Opera
A few weeks ago I was speculating anxiously on the possibility that even the greatest masterpieces, in opera or other art forms, might be exhaustible, or that anyway I might not be able to find anything fresh in them, and therefore might succumb either to a state of mild boredom, or else, like some critics, irritably demand that every production ‘break new ground’, as if it is the job of directors and performers to cater primarily to jaded palates. Any production of an opera which bewilders an audience that knows, at least in moderate outline, what the plot is, who...
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Is any opera more frustrating than Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann? It persistently arouses hopes which it almost as persistently fails to realise. Because there is no such thing as an authoritative text, one always hopes that a new production will have hit on a solution to its numerous problems. I’ve seen enough accounts of it now to feel miserably confident that any production will be a mixture of pleasures and let-downs. This new effort by ENO, a co-production with the Bavarian State Opera, is as good an attempt as any I ever expect to see, and its shortcomings are...
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Bellini’s Norma is an opera that I not only adore: it obsesses me, too. Whenever I listen to it, I have to hear it again very soon, and parts of it lodge in my mind, playing over and over again, to an extent that very few other pieces do. It was the work through which I first came to realise Callas’s lonely greatness, and it was through her that I came to see how great Italian opera could be, too, having childishly dismissed it tout court as superficial compared with the great German traditions. I still think that Norma operates...
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When you see two of the undisputed masterpieces of the repertoire in one week in one of the world’s leading opera houses, competently performed, and remain largely unmoved, you’re bound to ask yourself the question: have I been to these things, and heard them on record, too many times? It is, after all, possible to get tired even of the greatest works if you have experienced them regularly in the same productions, and without any special ‘magic’ ingredients, such as can bring back to life, or sustain, a standard work.
It was a question I found myself asking with...
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The Enchanted Island is a baroque concoction at the New York Met which has been widely touted and last Saturday was relayed worldwide to cinemas, a transmission that went less smoothly than any I have seen before, with some sharp variations of volume and a temporary complete breakdown. On the whole, the sound level is very high, as if everyone is singing at the top of their voice; while it’s nice to have ample volume, it is clearly and disconcertingly a misrepresentation. Danielle de Niese, for instance, has a small voice which just about fills Glyndebourne’s house. Here she sounded...
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Giulio Cesare was the first of Handel’s operas to return to general favour after more than a century and a half of neglect, and I suppose that it is still the most frequently performed. That isn’t surprising, since its plot is, by Handelian standards, simplicity itself, and the level of inspiration in the arias is astonishingly high. There is a problem with it, at least in the UK at the moment, and that is that David McVicar’s Glyndebourne production of 2005 has been so widely and wildly acclaimed, and distributed, that new productions are bound to be seen in its...
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