Intermezzo

Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra go on strike

 

The legendary Gewandhausorchester Leipzig went on strike at the weekend for the first time in their 265 year history, forcing cancellation of their scheduled concert and ballet performances. And they weren't the only ones.

After the house orchestras walked out, Land des Lächelns was performed in Münster with piano accompaniment only, as was Zauberflöte in Magdeburg and Fidelio in Duisburg.

This is just the latest and most high-profile action since pay talks for Germany's 90 state-employed opera and concert orchestras broke down in early October. (Independent orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic aren't involved.)

The main complaint is that pay rises granted to other state theatre employees weren't extended to musicians. But orchestras are also increasingly concerned that their previous conciliatory stance has failed to protect them from job losses.

Currently, state orchestra pay is negotiated collectively across the country. But if the current problems can't be resolved by March 2009, then orchestras may have to switch to individual agreements with their state or city employers.

La Scala season to open in London cinemas

     

7 December marks the opening performance of La Scala's 2008/09 season, which for the first time ever will be simulcast live around the world.

This year's Italian job is a new production of Verdi's Don Carlo, directed by Stéphane Braunschweig and conducted by Daniele Gatti. Fabulous Ferruccio Furlanetto plays Philip II, as he did to all-round satisfaction in the recent Covent Garden production. Giuseppe Filianoti, Dalibor Jenis, Matti Salminen, Fiorenza Cedolins and Dolora Zajick bask in the glow of his star powah.

Participating cinemas in London are the Curzon Chelsea and Curzon Richmond. Tickets cost an eyewatering £25 - no wonder they haven't sold out yet - and can be purchased online here.

Anyone thinking of going needs to be aware that one of the Italian stage unions may scupper the show by going on strike. Check out Opera Chic for the latest news.

Rolando Villazon - from one tired old vehicle to another

 

With a night off from his hot-ticket Hoffmann at Covent Garden, Rolando popped over to Germany for a few hours yesterday to lean against old cars and pick up some Hoffing tips from the Hoffmeister himself, Plácido Domingo. 

Hopefully his long-distance minibreak to the Bambi Awards, aka the 'German Oscars' won't exhaust him for tonight's Covent Garden show.

A Christmas present from the Royal Opera House - watch Hänsel und Gretel online

Banksy

A welcome confluence of circumstance. 

A BBC2 broadcast of Covent Garden's Hänsel und Gretel sometime over the Christmas period (date not yet known), plus the start of live online streaming for BBC1 and BBC2, means that you should be able to watch Hänsel und Gretel online.

Depending on which performance they choose to film, the cast includes Angelika Kirchschlager and Diana Damrau, or Alice Coote and Camilla Tilling as the children, with Thomas Allen or Eike Wilm Schulte and Anja Silja or Ann Murray in support. Colin Davis (in possibly his last ROH show) or Robin Ticciati conduct.

The Royal Opera House website may have further information on its TV page here at some point.

The tale of Rolando Villazon's Hoffman at Covent Garden

Les Contes d’Hoffmann - Royal Opera House, 25 November 2008 (opening night)

His sensational Hoffmann at Covent Garden just four years ago made Rolando Villazón a household name. In this household anyway.  Since then he's risen, fallen, faked it onscreen with Netrebko, outshone the scenery in Mr Hytner's recent Don Lego, gone Panstik-crazy in Onegin, and even found time to take half a year off. So expectations were ----- mixed.

This performance saw an older and wiser Villazón. A new word has entered his vocabulary - restraint. Not every second on stage blew my socks off - he sensibly paced himself, taking the long-term view and conserving his voice at the start to make sure it was still there at the end.

His vocal everest came in the high-lying Giulietta act (the second act here), where his top notes were hard-won, but cleanly struck, with not a hint of the dreaded crack. He audibly relaxed as he came into the home straight, and here we heard him at his very best - ardent and secure, with that fabulous ring at the edge.

The character of Hoffman is a gift to a versatile actor. A great physical comedian, Rolando was predictably at home with the drunken lurching and grotesque posturing of the Kleinzach song. But equally accomplished was the sudden switch to nostalgic reverie as he recalled his beloved.

The ancient and all too literal production doesn't hint at the passage of time.  This was something Rolando supplied himself, with unexpectedly great subtlety, chronicling Hoffman's descent from naive and exuberant young poet (the Rolando we know and love) to a battered and cynical alcoholic. An intelligent and complete portrayal, and what's more, a bravely vulnerable one.

****Rolando Villazón and Gidon Saks talk to Radio 3's In Tune here (available until 27 November) -  Rolando reveals that years ago he used to watch his hero Domingo in the video of the original production (ahhhh, schweet!)****

Nobody else really came close, though the veteran character tenor Graham Clark was tremendous fun in his multiple roles as the four servants, and, unbelievably, sounding as fresh as he does on twenty year old Bayreuth recordings.

Kristine Jepson provided solid and generous support as Nicklausse but was often a little too far backgrounded.

Gidon Saks had the other big part, Hoffman's quadruple nemesis, the four villains. He'd done a pretty good job with individual characterisation in the general rehearsal, but was curiously anonymous on this, the big night. Only his Dr Miracle had the necessary presence and malevolence - his other roles were dry-toned and underbaked.

Ekaterina Lekhina's Olympia was an audience favourite. Her tiny exquisite features and jerky clockwork movement made her an eerily believable doll. Musically, the line was hardly smooth, perhaps consciously sacrificed for dramatic effect, but she had all the notes spot on.

Christine Rice played the courtesan Giulietta as if through Hoffmann's eyes, a romanticised and unattainable love object, not a pricy tart with an eye for a bob on the side. An intelligent portrayal sung with velvety warmth, but the steamy sensuality that should pervade this scene came only from the assorted couples scattered about the opulent rugs, not from its centre. Momentum quietly fizzled away; any dramatic tension collapsed slowly and predictably as a souffle. Lovely frocks though.

And a special mention for Kostas Smoriginas as Schlemil - a commanding voice and presence with top sword skillz, looking like a young Helmut Berger in his blond wig.

Katie Van Kooten as Antonia sang beautifully and had everything except the vulnerability that could make you root for her. Gaynor Keeble as the spirit of her mother was truly affecting, and the most memorable of the mostly well-taken smaller parts.

This is really a singers' opera, not an orchestral showpiece, and there was fine support from the pit. Pappano kept it light and playful, and wasn't tempted to pull things around unnecessarily. He was marvellously sympathetic to the singers, as ever, never overwhelming in terms of tempo or dynamics.

Outmoded as it is, this is in many ways a wonderful production, easily my favourite amongst the slumbering dinosaurs of the ROH storage chambers. It tells the story in a way even the youngest or most boneheaded can grasp. Many miles of fabric are used to great effect in the sumptuous costumes, the sets distribute the principals logically across the stage, and gosh, you even get a real gondola on a real(ish) canal.  Its great weakness is in taking the words as they come. It doesn't even try to scratch beneath the surface, let alone take advantage of the many appealing structural elements which offer themselves up for interpretation. Retirement must beckon.

 

 

 

 

   

Thomas Quasthoff at Wigmore Hall

Thomas Quasthoff /Justus Zeyen - Wigmore Hall, 21 November 2008

 

Schubert Der Sänger; Auf dem See; Wandrers Nachtlied II; An Schwager Kronos
Musorgsky Lieder und Tänze des Todes
Schumann Liederkreis Op. 39

Encores Schumann Widmung; Schubert Der Musensohn; Seligkeit

Is Thomas Quasthoff planning a new career in chat? He certainly gave us plenty of it at the Wigmore Hall. His introductory speech made a (quite unnecessary) apology for tackling Musorgsky in German rather than Russian, on the eminently reasonable grounds that he doesn't think he should try to sing in a language he doesn't speak. Later he managed a lengthy introduction for each of his encores (without actually mentioning what he was about to sing, it should be added). Not that he's bad at it. I can't think of another singer so able to entertain and hold an audience's attention with this sort of thing. But it disturbs some sort of indefinable equilibrium, turning a recital into a show of a quite different type.

And did it alter his own focus? Intensity was lacking at key moments; there was a hint of going through the motions, or perhaps just tiredness. Quasthoff is blessed with a fine natural instrument. In the lower-lying An Schwager Kronos and particularly the rumbling Musorgsky death songs he used it with devastating power. These were truly terrifying, showing a startling flipside to the jovial bonhomie of his introduction.

Perhaps sustaining this level of intensity throughout a recital is too much to ask of any performer.  Wandrers Nachtlied was by contrast rather half-hearted, as were many parts of the Eichendorff Liederkreis, particularly the higher or quieter passages where Quasthoff is least at ease technically. Justus Zeyen's unobtrusive excellence was some compensation.

Dorothea Röschmann at Wigmore Hall

Dorothea Röschmann / Graham Johnson - Wigmore Hall, 20 November 2008

Schumann Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart
Wolf Nimmersatte Liebe; An eine Äolsharfe; Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens; Denk' es, o Seele!; Im Frühling; Gesang Weylas; Begegnung
Mahler Rheinlegendchen, Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen, Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht, Lob des hohen Verstandes and Verlorne Müh from 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn'
Brahms 8 Zigeunerlieder

Encores: Schubert Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt; Wolf In der Frühe; Mahler Selbstgefühl from 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn'

Dorothea Röschmann's pearly top notes still emerge effortlessly, but her voice seems to be in a process of transition. It's gaining weight, the centre is dropping, but it's not quite there yet. To speculate how much of this is natural evolution and how much is being hurried along by Röschmann's acceptance of some meatier roles recently and in the near future is probably fruitless (but nevertheless 'interesting'). 

Schumann's Mary Stuart settings are low-lying for a soprano, and Röschmann never sounded quite at ease in the range. It was not a promising start. But the rest of her programme rarely dipped quite as low, and she seemed more comfortable vocally and more freely expressive.

Her recital art is all about nuance and inflection. Although she's capable of grand gesture and bold dramatic expression in the opera house, she wisely leaves that behind in the concert hall.

We saw a small, solid woman in a black lace strapless sheath and matching bolero, her sensible brown bob uncombed, her face makeup-free, like a librarian trying on a party frock. Her comportment has a stillness born of inner calm. Her facial expression is more conversational then stagey. There are none of the diva flourishes employed by the less wise, so distancing in the intimate atmosphere of the Wigmore Hall. Röschmann's effects are achieved more subtly, almost by voice alone.

She explored some of Wolf's most erotically-charged Mörike settings, traversing seamlessly from the sly innuendo of Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens to the nostalgic Im Frühling, always conscious of both the words and their meaning.

She was equally at home in the rustic idiom of the second half and its folk song texts drawn by Mahler and Brahms. Here, as if to compensate for the lack of lyrical subtlety, she employed a much broader range of vocal characterisation, peaking with the animal farm of Mahler's Lob des hohen Verstandes, its donkey, cuckoo and nightingale all brilliantly evoked. If the Zigeuner Lieder all had a rather samey feel, despite their stirring rhythms, this is as much Brahms's fault as Röschmann's. The contrast with the first of her three encores, where she completely inhabited the tormented teenager of Schubert's plaintive Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, showed this only too clearly.

The concert was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 25 November 2008 at 7 p.m (that's today!) and available for a week afterwards on the IPlayer.

Prima Mr Gelb

"Italy hears no more such exquisite Voices as in Times past, particularly among the Women, and to the Shame of the Guilty I'll tell the Reason: The Ignorance of the Parents does not let them perceive the Badness of the Voice of their Children, as their Necessity makes them believe, that to sing and grow rich is one and the same Thing, and to learn Musick, it is enough to have a pretty Face."

Observations on the Florid Song; or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers by Pier Francesco Tosi 1723 - yes 1723

The world's REAL greatest orchestras - the alternative list

Gramophone magazine created predictable ripples last week when they published the latest of their trainspotterish top 20 lists, this time the world's greatest orchestras. Or to put it more accurately, a handful of invited critics' twenty favourite orchestras.

But who wants to nitpick whether the Berlin Phil is better than the Vienna Phil? What about those musicians who are redefining (or just abusing) the term 'orchestra'?

Here in no particular order is my alternative top 20. So alternative there aren't even 20 names on the list! Outta there!!!

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The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain

The all-uke band behind the great British ukulele revival, almost singlehandedly responsible for encouraging a whole generation of neophyte musicians to pick up their first instrument - with more success than any number of state-sponsored initiatives and well-meaning outreach programmes. Just for that, they deserve a medal.

Their live shows are hilarious and dazzling and guaranteed to make you want to rush out and strum the bonsai guitar yourself. They tour all over the country, but return to Cecil Sharp House in Camden once a month, next date 18 December.

Here they tackle Devil's Gallop by Charles Williams on German TV:

and prove that just as granny says, all modern music sounds the same - and Handel wrote everything first anyway:

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The Modified Toy Orchestra

A bunch of Brummie circuit-benders, who play with rewired electronic toys discovered at car boot sales. Electro pop in a faux-fur coat.

They play Covent Garden Piazza on 4 December at 6pm as part of the Covent Garden Christmas Delight festival - admission free.

The Modified Toy Orchestra with Grand Occasion:

and here Modified Toy Orchestra main man Brian Duffy explains how, but not why, in a French TV documentary:

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das Wiener Gemüseorchester

There's more than one musical Wiener in Austria's capital. The Vegetable Orchestra of Vienna plays instruments made from fresh vegetables. They say "The utilization of various ever refined vegetable instruments creates a musically and aesthetically unique sound universe." I say I never knew a carrot sounded like that. They craft new instruments for each performance, so no two shows sound the same.

This video shows the orchestra selecting and preparing their instruments, followed by some concert extracts:

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Animal orchestras

After the vegetables come the animals. Nowadays an animal orchestra would be guaranteed to draw the wrath of the RSPCA  - and that's just for starters.

But it wasn't always so. In The Cat Orchestra and the Elephant Butler, Jan Bonderson relates how the feline organists of Signor Capelli enchanted 19th century London. And he describes the orgue à cochons of Louis XI's court - a row of pigs with nails through their tails, each of which emitted a differently-pitched squeal. A marginally less unkind version of this was constructed for Gabriel Aghion's 2000 movie Le Libertin - the piggy tails merely tweaked:

Rolando Villazón - back for Offenbach

  “Four years ago it was still too much about my first Hoffmann, my first Covent Garden . . . it was still too much about Rolando Villazón. Now it’s going to be about Offenbach.”

Rolando pimps Les Contes d'Hoffmann, opening next week at the Royal Opera House, and dutifully answers the same ole questions about his recent career break, his controversial Don Carlo, the Netrebko-Villazón phenomenon. All in The Times.

<40 = $20 : Boston Symphony Orchestra's magic numbers

Boston Symphony Orchestra have a cracking deal for anyone under 40 - tickets for the rest of the season (normally up to $115) are being offered for just $20, thanks to a subsidy from a generous patron. 

Fill seats, incubate a new audience and still get paid for it - no wonder Boston is the smartypants capital of the USA.

 

Tony Hall confirms Covent Garden belts to be tightened

Royal Opera House boss Tony Hall calls the recession, flags up postponements and even apologises (sorta) for La Bohème in today's Evening Standard:

“The most important thing by a mile,” he tells Fiona Maddocks, “is to keep the repertoire brilliant and sparkling, the performers world-class. In hard times, people need these things more than ever. There's no point doing La Bohème over and over again [July and October were quite enough, thx], or cancelling the expensive star names [no, wait long enough and they'll do it themselves]. That's part of our identity. My job in the next three years — or however long these hard times last — is to ensure we have a strong artistic team who will carry us through on a high.”

“Of course, we'll have to look hard at how we spend money. There may be things we have to postpone. We have our supporters, private and corporate, and we must hope they'll stay with us.” 

Itchenor piano capital of the universe

 

A six year old from Sussex has raised over £1,000 for charity by playing 21 pianos in just 3 hours. 

In true pro style, Tom Hammond began his pianothon in a school and finished up in a pub.

What's almost as astonishing as the feat itself is that he did it all in the village of Itchenor, size 263 houses (as per the reliable-sounding Itchenor Society). Which means, unless there's a piano warehouse tucked away there, nearly one in every ten homes in Itchenor must have a piano. Can that be typical?  

Stormy seas ahead for Royal Opera House?

 
Théodore Géricault - Le Radeau de la Méduse

"For the next two or three years, I have to look very carefully at all the things we do to make sure this place remains buoyant.''

It's not surprising that the project to open a northern outpost of the Royal Opera House in Manchester would fall through if the government failed to stump up the £60m to £80m cost, as ROH head Tony Hall told Bloomberg today. No-one seriously imagined the profit on ice cream sales at Covent Garden was going to cover it. 

But what about that little bomb he dropped at the end of the interview? Ticket sales for the spring season are healthy so far, but ticket income covers little more than a third of Covent Garden's costs. And they went on sale before the latest round of doom, gloom and job cuts anyway. The balance of the Royal Opera House's funding comes equally from private and public sources. It's dependent on the continuing largesse of the rich, even as their investment portfolios plummet, and handouts from the sure-to-be-squeezed Arts Council.

Will Renee Fleming have to bring her own frocks?

Zeffirelli with knobs on - Robert Lepage's dilution of Faust

La damnation de Faust - Metropolitan Opera, 10 November 2008

Back at last from The Land of the Reversed Baseball Cap, where an eventful week saw Gérard Mortier quitting his NYCO post before even taking it up and Peter Gelb announcing he'll be "switching repertory around” - swapping some planned productions for cheaper ones - to save money at the Met next season.

But from what I saw there last week, ideas seem to be in as short supply as ready cash. The two new productions which on paper seem the most forward-looking and adventurous of the season, La Damnation de Faust and Dr Atomic, were full of splashy technology but (for quite different reasons) surprisingly short on genuine effect.

Peter Gelb revealed the puniness of his expectations for Robert Lepage's Faust in a telling programme note:

"In the 1970s and 80s, Franco Zeffirelli made his vivid, larger-than-life brand of stagecraft a fixture at the Met. His productions.....elevated the possibilites for visual splendor that could be achieved here. This month, another visionary director makes his Met debut, and I believe that he too will help usher in a new era of theatrical excitement and visual thrills."

So Gelb's not interested in telling stories or exploring ideas, just giving folks something purty to look at. Even Zeffirelli at his most Zeffirelliesque could manage more than that. And Lepage's production fails to rise above the dismally low bar Gelb has set for it. It simply replaces the miles of curtain fabric with stacks of monitors, the corsets with leather pants and the crinolined chorines with six-packed acrobats.

To be fair, La Damnation de Faust is a challenge for any director, a sequence of tableaux not a linear narrative. But Lepage infers an overarching structure not reflected in the music by shoehorning the whole thing into a single set of shallow scaffolding across which characters process, videos play, and acrobats fling themselves. It's all slickly executed and some of the imagery is enchanting, even beautiful - a ghostly underwater dance rendered in video, Marguerite's ascension by ladder at the end. But much is over-literal - like the Rat eulogy complete with actual rat - and a potential coup de théâtre crucifixion is reduced to banality by excessive length and repetition.

There were long stretches where I felt, as with Achim Freyer's sweetly dotty Eugene Onegin in Berlin, that I really could have been watching anything, that Lepage could do, say, Don Giovanni or Les contes d'Hoffmann with exactly the same visuals and it would seem just as (in)appropriate.

But worst of all, a lot of it was just plain boring. Juddering from spectacle to spectacle without building any dramatic tension means that theatrical effect is entirely dependent on what's in front of the eyes at any moment - and as with any production, much was necessarily mundane. Lepage has some terrific ideas and a bold use of technology, but it's all just thrown in there. It needs moulding.

The musical side was more impressive, though some of the singing wouldn't win any prizes. Marcello Giordani (Faust) sounded unaccountably knackered, a pale shadow of the impassioned commitment he brought to the role at the Proms last summer. 

Opera's favourite devil, John Relyea - this time got up as a foxy cockroach in a red leather suit and the traditional plumed hat - hardly sizzled. His Méphistophélès was earthbound, prosaic, though solid enough I suppose.

Susan Graham was the pick of the soloists by some distance, her angelic and charismatic Marguerite offering the only real hint that we were sitting in what likes to think of itself as the world's greatest opera house.

Ultimately it was left to James Levine to salvage standards, and although he didn't bring the precision, clarity and sheer perfectionism that he had to his Proms performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, there was warmth and focus and a total security to the sound. And not forgetting the Met chorus, who seem much improved from last year (has there been a weeding?) with clear diction and fine coordination.

The 22 November performance will be livecast, and I suspect that, more than most Met productions, it will be transformed by the process. Especially if Lepage himself is closely involved. The shallow stage, the use of vertical space, all help with vocal projection in live performance, but they also immediately lend themselves to screening, a sort of built-in framing device. As with so many Lepage productions the debt to cinema is an obvious one - and here's one opportunity for it to pay back.  

Susan Graham prays for a bunch of naked guys:   
 

hay, it worked!:

 

 

 

 

Señor Mortier 4 Madrid?

 

Is Gérard Mortier, current Paris Opera boss and recent New York City Opera escapee, packing his castanets for a long vacay in Madrid? It looks as if he's ready to slug it out for the top opera job there.

Current Teatro Real artistic director Antonio Moral is due to step down in 2010, as is the musical director, Jesús López Cobos. The Spanish press have been entertaining themselves for months with speculation about successors.  But not for much longer. The Spanish culture minister has slapped down a deadline - sort it out by 15 December or else.

Front runners to date have been Stéphane Lissner, current La Scala capo, in cahoots with petite Man Utd fan Daniel Harding, his frequent musical collaborator.

Now Spain's most popular paper, El País, reopens the whole can of sardines by revealing that Mortier visited Madrid on Saturday  to pimp himself out to the madrileños 'catch a Rembrandt exhibition at the Prado'. But apparently he 'didn't receive an offer' according to 'sources close to' both the Teatro Real and Mortier himself.

So is that the end of the story? Well, not exactly. Lissner has four years to go on his La Scala contract, and was expected to stay even longer, until 2015, when Milan hosts a big exhibition. Of course, recent (ongoing) union troubles could give him an excuse to wriggle out of the Italian job honourably.

Mortier, on the other hand, is ready, willing and unencumbered - as soon as his Paris contract runs out in summer 2009, anyway. And having made extensive plans for the NYCO post which fell through, he has a roster of opera projects on the go. Many of these could be easily transferred to Madrid. What's more, according to El País, he has three credible potential musical directors in the picture, if not yet in the bag - Semyon Bychkov, Sylvain Cambreling (who worked alongside Mortier at La Monnaie) and 30 year old local boy, Pablo Heras.

What seems to seal his interest in the Madrid job (or at the very least, clarify his distinct lack of interest in several other locations) is a bitchity-bitch interview that turned up in yesterday's Wiener Zeitung. Here's some of the diss he sprays around the rest of Europe:

Paris? Staying on isn't realistic now he's reached official retirement age anyway, but the Paris Opera orchestra might be interested to discover that he misses in Paris the 'unbelievable musical quality' that he finds in Vienna. Despite the fact that he - personally, of course - has improved Parisian musical standards 'tremendously'. The nail in the coffin? He says Gounod wrote 'really bad music' - a two-fingered response to the repeated French criticism that Mortier doesn't programme enough French opera?

Germany? Confirming what many of us suspected, he claims he never really wanted the Bayreuth job he applied for in the summer. It was a 'political act', a gesture to show that an institution financed by the taxpayer shouldn't be a family affair. He knew the succession was a fait accompli anyway, and he probably wouldn't apply again in future.

Vienna? At 65, he thinks he's too old to run another big opera house (is this just a sly dig at current Intendant, Ioan Holender, 73?) And that the Staatsoper haus orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, only play at 70% of their potential. And that modern works should be handed over to other orchestras, like the Klangforum. Oops. Oh, and let's not forget 'Austrian provincialism' while we're at it. Off his chest and straight inyerface. To Austria's newspaper of record. Oops again.

But wait, there's more. Smaller opera houses? He's too old, he thinks, for 'cut-price opera'.

Inflate your budgets now, Madrid.

ono not Matilde di Shabran again

Matilde di Shabran - Royal Opera House, 6 November 2008

My third and last visit to this production. And possibly - who knows? - the last time I'll ever see it. Until the trees start sprouting tenorinos, it's an opera that needs nothing less than Mr Rossini Pants himself, Juan Diego Flórez, not to mention the equally gifted soprano that Aleksandra Kurzak has provided here.

It's fascinating to see how performances change from night to night.

This was the eighth, and the acting, particularly from JDF, was so much more assured than it had been earlier. Just little things, an angry glance, a simpering smile, these made all the difference. Sadly he again sounded rather tired and weedy in the first act, just as he had on the opening night.

But Alfonso Antoniozzi (Isidoro) and Carlo Lepore (Ginardo) were more on the mark vocally than either of the previous performances I heard. Antoniozzi has had a rough ride from the critics. It's true his singing is far from spot-on, but in many ways he held the show together with his exquisitely-timed comedy. And it's only fair to point out he got a huge ovation from the audience each night.

Not that front row guest the inscrutable Mr Hytner seemed to care one way or the other. No expression whatsoever. And he never made it back for the second act - who knows why. Carlo Rizzi's conducting perhaps? It was the most disappointing part of the evening, seemingly careless more often than not, and frequently drowning out the singers. Perhaps the weeks of endless tiddlypom have finally taken their toll.

   

Diana Damrau - promising start, needs more work

Diana Damrau / Julius Drake - Wigmore Hall, 4 November 2008

Berg Seven Early Songs
Barber Mélodies passagères Op. 27
Iain Bell Daughters of Britannia
Strauss Drei Lieder der Ophelia Op. 67
Strauss Malven; Einerlei Op. 69 No. 3; Ständchen Op. 17 No. 2; Freundliche Vision Op. 48 No. 1; Wiegenlied Op. 41 No. 1; Muttertändelei Op. 43 No. 2; Amor Op. 68 No. 5

For her Wigmore debut, Diana Damrau went for an wide-ranging programme that allowed her to display a mastery of several styles and languages. It let on that there's more to her than the high-flown coloratura chirruping she's known for.

Precise in every note, equally at home in English, French and German, capable of the most exquisite floating pianissimos and faultless messa di voce - technically, it was staggering. Yet despite the breathtaking technique, I couldn't help feeling there was something missing for most of the evening. And that was a sense of detailed engagement with the text. The opera singer's ability to nail mood and emotion was there. But the lieder singer's feel for poetry emerged only in some of the Strauss songs she closed with. Her technical arsenal was more structural than semantic, with a particular tendency for showstopper FX on final lines and a disregard for verbal nuance.

It's perhaps unsurprising that the group of songs written specially for her, Iain Bell's Daughters of Britannia, suited her abilities best. Bell's bold characterisation and plain language may not be particularly innovative or poetic. But Damrau could assume a series of sharply-hewn and convincing personas as she slipped into the shoes of Boudicca, Maid Marian, Lady Godiva and the rest.

As the deranged heroine of of Strauss's Ophelia songs, or the tender mama of his Wiegenlied and Muttertändelei, again she transported us. She is clearly some actress, as she's shown time and again on the opera stage. But when it came to being herself, despite all the artistry, there was just something missing.

 

Naked Executioner gets his chopper out for charity

Does the name Duncan Meadows ring a bell? He's the Covent Garden busker who hit the headlines earlier this year for his silent (and *totally nekkid!*) role as the executioner in David McVicar's Salome (left).

Well, Duncan and his chopper have popped up again. This time his weapon-handling skillz are displayed in the Royal Opera House's new hawt nude calendar (below), making him perhaps the only subject to flash less flesh on the page than on the stage.

  

Hawt nude calendar update - Royal Opera House finally get 'em off

The Royal Opera House's hawt nude calendar finally hits the shelves!

Coyly titled 'A World Stage Revealed', it promises "a hint of cheek". And that's all it delivers, thanks to some cunning poses and creatively positioned props.

The 12 male and 12 female portraits include dancers like Ed Watson, Eric Underwood, Zenaida Yanowsky and Sian Murphy, as well as orchestral and production staff.

Singers are not that well represented (did you really want to see John Tomlinson in the altogether anyway?), but Charles Castronovo has bravely bared all.

Sales of the £10 calendar will raise funds for Macmillan Cancer Support - buy it here.

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The Royal Ballet's Sian Murphy: 

Mark Skipper, actor and acrobat:

Pointe shoes mistress Catherine Ladd: 

Cheryl Knight, who works in performance support:

Emma Granger and Caroline Clarke of the Royal Opera House orchestra: 

Royal Opera Carmen dancers:  

Emily Gottleib, stage manager: 

Teh Ginger Prince, Edward Watson:

The costume department's Sabine Lemaitre:
 

And my favourite - Zenaida Yanowsky of the Royal Ballet previews baby Owen:
 

~~~~~  all images © Royal Opera House  ~~~~~