Shakespeare's Macbeth is full of fleetingly funny moments. Halfway through the regicidal Second Act, we stumble upon a castle porter gibbering on about the bodily consequences of drink - "nose-painting, sleep and urine". Verdi's opera mostly shuns these vignettes for the bigger, more concentratedly darker picture. The music works itself up into an ornamented mania and for the most part broods on low orchestral colourings. There is nothing funny about a single second of it.
opera reviews
Jasper Rees
We love Gareth Malone, don’t we? We are big fans of the Pied Piper of primetime. And so we should be. The youth of today seem impressively eager to down tools, put away childish things like knives and drugs and safe-cracking equipment, and follow this slightly weedy and totally uncool choirmaster out onto the concert platform. Our glorious new coalition should be using him to tackle crime.
stephen.walsh
“Art and love, these have been my life,” sings Tosca in Puccini’s opera. “Music or words first?” the Countess worries in Strauss’s Capriccio. Now in the third of Grange Park’s operas this summer we have the warring advocates of tragedy, comedy, melodrama and farce in Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges. Could it be guilt at its own idle detachment that draws country-house opera into the agony of self-reflective theatre? Well, Tosca is barely self-reflective – an excuse for a big aria and an off-stage cantata. But Prokofiev’s Oranges – like that other, and better, Strauss concoction, Ariadne auf Naxos – derives both humour and instruction from our lurking fear that all these stage passions, triumphs and disasters are mere trickery and greasepaint. And it does so in music that vibrates with energy and sardonic wit from first bar to last, music strictly devoid of serious agony.
David Nice
It's not hard to imagine the Bloomsburyites frolicking around the exquisite Garsington grounds in mock-ups of scenes from Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. Lady Ottoline, chateleine of the enchanted garden, would writhe as eastern sorceress Armida, though Lytton and co would hardly make a very butch bunch of opposing crusaders. To be honest, there wasn't much more testosterone or sex on show in Rossini's dramatically flimsy, musically elaborate operatic nod to Tasso last night, and the gaudy onstage attempt at a garden of delights couldn't compare with the real thing. But it's something at least to field four light Rossini tenors, albeit of varying ability, and with Jessica Pratt's phenomenal final scene, a star was born.
igor.toronyilalic
The sun rode high, the gardens glowed green, my lemon berry pudding bulged proudly and, on stage, the familiar 24-carat farce that is Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro was working itself out to perfection. It was Garsington - and my baking - at its very finest, a fittingly triumphant opening to the final season at Garsington Manor (they move down the road to Wormsley Estate next year). Sets, direction, singing - two young standouts in particular - all had a part to play, as did the conducting of Douglas Boyd.
stephen.walsh
By far the most uncomfortable – perhaps the only uncomfortable - thing about Richard Strauss’s last opera is the date of its first performance. In October 1942 the battle of El Alamein was raging and the British were bombing German cities while the Munich opera audience were entertained by a rambling disquisition on the respective merits of poetry and music as art forms, set in an eighteenth-century French château. What modern director could resist this provocation? Stephen Medcalf positively draws attention to it in his new staging for Grange Park Opera by transplanting it bodily to – wait for it – 1942, and having the singers arrive in forties gear before climbing into their rococo outfits.
Crude maybe. But the idea has interesting consequences. Capriccio is a costume drama about staginess and artistic effect. At one point, after seemingly endless arguments about words, music and the theatre, Strauss’s heroine, the Countess Madeleine, instructs the participants to collaborate in an opera; and what will the opera be about? Naturally, the scenes we’ve been witnessing – in other words, Capriccio. The apogee of all this meta-play-acting is reached when two of the singers playing the German forties performers dressed as rococo Frenchmen act out a scene-within-the-scene composed by Olivier, Strauss’s poet figure. By the end of a long evening of such stuff, it’s rather a relief when the characters reappear one-by-one in their original wartime clobber, and the Countess delivers her punishing final monologue about art and love in a bombed-out house (designer Francis O’Connor) with a backdrop of Dresden in ruins.
There are different truths about Capriccio. One is that it is simply unendurable. Another is that it was an extraordinary comfort in 1942 to be reminded that there was music as beautiful as Strauss’s and higher things in life than Lancaster or Dornier bombers, just as the men in the trenches in 1917 had read Prufrock to be reminded of toast and tea. I’m somewhere in the middle on this. Strauss (and his librettist, Clemens Krauss) made a mistake, in my opinion, to get bogged down in disputes about prima la musica, dopo le parole – music or words first - when the real core of his music is sensual passion. Capriccio comes to life when the Countess and Olivier, who is in love with her, launch into an emotional exchange allegedly about the composer Flamand’s having set Olivier’s sonnet to music, and in the trio that follows, in which Flamand (also in love with the Countess) sings it. For much of the rest the piece meanders self-indulgently and at length, the old master brooding over past costume romances and soprano aristocrats and operas-within-operas. Strong theatre it rarely is for long.
Lively staging and stylish singing can invigorate it, and Grange Park provides them here. Susan Gritton’s Countess is outstanding. The role has grande dame written all over it, but Gritton plays it with freshness and wit and persuades us that she is, as Flamand raves, young and radiant, though a widow. She has just that silvery sheen on the voice, without edginess, that Strauss seems to have liked in the first Countess, Viorica Ursuleac, and her line is superb until the monologue, where traces of tiredness perhaps show, understandably. Andrew Kennedy’s Flamand and Roderick Williams’s Olivier are likewise nearly faultless, well-observed portraits of characters whose differences reflect more than those of their trades – at least one hopes so.
The third personage in these disputes, the theatre director La Roche, is finely taken by Matthew Best – a suitably raffish figure but majestic to excess, as required, in his big solo about the birth of Athene and the fall of Carthage, musically the most original pages in the score. I also enjoyed very much Sara Fulgoni’s larger-than-life Clairon, the Count of Quirijn de Lang, an interesting and promising young baritone, and the inevitable Italian tenor and soprano, Wynne Evans and Sally Johnson - the most factual image of musicians down the ages, battling for their fees and meanwhile stuffing themselves with cake and sherry.
Stephen Barlow conducts, stylishly enough, though the performance takes time to get into its stride and the playing of the English Chamber Orchestra has its rough edges early on but soon improves. I wonder, also, whether keeping the German text was a helpful decision. Krauss’s libretto is wordy, to put it mildly, and needs to be heard, precisely for reasons that supply one tier of the drama being played out, ironically, in the music.
graham.rickson
Among the many pleasures of Donizetti's Mary Stuart is the fun of watching a chunk of primary-school history filtered through a florid bel canto imagination. There are moments when you want to cry out, “That’s not what happened!” But it’s so fast-moving, so well-paced, that you soon stop complaining and just surrender.
Adam Sweeting
The BBC's opera season is a great idea, even if the results have been variable. Plaudits for Antonio Pappano's zinging Opera Italia must be weighed against a barrage of rotting fruit for Diva Diaries, a farcical extended commercial for soprano Danielle de Niese. And while Stephen Fry is the unsurpassed master of plugging Twitter and iPads, his claimed passion for Wagner doesn't seem to have inspired illuminating insights, let alone any decent jokes.
william.ward
Golfing for Cats: Alan Coren once invented the perfect book title on the basis that if you combined those who follow the activities of Tiger Woods with those who adore smaller domestic felines, you have a massive demographic primed to buy your last tome. Likewise for TV commissioning editors, there must be something tempting about the high-concept hybrid.
David Nice
To both paraphrase and contradict one of the many French critics who savaged young Bizet, his first stage work of genius mentions no fishers in its gawky libretto but offers strings of pearls in the music. That's to say, much more than the famous duet, the least moving number on offer last night. I’ve come to love this fitfully ravishing score’s gentle, intimate side but had given up on seeing a less than tawdry staging to solve the opera’s gimcrack orientalia.