English touring opera

English Touring Opera has begun its autumn season and the miracle isn’t so much that they’re touring at all these days, but that they do it so well. Two generations back, this was the natural condition of opera in the UK: not Netrebko at Covent Garden, but agile, medium-scale companies playing at the Wolverhampton Grand or the Sheffield Lyceum alongside the panto and the 1950s equivalent of Friends: The Musical and An Evening with Sandi Toksvig. Don’t believe it? It’s all in Alexandra Wilson’s new book Someone Else’s Music, which is out now, and which all British opera buffs should read because it’ll make their jaws drop. Case in point:

Britten’s Peter Grimes turns 80 this June, and it’s still hard to credit it. The whole phenomenon, that is – the sudden emergence of the brilliant, all-too-facile 31-year-old Britten as a fully formed musical dramatist of unignorable force. W.H. Auden had urged him to risk everything – to step outside his admirers’ ‘warm nest of love’ – and in the first moments of Peter Grimes, Britten does precisely that. The folk-opera bustle of the opening tribunal scene dissolves into the desolate bird cry of the first Sea Interlude and straight away, you’re in the presence of something unimaginably vaster and more true. It pins you to your seat. That was

When does a new opera enter the repertoire? Judith Weir’s Blond Eckbert has only had a couple of UK productions since its première at English National Opera in 1994, but it’s been doing reasonably good business on the continent, where its source material – a story by German writer Ludwig Tieck – presumably has more cultural currency. In any case, it’s back now, as part of English Touring Opera’s autumn roster, and both the staging (by ETO’s general director Robin Norton-Hale) and the performances deserve to make Weir’s haunted, oddly unsettling opera a lot better known. If my toes had curled any harder I think I’d have dropped a shoe

In 1937, John Barbirolli took six pieces by Henry Purcell and arranged them for an orchestra of strings, horns and woodwinds. Nothing unusual about that: arranging baroque music for modern symphony orchestras was what famous conductors used to do. Beecham and Hamilton Harty re-upholstered Handel. Mahler did something similar with Bach, then directed the result from a grand piano, and wouldn’t you give anything to have heard him? All good clean fun in those innocent days before the advent of historically informed performance. ‘Can you tell me what was happening?’ asked a woman on the way out It’s unusual to hear these things revived now, and curiouser still when the

Lightning sometimes strikes twice. English Touring Opera hit topical gold last spring when, wholly by coincidence, they found themselves touring with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian anti-war satire The Golden Cockerel. Now the company’s general director Robin Norton-Hale insists that their current tour of Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims – written in 1825 to celebrate the coronation of King Charles X of France – was fixed long before this month’s events at Westminster Abbey were even a glint in the Earl Marshal’s eye. Really? In truth, opera planning cycles generally operate in years rather than months. On the other hand, Il viaggio a Reims is an extravagant heap of dramatic (if not musical)

You wouldn’t like Tamerlano when he’s angry. ‘My heart seethes with rage,’ he sings, in Act III of Handel’s opera – spraying coloratura about the stage like Silly String on a 1980s kids’ TV show. That’s the deal with baroque opera: the emotional register is extreme and you’re either in the moment or you might as well leave the theatre. Literal realism, clearly, is not the point – making it even more necessary for a modern director to sketch in some hint of a social or cultural framework in which we can locate and comprehend these hyper-real characters. The music is too hot and too strong to work as drama

Blame it on Serge Diaghilev. Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908 and never saw the première of his last opera, The Golden Cockerel. When the great showman finally presented it in Paris in 1914, it was as Le Coq d’Or: a spectacular opera-ballet hybrid, with colourful, folk-inspired designs by Natalia Goncharova that came to define the Ballets Russes in its imperial phase. That was the form in which it came to Britain, where the Evening Standard described it as a ‘farrago of love-making, black magic and ingenuous inconsequence’ before turning to the real news – the costumes. And that’s the basic impression – a fabulous but flimsy slice of Slavic exotica –