Intermezzo

Smashing fun

The Importance of Being Earnest - Royal Opera House, 14 June 2013 (first night)

Gerald Barry's comic masterpiece achieves two rare distinctions. Not just genuinely funny, it seems to be (rarer still) director-proof too. The Royal Opera House advertise this as the opera's "first UK staging". But with the orchestra on one side of the stage, a few plates of buns passing for scenery on the other, and the cast seemingly dressed in their own clothes, Ramin Grey's production has little to distinguish it from last year's Barbican concert version.

Royal Opera House autumn booking unleashed

Booking for the first chunk of the ROH's 2013-14 season opens tomorrow (for ROH Friends) and 9 July (enemies).

Top of your list should be Music Theatre Wales' guest appearances in the Linbury Studio. Not just because Mark Anthony Turnage's Greek and Salvatore Sciarrino’s The Killing Flower are rarely-performed modern classics, but because they're likely to sell out very quickly. Unless, of course, the ROH are holding seats back to flog at at a later date, as has been their most recent annoying habit. "Three-dimensional sonic structures that envelop an audience in extremes of volume and texture" are promised in another Linbury opera, the brand-new The Wasp Factory by Ben Frost and David Pountney.

Clouded message

"The IT team opted for the Gold support service from AWS and uses a host of Amazon services including EC2, S3, AWS Elastic LoadBalancing, DynamoDB for database management, CloudFront, and CloudFormation. It is now looking at AWS Elastic Beanstalk to make its web services more sophisticated. "We have had some issues with AWS hardware and tools such as DynamoDB,” Greig said. “But it is not more than what would happen if we were on an internal infrastructure.”"

If you understand all that, then you may care to read more about the Royal Opera House's ticketing system from Computer Weekly.

 

Tartan wars - Kasper Holten bites back

Kasper Holten has kindly spared the time to make a lengthy and constructive comment addressing some of the criticism of La donna del lago and the more general issues raised.  You can read it on the post itself, or below:

Does this man smell? Bollocks!

Scots are fuming over their haggis at John Fulljames's portrayal of Highlanders in La donna del lago reports the Herald.  The director shows them as kilted thugs with matted hair and filthy clothes, going round raping and disembowelling everything in their path in between 2^1/2 octave coloratura runs.

"Turning Highlanders into savages is the clear choice of an author; that's what Rossini and Scott are saying," he claims. "If you look at those films [like Highlander and Braveheart], the Highlanders are hairy. You do imagine they'd be smelly."

But Professor David Purdie, the chairman of the Sir Walter Scott Club, dismisses that interpretation as "bollocks".

"Scott was a great admirer of the courage and characteristics of the Highlanders and lamented the fact they had been separated for so long from southern Scotland by geography, language, politics and religion. Scott more than anybody else helped to unite the Highlands and Lowlands. His great aim in life was the promotion of Scotland as a unity within the United Kingdom."

La donna del lago, Royal Opera House

La donna del lago - Royal Opera House, 17 May 2013 (first night)

The Royal Opera House has pulled together the most perfect cast imaginable for this new production. They more than lived up to expectations, with line after line of the most thrillingly spectacular Rossini singing I've ever heard. Even a production that rivals the recent Nabucco for sheer ineptness couldn't dim their brilliance.

Research Apportunity

Researchers at King's College London are looking for volunteers to help them develop a mobile app for the Royal Opera House.

Applicants have to record their smartphone usage for a week.

The reward for participating is free access to premium paid-for content on the app when it is launched, a 10 per cent discount at the ROH shop, and a DVD of a ROH performance.

For further details, including how to take part, check out the King's website.

WTF is Lianna Haroutounian?

All live reports welcome. Meanwhile.....

Harteros out of Don Carlo

Not entirely unexpected news from the Royal Opera House: "Anja Harteros has withdrawn from singing the role of Elizabeth of Valois in Don Carlo for the performance on 8 May due to acute tonsillitis." Lianna Haroutounian, already booked for most of the run, replaces her.

There's no word about Harteros's one remaining booking, 11 May, yet, but "acute tonsillitis" is not something that clears quickly. Could we have unwittingly seen her last ever Covent Garden performance already?

Don Carlo, Royal Opera House dreamteam style

Don Carlo - Royal Opera House, 4 May 2013

Jonas Kaufmann wasn't ill; Anja Harteros turned up. Given that she'd marked half her lines at the general rehearsal earlier in the week (every singer's prerogative of course, but rare here) I had wondered. If success is defined as exceeding expectations, then the opening night of this third revival was a winner even before a note was sung.

Jonas Kaufmann last night - video

Jonas Kaufmann's final encore last night, Ah, la paterna mano, Macduff's aria from Macbeth.

(Not my video by the way - I don't endorse shooting while singing. But a big thanks to whoever did. And I trust all those who dashed out after the second encore have learned their lesson.)

Royal Opera to go baroque

The Royal Opera will be crossing the Thames next year to stage Cavalli's L'Ormindo in a new indoor theatre being built next door to Shakespeare's Globe. The 350-seat Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (artist's impression above) aims to reproduce a Jacobean theatre in authentic fashion, complete with candlelight, crap sightlines and dodgy acoustics. I don't even want to think about the ladies loos.  But apart from the lack of boxes, it looks not a million miles from the Venetian theatres Cavalli himself would have known. Conductor Christian Curnyn promises further historical flavour, and Kasper Holten directs.

Even though it doesn't open until 25 March 2014, booking opens on 14 May 2013.

Here's a bit of the music from Sandrine Piau:

Placido Domingo's Nabucco debut

Nabucco - Royal Opera House, 15 April 2013

Poor Placido Domingo. What a way to make a role debut. On top of one of the ugliest and least comprehensible productions of all time, he had to contend with clouds of swirling sand and what looked like a bad case of backache. Being, legendarily, the type that puts up and shuts up, there were no pre-show excuses, no indulgences sought. Leave that sort of thing to Generation Pantywaist; Placido is a soldier.

Christoph Waltz to direct Renee Fleming's Covent Garden farewell

So, the rumour was true. Oscar winner and Kommissar Rex guest star Christoph Waltz will direct a new Rosenkavalier at the Royal Opera House in 2016. Renee Fleming is to play the Marschallin in her Covent Garden farewell, with Andris Nelsons conducting. Whether Waltz has secretly auditioned Placido Domingo for the role of Baron Ochs is not clear.

The production, Waltz's first, will debut at the Vlaamse Opera in Antwerp on 15 December 2013, where Dmitri Jurowski will conduct a cast that includes Christiane Karg as Sophie, Maria Bengtsson as the Marschallin, Stella Doufexis as Octavian and Albert Pesendorfer as Ochs.

Nearly New Nabucco

This looks like a barrel of laughs.

Daniele Abbado's nearly-new production of Nabucco opened earlier tonight at the Royal Opera House after its La Scala run. I couldn't be there, but I'm going to live the dream with this photo set:

A bit of ruff

Eh? Die Meistersinger with ruffs? Richard Jones plunges into a not-unfamiliar world of ginger wigs and puffy shorts with his new production of Britten's Gloriana - the one that's coming to Covent Garden in June.

Typically, the Royal Opera House are choosing to celebrate the centenary of the composer's birth with a secondhand show - it launches in Hamburg tonight with Simone Young conducting and Amanda Roocroft as Elizabeth I.

Production photos and video below.

No April Fool

Get *50% OFF* tickets for the Royal Opera House's Nabucco with this Ticketmaster offer.

It's valid for the top three price categories (originally over £200) and on 1 April only. No joke.

Thanks to Richard for spotting.

More opera Beard news

After feminist collective La Barbe ("The Beard") invaded the Paris Opera at the weekend, comes the news that the Royal Opera House is to get a Beard of its very own.

The ROH have just announced that Alex Beard, currently Deputy Director of the Tate, will be taking over from Tony Hall as Chief Executive, starting in September.  His salary of £250,000 will be considerably less that Hall's £400,000-odd. 

Mystery man Beard's Tate bio shows that he spent just a year working for the accountancy firm KPMG before moving into the arts world. Well, I did suggest someone with a business brain. His years at the Arts Council before moving to the Tate should come in useful too.

Beard is also a trustee of Glyndebourne Productions Limited, which we must hope indicates an interest in opera.

On the minus side, he had some responsibility - nominally, at least -  for the Tate's Kraftwerk tickets fiasco.

As reader Manou comments on the earlier post, "La Barbe" also means "enough, how boring". Hmmmm.

Sir Tony slams "don't care" cancellers

Antonio Pappano had a fierce word or three for singers who pull out of productions at today's Royal Opera House press conference. Reuters reports:

"It happens a lot," he told reporters, referring to cancellations. "It happens more and more. There's something about this generation of singers, that they are weaker in their bodies or don't care.

"I don't know what it is, but it's something that is very very frustrating for me personally."

Asked afterwards to expand on his remarks, he explained it was partly a health issue, with common colds tending to last longer than, say, 10 years ago.

"You can imagine singers. That's a real problem. And there's so much travelling involved now with good singing. I think that people are overbooked, they're over-committed, too many new things, the stress on them and the amount of PR."

"I mean (for Spanish tenor Placido) Domingo to cancel, (he) would have to be on his death bed. It's just a different generation.

"It's taken much more lightly today, the idea of contract, the idea of a commitment. It's true."

He called on opera stars to take longer rest periods between roles to cut down on the risk of illness and exhaustion.

Royal Opera House 2013- 2014 season revealed

The ROH officially revealed full details of their 2013-14 season this morning. As most had slipped out one way or the other already, there are only one or two surprises - not all of them welcome.

There are seven new productions, and in celebration of Richard Strauss's 150th birthday there are three of his operas.

The most exciting new production, long-known, is Stefan Herheim's Les Vepres Siciliennes, conducted by Antonio Pappano and featuring Marina Poplavskaya, Erwin Schrott, Michael Volle and the inevitable Bryan Hymel.

Claus Guth's Die Frau Ohne Schatten comes fresh(ish) from La Scala with Johan Botha, Emily Magee, Michaela Schuster and Johan Reuter, and is conducted by Semyon Bychkov.

A new (to Covent Garden) Robert Carsen Carmelites conducted by Simon Rattle features Magdalena Kozena and Anna Prohaska.

Star-wise,  Juan Diego Florez is back in La fille du régiment, this time with Patrizia Ciofi, Ewa Podles - and future Downton Abbey star Dame Kiri te Kanawa.

Manon Lescaut features Jonas Kaufmann, together with Kristine Opolais and Christopher Maltman. There's a Faust revival with Joseph Calleja, Anna Netrebko, Bryn Terfel and Simon Keenlyside. Joyce DiDonato reprises her Maria Stuarda  in a new Leiser/Caurier production, with Carmen Giannattasio and Charles Castronovo. Karita Mattila makes her return to Covent Garden in Keith Warner's splendid Wozzeck, also featuring Simon Keenlyside, and Christof Loy's Ariadne auf Naxos, with Jane Archibald and Ruxandra Donose.

To compensate for his multiple London no-shows perhaps, Jonas Kaufmann also gives a main stage recital on 6 April.

Conductor wise, the major shock is that baritenor Placido Domingo will be let loose on Tosca.

Full details: