Intermezzo

Modern opera doesn't sell?

In exploring one myth, Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur has quashed another.

According to Kasper Holten, its recently-ended five show run played to an average 95.4% capacity, comfortably above the ROH's last season's average of 92%. Of course that still means 100 or so seats were empty each night, but it's still one in the eye for those who claim modern opera is an unsustainable minority interest. Not to mention those who plead that taking risks leads ineluctably to poor box office.

Ticket pricing played an unquestionable part in its success. Prices were initially set at a maximum of £65 (compared to £225 for some productions), and even then there was a spot of strategic discounting later.

But cheap seats can't be the whole answer. Judith Weir's dreadful Miss Fortune failed to sell even when the discount offers were crowned with free kebabs.

The difference is one of quality. Miss Fortune was well cast, entertainingly staged and keenly priced. But it lacks The Minotaur's trump card - a great score.  It explains too why Anna Nicole and The Tempest filled the house - and why The Passenger and Caligula couldn't do the same job for ENO.

Initial reaction to The Minotaur was positive, and when there's a buzz about a show - any show, not just opera - word quickly gets around London. Combine that with accessible pricing and people will come. There's a sizeable public out there who are turned off by what they see as the kitsch trimmings of traditional opera - the pretty tunes, the silly plots, the puffy shorts. That's the potential audience ENO have spotted, but failed to capture - and the audience The Minotaur has grabbed.

Fingers crossed that the ROH will have the guts to chuck out any Missfortunate duds on their recently announced new opera programme before they get anywhere near the stage. And that ENO will either find a way to sort the operatic wheat from the chaff - or just stick to the Jonathan Miller-style bel canto fluff which, much as it pains me to say it, has hit the artistic mark better than anything else they've done recently.

The Minotaur returns to the Royal Opera House

The Minotaur - Royal Opera House, 17 January 2013

Looking back at the notes I made after The Minotaur's first outing in 2008, little in this first revival challenges my initial impressions.  The principal cast and staging remain virtually identical, with a new conductor the only significant change. After a bout of tendinitis forced Pappano out, Ryan Wigglesworth has taken over baton duties with a light touch and a flair for clarity. 

Curse of The Ring strikes Pappano - again

Five years almost to the day since his last Wagner-related injury, Antonio Pappano has once more been struck down by the Curse of The Ring.

The Royal Opera House report the maestro is suffering from "acute tendonitis in his right elbow" - aka tennis elbow - following a string of heavy-duty engagements including Otello, Les Troyens, several concerts with his Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and of course The Ring. This means he has to pull out of the ROH revival of The Minotaur in the new year, to be replaced by Ryan Wigglesworth.

Coincidentally, Franz Welser-Möst recently suffered a similar affliction. He's now back on his podium. Perhaps they could get together and share tips? 

Then again, perhaps not.

Birtwistle's Minotaur on TV tomorrow

Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur finds itself on BBC2 tomorrow night, Saturday 7 June, at 7.35pm. in a performance recorded at the Royal Opera House.

It may be available after broadcast on the BBC iPlayer - worth a check later.

Classical music programmes currently available on the iPlayer are Early Music and last year's Prom 48 (the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra)

 

Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur premieres at Covent Garden ****Now with added T1ts!****

The Minotaur - Royal Opera House Covent Garden, 15 April 2008

It's hard to accuse Sir John Tomlinson of stealing the show when the whole thing was written specially for him. Even so, 45 minutes along, just as it started to drag a little, his first appearance jolted it back into life. Bull-masked and bare-chested, he roared and lowed the Minotaur into being, spotlit alone on the bare stage as the orchestra rose to a clamour beneath him. Talk about making an entrance.

The evening started well enough - glassy black sea rolling on a video screen, sighing strings, bass winds grunting ominously beneath. But then Ariadne and Theseus turned up. In Birtwistle's tale, the pair are grossly unsympathetic. She'll do anything to escape the prison of an island she shares with the Minotaur, including tricking the visiting Theseus into marriage. Theseus isn't interested in anything except the revenge-killing of the Minotaur. Hardly a pair of lovebirds.

Birtwistle's scoring here is almost serene; cool and translucent. The vocal thread leaps and jerks here and there, but never thrills. The spare, minimalist set  - a sun, a sky, a sail - starts to look bare and dull. The joy spreads thin. Twenty minutes in, and I was counting down to the interval. Christine Rice and Johan Reuter sang splendidly and no doubt did what they were supposed to do, but like a family Christmas, the whole thing just probed the powers of human endurance a little too hard.

But with the entrance of the Minotaur, everything shifted up several gears. The music became bristling, abrasive and veryvery loud, with an army of percussionists spilling out from the pit and into the stage side boxes, and two more beating their drums on stage.

In Birtwistle's version of the tale, the Minotaur is not a dumb agent of destruction, he's a deeply sympathetic character, yearning to make sense of himself and his existence. (But managing the odd bit of beastly rape and murder in between).

Trapped in a bullring, egged on by a masked chorus, the Minotaur bellows inarticulately and gores his sacrificial victims with balletic grace. Then alone in a dream and gazing into the mirror of his future, he speaks, or rather sings, a caged handful of circling notes. Tomlinson's face, visible beneath his wire bull mask, emphasises the human shadowed beneath the beast. It's riveting and unsettling.

I still can't decide whether the near-repeat of the sacrifice and mirror-dream scenes increases or diminishes their impact - it's structurally elegant, but does it add anything?

I had more doubts about the Keres, mono-winged goth vultures who descend to feast on the Minotaur's sacrificial leftovers. Amanda Echalaz was brilliantly terrifying as their screeching leader, but shouldn't the Minotaur himself and his killings be the scariest thing on the stage?

Here are the t!ts, and yes they're more like the front of a ship than the front of a page 3 lady, but hay, countertenors can't grow their own. Ariadne had to get the ball of string tip somehow, and Andrew Watts, the Snake Priestess, provided it, gliding skywards, skirts trailing, stuttering in an arresting shriek. It was the closest the evening got to humour, a relief from the intensity of the soul-searching and bloodshed, but far too brilliantly executed to be a mere distraction.

Even the return of Theseus and Ariadne for some more dry interplay couldn't deflate the thrilling dénouement, where mortally wounded by Theseus, the Minotaur finally speaks, becoming human in death, a heartbreaking transformation from Sir John Tomlinson.

Clearly conscious of the responsibility in mounting this major premiere, Pappano had polished the orchestra to Berlin Phil-like perfection. Yes even the horns. I can't recall ever hearing the Royal Opera House orchestra play quite this immaculately - it certainly raises the bar for future productions.

One thing we probably won't see again though is £65 top price tickets - and anyone who imagines ticket prices don't affect the audience mix should have checked out the significant proportion of younger faces in the full house tonight.