Intermezzo

high on Bach

A New Zealand woman who raised 20 cannabis plants in a secret den played them Bach to help them grow, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

never mind the bollocks here's Cecilia Bartoli

Sacrificium - Cecilia Bartoli / Il Giardino Armonico - Barbican, 24 November 2009

Cecilia Bartoli's annual trip to the Barbican was this year tied in with her new CD of rare castrato arias, Sacrificium. Fortunately she didn't try and replicate the cover look (does she regrette rien, I wonder).

Instead, with Il Giardino Armonico's sprightly strings sawing away behind her, she sprang on mid-intro in full highwayman gear - well it is panto season - and launched into straight into a fearsome stretch of trademark coloratura like a runaway sewing machine, thigh boots planted manfully, cloak swirling behind her. A layer came off each couple of songs until she was left standing in nothing but shirt, boots and leggings. Then it was time for a costume change - a golden frock with its red skirts hitched up to show the man-pants still in place.

Last year she was so confident in the power of her bel canto offerings, she didn't even bother to buy a new frock, sporting the same one as the year before.

Were this year's theatrics a tacit acknowledgement that the material on the new CD is less strong than her previous offerings? A selection of display arias by Handel's less talented contemporaries, their original purpose was to showcase the talents of the greatest castratos - rapid coloratura, trills, long-breathed phrases, messa di voce and so on. In the writing at least, the art took second place to the craft. When la Ceci gave us Handel's simple yet touchingly lovely Lascia la Spina as an encore, the difference between sound workmanship and true genius was made painfully obvious.

Nevertheless, she gave the flawed offerings her considerable all, and as a display of her skills it was hard to fault.  Fantastic breath control and agility are combined with unmatched warmth and expressiveness. Once or twice the tuning went awry in the faster passages, but it hardly mattered. A tendency to close her eyes and shut out the audience in the slower arias was more of a problem than it might have been with stronger material. In the faster ones, the exhilarating vocal gymnastics and Bartoli's sheer exuberance were enough disguise for any lack of inspiration in the writing. No-one can match her for commitment to her material, nor for the passion she puts into every note. But I was pleased to see from the programme that her next project is the considerably more worthy Giulio Cesare.

After the short-change divas of the South Bank, it's worth pointing out that there were two full hours of music, at least half of it (probably more like three quarters) featuring the headline singer - and the tickets were cheaper, too.

Say what you like about Cecilia Bartoli, she knows her audience, she knows exactly what they expect, and she gives it to them time after time.

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Anna Caterina Antonacci at Wigmore Hall

Anna Caterina Antonacci / Donald Sulzen - Wigmore Hall, 23 November 2009

Fauré Cinq mélodies de Venise   Hahn Tyndaris and Phyllis from Études latines, Fumée, L’énamourée, Le printemps   Bachelet Chère Nuit   Respighi Three canti all'antica, Pioggia, Nebbie   Zandonai Paolo, date mi pace! from Francesca da Rimini   Encores: Mascagni Son pochi fiori from L'Amico Fritz   Trad. Lu cardillo  

Despite her superb Carmen a couple of years back, the Royal Opera House have criminally failed to invite Anna Caterina Antonacci back yet. So it's fortunate she's become a regular Wigmore Hall visitor. This lunchtime recital caught her at her very best. 

Disregarding the hour and the atrocious wintery weather outside, she embodied la bella figura in a bewb-framing strappy black gown crowned at the cleavage with a giant rose, a sequinned lace shawl twinkling around her shoulders.

The temperature was low for Fauré's Cinq mélodies de Venise, her silvery singing poised and elegant, but so cool it kind of made you wonder what the fuss was about. Antonacci really comes into her own where there's more at stake emotionally, as the rest of the programme showed.  

She was ardent and engaging in a handful of Hahn songs, dramatically involving in operatic extracts from Zandonai and Mascagni. A rich palette of colours united words and music. Her commanding physical presence communicated so much more, with an understated and unselfconscious projection perfectly scaled to the recital hall.  Her dark, gleaming soprano was as easy and effortless as a jazz singer's, evenly produced from top to bottom. Picture painting is not her greatest strength but she can inhabit an emotion so totally you could believe she's making up the words as she goes along.

The recital was also broadcast by Radio 3. It's available on iPlayer until 30 November and repeated on Saturday at 2pm. Although recording never seems to do Antonacci full justice, it's still worth a listen.

ENO's Messiah brings tidings of great joy - £10 tickets

The discounting really has started early for ENO's new staging of Handel's Messiah.

It doesn't even open until Friday 27 November, and already tickets are reduced to £10 courtesy of the Evening Standard.

Go here to book.

And get your LOLs here now while stocks last - I fancy you'll find precious few in Deborah 'srsly' Warner's new production.

 

The Tsarina's Slippers at the Royal Opera House

Cherevichki / The Tsarina's Slippers - Royal Opera House, 20 November 2009

The Royal Opera House have chosen to bestow upon their new production of Tchaikovsky's Черевички (Cherevichki or Tcherevichki) an appropriately Royal title - The Tsarina's Slippers - in place of The Little Shoes, as it's usually known in English. Me I prefer the punchier and more accurate Little Boots, but sadly that one is already taken.

Francesca Zambello's folksy production with its mostly-Russian cast is intermittently entertaining but I spent much of its three hours looking at my watch and dreaming of crisps.

The opera's lack of momentum, which must play a part in the relative rarity of performances, can't be blamed entirely on the director though. Tchaikovsky doesn't seem to care much for his central story in which Vakula, a simple village smith, enlists the Devil's aid to procure a pair of the Tsarina's fancy boots, the only way he can win the heart of a vain village girl. He seems more interested in Vakula's witchy mother and her gruesome suitors, not to mention the numerous opportunities to slip in a quick ballet.

However enchanting some of these diversionary episodes are, they all fragment the story to the point where it's hard to care less about any of the characters. You could wander out for ten minutes and not really miss anything (a point to bear in mind when the BBC broadcast this over Xmas). The inevitable cuts don't help either. Why keep in all the royal minister's endless windbagging, but cut out the Cossacks' entrance to court, which explains how Vakula gets in to see the Tsarina?

For all the Royal Opera's attempts to sell this opera as Tchaikovsky's hidden comic side, it's telling that Vakula's longest and most effective scene is not some festive fairytale nonsense, but the one where he's contemplating suicide at the water's edge.

Two things hold this production together. The first is Alexander Polianichko's marvellous conducting. He doesn't just display the music, he conducts the whole opera with a splendid ear for drama and support for the singers. Inevitably some colour and detail is sacrificed for pace, but I think it's the right choice. The other is the design. Mikhail Mokrov's charmingly naive sets and Tatiana Noginova's traditionally-inspired costumes fill the stage with busy colour, though at the expense sometimes of any clear idea of location.

Apart from that, it's a collection of set pieces, some more successful than others, with the highlights coming from the Royal Ballet's contributions. Alastair Marriott went with a traditionally-styled pastiche that fits the production like a glove. His perfectly-judged idiomatic choreography includes an underwater nymph dance, a royal ball and a couple of delightful pas de deux, Gary Avis lofting tiny Mara Galeazzi with a grace and purity of line that made an affecting contrast to the riotous clamour of the village peasantry. A huge hairy dancing bear in pointe shoes (we guessed Bennet Gartside from the size) added more colour to the grand party finale.

The biggest applause of the night went deservedly to the team of spectacular high-kicking Cossack dancers who emerged from beneath the skirts of a giant golden Tsarina effigy  - their chapkas and p0rn 'taches cunningly concealing the fact they come from Nottingham.

The singing was Russian through and through, full of heart and gusto. Not a lot of finesse though. The likeable Vsevolod Grivnov had to work hard to be heard, but his lyrical tenor made Vakula the pick of the bunch. Olga Guryakova's powerful but wayward soprano made it only too clear that the part of the shoe-loving Oxana is not an easy sing. At least the petulant charm that enraptures Vakula came more easily than the notes.

Maxim Mikhailov was desperately underpowered as the Devil, as none of his tail-twirling antics could conceal - was his prosthetic piggy snout a problem perhaps?  Larissa Diadkova's mumsy witch Solokha would put the wind up no-one. At this stage in her long career she sounds more timeworn than her remarkably smooth brow might suggest, but that's no handicap in this part. The one unequivocally successful non-dancing scene ended in a quartet with her four lovers concealed in coal sacks - some splendid deep Russian voices especially from Vladimir Matorin as Chub.

The vocal shortcomings might have been less obvious if the singers had been better directed. But it appeared everyone had been choreographed into position and left to their own devices, leaving the task of entertaining the audience to the scenery. It almost worked.

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Vienna Philharmonic bring Beethoven to Paris

Vienna Philharmonic / Thielemann - Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Paris, 16 November 2009

An all-Beethoven programme may sound like the most conventional scheduling ever. But in London, the fear of being labelled anything less than cutting-edge means it's the last thing you're likely to hear.

No such reservations for the Wiener Philharmoniker, who are taking a whole series of Beethoven concerts around Europe with Christian Thielemann over the next few months, culminating in a back-to-back cycle at Berlin's Philharmonie next December. Mit CD/DVD tie-in (alleged production cost - $1m) natürlich. Sadly London is not included on this particular tour - the ineradicable Lorin Maazel will, yet again, prepare our annual helping of Wiener.

Paris however was bestowed with Maestro Thielemann and Beethoven's 7th and 8th symphonies. A skinny sliver of sparkling new Jörg Widmann was to have slipped in between, but the overextended composer never got round to writing it, so the Egmont Overture it was instead.

All the better for Christian Thielemann, a Beethoven specialist and famously resistant to the lure of the new. Thielemann is on something of a high at the moment in the German media. Recently voted Germany's most popular conductor by a mile in a newspaper poll (though he'd probably pwn the least popular title too), he's also just been appointed next chief conductor of the Dresden Staatskapelle and, something of a coup, has snatched a coveted Xmas TV concert slot from the mitts of Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic. All this is big stuff in Germany, a country that actually cares who runs its orchestras and how.

The artistic understanding between Thielemann and the Wieners is evident not just from the musicians' total attentiveness (and a few doggily adoring glances). Thielemann spins the music out in long, polished phrases, sculpting each section with dramatic shifts in tempo and dynamic. The orchestra breathe with him, the rapport is absolute. Each idea emerges with utter clarity.

From their London performances it can hard to fathom why the Vienna Philharmonic are often called the world's greatest orchestra, but on this showing they exceeded any reasonable expectation. Thielemann bounded on with a hypercaffeinated energy that he maintained from the con brio first movement of the 8th right to the end of the night. The one-bar jokes of the Scherzando second movement were actually funny, and the contrapuntal brilliance of the third was captured in perfectly balanced crystalline layers, in exquisite contrast to the luxurious sonic carpet the Wieners rolled out for the last movement.

The 7th became a roller coaster ride, a gem of immaculately juxtaposed contrasts.  From an introductory adagio so molto it nearly ground to a halt, Thielemann launched the vivace theme of the 7th's first movement at an exhilarating pace. The second, 'slow' movement is actually marked allegretto, and that's exactly what we got, not the usual funereal trudge but something curiously evocative of a cha-cha. And it ended with a wildly driven dance - Wagner's famous words incarnated.

Among the violinists at the 7th's first performance was Ludwig Spohr, who noted of Beethoven's conducting style, "As a sforzando occurred, he tore his arms, previously crossed upon his breast, with great vehemence asunder. At piano he crouched down lower and lower to show the degree of softness. If a crescendo entered he gradually rose again and at a forte jumped into the air." Thielemann would be the last to follow the emaciated 'historically-informed' school, but I did wonder if Spohr's well-known words influenced Thielemann's gymnastic gesticulations on the podium, at variance with his usual Thunderbird puppet style. Whatever it was, it worked.

 

CBSO auction off Andris Nelsons

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra have worked out a way to grab the headlines in the Birmingham Post and pick up a bit of cash for charity along the way too.

They're auctioning off an Ebay package which includes a precious hour alone with their cuddly conductor Andris Nelsons, during which he will impart all his secret skillz to the lucky winner *plus* an hour conducting his personal orchestra the CBSO *plus* a dinner with 'select players' (Grade 8 knife and fork use minimum) afterwards.

For anyone who'd rather fiddle with the CBSO string section, there are similar learn, play and dine opportunities for violin, viola, cello and double bass players too.

Start the bidding now and start it high!

Covent Garden Don Carlo on TV

The Royal Opera House's Don Carlo will be shown on BBC4 tomorrow 20 November at 8pm. The performance is taken from the first run in 2008 and features Rolando Villazon in the title role, together with Marina Poplavskaya, Simon Keenlyside, Sonia Ganassi and fabulous Ferrucio Furlanetto. Not clear at this stage whether it'll be on the iPlayer later.

UPDATE - available on iPlayer here for a limited time.

the idiot-proof seating plan

It may look like an old TV set with a toy theatre trapped inside, but in fact this is the seating plan in the Théâtre du Châtelet's box office. A perfect 3D scale model of the auditorium, the only thing not to scale is the giant number plastered on each grasshopper-sized mini-fauteuil. No excuse for picking the wrong seat by accident.

and closer up:

 

Barenboim flips for Jonas Kaufmann

Daniel Barenboim brought a luxuriously-cast Verdi Requiem to a sold-out Salle Pleyel in Paris on Sunday night - Barbara Frittoli, Sonia Ganassi, Jonas Kaufmann and Rene Pape were the featured soloists.

Sadly neither they nor the Orchestra of La Scala nor Barenboim himself (in random pull and tweak mode) lived up to expectations - indeed the only memorable performance came from the immaculately prepared La Scala chorus.

Rene Pape's pallid performance suggested, not for the first time, that a prairie oyster or two might have helped. More surprising was that a listless Jonas Kaufmann lost his way in the not exactly challenging score and missed an entrance. Luckily Barenboim was there to rescue him, flipping Kaufmann on to the right page whilst still conducting with the other hand. Another multitasking credit for the maestro.

taking classical music out of the concert hall

A German chamber music group is to give a recital in a brothel (they're legal in Germany) to bring music "out of the concert hall and to where people are".

Leipzig's Forum for Contemporary Music (FZML) will be visiting the city's Eros Centre (website features virtual tour, how very German) on 20 November to perform "erotic songs, ballads about pimping and compositions about stripping" - "thus matching the musical reference to the location" they proudly state.

Works by Satie, Volans and Weill are included. The concert is funded by the Saxony Cultural Foundation, and tickets cost €15 - tummy rub not included.

Royal Opera House's battlefield revealed

This clip from The House, a 1995 BBC fly-on-the-wall documentary (not available in the ROH shop), is a glimpse into a troubled time in the Royal Opera House's history.

There are angry scenes outside the house as traditionalists protest at the premiere of Birtwistle's Gawain. A Magic Flute production imported from Scottish Opera fails to hit the spot (no surprise - it looks like a school play). The music director Bernard "maybe I'm too old-fashioned" Haitink whinges that if he doesn't understand the new Ring, the audience won't either. (Bernard's audience are the sort who applaud over the last bars of Meistersinger).

 "Every rehearsal period is a battlefield between the musical and dramatic elements," concludes general director Nicholas Payne. "That's what opera's about".

Dame Joan defaced

A giant portrait of Dame Joan Sutherland hanging in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall has been defaced by a toddler. 

Anyone who has seen Steven Campbell's huge mural, which features the treasured Dame garlanded with a tiara of tears, her chin resting on Mount Rushmore, might suspect the Dame herself had paid the child to rip off the real pillow attached to the face. But no, it seems it was an accident. So for now, the Dame looms over the foyer with glue hanging from her chin while concert hall management wait to see if the insurance will stump up.

Sadly there's no image of the portrait online - the photo above shows the artist with some of his other work. Here's a glimpse of it from the Daily Record:

Munich's portable opera house

The world's biggest and best opera festival is expanding.

The Bavarian State Opera have commissioned a new temporary structure for the 2010 Munich festival. The Pavillon 21 Mini Opera Space has a capacity of 300 and can be dismantled, transported and set up anywhere, though to begin with it will be sited in a square behind the main opera house. Its spiky shape was based on computer-modeled spatial sound recordings of a Jimi Hendrix song and serves a practical purpose. Inside, the acoustic reflecting surfaces are increased. Outside, noise is reflected and absorbed by the perforated aluminium panels of the shell.

It will be christened with a new production from Germany's oldest enfant terrible, Christof Schlingensief, but the State Opera's Director, Nikolaus Bachler hopes in future to invite "international artists from the fields of performance, visual arts, literature and composers, VJs, directors and musicians" and "unusual and unexpected formats".

Alan Bennett's deceptive Habit

I probably would have gone to see The Habit of Art anyway. A new Alan Bennett play - are you kidding? But what really sealed it was the subject matter. The publicity - even Alan Bennett himself - suggests it's an exploration of the relationship between Auden and Benjamin Britten, a relationship which led directly to some of Britten's greatest music. Britten was just 29 when he set Auden's words for Hymn to St. Cecilia, their final collaboration. Although both men lived another thirty-odd years, they fell out and never even met again.

What was behind their rift, and what might have happened if they'd encountered each other later in life? An imaginary meeting in 1972 is at the centre of Bennett's play. But as the Guardian's naughtily early it's-not-a-review-it's-a-feature revealed after the first preview, The Habit of Art is really about Bennett himself. In dialogue with himself, in fact. Auden expresses Bennett's anxieties about ageing and his ambivalence towards his 'national treasure' image. Britten is Bennett's need for support and validation of his work, the still-fresh wound of his youthful feelings of inadequacy. Bennett's words and Alex Jennings's characterisation don't add up to any picture of Britten that you might immediately recognise from writings or broadcasts - nor are they intended to. As portraits go, the characters are as imaginary as the formally inventive play-within-a-play situation they're placed in.

In short, while the play has much to recommend it that I won't go into here because this is a music blog, no light is shed on Britten. There's also very little music. What there is gets played in deliberately rehearsal-style fashion on electric piano. There are reasons why it's worth seeing The Habit of Art - but music isn't one of them, so don't queue hours for tickets on that basis.

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The prickly Britten was legendarily offended (and I can't say I blame him) by this Dudley Moore skit from Beyond the Fringe, a TV show that also featured the young Alan Bennett. Nearly 50 years old!

the silent Rosenkavalier

Le Chevalier à la rose (Der Rosenkavalier): Orchestre National d'Île de France/Frank Strobel - Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, 14 November 2009

Many people accuse Richard Strauss's music of sounding like a film soundtrack. Not everyone realises that he did actually write one - albeit after a considerable amount of arm-twisting.

Largely based on his opera Der Rosenkavalier, it was created for live performance by orchestra (no singers) alongside the 1925 silent movie of the same name, which fleshes out the story line of the opera but still manages to come in at half the length.

The opera's librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal also wrote the film's script. But despite pleading he could whip up little enthusiasm in Strauss. There was much at stake for Strauss. If the film failed, he failed. But if on the other hand the film were successful, it might undermine the reputation of the opera in comparison, a risk to which Strauss was acutely sensitive. The politicking between film makers, financiers, publishers and the numerous other parties engaged in the making of a movie was another aspect of the process Strauss found distasteful. His doubts were salved by liberal applications of cash, and he took the job, but it wasn't a whole-hearted effort.

Much of the routine rearrangement was turned over to assistants. Where new music was required for new scenes, Strauss preferred to recycle old tunes. The limited amount of truly new material, principally a battle march, lacks inspiration. Once complete, Strauss tried his best to turn his back on it - Hofmannsthal had another battle persuading him to conduct the 1926 Dresden premiere. But eventually the score was delivered, the premiere conducted. 

The film's director was Robert Wiene, a hot property after his influential (and financially successful) 1920 film Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari. That cost 20,000 dollars to make. Ten times as much was raised for Rosenkavalier, enabling Wiene to stage a massive battle and an extravagant outdoor masked ball finale. Both are centred around the Marschallin's husband, who is of course unseen in the opera. In the film he's cipher-like and I suspect created merely for the purpose of these very scenes. Servants, guests, soldiers, peasants (some interesting 'real' faces) crowd the screen. More cash was splashed on opulent costumes and lavish sets from the designer of the opera's 1911 premiere, Alfred Roller.

In spite of all the money thrown at it, the film has little of Caligari's extraordinary originality. Perhaps it was all those interfering financiers or perhaps Wiene was simply running out of ideas. There is just one truly memorable image - the screen fills with what looks like a huge white fleece, which parts like a set of jigsaw pieces, revealing itself as the massed heads of a group of elderly periwigged gossips. But the pace is unflagging, and (within the confines of silent movie high style) Wiene draws excellent performances from all his actors, right down to the extras.

Sadly and despite initial acclaim, the original film did not survive intact. The version shown at the Châtelet was pieced together from what remains, using a selection of stills and brief clips to make up ten minutes missing from the end.

Silent movie specialist Frank Strobel has been conducting this version around Europe since 2006 - he visited Liverpool last year, but not, as yet, London. He was fortunate to have for this performance the services of the young and energetic Orchestre National d'Île de France, who make something of a specialism of work outside the mainstream classical repertoire. They played the technically challenging music tirelessly for nearly two hours, filling the lofty tiers of the Châtelet with great attention to detail and dynamics.

The score isn't Strauss's greatest, the movie isn't that special, but with the orchestra in the pit and the film projected on the Châtelet's enormous screen above them, somehow they compensated for each other's deficiencies. The many comic moments charmed, the Marschallin's sad surrender of Octavian drew a tear or two, the whole drama came alive. A packed and hugely varied audience - several small children included - gave orchestra and conductor a massive ovation.

Frank Strobel takes the stage:

 

The audience leaving: 

A promo video made by Houston Symphony Orchestra for their performance of the film earlier this year:

Cheap Bluebeard

Less than a week old and already the price is tumbling. Via an offer in the Independent, ENO are offering dress circle seats for their fab/crap  Bluebeard / Rite of Spring double bill for £15 on 12 and 14 November. Enter the code DUKEDC when booking here.

Bryn Terfel is not so bad

Bryn Terfel - Royal Festival Hall, 11 November 2009

For marketing purposes only, cuddly Bryn Terfel is currently posing as a Bad Boy. But as CD-pimping, Gubbay-promoted, extravagantly-priced celebrity recitals go, this one was actually pretty good.

Not only did Bryn get in twice as much singing as Renee Fleming did last week - a full ten numbers - he also managed more costume changes. Method acting in a cloak for Dulcamara's Udite, udite from L'Elisir d'Amore, a hunting jacket for Kaspar's Schweig, Schweig from Der Freischütz, and more droopy scarves than a retired ballerina, he slipped easily from character to character as he ran through his list of operatic and musical villains, supplying a little introductory comment for each one. He even engineered a bit of audience participation, with a Happy Birthday sung to celebrate his 44th earlier this week.

The young (and presumably Gubbay-cheap) Sinfonia Cymru backed him energetically if not idiomatically, with Gareth Jones steering them competently enough through crowd-pleaser interludes like Danse Macabre and Night on a Bare Mountain.

But Bryn was the main attraction, and the Te Deum from Tosca was a reminder that his poisonously sinister Scarpia is probably the best around right now. A couple of devils, Gounod's from Faust and Boito's from Mefistofele, crackled with menace. The razor-accessorised Ballad of Sweeney Todd was a too-brief demonstration of a role he seems born to play. An extraordinarily poised Mackie Messer avoided cabaret caricature, though I detected a faint Welsh whiff around a few of Bryn's usually immaculate German vowels.

Wonderful textual colouring in When the Night Wind Howls from Ruddigore demonstrated a surprise affinity for Gilbert and Sullivan. A slightly less successful surprise was It Ain't Necessarily So from Porgy and Bess. The transposition from tenor to baritone wasn't a problem, but the wavering inter-continental accent, sometimes South Carolina sometimes South Kensington, suggested a little more work was necessary. A Misérable encore by The Other Schönberg was the least successful item of the night. Though Bryn gave it everything he'd got, it simply sounded second-rate after everything that had gone before.

Artaxerxes at the Royal Opera House

Artaxerxes - Royal Opera House Linbury Theatre, 9 November 2009

Martin Duncan's new production of Arne's Artaxerxes is one of the most exquisitely-costumed operas I have ever seen. It's almost worth the price of admission simply to gaze on Johan Engels' vast panniered skirts, covered in acres of richly-embroidered vintage kimono fabric and split to reveal equally sumptuous velvet zouave pants in all the colours of a Persian miniature. One of the costumes even turns into a throne, Transformers-style (above), and you can't get much cooler than that.

But enough of the big-ass frocks. Does the music work? It certainly doesn't have Handel's melodic fluency or Gluck's formal inventiveness or Mozart's emotional resonance. But Arne's opera was one of the most popular in the English repertoire from its 1762 debut until the 1830's, so it must have something going for it. The tunes are pleasant if not memorable, the improbable story is neatly paced, and if neither plot nor harmonically tame score whip up much dramatic tension, it is always imaginatively orchestrated.

So Artaxerxes may not be the greatest opera ever written, bu everything about this production shows it off to its best advantage.

The Linbury has been transformed. Several rows of stalls seats are taken out to extend the blue-washed stage. The pit is sunk into the middle like a Roman bath with the orchestra arrayed in full view, clad in puffy white poet blouses. Fairy lights dangle from the ceiling and burning incense dispenses a choking fug over the audience as they enter (no wonder half the cast have been suffering from respiratory woes).

Movement shares the baroque formality of the score, with every gesture minutely choregraphed as the cast slip from one stylised pose to another (not that the corridor-width costumes leave much scope for spontaneous action anyway). It may sound daft, but the cast's finesse and commitment is such that it's actually rather charming.

The story is rather silly, and again it's some credit to the cast that they spin it out so well. Artabanes kills Persian King Xerxes as part of a plan to put his own son Arbaces on the throne, but instead Arbaces is wrongly accused and imprisoned. Luckily for Arbaces he is mates with Xerxes' son, the new king Artaxerxes, who helps him escape. Arbaces seals the deal by saving Artaxerxes from yet another backstabber, Rimenes, and Artabanes confesses to the murder. As a by-the-way which actually takes up more of the opera than the main plot does, Arbaces is in love with Xerxes' daughter Mandane, and his sister Semira is in love with Artaxerxes.

Chris Moyles lookalike Andrew Staples sang Artabanes with exemplary clarity, but I couldn't always follow often hazy diction elsewhere. I strongly suspect it didn't matter that much though. The voluptuously-voiced Elizabeth Watts got the most and the best of the music in the part of the feisty Mandane. Caitlin Hulcup captured the tragedy of Arbaces' dilemma, and was so convincing that for the first few minutes I thought she must be a particularly sweet-voiced countertenor. The real countertenor was Christopher Ainslie, who did well as Artaxerxes in a part written a little lower than he found comfortable. Rebecca Bottone sang with charm and clarity as Semira, and only Steven Ebel as Rimenes, suffering from a cold, struggled a little.

Ian Page of the Classical Opera Company not only conducted dexterously but wrote seamlessly-fitting music for the recitatives to replace the originals, lost in a Covent Garden fire some 200 years ago. Did they have incense burners then, too?

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Maria di Rohan at the Royal Festival Hall

Maria di Rohan - OAE / Elder - Royal Festival Hall, 7 November 2009

Mark Elder and the OAE spent the week before this concert performance rehearsing and recording Maria di Rohan for the Opera Rara label. The consequent polish and confidence perhaps flattered the work - you rarely hear bel canto played this stylishly in the opera house, let alone on period instruments – but still, it’s remarkably light on cliché and a cut above the usual second-division bel canto potboiler.

Donizetti’s first version of the score, as played here, omits a certain amount of frou-frou the composer added for later performances in Paris and generally taken up since. The result is a propulsive drama that never sits back on its arias for too long, but at the expense of any light relief. There are no pretty tunes, no showpiece cabalettas. A charming almost throwaway duet taken from the second version and presented as a final petit-four demonstrated Donizetti’s later additions were perhaps a little more than a sweet-toothed concession to French taste.

It was cannily cast and sung with finesse, though without that final degree of dramatic conviction that might have turned a thoroughly enjoyable performance into an electrifying one.

Krassimira Stoyanova’s dark, agile soprano negotiated the lines readily enough, but it wasn’t until the second half that she really seemed to engage with the character of Maria, the apex of the opera’s love triangle. Jose Bros brought clarity, a bright nasal tone and seemingly limitless volume to her forbidden crush, Riccardo. But again, nothing really leapt off the page until the second half. Christopher Purves as her honourable husband Enrico had the expressive edge, but some kind of vocal health problem meant his most heroic act of the evening was simply making it to the end. The supporting cast were excellent all round, with Loic Felix as Armando di Gondi particularly impressive.

 

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