Opera

It was some time since I’d been to a performance of Mozart’s greatest though not his deepest opera, Le Nozze di Figaro, one of the works of which I can’t imagine ever tiring. And it is, despite some heavy vocal demands, an opera which normally suits students at the music colleges well. There weren’t any obvious grave shortcomings in the first night’s performance of it at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, but it annoyingly failed to achieve lift-off. Nerves may well have a lot to do with that: the playing of the Overture had enough problems of intonation among the winds, which later played beautifully, to suggest that.

I went to two of the most familiar operas in the repertoire this week, one in HD from the New York Met, the other at the Royal Opera. Both were given in decent if not, with some exceptions, outstanding performances. The experiences led me to think again about the differences between seeing an opera onstage in a theatre and seeing one ‘live’ in the cinema. Our intermission hostess, Renée Fleming, repeated the usual formula about how there is no substitute for actually being present in the theatre where the opera is taking place, but I wonder what she would say if challenged on that point. There is a question of

Perfect for Friday evening is this: the Gordon Brown-themed version of Ko-Ko’s ‘little list’ from The Mikado that Jeff Randall wrote for us back in 2007. The chorus should be sung, according to Jeff, by three people who have been quite prominent this week: Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper… The clunking fist, Jeff Randall, The Spectator, 3 March 2007 Britain doesn’t do Lord High Executioners, but if it did, Gordon Brown would probably be the best in the world. The prospect of the Chancellor in this role occurred to me while listening again to Gilbert & Sullivan’s masterful satire, The Mikado. Ko-Ko makes his entrance with ‘a little