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.
opera reviews
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.
alexandra.coghlan
The opening night of Le nozze di Figaro was not so much an opera of two halves as an opera of two teams. In the pit we had Sir Colin Davis and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House offering a crisply incisive rendering of Mozart’s score; onstage we had the Royal Opera Chorus and a selection of soloists, most of whom seemed set on a rather different – and, in the case of the chorus, downright lacklustre – rendition of the score.
Jasper Rees
Is there anywhere Stephen Fry will not go? I mean in documentaries. We’ve had Fry on depression and Fry on America, Fry on HIV and Fry on endangered species. Movingly, we’ve had Fry on who he thinks he is, an odyssey in which he discovered that much of his family fetched up in the gas ovens. Fry on Wagner? Admit it, you weren’t surprised. You didn't think, not another bloody comedian investigating, in pursuit of ratings, a subject of which he knows next to nothing. Fry, as everyone knows, knows everything.
David Nice
The backlash begins here with the first of Flavia Rittner's three documentaries: not an operatic wannabe or a gushing celebrity outsider to present, only a conductor who knows and loves his job inside out and a parade of gorgeous, energetic singers all at the very top of their hard-working game in state-of-the-art productions.
David Nice
Was Rossini, credited with the unsinkable comment that Wagner had "beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour", hoist by his own petard in his last and grandest opera? For while Wagner, at least in performances as well-paced as the one I heard of Siegfried in the hands of last night's valiant field marshal Dominic Wheeler, really ought to have no dull moments, Rossini's Guillaume Tell offers many stunning quarters of an hour but just a couple which are so-so. In Chelsea Opera Group's blazing concert performance, however, none of it was less than compelling.