Paradise Moscow

Paradise Moscow

Music by Dmitri Shostakovich

RNCM Theatre, 24 March 2013

A zestful production of Paradise Moscow, an operetta set during the false dawn following Stalin’s death.

David Poutney’s translation gives it something of the flavour of Gilbert and Sullivan’s work.  There’s some satire but in the main it’s played as a romantic comedy.

One or two moments lead to a twinge of dread: when a couple are told that their home no longer exists, has been airbrushed out of history, as it were.  And the garden where the plants and flowers have eyes and ears.  These suggest, ever so slightly, a more sinister (and no doubt a more realistic) world.

The cast were splendid, showing bags of personality and humour and charm, and they gave each song a lot of welly.

Paradise Moscow is showing again tonight and on Thursday, details here.

Otello

Otello

Music by Giuseppe Verdi

Opera North

The Lowry, 13 March 2013

The beautiful thing about Otello is that it is rousing and moving, yet also (if you’re being a mite honest with yourself) joyously diabolical.

It is a malicious game, gleefully played.

Another pleasing factor is the dramatic irony of seeing an actor acting, which is to say deceiving others.  Part of us always seems to root for Iago, whose near-relations, virtual brothers almost, include Richard the Third and Coriolanus: warriors who cannot cope with peacetime, who find a glee in intrigue and malicious machinations.  Well, what do you do?  You make mischief, that’s what.

Far gone, that’s where Iago’s head is at.  He is a nihilist and no mistake.

Verdi’s opera is the equal of  Shakespeare’s play, and this production is serenely copacetic.

Future tour dates of Otello can be seen here.

La voix humaine & Dido and Aeneas

La voix humaine & Dido and Aeneas

Opera North

The Lowry, 12 March 2013

There is a similarity of theme – a woman forsaken, despairing, betrayed by her betrothed – but there’s no denying which piece packs the greater emotional punch.

Jean Cocteau, unlike his lover Raymond Radiguet, had very little understanding of women.  He gives us a woman – Elle, a brave performance by Lesley Garrett – who is in essence a hysterical butterfly, flitting hither and thither.  It is weak emotion, ultimately uninvolving and soon dissipated.

To do despair, melancholy, profound sorrow aright, you need – though let’s not be too chauvinistic about this – the English Renaissance; and Henry Purcell’s music together with Nahum Tate’s libretto, especially the final aria, is as fine as any of John Dowland’s songs.  That sentiment about death being now a welcome guest, the refrain: Remember me! / But ah, forget my fate!

The choreography here, what with the dancers aligned at times along a wall of the stage, had faint echoes of Café Muller, which is likely to be homage rather than coincidence.  Pina Bausch memorably used Dido’s lament in her classic work.

Future tour dates of both productions can be seen here.

RNCM Opera Gala

RNCM Opera Gala

RNCM Theatre, 22 January 2013

It is the Opera Olympics, no less.

The evening promised world-class arias by world-class composers and it yielded world-class performances of the same by RNCM alumni and students and the Orchestra of Opera North.  Each performance – and there were 17 all told – was a highlight.

Just as with Opera North’s staging of Wagner’s ring cycle, the orchestra were up out of the pit, the choir behind them, the singers taking their place front of stage.  A smart set-up and it worked well here.

Pure indulgence, this concert, just like eating cherries: pleasure that does you good.

The Return of Ulysses

The Return of Ulysses

(Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria)

Music by Claudio Monteverdi

RNCM Theatre, 11 December 2012

Heather Lowe as Penelope and Daniel Shelvey as Ulysses. Photo by Paul Cliff.

This is an absolutely wonderful production of Monteverdi’s great pioneering opera.

As with the RNCM’s previous production of Xerxes, we are in the ancient world.  Ulysses winds his way homeward toward Penelope, his path alternately lighted and obstructed by the gods.  We are in an unfinished universe, one where creation, humanity and even the gods themselves are all works-in-progress.

The opera has formidable dramatic force and genuine epic grandeur, and everything about the production brings these qualities to the fore.  There are a bevy of beautiful performances, not least from Catrin Woodruff as Minerva, Ulysses’ valuable ally; there is an audaciously designed and adaptable set, serving as rampart and rocky shore; and an authentic rendering of Monteverdi’s music, the orchestra playing on harpsichord, baroque harp and theorbo…  Together, they made a sumptuous sound and contributed to a sumptuous experience as well.

The Return of Ulysses is showing again on Thursday and Saturday, further details can be found here.

In the Locked Room & Ghost Patrol

In the Locked Room & Ghost Patrol

Music Theatre Wales & Scottish Opera

RNCM Theatre, 7 November 2012

NICHOLAS SHARRATT as Sam (left) and JAMES MORAN-CAMPBELL as Alasdair in GHOST PATROL. Credit: © CLIVE BARDA / ArenaPAL.

A double bill of contemporary opera: that is what you get with this lot.

The first offering, In the Locked Room, was based on a story by Thomas Hardy, and it was an intriguing, mysterious affair.  Perhaps it could best be described as a preternatural love story.  Huw Watkins’ music was eerily effective.

To many, Louise Welsh will be a familiar name.  She is a fine novelist, author of The Cutting Room amongst others, and was the librettist for Ghost Patrol, our second opera of the night.  This might have been – and in parts, perhaps, it skirted with being – a love triangle too, but as it turned out it touched mainly on the far-reaching effects of war.  Their night patrol had undergone an awful ordeal, some foul accident that’s oh so slowly revealed, but when Sam and Alasdair, the two ex-comrades who’re apparently fairly well adjusted, meet again in Civvy Street, all the buried memories come rushing to the surface.

There is again plenty of fine music, this time from Stuart MacRae.  A Scots ballad is hidden in the opera, one of those visions in marble, and the score for the fight sequences is exciting and very effective.  He can do a lot of different things and can do them very well, can Mr. MacRae.  Raymond Short choreographed the fight sequences and it struck me that they’re rarely seen at all in opera, and never as well as this.  I wondered why, then the answer struck me.  Opera singers aren’t generally as – how should one put it? – as mobile as Nicholas Sharratt and James McOran-Campbell are here.

All in all, this was an excellent night at the opera.

Opera North’s Don Giovanni

Don Giovanni

Music by Mozart

Opera North

The Lowry, 10 November 2012

William Dazeley as Don Giovanni. Photo credit: Robert Workman

The alternate title of the opera is The Rake Punished, though The Rake Unrepentant might have been more apposite.

For Don Giovanni dies as he lived – there are no last minute pleas for absolution – and accepts damnation without so much as blinking twice.

There cannot have been much joy or fun in it at the close, mind.  A bit battle-weary he seems like here, especially since all that raking looks to have become simply a numbers game.  He’s got a bit of a reputation and they now expect him to bed a certain number of women each month, week, day, hour, minute…  Our hero is feeling the pressure, and wouldn’t you be?  His performance is being monitored, there are KPIs he’s got to achieve each quarter.  Targets need to be met.  It’s hardly the libertarian ideal.

And D.H. Lawrence would hardly approve, in fact he’d likely scold mercilessly.  ‘What many women cannot give, one woman can.’  That was his view.  Don Giovanni, man, you’re going about it all wrong.  Many crumbs do not a cake make.  Think on it.

What’s special about this excellent staging of Don Giovanni is the way in which the conceit of the puppet theatre suggests that these people (not only our hero, but the paragons of virtue, so-called, too) are automata, their actions arising from forces outside their control.  We see how sad and silly human beings are, when seen from Heaven’s perspective.  Of the several fine performances, I particularly enjoyed William Dazeley in the title role and Claire Wild’s lively and zestful Zerlina.

Don Giovanni is touring throughout November, visiting Newcastle and Nottingham, and further details can be had here.

Opera North’s The Makropulos Case

The Makropulos Case

Music by Leoš Janáček

Opera North

The Lowry, 8 November 2012

Yiva Kihiberg as Emilia Marty: great voice, great legs. Photo credit: Donald Cooper.

She was only an alchemists daughter…

… but her beauty had a wild chemistry that made mice of men.

Yiva Kihiberg plays the lead role, opera diva Emilia Marty, and she makes for a formidable femme fatale.  She has a great voice, great legs and is seductive as all hell.  Nor can one doubt the dramatic power of Janáček’s music, and do listen out for the astonishing dissonant screech that closes act two.

Yet the opera feels truncated and the denouement comes much too soon.  The final act is too short; the  intrigue that has been so expertly built up is dissipated prematurely. 

Also, one feels on reflection that certain themes could have been brought out more fully.  There is, for example, a moment in act three where Emilia renounces immortality and embraces at last her creatureliness, including naturally her own death.  It is an heroic act on her part – she doesn’t get many – but there’s no emphasis in the score and the moment swiftly passes by.

This production is top notch as far as that goes, well up to Opera North’s high standards, but taken as a whole the opera feels curiously incomplete.

The Makropulos Case is touring throughout November, further details are here.

Opera North’s Faust

Faust

Music by Charles Gounod

Opera North

The Lowry, 6 November 2012

Peter Auty as Faust and James Creswell as Méphistophélès. Photo credit: Tristram Kenton

This is a splendid production of Gounod’s finest opera.

It is so superior to the composer’s other works in fact, such as Romeo and Juliet which Opera North staged in their Shakespeare season a few years back, that one or two contemporary critics even went so far as to question his authorship.  A challenge to a duel netted some speedy retractions.  No critic would venture to die for his opinions.

If there is one factor above all others that makes the opera succeed as a drama, it is the relationship between Faust (Peter Auty) and Méphistophélès (James Creswell), and here it feels fresh and genuine.  There’s a give and take, a toing and froing, kindness (seeming kindness, anyway) and exasperation.  Méphistophélès is a kind of worldly mentor to the good doctor.

Musically, Peter Auty is a spellbinding tenor and James Creswell is not far behind.  Singly and together, they made some gorgeous, titanic sounds.

Another factor worth mentioning is the set, and in particular the visuals – foreground and background – designed by Ran Arthur Braun.  The cascading images flowed as melodically as Gounod’s music and created a dynamic, fluid environment for the action taking place.  One gained the impression that Opera North’s often quite experimental use of video and montage for their Wagner productions have left a legacy that has been carried over into their mainstream work.

Certainly, the extensive use of film made watching Faust an altogether more complicated but potentially more enriching experience; a set is no longer simply static clutter.  But it did blur the boundary between cinema and theatre.  If there still is one, that is: Joe Wright’s film of Anna Karenina is another problematic case.

Faust is playing at The Lowry again tomorrow then touring the UK throughout November, further details are here.

Co-Opera Co.’s Hansel and Gretel & The Magic Flute

Hansel and Gretel & The Magic Flute

Co-Opera Co.

RNCM Theatre, 30 & 31 October 2012

The Magic Flute. Photo courtesy of Co-Opera Co.

Co-Opera Co. is an opera company one of whose aims is to aid opera professionals at the beginning of their careers.

They do this by showcasing their talents, staging some marvelous productions along the way.  These operas were two such sterling affairs.   Fairytales have been a rich source of material for both ballets and operas for a long time, and you’d be hard pressed to find a creepier tale than Hansel and Gretel.  Those poor, neglected, undernourished children who’ve been kidnapped by a cannibalistic witch, who then has the onerous task of fattening them up for the oven.  For this staging, Shuna Scott Sendall made a wonderful witch – if that’s not an oxymoron – and her entrance onstage was a wicked affair.  The set designed by Carl Davies was a thing of wonder too.  The witch’s dress doubled as house and oven.

Shuna Scott Sendall as the witch in Hansel and Gretel. Photo courtesy of Co-Opera Co.

There is an awful lot going on in The Magic Flute, but with Mozart as your companion you’re in very good hands.  As Papageno, David Milner-Pearce was incredibly engaging and the three ladies, what with their frequent interjections, added a high gallop and a noticeable erotic frission  to the proceedings.  And Fleur de Bray as the Queen of the Night was a class act, showing full mastery of a challenging singing role.  Hers was a regal performance indeed.

The three ladies in question in The Magic Flute. Courtesy of Co-Opera Co.

Two happy endings, two splendid productions and a peek at some opera talents of the future: what more could you ask for?  All’s well that ends well!

Co-Opera Co is currently touring both these operas and Don Giovanni.  For details of future performances, click here.