Richard Bratby | The Spectator columnists & writers

An electrifying, immersive thrill: Scottish Opera’s Candide reviewed

The first part of the adventure was getting there. Out of the subway, past the tower blocks and under the motorway flyover. A quick glance at Google Maps and into a patch of litter-blown scrub. Someone bustles up alongside me: ‘Are you looking for the opera?’ I am, yes: and my guess is that the cluster of clipboard-y types in high-vis tabards next to that warehouse probably marks the entrance. We’re waved in: ‘Big Cock’ proclaims a graffiti-covered wall. There’s a stack of shipping containers, an improvised bar (cold beer and Scotch pies) and a big tented space filled with drifting crowds and that apprehensive, slightly unsettled murmur you always hear when – unusually for an opera audience – no one really knows what they’ve let themselves in for.

A classic in the making: Glyndebourne’s Poulenc double bill reviewed

One morning in the 20th century, Thérèse wakes up next to her husband and announces that she’s a feminist. Hubby, who’s been in either of two world wars, just wants his bacon for breakfast. Too bad: declaring herself male, Thérèse has already detached her breasts and hurled them spinning into the middle-distance. But they keep hanging around, great pink wobbly orbs floating just above her head. She takes out a gun and blasts them to shreds. Renaming herself Tirésias, and with her husband trussed into a moob-enhancing corset, she sets out to run the world, leaving the men to work out how to make babies alone. Babies (we’ve been told by an evening-suited Prologue) being an urgent national requirement. More fizz, anyone? Les Mamelles de Tirésias comes after the interval in Glyndebourne’s Poulenc double bill, and it probably works best on an audience that’s been suitably lubricated, though Poulenc’s score (he adapted the libretto from a surrealist farce by Apollinaire) is a natural stimulant in its own right.

Convincing performances and unexpected sounds: Opera Holland Park’s Delius/Puccini double bill reviewed

Delius and Puccini: how’s that for an operatic odd couple? Delius, that most faded of British masters, now remembered largely as a purveyor of wistful aquarelles. And…well, and Puccini. Early, neglected Puccini, true, but this is Opera Holland Park, where they make it their mission to rescue the waifs and strays of Italian late romanticism, and see how they scrub up. Demonstrable dud by unfashionable Englishman vs youthful ambition from Italian opera’s ultimate marquee name. We all knew, in advance, how that was likely to play out. And we were all wrong. It turns out that both Puccini’s Le Villi (1884) and Delius’s Margot la Rouge (1902) were written for the same long-running competition that gave us Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana.

With everything working properly, this would have been a lot of fun: Grange Park’s La Gioconda reviewed

There are composers who are known for a single opera, and there are operas that are known for only a single aria. But to be a 19th-century Italian opera composer and to be remembered solely for your ballet music – well, that’s a bit special. As the orchestra tiptoed into the ‘Dance of the Hours’, in Act Three of Grange Park Opera’s production of Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda, the audience sighed with recognition. There were a few giggles, too. Ten minutes later, as the ballet slammed to its finish (without a note of actual – y’know – singing), they exploded into the loudest ovation we’d heard all night. It was probably always going to happen. The choreography (Sarah Fahie was credited with ‘Movement’) was amusing: two gender-bending dancers in floaty orange frocks played out a larky courtship.

A bleeding, inch-thick hunk of verismo sirloin: Royal Opera’s Cav and Pag reviewed

One legacy of lockdown in the classical music world has been the sheer length of the 21-22 season. In a typical year, most orchestras and urban opera companies would be winding down by mid-May. Not this time: after two years of postponements, and with lost income to recoup, seasons are stretching out like the finale of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto. Rumour maintains that audiences are being stretched too thinly, and although it’d be naive to infer anything fundamental from a smattering of vacant seats, it did feel surprising to see empty patches for the first night of the Royal Opera’s Cav and Pag. Absent Kaufmaniacs, disappointed by Jonas’s latest no-show? (He cancelled last month with Covid-related vocal problems, and has since confirmed that he will not appear later in the run.

Had the air of a Blue Peter Christmas special: Grange Festival’s The Yeomen of the Guard reviewed

The Yeomen of the Guard has been called the ‘English Meistersinger’ but the more you think about that, the dafter it gets. It’s not just the very obvious difference in scale and means between Wagner’s five-hour national epic and Gilbert and Sullivan’s sprightly opéra comique. Wagner’s whole drama builds to a collective affirmation of German art. The Yeomen begins by setting up a fantasy of an English golden age – the Tower of London in the 16th century – then systematically cuts it to ribbons. Act One’s gallant hero becomes Act Two’s callous seducer, whose march towards his own happy ending leaves a trail of collateral damage: a spiral of lies, two all-but-forced marriages and the unheeded emotional destruction of at least one central character.

A thoroughly enjoyable grand old heap of nothing: The Excursions of Mr Broucek reviewed

Sir David Pountney, it appears, has been to Prague. He’s booked himself a mini-break, he’s EasyJetted out, and after (one assumes) necking a couple of pints of unfiltered Pilsner, he’s splurged the entire design budget for Janacek’s The Excursions of Mr Broucek on the loudest tourist tat that the Mala Strana has to offer. Scale it up, pile it on stage; job’s a good ’un. There’s a snow globe and a Lenin candle; there are dinky toy houses and a cardboard pop-up of the Charles Bridge. A massive souvenir plate (badly cracked) hangs over the stage, blazoned with a panorama of Hradcany Hill and the single word – at least two feet high – PRAHA. The Excursions of Mr Broucek, in case you hadn’t guessed, takes place in Prague, and Leslie Travers’s multicoloured toy shop of a set is one of the more surreal delights of this rare British staging.

A completely satisfying operatic experience: Opera North’s Parsifal reviewed

When Parsifal finally returns to Montsalvat, it’s Good Friday. He’s trodden the path of suffering but now the sun is shining. Confused, he turns to the aged and broken Gurnemanz: why, on this day of utmost grief, does not the whole of nature mourn? Gurnemanz gestures at the woods and meadows, glowing, as Wagner tells us, in the morning light: ‘You see, it is not so.’ At this point in Opera North’s new concert staging, Parsifal (Toby Spence), Gurnemanz (Brindley Sherratt) and Kundry (Katarina Karneus) are sitting on the lip of the stage, as if having a quiet chat and – with a gentle relaxation of the shoulders, the smallest widening of the eyes – somehow embodying between them all the wonder, tenderness and slowly dawning hope of some of Wagner’s most profoundly compassionate music.

The opera that wouldn’t die

Serves Ethel Smyth’s opera magnificently: Glyndebourne’s The Wreckers reviewed

You’ve got to hand it to Dame Ethel Smyth. Working in an era when to be a British composer implied an automatic cultural cringe towards the continent, she didn’t miss a beat when Henry Brewster, the librettist of her 1906 opera The Wreckers, chose to write in French. The incoming music director at Covent Garden was the Frenchman André Messager; perhaps, Smyth reasoned, ‘to compose this opera in French would be the best chance of a performance in England of an English opera!’ Good call: 116 years later, you get the distinct impression that the opportunity to première the unheard French version of the opera (it’s been done numerous times in English) may have tipped the balance for Glyndebourne. Picnics, after all, are more easily digested when you don’t have to worry about the words.

Claude Vivier ought to be a modern classic. Why isn’t he?

April is the cruellest month, but May is shaping up quite pleasantly and the daylight streamed in through the east window of St Martin-in-the-Fields at the start of I Fagiolini’s latest concept-concert, Re-Wilding The Waste Land. The centenary of Eliot’s poem is the obvious hook. But whether you’re counting from the Rite of Spring riot in 1913, Schoenberg’s Skandalkonzert the same year, or further back to Strauss’s Salome or Debussy’s Faune, music’s modernist moment occurred some time earlier. Which is helpful, in a way, because it freed the group’s director Robert Hollingworth from the limitations of chronological programming and gave him scope to do something a bit more interesting, and possibly a bit more Eliot-esque.

Even Nelsons’s miscalculations are fascinating: Leipzig Gewandhaus/Andris Nelsons, at the Barbican, reviewed

Imagine growing up with a whole orchestra as your plaything. Richard Strauss’s father was the principal horn of the Munich Opera, and doting relatives funded publication of the teenage Richard’s earliest compositions. At the age of 19 he was assistant conductor of the Court Orchestra in Meiningen, and had rather got used to having world-class musicians at his command. It was the spirit of the age in fin-de-siècle Central Europe, a time and a place where it was perfectly normal for an opera house to have 16 spare horn players hanging around to play offstage effects, where conductors derived their authority from royalty and if (as Alma Mahler describes) the Maestro wished to hear Brahms’s Horn Trio, he’d simply summon the necessary players to his suite and give them their orders.

Too affectionate, not enough cruelty: Don Pasquale, at the Royal Opera House, reviewed

There are many things to enjoy in the Royal Opera’s revival of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, but perhaps the most surprising is that the director plays it straight. This was my first encounter with Damiano Michieletto’s newish (2019) staging, and the plan was to approach it without preconceptions. (If we’re about to experience, say, a Bold Feminist Re-Imagining, I’d prefer to deduce it from the evidence on stage.) But for an opera premièred in 1843, Don Pasquale is distinctly old-school, with all its commedia dell’arte assumptions intact and whirring away like clockwork. The elderly miser Don Pasquale disinherits his lovelorn nephew and marries a compliant young bride who instantly becomes an abusive shopaholic scold.

A fine cast, superbly conducted – just don’t overthink the production: Royal Opera’s Lohengrin reviewed

To be a Wagnerite is to enter the theatre in a state of paranoia. Mainstream culture has decided that Wagner was uniquely wicked; that’s just how it is, and it’s futile to retort that we seem comparatively relaxed about, say, Richard Strauss’s membership of the Reichsmusikkammer, or Stravinsky’s post-1945 anti-Semitism. Or that within recent memory Prokofiev’s October Cantata was presented in the UK as a bit of kitschy fun. (Never mind the dead kulaks: enjoy those accordions!) True, Wagner was an immeasurably greater artist, so he should be held to higher standards. No quarrel with that, at least not here and not now. But it does mean that in any given production of a Wagner opera, you sit waiting to be clobbered with totalitarian symbolism as the director reaffirms that the man who created this artwork was Literally Hitler.

A spirited attempt to fix a show that’s never really flown: Utopia, Limited reviewed

Utopia, Limited (1893) is a rare bird, and one that every Gilbert and Sullivan completist simply has to bag. The point of completism, of course, is to acquire an overview: if artists are truly original, everything they created should illuminate the whole. But what if a career tailed off, or ran to seed? It’s just going to be depressing, isn’t it? By the time they began their penultimate opera, Gilbert and Sullivan hadn’t collaborated for three years. In fact, they’d barely spoken. Goaded back into harness, they produced a comedy that really ought to have sparkled and yet somehow… well, put it this way: even the late D’Oyly Carte company waited until 1975 before attempting a revival. Scottish Opera deserves only praise for this latest resuscitation effort.

Pitch-black satire drenched in an atmosphere of compelling unease: ETO’s Golden Cockerel reviewed

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 – that has lodged itself in western memory, reinforced more recently by the Mariinsky company and Valery Gergiev.

Comes so close to greatness but succumbs to prejudice: Royal Opera’s Peter Grimes reviewed

No question, the Royal Opera is on a roll. Just look at the cast list alone for Deborah Warner’s new production of Britten’s Peter Grimes. Allan Clayton sings Grimes, Bryn Terfel is Captain Balstrode, and John Tomlinson is Swallow, with Mark Elder conducting. Even before you get to a supporting cast that includes premium names such as James Gilchrist, Jennifer France and Catherine Wyn-Rogers, you’ve basically got the three pre-eminent British male singers of their respective generations, singing their boots off in the greatest of all British operas under the baton of the conductor who (it’s naive, but let’s dream) really ought to succeed Antonio Pappano when he leaves the Royal Opera in 2024. If that’s not exactly what a flagship national opera company ought to be giving us, I don’t know what is.

Spot-on in almost every way: Scottish Opera’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream reviewed

Scottish Opera’s new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to open in midwinter. Snow falls, fairies hurl snowballs and the aurora borealis flickers and arcs across the darkened sky. Meanwhile Britten’s score swoons and sighs, its drowsy clouds of string tone wafting above gently snoring basses to create an atmosphere whose every glimmer evokes perfumed warmth. It should be a contradiction, but it doesn’t feel that way at all. Dominic Hill’s direction, Tom Piper’s designs and Lizzie Powell’s lighting (it’s hard to separate their contributions) create a visual world of opposites, illusions and inverted expectations; a setting for magic and misrule, which last time I checked is pretty much exactly what’s needed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whether Shakespeare’s or Britten’s.

Astonishing, if unnecessary, grandstanding: Barbara Hannigan’s La voix humaine reviewed

I think it was when she leaned forward and balanced on one leg that Barbara Hannigan jumped the shark. It wasn’t just a question of physical agility, although that was impressive enough. Hannigan performed her on-the-spot acrobatics while singing; the results were projected on to a big screen by three remote-controlled cameras, which zoomed in on her eyes, merged blurry images of her face and occasionally froze, meaningfully, on a particularly arresting posture. She did all this at the same time as conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in Poulenc’s one-woman opera La voix humaine, though that wasn’t really what this was about; at least, not by the time she was on one leg. It reminded me of the Brummie schoolkid who, taken to an orchestral concert and asked for his thoughts, replied: ‘The man with the little stick was a very good dancer.

Deserves to become an ENO staple: The Cunning Little Vixen reviewed

Spoiler alert. The last words in Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen come from a child playing a frog. The story has come full circle — there was a frog near the start of Act One, and naturally you assume it’s the same one. But no: ‘That wasn’t me. That was my grandaddy. He used to tell me about you.’ It’s the final sad-sweet sting; the orchestra swells and the curtain falls. Perfection. Or so Janacek thought, anyway: ‘To end with the frog is impossible,’ insisted his German translator Max Brod — the same well-meaning meddler who either rescued or (according to taste) wrecked Kafka. Brod wanted a final hymn to nature from the central human character, the Forester. You know, a proper peroration. Janacek, thankfully, put him straight back in his box.

Old-school excess, star power and spectacle: Royal Opera’s Tosca reviewed

London felt like its old self on Friday night. Possibly it was just me; when you visit the capital once a week, your impressions will only ever be snapshots. Still, it’s been a while since I’ve battled such a flood tide of commuters on the ramp at Euston, or since the Royal Opera House seemed to be buzzing quite so excitedly. Crowds were four deep at the champagne bar; a latecomer in a spangly tux squeezed past and into his seat, grinning a slightly tipsy apology. And at the heart of it all — the succulent hunk of well-aged rump steak generating all this sizzle — was a revival of Jonathan Kent’s lavish period staging of Puccini’s Tosca, with a marquee name in the title role. That’d be Angela Gheorghiu, who headlined this production when it first appeared in 2006.

Handel as Netflix thriller: Royal Opera’s Theodora reviewed

The Royal Opera has come over all baroque. In the Linbury Theatre, they’re hosting Irish National Opera’s production of Vivaldi’s 1735 carnival opera Bajazet; unsurprisingly, its first appearance at Covent Garden. Upstairs in the big room, they’re doing Handel’s Theodora: premièred at Covent Garden in March 1750 and then ignored by the Royal Opera and its forebears for the next 272 years. In fairness, it isn’t actually an opera. It’s an oratorio, and it was a flop. Handel attributed its neglect to the fact that the story ‘is a virtuous one’, though the music’s emotional appeal is uncompromising, and the basic morality — Christians and virtuous pagans vs a tyrannical Roman governor — is clear-cut. Well, we can’t be having that — this is 2022, after all.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: modernist master

To look at a picture of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like contemplating an image of a mountain. Not the elegant, keen-eyed Edwardian intellectual whom we sometimes glimpse on CD sleeves or in concert programmes; I’m thinking of the portraits from the last decade of his long life. By the 1950s ‘RVW’ had been the father of British music for so long that he already seemed like part of the landscape, and he looked it too. The craggy jowls, the weathered thatch of grey hair; that questioning gaze — and beneath it all, those great, tumbling scree slopes of rumpled tweed. In his 150th anniversary year he’s still there, towering in the middle distance of national memory. Looking at the anniversary programming, you wouldn’t necessarily think that anything special had been planned.

Clear, complex and gripping: Opera North’s Rigoletto reviewed

Say what you like about that Duke of Mantua, but he’s basically an OK sort of bloke. A bit of an arse, sure; the kind of TOWIE-adjacent, skinny jean-wearing reality star who’d commission photographic portraits of himself and recruit an entourage of hipsters and B-boy wannabes. But really, his worst crimes are against taste. His neon-lit crib might be hung with hideous religious art, but his parties are relatively free of the nudity, quaffing and non-consensual dry-humping that tends to characterise Act One of Verdi’s Rigoletto. In Femi Elufowoju Jr’s new staging for Opera North, the Duke lays on a hog roast for his posse but doesn’t forget to order pizza for his security staff. The Deliveroo courier got a big laugh as they pedalled in across the stage.

Not pleasant, and not in tune, but unarguably compelling: Royal Opera’s Nabucco reviewed

Nabucco, said Giuseppe Verdi, ‘was born under a lucky star’. It was both his last throw of the dice and his first undisputed hit, composed after the failure of Un giorno di regno and the death of his young wife and two children had driven him to abandon music outright. The story (at least, as Verdi told it) was that the director of La Scala had forced him to accept a libretto on the Biblical story of Nebuchadnezzar, and that when a page fell open on the chorus ‘Va, pensiero’ the muse returned. Citation needed, possibly, but there’s no question that the ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ is one of those once-in-a-lifetime melodies; a tune (as Elgar might have put it) to ‘knock ’em flat’. It’s not every night at Covent Garden that the first curtain call — and the loudest applause — goes to the chorus.

A booster shot of sunlight: Unsuk Chin’s new violin concerto reviewed

Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra began the year with a world première. Unsuk Chin’s Second Violin Concerto opened with the soloist, Leonidas Kavakos, completely alone in front of a silent orchestra, playing phrases that rocked back and forth until, suddenly, they were striking sparks. As well they might; Kavakos, after all, is the reason that the concerto exists — the violinist whose ‘burningly intense’ (the composer’s words) artistry has prompted Chin to break her self-imposed rule of writing only one concerto for any given instrument. She explained in the programme notes that ‘the solo violin part forms the foundation of the whole score, the soloist triggering all of the orchestra’s actions and impulses.

Musical conservatives ought to love identity politics

It’s 2022 and classical music is, again, dead. It’d be surprising if it wasn’t. In 2014 the New Yorker published a timeline by the industry analyst Andy Doe showing the precise chronology of the decline and fall. Ageing audiences in the 21st century, the gramophone in the 20th, the dangerous new technology of the pianoforte in the 1840s: all, in their time, were considered proof that the rot was terminal. Doe traced the root of the problem back to a papal bull in 1324, giving new potency to Charles Rosen’s remark that ‘the death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition’. Anyway, the fatal blow this time is the Great Awokening. The symptoms are allegedly widespread in university music departments: students who can read music are being made to check their privilege, and Beethoven, if he hasn’t been cancelled as a sonic rapist, has been relegated to the status of ‘above average composer’.

The genius of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker score

By all accounts, Tchaikovsky struggled to compose The Nutcracker. It wasn’t his idea of an effective ballet scenario, and he was unimpressed with the choreographer Marius Petipa’s prettified storyline. Mid-composition, he learned of the death of his younger sister Alexandra. ‘Even more than yesterday, I feel absolutely incapable of depicting the Kingdom of Sweets in music,’ he wrote. But inspiration can be counterintuitive. On a good day, Tchaikovsky could write as fluently as any Victorian serial novelist, churning out forgettable piano pieces (as he put it) ‘like batches of pancakes’. Projects like The Nutcracker put him through purgatory but the result, with hindsight, was nothing less than the sound of Christmas.

Reprehensible – but fun: Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s Complete DG Recordings reviewed

Grade: B It must have been an interesting day in the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s press office when Blair Tindall’s memoir Mozart in the Jungle hit the bookshops in 2005. ‘He sat in the desk chair, pushed aside the first oboe part of Rossini’s Italian Girl in Algiers and tapped a pile of cocaine on the glass’ runs a typical anecdote. Even in 2005, it wasn’t really what anyone expected to hear from a former member of Orpheus — a youthful, conductor-less New York outfit who used to pose for album covers dressed in spotless white. For a brief moment during the 1980s CD boom, Orpheus was going to save classical music — offering stylish, low-calorie interpretations for collectors who craved something healthier than Karajan’s Berlin Philharmonic but weren’t ready to embrace the valveless veganism of period instruments.

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