Intermezzo

Prom 60 - Martha Argerich returns. And so does Alice Coote

Prom 60: Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Dutoit / Martha Argerich - Royal Albert Hall, 30 August 2009

Proms Chamber Music 13: Alice Coote / Steven Osborne - Cadogan Hall, 30 August 2009

Martha Argerich is often described as ‘reclusive’, but a glance at her busy calendar shows, no, it’s just the UK she doesn’t care for. A recent visit to the Royal Festival Hall aside, she hasn’t played here for an eternity. So her appearance in Sunday’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Prom was unmissable, and not just for me. Every seat was filled and the arena was packed to bursting. I don’t think even the ukulele Prom was this well-attended.

The original programme seemed too good to be true – two concertos, Ravel and Prokofiev’s first. Sure enough, the Proms website announced a few days ago that lack of preparation due to illness meant the Prokofiev would be substituted by a purely orchestral piece (though with no further notices or announcements many in the audience were unaware of the late switch).

But the Ravel alone was worth waiting for. Argerich contained its Gershwinesque exuberance within chamber-like dimensions, conjuring a playful intimacy with her extraordinarily light and fluid touch. Its virtuosic demands were satisfied with carefree spontaneity, her skills seemingly limitless. Watch her and her fingers seem to plunge almost brutally into the keyboard, yet listen and you could believe they’re dancing weightlessly above it, teasing the sound out by charm alone. Her effortless languor in the beautiful central adagio made time stand still.

And there was more! Solo recitals from Argerich are a rare treat these days, but we got a glimpse of what might be from her encore, a Scarlatti sonata performed with the limpid gravity of late Chopin. And here was the real magic – rapidly hammered single note repeats where each note was coloured slightly differently. (Go to 48:35 on the iPlayer broadcast to experience).

Argerich ended a first half which began with an overdue UK premiere - the lush, knotted melodies of Vivier’s Orion, a Messiaen-like journey into outer space beautifully performed by Dutoit and the RPO. But I skipped the second – anything after Argerich would have been a let-down.

Earlier in the day, I went to a couple of the many concerts that the Cadogan Hall hosted over the weekend. Designed to showcase a large number of current and former BBC New Generation Artists in each, they were, inevitably, something of a mixed bag, with no-one given long enough to make much of an impression either way.

Just when I thought the highlight of the day might turn out to be Martinů’s slight but delightful Promenades for flute, violin and harpsichord, Alice Coote and Steven Osborne emerged to end the 2.30 concert with a selection from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Only four songs - Rheinlegendchen, Das Irdische Leben, Wo die Schonen Trompeten blasen and Urlicht - but she dove headfirst into each, so intensely committed and so acutely attentive to textual nuance that it seemed a lifetime of emotions had been laid out before us. Pity poor Steven Osborne who did his best with the half-hearted piano reductions. These songs are transformed in the full orchestral versions - for which (as she volunteered in a pre-recital interview) Alice Coote is open to offers.

  

LPO miss Mark

London Philharmonic Orchestra / Mark Elder / Alice Coote / Paul Nilon - Wigmore Hall, 9 January 2009

What's the point of a conductor? This recital, so tempting on paper, proved that even with a chamber-sized ensemble, a stick-waver is not dispensable.

Thirteen members of the LPO squeezed on to the bijou Wigmore stage and attempted to steer themselves through the tricky waters of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll without a guide, and at a guess, without a lot of rehearsal.  There were numerous glaring slips of ensemble. Balance was non-existent, winds massively overweighted. Tempo or dynamics were cautiously unvarying - monotony spared us the otherwise inevitable chaos. The musicians looked relieved just to reach the end. I certainly was.

It was a different story when Mark Elder picked up the baton for Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. There was even less room on the platform now, and musicians spilled out behind through the doorways. But at least they were playing together, more focussed yet paradoxically more relaxed. Even the intonation was for some reason more accurate.

But the Wigmore Hall acoustics are not kind to such massive forces, however closely reined. They treat every instrument and every voice democratically. To a string quartet, it's a miracle that magically makes them sing with one voice. For Paul Nilon and Alice Coote it was a disaster. Despite heroic efforts, they were frequently inaudible, not riding the band, but joining it.

Paul Nilon's ringing tenor was abandoned in every possible sense in the lurching waltz of the opening drinking song. The looped and intertwined instrumental lines sprang out with crystal clarity; the tenor sank slowly to the bottom of the glass.

Alice Coote fared a little better. At least the mezzo is allotted some of the more thinly-orchestrated passages, so she could shine through without force. She brought delicacy and exuberance in turn to Von der Schönheit, and with her unique gift for inhabiting even the silence, caught the disquieting change in atmosphere that occurs at the end of the song - without singing a note. Perhaps you had to be there. Nostalgia and yearning were joined in Der Abschied, her exquisitely poised farewell.

I suspect only age and infirmity prevented the capacity audience from rising to their feet at the end. I haven't heard many ovations that loud or prolonged at the Wigmore for a while. But while you couldn't fault the effort, or dispute the Wigmore audience's sentimental adoration of Coote and Elder (based on a history of solid performances) what this performance really proved is that if the performers don't fit the platform, the sound doesn't fit the hall. Oh, and a conductor is not a luxury.

What's on in London - January edition

As the London concert scene awakes from its festive slumber, evenings are once more full of Things To Go To. Here is a selection of what's happening in January

There are two premieres at the Royal Opera House. Willy Decker's much-travelled Die tote Stadt, which I caught last year in Vienna, opens on 27 January 2009. Still plenty of tickets left - be warned that the mise en abîme staging is largely performed in a kind of box upstage, and may not be fully visible from some side seats. 

This year's annual Britten production is The Beggar’s Opera, in the Linbury Studio from 20 January. The cast includes Tom Randle and Susan Bickley; Christian Curnyn conducts.  It's currently sold out, though as ever, seats may 'appear' later. Avoid side seats towards the front, where the sound is abysmal.

In an appealing ballet triple bill, the separated-at-birth Martha Wainwright and Zenaida Yanowsky return from 31 January for Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins. Mats Ek’s Carmen and Christopher Wheeldon’s frenetic DGV, set to Michael Nyman's music, complete an evening that should attract music lovers as well as ballet fans.

The English National Opera's January is yet another month of ballet, but Nicholas Hytner's enduring Magic Flute returns on 24 January with Roderick Williams as Papageno and Robert Lloyd as Sarastro.

The Barbican's year sets off to a cracking start. One of the early highlights is Haydn's Creation with Thomas Quasthoff and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra conducted by René Jacobs on 10 January.

Sir Colin Davis conducts the LSO in Verdi's Requiem on 11 and 14 January, with soloists Christine Brewer, Larissa Diadkova, Stuart Neill and John Relyea. (There's another opportunity to hear it at the Royal Opera House on 13 March, this time with Pappano conducting.)

Lock up your grannies on 17 January - the BBC Symphony Orchestra celebrate the genius of Stockhausen with a whole Stockhausen day - a 12 hour programme of films, talks and concerts.

On 27 and 29 January Valery Gergiev conducts the LSO in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle, with Katarina Dalayman and Willard White. The double date suggests a recording is planned.

Gergiev cools his heels in London for a few more days to conduct the visiting Mariinsky Theatre in three performances from 30 January.  Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades,  Rubinstein's  The Demon and Smelkov's new The Brothers Karamazov are on the menu - here's a video of the latter, which premiered in Russia last year.

Over at the Royal Festival Hall, on 24 January Mark Elder conducts the LPO in a bill which includes a couple of intriguing rarities -  Martinu's The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca and Strauss's Symphonia domestica  - alongside Mendelssohn's more familiar Violin Concerto. Listen to the Martinu on the LPO's site.

On 27 January Rachel Podger joins the OAE in the Queen Elizabeth Hall for bill of Bach and Telemann. But skip that for the 10pm bargain Night Shift concert, which repeats some of the earlier programme and adds a few extras on top - tickets £8, drinks allowed, and a more laid-back atmosphere all round.

At Wigmore Hall, tomorrow, 9 January, Alice Coote and Paul Nilon tackle Mahler with Mark Elder. For spring, there's a focus on vocal music, and 11 January sees the first of a series of Sunday 4pm concerts featuring young British-based singers, all at a bargain £12 price. This one has Anna Grevelius, Anna Leese, Andrew Staples and Jacques Imbrailo. Emma Bell and Lucy Crowe appear later on in the series

Robin Ticciati's House of Gingerbread

Hänsel und Gretel - Royal Opera House, 11 December 2008 (first night of second cast)

Despite the fact that Hänsel und Gretel is nominally a children's opera, there were precious few kids in the auditorium for this second performance in the run. There weren't many at the first either. But with tickets at up to £110 it's perhaps not surprising.

Less privileged children will just have to wait for the TV screening - now confirmed as BBC2 at 3pm on 25 December.

So 25 year old conductor Robin Ticciati was, as usual, younger than 99% of his audience.  This was not just the first night for the second cast, but also Ticciati's Covent Garden debut. Alternating conducting duties with Sir Colin Davis was not quite a mighty leap into the unknown, as he's just finished conducting Glyndebourne's touring production.

His Hänsel und Gretel is quite different from the dark post-Wagnerian elegance of Sir Colin's. For a start, he set up a cracking pace, knocking at least five minutes off each half. The touch was lighter, he pulled tempos and dynamics around less. It was a playful interpretation that emphasised the shiny surfaces more and the dark undercurrents less.

The orchestra, horns especially, played beautifully for him. Overtures apart, his eyes were locked on the stage almost constantly, with barely a glance at the score, still less at the musicians.  Obviously he's telepathic as well as talented, because everything held together perfectly.

In Alice Coote's Hänsel and Camilla Tilling's Gretel we had a less intuitively-matched pairing than the first cast of Angelika Kirchschlager (enjoying herself in row B of tonight's audience) and Diana Damrau. The first cast were best of friends; the second were more like real siblings, with all the differences and discords that implies.

Alice Coote's Hänsel was the boisterous dimwit familiar from her Met performance earlier in the year and powerfully sung. Camilla Tilling's voice was underweight in the first act, but improved, and she had a childlike vulnerability that eluded Diana Damrau, for all her impressive technique. We all now know girls are smarter than boys, but it's also woven into the Hansel and Gretel storyline, as Coote and Tilling beautifully illustrated.

Irmgard Vilsmaier as Mother and Eike Wilm Schulte as Father got a head start on laughs - she's about twice his size in all directions. They sang more accurately and enunciated more clearly than the first cast, even if they lacked some of their dramatic confidence and presence.

Ann Murray's more governessy character terrified less than Anja Silja's definitive witch, though the voice is in better shape. As reader ljg pointed out, she may be the first singer to tackle a role previously performed by her husband (Philip Langridge at the Met).

Eri Nakamura's Sandman and Simona Mihai's Dew Fairy were both nicely done, though the rubber-masked Sandman costume still gives me the creeps  - far more so than the dead children strung up in the witch's freezer which have so perturbed 'children's campaigners'.  The Tiffin schoolchildren on the stage didn't seem to have the least problem with any of it.

Incidentally, Green & Blacks have been giving out their very yummy chocolate before selected shows for a while now, and I was pleased to find the Royal Opera House have recruited another  sponsor, this time Acqua di Parma, handing out cologne samples. One commercial intrusion I really don't mind.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Prom 18: Glyndebourne's Poppaea flashes her bits at the Proms

Prom 18: The Coronation of Poppaea - Glyndebourne Festival Opera - Royal Albert Hall, 18 July 2008

Having decided I'd rather spend four hours in a comfy(ish) seat with a decent view than straining my stilettos to peer through the crowd, I forked out £21 for a choir stalls seat, behind the stage. This isn't always a great place to sit for big orchestral concerts, right on top of timps and tubas which can drown out every other sound.

But for this semi-staged performance of Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppaea (yes, the English title despite being sung in Italian) I ended up mere inches from the action, and what's more, the orchestra were behind the singers. The best seats in the house? For one night only, possibly.

Robert Carsen's original Glyndebourne staging was swagged top to toe in red velvet. The Royal Albert Hall couldn't quite stretch to that, so instead we got a few draped objects scattered strategically around the stage >>>>>

Normally when Glyndebourne visits the Proms, it brings a full sized orchestra with it, so the singers end up squeezed on to a sort of landing strip in the middle.

But with the 20-odd musicians of Emmanuelle Haïm's tiny band shoehorned on to the front of the stage, there was plenty of space left for what turned out to be one of the most complete operatic stagings I've seen at the Proms, not much 'semi' about it at all.

It opened with a cringemaking and redundant bit of comedy 'business': Virtue (got up as a nun see left) and Fortune (glamorously evening-gowned) arguing in the front row of the Arena - from where they were invisible and inaudible to most of the audience (except us lot in the choir, nah).  Did the director not realise the audience would be standing?

Equally irritating was the way Cupid - written into only a couple of scenes - loitered around the stage throughout  like a wasp at a picnic. It may have made sense in the Glyndebourne staging, but it didn't transfer to the Proms. I shall now remember Amy Freston for her annoying arrow-waving intrusion rather than her brief but excellent singing.

Emmanuelle Haïm directed the pared-down Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment from the keyboard, in thinly-scored, unfussy and beautifully translucent arrangements.

Although she'd trimmed the score here and there, only one full scene was sacrificed. I wished she'd pruned more ruthlessly - or at least upped the consistently stately pace here and there. It was a hot fuggy night, half the audience hadn't heard of deodorant, and there there several moments I just wanted her to get on with it.

Vocally, the main draw was Alice Coote, and she didn't disappoint as the coolly psychopathic Nero, a butcher in a dinner suit. An opaque and less intense performance than Coote often gives, but just as enthralling.

Danielle de Niese made a surprisingly good job of Poppea, given that her career seems to be headed down the Katherine Jenkins route.

While her idea of acting secksy is as subtle as a stag party strippergram, the voice had more colour and gleam than previous exposure had suggested. As she pouted and squirmed and ground her sturdy thighs into the prone Nero, the difference between the two performances became painfully obvious though. Coote wants you to believe in her, utterly; De Niese just wants to be admired. Poppea is more than a firecrotched party girl; she's a schemer who uses her body as a tool to pursue her broader ambitions. De Niese's dramatic skills didn't stretch this far. But otherwise, the role didn't tax her limitations, and she was one of the best things about the evening.

Iestyn Davies sang Ottone with remarkably secure tone and excellent projection  - definitely one of the few countertenors with the ability to fill a space the size of the Royal Albert Hall. He bravely sidestepped a cheap laugh, and didn't allow the female disguise he sported for Poppea's attempted murder to overshadow the implications of this desperate act.

Just as well really, because there were men in frocks to spare. Though neither could resist dipping into mannerism, some of the best vocal performances came from the character singers Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke as the Queen Motherly Amalta and Dominique Visse as the Mrs T-like Nurse.

Tamara Mumford as a Nepregko-lookalike Octavia and Marie Arnet as Drusilla also gave able performances, and only Paolo Battaglia's desiccated and uncomfortable-looking/sounding Seneca really disappointed. Cruelly costumed in a thick tweed suit, he must have been envious of the many other characters given dramatic licence to cavort in their underpants on this steamy night. Nero's, Ottone's, Amalta's, Lucan's - we saw 'em all.

The only evidence of airconditioning was the noise it made, like hobnailed elves dancing in the pipes. Now that's one area where the Arena really does score - for some reason it's noticeably cooler than the seated areas on the hottest days.

Listen to the whole concert for the next 7 days on Radio 3 here.

A few reverse-angle photos - the only real disadvantage of the choir seats:

 

 

Sweaty Eddie's La Clemenza di Tito at the Barbican

La Clemenza di Tito - OAE/Gardner - Barbican, 26 July 2008

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment immediately sounded a lot better on this outing than they do at their native South Bank, confirming my suspicion that however questionable the Barbican acoustics might be, the Royal Festival Hall's are (despite the refurb) still worse.

As for the rest of the evening, this concert performance knocked the spots off David McVicar's recent ninja yawnathon for ENO (in which conductor Ed Gardner and Alice Coote also featured).

The OAE were immaculately prepared - perhaps a repeat performance this weekend at the Lincoln Center , marking Gardner's New York debut, justified a little extra rehearsal time. They were on thrilling form, playing as if their lives depended on it.

Even though the daily ENO grind is turning Gardner prematurely grey, his floppy-fringed cuteness endures. If only that was enough to move orchestras. I've found his ENO efforts patchy - too often pallid and uninspired - but he surprised me tonight, working up a sweat on the podium and a fire on the stage.

Tito seems to have built up a chorus of apologists recently, all ready to proclaim that it's unjustifiably sidelined, one of Mozart's finest, etc. But it's not. Unlike Die Zauberflöte, so eminently resistant to even the most cack-handed of treatments, when Tito's given a second-rate performance, it sounds like a second-rate opera. This is the first time I've heard it dispatched with the sort of passion and commitment that do it justice.

Of course the soloists played a huge part in this, none more so than Alice Coote, who gave so much more than just singing. In the central role of Sesto, agonisingly torn between self-destructive love for the selfish, ambitious Vitellia and loyalty to the Emperor Tito, she inhabited her part fearlessly and totally.  This was a concert performance, but nothing except the music stand gave a hint that this was anything less than Coote would deliver on the opera house stage. She looked utterly spent as she sank back into her plastic chair at the end of each aria.

Toby Spence as Tito was dressed for St Moritz in January with his white polo neck and thick velvet jacket. But this was London in July, with British (i.e. rubbish) aircon. When he whipped the jacket off and sat astride his chair (to the apparent surprise of the other performers) as he started to interrogate Coote aria-style, I wondered if it was a spot of heat exhaustion. But no - dramatic licence (and very effective) - he put it straight back on again afterwards.

There was a range to his performance that suggested experiment as much as expressive breadth. Not all of it came off - in particular I felt he stressed Tito's benevolence at the expense of his authority - but it was clear he has an ever-growing range of vocal tools, not to mention the ability to keep an audience on the edge of their seats.

Next to the white-hot intensity of these two, Hillevi Martinpelto's studied and refined portrayal of Vitellia inevitably paled a little. Vitellia's mean streak needed a harder edge. But she sang beautifully, every note appropriately shaded, the voice still lustrous and almost girlish. It was 'Mozart singing' in the classic sense, and a pleasure to listen too.

Sarah Tynan was wonderfully cast as the sweet Servilia, the plaintive innocent, and Fiona Murphy too as the doughty Annio.

Matthew Rose's Publio seemed rather lugubrious in comparison to the spirited performances elsewhere, but there's something of that in the character anyway, and his sonorous bass was impressively mobile in the faster passages. 

The Clare College Cambridge Choir were enthusiastic and crisply drilled - a textbook rendition, if not an especially sensitive one, to nitpick.

This concert was announced relatively late, and the Proms always provide stiff competition at this time of year. Even so, it surprised me, given the casting, that it was far from sold out - the whole balcony closed, and empty seats here and there elsewhere. The Barbican sometimes offers up some rather dodgy programming in its annual summer Mozart festival, but this was an overwhelming exception.

Here's one she made earlier: Hillevi Martinpelto sings Deh seh piacer mi vuoi for Charles Mackerras:

Alice Coote's unforgettable journey

Alice Coote/Julius Drake - Wigmore Hall, 28 March 2008

Schubert - Winterreise

Very few women have tackled the manly Winterreise successfully - Brigitte Fassbaender, and, memorably, Christa Ludwig are the only ones I'm aware of. And to add to the pressure on Alice Coote, tonight's performance, the first of two over the weekend, was being recorded.

Her performance tonight was completely idiosyncratic and entirely Alice, utterly spellbinding.

She swept through the entire 75 minutes with bare seconds separating each song, no pauses for breath, water or recomposure, turning the 24 songs into an uninterrupted torrent. This was not an intellectual exercise in laying each song in turn on a velvet cushion of considered response, but a revelation of the emotional truth underlying whole cycle.

Any blurring of the individual identity of each song was recompensed in the blinding intensity of the performance. Resisting any temptation to break the mood, the often jauntily-taken Die Post was in her hands cuttingly ironic, the illusory repose of Der Lindenbaum exposed as the bitterest of despair.

Alice Coote's voice is not merely an instrument, it's almost an orchestra in its own right. The core is a luscious velvety mezzo of great beauty, but we heard little of that tonight. The range of colour and expression she can extract is staggering, and she deployed it fearlessly. Not all of the risks worked - she can conjure something forceful and screechy, most effective used sparingly, like black in a painting. Here she daubed it on too liberally in the earlier part of the cycle.

No stranger to a trouser or two on the operatic stage, tonight Alice went for an all-black Liza Minnelli-ish look - black satin mini trench belted over narrow pants and a sparkly low cut vest.  I mention this not merely in the interests of fashion. Alice Coote is an instinctive, almost compulsive, actress, and we would have got a different performance in a dress. Lurching forward, one hand in the piano, or twisted into some gawky pose or another, she cut an awkward, arresting, but entirely unselfconscious figure.

Julius Drake was an unintrusive and solid support, his role tonight very much a secondary one, no flourishes and no extended postludes, the piano symbolically on its shortest stick. As they left the stage after the final applause, she clutching the obligatory bouquet, he the wine bottle that the Wigmore Hall supplies to performers of the masculine gender, she made to grab his bottle. All that singing must build up some thirst......

Incidentally, I wasn't surprised to see a music stand - many performers need that crutch, regardless of how well they know their material - but I was surprised how often Alice referred to it.

Alice Coote and Julius Drake visited Radio 3's In Tune on Thursday to perform a couple of songs and discuss Winterreise. Here is the programme (their bit starts about 10 minutes in) - available online until Thursday.

No gingerbread for Hansel and Gretel at the Met

Hansel and Gretel - Metropolitan Opera, New York, 8 January 2007

Outside the Met before the show

There've been complaints from critics that this production is too scary, not sugary enough to bring the kids to. (Not quite as scary as the $3,550 (=£1,800) the Met wants you to pay for family tickets and a bed for the night though.) The sprinkling of children in my area of the audience seemed riveted, not at all perturbed. In truth I could see little that would bother any but those who are too young for a full night out at the opera anyway. The central themes of starvation and cannibalism (seasoned with child abuse and wife beating) are handled with engaging restraint. I did overhear some grannies on the way out who felt short-changed by the lack of a gingerbread house and a forest. It's probably this generation, who've perhaps seen a more literal take before, who are most likely to feel disappointed. But I've avoided it in the past for precisely the opposite reason, so this was my very first Hansel and Gretel.

It's immediately recognisable as a Richard Jones production from the shoebox set and sixties decor unveiled for the first act. The set, a dilapidated kitchen, is cleverly constructed so that it's higher and wider at the front than the back. This lends a surreal, unsettling depth to the visual, and makes the performers at the rear of the stage (the parents) seem suitably larger than the ones at the front (the children, played of course by adults). Manic movement compensated for the rather opaque written characterisations. Alice Coote presented Hansel as a typically boisterous small boy, charging around bull-headed, and Christine Schäfer's Gretel was a sweet and bashful little girl. The action (and there's lots of it) is precision-choreographed. Having recently seen rather too many Wagnerians shuffling cluelessly around the stage like sheepish auditionees, it was a delight to see some proper stage blocking for a change.

Although this production is in English, Coote and Schäfer's slurry diction made me grateful for the Met's seat-back subtitles (seatitles?). The problem was shared, to a lesser extent, by the rest of the cast. But then this is the case with so many English-language productions I've seen (like, just about everything at the ENO) that I have to wonder if it's a problem with the language itself as much as the singers. Especially for sopranos, it's tough to get the syllables across cleanly.

The second act is set in another expanding box, this one taller and more threatening, its forest setting evoked by dark leafy wallpaper and a tree branch chandelier.

Nodding trees around the sides are revealed as actors in uncomfortable headgear, and there are more actors, grotesque chefs who advance to set the giant banqueting table in the children's dream sequence, and a bizarre fish-headed waiter who rises out of the floor. Sasha Cooke (a slightly scary old-guy Sandman) and Lisette Oropesa (the Dew Fairy) get some of the prettiest music in the opera, and delivered really charming cameos here.

The third act began not with the expected gingerbread house, but with a giant cake-bearing mouth that led in to the witch's kitchen, a huge food factory complete with enormous oven. Due to illness, the scheduled Witch, Philip Langridge, was replaced by Adam Klein. Prosthetically tubbified, he delivered such an appropriately beguiling performance that I didn't miss Langridge at all.

The visuals are so breathtaking and consistently engaging that the music could almost take a back seat. But Vladimir Jurowski conducted the Met orchestra (sounding considerably more vigorous than they had in the previous night's Die Walküre) with a drive and attention to detail that underlined that this is not the glorified panto some might like it to be.

Courtesy of Welsh National Opera, who originally commissioned it, this production (different cast) can be seen in Cardiff and Birmingham this summer.

 

Mr and Mrs Jurowski and the kids:

ENO Carmen Dress Rehearsal

Carmen (Dress Rehearsal) - ENO, 26 September 2007

Articles like The CCTV Carmen and snippets dangled on the ENO's Carmen website warned that director Sally Potter would be abandoning the traditional cigars'n'castanets approach. So I wasn't surprised at the opening set - gigantic front-projected cctv images fade to reveal a portakabin in front of a dark curved marble wall, implying some unspecified menace lurking behind.

The portakabin holds the security guards that Potter has substituted for Bizet's soldiers. Carmen and the other women work in some unlabelled drudgery behind the wall, but their slapper heels and minis give a hint. The street urchins of the original become child jeebus-freaks and breakdancers - you get the picture. Only toreador Escamillo is spared a recasting. In this dark world, cruelty and violence seem inevitable.

The sets are strikingly simple and creatively lit, coherence lent by their clean lined geometry and rippled surfaces. The second act is set in a blue-lit chrome cocktail bar, the third on a covered bridge suspended over the stage, and the last outside the curved wall of the bull ring (cue beery British tourists exclaiming 'it's bloody hot here'). Traditionalists will be pleased to note there's no knicker-flashing, camouflage netting, etc - Potter is out to illuminate, not to shock.

Movement and blocking are economically choreographed. Even when there's a crowd on stage, it never looks cluttered. That is, until the tango and hip hop dancers pop up. Gifted with these amazingly skilled performers, it seems as if Potter felt obliged to include them in nearly every scene. Sometimes it works, sometimes, despite their breathtaking talent, they're a bit of a distraction. As is the gratuitous dog led across the stage by a security guard in the third act.

The ENO's English language-only policy works to Potter's advantage, allowing the libretto to be shoehorned into the production concept by a very free translation. This is really the only area where she's taken significant liberties - despite the relocation and modernisation, the characterisation and narrative are entirely recognisable.

I'm guessing the translation caused a lot of headaches. It still feels unfinished and clumsy in places. Disparities between the sung text and the surtitles hint that it must have been revised up to the last minute. Incidentally and disappointingly, the surtitles prove vital here for comprehending many of the singers. This is not the first ENO production where this has been a problem, and it's something they should really make more of an effort to address. Most of the compelling reasons for staging operas in English evaporate when you can't understand a bleeding word.

The ENO orchestra just keep getting better. They were on top form here, with a perfectly judged (but perhaps controversial) degree of Anglo-Saxon restraint from Edward Gardner in the pit matching the low key of the production.

It's not fair to make final judgments on singers based on a dress rehearsal, but it seems the casting choices are good ones, and there were no real disappointments. Carmen, poor Alice Coote, seemed still to be suffering from the virus which rendered her voiceless last week, and wisely held back here to save herself for the full performances. Whether she can bring the sensuality and passion the role demands remains to be seen - her reading here was opaque and subdued, making her switches of affection seem more imposed than selected.

The clean, accurate singing of Julian Gavin as Don José had a simple dignity, even if his final descent into madness and murder was too restrained to convince. The splendidly beehived Elena Xanthoudakis (Frasquita) and Fiona Murphy (Mercedes) were memorable despite the shortness of their parts.

This isn't a traditional Carmen by any means, but it's a recognisable one, even without the usual cheese topping.

If you're booking tickets, sight lines are pretty good all round, and you won't miss any principal action wherever you sit, just a little of the top of the sets from higher up.

Reckless snog puts Alice Coote's ENO Carmen in doubt

The wheels of opera are not running smoothly at ENO. Alice Coote, due to debut as Carmen in just two weeks time, has been forced out of action with a nasty virus, caught according to Alice from an unspecified "singer who breathed on/kissed me".

Rehearsals are of course in disarray, but there's no indication yet as to whether Alice will be well enough to perform on the first night, 29 September.

In what must be an opera first, Alice will be graciously allowing her doctor's visit and treatment to be filmed for display on ENO's Carmen mini-site (which is well worth a look anyway, with videos and commentary on all aspects of the production).

Get well soon Alice!

La Clemenza di Tito Dress Rehearsal

La Clemenza di Tito (dress rehearsal) - ENO, 5 June 2007

Photo: Laurie Lewis

I didn't catch this much-hyped production when it debuted a couple of years ago. But I came away today feeling I hadn't missed much.

Not at all the fault of the singers - although it was only a dress rehearsal, there was little to criticise here. Alice Coote's impassioned Sesto was a highlight despite the fact that she was recovering from a cold. The part of Vitellia demands a broad tessitura, and poor Emma Bell was forced to growl the deepest notes in an otherwise thrilling and lucid performance. Paul Nilon brought a human side to the rather baldly drawn role of Tito, though he didn't have that truly imperial charisma, and was vocally rather constricted at times. And the secondary roles were handled with energy and conviction. The orchestra too, led by Edward Gardner, were elegant and precise, with some beautiful clarinet work. Only the chorus, singing from the pit, sounded rather limp.

The design was more problematical. It begins with a nearly bare set in shadowed gloom. Curved orientalist panels are cleverly set into the stage revolve and periodically slid and twisted into various configurations. These surround a stunted little garden centre tree. The construction is ingenious but the concept ultimately too banal to retain interest for the entire performance. And I loathe a darkened stage, so I was dying for someone to turn the lights up, but it never happened.

The only visual break from the tedious glide of panels across stage were a couple of strange dancer interludes. In the first, the imperial guard in the form of a gang of baton twirling ninjas prance across the stage in formation, then disappear. They pop up again later, this time a portentous plod with a tray of nightlights. Immaculately executed and admittedly entertaining on both counts, but really nothing to do with the music or the drama.

The crepuscular minimalism of the design should have at least focussed attention on the performers, but they were largely static and often inadequately spotlit, holding attention only with the quality of their singing. A couple of nights back I saw Cheek by Jowl's Cymbeline at the Barbican, where a lot more is done with a lot less, simply by keeping the action moving fluidly and intelligently, and, most importantly, framing it in an overall structure. This Tito had nothing to say - it was just a moment we'd walked in on and walked away from. Mozart gave it a clear beginning and end, moments of great drama and moments of intimacy, which simply weren't reflected in David McVicar's one-note production. Only the fabulous musical performances made it worth seeing.