importance to three major religions in Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Alas, whilst Beamish’s score for five players is deftly crafted and beautifully ‘heard’ – and, moreover, was finely executed here by an excellent cast and Nova Music Opera Ensemble under Vass – it is required to bear the too heavy weight of simplistic moralising from the text. Glynn and Beamish’s concern to highlight social and political injustice, and to question the apparent whimsy of a cruel deity in at first refusing, then ultimately condescending to ‘stretch out his hand’, may be laudable and keenly felt, but their undoubted sincerity did not translate into emotional resonance or thematic depth on the stage. Certain aspects of the work’s deliberate ‘dryness’ did indeed feel apropos Hagar’s banishment to the desert; the deeper-toned viola and double-bass, for example (also found in the Britten, rather than the more predictable violin and ‘cello), unwound beneath ringing crotales and Curlew-inspired flute to evoke dark-toned, arid textures, whilst smartly avoiding direct stylistic references to Britten’s music – or, indeed, to familiar repertoire of the flute-viola-harp trio at the core of Beamish’s overall sonority here.

But there was no room for ambiguity in either narrative, characterisation or dialogue, and the stage setting misfired in portraying too literally various everyday scenarios without a corresponding thoughtfulness of dramatic treatment (the black wheelie-bag familiar to modern-day aircraft cabins was an unfortunate vehicle for Hagar’s ‘dispossessions’, so to speak, when a cloth sack – or even gestures – might have been less jarring to the design, and no more challenging of budgetary constraints). But much was packed into an intense thirty-five minutes, and Beamish’s vocal writing matched her instrumentation in confidence and poise, with Hagar’s supporting characters in Abraham and Gabriel well portrayed by Owen Gilhooly and Edmund Hastings respectively. The Festival, Nova Music Opera and the funders alike (the Britten-Pears Foundation) deserve credit for the commission – which I hope will be the first of many chamber operas to come at Presteigne.

The Britten-Pears Foundation were also generous contributors to another and wholly contrasting Britten centenary production in the form of his ‘choral operetta', Paul Bunyan, performed two days later by the WNO Youth Opera in Cardiff; a work which unsuccessful première (at Columbia University in 1941) demonstrates how fraught the road to successful opera creation can be. Bunyan was Britten’s first ‘opera’ and his most ambitious collaboration with Auden, whom he first met in 1935, and its failure might well have contributed to their personal and artistic parting of the ways. Later, in a spirit of reconciliation upon Britten’s fiftieth birthday, Auden was to acknowledge that ‘I knew nothing about opera or what is required of a librettist. In consequence, some very lovely music of Britten’s went down the drain and I must now now make apologies to my old friend’ (this, of course, also coming long after Auden’s prodigious triumph with Stravinsky’s the Rake’s Progress in 1951).

Auden had left Britain for America with Christopher Isherwood in 1939 in response to the gathering conflict which would become World War II, and they were soon joined by Britten and Peter Pears. Bunyan was the result of a suggested schools commission for an operetta for young people to perform which, it was hoped, would lead to the work’s production on Broadway. In the event, the score got dumped in Britten’s bottom drawer after being largely panned by the American critics, until he was persuaded to revise the piece after extracts from it were warmly received at Aldeburgh in 1974 – the year after Auden’s unexpected death. This WNO performance was of the resultant, revised work, which was hailed a success upon its performance in 1976 (coincidentally, the year Britten himself died).

However, the work remains problematic; not because of any supposed difficulty in defining whether it is an opera, or an operetta or a musical, say, in the tradition of Rogers and Hammerstein (arguably, it’s all of these things and none the worse for that). But the libretto, which many American commentators found so patronising coming from two upstart young foreigners, has not aged well and the second half of the piece in particular lacks dramatic momentum. With this in mind, WNO should be congratulated for a superb production, in which the work’s darker dramatic undercurrents were subtly emphasized in combination with it’s musical strengths to both thought-provoking and entertaining ends.

Just how tongue-in-cheek Auden’s text was intended to be is impossible to gauge at such a distance in time, but the words veer from cod-philosophising to sheer doggerel, to dubious homilies to the combined, breezy forces of nature, capitalism and the birth of ‘the American way’:

‘It is a spring morning without benefit of young persons./ It is a sky that has never registered weeping or rebellion./ It is a forest full of innocent beasts. There are none who blush at the memory of an ancient folly, none who hide beneath dyed fabrics a malicious heart/ It is America but not yet./  Wanted … Men without foresight or fear … Energetic madmen … poets of the bottle … all who can hear the invitation of the earth … America … awaits the barbarians of marriage.’

Which first part is just so much hokum until one considers the plight of the Native Americans, for instance (surprisingly well documented by this time but nevertheless continuing to be airbrushed from history) and the fact that Paul Bunyan, far from being a simple ‘mythical hero’, was a figure who only reached a wider American public after being reworked by a logging company for an advertising campaign in 1914.

Fortunately, the team at WNO, from Director Martin Constantine to Producer Paula Scott, Designer Cai Dyfan and many others, seem to have made inspired use of such factors in presenting the piece – entirely without labouring any point – as a look at the dark underbelly of the American Dream and, indeed, they have given the piece contemporary resonance as a form of branding/advertising/soap opera/musical entertainment, ‘watched’ on tv throughout by the young Boy (the stalwart Henry Morris). Hence Stephen Fry, who narrates the (pre-recorded) off-stage voice of the logging magnate Bunyan (complete with occasionally dodgy American accent), looms truly giant from the back of the stage via video, and many of the crowd scenes (and there are many – this is an ensemble piece) seemed designed to capture that ambiguous place in which white-toothed wholesomeness blurs into hyperactive, primary-coloured nightmare. Which, to me, characterises the ambivalence of the ‘American Dream’ as a cultural ideal, as well as pointing the way to those themes of alienation and sociopathic dysfunction which Britten explored so brilliantly in later operas. At the same time, moreover, this production was also easy to enjoy as simple entertainment, making it an impressive, multilayered achievement for WNO Youth Opera in both conception and execution.

The score is a bricolage of various pastiche styles from the blues (the mirror opposite of the recurring happy ‘blue moon’ theme of the lyrics?) to vaudeville, ballad and more ‘authentic’, bitter-sweet Britten, and it was performed with confident panache by the WNO ensemble under the sure baton of conductor Alice Farnham. Auden is right, it seems to me; there is indeed some ‘very lovely’ music in Paul Bunyan and the uniformly excellent cast (Only Boys Aloud, directed by Tim Rhys-Evans, swelling the chorus of lumberjacks to huge proportions) were able to make the most of it thanks to several of the lesser solo parts being distributed amongst the singers, who took turns to deliver lines and perform Britten’s on-stage, guitar-backed ‘campfire’ songs.

The young singers were a joy to hear and to behold, showing great levels of commitment and vitality with some wonderful acting and neatly-judged humour. Joseph Gorvett as the Western Union Boy had an exceptional turn-on-a-bicycle, but many deserve equal praise, from Elgan Llyr Thomas’s beautifully poignant Jonny Inkslinger, to Ross Scanlon’s swaggering Slim, the bravado of Lukasz Karauda’s Hel Helson (with his comic Swedish henchmen, complete with Jedward hairdos) and on, to the fabulous cooks, animals, geese, trees and others.

For me, however, the musical highlight of the evening was delivered by Vanessa Bowers as Tiny in a quietly heart-rending lament to her dead mother upon arriving at her estranged father’s logging camp. Whatever Paul Bunyan may ultimately lack in dramatic veracity or structural sophistication, it seems that even here, through this brief snap-shot, Britten was able to portray grief of real substance. Perhaps the most affecting symbol from WNO’s production in this regard was the closing image of Jonny Inkslinger-turned gunslinger in an ironic sense, with his pistol cocked at his own temple.

On one level, Paul Bunyan could not be further from the later, sparse ritualism of Curlew River. And yet, ritual of a different social kind lies somehow at the heart of this piece too, in its depiction of intense, emotionally driven individuals, struggling to find their place within a complex group culture that would have been so different from Britten’s own. At root, though, beneath the glossy Americana, is the culture underlying Paul Bunyan so very alien from the life at sea or on the Fens that Britten went on to explore in the ordinary, working folk of later, more literally homespun operas? Perhaps in terms of the push and pull of personal rivalries, of battling the system, of love and friendship and the overriding common need to put bread on the table, the cultures of Britten’s England and his American sojourn might not be so different after all.


*The Royal Mint has just announced that Britten will be commemorated on 50p coins to be issued later this year. A fitting tribute, perhaps, to a composer whose royalties increased ‘by about 30% between 2007 and 2011’ according to his publisher, Boosey and Hawkes. He will be the first person since the Queen to have his full name appear on a coin.

Brecon Jazz Festival 2013: Zoe Rahman Quintet, Courtney Pine, Laurence Cottle, Phronesis

Zoe Rahman Quintet – Brecon Cathedral, 9 August
Courtney Pine – House of Legends, Market Hall, 9 August
Laurence Cottle Trio – Castle Hotel, 10 August
Phronesis – Theatr Brecheiniog, 10 August

‘If you agree that jazz music can bring people together, jump on four’.

Well, who would argue with that traditional audience appeal from Courtney Pine; multi-instrumentalist, composer, band-leader, champion of jazz diversity and UK/Caribbean music extraordinaire? And who could resist jumping with him in celebration of his ongoing mission to promote social unity through jazz? Just one of several stars gracing this years Brecon Jazz Festival, Pine has been a key figure on the UK jazz scene for nearly all of the twenty-nine years that the Festival has existed. During that time, he has suffered more professional tribulations than some might realise at the hands of a jazz establishment wary of music which dares to step outside narrowly defined stylistic boundaries. So Pine’s appreciation was heart-felt for an ‘amazing, amazing Festival’ which has all but risen from the ashes over the last few years to present a strongly eclectic line-up of newcomers, emerging talent and established greats for 2013 in venues across the town.

Pine offered special praise for Brecon’s promotion of UK artists in an increasingly global and commercial jazz world; a feature of the resurgent Festival which the current organisers, Cardiff-based Orchard Media, sought to bolster in this, their second year at the helm, with a third more gigs scheduled than in 2012 overall. From Pine himself, showcasing his latest, critically acclaimed album House of Legends, to popular figures like Acker Bilk and Jools Holland and younger generations of individualist, ground-breaking artists like Django Bates and Roller Trio (not to mention artist-in-residence Huw Warren, through to a multitude of young and local talent), Brecon Jazz can be said to have assembled its own potential ‘house of legends’ this year – even without the iconic American Mavis Staples, who cancelled at late notice on medical grounds (hopefully she’s recovering well).

Before Pine took to the Market Hall stage on Friday night, his sometime collaborator and band-member Zoe Rahman presented her piano Quintet at Brecon Cathedral (she played on Pine’s previous album Europa whilst he has guested for her as alto flautist). Rahman herself is an excellent band-leader, known for her easy rapport with both ensemble and audience. Tonight she also lived up to her reputation for award-winning exuberant virtuosity, playing with her trademark natural feel and melodic vitality. Her engaging set ranged from the tight, chordal jazz of ‘Down to Earth’ (from the album Kindred Spirits) to alternately dreamy and dancing, swirling tunes from the 2008 album Where Rivers Meet, inspired by her Bengali-English-Irish heritage and co-driven by her talented brother Idris on clarinet/tenor sax.

For me, Rahman’s ‘purer’ jazz material tends to be more strikingly emphatic yet also more satisfyingly lyrical, but here, the cathedral acoustic especially suited her eastern-inflected compositions, bringing out the spatial generosity of both lines and textures. Rahman was beautifully supported by long-term Trio regulars Alec Dankworth on pulsating acoustic bass and the molten talent of Gene Calderazzo on drums (both picking out accents and subtle, off-beat nuances with impressive sensitivity), whilst flautist Roland Sutherland proved a tremendous asset to the line-up; not only in terms of enriching the ensemble sound but through the sheer liquid creativity of his solos. Altogether, this was fine music-making of heart and integrity, and the sell-out audience showed appreciation in kind.

Later that evening, Courtney Pine and band offered a display of thumping, infectious dynamism. The man is a force of nature and notes cascaded from his soprano sax and EWI alike with Olympian speed and dexterity (EWI stands for the unsexy-sounding ‘electronic wind instrument’. Basically, it’s a wind synthesizer and, in the hands of a musician of Pine’s calibre, a truly potent one – if high-octane, eight-octave pyrotechnics are your thing). House of Legends is an homage to Caribbean music that takes in influences from London to South Africa and Latin America; Pine being keen to point out that Cuba is part of the Caribbean. It is an album unashamedly leaning towards the popular and is laden with ska, merengue and calypso joy – but it is also serious in addressing colonial history for example, with tracks honouring the fiftieth anniversary of Jamaica, as well as dedications to Stephen Lawrence, Nelson Mandela and Claudia Jones among others.

Tonight’s gig was all about celebration and working the crowd, with a line-up essentially comprising an extended, gleefully virtuosic rhythm section of drums, percussion, steel pan, upright stick bass and guitar. On the album, the production values are, as you would expect, slick and attentive to complex rhythmic detail. But much of that was lost in Brecon’s Market Hall, where the resonance reduced the overall sound to a pounding boom at times – if a gloriously happy boom, which seemed not to bother the audience one jot, who revelled in Pine’s showmanship and his witty call-and-response approach. For me, without audible rhythmic intricacy or the swooping harmonic richness of the album’s brass section, the highlights tonight were the individual solos – from Pine himself, but also particularly from Oscar Martinez on percussion and Samuel Dubois on steel pan. Solos across the ensemble ranged stylistically far and wide without abandoning a jazz sensibility – and were most effective when the rest of the band backed off to clear the otherwise thick texture. But it was the overall unquenchable spirit of the gig that really made things fly – so it was almost a relief to be able to stand up and actually dance at Pine’s instigation later in the evening, as sitting in rows to listen to such vibrant, energetic grooves ultimately made no sense.

As well as tunes from House of Legends – perhaps most irresistibly summed up by ‘Liamiuga (Cook Up)’ which both opened and closed the set in dazzling style – Pine made homage to greats of yore in a loving rendition of Johnny Greens’ much-covered classic ‘Body and Soul’. The following evening, in an entirely different kind of gig, super-bass guitarist Laurence Cottle devoted most of his Trios’ set to jazz standards in homage of past-masters like Charlie Parker and John Coltrane, as well as evoking – in me at least – nostalgia for the jazz-fusion of figures like Herbie Hancock, Bill Bruford and the lamented genius, Jaco Pastorius. Who knows how many years of stage, session and other studio experience are represented by Cottle’s Trio? But what he, Mornington Lockett (tenor sax) and Ian Thomas (drums) don’t know about chops, licks and standards is probably not worth knowing. Indeed, their set at Brecon’s Castle Hotel (Saturday 10th – a popular venue on the Brecon Fringe Festival and new for Brecon Jazz this year) had me reflecting that the word ‘standard’ seems somehow too prosaic to describe the repertoire gold that has been bequeathed to us from, say, the thirties on down through the bebop years via figures like Parker, Coltrane and so many others. The sheer creativity that this inheritance continues to inspire speaks for itself – as it did with eloquence throughout this set.

Cottle’s Trio is, of course, led from the bass – on this occasion a five-string fretted – and the approach is ‘old-school’, but none the worse for that. Where he, Lockett and Thomas excel is in their breathtaking instrumental skill and musical inventiveness, both as a unit and individually; for example, playing Miles Davies’ ‘Donna Lee’ over the chords to Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ – and encompassing so many passing references to further tunes that I, for one, could not keep up. From rusty mellow sax sounds to hard-edged, bubbling grooves and funky walking bass lines, this was a set about the music and nothing but the music. A particular stand-out for me was Pat Metheny’s ‘Question and Answer’, which was delivered with soul and no small passion; Cottle’s playing here and throughout full of lovely chordal touches and ringing harmonics. All in all, it was the kind of sub-textual homage to Pastorius that only the most brilliant of bassists in their own right could pull off. An excellent gig and in need of no extra fanfare for the contented crowd.

This year, the Brecon Jazz Festival showcased a wealth of exciting, diverse takes on the classic jazz trio, both traditional and more modern in approach; not least – in some ways, straddling both camps – the exceptional trio Phronesis, who played a packed Theatr Brecheiniog at the other end of town, ahead of Cottle’s gig that same Saturday evening, August 10th. This earlier gig turned out to be the highlight of my visit to the Festival. A mixed British/Scandinavian line-up, comparisons between Phronesis and Sweden’s erstwhile E.S.T. have, to my mind, been overstated – however genuine the excitement in doing so; for, as well as being international in membership, Phronesis’ style is entirely different from that of E.S.T., tending more towards alternate tightly-wrought Latin and a loose-limbed, off-camber swing than the electronics-exploring, clean, Scandi jazz-rock fusion so formerly beloved of Esbjörn Svensson and his cohorts (E.S.T. also having been an excellent band, and so cruelly curtailed by the tragic early death of their founder/leader in 2008).

Phronesis, too, is not so much a piano trio as a double-bass trio, formed by brilliant composer-bassist Jasper Høiby in 2005, with Ivo Neame providing spare but expressive pianism and Anton Eger an exemplar of subtle, textural drumming. As with all chamber ensembles, though, it’s the telepathic co-creativity that lifts a good band into greatness, and this was amply demonstrated by Phronesis in Brecon tonight. If I was being über-picky, I’d say that not all the compositions came off entirely – or, at least, not yet; the point of the set being audience feedback, as the band were boldly presenting brand new material in preparation for recording later this year. But even the works-in-progress were top-level stuff and November’s live recording at the London Jazz Festival is sure to be fantastic. At any rate, the band warmed up, from the opening, splashy (mainly in a good way) ‘Out of Control’, through increasing delicacy and nervy-but-cool edginess in tracks like ‘Herne Hill’ to complete lift-off in the superb ‘Behind Bars’.

From Eger’s hollow skitters and metallic rim-shots to the deceptively loping, tight unisons and octaves of Høiby and Neame, this is not a band afraid of the silence between the notes, regardless of their continual, tumbling energy (skipping on gravel comes to mind). Nor is it afraid of going off on tangents, with a constant kind of ‘slippage’ that produces the most thrilling, propulsive jazz, as phrases are hung in space before being swept up into new, cycling grooves and back again. In short, Phronesis are a marvel. As an encore, ‘Suede Trees’ was offered from last year’s beautifully thoughtful album Walking Dark. It’s not often that a drums solo makes me weep for joy, but on this occasion, Eger completed what for me was a profoundly musical experience by weaving a web of such intense, almost melodic intricacy that I was simply stunned. Judging from the audience’s enraptured response, I was not the only one.

Coming back to Courtney Pine’s optimism for jazz as a unifying social force, the carnival atmosphere on Brecon’s streets was palpable as I walked back and forth across the town at various points during the Festival. Certainly, the festive mood was helped by the road closures on Saturday, which allowed venues to spill music and people outside – but, more importantly, by Orchard’s ongoing determination to return to the Festival’s more street-based roots, focusing on venues in Brecon itself rather than with gigs taking place in marquees on the outskirts of town.

A vital factor, though, for me, is that the Jazz Festival runs alongside an increasingly exciting Brecon Fringe Festival. This sister event offers its own profusion of live – mostly free – music and entertainment at further venues in town throughout the three-day period. Hence, the Jazz Festival’s scheduling of a late-night Saturday DJ set from Snowboy at the Jazz Club (Market Hall), for example, helped to cut across the supposed boundaries between Jazz Festival-goers, Fringe Festival-goers and local revellers. As in so many areas and on so many levels, partnership seems the way forward in the successful promotion of ties between local and global, street festival and international showcase, to mutual benefit. This year, Brecon Jazz Festival proved that it is possible to do all these things, both in terms of its remit to serve a wide swathe of international jazz fans coming from near and far, and for the local community, together with the Brecon Fringe. If the success of 2013 can be built upon for next year, the 30th anniversary will be one hell of a party.

Three Choirs Festival: Ashkenazy / Philharmonia Orchestra - Elgar, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff

Gloucester Cathedral, 27 July 2013


Edward Elgar - In the South
Jean Sibelius - Luonnotar
Sergei Rachmaninoff - The Bells

Conductor: Vladimir Ashkenazy
Soprano: Helena Juntunen
Tenor: Paul Nilon
Baritone: Nathan Berg




Hereford, Worcester and Gloucester may lie firmly beyond the ‘Land of Song’, but the excellence of their cathedral choirs and the passion for amateur and professional singing evident across their counties serve as a reminder that - in present-day choral terms at least - that particular cultural cliché can be overworked. Alternating annually between each cathedral, the Three Choirs Festival is one of the longest-running choral events in the world. This year, it celebrated its 286th birthday in Gloucester with the usual emphasis on tradition and, in 2013 at least, with cautious nods to the new; the latter represented most extensively by Arvo Pärt - a composer now so ubiquitous in UK programmes that even the most musically risk-averse of Three Choirs regulars must surely be familiar with his music.

It goes without saying that there would be no such questions of recognition regarding Edward Elgar, the Festival’s dominating force for much of the twentieth century and continuing to the present day. A Roman Catholic outsider from rural Worcestershire, Elgar rose after many years of struggle, not merely to be embraced by the English establishment, but - however improbably in more subtle ways - to define it in the eyes of many. For Adrian Partington, the Three Choirs’ Artistic Director (and, incidentally, the long-standing Chorus Master at BBC National Chorus of Wales), Elgar ‘is still, and probably will remain, the essence of the Festival’ and the composer was duly honoured throughout the eight days of music-making; not least, with a thrilling opening gala performance of his concert overture In the South (Alassio) Op. 50 by the Philharmonia Orchestra under its esteemed conductor laureate Vladimir Ashkenazy.

Elgar’s single-movement piece was conceived and largely written whilst on holiday to Northern Italy in 1903-4 and is one of his least complicatedly exuberant. Indeed, it came at a high point in his career, when his acceptance into society was about to be made publically unequivocal; the March 1904 London Festival at which In the South would be premièred was devoted solely to Elgar’s music - an unprecedented stamp of approval for an English composer - and he was elevated to a knighthood later that year. Regarding tonight’s programme, I had a slight concern that the opening placement of the piece would be as a crowd-pleaser before Ashkenazy got down to business with his specialisms of Sibelius and - especially - Rachmaninoff (I agree with Mark Elder, for instance, who believes that In the South is really more subtantial than a concert overture and should be accorded the significance of a symphonic poem rather than treated always as a programme apéritif). But I needn’t have worried. Ashkenazy’s terrific rendition not only opened the concert (and the Festival) in style, but it made plain the true stature of the piece. 

The big, warm sound for which the Philharmonia is so famous came into its own right from Elgar’s extrovert, Straussian beginning, with Ashkenazy clearly relishing the score’s broader phrases, without neglecting the textural contrasts and many fine timbral details - and without slipping into sentimentality. Beautifully incorporating the extended reverie of the solo viola serenade (lyrically played by Rebecca Chambers), this was a fullsome, entirely unbombastic, performance which lived up to David Owen Norris’s observation that ‘very little of what this music is about is on the surface’; something which I believe to be true of much of Elgar’s music, in stark contrast to the jingoism with which it is so often misguidedly associated. Particularly stunning tonight was the cyclic ‘descending fanfare’ so to speak, of intervals dropping by fifths, in Elgar’s depiction of imagined Roman legions crossing a viaduct near his holiday home. This was spine-tingling in the cathedral space and will resonate long in my memory.

In some ways, the Elgar was actually the highlight of the evening, as the bold, lush orchestral colours filled the cathedral with no voices to add more problematic balance issues into the reverberant space. The other two programme items suffered at times in this regard - although there was no gainsaying the sheer quality of musicianship on offer. Central to proceedings were twin centenary celebrations; the first having special significance for the Three Choirs in the form of Luonnotar (Op. 70); Jean Sibelius’s short masterpiece, which was commissioned by the Festival and premièred there in 1913. This is a wonderfully beguiling work which Sibelius composed between his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies and which hovers between worlds on many levels; from its ethereal soundscape, oscillating between light and dark colouration on the edge of tonality, to its deep, organic phrase structures that point to the radical architectural techniques Sibelius would shortly come to more fully embrace. Again, Luonnotar (at least, in the orchestral version - the piece also exists as a song for soprano and piano) hovers between solo ‘cantata’, orchestral song and symphonic poem. The supposed strangeness of its soundworld, together with the tremendous difficulty of its vocal line, led to the piece’s neglect for many years - arguably until the very same magical combination of Ashkenazy and Philharmonia with the sorely missed Elisabeth Söderström threw down the interpretational gauntlet in the late nineties. The high tessitura is challenging enough, but the Finnish text, taken from the mythological epic Kalevala, still sadly deters many non-Scandinavian sopranos from attempting the part.

Tonight’s soloist, the Kiiminki-born Helena Juntunen, amply demonstrated her vocal prowess as well as her Sibelian expertise. From ghostly floating over sustained strings to fearsomely climactic major-minor ambivalence, soprano and orchestra together were spellbinding throughout, with some fine sectional blending - particularly between brass and woodwind - adding to the heightened atmosphere. However, notwithstanding Juntunen’s expressive intensity, there is some irony in the words themselves being lost in the acoustic, as Sibelius’s setting of this ancient Finnish text can be seen as part of his ongoing attempt to assert the right to Finnish culture and national independence against the Russian domination that had prevailed in his country for over a hundred years.

Finland was at last able to claim independence from Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution there of 1917. Around that time, many Russians of the old aristocracy fled the Motherland into exile after the Communists took control. Among them was Ashkenazy’s elder-countryman Sergei Rachmaninoff; a composer with whom the celebrated pianist and conductor has, of course, enjoyed a long and distinguished association. Tonight’s performance of The Bells (Op. 35) - as might be imagined - was spectacular. Also written in 1913 (the same year, too, as Rachmaninoff’s fellow-exile and aesthetic opposite Igor Stravinsky produced his (in)famous Rite of Spring, which centenary celebrations are surely inescapable this year), Rachmaninoff also referred to it both as his ‘Choral Symphony’ and his ‘Third Symphony’; that is, until he wrote a purely instrumental Symphony No. 3 in 1935-6.

Whatever the designation, The Bells is possibly the greatest of Rachmaninoff’s secular choral works. Coincidentally, like tonight’s Elgar, it was composed during an Italian holiday, after Rachmaninoff received a copy in translation of the poem in four sections by Edgar Allan Poe from which it takes its name. Having loved the sound of Russian church bells since he was a child, and inspired by the poem’s darkening sweep from youth to old age, he now set to work in the same Roman apartment that his revered forbear Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky occupied in earlier times - the mournful ending of whose Sixth Symphony Pathétique inspired Rachmaninoff’s own death-shrouded finale in his own work. Tonight, the combined forces of Philharmonia and Festival Chorus were magnificent, with Ashkenazy seeming to conduct from inside the sound itself to produce a performance of elemental power. Of the three soloists, Juntunen again proved immensely impressive (if not so dark-hued as I personally would favour), whilst baritone Nathan Berg exuded charisma and melancholic intensity in equal measure. Alas, the undoubtedly fine tenor of Paul Nilon - from where I sat at least - was too easily overwhelmed by the huge forces of chorus and orchestra.

Overall however, the glories of this performance were many; from the rich, deep-piled carpet as it were, of the Philharmonia lower strings to the exquisite bell-like sonorities - so beloved of Rachmaninoff - in ringing brass, woodwind and, indeed, percussion; from the tight, rhythmic energy of the third movement Presto, palpable despite the cavernous acoustic, to the achingly desolate cor anglais of the final Lento lugubre (played with moving simplicity by Jill Crowther). Rachmaninoff often referred to The Bells as the favourite of his own works. Contrary to his reputation and the scowl familiar from certain photographs of him, his was a melancholic rather than a tragic disposition and the orchestral coda to his choral symphony does seem to suggest some hope within the mournful conclusion.

It would be fascinating to see for which composer the cathedral bells might be ringing in celebration a hundred years from now at the Three Choirs Festival. In terms of commissions, Luonnotar was a major contribution to the then international contemporary scene (although the Festival had actually commissioned a choral piece from Sibelius as you might expect, but which never materialised) and has now, at last, begun to be accorded the recognition it deserves. This year, there were welcome new pieces from John Hardy, Torsten Rasch and John O’Hara - but we will have to wait until next year for a major new commission from the Festival. That will appear in the form of Torsten Rasch’s projected work A Foreign Field (Echoes 1914) in commemoration of both World War I and the destruction of Chemnitz by Allied bombing in World War II; an important première to which I look forward immensely.










Published in Wales Arts Review 2.19: http://www.walesartsreview.org/three-choirs-festival-ashkenazy-philharmonia-orchestra-elgar-sibelius-rachmaninoff/

Book Review: A History of Opera: the Last 400 Years by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker

604pp, Allen Lane, £30 hardback



In a piece for Wales Arts Review, following the recent BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition, I quoted from (and recommended) a book on opera that was published just last autumn to instant - and virtually universal - acclaim; a book which has nonetheless prompted grumbles and disagreement from admirers and the odd detractor alike, thereby stimulating debate about opera itself well beyond the small but intense world of its authors’ usual academic milieu. That book is A History of Opera: the Last 400 Years by Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker; two of the most distinguished opera experts on the planet, who offer their substantial wit, knowledge and insight to a wider public in an engrossing discussion of opera’s history, present state and potential future.

On one level, the book is simply what the title suggests at face value; an historical reference book packed with information about opera composers and their works - and which the authors have carefully pitched at a general reader with a beautifully adroit, jargon-free style. But the book’s easy-going, authoritative brilliance and engaging prose do not, in themselves, explain why it has generated such eager critical attention, and why it leapt onto every half-decent ‘Book of the Year 2012’ list within a few weeks of publication; for how could this be, if opera is, as popularly perceived, a more rarefied art-form than most, appealing to just a tiny minority of people? And how, then, might we appraise the authors’ double-edged title reference to opera’s ‘last 400 years’, signalling their belief that the genre itself is actually in terminal decline?      

There is a paradox at the centre of Abbate and Parker’s thesis, and one which is keenly felt; for the book is based upon their equally passionate belief that opera at its best continues to offer the most uniquely compelling of live, dramatic and musical experiences - because of rather than despite the inherent ‘unreality’, ‘strangeness’ and even ‘preposterous’ attributes of the art-form, and to a degree which overrides the ‘ridiculous’ expense and tremendous practical challenge of its production. Their book sets out to explore the transportative nature of operatic experience, showing how conceptions of opera have changed throughout the ages to the present day - and the book is undoubtedly a tour de force. But it comes from an ultimately troubled - and in many regards ironically conservative - viewpoint as we will see, notwithstanding the authors’ bewailing of the ‘cultural pessimism that now fuels the repertory’ and which has ‘turned operatic performance into an activity policed by a reverence for the work as a well nigh sacred object - a reverence in almost all cases not present at the time it was created.’

Abbate and Parker’s History is the first single-volume of its kind to be published for a generation (a New Grove History of Opera edited by Stanley Sadie appeared in 1989 and there have been others of various types before and since, including Parker’s own (as Editor) Oxford Illustrated History of Opera, 1994). The book’s publication in itself points to a renewed appetite for engagement with the genre. Broadly speaking, as with the New Grove History, the authors choose to adopt a traditional, chronological approach to music history, also dividing it along familiarly (some might say, tiredly clichéd) national lines. But theirs is a far more vivid approach, offering invaluable information from within a gripping historical narrative in a way which reflects their lifetime’s experience, collaborative strength and the cross-disciplinary leaps into critical and literary theory, film studies and so on, that opera study has made in the intervening years. Starting at the beginning as it were, with Monteverdi and his Florentine contemporaries, Abbate and Parker show how audiences were first captivated by this strange, new type of sung theatre in the early 1600s, going on to examine, through a ‘great procession’ of key composers and iconic pieces of repertoire, various aspects of opera which have come to be associated with - or even to define - different periods of operatic history. This might sound like potentially dry theoretical stuff, but in practice, every page is littered with compelling wider arguments, fresh angles and highly entertaining remarks. Particularly good, for example, is the authors’ tracking of opera seria through Handel and Gluck, on to Mozart and the innovations of opera buffa and Singspiel. In a characteristic, creative move along the way, they grasp an opportunity to discuss the re-staging of Gluck’s Orfeo in early twentieth century Germany as a means of showing how the work has embodied classical restraint across the ages - as well as poking fun at the politics of operatic and musical fashion in that later age, when German composers unleashed an unbridled Expressionism onto a oft-bewildered public:

‘Staging Orfeo with high-minded intent ... has always signalled a reaction against theatrical extravagance. In Germany ...  Richard Strauss’s Elektra may have shrieked, raved and jumped up and down in dirty rags, struggling to make herself heard over an enormous, blaring orchestra; but never mind, Gluck’s Orfeo, brought back on stage to sing out his grief in sunny C major, restored much-needed restraint.’

Fun too, is the way in which Abbate and Parker deal with the endless controversies over national pride that have occurred throughout operatic history; whether or not, say, French opera might be superior to Italian in the eighteenth century - and, of course, whether Italy (Verdi) or Germany (Wagner) shines brighter in the nineteenth. As a renowned expert on Verdi and nineteenth century Italian opera, Parker has, to put it mildly, an interest in giving his man his due. But the authors maintain a dignified, creditable balance, whilst at the same time making serious points in their re-calibration of a debate which not only still remains oft-weighted in Wagner’s favour,* but is ultimately pretty pointless, asking, ‘Do we need to continue such ancient polemics?’ Nonetheless, they enjoy small acts of subversion throughout, such as the titling of a sub-section on the young Wagner as ‘Wagner the Italian’ in implied riposte to those who insist on characterising elements of late Verdi as ‘Wagnerian’.

By these means and many more, Abbate and Parker breathe new life into an arguably stale chronological format; not only showing how opera has changed and developed over time, but doing so from a consciously historical perspective of our own time, putting us - the audience - at the heart of the operatic experience in a way which Sadie would never have thought to in his earlier, much more formalist musicological day. They remind us that opera is an art that is performed and they set out - at least in part - to explore how our contemporary expectations and experiences of operatic performance are shaped by what we know, or can glean, of the processes of history. For instance, in tackling the intellectual snobbery displayed by Berlioz and other high-minded French contemporaries towards opéra comique, they note how ‘for certain composers, for certain audiences, the gap between speech and song ... threatened to turn into an unbridgeable gulf. We are heirs to this way of thinking’ and ‘may need new attitudes ... before classic opéra comique once again becomes something to be savoured.’

Inevitably, much of the grumbling about the book has focused on questions of which composers have supposedly been short-changed - like that same Berlioz (‘a notorious fountain of aesthetic hauteur’); given too great a significance - like Rossini; or more or less entirely neglected - like Prokofiev. And several are the works about which various commentators have somewhat fussily voiced objection, either on grounds of inclusion, exclusion or difference of opinion (like Andrew Clark’s quibble, in a review for the Financial Times, with the authors’ view on Weber’s Der Freischütz). Although such complaints are entirely reasonable in themselves, especially when a book has been marketed as ‘definitive’, the temptation to concentrate on details can lead to missing a vital larger point - albeit a hugely ironic one, given that this History is almost entirely canon-led; which is that the operatic establishment’s very reliance upon some quasi-sacred orthodox canon of ‘great’ works from the past, recycled ad nauseum, is a sign that opera today is an endangered species; a worry to which I will return shortly. Abbate and Parker allow their concern to permeate their book, however, in which a world-weary tone is detectable beneath the authentic passion and delight, and where a cynicism can sometimes peep through the wit. Manon, for example, is described as ‘Massenet at his most persuasive; and also - not coincidentally - his least Wagnerian’. As with the Gluck-Strauss quotation above, this is just one of a myriad tiny ways in which the discussion of one composer is used as a subtle means of remarking, often disparagingly, on someone else or some other topic.

This mordant style is both entertaining and enlightening for the most part, and helps to build a fascinating web of cultural cross-references. But in the truncated - and frankly cursory - final chapters on twentieth century and contemporary opera, the tone flattens and becomes morose, reflecting Abbate and Parker’s own ‘cultural pessimism’ as well as their evident dislike, for the most part, of the opera of their own time. Looking everywhere for signs of impending operatic demise, for instance, they slide from playfully expressed scepticism to far more serious - indeed far-fetched - speculation, in suggesting that an increased readiness to mourn death, found in opera written after 1920 (to wit Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges), gives rise to the ‘suspicion ... that the mourning is also for a dying art form: for opera itself.’

Melodrama aside, the issues Abbate and Parker raise are far-reaching and, in many ways, urgent. In my view, they are right to decry a mainstream, global operatic culture that demonstrably venerates the past over the present, peddling often spurious notions of ‘tradition’ in fear of real artistic change and innovation; a culture reliant on the same old war-horse operas from the narrowest of allowable repertoires, dished up in ever more dusty or incredulity-stretching guises - with new successions of singing celebrities ever-willing to re-glamourise the machine. However, whilst this might be a fair description of populist big-opera, big-money culture (hold up your hand, the New York Metropolitan), it is certainly not the case that all opera culture is now like this, with no pockets of excitement and innovation. In Wales alone, for instance, Welsh National Opera (not to mention the chamber scale Music Theatre Wales), is a company of international quality, producing programmes of real breadth, artistic vision and integrity on a relatively limited budget - and even that stalwart of tradition and high(er) finance, the Royal Opera House, has embarked on a hugely ambitious new programme in recent years, including the commissioning of important new works. So, whilst I agree with the authors to an extent, such blanket doom-mongering as the following is, I believe, not only unhelpful (with no redemption offered and no solution) but unfair to those who are achieving great things in places where opera culture is still very much alive and kicking: ‘the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries, our time, are also the time during which opera began to reside in a mortuary, a wonderful mortuary full of spectacular performances, but a mortuary for all that.’

It seems to me a question of which operatic worlds you choose to inhabit - and Abbate and Parker not only appear solely to inhabit the world of the international mainstream canon as bequeathed by ‘history’, but they make the mistake of assuming that that world is opera today and, alas, their otherwise splendid and inspiring book seems caught at times between hand-wringing over the crisis and the determination to find something or someone to blame for it. There is a range of guilty parties in their view - ‘all important symptom[s] of our operatic condition’. Advocates of ‘historically informed performance’ are one such; according to Abbate and Parker, a movement ‘sustained by cultural pessimism, by recognition of the fact that, musically, we now enjoy novelty when it comes from the past rather than the present’. Again I agree in principle - but is it down to the authenticists’ missionary zeal or passivity on the part of their detractors that there are more and more such productions of, say, ‘new-old’ operas by Handel?

Or is the fashion for ‘authenticity’ traceable to the ‘culture industry’ itself, to borrow Adorno and Horkheimer’s classic description (extremely loosely speaking) of a society in thrall to commercial rather than artistic values - an important factor in opera’s downward slide on more than one count according to Abbate and Parker - and with which I would largely agree. For, it could be argued that, however artistically motivated its practitioners might be - or, indeed, artistically deluded if you agree with the authors’ point about the impossibility of (re)creating an authentic historical musical event** - the ‘historically informed performance’ movement has been promoted hard by a music industry eager to profit from the recycling of established repertoire, but otherwise running out of options to re-dress the familiar. Not only that, but the profit ethos of our ‘culture industry’ metaphorically cheapens music across the genres from the popular to the classical. Most recently in ‘opera’, this phenomenon is encapsulated by the ghastly commercial exploitation of child soprano Jackie Evancho, whose rendition of ‘Nessun dorma’ (a highly sexual aria in Puccini’s Turandot) signals, in the words of Abbate and Parker, ‘the burial rite for opera’s fundamental ground note of adult passion, the utter loss of meaning and context for the piece’ - as if the Three Tenors money-spinning circus of yore wasn’t bad enough.

The rise of the director as the main, creative driving force in opera companies, rather than the conductor as hitherto (a current exception being the ROH with Antonio Pappano), presents another problem for Abbate and Parker, with the increasing trend for crowd-pulling - and sometimes deliberately controversial - stagings of the ‘classics’. They are also sarcastically dismissive of what they describe as ‘the amiable bricolage of contemporary opera production ... the pleasurable sense of alienation postmodern directors so reliably provide’. In fairness, a theatre-led approach can end up being at odds with the score. Attempts to ‘up-date’ operas from the past for the ‘modern-day’ can be cringe-making - and operatic experimentalism is never helped by the kind of bad press accompanying such debacles as this year’s abandoned Nazi-themed Tannhäuser in Düsseldorf. But the problem seems to me more that some directors have ‘cloth ears’ as Stephen Walsh so succinctly put it, rather than that contemporary productions per se are guilty of compromising the music-theatrical integrity of the repertoire; insensitive conductors are just as likely to be found as insensitive directors after all. It is certainly a conundrum for the authors, though, who also argue passionately against the kind of slavish adherence to the score which would never have occurred in a past wherein Mozart and Verdi, for example, often re-wrote arias and whole chunks of score to suit particular singers and differing performance environments.

In any case, the constant re-staging of the classics surely relies upon equally constant fresh interpretations. ‘Exactly,’ I hear Abbate and Parker cry. ‘And that is why opera is dying!’ Well, maybe that will turn out to be the case, and maybe not. But I, for one, am not half so pessimistic as they about the operas being written now - opera composers being an increasingly thriving breed it seems to me, whether ‘dabblers’ or no (a way they describe opera composers who don’t specialise in the genre), but whose creative efforts to expand and refuel the repertoire are dismissed by the authors on several counts; most importantly, though, for reasons which bring us at last to the very heart of their shared passion for opera:

For, central to the authors’ agenda, is their beguiling appeal throughout the History of Opera on behalf of what they see as the fundamental kernel of operatic experience; one which lurks, tantalisingly resistant to analysis, beneath all historical and biographical facts, theories and narratives. And that is the transportative power of singing; the extraordinary, sensual marvel of the human voice. Time and again, Abbate and Parker bring us back to the voice and to other fundamental, performative ingredients of this irrational and perplexing art-form that scholars have, until recently, been apt to treat purely as a dry text for analysis - whether through the musical score, or through the literary drama of the libretto, or both.

The whole book is, in many ways, a hymn to the voice, based on the idea that ‘acoustic sensuality’ is ‘opera’s fundamental note’ and, moreover, that ‘the persuasive power of pure singing had a great deal to do with the evolution of opera.’ The authors show how, throughout history, operas have been written around the voice rather than voices being called upon to adapt to opera, as expected today - and how, often, operatic roles were devised or adapted for individual singers. Hence, the demise of the castrato in the late eighteenth century and the rise of the romantic tenor post-Rossini are both phenomena which have had a tremendous impact upon the development of opera - not to mention our seemingly unstoppable love affair with the (usually tragic) soprano heroine, and such vocal developments designed around her as bel canto. Abbate and Parker remind us that ‘“aria” means air, after all’ and the book is full of references at every turn to how ‘the experience of ... operas will cause [these] questions to dissolve, for a few moments, while we are transported by little songs, carried on a blissful musical wind.’

Naturally enough, then - and completely unsurprisingly for two opera-lovers who have devoted their whole lives to pre-twentieth century opera - Abbate and Parker appear singularly unimpressed by musical turns to extreme dissonance after 1900 and by the fact that, as they somewhat obliquely put it, ‘by 1945, opera’s great undertow - the expressive power inherent in the melodic arc, as performed by a human voice - was demanding a faith that for many composers was beginning to look blind.’ For them, it seems, a relative lack of outrightly sensual, physically tactile and overtly melodic singing in operas of the twentieth century and present day signals the death knell of opera itself (though how you define those qualities is, again, open to question) - not to mention their concern about the small numbers of operas commissioned post-war which have so far found a place in the repertoire. But even largely tonal, melodic composers who are performed on a regular basis - like John Adams, for instance - fall short in their eyes; Adams’ musical style being unflatteringly described as a ‘warm bath of vast and slowly-changing sound’. 

For a book which celebrates opera so exquisitely in so many ways - beautifully describing and narrating (at least, until they arrive at the twentieth century) the story of an art-form which has survived the perils of cost, practical challenge and cultural upheaval across the ages - Abbate and Parker are astonishingly bleak about opera’s prospects in the twenty-first century. Moreover, theirs is a miserable ending, which creeps out with a whimper rather than jumping off the ramparts with a defiant shriek, as it were. Their final chapter, ‘We are alone in the forest’, offers no solution to any of the problems they bemoan; indeed, their tired dismissal of opera composing today hardly seems calculated to help a situation of supposed artistic torpitude.

It does seem fitting, then, that one of many real, practical rebuttals to Abbate and Parker’s prophecy of doom should recently have emerged to such widespread excitement from the very university department which Parker heads as Professor of Music at King’s College, London; for it is here that George Benjamin also happens to be Professor of Composition. Joining the ranks of opera composers as diverse as Harrison Birtwistle, Michel van der Aa, Unsuk Chin, Thomas Adés, Mark Anthony Turnage, Kaija Saariaho and many many others, I am certain that the composer of the acclaimed Written on Skin - Benjamin’s recent opera début and a piece which has, for once, been aptly described as a ‘modern masterpiece’ - will have much to say in the coming years about any supposed death of the art-form of which he has just proven to be so magnificent an exponent.



* Which is more than the BBC has managed to do in devising their Proms programme in this year of shared bicentenary for Wagner and Verdi. They have programmed a whole seven Wagner operas in concert - including the entire Ring cycle - to none by Verdi.

** With such compelling ‘authentic’ performances as that offered by the French period orchestra Les Siècle (conductor François-Xavier Roth) at last week’s BBC Proms (of Stravinsky’s centenary-celebrating Rite of Spring and other works), it’s hard to argue with the fascination and superb insights of the very best exponents.


Published in Wales Arts Review 2.18: http://www.walesartsreview.org/a-history-of-opera-the-last-400-years-by-carolyn-abbate-and-roger-parker/

Sound Affairs: Michelangelo Drawing Blood

Cheltenham Festival, 11th July 2013
Music: Charlie Barber
Choreography: Andy Howitt


 Michelangelo is an iconic figure of the High Renaissance, whose profound - and possibly unparalleled - impact upon western art continues to resonate down the ages. Together with Leonardo, he epitomises “Renaissance Man”; a concept representing more a creative ideal than a mere colloquialism for “polymath”. How better, then, to explore Michelangelo’s creative process than through a new piece of music theatre incorporating a wealth of multimedia in film, choreography and music both live and pre-recorded?

That is exactly what Sound Affairs set out to do in their latest, quietly absorbing production, Michelangelo Drawing Blood...

To read the review, go to Bachtrack at: http://www.bachtrack.com/review-cheltenham-festival-2013-michelangelo