Arts Reviews

Monteverdi’s last and greatest secular masterpiece, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, is an opera we get far too few chances to see. The last time it was performed on stage in London was in the largely brilliant ENO production of 2000, which has never been revived. That does have the consequence, however, that one is always pleasurably shocked by it anew, and though the Zurich Opera’s one-night stand at the Royal Festival Hall was only a partly acted concert performance, the impact was undimmed. Nikolaus Harnoncourt brought with him the Orchestra La Scintilla of Zurich Opera, around 30 players of authentic instruments, and a starry cast, the most surprising feature of which

The Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg paid a concentrated visit to the Barbican last week, performing four theatre pieces on three evenings. I failed to see the first, a concert performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s meretricious opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, so my palate was clear for the second evening, a double bill of Stravinsky, two of his supreme masterpieces, both dense, compact, overpowering in the energy and intensity they conveyed. The first was the ballet (not danced) Les Noces, a precursor of minimalism, but laden with content and for all its repetitiveness and wilful ignoring of the changing moods of the text, indeed very largely of the

Towards the end of his Diaries, Kenneth Tynan complains that the older he gets, the more estranged he feels from his glamorous persona. In a sense, this is a rift that still exists today. Tynan’s posthumous reputation grows ever more glorious with each passing year, yet if you bother to read anything he wrote — particularly the Diaries — he seems completely idiotic, like a parody of a dissipated champagne socialist created by Craig Brown. There are constant reminders of just how ridiculous he was capable of being in Tynan, a one-man show performed with an air of nicotine-stained melancholy by Corin Redgrave. On the birth of his son, the

The new production of Mozart’s penultimate opera La Clemenza di Tito (why is the title not translated?) by ENO generates an atmosphere of resigned, dignified and respectful boredom. That is hardly at all the fault of anyone but Metastasio and Mozart, the latter of whom was pouring almost all his genius into The Magic Flute. As Tovey writes, ‘The score of Clemenza di Tito as a whole gives one a nightmare impression of the Zauberflöte having dried up and gone wrong.’ Actually, most of the score is amazingly remote from its sublime contemporary, sharing with it only harmonic simplicity. Metastasio’s ludicrously incredible characters, especially Tito himself, defy vivification. If we