Don Giovanni - Royal Opera House, 21 February 2012
Francesca Zambello's witless, charmless, tasteless production hasn't improved with age. But great performers can redeem even the most idiotic of stagings - and frequently have to in these parts. If Erwin Schrott isn't the finest Don Giovanni around right now I'll eat my pants. Yours too.
Unlike Carnegie Hall, the answer isn't just "practice". For more than one reader, the promised five minute walk from New Street station to the appallingly under-signposted Symphony Hall has turned into a twenty minute ramble through interminable shopping arcades and deserted streets.
The CBSO seem unwilling to share the innermost secrets of their dominion on their website, so with Tristan und Isolde and Jonas Kaufmann coming up shortly, here is the secret route that will get you there in a jiffy, plus a dining warning.
Asked if he'd ever contemplate a nude role, Jonas Kaufmann responded that he wouldn't turn it down on principle, reports the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung.
Opera is the focus of the next episode of the Sky Arts series First Love, in which celebs revisit their earliest attempts at music making, with professional assistance. The aim is to survive a buttock-clenching live performance at the end of the show.
The Lady Frederick Windsor, aka actress and former budding soprano Sophie Winkleman, is the willing victim this time round. Her challenge is to sing Quando m’en Vo from La bohème at the King's Head opera pub. She'll be mentored by Sarah Tynan, who has sung Musetta, and advised by Marina Poplavskaya, who hasn't (as far as I know). But at least Nice Hair should be guaranteed.
I asked for a clip from the show, but apparently they have none, so you'll have to make do with a photo. (Rather like trying to sell a car without offering a test drive, so serves them right if nobody watches.)
The show is first aired on Sky Arts 1 on 28 February, with repeats to follow.
Kathleen Ferrier is one of ten 'Britons of Distinction' featured in the Royal Mail's latest stamp set. She would have been 100 this year.
Frederick Delius (150th birthday) is also included.
The stamps are only being sold as a full set of ten.
This Saturday, 25 February, Ariadne auf Naxos will be streamed live from Festspielhaus Baden Baden on Medici TV.
The show begins at 8pm (which is 7pm UK time), and will also be broadcast on the 3sat TV channel at 8.15pm CET.
Philippe Arlaud's new production is conducted by Christian Thielemann and features Renee Fleming in her first stab at the title role.
Many thanks to reader Vecchio John for pointing out that booking opened this morning for La Scala's June 2013 Ring cycle.
There are two cycles, beginning 17 June and 24 June. Tickets range from €435 (top balcony) to €1,200 (best stalls), and there were plenty left in all price ranges at the time of writing. They are currently being sold only as 'packages'. These include all four operas and various extras like free drinks and theatre tours. If you're thinking of buying the cheapest tickets, bear in mind that the balcony is a looong way up.
Although Guy Cassiers' production has been slated, there are musical compensations. Casting includes Rene Pape and Michael Volle as Wotan, Irene Theorin as Brünnhilde and Waltraud Meier as Sieglinde - and of course Daniel Barenboim conducts.
Warning - the purchase process is a bit 'Italian', and you need to enter your personal details before you can select seats. If you pay by Visa or Mastercard, you will need to pre-register on a completely different site. And there is a commission charge.
Media censorship? Let me qualify that straight away by pointing out that the 'media' in question is not those nice gentlemen from Die Welt. Rather it's the fearlessly frank former Vienna Intendant turned Germanic Jeremy Kyle, Ioan Holender.
Since leaving the State Opera, Holender now brings much-needed "depth, irony and entertainment value" to the Austrian public via his own TV show. In Kultour he travels around Europe reporting on cultural events and sparring with the artists concerned. He asked Salzburg Easter Festival if he could tackle their upcoming Carmen for a future episode.
But the Festival's artistic director Peter Alward has turned him down on the grounds of "personal dislike, lack of respect and obvious bias". It seems he remembers some remarks Holender made to the press a couple of years ago, when the Festival was going through its fraud crisis. Holender, true to type, had described it as a "nonsense Festival without a concept" and a "moribund, artificially kept alive waste of money."
Now Holender has labelled Alward's refusal to co-operate as "pre-censorship". Alward says the accusation is "completely irrelevant".
Holender points out "If I'd only let those who'd written good things about the State Opera into the house, soon no one would have been allowed to come anymore."
Way back in 2008, I looked at whether it was worth forking out for Friends' or Members' privileges at London's main classical music venues. The picture has changed since then - ROH booking has gone online, prices have gone up, demand has gone down. So here's a revised view based on my own experience.
English Touring Opera return to Hackney Empire on 8 March with a new Thomas Guthrie production of The Barber of Seville. It's followed in swift succession by a revival of their acclaimed Eugene Onegin from 2007, a show I never got to see, that apparently "sheds more light on Tchaikovsky's masterpiece than any other recent UK production". After that they're off round the country for a few weeks, taking in venues from Truro to Perth.
Both works will be sung in English, which is sure to get some opera lovers hot under the collar. But ETO's General Director James Conway argues that effective comic timing inThe Barber of Seville depends on immediacy - and he's not keen on English singers tackling the difficulties of Russian. Casts are mostly young, mostly British, and include the 2011 Kathleen Ferrier award winner Kitty Whately as Rosina.
ETO is one of the lucky few organisations whose Arts Council funding increased in the last round, but earlier cuts mean they're still far from flush. Despite this, Hackney Empire seats have been kept at at very reasonable £10 to £32, which has to be the best opera bargain in the capital. For the same price as pub opera, you get a full staging and good (occasionally outstanding) singers - and a decent-sized orchestra instead of some dodgy old piano too.
If that doesn't appeal, in the autumn there's another tour, with a focus on modern and less familiar works. The London stop is the Royal Opera House Linbury Studio, and partners the Aurora Orchestra will be keeping musical standards high. Three broadly contemporaneous chamber pieces - Britten's Albert Herring, Peter Maxwell Davies's The Lighthouse and Viktor Ullmann's The Emperor of Atlantis - have been picked for their theatricality and variety.
"I show the public what they ought to see, not what they want to see," Bavarian State Opera Intendant Nikolaus Bachler told a Munich symposium as he debated the future of opera with the Met's Peter Gelb.
The Americans, the audience were told, bow to public taste.
Le nozze di Figaro - Royal Opera House, 14 February 2012
Oops. David McVicar's finest production isn't as bulletproof as it once seemed. This time round, coarse revival direction and subpar casting have diminished its subtlety and psychological insight.
So you've got your desktop MetMachine. Where next in your mini-Ring?
Sadly it seems just as tough to cast a desktop Ring cycle as a real one.
In fact the only candidate I could find was 3" pig Olivia. Olivia is not just a professional opera singer, she's also poseable, an asset to any budding director. And she has "small parts", which should please the General Manager.
I'm not quite sure of Olivia's Fach, but Amazon reviewer 'Mom in CT' points out "Her dress doesn't stay on" which indicates she may be a soprano. On the other hand, her "painted on underwear" suggests mezzo tendencies. Let's just put her down for Brünnhilde.
Cue the sound of scraped barrels. The Royal Opera House's imminent revival of La fille du régiment will feature none other than Tory trouper Ann Widdecombe in the role of Duchesse de Crackentorp.
Any idea what inspired this "playful yet sophisticated executive desk set"?
Yes, it's Robert Lepage's Met Machine, restyled in miniature. Boasting a mere 15 planks rather than the 24 of the original, it comes in around 20 million bucks cheaper at $15. It "can be fashioned into shapes reminiscent of the stage settings in the Ring cycle or pulled apart and refashioned into an unlimited number of configurations" if you need any further tempting.
There will be a revolving stage. There will be film. But there won't be any cuts or rewrites. Renowned deconstructionist Frank Castorf hesitated to accept a job where he wouldn't be allowed to tinker with the script, as is his usual practice. But conductor Kirill Petrenko and the two Wagner sisters stood firm. So a clause has been included in Castorf's contract for directing Bayreuth's 2013 Ring cycle - Wagner's words and music remain intact.
Interviewed in Die Welt, the self-styled "Teutonic taskmaster" explains his early ideas.
He describes the story as "a journey towards the gold of our times - oil" which will start "some time after the Second World War". East and West will be brought together on a revolving stage, which has already been designed by Aleksandar Denic. One set will be Berlin Alexanderplatz, representing postmodern socialism. As the stage turns, Wall Street will appear. Castorf isn't aiming for clear conclusions, and admits he doesn't know yet exactly where he's going, but he says he's having fun finding out.
So, Katharina Wagner's not going to jail. Not yet anyway.
The German Staatsanwaltschaft (federal prosecutor) has ruled that it's not criminal for the Bayreuth Festival to hand out free tickets. Giving them away to the media and people in the art and culture field, as Bayreuth does, is OK. As is providing seats for "persons whose presence must be viewed as an advertising medium for the future popularity of the Wagner Festival" - or politicians and assorted micro-slebs.
In other words, while the Bayreuth Festspielhaus is crumbling away for lack of repair funds, while Cologne Opera is labouring under a massive deficit, and while music institutions across Germany are feeling the pinch, the German government has frittered away money merely to prove Bayreuth operates exactly the same ticketing privileges as any other opera house.
The inquiry was initiated last year by the German Bundesrechnungshof (federal audit office), which is responsible for monitoring government spending. The auditors were concerned that a chunk of Bayreuth's sought-after tickets go to the Friends Society (at full price), with a small proportion given away, leaving 'only' 70% for the general public.
But it's hard to understand why the investigation ever made it as far as the courts. Public subsidies only cover around a third of the Festival's costs, the Friends provide nearly as much funding as the state, and many other opera houses have a far smaller public allocation (around 20% at Covent Garden). Viewed in this light, Bayreuth's ticket policy looks positively generous, a practical compromise between the need to fund an expensive festival and Richard Wagner's utopian dream of free tickets for everyone.
What the auditors have failed to grasp is that opera is not, never has been and never will be value for money. The economics of opera would be best modelled by raking a load of banknotes into a heap and setting fire to it. As, it seems, would the economics of auditing.
The Buxton Festival have very kindly provided me with some unsolicited free advertising in the form of the cover art for their 2012 brochure, unveiled yesterday by the artist, Ingrid Karlsson-Kemp.
The city of Leipzig, birthplace of Richard Wagner, has been holding a Wagner Festival each May since 2006. In a quiet little way. All that is set to change in 2013. The 2012 schedule hasn't even been announced yet, but an impressively full programme has already been laid out for the composer's 200th birthday celebrations.
Running from 16 to 26 May 2013, the festival will include operas (some in collaboration with Bayreuth), concerts, talks, exhibitions, theatrical events, a cabaret and even a new ballet.. Ulf Schirmer conducts the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Lorin Maazel's edited highlights package Ring without Words (without singers, without their wage bills). A walk through Leipzig has been designed to link locations related (with varying degrees of tenuousness) to Wagner. A Wagner cycle ride is planned. Conceivably there are Wagner Würste and a neckbeard competition in the offing. In short, it's a Megawagnerfest.
If that's not enough, the dates coincide with the annual Wave Gotik Treffen, which claims to be the world's largest Goth festival. In true festival spirit, the whey faced medievalists will be joined by various middle-American Wagner Societies and stray academics in some kind of crossover event.
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