The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
In one of his finest essays, Gore Vidal recalls that when he worked as a scriptwriter for MGM the Wise Hack always used to advise his toffee-nosed team that ‘shit has its own integrity’. If crap is what you’re producing, make sure there are no signs in it that that’s what you think it is.
2012 has been an undistinguished year in opera, at any rate in the UK. A combination of cutbacks and the promise of stops being pulled out next year for the bicentenaries of Verdi’s and Wagner’s births and the centenary of Britten’s has led to the big companies counting on our anticipation. Except that, in the
The way the director James Conway sees it, Monteverdi’s last opera L’incoronazione di Poppea is about that most delicate of subjects, adult abuse by youngsters. That isn’t what he says in his programme note for his production at the Royal College of Music, where he claims that the opera is about power, ‘love, yes, but
Some operas become, thanks partly to the frequency with which they are produced, victims of their own popularity. The most obvious sufferer is Carmen, which is a no-winner for singers and directors alike. As soon as the curtain rises and you see lemon trees and swaying hips, your heart sinks and you spend the interval
I think I have developed a crush on Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore, which is strange, considering that it is so evidently adorable a work that most opera-goers fall for it straight away. I have never been averse to it, in the way that I am to quite a lot of Donizetti’s work, but in the light
As usual on the rare occasions when Vaughan Williams’s last and largest opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress, is performed, the new production at English National Opera has been greeted antiphonally, with cries of ecstasy mingled with indignation that it is so little performed from one side, and moans of boredom and weariness from the other. Though
The Guildhall School of Music and Drama is outdoing itself in putting on a triple bill of little-known operas, two by Massenet and one by Martinu. What is still more remarkable is that GSMD has put them all on before, though I think in different productions. This time round the designer Yannis Thavoris has produced
I thought my 27th Wexford Opera Festival since 1972 was going to be one of the best. I had seen and enjoyed the Cilea and Chabrier operas on the bill at Holland Park and Opera North in the 1990s, and I was intrigued whether Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet was viable music theatre. Wexford
The legend of Faust is perhaps the dominant one in post-Renaissance Europe, yet it resists satisfactory artistic realisation. The most celebrated versions of the legend, such as Marlowe’s and Goethe’s, seem to me to be utter messes aesthetically, retaining their status through the great passages they include rather than through any coherence. Thomas Mann’s Dr
About two of the operas I saw in Leeds this week there is a serious question as to whether or not they are comedies. The third, Gounod’s Faust, is clearly not meant to be; I’ll be writing about it next week. The new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni by Alessandro Talevi is jokey and fast
The Met Live in HD series for 2012–13 got off to a brilliant start with a new production of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, the most warm-hearted of comedies — in fact, a work so genial that I’m always surprised it doesn’t lapse into insipidity. This production by Bartlett Sher made that seem less of a danger
What begins with the borrowing of some capital ends 14 hours later with cataclysmic disaster. It is a drama thousands and thousands in the western hemisphere watch these days — from Seattle to New York, from London to Milan, and from Munich to St Petersburg. Ticket prices are high, although sponsorship money flows in luxuriant
How should you feel at the end of a Ring cycle, before — at any rate if you’re a reviewer — starting to list the pros and cons? Nothing very simple, obviously, but some kind of exaltation, of however confused or complex a kind. Famously Wagner had severe problems with the conclusion to the cycle:
There is no experience faintly comparable to sitting in an opera house at the opening of Wagner’s Ring cycle, knowing you will be watching and listening to the whole thing in the space of a week. The opening E flat, especially when it emerges as it does at the Royal Opera in total darkness, the
‘Tell a dream and lose a reader’ was one of Henry James’s most immediately practical if obvious pieces of advice to fellow authors. Dying in 1916, he didn’t have much chance to experience surrealism in its numerous manifestations, and one can’t imagine his responding positively if he had. For the abandonment of memory, of motive,
As any regular opera-goer knows, next year is uniquely one for three major operatic centenaries, two of them, Verdi’s and Wagner’s, bicentenaries, while Britten was born only 100 years ago, but seems to have been dead for a very long time. So we can expect numerous series — of performances, recordings, broadcast radio and TV
Going to the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith for the annual season of Tête à Tête is a chancy affair, though one can be sure of a very high standard of performance, both vocally and instrumentally. It helps, of course, that none of the studios is large, so the singers can produce their voices at conversational
Glyndebourne’s last offering this season is one of the most stylish things it has done for a very long time, Ravel’s two brief operas directed by Laurent Pelly, who was responsible for its brilliant Hänsel und Gretel in 2008. It may seem odd that Ravel’s pair — though they were conceived quite separately, and years
My first visit to Dorset Opera, last year, left me very impressed. If anything this year was even better, though I found one of the three operas dull. In last year’s programme, I seem to remember, we were promised an Olympically themed opera, Jesse Owens, but that didn’t materialise, nor was there any mention of
If I said what I really thought about Götterdämmerung at the Longborough Festival, of which I saw the last of four performances, anyone who wasn’t there would think I was madly exaggerating; but anyone who was there would agree — I have run into several people who were at one or another of the performances,
The Royal Opera season concluded, as is now customary, with an evening in which the participants in what used to be the Vilar Young Artists programme, in the light of events renamed the Jette Parker Young Artists, are paraded to show their progress. They make a truly international team, as the slip inside the programme
Verdi’s art reaches its summit in Otello, and in doing so reveals both his greatness and a paradox that seems inseparable from it. The plot is harrowing, more so than any of his other operas, and Verdi exploits its agonising capacities to the full. The glorious love duet which concludes Act I is something to
There are two places in Le Nozze di Figaro where the music undergoes a brief but potent change, which indicates how much deeper the undercurrents are than the busy actions we are witnessing. If either of these is short-changed or mismanaged, the whole work is rendered less moving and serious than it really is. The
In the late 1970s the Royal Opera announced that it would be performing Berlioz’s Les Troyens and Wagner’s Ring in alternate years, the idea being that the two great 19th-century operatic epics would prove equally popular. We never found out whether they would have done, since while the Ring cycles continued, Les Troyens never got
This week’s opera-going afforded one example of truly great art, and one of its plausible counterfeit. To deal with the latter first: no one can deny that Billy Budd is one of Britten’s most accomplished pieces, a virtuoso exercise in the use of large orchestral forces, and in restriction to male post-pubescent singers. And musically
Welsh National Opera’s new production of La Bohème, which I saw last week in Birmingham, is striking in a variety of ways, but its outstanding feature is the conducting of Carlo Rizzi. One tends to think that of all operas Bohème can look after itself, and up to a point that is true. Bashed out
It struck me for the first time at the latest revival of David McVicar’s production of Richard Strauss’s Salome that this opera, Strauss’s first to maintain a place in the repertory, and its successor Elektra are, for all their differences, companion pieces. Even before reading the late Patrick O’Connor’s excellent article ‘Happy Families’, the best
English Touring Opera ended its spring tour in Cambridge this year with three performances of The Barber of Seville and two of Eugene Onegin, both in English translation, the former done without surtitles, the latter with. Neither of them really needed them, since the Arts Theatre is small and most of the singers enunciated with
It’s taken me a shockingly long time to realise how great Verdi’s Falstaff is, and I still wouldn’t agree that it is his greatest opera, which fully paid-up Verdians tend to think. It may be a measure of my progress, though, that I got a lot of pleasure out of the new production at Covent
