Opera

Pure feelgood: ENO’s Cinderella reviewed

‘Goodness Triumphant’ is the alternative title of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, and you’d better believe he meant it. Possibly my reaction was coloured by last week’s experience with the weapons-grade cynicism of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, but honestly – it’s just so sweet. A gentle, put-upon girl gets her fairy-tale ending in the face of stepsisters and a stepfather who are basically buffoons rather than outright villains. We’re in the realm of panto, or children’s TV: nothing really dark can happen here and the only sorcery is worked by Rossini, whose fountain of laughing, crystal-bright invention is as life-affirming as Haydn, if he’d been born 50 years later and in Italy. Pure

A visit from the left-whingers

The Americans wanted an argument and they weren’t going to take no, or indeed yes, for an answer. They arrived late at night and parked their car width-ways across the driveway, blocking it, while ignoring the parking area a few feet further on where there is space for about ten cars around a central fountain. I went out and asked them politely to move and they said they would, when they were ready. But first they wanted to stand on the driveway and complain about the cost of the hire car, the narrowness of the Irish roads, and the fact that their flight had taken nearly two days with three

The decline of Edinburgh International Festival

Edinburgh International Festival was established to champion the civilising power of European high culture in a spirit of postwar healing. But its lustre and mission have now been largely eclipsed by the viral spread of its anarchic bastard offspring, the Fringe. In competition with the latter’s potty-mouthed stand-ups and numberless student hopefuls, the dignified old Festival proper struggles to make much mark on the hordes who descend on the city in August, inflating prices and infuriating the residents. Perhaps the kids will love it, but if this is the future of ballet, then count me out Nicola Benedetti, a splendid woman and a wonderful violinist, is now in her third

A Brigadoon better than most of us ever hoped to see

The village of Brigadoon rises from the Scotch mists once every 100 years, and revivals of Lerner and Loewe’s musical are only slightly more frequent. The last major London production closed in 1989; and if you know Brigadoon at all it’s probably through the lush 1954 movie. The new staging at Regent’s Park takes a very different approach. The songs, the basic story and the heather (lots of it, pink and looking only slightly artificial) are all still there, but the director Rona Munro has rewritten the book, backdating the action to the second world war and turning Lerner and Loewe’s American tourists into a pair of shot-down bomber pilots.

The drama of an Irish supermarket car park

The woman pushing a wheelchair was causing such a rumpus in the supermarket that whichever aisle I was in I could still hear her shouting. She was an Englishwoman abroad if ever I saw one. Resplendent in sleeveless vest and leggings, she was pushing her adult daughter around an Irish supermarket as a friend or family member pushed their trolley, and she was making sure that as many people as possible were aware of her. She was shouting so much, about everything, that nobody was taking the slightest notice, and she became the soundtrack of the shop, an integral background kerfuffle. Neatly dressed Irish people went about their business as

Why has the world turned on the Waltz King?

On 17 June 1872, Johann Strauss II conducted the biggest concert of his life. The city was Boston, USA, and the promoters provided Strauss with an orchestra and a chorus numbering more than 20,000. One hundred assistant conductors were placed at his disposal, and a cannon shot cued The Blue Danube – the only way of silencing the expectant crowds. Estimates vary, but the audience was reckoned to number between 50,000 and 100,000; in all, there must have been a minimum of 70,000 people present. This month’s Oasis reunion only played to 80,000. The result, in an age before modern amplification, was much as you might expect. ‘A fearful racket

Brilliant rewrite of Shakey: Hamlet, at Buxton Opera House, reviewed

‘There is good music, bad music, and music by Ambroise Thomas,’ said Emmanuel Chabrier, but then, Chabrier said a lot of things. I adore Chabrier – who couldn’t love the man who wrote España and turned Tristan und Isolde into a jaunty quadrille? – but it doesn’t do to take him too literally. Thomas ended his career as a notoriously crusty director of the Paris Conservatoire, and when the French musical establishment puts you on a pedestal younger composers invariably start hurling the merde. Scraps of Thomas’s music survive in all sorts of odd corners (a snippet from his opera Mignon crops up in The Life and Death of Colonel

Brave and beautiful: Longborough’s Pelléas et Mélisande reviewed

King Arkel, in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, is almost blind, and he rules over a kingdom of darkness. Debussy’s score is so luminous that it’s easy to forget just how dark it supposedly is, this mythical realm of Allemonde – even despite the libretto’s references to gloomy caves, shadowy castles and forests that block out the sunlight. Many productions take their visual cues from the music rather than the words, providing endless opportunity for shimmering effects and the subtle play of light and shade. Jenny Ogilvie’s staging for Longborough Festival Opera doesn’t just embrace the darkness; it goes all in. Shadows texture the huge, brutalist wall of Arkel’s castle and

I’ve rarely seen a happier audience: Grange Festival’s Die Fledermaus reviewed

‘So suburban!’ That’s Prince Orlofsky’s catchphrase in the Grange Festival’s new production of Die Fledermaus, and he gets a lot of wear out of it. You couldn’t really describe the Grange Festival as suburban – it’s hard to imagine a corner of the Home Counties that’s more remote from urban civilisation. No, if the vibe at Garsington is plutocratic, and West Horsley is pure Stockbroker Belt, the Grange Festival is definitely county, in a comfy, faded, Aga-and-chintz sort of way. The picnic takes precedence over the opera, and you’ll see evening wear that was new around the time that Alan Coren retired from Punch. Anyway, this lively Die Fledermaus knows

The cheering fantasies of Oliver Messel

Through the grey downbeat years of postwar austerity, we nursed cheering fantasies of a life more lavishly colourful and hedonistic. Oliver Messel fed them: born into Edwardian privilege, the epitome of well-connected metropolitan sophistication, he doubled up as interior decorator and stage designer, creating in both roles a unique style of rococo elegance and light-touch whimsy that sweetened and consoled – ‘a gossamer world of gilded enchantment’ as Roy Strong soupily put it. ‘Marie Antoinette would have felt at home in any of his settings.’ Like his rival Cecil Beaton, Oliver Messel sums up an era Posterity has not been kind to Messel. Only a little of his art has

Summer opera festivals have gone Wagner mad

Another week, another Wagner production at a summer opera festival. This never used to happen. When John Christie launched Glyndebourne in the 1930s, he hoped to stage the Ring. So he gathered a team of refugee musicians from Germany, who quickly assured him that it was impossible and he should stick to Mozart. The man who changed all that was Martin Graham, the plimsoll-wearing founder of Longborough Festival Opera, who died in April at the age of 83. Graham was irrepressible; a self-taught enthusiast. With no one around to tell him it couldn’t be done, he pushed ahead regardless, staging the Ring cycle twice in as many decades. And now

Thrilling: Garsington’s Queen of Spades reviewed

Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades is one of those operas that under-promises on paper but over-delivers on stage. It’s hard to summarise the plot in a way that makes it sound theatrical, even if you’ve read Pushkin’s novella, and I’ve never found a recording that really hits the spot. And yet, time and again, in the theatre: wham! It goes up like a petrol bomb. With a good production and performers, Tchaikovsky hurls you out at the far end feeling almost hungover – head swimming, and wondering where those three hours went. The cast and staging at Garsington are very, very good. True, you’d expect great things from any production

Sincere, serious and beautiful: Glyndebourne’s Parsifal reviewed

‘Here time becomes space,’ says Gurnemanz in Act One of Parsifal, and true enough, the end of the new Glyndebourne Parsifal is in its beginning. We don’t know that, at first: the sickbed image that’s glimpsed during the prelude doesn’t resolve itself until the opera’s closing scenes. In between, characters appear on stage in multiple forms, at different ages – past and future selves attendant on the present, whatever ‘present’ means in Monsalvat. Wagner, after all, makes it clear enough that time in the Grail Domain moves in mysterious ways, and his whole musical strategy reinforces that truth. So I can’t get too upset about those multiple personas, even though

James Heale, Angus Colwell, Alice Loxton, Lloyd Evans, Richard Bratby, Christopher Howse and Catriona Olding

38 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: James Heale analyses the splits in Labour over direction and policy (1:27); Angus Colwell asks if the ‘lanyard class’ are the new enemy (6:21); Alice Loxton explains why bite-sized histories have big appeal (9:58); Lloyd Evans reports on how Butlin’s is cashing in on nostalgia (15:00); Richard Bratby on Retrospect Opera, the non-profit record label that resurrects the forgotten works of British opera (20:40); Christopher Howse provides his notes of typos (27:27); and, Catriona Olding reflects on the death of her partner, the Spectator’s Jeremy Clarke, two years ago this week (32:15).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

The forgotten story of British opera

British opera was born with Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and then vanished for two-and-a-half centuries, apparently. Between the first performance of Dido in 1689 and the première of Britten’s Peter Grimes in 1945, serious British operas effectively didn’t exist – or so we’re told in textbooks and biographies. But what if there was a different story; a forgotten story of a lively, eclectic British operatic tradition that thrived in those missing centuries, and was buried only through a combination of accidents, economics and our enduring national snobbery about theatre that’s sung rather than spoken? And what if there was an organisation devoted to excavating these forgotten works and giving them

Our half-time scorecard on the Royal Opera’s Ring cycle

With Die Walküre, the central themes of Barrie Kosky’s Ring cycle for the Royal Opera are starting to emerge, and one of them seems to be wood. Not trees, so much; at least not as a symbol of life. After the rapid assembly of a world from theatrical nothingness (a bare stage), Hunding’s forest hall is simply a wall of blackened planks, with no World Ash Tree in sight. Then you notice the protruding hilt of the sword Nothung: no, that is the World Ash Tree, and Hunding has recycled it into building material. We knew he was a wrong ’un, but really: this is Sycamore Gap-level wickedness. Various ex-trees

Inspired: Scottish Opera’s Merry Widow reviewed

The Merry Widow was born in Vienna but she made her fortune in the West End and on Broadway. The original 1905 Viennese production was a shoestring affair. It was the English-language revivals in London and New York that made the Widow a global smash, and that happened only after extensive rewriting, done with Lehar’s wholehearted endorsement. Hanna Glawari (deemed unpronounceable) was renamed Sonia Sadoya, Zeta became Baron Popoff and the comedian George Graves inserted a humorous monologue about a chicken called Hetty. You probably had to be there. Anyway, the point is that operetta is protean. Rewrites, updates and changes of setting are not only forgivable; they’re intrinsic to

Why Londoners still love Ally Pally

It was conceived as a ‘people’s palace’ – and, as it turns 150 this week, Alexandra Palace continues to fulfil this brief admirably. There is something for everyone, and it’s not too sniffy about who ‘everyone’ describes. Hence the annual mayhem around the winter darts tournament, when everywhere between Muswell Hill and Wood Green is crawling with groups of very drunk men dressed as Smurfs, monks or the cast of Scooby Doo. The Royal Opera House this isn’t. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t more lofty, less populist offerings. I recall when Alexandra Palace’s theatre reopened in 2018 after an £18 million restoration, it debuted with an ENO production of

Imagine Dua Lipa releasing an album of Victorian parlour ballads

Grade: B+ This is unexpected. A bright young cellist – one of the brightest, in fact – makes his recorded debut with a collection of opera fantasies. In the 19th century, touring virtuosos routinely ransacked hit operas for melodies, then decked them out with every conceivable bit of flummery, dazzlement and top-end-tinsel, the better to excite their fans. They were wildly popular. The young Wagner spent a miserable few months in Paris compiling opera fantasies for cash in hand. The process basically radicalised him. Nowadays, there’s no less fashionable genre, and for the excellent 26-year-old American cellist Zlatomir Fung to record a whole disc of the silly things – well,

Poulenc’s Stabat Mater – sacred, fervent and always on the verge of breaking into giggles

It’s funny what you see at orchestral concerts. See, that is, not just hear. If you weren’t in the hall during Poulenc’s Stabat Mater would you even realise that the tuba uses a mute in the final chord? Visually, it’s hard to miss – the thing’s huge, whether standing on the floor or being heaved into the instrument’s bell. The sound? A muffled, matte effect, quite unlike the usual nasal buzz of muted brass. But how droll of Poulenc, and how utterly in keeping with the raffish, trash-fabulous aesthetic of Gallic brass writing: a world where no symphony is complete without a pair of honking cornets à pistons. And how