Michael Church

Katya and the Vixen: Janacek at the ROH and ENO

2010-03-22T14:07:59Z

Orchestrally speaking, Janacek is bringing out the best in our big opera houses. While Sir Charles Mackerras gallantly triumphs over age and infirmity to conduct a coruscating performance of ‘The Cunning Little Vixen’ at Covent Garden, Mark Wigglesworth extracts more pliant beauty from the Coliseum band than any other conductor has in recent memory.

Dramatically, things are more variable. It was rotten luck for Covent Garden that Emma Bell, whose Fox was eagerly awaited, should have been taken ill a day before curtain-up, leaving Elisabeth Meister - a soprano on the Jette Parker scheme - to vault into this exposed position from a minor part as the Rooster: she did as well as could reasonably have been expected. But in this opera’s beguiling hubbub, where children’s voices mingle with those of adults, it didn’t matter hugely that Emma Matthews as Vixen Sharp-Ears didn’t vocally impose herself; what counted far more was the wonderful singing of that genial giant Matthew Rose as the Poacher, and of Christopher Maltman as the Forester. The grave beauty of Maltman’s closing monologue cast a retrospective glow on everything that had gone before. Castigate Bill Bryden’s production as showbizzy if you will, but for me, as for many others, this aerial extravaganza, with its vast turning wheels suggesting the cycle of the seasons, is an inspired expression of this work’s intricate, child’s-eye truthfulness. I still remember David Pountney’s version for ENO is the Eighties - with its quieter bucolic charm - but this show is a winner.

Over at the Coliseum, David Alden’s realisation of Janacek’s ‘Katya Kabanova’ misfires from the start, as the curtain rises on a peasant woman peeling potatoes in front of an unpainted and flamboyantly skewed plywood set on Alden’s trademark raked stage: corny Slav realism meets corny agit-prop modishness. As with his production of Janacek’s ‘Jenufa’, Alden updates this nineteenth-century village tragedy to the Soviet Twenties, and as before, the suffocatingly condemnatory atmosphere of a God-fearing little society - essential if the drama is to work - is lost. Adultery to the Bolsheviks was no big deal, and the agit-prop hoarding showing a devil pitchforking malefactors down to hell is oxymoronic in the strict sense of the word.

The plot turns on the fact that Katya is on the verge of a breakdown, trapped in her loveless marriage, yearning for someone else, and prey to Ophelia-like delusions which intensify as she moves towards her Ophelia-like demise. Apart from one superb moment when the whole world seems to go into a convulsion of communal angst - with the storm hitting the village and people being hurled about - this staging is the complete antithesis to the Expressionist classic devised by the late Maria Bjornson for Covent Garden. Here, huge shadows are projected, to no obvious purpose. The leitmotif river is sometimes in the pit, sometimes backstage, and Katya’s athletic run-and-jump into it is pure cod-Tosca. When the hoarding is ostentatiously lowered face-down into the middle of the stage, it stays there for the rest of the evening, pulley and all, just getting in everyone’s way. Why is the household icon boldly displayed, when Soviet rules would have forced the family to hide it in the attic? Why is the lovely counterpoint between the happy lovers and the doomed ones destroyed by making the latter muffled and out of view? And above all, why does this Katya - undeniably well sung by the American soprano Patricia Raclette - come across as so insufferably confident and composed?

The evening’s saving grace lies in the rest of the singing. Susan Bickley’s Kabanicha is as steely as one could wish, while Stuart Skelton’s Boris projects grave despair, and John Graham-Hall’s castrated Tikhon is a creature forged in hell. But the stars of the evening are Anna Grevelius and Alfie Boe, as Varvara and Vanya: one couldn’t imagine a more spirited pair of young lovers, or a sweeter vocal match.

English Touring Opera goes back on tour

2010-03-16T14:49:05Z

One of the most dependable pleasures of the operatic year comes when English Touring Opera unpacks its goodies at the start of a new season. You know everything will be pared down for travel, with visibly portable sets, but you also know that whatever it’s doing will reflect an original take. I will never forget what they did with Monteverdi’s ‘Orfeo’.

With a white box containing stunted, lifeless trees and a pile of white rocks, and with a pitted moon looming above, Kathy Prendergast’s set evoked a barren world into which the bewildered characters stumbled one by one, before Catherine Manley’s bright-toned Muse lit the universe up with song. Given that Orpheus cures ills, charms trees and rocks, and visits heaven and the underworld, James Conway’s decision to turn it into a tale of shamanism was plausible, and resulted in one of the most penetratingly truthful accounts I’ve ever heard of this great work. With just nine singers - augmented at one point by locally-recruited choristers in the balcony - plus a large and superb period band, English Touring Opera produced that madrigalesque sound which can only be achieved when everyone is a soloist in their own right.

I could have dwelt equally well on the virtues of ETO’s ‘Seraglio’, or its ‘L’infedelta delusa’, or on its bold revival of Cavalli’s ‘Erismena’. But I’ve described this show at length, partly because it exemplifies the company’s approach at its best, and partly because its unfairly negative reviews led to the sets being junked: its overstuffed barn can only accommodate the paraphernalia for eight shows at a time.
ETO may seem like the perennial new kid on the block, but it’s now into its fourth decade. And when you consider the artists who have graced its programmes, you realise how crucial it has been to the excellence of the British operatic scene. Its conductors have included Nicholas Kraemer, Stephen Barlow, David Parry and Ivor Bolton, with the sadly-missed Noel Davies a more recent mainstay. Its directors have included Steuart Trotter, Richard Jones, Declan Donellan, Stephen Pimlott and Stephen Unwin, while its regular singers have included – to pluck just a few names from a dazzling list - Susan Bickley, Vivian Tierney, Sarah Connolly, Mary Plazas, Susan Gritton, Alastair Miles, and William Dazeley. ETO has always been at the cutting edge.

Its current general director is James Conway, an archetypally soft-spoken Irishman who joined after a long stint at Dublin’s Opera Theatre Company, whence he had long admired ETO from afar. ‘I still remember the key question in the interview,’ he says. ‘What do you want to do? – And I simply said I was interested in making good work, and ensuring that there’s a good public for it. And I think we’ve achieved those things, and stayed in the black. We have to make not very much money go a very long way – but like Mr Micawber we’ve always come out with one penny on the good side, and even paid our artists not too terribly – though still not well enough.’ But he also knew from the start that the company had to become more elastic in terms of scale, and that it needed to do both more performances, and also more productions and co-productions, and that it needed to make greater efforts to harness the talent in the music colleges, whose sometimes superb shows are seldom seen beyond the campus.

The point of this long-winded preamble is simply to say that they are now back on tour with three corkers: William Oldroyd’s production of ‘Don Pasquale’, and Conway’s productions of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and ‘The Marriage of Figaro’. Having missed the last of these the first time round, I caught it at Sadler’s Wells, and what a delight. This co-production with the Royal College of music and the International Opera School trades brilliantly on the freshness of young voices: Nicholas Lester’s Almaviva and Robert Davies’s Figaro are both ideal realisations of these roles, with Eliana Pretorian giving us a bewitching Susana; Mark Wilde’s mellifluously mincing Don Basilio, Niamh Kell’s gawky, moon-faced Cherubino, and Henry Grant-Kerswell’s giant-haystacks gardener Antonio all hit the spot, and with perfect diction. Conductor Michael Rosewell brings out the sheer charm of the score, while Conway’s direction results in more spontaneous-seeming ensemble work that I have ever seen on a large stage (and how pretty this one looks in Agnes Treplin’s designs). Maybe this is the secret: small is beautiful.

They will be on the road for the next three months, taking in Exeter, Truro, Poole, Sheffield, Cheltenham, Norwich, Buxton, Belfast, Wolverhampton, Crawley, Snape, Warwick, Durham, Perth, and winding up in Cambridge on May 29. With assistance from the Foyle and Paul Hamlyn foundations, what an excellent way of spending Arts Council money.

Tracey Emin rule ok

2010-03-16T14:31:40Z

A few blogs ago, I ruffled some fine-art feathers by suggesting that Anish Kapoor was a fraud. I recommended that readers should catch an interview he had given on BBC World, in which the bogusness of London’s fine-art scene was gloriously laid bare. Having just watched Tracey Emin interviewed on BBC Four by the indulgently uncritical Mark Lawson, I now recommend - at the risk of ruffling more feathers - that people should catch this revelatory programme while it’s available on Freeview. Because if you ever wanted to get inside the YBA mindset (beautifully pilloried in the current Private Eye), this show - preferably laced with a pleasantly stiff whisky - is for you.

I won’t spoil the fun by giving it all away in advance, and I’m not suggesting that Tracey is anything but a thoroughly decent - and these days rather sweet - human being, with a clear run ahead towards her Damehood. It’s piquant to hear her affronted head-girl tones when she complains about the rotters who had the nerve to question her suitability to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale: ‘They should have all got behind me when I was selected.’ Quite so: for Team Britain, that sort of behaviour is just not good enough.

But the Eureka moment not to miss - both hers and ours - comes when she describes looking at her bed after 36 hours of drunkenly fouling it, and realising that it is no mere bed, but ‘My Bed’, and thus Great Art for the galleries, without anything further being done to it at all.

The other point to note is her condescending declaration that the thousands of other artists who beaver away producing paintings and sculptures are lesser beings, because they have never hit the headlines with a ‘seminal’ work. Damien, who has produced one (his shark), gets into the big league, but Tracey has produced no less than two, so of course she’s out there on top. ‘I love my art’, she purrs gratefully, and you can see why: no cash-cow was ever so cheap to maintain. But is she an artist? If she is, the evidence remains well hidden - for all her pious words about long nights spent learning how to pattern-cut and draw.

As with Anish Kapoor, toilers in the musical vineyard will simply wonder at an artistic community which tolerates such smugness, and celebrates such contempt for what art is really about.

Podles trumps Mehta at the Wigmore, while Cerha springs a surprise

2009-12-29T18:22:12Z

Bejun Mehta's first 41 years make an interesting story. The son of two musicians, and a nephew of Zubin Mehta, he first found fame - and accolades from Leonard Bernstein - as a boy soprano. After the break he tried unsuccessfully to make it as a baritone, then as a cellist, before being inspired by the example of David Daniels to try his luck as a counter-tenor, and lo! Hes now a counter-tenor star in his own right. He may be sought-after for Handel and Britten - he made a strikingly evil Oberon in the Glyndebourne A Midsummer Nights Dream - but his Wigmore debut suggests that as a recitalist hes still got some way to go. He has a beautiful, bell-like sound, but its not based on speech, and it comes out unvaryingly, whatever hes singing about. On the operatic stage, he can get right inside his part (despite hilariously chaotic coloratura), but in recital he completely fails to characterise each song as required.

He could learn a thing or two from the great Polish contralto Ewa Podles, who took the same stage a week later. Last time round - in a concert now enshrined on a WigmoreLive Cd - she and her pianist Garrick Ohlsson (a virtuoso in his own right) regaled their fans with songs by Chopin, Rachmaninov, and Tchaikovsky. This time they did Musorgsky, Haydn, and the little-known Polish composer Mieceslaw Karlowicz (1876-1909), for whom Podles carries a torch. Whether he would have emerged as a major composer if he hadnt been swept away by an avalanche at 33, Im not sure: the piano accompaniments to his songs were more memorable than the voice parts, for all their wistful grace. But the main event - Musorgskys The Nursery - was electrifying. These songs were Musorgskys boldest shot at reflecting the rhythms of everyday speech in music: Podles gave each a unique and irresistible character, by turns comic, sad, and surreal. Her sound is huge, yet her coloratura is astonishingly nimble, and she has a seemingly inexhaustible range of colours up her sleeve. The more she sang - finishing with a blast of Rossini as her send-off - the less we wanted to let her go: a life-force.

The following night the Wigmore hosted the Vienna Piano Trio, and note the roster - Wolfgang Redik (violin), Matthias Gredler (cello), and Stefan Mendl (piano) - as these youngish musicians may be names to conjure with in years to come: I have never heard a Haydn piano trio sound so un-sedate, or Brahmss Opus 87 trio so vivid. Sandwiched between them was a short work of great intriguingness: Friedrich Cerhas Five Pieces for Piano Trio broke the rules of the game by doing away with the pianos dominion, and letting the subtler sound-worlds of the other two instruments dictate what should happen. Cerha - who once set the cat among the pigeons by daring to complete Bergs Lulu against the dead composers wifes wishes - is with his friend Kurt Schwertsik one of the two leading composers in Austria today. Everything they do is (often quietly) revolutionary, and never less than interesting.

Brilliance and brainlessness at ENO

2009-11-09T14:39:42Z

To see the revival of David McVicar’s fabulous ‘Turn of the Screw’ (left) is to be reminded just how good English National Opera can be when it sticks to its metier: getting brilliant directors to give tried and trusted classics a new and original twist, with singers who understand how to work as an ensemble. While 84-year-old Charles Mackerras cast a lovely spell from the pit, the cast who bodied-forth Britten’s ghost-story might have been born to their roles. No praise can be too high for Michael Colvin’s sinister Peter Quint, Cheryl Barker’s louring former governess, or Rebecca Evans’ plangent incarnation of the current governess; the boys alternating as Miles - opposite Nazan Fikret’s vividly-imagined Flora - were as good as any I have seen in that precarious role (the treble voice must be strong and pure, with no intimation of the adolescent break to come); Ann Murray, as the housekeeper, carried real authority. Tanya McCullin’s delicate sepia designs haunted the mind long after the last notes have sounded; the moment when Quint literally summons Miss Jessel up out of the earth remains one of the most convincingly spooky I’ve ever seen.

To see Rupert Goold’s version of ‘Turandot’ (right), on the following night, was to be reminded that this company can still, with great deliberation, shoot itself in both feet. Nothing in Goold’s theatrical track record - garlanded with praise for his flashy ‘Enron’ production - had given an indication as to how he would deal with this problematic work, with its melange of sublime music, adolescent emotion, and sheer vulgarity: we were assured his take would be original. It was, but only in the sense that it plumbed depths of crassness never before seen at the Coliseum.

The curtain went up on a Soho - or SoHo - Chinese restaurant, where a Halloween party was in progress containing just about every stereotype known to metropolitan man. Camp queens, jewelled Goths, a trio of Elvises, a Chelsea pensioner, some Hasidic Jews, a NYPD officer, a nun - you name it, it was all in there somewhere. There was also a white-suited Tom Wolfe journo, who was sometimes the invisible chronicler, and sometimes the impresario making things happen; the Emperor was presented as the shambolically-colourful lord of Longleat on a bender; Ping, Pang, and Pong were dolled up as camp cooks with cleavers, sometimes supported by a bevy of dancers with pigs’ heads, and at others by a leggy troupe of mannequins. You got a message: this director doesn’t like women.

You also sensed his desperation to reference everything to topical reality: unsurprisingly this periodically misfired, with some stereotypes being toe-curlingly out of date. Nothing made dramatic sense at any level; the ritualised violence was about as threatening as the violence in ‘The Mikado’. When the journo got inexplicably impaled by Turandot, and scrambled up onto the kitchen range - yes, we were in the servants’ quarters for the final act - to expire bloodily with his notebook falling from lifeless fingers, we got a clumsy reference to the dying Puccini, but so what? Nothing, I repeat, made sense. The whole thing was like having the room invaded by a tiresomely camp friend who is constantly shouting ‘Let’s do the show right here!’, when all you want is to have some sort of conversation.

The sad thing was that in strictly musical terms this was a decent evening. If Kirsten Blanck’s Princess Turandot was efficient rather than inspired, Amanda Echalaz’s Liu was ringingly sung, as was Gwyn Hughes Jones’s noble Calaf; the chorus was in splendid form, and the long trio for Ping, Pang, and Pong was rivetingly delivered under Edward Gardner’s skilful beat. What a waste.

What this show reflects is that most common of failings among would-be cool-dude directors - a total lack of faith in the work itself. When in doubt, let postmodern ‘style’ replace thought, and turn it into a Broadway musical: ‘That’ll draw the crowd!’ Oh really? It will be interesting to see whether ENO has the nerve to revive this brainless travesty.

And so to the long-awaited ENO double bill: Bartok’s ‘Duke Bluebeard’s Castle’ in an unusual pairing with Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’ - opera and ballet yoked together for once. To direct the former, ENO has drafted in Daniel Kramer, another flashy young theatrical figure - but at least one with a brain. So simple, and so obvious: transpose the castle to a basement in an Austrian suburb, and turn Bluebeard into Josef Fritzl. Why not? Bluebeard’s collection of ghostly victims makes an excellent fit, as does his enjoyment of this secret harem. We meet the Duke - Clive Bayley, possessor of the most wonderfully sepulchral bass - on a dimly-lit street, where he links up with soprano Michaela Martens. Their initial encounter is crudely, almost comically sexual, as she applies her lips to his like a limpet, before being drawn in through his front door.

I won’t spoil the pleasure of designer Giles Cadle’s coups de theatre by describing them: suffice it to say that the eye is as ravished as the ear is by the glorious singing (and the equally glorious playing under Edward Gardner in the pit). Bayley’s Duke is an extraordinary creation, sometimes convulsed with fearful excitement, sometimes dancing about like a delinquent 12-year old. And though his patent lack of sex-appeal makes Martens’ initial attraction inexplicable, he projects a queasy and credible necrophilia. The final tableau is so shocking that the applause takes at least a minute to materialise - and to me it felt crassly over the top, but the rest of Kramer’s Polanskian imaginings are highly persuasive. What we need now is a revival of Willy Decker’s majestic ROH production of this work, with John Macfarlane’s darkly suggestive designs. Kramer’s literalism is ingenious, but ‘Bluebeard’ is better served by something more oblique.

Meanwhile Stravinsky’s ‘Rite’ was woefully ill-served by the banal choreography which the Ireland-based Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre chose to plaster over it. We were promised a dance piece which would reinforce the ritual intensity of the music, but what we got instead was a cloudy sequence of events which did precisely the opposite; it might have been a ‘Lord of the Flies’-type story, and then again it might not. A sacrifice of sorts began to unfold at the outset - we were in a park full of young social rejects in a bleak Celtic place - but the whole thing degenerated into undressing, cross-dressing, and much donning of animal masks, with the final sacrifice replaced by what looked like a clumsy piece of social didacticism. Nijinsky’s choreography worked because the music was gloriously transparent through it: this choreography was opaque, while the music - conducted with an odd lack of finesse - blundered irrelevantly along below. Memo to ENO: by all means revive ‘Bluebeard’, but in tandem with something that works.

Classical music has no Anish Kapoor, thank God!

2009-10-19T16:57:51Z

Anyone wanting to take the pulse of the fine-art world in its present state should use the BBC’s watch-again facility to catch Stephen Sackur’s interview with Anish Kapoor in BBC World’s Hard Talk slot. Because in twenty-five delicious minutes this encounter definitively lays bare the vast con-trick which has turned contemporary fine art into a standing joke - at least for those who don’t have a professional or financial stake in it (and perhaps, in a secretly gloating way, for the profiteers as well).

Sackur may be good on the Middle East, but there’s no softer touch than a hard-news journalist who ventures into fashionable culture. And it was clear from the outset that this one had bought Kapoor’s expensive publicity, hook, line, and sinker: Sackur was a sucker. Running his hands through his perfect silver mane, and with a face positively bloated with self-love and condescension, Kapoor gave the impression of having just enough energy to open his sleepy eyes to answer the BBC man’s gently-lobbed questions. His manner was that of a genial professor leading neophyte students into a maze of his own making: patient, amused, and oh so superior. Sackur, meanwhile, was all wide-eyed eagerness: he doesn’t often get to talk to artists this rich and famous. Did Kapoor see any contradiction, he asked respectfully, between the demands of art and money? ‘We must be adult about money,’ Kapoor purred in reply, after some exquisitely-nuanced prevarications about the successful artist’s ambiguous plight in contemporary society. The well-heeled, feather-bedded Tracey Emin - bleating about our tax laws and running off to France - would doubtless have heartily concurred at this point. How can these people be so full of shit and not know it?

We glimpsed Kapoor’s gigantic oozing red-wax ‘sculpture’ portentously leaving blood on the walls at the Royal Academy; we got the obligatory hushed question about the relevance of the (in this context irrelevant) Holocaust. It emerged that he was actually - gasp! - glad that people should interpret his work in opposing ways. He showed a sublime ignorance of any other artistic world than the one he inhabits, suggesting that never before had spectators brought ideological baggage to their viewing of what they saw - no awareness that, at all times in European history, people have come to public art literally weighed down with ideology - religious, political, or whatever. Sackur’s awe-struck inquiry as to how he found the courage to face the terrifying prospect of a whole day of creative block got a beatifically cosy smile in reply.

But this being ‘Hard Talk’ - and Sackur having a macho image to maintain - we eventually got the killer-question he’d been carefully saving up. Not everybody was an admirer, he said through nervously clenched teeth: what was Kapoor’s comment on Brian Sewell’s typically forthright verdict that he was a total charlatan? Kapoor’s face became wreathed in smiles, and he gave the prettiest little laugh. ‘Poor Brian…’ No, really, coming from such a source, that verdict was a compliment!

If this nauseating own-goal was a perfect encapsulation of contemporary fine-art effrontery, it also served as a reminder that classical music’s commercialisation has a long way to go before it can begin to compete. There are of course plenty of parallels in the way the press and television collude in the big labels' promotional racket. When the boss of Deutsche Grammophon confesses that musical quality alone is not enough to ensure you a place on his roster, and that marketability demands quite other qualities, we know we’re in trouble. Would Nicola Benedetti be the ‘star’ she is without her unprecedented initial advance, her assumed Italian name, and her tumbling golden tresses? Nigel Kennedy’s knack for publicity perennially disguises the fact that as a musician he’s a one-trick pony. Yet both these people can play, and this points to classical music’s saving grace. You don’t need skill or talent to make a fortune as a fine-artist: all you need is nerve, and ars longa, vita brevis doesn’t come into it. But with music - even if you’re only a second-ranker like these two - if you don’t have the basics, you’re rumbled immediately.

(Photos: Reuters)

ROH’s ‘Don Carlo’ and ENO’s ‘Le grand macabre’ go head to head: ENO wins with a knockout

2009-09-18T16:24:55Z

It’s an unequal battle, given their relative levels of finance, but ENO and the ROH can never escape comparison. There have been times when ENO has been left for dead in the gutter, and times when its feisty performance has outclassed its richer rival. Here they are at it again, simultaneously kicking off their new autumn seasons.

When the Royal Opera House unveiled Nicholas Hytner’s new production of Verdi’s ‘Don Carlo’ last year, my duty was to review it at speed - a mere hour between curtain-down and delivery for the Independent’s late edition. I found it brilliantly sung, stylishly designed, and politically topical - a rave. So how come I’m underwhelmed by its revival? Some of the new singers may not cut it as the first lot did, but my volte face indicates the limitations inherent in reviewing in the fizz of the moment. ‘Overnight’ reviews are macho, second thoughts are the ones which deserve publishing.

This time round, the sets gave a strong whiff of Shaftesbury Avenue - or rather, with the twee silver forest in the opening scene, and with the principals kicking their errant ‘path’ back into place as they sang, of a Christmas window at Harvey Nichols. Apart from in the memorial chapel scenes, the lighting and colours were hard and flat, pastiche Hockney. The massive crowd scenes were contrived with supreme efficiency, but there was no sense of any underlying emotion. The auto da fe, with its burnings at the stake, was no more threatening than the mob scenes in ‘Les Miserables’. And what idiot techie decreed that the amplified bells which blasted the auditorium should drown the orchestra, even when it was playing full strength?

Moreover, when the audience was swept by a gale of unwanted mirth as Princess Eboli (Marianne Cornetti) unveiled herself to a supposedly appalled Don Carlo (Jonas Kaufmann), who had been under the impression she was somebody else, it was clear the chemistry wasn’t working. Cornetti must take the blame for that: mezzo Sonia Ganassi, the original occupant of this tempestuous role, had in this scene chilled us to the marrow. Meanwhile Kaufmann - currently the best lyric tenor around - sang gorgeously, but at no point did he convey, as Rolando Villazon did, the requisite impression of a young man going to pieces before our eyes.

Carlo’s derangement has a Hamlet-like cause in that Elisabetta, the young woman he loves, is being forced to marry his father. As before, the young Russian soprano Marina Poplavskaya played Elisabetta, and as before I was unmoved: she looks and sounds wonderful, but vulnerability is beyond her. This Elisabetta is emotionally ironclad, even when supposedly singing her heart out to the king who is her unwitting oppressor. But with the great Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto (left) once again in that role, King Philip saved the day - a hugely commanding presence, conveying as much by his stillness as by his gloriously resonant voice. Presented as a bookish prince of darkness surrounded by the coffins of his ancestors, he is one of Verdi’s most convincingly complex characters, more than half in love with death, but simultaneously locked in his own hopeless battle with his deceased father the Emperor Charles V. As Furlanetto sings it, underscored by its lovely cello solo, the tortured but exquisite soliloquy in which he faces up to his political and sexual impotence becomes the majestic performance Verdi’s great work deserves. Only when this singer commanded the stage - or shared it with that that other big bass, John Tomlinson - did the drama feel remotely believable, but he alone is worth the price of a ticket.

Meanwhile, with Gyorgy Ligeti’s absurdist fantasy ‘Le grand macabre’, the Coliseum is hosting the most extraordinary show ever to have graced its stage. Ligeti preferred instruments to the human voice, and this is less an opera than a freaky piece of music theatre, so it made sense to let the world’s freakiest street-theatre group loose on it - La fura dels Baus from Barcelona. In the mad kingdom of Breughel-land, ‘in some century or other’, the inhabitants are persuaded to abandon their fear of death and live for the moment: eat, drink, be merry - and get your end away. The concept which directors Alex Olle and Valentina Carrasco have come up with is blindingly effective: the whole stage is filled with a gigantic female nude - grander than anything dreamed up by Anish Kapoor - out of whose orifices people emerge, and in whose recesses all kinds of mayhem take place. This is both a disintegrating body, and - as fascist elements proliferate - a satirically-viewed body politic.

The ‘drama’ is slapstick stuff, and the humour lavatorial in a quintessentially Seventies way (it premiered in 1978): avant-gardism never stays avant-garde for long. All the performances are over the top, which means that the usually compelling Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke is just one of nine people desperately acting their heads off. There is some lovely singing from counter-tenor Andrew Watts as Prince Go-Go, and from sopranos Frances Bourne and Rebecca Bottone (in flayed-flesh body-stockings) as the busily-humping lovers Amando and Amanda (their original names, Clitoris and Spermando having been supplanted to placate German audiences); there are some ravishing solos from soprano Susanna Andersson doubling up as Venus and the chief of police.

But the real event is the set, which is so mesmerising we never take our eyes off it. This troubled giantess with disturbingly lifelike breasts doesn’t just rotate and gently disintegrate: she morphs into a 3-D skeleton, while her face transforms itself time and again with the speed of a Chinese conjuror. Meanwhile onto her vast body are projected figures from animated Breughel paintings, from Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’, or from a mystic Aboriginal ritual; sometimes these projected shapes crystallise into the cast themselves. It’s beautiful, terrible, and thought-provoking.

And that’s the point. The libretto may be by a Belgian, but the whole thing is shot through with the hard-edged Central European surrealism of Kafka and Karel Kapek. And this takes us back to the mind of its creator, who saw most of his family wiped out in Auschwitz, and then had to flee Budapest when the Soviet tanks rolled in in 1956; one of his more unnerving childhood experiences was of turning up to sit an exam in Romanian, only to discover that the political map had changed overnight, and he had to take it in Hungarian. For him, a mad world was normality.

But the residue left in the mind, as one walks out into the street, is not just visual: it’s also the wondrous patternings on muted strings, and the final nonet, which rings in the ears with an ineffable bucolic sweetness, echoing the ends of ‘Dion Giovanni’, ‘Falstaff’, and Stravinsky’s ‘Rake’s Progress’. Ligeti’s score works its own powerful spell. There are only six more performances, with the last on October 9: don’t miss it.

Following up this advantage, ENO have put on yet another revival of Jonathan Miller’s Mafia ‘Rigoletto’, premiered in 1982. This production feels as fresh as it did then: the violent world which Miller constructs in the opening scene, and the Hopper-esque café by the waterfront in the finale, have an immediacy which hits you in the gut. This time round it’s Michael Fabiano’s beautifully-sung Duke, Brindley Sherratt’s sepulchral Sparafucile, and Anthony Michaels-Moore’s compelling performance in the title role which carry the day.

There are times when ENO seems to forget the strengths to which it must play: dusting off forgotten gems, and presenting them with a resident troupe whom the audience know and love. This week we got the gem, but not the troupe - and why was the Verdi given to a conductor untried in London? Stephen Lord may be, as the programme unconvincingly shouts, ‘one of the 25 most powerful names in US opera’, but there are plenty of Brits who could have done it better. British jobs for British workers? For once those weasel words fit.

Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Prom - and the story behind it

2009-09-04T18:02:02Z

This year’s penultimate late-night Prom - on September 13 - will see Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble celebrating 10 years of musical discovery and experiment. An inspired project, whose growth and development I described in the Independent on Sunday. But this is just the tip of a far more important iceberg, in the form of the Aga Khan Foundation’s remarkable cultural conservation work spanning the whole of Central Asia, without which Yo-Yo Ma’s project would not exist.

This foundation is currently running a broad package of development projects - ranging from microfinance to music - intended to improve the material and spiritual well-being of the inhabitants of old "Turkestan": this includes all the countries bounded to the north by Kazakhstan and by Afghanistan to the south, most of which are seriously poverty-stricken. When the Soviets arbitrarily carved up the map, they tried to erase ethnic identities, with particularly damaging results for music. Nomadic instruments were "tamed" by being marshalled into orchestras, Sufi chants were proscribed, and shamans - whose flutes and horse-hair fiddles were their professional armoury - were persecuted, sometimes to the point of execution. The region's master-musicians are now being supported in a variety of ways: help with international tours, permanent recognition through Smithsonian Folkways’ superb 10-CD series on Central Asian music, and, most importantly, appointment in a tutorial capacity in one of the new music schools which the AKTC has set up across the region. For more on this, see my article in the March 2009 issue of ‘BBC Music Magazine’. For more on the Aga Khan Foundation, go to www.akdn.org.

Khyal at the Proms

2009-08-17T11:32:02Z

When the Proms’ annual foray into other musics misfires, it’s usually because the musicians chosen are cross-over folk, keener to ingratiate themselves with a Western audience than to celebrate their own culture. This year’s Indian Voices Day was a welcome exception to the rule: a morning of Khyal, an evening devoted to Bollywood (a sensible piece of populism, given the size of London’s Indian community), and sandwiched between - much blessed by fine weather - a sequence of village song-and-dance groups in Hyde Park.

Khyal means "imagination", and denotes the essentially improvisatory mode which grew out of the codified raga style. It’s both instrumental and vocal, but what we got here was the latter, in contrasting forms by its leading living exponents. Pandits Rajan and Sajan Mishra spun extraordinary sounds in their local version of scat, more like water in a madly-waving metal drum than ordinary human voices. What was notable about young Manjiri Asnare Kelkar (pictured, centre), on the other hand, was the way that even her most floridly extreme effects - the Indian equivalent to Western coloratura - sounded entirely human. I don’t know how she does it, but she manages to cover the whole range from our low contralto to the top of our soprano register - and all in a firm, vibrato-free, and gloriously unforced "chest" voice. Her first song, in the Jaipur gayaki style, was on an oblique but fertile minor scale; her second, which had affinities with Central Asian balladry, and which had sparky support from the harmonium and tabla, was on a beguiling major. Part of her art lay in the hand-gestures with which she accompanied herself, very like the mudras of a bharatnatyam dancer. Let’s hope she comes back soon.

The father-and-daughter act which preceded the khyals was a more muted but no less charming affair, as sarangists Pandit Ram Narayan (and old colleague of Yehudi Menuhin’s) and Aruna Narayan chased each other up and down the scale on their ancient bowed instruments, with never-faltering rhythmic precision.

Anyone wandering into the auditorium might have concluded that the attendance for this concert was disappointing, given the large numbers of empty seats. But as Proms controller Roger Wright likes to point out, a full Royal Albert Hall equals two full Festival Halls, or three full Barbicans, and this was definitely a Barbican and a half - not at all bad, for such a recondite art-form.

(Photo: Getty Images)

Valery Gergiev's hubris

2009-07-30T12:14:13Z

Having just watched - with mounting disbelief - the first production of Valery Gergiev’s Mariinsky ‘Ring’, I am digesting the implications. One is that if his ‘Rheingold’ is an amateurish clunker, the portents are dire for the other productions in his cycle. Since my ‘Rheingold’ review is already on The Independent website, I won’t repeat my unkind judgments here, but a second immediate thought is that many critics failed to appreciate the brilliance of Keith Warner’s Royal Opera House ‘Ring’, when it was unveiled in 2007.

In Bryn Terfel and John Tomlinson we had the best alternating pair of Wotans in the world, but they - plus many other pieces of inspired casting - were only part of the reason for that cycle’s dazzling success. Its greatest strength lay in the way Warner and his team - designer Stefanos Lazaridis, lighting designer Wolfgang Gobbel, and video specialists Mic Pool and Dick Straker, with Antonio Pappano in the pit - imposed their vision, in all its beauty, strangeness, and mystery. I hope the ROH revive it soon, to erase current memories.

But back to Valery Gergiev, who may be riding for a fall. Today’s Guardian carries a forelock-tugging leader "in praise of" him, but even this sounds a note of caution. His workload is extraordinary, says the writer: might this Ring be a self-imposed challenge too far? But never mind, he concludes: ‘his hyperactivity is overwhelmingly his strength’, and it’s not our business to ask him to be different.

But we do have the right to ask whether hubris is taking its toll. Gergiev’s intemperate political interventions over the Russo-Georgian war last year were shamefully tribal-verging-on-racist; his assumption that he can now function like a Diaghilev, acting as producer as well as music director, reinforces the impression that he never questions his own abilities, or his own behaviour. (We will pass over his close personal links with Vladimir Putin.) All this spells danger. Is an alarm-bell now ringing?

(Photo: Getty)

More from Verbier: 10 pianists, 4 pianos, 2 rarities

2009-07-29T11:23:58Z

I never heard the Cypriot pianist Nicolas Economou, killed aged 40 in a car crash in 1993, but I’d heard about him. Friedrich Durrenmatt, Maximilian Schell, Arthur Miller, and Volker Schlondorff were among his (for a musician unexpected) friends; Martha Argerich, with whom he played chamber music, described him as a creature of outstanding intelligence, with a spirit at once warm, fastidious, and fantastical. He studied in Moscow, settled in Germany, but always championed the arts of his native island; he composed and conducted, wrote philosophical essays and poetry, and was constantly pushing out the boundaries of what his instrument could achieve; improvising with Chick Corea led to a CD, On Two Pianos, where he and the American jazzer interacted fruitfully.

Two years ago a previously unknown manuscript turned up in his still incompletely-excavated archive, and at Verbier we heard it: Vivaldi’s "Le Quattro Stagioni" arranged for four pianos. Well, why not? Almost everything imaginable has been done with this work - 600 different versions to date, including a tango one by Gidon Kremer - and though four boxes of hammers are about as far as you could get from the original bowed strings, it ought at least to be interesting.

And it certainly was. "Spring" came clad in pearlised high cascades, and bewitched and exhilarated us. "Summer" opened with a great stillness, which dissolved into a riot of bustling percussive activity; a breath of wind gave way to a raging tempest, with every effect in the pianistic book being pressed into service. And if the massed pianos failed to convey the grating cruelty of Vivaldi’s winter blasts, they did set up a series of magical atmospheres, much enhanced by the way the four Steinways were arranged in a circumambient square. A curiously faithful translation - and at the same time a completely new work. It should be heard again, though - given the complication of hiring and transporting four such beasts - I’m not sure where.

Here, led by that supreme chamber-player Manny Ax, its presentation was quintessentially Verbieresque: Yuja Wang and Alessio Bax were the other constants, with the fourth position being occupied by a different player for each season. For this game of musical chairs, Argerich, Kissin, and the other grandees stood back to let the next generation shine: no surprise that 21-year-old Yuja Wang should leave the most indelible impression, both through her pianism and her exquisite person. This Curtis Institute-trained Chinese, whose Chopin, Scriabin, and Ligeti disc I praised in May, is without doubt the next big star in the pianistic firmament: watch out for the flurry on the net, the ecstatic print and video profiles. I predict ten heady years, before maturity presents her with challenges of a different sort. Nobody can trade on youth for ever.

If this arrangement was a rarity, the four-piano work by Milhaud which preceded it was scarcely less so. "Paris suite pour quatre mains" was his excited response to the sounds he heard from his window, and the six pieces moving from Montmartre to the Tour Eiffel had an infectiously urban gusto; hardly a masterpiece, but definitely worth an airing. The same applies to the four-piano treatment of ‘Carmen’ which Mack Wilberg wrote for the Los Angeles Piano Quartet, and which rounded off this evening: an oblique, wrong-note, spookily negative image of Bizet’s all too familiar music.

The other big mid-festival event was Thomas Quasthoff’s recital of Schubert’s "Die Schone Mullerin" with Emanuel Ax at the piano. There has recently been some muttering about Quasthoff being in vocal decline - that his voice is no longer "supported" as it should be. No hint here of any such problem: he projected comfortably to every corner of Verbier’s substantial church, with the drama as poignant as one could wish. Interviewing him for the Independent on Sunday last winter, I got the full measure of his heroism; why his shockingly candid autobiography The Voice remains unpublished in Britain, despite its success in America, is a mystery. What are the publishers waiting for? He’s still in his prime, so get it out now.

Verbier: The Three Basses - and Lang Lang

2009-07-23T11:05:32Z

It’s never happened before, and won’t happen again, but what we have here - in a big tent on top of a high Swiss mountain - is an extraordinary line-up. Bryn Terfel and Rene Pape - the world’s greatest Wagnerian basses - with fellow-bass Thomas Quasthoff (all pictured, left), the world’s most moving exponent of Schubert Lieder, perched on his high stool between them. And what they are doing is cabaret - a gamey mix of Broadway hits, with ‘Anything you can do, I can do better’ recurring like a leitmoiv in a variety of forms. "I can sing higher - lower - longer…" -they take it in turns to outdo each other, with Quasthoff bringing the house down with a bawled "Fuck you" when Terfel, in basso profundo mode, wins a round.

He and Quasthoff - to whom thalidomide plus a Dickensianly awful German "special" school dealt an atrocious hand, but whose subsequent life represents an unparalleled triumph of the will - are cabaret veterans, and take to this game like ducks to water; they round things off gracefully with one of Terfel’s signtaure tunes, ‘Danny Boy’. Pape, who is a perfectionist to his fingertips, finds it harder to get into the swing of things. But what’s fascinating is to see how these very different voices, each backed by an outsize personality, emerge in such an unaccustomed format. They’ve only had one rehearsal, and the show is rough at the edges, but that’s part of the pleasure.

But this is only the half of it, because at the piano - and the man whose brainchild this weird encounter is - is another outsize personality in the form of Lang Lang. The basses had been singing "Don Giovanni" the night before, and as it was Lang Lang's turn to have carte blanche for a night, why not follow that with this? Meanwhile, as violinist Vadim Repin and cellist Mischa Maisky have been playing with him in the first half of this evening, why not rope them in too? Maisky vamps, Repin brings a touch of bluegrass, and Lang Lang tickles the ivories as though he’s been playing cabaret all his short life.

This instrumental trio - another unlikely yoking - have come together to give a first public airing for a programme they will soon be recording for Deutsche Grammophon: Rachmaninov’s youthful "Trio elegiaque" plus the great trio Tchaikovsky composed in memory of his friend and mentor, Nikolai Rubinstein. These pieces work well together, and though one could sense these musicians - all superstars in the classical firmament - sizing each other up, and feeling their way towards musical synergy, it’s a fair bet that the resulting Cd will be a success. DG hope that its sprinkling of Lang Langian stardust will help rope in a new audience for chamber music, and good luck to them. A few blogs ago, I accused Lang Lang of compulsive self-aggrandizement: having watched his ultra-professional behaviour as a chamber player, I take it all back.

All this is why the Verbier Festival is such an important annual fixture. The world’s greatest musicians don’t just come to strut their stuff – they come to experiment, try out new works, and new combinations. And though it’s an exclusive event, packed (and financially supported) by droves of the super-rich, it also becomes everyone’s property thanks to its presence on the net. Classic FM are doing daily podcasts, and Medici Arts are broadcasting it live on film. Click on www.medici.tv and watch Martha Argerich play Scarlatti like the wind.

All pictures courtesy of Verbier Festival

Chechnya is part of Europe: Brown, Miliband, and BBC please note

2009-07-17T11:24:06Z

This has been a depressingly typical week with the British media, which, led by the BBC, have displayed their default bias in time-honoured style. The airwaves have been saturated with wall-to-wall coverage (led by dark-suited presenters) of planes landing, coffins being marched to the cemetery, endlessly recycled footage of our boys in the field, and discussions in Parliament about a few more helicopters to prosecute a glaringly unwinnable war. This is the coverage the government wants, so the BBC obliges. With our allegedly clever young Foreign Secretary linking Helmand with ‘violence on the streets of Britain’, any hope of sanity prevailing at government level looks remote.

Meanwhile Miliband - plus Brown, plus an obedient BBC - is pursuing Blair’s policy of turning a blind eye to the continuing outrage in Chechnya. Yet Chechnya, unlike Afghanistan, is part of Europe. On Wednesday, Natalia Estemirova - whose brave reports (see the front page of today’s Independent) have been the outside world’s best source of information on Ramzan Kadyrov’s psychopathic depredations - was kidnapped and shot, with her body being dumped in a road in neighbouring Ingushetia. Like Putin after Anna Politkovskaya’s murder, President Medvedev has held up his hands in horror, but we can be sure, as before, that the murderers won’t be brought to justice. This story got a few minutes on BBC World on the day it happened, followed by a passing mention yesterday, but today it’s just water under the bridge.

There are plenty of BBC journalists who would like to challenge this selective blindness, but their bosses won’t let them: don’t rock the boat. But with unrest spreading across the (largely Muslim) North Caucasus like an incipient tidal wave, the boat may sink anyway. Meanwhile Russia remains determined to prevent the outside world knowing what’s going on there. In 2006, when recording in North Ossetia for my Chechen folk-music CD (Songs of Defiance, Topic Records), I discovered to what absurd lengths Russian censorship can go. When the police heard that a Western musicologist was on the loose - I wasn’t even flying the journalistic flag - they rushed round, stopped the recording session, questioned me for three hours, declared that I had committed a ‘crime’ by recording without government permission (as if they would have given it!), and bundled me out of the country.

And while the West turns a blind eye, so does most of the Muslim world. Chechnya has now even been largely abandoned by the liberal-left, who write it off as a ‘failed state’. Solzhenitsyn described the Chechens in the gulags as the one group who would not give in: it's possible that the crushing poverty and fear which Chechens now routinely endure has finally broken that will. But if you read Tony Wood’s ‘Chechnya: The Case for Independence’, which is both a brilliant polemic and a definitive history, you may conclude that there is still hope for this perennially persecuted nation.

Music's primacy: The Fairy Queen at Glyndebourne

2009-07-15T12:43:21Z

My colleague Adrian Hamilton argues in the Comment pages that there’s too much Shakespeare on the London stage at present. No disrespect to the Bard’s greatness, he says, just a touch of indigestion. I know what he means, but would widen the thought. Throughout the 70s and 80s I was a hopelessly-addicted theatre junkie, four or five nights a week, every week. This was as much about discovering new writing on the fringe, as about savouring the delights of the National. But around 1990 I noticed that I was more often leaving at the interval than staying to the end - my addiction had passed. Being shut in a darkened auditorium with a bunch of desperately self-projecting actors had begun to feel like an incarceration, and if the play was anything less than first-rate, the experience was unendurable.

Transferring my allegiance to opera, I gradually understood what it was that I had fallen out of love with: the self-regarding nature of the actor’s trade, at least as practised in London. This goes not just for the media-friendly wannabes in the junior ranks, but also to the top. When people talk of Olivier’s Henry V, or McKellen’s Richard II - or even Jude Law’s Hamlet - the focus is squarely on the actor, whose performance is seen as his personal apotheosis. He, as much as Shakespeare, becomes what the thing is about. This way of thinking is deeply embedded in theatreland’s unconscious: it was always there, but the cult of celebrity has greatly intensified it.

Opera, which has given us the term prima donna, is far from immune to this disease. Pavarotti, who couldn’t act to save his life, became a self-created sacred monster: when he sang ‘Turandot’, it was to glorify his own voice, rather than Puccini’s. But since the composer has in some respects done the stage director’s work for him - indicating in detail how a role should be sung - there’s a built-in protection against self-aggrandisement by singers. Music demands a humility on the part of the performer, almost an anonymity, in the face of the work being performed. Liberties are rationed by the professional discipline required. Angela Gheorghiu’s (above, left) off-stage behaviour may sometimes be a story in itself, but when she sings ‘Tosca’ as brilliantly as she does at present in the Royal Opera production, all one registers is her consummate artistry - and the scale of Verdi’s genius. Between opera-singing and acting lies a greater gulf than is sometimes realised.

Such thoughts were crystallised for me by Jonathan Kent’s new production of Purcell’s ‘The Fairy Queen’ at Glyndebourne. This ‘semi-opera’, with its anonymous libretto loosely based on Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, juxtaposes acted scenes with sung ones, and I found myself increasingly impatient for the actors to finish, so the singers could start. This was more than just the consequence of an unequal battle between cod-Shakespeare and vintage Purcell. And it was not that the actors weren’t good: they were mostly RSC and RNT regulars, with Sally Dexter and Joseph Millson bringing majesty to Titania and Oberon, and Desmond Barrit making an irresistibly funny Bottom, while the ensemble performance of the misaligned lovers was as good as it gets. But what struck me was this little quartet’s sheer actorishness: by the way each had worked out his/her personal comic routine, and was plugging it for all they were worth.

Whenever the actors fell silent, we were free to float off in an experience beyond the limits of speech. Designer Paul Brown’s fertile imagination has run riot as never before, creating worlds beyond worlds with a range of reference including Disney and Max Ernst, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and the Renaissance painter-fantasist Guiseppe Arcimboldo - and not excluding a stageful of inventively copulating rabbits. Kim Brandstrup’s choreography gives the masques a wonderful suggestiveness, while William Christie and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment weave exquisite spells from the pit. As for the singers, no praise is too high for tenor Ed Lyon (whose sound has an extraordinary sweetness), for bass Andrew Foster-Williams (whose incarnation of Winter might be Edward Scissorhands’ granddad), and for their melodious fellow-spirits. When the incomparable Carolyn Sampson (right) deploys her delicate artistry in ‘The Plaint’, the earth holds its breath.

At moments like this, one remembers that theatre for the ancient Greeks initially meant song and dance. And one realises anew the truth of Walter Pater’s dictum: all art aspires to the condition of music.

‘The Fairy Queen’ is sold out at Glyndebourne, but this production comes to the Proms on July 21.

Royal Opera heroes: DiDonato, Florez, Tramonti - and Peter Katona

2009-07-06T09:53:30Z

Is there anything mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato (left) can’t do? As the scorned Donna Elvira in ‘Don Giovanni’, her sulphurous rage incinerates everything it touches; as Handel’s jealous Medea, she runs the gamut from plangent wistfulness to enraged coloratura; shaking her tousled blonde mane, she does raunchiness with the best of them - her first ambitions lay on Broadway - yet her sound is always beautiful, and never at the expense of the drama. In Covent Garden’s revival of the Leiser-Caurier ‘Il barbiere di Siviglia’ she unexpectedly found herself facing the biggest test of her career, and handled it with absolute brilliance.

We had the dream Latin line-up, led by Juan Diego Florez (below, right) as Almaviva, with Pietro Spagnoli as Figaro, Alessandro Corbelli as Bartolo, and Ferruccio Furlanetto as Don Basilio, with Antonio Pappano in the pit. Florez’s singing was as usual beyond compare, Spagnoli brought an irresistible burly forcefulness to the title role, Furlanetto did astonishing and surreal things with his ‘slander’ aria, while the protean Corbelli became commedia dell’arte incarnate; the chorus nimbly doubled up as musicians, soldiers, and G&S policemen; and DiDonato’s flouncing and petulant opening aria - hurling darts at the wall to underline her frustration - had all the heft one could wish for.

Towards the end of the first act she fell, but picked herself up so fast that one almost felt the fall was part of her act, and the music swept on, with the spiralling madness Rossini injects into his score delivered with perfect ensemble precision. Then came an ominous announcement before the curtain rose for Act 2: DiDonato had badly sprained her ankle, was in considerable pain, but would - with our indulgence - carry on. She reappeared, limping with a crutch, and brought the house down with a complaint (in Italian) about cramp in her foot, whereupon the crutch became an integral part of her act, which proceeded in an entirely unrehearsed but utterly convincing manner. When she systematically wrecked the set in a climactic access of rage, her own physical wreckedness reinforced the comedy. And the rest of the cast improvised round her, with Florez gallantly helping her to her feet when necessary. Indeed, the improvisatory spirit seeped into everything: when, after Florez’s final aria, the house erupted into the longest mid-act ovation I have ever heard there, Corbelli - required by the libretto to express envious resentment - ostentatiously looked at his watch.

Only the next day did we learn that the ‘sprain’ was in fact a break, and that she would finish the run in a wheelchair, hoping she hadn’t done too much damage to the broken fibia by walking on it for two hours (having watched my wife make that very same mistake after breaking her ankle, I know whereof she speaks). DiDonato’s blog tells the story in graphic detail, with pictures - yankeediva.blogspot.com

Meanwhile, much of the charm of this evening comes from the casual did-we-really-see-that? conjuring tricks perpetrated by directors Moshe Lieser and Patrice Caurier and their designer Christian Fenouillat: sometimes their work is too bland, but here - much aided by the ROH’s state of the art machinery - it has wonderful edge. But if DiDonato was the star among stars, it’s worth remembering that such constellations don’t happen by accident, and that with singers’ diaries booked four years in advance, dream teams are often impossible to assemble even if you’ve hit on the right people. All credit for this goes to Covent Garden’s elegant and shadowy casting director Peter Katona, long the company’s secret weapon.

If design was central to this production’s success, it’s even more crucial to the ROH’s current revival of ‘Un ballo in maschera’. Mario Martone’s take on Verdi’s monolithic tragedy boasts Ramon Vargas - now at the top of his form - as the doomed governor, with superbly resonant support from Dalibor Jenis as his friend-turned-murderer. But the trump cards here are Sergio Tramonti’s sets. I won’t give away the conjuring trick which illuminates the last act, except to say that no other opera designer has ever used giant mirrors to more riveting effect.

The ROH's 'Barbiere di Siviglia' will get the free big-screen treatment on July 15 at cinemas up and down the country: new venues this year are in Bristol, Cardiff, Middlesbrough, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Swansea and Waltham Forest.

The beauty of Jephtha sung straight

2009-06-25T13:17:05Z

Erupting in ecstatic roars after three hours of white-hot passion, a packed Barbican audience rammed home a point which conductor Paul McCreesh (left) had made before he led his army onstage. This late oratorio by Handel deserved to be performed as often as Beethoven's Ninth, he declared in a pre-performance chat. Oh yeah, one felt like saying, the usual directorial hyperbole… My only memory of Jephtha was Katie Mitchell's staging for ENO, which over-strenuously tried to make up for the fact that it wasn't meant to be staged, and thus fatally deflected attention from the music itself.

The plot closely mirrors that of Idomeneo. The Israelite leader Jephtha vows that if he is successful in battle, he will sacrifice the first living creature he encounters, which turns out to be his only child Iphis. As the knife hovers, an angel appears and announces that Iphis - who nobly hasn’t complained - will be spared if she takes a vow of perpetual virginity. The message of Thomas Morell’s sanctimonious libretto is that self-sacrifice is the means of redemption, and virginity an excellent thing: the message of the music is not so bland. Handel was going blind: the stark way he sets Pope's cold maxim - "Whatever is, is right" - suggests he was wrestling with his own fear of the impending unknown.

The work opens in sunlight, dives down to Hades, then surfaces again: bold melodies in major keys give way to contorted chromaticism and dense counterpoint, before their transfigured resolution. McCreesh had not only signed up the best tenor in the oratorio game as Jephtha - Mark Padmore (right) - but also mezzo Christianne Stotjin and soprano Mhairi Lawson as his wife and daughter, and these three singers carried all before them.

Padmore’s artistry allowed him to deliver every repeat of every aria with subtle variations in colour; the recitative in which Jephtha all but falls into madness acquired the oracular intensity of Hamlet’s "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow". The ironic juxtaposition of rejoicing and lamenting at the plot’s pivotal moment became edge-of-the-seat stuff, as dramatic as any opera - and this was a mere ‘concert performance’ at the Barbican!

Stotjin's dark art is subtler, but no less arresting; Mhairi Lawson's soaring arias were grace incarnate. And in William Docherty as the Angel we got a treble whose voice rang triumphantly out over the full chorus and orchestra - he's a "quirister" at Winchester College, where they clearly know how to train them. Trebles with this ability are very thin on the ground, so Docherty should make the most of his voice while it lasts.

Many conductors cut great lumps out of oratorios like this, claiming that the repetitions are boring: McCreesh's artistry allowed him - with his superb Gabrieli Consort plus the Wroclaw Philharmonic Choir - to give us every repeat Handel wrote, without any whiff of déjà entendu. Bravo - and encore!

(Photos: Paul McCreesh by Sheila Rock, Mark Padmore by Marco Borggreve)

Kiarostami and Minghella: ENO film directors

2009-06-23T14:40:43Z

After Sally Potter’s cack-handed shot at Carmen - "stripping away the flamenco clichés’ to reveal what she pretentiously termed the ‘secret emotional geometry" - film directors have been wisely kept away from English National Opera. But Abbas Kiarostami’s take on Cosi Fan Tutte - imported from Aix-en-Provence, and resurrected here by his assistant Elaine Tyler-Hall, because the Foreign Office perversely wouldn’t let him into the country - is a reminder of what enlightenment such people can bring. And when one sees this production and Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly on successive nights, the message is reinforced.

This Iranian film-maker’s screen work dissects personal and social relationships with patiently forensic skill: his latest film, Shirin, which focuses on close-ups of 100 women as they watch a film about a love-triangle, goes on UK release next week, and could hardly be more topical. He describes Mozart’s world as a ‘closed-up heaven’, into which he wants to let fresh air: his solution is so obvious that it’s amazing it’s been so seldom used. Quite simply, he replaces a painted backdrop with a cinematic one: a row of busy cafes in front of which Don Alfonso and the boys hatch their plot; a misty, dreamy view of the Bay of Naples, across which a red-sailed yacht slowly approaches, then bears the boys off to war; and a simulacrum of the theatre orchestra (plus a duplicate conductor) against which the denouement unfolds. So simple: if the third moving backdrop is somewhat distracting - one is aware of the real conductor trying to keep pace with the filmed one, and not always succeeding - the first two make gracefully suggestive reinforcements of the drama. The production itself has flaws: for example, the ending, which should underline whatever moral the director has settled for, here disintegrates pointlessly. But the singing, if not blindingly marvellous, is uniformly first-rate. You can catch this show until July 5.

Meanwhile it’s good to have Minghella’s Butterfly back, revived by his choreographer (and widow) Carolyn Choa: first time round, I was not totally convinced, but now I realise how apt his vision is. From the moment his performance space is revealed - a huge sweeping rake, with a correspondingly raked ceiling curving down to it, so that everything seems destined to be swallowed up by the horizon - we are drawn inexorably into the drama. And never has that drama been more clearly one of rape: the gorgeous costumes, the black-veiled figures manipulating symbolic puppets, the giant mirror which shows what goes on behind the sliding screens, as well as in front of them - everything deepens the pathos of the victim-culture. The vicious crimson stain which spreads across the entire stage as Cio-Cio San expires is the sort of coup only a film-maker would dream up. Minghella was a deeply musical film director - see how Gabriel Yared’s score pervades and underscores every scene in his masterpiece, The Talented Mr Ripley - and he would have worked more wonders with opera, had death not snatched him with such untimely speed.

Elliott Carter comes to Aldeburgh

2009-06-22T16:47:11Z

What makes a man approaching his 101st birthday fly the Atlantic, and penetrate the remotest reaches of Suffolk? "You can’t keep a composer away from his music," explains a smiling Elliott Carter, in Aldeburgh to witness a blizzard of his works in performance - plus the unveiling of a new one - and beginning his stay with a public interview with pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, in which he proves that chronological time is irrelevant, and you’re only as old as you feel you are.

What’s fascinating about Carter is the way he didn’t find his voice until he was seventy. "I’m a fanatic," he tells us, in the airy new Britten Studio. "I wouldn’t be happy unless I was writing music, trying to do things I haven’t done before." He talks of the pleasure of finding that voice, and using it to explore the layering of time, which is something (pace Proust) which music does better than words. And it’s piquant to hear this arch-modernist declare that his polyphonic experiments picked up where the Elizabethan madrigalists had left off.

Aimard feeds cues to bring out Carter’s blunt and forceful character. "How else could you do it?" the composer snaps, when complimented on his freewheeling ability to follow his muse. He recalls hobnobbing with Charles Ives in the Twenties, and composing alongside Poulenc in the Thirties, but rejoices in not having to pay any attention to what other people are doing any more. And what he’s doing is like research science: "What bugs me about Schoenberg is the way he’s not sensitive to the vertical sound. I decided to focus primarily on the harmonic structure of my pieces. Let me show you." Shoving Aimard aside, he puts his hands to the keyboard, to reveal a touch still fresh and firm. Aimard then announces his intention of playing a series of Carter’s works. ‘I hope I like them!’ he replies, whereupon we launch into a wonderfully unorthodox concert.

First come two of his "tribute" pieces: the first shaped by oblique intervals tethered by a sequence of chords as though planted in the earth, the second with three- and four-note patterns running rings round each other, which Carter aptly described as being "like a sprinkling of notes, a drizzle of sound". "They’re not as bad as I thought," he comments drily as Aimard spins his way through yet more polyphonies; what they have in common is clarity, expressiveness, economy, and a QED-type resolution at the end which is extraordinarily deft. This music may be austere, but it’s surprisingly welcoming to the ear.

Later in the day we hear Tamara Stefanovich, Aimard’s recording partner, play "Matribute", one of the Carter pieces which Aimard had played, and the difference is instructive. She has an excellent technique, but doesn’t dig into the keys the way Aimard does, and the loss of emphasis leaves the piece sounding rather ordinary. Moreover, she doesn’t quite bring off Carter’s "Catenaires", described by the composer as "a fast one-line piece, a continuous chain of notes", in which, with both hands working furiously, agitated swarms of ideas must mysteriously give the impression of relaxed repose. When Aimard plays this, the trick works beautifully. On the other hand, by juxtaposing Carter with a Haydn sonata and Bartok’s ‘14 Bagatelles’, Stefanovich shows how close his pianistic world-view is to theirs.

This is Aimard’s first year as artistic director at Aldeburgh, and he’s making a good fist of it, with a strategy he describes as "blocks of events". Thus the first weekend gave us a feast of Birtwistle and allied composers, with "Harrison’s Clocks" and Ligeti’s "Poeme symphonique" for 100 metronomes providing chic ballast for Birtwistle’s latest reworking of the Orpheus myth in "The Corridor", and for "Semper Dowland", this being Birtwistle’s rumination on John Dowland’s ‘Lachrymae’ for tenor and chamber orchestra. The second weekend brings - in addition to a lovely performance of unadulterated Dowland by Mark Padmore with lutenist Elizabeth Kenny - a collection of works broadly inhabiting the same sound-world as Carter’s, from which George Benjamin’s "Duet for Piano and Orchestra", written for and premiered by Aimard, stands out. After his long march in Boulez’s shadow, this no-longer-young British composer has at last found his own voice, and it’s marvellously eloquent.

Carter’s own new work, "On Conversing with Paradise", is an 11-minute setting of some fragments of Ezra Pound which express the poet’s despair at not having written the perfect poem. Under Oliver Knussen’s incisive baton, baritone Leigh Melrose and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group evokes a timelessly simple and savage world which makes the Maltings rafters ring. Modal rather than tonal, and grounded in thudding and throbbing percussion, it delineates a view of heaven (as seen from hell) with unassailable authority.

There are always felicitous surprises in Aldeburgh: one of this year’s comes as I walk past the parish church, with the bells summoning the grey-headed faithful to Matins. Eight bells, sounding in constantly-varying permutation: Ligeti might have written it, and Britten will certainly have loved it. Some old things are forever new.

Radio 3’s Hear and Now will broadcast these and other Aldeburgh events on July 11 and 18.

Photos courtesy of www.aldeburgh.co.uk.

Ian Bostridge up a blind alley

2009-06-15T11:11:36Z

It sounded a neat idea, as Ian Bostridge outlined it in the Guardian. The Threepenny Opera’s perennial relevance - particularly marked, as capitalist binge leads to universal bust - makes it worth looking at anew: singing Lieder with Dorothea Roschmann and Angelika Kirchschlager prompted him to wonder "how wonderful it would be" to hear them tackling Brecht-Weill. Why not stand the usual tradition on its head, and replace singing actors by acting singers? "There’s room for both grit and cantilena" argued Bostridge: the Lieder-singers’ commitment to the words made them particularly suited to this challenge.

Thus it was that we gathered at the Barbican to hear this theory put into practice, with the aid of the versatile Klangforum Wien led by that arch-funster HK Gruber, who would both conduct and sing Peachum in his inimitable chansonnier style; as this was a concert performance, there would also be a narrator. And what an intriguing line-up: Roschmann as Polly, Kirchschlager as Jenny, Bostridge as MacHeath, plus three Austrian/German singers. Would they be as wonderful as promised?

The show seemed discombobulated from the start. The German narrator was stuck out in the distance, and stumbled over his words, while Gruber’s dry beat didn’t swing. Then Bostridge, who had been desperately mugging to convey the right sort of loucheness, opened his mouth. With hair slicked back, Tarantino shades, and his skeletal form encased in a sharp gangster suit, he’d done what he could to transcend the etiolated persona in which he sings Schubert and Britten, but the results were painful both to hear and watch. When he went down low, his voice disappeared: what was the mysterious "sound engineer" in the cast-list doing? Capriciously turning a mike on and off? When audible, alas, Bostridge’s sound was a mere wispy parody of the roughness which is a sine qua non for this part.

On the other hand, Roschmann gave Polly wonderful oomph, while Hanna Schwartz and Florian Boesch hit the button brilliantly as Celia and Tiger Brown; Gruber’s singing was nicely in character too. Kirchschlager projected raunchiness with her body, but seemed vocally constrained just as Bostridge was, if not to the same degree. Were they both instinctively protecting their voices, as all classical singers must, from the damage which unbridled raucousness would do? This is why, for example, the Handelian mezzo Sarah Connolly - initially an accomplished jazz singer - now doesn’t dare sing jazz. "It’s just too dangerous," she tells me. I think Bostridge may belatedly have discovered this too. Stick to Britten, Schubert, and Mozart, Ian: this is a blind alley.

From flash opera to flatpack opera

2009-06-11T12:49:19Z

After singing waiters, and "flash opera" - a musical mob suddenly bursting into song in Waterloo station - supermarket opera is a relatively sedate concept; indeed, Glyndebourne’s go-ahead education department did one back in the Nineties. But Flatpack Opera takes the idea on interestingly, being not only set in a supermarket, but making that its subject. Thus it is that I find myself mingling with bemused shoppers in the entrance to the Wembley IKEA, watching two leggy dancers cavorting in a cascade of yellow shopping bags, while a guitarist sings his West Coast heart out.

We are called to attention by a soprano chanting into a megaphone, and lured upstairs to the bedsit department, where a young man practises scales on a keyboard while his friend unpacks and assembles a bookcase. The comedy is largely wordless, mildly surreal, and seemingly improvised: two Middle-Eastern families who have been busily shopping put down their bags and join those who have come to see the show (no money changing hands, for this is free). On then, to another bedsit, where a young couple are setting up house, and the wife has been shopping: the trouble is, her husband likes nothing she has bought, and in the space of five minutes we see their relationship disintegrate - in song. Led on by a violinist like a Pied Piper with an ever-lengthening following, we move from scene to scene: in the kitchen department a Nigella-figure prepares a dinner with her partner, making Evelyn Glennie-type percussion as they chop and grate and slice; in the bedroom area, couples swap partners.

It’s all rather fey and whimsical, but the singing and playing by the small ensemble - strings, keyboard, accordion, guitar - is of the highest order: Lea’s singers are all young high-fliers, and she herself is at music-theatre’s cutting edge, while her composer Tom Lane works with a variety of smart quartets and the LSO. The idiom he’s settled for here is minimal-atonal, but oddly easy on the ear: perfect as an introduction to the art-form, which is what this event clearly was for its accidental audience. Some shoppers were so unnerved that they pretended it wasn’t happening at all, others moved from bewilderment to enjoyment, and forgot their shopping entirely. The best thing about it was the total lack of pretention or explanation: take it or leave it, was the message, and most people happily took it. Lea now hopes to do the show in other IKEAs across Europe: if she does, she should stiffen its sinews, and give the plot some bite.

Lilya Zilberstein: Soviet pianism lives!

2009-06-09T17:17:54Z

The Keyboard Charitable Trust is dedicated to a noble cause: helping gifted young pianists to build a career, at a time when their debut concerts - which 20 years ago used to be routinely reviewed - scarcely ever merit mention in the press. (Who he? Never heard of him. Tell us about someone we know…) But the pianist who launched the Trust’s inaugural gala concert at the Wigmore Hall - where would chamber music be without this admirable institution? - was neither young nor unknown, just virtually unknown in this country. I had only clocked her through her four-hand appearances at the Lugano Festival, with her great mentor, Martha Argerich.

Born in Moscow in 1965, Lilya Zilberstein studied from the age of five at the celebrated Gnessin music school, where a host of stars, including Yevgeny Kissin, have cut their teeth. Winning competitions first in Russia, then beyond, she has enjoyed a dizzy concert career just about everywhere apart from London; now based in Germany, she tours with Argerich and Maxim Vengerov, and gives master classes in many conservatoires, including the Royal Academy.

Just how lucky her students are, was evident the moment her fingers touched the keys in Brahms’s Op 117 Intermezzi. The first, described by the composer as ‘the lullaby of my sorrows’, came with a wonderfully warm and singing tone; as the pieces unfolded, with that old-fashioned technique whereby the right hand sounds marginally before the left augmenting the expressiveness, we were transported to a long-gone world which lives on through its survivors. I’m talking about the golden age of Soviet pianism, whose finest flower was Sviatoslav Richter, but whose many other blooms still adorn the concert scene, with Zilberstein - with her amazing technique and magic touch - prominent among them.

If the Intermezzi seemed to swim in a great surrounding stillness, all hell broke loose when we entered Brahms’s Paganini Variations. After an immaculate statement of the theme, Zilberstein tore into the first variation with demonic force, with each succeeding one emerging in its own unique colours - soothing, insinuating, pleading, avenging; the whole thing was intoxicating. Rachmaninov’s Opus 32 Preludes formed the second half: they may not have the furnace-wrought perfection of the Brahms, but they too were magical. The packed audience at the Wigmore consisted of the usual suspects: it’s time the wider world woke up to her excellence. Why doesn’t the South Bank give her a break? There she’d be dynamite.

Fliter, Tchetuev, Yerzhanov - plus dead piano

2009-05-29T15:03:00Z

When three young pianists tackle major works by Schumann at the Wigmore Hall on successive days, comparisons are mandatory. First up was the Kazakh pianist Temirzhan Yerzhanov, supported by a big cohort of his compatriots, who gave us eight pieces from Schumann’s "Bunte Blatter" plus his Piano Sonata No 1, followed by Prokofiev’s "Visions Fugitives" and Piano Sonata no 2. But in his hands both composers came across as unrelievedly dark and declamatory; Schumann was completely devoid of his lightness and fancy. The encore was a Chopin nocturne, and even that was ponderous.

I note that Yerzhanov records for a label called Con Brio: perhaps he should sign up with one called Dolce, because at present half his palette is missing. I note also that he traces his keyboard ancestry back via a chain of Russian pianists to Liszt, and that he is a globe-trotting conservatoire teacher: caveat emptor - buyer beware.

When Buenos Aires-born Ingrid Fliter sat down at the piano the next day, it was hard to believe it was the same instrument: launching into Chopin’s Grande Valse Brillante Op 18, she delivered its twists and turns with bewitchingly evanescent charm. Reaching the showy conclusion, however, she suddenly faltered, banged a note, got up and looked into the piano's works, shrugged apologetically, and walked out. But this was a live lunchtime broadcast for radio 3!

Were we still on air? What were the listeners in the shires hearing? There was no sign of Radio 3’s Fiona Talkington, who had enjoined us to provide "atmosphere" over which she would do her links. Instead, on marched the house manager, plus an assistant with a face like an undertaker, who shut the piano's lid. Then they took up the floor, and descended into the depths: three new piano legs appeared, followed by three new pedals, then a sleeping beast was unwrapped and cranked into the daylight. The scene was so surreal that people began to take pictures, until an usher sternly forbade it: a mere fifteen minutes later, business resumed - which must have been some sort of record.

The remainder of her recital consisted of Schumann’s "Etudes Symphoniques", a majestic work requiring a massive feat of imaginative control, but she had obviously been knocked off balance. She had thought deeply about how to negotiate the peaks and chasms of Schumann’s visionary landscape, and gave it wonderful sweep and grandeur, but many of the variations needed more shape. The theme should have stood out more starkly against the swirl which followed, and there were times when the musical line got lost in a welter of lovingly dwelt-on detail. Her unusual envoi was a pair of posthumous variations which came to us like ghostly, beautiful echoes; her defiant encore was Chopin's "Minute Waltz", which in her hands became 90 seconds of show-stopping fun. Come back soon, and justify the promise of your brilliant EMI Chopin disc last year.

Day three brought the 28-year-old Ukrainian Igor Tchetuev, whose dizzy career has taken him to the the world's smartest halls and festivals since he won the Grand prix for his country’s young pianists' competition at 14. And here it was immediately apparent that we could relax. Schumann’s Arabeske in C major came with a silky singing tone, sections of mellifluous murmur alternating with incisive declamatoriness. He moved on without a break into the Abegg variations, which were delivered with limpid resonance. Each was exquisitely shaped, and the virtuosity seemed effortless. He then gave us Chopin’s first 12 Etudes, followed by a stirring Petrushka (once nearly coming to grief, but not quite) in a manner which reminded us that the golden age of Soviet pianism is still alive and well, in the hands of its latter-day products.

This brilliant young player can next be caught at the Cadogan Hall on June 11.

Wu Qian and Yuja Wang: China’s new piano stars

2009-05-22T11:00:33Z

China’s fabled 30 million piano students haven’t yet thrown up the hoped-for army of stars. Among the few to have emerged, Lang Lang may be the most prominent, but he’s a mere peasant compared to his aristocratic coeval Yundi Li, whose playing and demeanour are oddly Chopinesque. (I sense Lang Lang is at least dimly aware of this. I once asked him how he rated Yundi Li: he clammed up, and his face clouded over.)

There are even fewer young females in the lists. This is no surprise, given the one-child policy and the ‘little emperor’ tradition of which Lang Lang is such a fine example. But as it happens, two of China’s brightest young (expatriate) female hopes have just released debut discs: Wu Qian (25, pictured left) and Yuja Wang (21, pictured right). Both began in Chinese conservatories, but spent their teens training in the West - Wu at the Menuhin school and the Royal Academy, Wang at the Curtis Institute - and their approaches to the keyboard are Westernised in a manner which Lang Lang’s, for example, is absolutely not. Both are formidable pianists; both are articulate about art and literature, as well as music; both have notably independent minds. Their repertoire overlaps in Liszt, but Wang tends towards the translucency of Ligeti, while Wu is at her most comfortable with Schumann. Of the two, Wu is the one whose music I prefer to live with: there’s something too careful, almost clinical, about Wang’s perfection, while Wu’s sound has a wonderfully resonant warmth.

So check them out and make your own comparison: "Yuja Wang: Chopin, Scriabin, Liszt, Ligeti" (Deutsche Grammophon), and "Wu Qian: Schumann, Prior, Liszt" (Dal Segno). This latter would have been a perfect Cd, had Wu Qian not misguidedly invited the 16-year-old Alex Prior - a boy making waves at the moment - to contribute a piece: his 20 pretentious and leaden minutes fatally drag down her lovely work with Kreisleriana and Petrarch Sonnet No 104. (By all means include a new young composer to leaven the greats: just make sure their music can cut it.)

Meanwhile Wu Qian is carving out a glittering career with the Sitkovetsky Piano Trio, which she dominates (pace the excellent violinist) with immense style: catch them if you can.

Does a voice have a sex?

2009-05-21T09:32:09Z

Every voice has its own colour, but sometimes they’re hard to tell apart – and when the singers are not of the same sex, things get interesting. On successive days I heard counter-tenor Iestyn Davies in the Lufthansa Festival performance of Handel’s ‘Athalia’, and mezzo Marijana Mijanovic singing in Handel’s ‘Agrippina’ - and I could have sworn it was the same voice. They both have a wonderfully resonant tone, with the same tensile strength and carrying quality: I can’t compare their audiograms, but the character of their two voices is essentially one. Listening to Mijanovic with closed eyes, it was easy to imagine that it was not she, but Davies, who was singing.

This is a curious echo of a historical conundrum.

Both these singers were doing parts written for castrati - whose voices transcended both sex and gender. Over the past three centuries, those parts have been colonised by basses, tenors, and above all by women: giving them back to the high-voiced men they were written for, as has happened following the counter-tenor explosion, is a sort of justice. (Though one can hardly complain about the wonderful frisson created by modern mezzos and contraltos in castrato roles, in a distinguished line stretching from Kathleen Ferrier to Sarah Connolly.)

But this question of the sex of a voice is always lurking in the background. When you’re listening to the swashbuckling James Bowman, who first launched the counter-tenor voice as a weapon in the stage armoury – the masculinity in that burnished clarion sound is overwhelming. But I once asked the American counter-tenor David Daniels – possessor of a voice often described as ‘gender-bending’ - how he felt about the comparisons made between his tone and that of Katherine Ferrier, and whether he perceived any fundamental difference between her voice and his. ‘Yes.’ In what way? ‘She’s a woman.’ But if he was listening blind? ‘I would still know.’ How? ‘I don’t know.’ Quite so - he wouldn’t. ‘In some ways,’ he then added, ‘it’s crazy to talk about femininity in my voice, but it would be ridiculous to say that it doesn’t sound feminine at all, because it obviously does.’

There’s nothing ‘feminine’ in Iestyn Davies’s voice – nor, I would suggest, in Marijana Mijanovic’s: but nor is there anything which could be described as crudely ‘masculine’. And neither singer’s sound remotely resembles what we know castrato voices to have been like (or rather, imagine, since the one extant recording - of Moreschi, ‘Angel of Rome’ - is risibly distorted). The castrato voice was a unique product of a cruel society plus a barbarous operation; Davies, Mijanovic, and singers like them embody a voice which is perfectly ambiguous, and unique to our more civilised times.

Technical coda

When the soundtrack to ‘Farinelli’ was made in 1994, the voices of soprano Ewa Mallas-Godlewska and counter-tenor Derek Lee Ragin were electronically spliced together: only thus could the full castrato range (seem to) be covered by one voice. Counter-tenor technique has now developed so much that one singer might manage the whole thing.

But range was only part of the castrato phenomenon. One anatomical effect of pre-pubertal castration was to prevent the larynx from growing: the castrato’s vocal cords were thus smaller and finer-textured than those of an adult male – more like a female soprano’s, in fact. And with this soft and flexible apparatus, the singer could perform exceptional vocal acrobatics. Counter-tenor Nicholas Clapton, who has impersonated Farinelli and written a book about Moreschi, has done a study. ‘We can see from Farinelli’s scores,’ he says, ‘that the things he could do were jaw-dropping. I recently worked out that well over a thousand notes a minute were sometimes going past his larynx. And during that whole minute, he might not take a breath.’

So history hasn’t come full circle - and with luck it never will.

In praise of amateur pianism

2009-05-19T09:35:23Z

Ever since a beaten-up honky-tonk came through our front door, I’ve been mad about the piano. I went through the grades, but was never a natural player, and over the years acquired some very bad habits. I would spend months on a piece, to a point where I was sick of it but still couldn’t play it: I systematically murdered the most beautiful things ever composed. My job as a critic reminds me daily what real pianism is, but my own pianism has become like a garden grown wild.

But you only get one life, and your fingers may not stay un-arthritic for ever: I recently decided that if I was ever to play Beethoven and Chopin decently, I’d better start lessons again. My first discovery was that my hands had lost their youthful elasticity: I kept straining fingers and thumbs through over-practice. But my second was that I could get round the keyboard with more assurance that my teenage self ever could: age brings practical wisdom.

To speed the process, I sign up for a weekend residential course with Debussy-authority Paul Roberts at his home in Sussex. Thus it is that I find myself in company with a lawyer, a psychoanalyst, an Olympic gymnast, and two high-flying medics, one of whom is an American transplant-and-trauma specialist whose night-job is concert pianism. Are there any parallels between musical performance and emergency medicine, I ask him. Very much so, he replies. Connecting with patients in stressful situations, and connecting with an audience, both demand a rapid intuitive and practical response.

As the new boy, I am nearing my moment of truth with the Beethoven pieces I have brought: I’ll soon know whether I am a player of sorts, or a total no-hoper, and I’ve taken a mild beta-blocker to improve my chances. The allegro of Beethoven’s second sonata may not have many notes, but it’s full of irregular scales and arpeggios, like somersaults on a trapeze. My first canter through is recognisable if rough, but my second is a total disaster: each jump-and-run looms like a black void without hand-holds, and the more I repeat it, the less able I am to find the notes, let alone play them. Mortification would be an understatement: I sense waves of sympathy from the other players who have all – apart from the seemingly armour-plated American - trodden this miserable path before.

As they take turns to play, it becomes clear that Roberts’s approach is anything but doctrinaire: he focuses first on each player’s positive points, then suggests ways of dealing with problems. On the second day my other Beethoven allegro – the charming Opus 14 No 2, which I’ve brought as a fall-back in case I come to grief – saves my life. I get through it in reasonable order, make it sing, and am shown how to deconstruct, and rebuild from scratch, the troublesome middle section. By now the atmosphere – supportive rather than intimidating – has dissolved my paranoia.

For that is what our self-destructive expectations often amount to. When the psychoanalyst flawlessly delivers the Chopin nocturne with which he’d crashed in flames on a previous course, people are visibly moved. Asked how he managed this transformation, he gives the sort of reply you might expect from one of his kind: first he took it into analysis, then he deconstructed it, then he found people to play his new version to, until the phobia was erased, and a proper performance could result.

Castigate all this as supreme self-indulgence if you will – at one level it’s no different from polishing your golf - but that’s not how it feels, nor what it is. These sessions are not just about music: they’re also about communality and self-knowledge, and if you’re lucky, you can emerge transformed.

Information on Paul Roberts’s courses in Britain and France is available here.