Opera

Perhaps I should come clean straightaway and admit that, despite the fact that OperaUpClose is about to celebrate its fifth birthday, I’d never been to see one of its shows before last week. This has not been a conscious decision; maybe, though, I’d been unconsciously put off by the company’s early braggadocio — by the manner in which it gleefully trumpeted the Violetta-like decline of ‘traditional’ opera so that it could offer itself up as a timely cure. I can’t say that I’ve ever been attracted, either, by the prospect of a luscious Puccini score reduced for three instruments, or of singers, many only just out of music college, tackling

During my opera-going lifetime the most sensational change in the repertoire has, of course, been the immense expansion of the baroque repertoire, with Monteverdi, Rameau and above all Handel being not only revived but also seen now as mainstays in most opera houses. To think that only 50 years ago it was regarded as daring for Glyndebourne to mount L’incoronazione di Poppea, even in Raymond Leppard’s abbreviated and sumptuous version, which has been most unfairly denigrated in recent years. Yet just as remarkable, though hardly ever remarked on, has been the instatement of Puccini (who never needed reviving, since after initial scandals and flops he has always been more or

Rather than brave the boos and the first reprise of Frank Castorf’s half-hearted Ring at Bayreuth, I decided to pay a visit to Munich and catch the last two days of its annual opera festival. Less of a festival, as one usually understands the term, than a ramping-up of activity in the final month or so of its regular season, it mixes new stagings with starrily cast revivals. I caught one of each: a new production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, with Christian Gerhaher in the title role, and a revival of La forza del destino that was rendered a little less starry by the last-minute illness of Jonas Kaufmann — that’s

Some of my most enjoyable evenings, when I reviewed opera weekly for The Spectator, were spent at the Royal College of Music, in the tiny but elegant and comfortable Britten Theatre. The performers, onstage and in the pit, are mostly current students of the RCM, led by one or another expert but puzzlingly little-known conductor. Repertoire is reasonably adventurous, but Handel, Mozart, Britten are perhaps the backbone. One of the pleasures of those performances is spotting the singers that one is sure will go on to big operatic careers, if they choose to. I spent a lot of time doing that, and almost always got it wrong. You have to

To suggest that the ageing Jules Massenet identified himself with the title character of his Don Quichotte is nothing new — and late works such as this by definition encourage biographical interpretations. One of the main liberties of the opera, premièred in 1910 and very loosely based (via a contemporary verse play) on Cervantes, was to bring the character of Dulcinea (here ‘La Belle Dulcinée’) out of the realm of the imagination and to embody her as a distinctly flesh-and-blood mezzo-soprano. That the first singer to perform Dulcinée, Lucy Arbell, was the object of Massenet’s infatuation only emphasises the biographical parallels, all of which give extra layers to a gently

God, opera singers are touchy. You dare to analyse how they look, you dare to criticise the enormous subsidies they get, you have the temerity to call someone an opera singer who hasn’t been vetted by an opera commissar and they go all Al-Qaeda on you. Yesterday the Today programme had an interview with Russell Watson, a decent, popular singer whose shtick includes shouty renditions of opera arias. The presenter introduced him as an opera singer and the poncey opera world went ballistic. ‘He’s not an opera singer!’ they bleated, ‘He’s just a singer!’ Note that twatty ‘just’? No art form that was confidant about what it does would ever feel

Should fat be an issue in opera? Are our opera critics overgrown schoolboys with a body fixation? To judge from reports and editorials in print and online over the last two days, you can answer ‘no’ and ‘yes’ respectively. Simple? No, not really. On Monday morning, the critics of various national newspapers published reviews of Glyndebourne’s new production of Der Rosenkavalier. These reviews included comments about the physical appearance of Tara Erraught, the young mezzo-soprano cast as Octavian. These comments have been widely disparaged and taken as evidence of ‘body shaming’ on the part of ‘male, middle-aged critics’. My first inkling of this debate came when many of my Facebook friends (mostly the opera singers) recommended an open letter by Alice Coote (on Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped

I remain puzzled that, so far as I know, no daily or weekly paper carries reviews of the New York Met opera relays (I’m not a denizen of the blogosphere, where they may well swarm). To judge from the number of cinemas that show these live relays, and from how crowded most of them are, clearly more people see opera in this form than in any other. And many of those people will be experiencing opera live for the first time in cinemas, and may well never go to an opera house. I suspect there is a strong element of snobbery involved on the part of non-reviewers, as if one

A revival of Anna Nicole will open the Royal Opera House new season, it was announced today. And students will be able to get in for £1, tweeted Kasper Holten proudly. A quid! So that’s an orchestra, an excellent cast of 17, a chorus, a production team of two or three dozen, two hours of words and music and a very good conductor all for less than one pot noodle. The news might baffle. The received wisdom is that opera tickets are too high. Far too high. So high that they are the principal (if not sole) reason why the art form has fallen behind the others in the popularity stakes.

Always try to get the worst seats for the opera. Upper circle. Foyer. Toilet. The nearest bus stop. The further back the better. You’ll regret it if you don’t. There really is nothing more off-putting than being able to see the singers. Opera up close, as Princess Margaret once said, is just two fat people shouting at each other in a large room. And then there’s the clown make-up and trannie costumes to deal with. It all makes much more sense from afar, where it assumes a lovely dreamy abstract fuzz. Was that a smile? Or a stroke? Who knows. The words and music will carry you along. But even ‘good’ theatrical

Opera seems almost always to have been acutely concerned with its own future. These days this is most often manifested in occasionally desperate, sometimes patronising attempts to entice new audiences to the art form. A new three-way initiative between Aldeburgh Music, the Royal Opera and Opera North takes a different tack by enabling a new generation of composers and librettists to try its hand in this most exacting art form. The initiative’s first fruit was a double bill premièred in Aldeburgh before being shown at Covent Garden’s Linbury Studio Theatre and Leeds’s Howard Assembly Room. That these two short pieces, about 45 minutes long each, should feel like studies for