Opera

When Glyndebourne is the most perfect place on earth

Glyndebourne. There is no single quintessential example of English scenery, but this is one of the finest. The landscape is  old, and verdant. There has been tillage and pasturage here for millennia, and the outcome is harmony, as if tamed nature has embraced man’s gentle mastery. On a sunny summer evening, earth has not anything to show more fair Figaro. Anyone reading the libretto might conclude that earth had not anything to show more absurd. What is this nonsense: a Feydeau farce mitigated by a bit of carpentry? There is a simple answer: the best of all comedies, apart from Shakespeare — and more easily, more continually laughter-worthy than even

Opera review: Longborough’s tiny stage takes on the Ring – and wins

There are no two ways about it: Wagner’s Ring cycle, the biggest challenge that any opera company can face, has been mounted with triumphant success in Longborough, and now presumably has been laid to rest. Nine years ago, at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, I saw the first attempt to stage it, in Jonathan Dove’s drastically cut version, and with skeletonic orchestration, and though there was some decent singing, on the whole I was unimpressed. I couldn’t believe that during the course of the following decade Martin and Lizzie Graham would succeed in turning a large chicken shed in Gloucestershire into a comfortable theatre, seating more than 400 spectators, and with

Letters: The Met Office answers Rupert Darwall, and a defence of Bolívar

Wild weather Sir: Weather and climate science is not an emotional or political issue — even though emotions and politics run high around it, as illustrated in Rupert Darwall’s article (‘Bad weather’, 13 July). However, it is important that opinions are rooted in evidence, and the article contains numerous errors and misrepresentations about the Met Office and its science. Here are a couple of points. The assertion of the Met Office’s ‘forecast failure’ is just wrong. The Met Office is beating all of its forecast accuracy targets. We are consistently recognised by the World Meteorological Organization as one of the top two most accurate operational forecasters in the world. While no

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 13 July 2013

Deborah Ross reviews two films for us this week. The first is Pacific Rim, a ‘giant monsters v. giant robots’ film, and to be perfectly honest, that’s about all she has to say on the matter. If you do want to find out more, here’s the trailer: Her second film this week is ‘The Moo Man’, which is almost the opposite of Pacific Rim. ‘Instead of being a big, noisy film with nothing to say, it’s a small, quiet film with quite a lot to say’. A documentary following a dairy farmer around his East Sussex farm, it is ‘beautifully and lovingly and discreetly filmed’, it says everything it has

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week | 14 June 2013

Sir Alfred Munnings lived his life in true bohemian style, ‘carousing with gypsies and horse-trainers, living rough and constantly on the road’. Summer in February is based on his early life living in Cornwall, with Munnings played by Dominic Cooper: ‘Irrepressible as an electric eel, and twice as dangerous’. But does the film live up to Munnings’ art – and, of course, to the hype? The problem with films about artists is, says Andrew Lambirth, the art. But Summer in February is ‘as vivid and visually complex as a Munnings masterpiece’ – in fact, almost as good as the book. Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, on at the Lyttleton, has been

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week

Coronation Day across the Globe was first broadcast in 1953, by the Home Service, and until last Sunday, it wasn’t broadcast again. In order to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the cororation, the BBC decided to delve into their archives and re-broadcast it. It might have been the first televised coronation, but the BBC’s radio team were ‘determined to show off what they alone could do’, writes Kate Chisholm in her radio review this week.  This determination resulted in messages of goodwill to the Queen sent from places ranging from the Australian outback to the top of Ben Nevis. In 2012, however, the programme seems ‘weirdly outdated’. Nevertheless, says Kate:

Spectator Play: The highs and the lows of what’s going on in arts this week

Christopher Purves began his musical career playing doo-wop and rock and roll with the band Harvey and the Wallbangers . These days however, the stages of Glyndebourne and La Scala are his new stomping ground. In this week’s magazine, Julian Flanagan chats to the baritone about his transition from pop to opera, the pivotal events of his opera career, and the ambitions he has yet to fulfil. In his latest role, Purves plays Walt Disney in Philip Glass’s The Perfect American at the ENO, which has proved to be a physical challenge for the singer. But ‘I’ve never gone for the easy life’, he tells us. His career path so far

From Harvey and the Wallbangers to Covent Garden: Christopher Purves interviewed

One of ‘the great operatic artists of the present’ sips coffee in his quiet Oxford kitchen. The artist is Christopher Purves, the description Michael Tanner’s (Arts, 13 March). In recent years, Purves’s fluid, eloquent baritone and considered acting have received rolling acclaim: Glyndebourne, La Scala, Teatro Real Madrid; Falstaff, Mephistopheles, Beckmesser and more. This year has seen his psychotic Protector in Written on Skin at Covent Garden, and now Walt Disney in Philip Glass’s The Perfect American at English National Opera. But first we talk about his children, whose pictures mosaic the kitchen cabinets, and mine. Purves is my cousin Edwina’s husband, and my son Benedict’s godfather. Over 20-odd years,

Spectator Play: what’s worth watching, listening to or going to this weekend | 17 May 2013

It feels like the only film anyone’s been talking about recently is The Great Gatsby. Given that even the release of the films’ multiple trailers created international news stories, it seemed inevitable that not everyone was going to love it. So, what does Deborah Ross say to the film’s critics? ‘You can tell them to go hang’. Gatsby, she says, is ‘fantastically enjoyable, and a blast. It is wild and rampant and thrilling.’ So there you go – listen to our critic, not anyone else’s. Desert Island Discs is one of Radio 4’s crowd-pullers but, as Kate Chisholm points out in this week’s radio review, the format ‘ is not best

Opera: Wozzeck, Die Zauberflöte

At the close of the first night of Wozzeck at the Coliseum there was a longer dead silence than I can remember after any operatic performance I have been to, and when applause began it sounded reluctant. Everyone was stunned by the intensity and involvingness of the preceding 100 minutes, the work having been performed straight through, no interval. Virtually every element in the production contributed to this shattering effect, and any shortcomings would be easily corrigible and with one exception trifling. Perhaps the first thing to say is that the conducting of Edward Gardner and the playing of the ENO orchestra were at least as fine as any that

Spectator Play: what’s worth – or not worth – watching, listening to or going to this weekend

Mark Millar appears to be the typical Spectator reader until you discover – as Peter Hoskin did when he interviewed him for this week’s magazine – that he ‘spends most of his time on bizarre world in distant corners of the multiverse… surrounded by assassins dipped in blood’. Why? Because he’s a comic-book writer – and a comic-book writer who Hollywood loves. The first film adaptation of his work, Kick-Ass, made $100 million at the box office, and its sequel Kick-Ass 2 – which comes out in July and the trailer to which is below – is expected to do just as well. Not bad for a man whose first

Spectator Play: what’s worth – or not worth – watching, listening to or going to this weekend

I’m So Excited is the latest offering from Pedro Almodóvar who, Deborah Ross says, she would usually love. But is I’m So Excited quite so, well, exciting? The trailer, which promises singing gay flight attendants, The Pointer Sisters, and plenty of booze, is below. And Deborah’s verdict? You can read it for yourself here. Do you have a favourite opera? In this week’s Spectator, Simon Courtauld declares his love for Verdi’s Don Carlos. It’s not about the structure, or the production, or all the little things that opera critics often criticise, he argues, but more about ‘the glorious music and the drama of the royal court in 16th century Spain.

Spectator Play: what’s worth watching, listening to or going to this weekend

In a week where the news has been filled with stories about a certain ‘strong woman’, Kate Chisholm has found another strong woman to write about. In this week’s radio column, she argues that the radio presenter Sue MacGregor managed to be the only female presenter on the Today programme without the need to deepen her voice or worry about power dressing or pussy-bow blouses. Like Thatcher however, MacGregor ‘has always done things her way’, and her radio programme The Reunion is a prime example of this. In this week’s episode, MacGregor unites five survivors of the King’s Cross fire; here’s a clip: This week’s television review comes from James

Spectator Play: Audio and video for what we’ve reviewed this week

If you succumbed to Downton fever, then the BBC’s latest period-drama, The Village, might have attracted your attention. But if it was Downton Revisited that you were after, you might have been sorely disappointed, says James Delingpole in his Television column. Set in 1914 Derbyshire, The Village is everything that Downton is not: ‘taut, spare, grown-up, accomplished, dark, strange and poetic, according to the critics’, and according to James, both clichéd and clunky. Here’s a clip from the first episode: Classical quartets seem to be all the rage in Hollywood at the moment, as this week’s Cinema review – Clarissa Tan on ‘A Late Quartet’ – illustrates. The film is,

Mozart magic

It was some time since I’d been to a performance of Mozart’s greatest though not his deepest opera, Le Nozze di Figaro, one of the works of which I can’t imagine ever tiring. And it is, despite some heavy vocal demands, an opera which normally suits students at the music colleges well. There weren’t any obvious grave shortcomings in the first night’s performance of it at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, but it annoyingly failed to achieve lift-off. Nerves may well have a lot to do with that: the playing of the Overture had enough problems of intonation among the winds, which later played beautifully, to suggest that.

Le Nozze di Figaro

I went to two of the most familiar operas in the repertoire this week, one in HD from the New York Met, the other at the Royal Opera. Both were given in decent if not, with some exceptions, outstanding performances. The experiences led me to think again about the differences between seeing an opera onstage in a theatre and seeing one ‘live’ in the cinema. Our intermission hostess, Renée Fleming, repeated the usual formula about how there is no substitute for actually being present in the theatre where the opera is taking place, but I wonder what she would say if challenged on that point. There is a question of

From the archives: Brown, the opera

Perfect for Friday evening is this: the Gordon Brown-themed version of Ko-Ko’s ‘little list’ from The Mikado that Jeff Randall wrote for us back in 2007. The chorus should be sung, according to Jeff, by three people who have been quite prominent this week: Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper… The clunking fist, Jeff Randall, The Spectator, 3 March 2007 Britain doesn’t do Lord High Executioners, but if it did, Gordon Brown would probably be the best in the world. The prospect of the Chancellor in this role occurred to me while listening again to Gilbert & Sullivan’s masterful satire, The Mikado. Ko-Ko makes his entrance with ‘a little

Flash Brindisi

Four minutes of La Traviata at a Philadelphia market. Four minutes of spreading surprise and sweetness and just a little joy too. Splendid: Relatedly: The Sound of Music in Antwerp’s Central Station.

Obama! The Opera!

A friend emailed me this today. Some internet sleuthing tracked the original source to this forum. L’Obama, ossia L’Avvento del Messia Opera in Tre Atti Personaggi: Barracco Obama, Il Messia, Redentore del Mondo……………………….Tenore Miracoloso Santa Micaela della Revoluzione, sua sposa……………………………………..Soprano Amaro Giovanni Maccheno, Senatore, Avversario dello Obama…………………………Basso Buffo Sara Palino, Governatrice del Alaska e Reginetta di Bellezza…………..Coloratura Buffa Guglielmo Priapo, Ex-Presidente………………………………………………..Tenore Mentitore Hillaria, sua Sposa, altra Avversaria dello Obama………………………Soprano Ambizioso Elena Tomasso, una strega……………………………………………………..Contralto Venenoso Giuseppe Bideno, “Piedimbocca”………………………………………………….Tenore Buffo Il Spirito di Giorgio Secondo, L‘Abominazione……………………………Baritono Cattivo Il Spirito di Ruscio Limbago, Bocca Grande……………………………………..Basso Noioso Jeremia Ritto, un uomo pazzo, pastore dello Obama……………………..Basso Demagogico Guglielmo Ayers, terroristo Americano, amico dello Obama……………..Tenore

Carmen May Seriously Damage Your Health…

Anthony Holden in The Observer: Carmen is back at Covent Garden for the first time since last summer’s Orwellian smoking ban and I’m delighted to report that the Royal Opera has taken not the slightest notice. If there’s any opera in which onstage smoking should be mandatory, this is it. Cigarette girls and soldiers alike all puff their heads off during the first act, to the point where the fumes drift gratifyingly into mid-stalls. And, even better, there are none of those ludicrous health-and-safety signs out front, as, for instance, at the Old Vic, to warn us of the perils of entering a smoke-stained auditorium. Of course in plucky Scotland