To the ENO last night for a production of Norma by way of a client meeting just south of Cambridge. I’ve grown more fond of Bel Canto opera over the years. Curiously Mary Gentle’s wonderful fantasy The Black Opera gave me a new perspective on the period. For those unfamiliar the term was coined by Rossini in the 19th Century and now refer collectively to his work, that of the early Verdi along with Donizetti and Bellini. If you haven’t read the book do, if you haven’t read anything by Mary Gentle then buy everything, starting with Grunts (Lord of the Rings from the perspective of an abandoned troop of Orcs). I should be clear at this point that I tend to the view that Opera doesn’t really start until Verdi matures and Wagner manifests something truly other. Earlier operas I collect but tend not to go out of my way to revisit.
Having just made it on time I picked up a programme to see the dreaded white slip announcing a cast change. Marjorie Owens, due to sing the lead part, was ill and her replacement Katrina Shepherd had only really shadowed major roles in her past. Now I normally take this sort of thing as it comes, you often get to see a new star in the making. But Bel Canto, as the name implies, really stands or falls by the quality of its dramatic sopranos. And within that field Norma stands alone as one of the most difficult parts in the whole cannon. The opening area to the Moon goes from the highest to the lowest notes without pause or space for hesitation. It was a seminal opera for Wagner which is reason enough to go, but with a good soprano the singing itself is sublime even if the ‘wholeness’ lacks a ‘modern’ treatment.
To a degree the expectations were low and the risk to Ms Shepherd low. Competence would be expected but not a commanding role. I was unhappy as I have a great fondness of Owen’s voice and that was compounded by my neighbour stinking of stale tobacco smoke. At the end I stayed on, rather than dashing for a train that would have got me home before midnight, choosing a ninety minute delay to applaud what was a magnificent effort in which she effortless took control of the stage and created the balanced interaction with Jennifer Holloway as Adalgisa that is the beauty of this opera. Forget the tenor roles, the only real male part (to my mind) is for Orveso as head of the druids. That performance deserved praise and it would have been churlish not to give it.
All of that said, the production itself has dire staging and slightly too slow a tempo in the overture. The latter is a pain, the former almost comical. This is opera about celtic mystery, love and sacrifice cited in conflict between the Gauls and the Romans. In this production it was transposed to a scene from Dickensian. The Romans were Victorian gentleman which Norma’s children appeared to be auditioning for the role of Oliver in the workhouse. A tree trunk was constantly manoeuvred around the stage to no apparent purpose and there was far too much cleaning and blooding of oversized axes, symbolism should not be shoved in your face. The opening picture has Norma just stopping short of executing her children to punish her unfaithful lover (this is opera after all).
To be clear I have no objection to reinterpreting opera. I loved the ROH performance of Parsifal situated in the Blitz and almost game to blows with an elderly couple who were huffing and puffing about modernisation during the performance. I thought the Seattle opera performance of the Ring was dire, a return to the 1950s with horns and spears, while the Richard Jones production at the ROH, castigated by traditionalists, at times inspiring, always interesting. For those not familiar it situated it in a Soviet psychiatric hospital with Brunhilde walking deranged in a hospital gown over operating tables strewn with body parts hurled from a charnel pot by the Valkyries. OK the giant fly in her rock was probably a step too far, but it made you think. The ENO shifting Rigolletto to Mafia run New York was inspired as was their Carmen situated in more recent guerrilla warfare. So I am far from a luddite in respect of productions. But as I said, they have to make you think differently about the opera, to see it through other eyes. This production had nothing in that respect, it was drab, pointless and distracted from the performance as a whole.
But the night belonged to Katrina Sheppeard and it was worth having to take the 2330 from Paddington, populated by an interesting mix of drunks and theatre goers. Next up Akhenaten, between lists to Bergen and Austin in a few weeks time.
Excessive travel, even by my standards over the last two months have resulted in a neglect both of mountain walking and cultural events. The former I hope to correct with some intensive sessions in the Brecon Beacons and Snowdonia over the next six weeks; I have a new ice axe to play with so the latter maybe a better focus than the former but that involves longer drives. I really need to try and get another couple of sections of the Welsh Coast Path done but the days are too short for long distance work, so better the abruptness of height and the exhilaration of ridges. I’m also going to be in Edinburgh for the new year and have negotiated one day for the mountains, still trying to work what is the best day trip from Edinburgh, possibly the Ochil Hills but all ideas are welcome.
In respect of culture I have ended up compressing one play and two operas into three successive nights. The first of those was meant to be a family trip to see Electra at the National Theatre but ended up as a solitary visit from which I have just returned. The excuses of the family in descending order of validity were:
A potential loss of £135 for three tickets was mitigated by the long queue of people waiting for returns I pleased to report that the tickets were not wasted, and the conversations I had with the two Chinese Students and one Middle Eastern woman who occupied the seats was some compensation.
The performance itself was worth making an effort for. I’ve always loved Greek Theatre since my month introduced me to it at the Chester Gateway Theatre way back in the 70s. It is pre-Christian which makes it nearly unique in the Western Tradition. The rest of the Western tradition cannot escape the Christian legacy, whether it is the pious cant of the Wilmslow Boy or the glory of Brecht (pain and joy from school days in those examples). It is also interesting that so much of the tradition has strong female characters in a society we tend to assume was innately Misogynist (in so far as that modern term has validity). The basic plot of Electra illustrates the absence of an orthodox morality. Electra is living in a form of self-exile in the home of her mother Clytemnestra now married to her Uncle Aegisthus. While her sister Chrysothemis is compliant she is seeking revenge for her Mother’s murder (with an axe) of Agamemnon. That murder was in consequence of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Electra’s sister Iphigenia to secure the support of the Gods for the Troy Incursion. Ultimately her brother Orestes will return to murder his mother and father in law. So father sacrifices daughter, wife slays husband, daughter defends father, son kills mother and evil power usurping uncle all without visible guilt, more a sense of inevitable flow.
It is a play which is dominated by the character of Electra (as is the opera of the same name). Kristin Scott Thomas was the big name attempting to fill Peggy Ashcroft’s shoes and she did it in part. At times the intensity of her performance was overwhelming. She staggered around the stage clutching the supposed ashes of her brother within her womb while maintaining a tempo of anger and pathos which I will not forget in a hurry. But at other times she was petulant and did not allow some of the deeper aspects of her character to emerge. In contrast Liz White as Chrysothemis, Diana Quick as Clytemnestra and Peter Wright as the Servant were impeccable is shorter but inch perfect portrayals of the moral ambiguity which is at the heart of the play.
The opening and close were comic in a good and a bad way. Matthew Darcy, understudy for Orestes came on to ask us to switch off mobile phones but managed to fool us into thinking there was a cast change before he regretted that Jack Lowden (playing Orestes) was all too healthy. He left us all wishing he had a chance to play the role, something confirmed by the somewhat wooden performance of the character in the play. The second moment was more depressing in that Aegisthus was portrayed as a comic fool with so sense of threat. That I want to forget. So now to bed and tomorrow it is the glory of Wagner at the ROH with Tristan/
My last full day in Australia before flying back to the UK tomorrow and it was pretty packed. The seminar Simon and I had run the previous week generated a lot of interest and I had follow through meetings before repeating the social sector event from Brisbane. For the evening I planned to go to the opera house in Sydney to see Don Giovanni, one of two Mozart Operas I am prepared to make an effort to go to. I agree with Kierkegaard that it is Mozart's greatest opera and that opera is the greatest form of art, but I profoundly disagree that Mozart is the greatest of all composers, but simply I think he lacks emotional depth, its all to clever by half. But the world seems divided between Wagnerians and Motzartians and the distinction does seem to fall between the musicologists and those of us who prefer a grander envisioning of meaning.
But this production had a good cast and on the night Nicole Carr as Dona Elvira had a voice to die for and a body to match the idea of a young naive victim of an experienced and cynical seducer. But overall the set was drab and the scene where Don Giovanni is taken into Hell was comical, it lacked gravitas and on that scene the whole opera stands or falls. Jud Arthur as the Commendatore just didn't have the depth of voice or presence to make it work. Leporello was clumsy not comic-tragic. I could go on but it was played as jest not as a morality tale. That is a choice which requires a very special production and this was not it.
It's always good to visit one of the world's iconic buildings but they really need to move Opera into the theatre which was designed for it. The concert hall really does not have the right acoustics but the building itself is part of the attraction; it's worth going just to get the view of Sydney Harbour Bridge from the Opera House itself (shown). I even played tourist and got the mug and T-Shirt! The walk there and back was good as well although chilly. All in all not a bad way to finish this extended trip.
This evening I went to the opening night of Donizetti's Maria Stuarda at the Royal Opera House, It's a powerful example of the Bel Canto style and the confrontation between Joyce Didonato as Maria and Carmen Giannattasio as Elisabetta at the end of Act II was everything I hoped for. In rehearsals for the first production in Naples the lines Impure daughter of Boleyn, do you speak of dishonour? Obscene, unworthy prostitute, let my blush fall on you. Profaned is the English throne, vile bastard by your foot were delivered with such venom that the two divas resorted to fisticuffs. In one of those strange coincidences I am currently reading Mary Gentle's Black Opera which is situated in the Naples at the same time as Maria Stuarda was pulled at the request of Frederick II before its first performance.
It was a controversial opera with themes of political power and abuse and Donizetti was pushing the bounds of the acceptable when he composed it. This production featured to my mind a wonderful staging which started with a lone axeman (either Cecil or Leicester I am not sure, but either would add significance) taking the head from a manikin. nbsp;It moved on to a gloriously colourful backdrop of Westminster with the Chesterfield Sofa's of a Gentleman's Club in the foreground. The rest took place in a prison camp reminiscent of the Gulags. 
Elisabetta was dressed in an almost stereotypical hooped dress with make up and posture reminiscent of the Red Queen in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. The rest of the cast were in contemporary dress, or undress in the case of Maria.
Now I really enjoyed this. One of the great delights of opera is that each performance is different and each Director provides new insight. Opera well produced makes you think, it does not allow you to follow a well worn pathway. OK it can go to far, the WHO production of Don Giovanni back in the 70s with the cast dressed in space suits with flashing lights while the Don washed red socks incessantly to indicate something complex about his various de-flowerings being one example. But in general I prefer directors to push the boundaries. This however is not the general view of the conventionati at the ROH. They loudly booed the production team when they came on stage at the end. They did the same decades ago at a wonderful relocation of Parsifal to London in the Blitz. In that case they wanted helmets and spears, here they wanted Fotheringhay Castle to be a real castle and the lead tenor to have a ruff.
This lack of imagination, an unwillingness to experiment and evolve is to my mind deplorable. OK you may not like a particular interpretation but in the main you should celebrate the endeavour. There is a metaphor in there somewhere ….
A family trip to part of two of what can only be described as a reimagining of Tolkien's Hobbit. To be clear up front I enjoyed it, but then I had set my expectations in a very different way from Lord of the Rings. There Jackson had promised to tell the story in film and in general he did a good job. No film can be a faithful reproduction of a book, but it needs to be faithul to the overall narrative. The only point which still irritates me is the way he messed up the character of Faramir in Part II. Instead of allowing Frodo to take custody of Gollum and proceed to Mordor he attempts to take him to Minas Tirith. His mind is only changed by the encounter with the Nazgûl at the fords of Osgiliath. The contrast with his brother Boromir is thus lost and we loose the important of his resumption of the role of Steward wedded to the Lady of Rohan. Oh and yes, Jackson does like his battle scenes, often to excess but I can live with that. Critically he keeps the key final assumption of the Ring by Frodo, who has to fail, and the final role of Gollum in ensuring its destruction; something foretold by Gandalf in the opening chapter. Without that the whole narrative would have been destroyed. The other frustration was loosing the whole Barrow mounds chapter, thus missing the origin of the sword that finally slays the King of the Nazgûl.
In the three films that make up the Hobbit his intent is very different. Here Jackson is seeking to tell the wider story of which the Hobbit only hints. That fills in the gaps with Lord of the Rings, using material from the appendices but not the Silmarillion as he does not have the rights to that work. So its more like Variations on a theme … that is common in music and it has to be judged as such. Now my son and I disagree on both. He thinks Jackson improved Lord of Rings but is not being faithful to The Hobbit. Extended discussions have taken place on this on many a drive to and from rugby matches but it looks like one of the reasons is that both of us are loyal to the book we read first.
In Lord of the Rings he stayed pretty close to the book in the first film, but then experimented in the second. We see the same here with an extended battle scene between the Dwarfs and Smaug, a love interest between Elf and Dwarf, a complete loss of the subtlety of the first encounter with Beorn in favour of a close encounter with the shape changer as a bear and an interesting sequence in which Sauron is revealed to Gandalf. Actually there was a lot more but those were the highlights. Key to enjoying this film is seeing it as a new story not the old one. I'm happy to do that as such is the intent and it is entertaining if a little excessive on the special effects at times. There is a much better exploration of the psychology of the characters than in the book, and a much richer overall narrative arc.
So I am looking forward to the third movie next Christmas and I should say that Martin Freeman really develops the character of Bilbo beyond that portrayed in the book. Bilbo becomes the central character and enabler, especially in the changed scene around the thrush and the last light of Durin's Day. But I won't spoil it for those who have not seen it.
Driving out of London and home last night was a tedious business and it was after midnight before we made it. I abandoned any idea of unpacking as I had an 0719 train back to London. Maybe I should have stayed up that night, but then with a day trip to Amsterdam and the need to get Huw home with his bags I opted for the four hours sleep option! It was a busy day of meetings with new and old friends and a visit to the Rohan shop in Covent Garden to get a new winter coat. Brilliant design as ever, the insulated jacket I had already bought zips into the Countrywide Jacket I choose (and a medium fit at that). The main event however was the evening performance at the Royal Opera house of Wagner's last opera Parsifal.
Now regular readers will know my love of Wagner and my realisation many years ago that his operas transcend human experience, beyond other forms of music or drama. Parsifal was long reserved for Bayreuth and was not performed elsewhere until it came out of copyright. It is ambiguous in respect of Christianity as Wagner, profoundly influenced by Schopenhauer, would always be ambiguous as the closing lyric (the title of this post) implies. In at least one interpretation the whole idea of religious experience is redeemed through the transformative power of music.
The production was brilliantly staged with the staging using the box like structures that provide a theme to Bacon's explorations of the human condition. This is one of the glories of opera in that each production has its own ability to explore and integrate different art forms and ideas. Just watching that production will send me to the Tate and its bookshop to see what deeper meaning I can gain from the staging. Otherwise the quality of the voices, especially René Pape in the demanding role of Gurnemanz, was outstanding but Simon O'Neill contrasted badly in physical appearance and presence with my first ever Parsifal, the WNO production conducted by the greatest of all Wagnerian conductors Reginald Goodall. Warren Ellsworth was a true Heldentenor in both voice and experience and his first Wagnerian roles as Parsifal and as Siegmund were for the WNO. Now he looked the part of the young innocent innocent fool and the WNO staging with a circular metal gantry provided the ritualised transitions between narrative and the sacred which are key to the opera.
Another Goodall production at the ENO with Ann Evans as Kundry also comes to mind. It was staged in a magical garden for the second act that attracted the odium of the critics. Mind you Evans famously soaked the Guardian critic with red wine (“that's from me and Reggie”) as a result, for which I silently applauded her. In another performance at the ROH the opera was interpreted into blitz in London which disturbed the traditionalists who too often inhabit the ROH but which my mother and I adored. I've seem many performances since but those three stand our for me. Wagner's music which always transports you into another place if you have the soul to hear it, carries an unearthly beauty in Parsifal, especially the final act.
One of the most interesting aspects of this production was the portrayal of the Grail as a young boy, dressed to represent Christ. By the final act the character was first a man of the age of Christ at the crucifixion, then an empty box. The knights need to drink the blood or sweat of the Body of Christ at the close of Act I approached perversion in its representation and I assume with deliberate intent. The Flower Maidens were clearly prostitutes and Kundry moves from a scarily bald figure in a costume reminiscent of a mental home to a red headed temptress between the acts. This was a production that clearly sort to situation the opera into a Baconic view of human nature.
Music creates a possibility of redemption, and without art it is not a concept we could understand in practice. The deep message of Parsifal is that of compassion and its power, something that is too often lost from modern life.
Yesterday was entirely encompassed by travel starting with an early morning flight from Seattle to New York and ending with an overnight to London after a six hour layover. The security line at Seattle was briefly held up when the TSA official decided to engage me in a conversation about weight loss, having looked at my passport photograph and then at me. She then moved on to chat about her time in London to the frustration of those behind me. It was a very human interaction and I had a bounce in my step as a result.
The flight to London was my last chance at relaxation with a frantic few days before Christmas. It started with quick shower followed by a meeting with Anne about our new 360º service. She had flown into Heathrow for the meeting and we made good progress; watch this space in the new year for more details. From there it was a frantic drive through traffic to pick Huw up from Euston station and then a pre-theatre dinner before a performance of Richard II at the Barbican. Originally it was a family trip but Eleanor was ill so Peter substituted at the last minute.
Richard II is the start of the History Plays that see us through the War of Roses until, with a perverse symmetry we arrive at the much maligned Richard III. For us it was a reverse flow as we had seen Richard III at the RSC last year. I am still trying to hunt down that 1970's play at the Duke of York Theatre in Lancaster by the way if anyone can help. Now I should be honest and say that I have always favoured the House of York in the various disputes which saw out the Plantagenets and saw in the disaster which was the Tudor dynasty. They did of course have one of the best propaganda writers ever in Shakespeare, and that has informed the common view of history thereafter. But despite the distortion it produces one of the great sequences of theatre. It also won us a television back in the 60s. My mother had refused to allow us one, confining us to radio so I had to sneak around to friends to watch the early episodes of Doctor Who. Then the BBC produced a television version of the full cannon and we had our lever. So they have an additional historical resonance for me.
Richard was of course a childhood king who inherited at the age of ten and was consumed by his teenage success in dealing with the Peasant's Revolt. The cycle of accusation and pardon, private armies and tyranny dressed up in the guise of Kingship is at the heart of the period and of the play itself. Bolingbroke on the other hand, schooled by John of Gaunt who could have been a greater King had Richard not been born, is more prepared for kingship and also for the consequences of his unmanning the sacred authority of the King and enabling if not planning his final murder. The contrast between Nigel Lindsay's brutal Bollingbroke and Dvid Tennant's fey performance in the title role made for a memorable evening. Mind you the outstanding performance was from Oliver Ford Davies (who seems ever present in any RSC production) as York. Of course with Doctor Who in the lead there was no question as to who would get the greater applause!
The concept of the sacred is not linked to monarchy alone and is ever present in modern society. We invest celebrity with status and authority that it has not yet earned producing the vain conceit that forms one of the more famous quotations from the play. Isolating any leader from reality will produce vanity and it is all too frequent with industrial leaders and the various sacred cows of common morality.
Yesterday was an interesting if packed day. I landed from Ohio by way of New York had a quick shower in arrivals then up to Oxford for a meeting on our new approach to scenario planning. More on that mid week and a chance to take part in an experiment on the privacy issue next weekend. Then to the Oxford station car park and a train to London to meet daughter for a meal followed by Ben Frost's production of The Wasp Factory in the Linbury Studio Theatre at the Royal Opera 2013. Then back to Oxford and an hours drive home arriving around midnight. It was a bit of a crazy schedule, but it was nothing on what is coming over the next two days! Sunday is a rugby match and an opera with a lot of driving followed by at 0630 flight on Monday morning.
It was more than worth the travel. Dinner with daughters when they are doing MAs in one of your subject and want to talk about material culture and cognition is a special privilege. We had a great dinner at One Aldwych and then went on to the opera. This was an intense experience and Jördis Richter (pictured) was an incredible athlete as well as performer. I remember when the book came out and the literally phenomena that was Ian Banks (or Ian M Banks for science fiction) burst onto the scene. His death earlier this year was a tragedy although his proposal to his girl when he knew he had terminal cancer summarises his writing: Would you do me the honour of becoming my widow. I will not ruin the story for those who have not read it, the whole thing is black, intense and profoundly disturbing. For many critics, and I agree with them, is that it was a post Orwellian attack on Thatcher and her cult of the individual. But it was more than that.
The great thing about an opera of a book, which is different from a film of a book, is that it takes an aspect and portrays it in the most complete art form. Voice, acting, staging, music, scenery: opera is the complete aesthetic experience. The staging here starts with a tray of dirt which moves to the vertical to create the isolation of an island and on which the actor/singers crawled and interacted. It was a compelling experience that took you into the world of schizophrenia though two characters. Birtwistle did something similar in Mask of Orpheus with each character portrayed by three (upper voice, lower voice and mime) which expands Platonic theory of forms.
I'm going to be posting more on aesthetics and their importance for human sense-making. But just for the experience kill for a ticket if it is revived or performed elsewhere.
For those who don't know (and shame on you if you didn't) we have just seen the bicentenary of Wagner's birth. Now I do my best to manage travel around the World to match my two great aesthetic passions namely Welsh Rugby and Wagnerian Opera. I saw the full Ring Cycle this year in Berlin and will be there for the Seattle performance later this year. Before that we had San Francisco, London & New York. San Francisco by the way was the best of those although Belin comes close. To attend any of the mature operas is to engage in one of the truly transcendent experiences available to humans. You are wrapped up, enfolded and transformed in a way that has little or no parallel.
Wagner of course is problematic in terms of politics and I plan a more reflective posting on that and other aspects in the next week or so. I had promised people that I would post on the Berlin Ring but the diabetes discovery that week rather disrupted my normal cycle of posting and reflection. I also realised that post my visit to Auschwitz in the middle of that cycle I needed to think and reflect more before doing so; it was a very Germanic production. So I have some more work to do there but I will build on his famous statement in a letter In 1948 the Revolution happens: all the mists of dawn fall away from me.
Today however I was at the WNO's excellent production of Lohengrin which is one of the transitionary operas along with Tannhäuser and the Dutchman. You can sense the masterworks to come, and this of all his opera's presents the chorus to best effect. Given that the great strength of the the WNO is its chorus – now professional but in the early days amateur – this was good news. Also the Millenium Centre on Cardiff Docks is to my mind one of the great modern opera houses in terms of both comfort (necessary for Wagner above all others given the length) and also acoustics. Emma Bell as Elsa was outstanding and so were the rest of the cast other than a missed note or rather phrase in her final minute by Susan Bickley as Ortrund. 
The whole opera hinges around the discourse between these two, one representing an abstract concept of Christian purity the other the older Gods of Europe. I personally think Wagner never resolved this one, but more on that in future posts. Above all this is the opera through which Wagner first explored the transforming potential of love, something that for me reached its sublime fulfilment in Tristan und Isolde. If it was Hitler's favourite opera (and it so reported) then he really didn't understand it.
I came out of the performance (an early start at 1500) to the evening sunlight in Cardiff Docks which is a form of home for me, it is the place my family comes from although then policemen entered only in threes which is rather different from the current middle class chic of the dining places. Its also the city with one of the best modern rugby stadiums so what more could you want?
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