Review of Opera North's performance of Fidelio at The Lowry, 15th June 2021

Rachel Nicholls as Leonore in Opera North’s production

of Beethoven’s Fidelio. Credit Richard H Smith 

Opera North’s return to live performance at The Lowry received the same kind of reception that the Hallé’s to the Bridgewater Hall did almost a fortnight ago. My goodness, we’re glad to see and hear live music in our community again.

It was a one-nighter only, an in-concert presentation with a small and socially distanced, mask-wearing audience, of course, no set beyond a nicely lit backdrop colonnade of pillars effect, with fiery light glowing between them, and no interval. The cast were in a line at the front of the stage, with the orchestra behind, and had to cope with minimal acting, even when singing about being in each other’s arms when obviously they couldn’t be.

(The only other thing in the visit is a so-called ‘Night at the Opera’ of concertised excerpts, so hardly counts in my book. It’s funny how marketeers reach for that title when what they have to offer is specifically not a night at an opera, but a set of songs from the shows).

But at least it made some amends for the lost great Beethoven celebration of 2020. Opera North did get this version of Fidelio out in December by filming it in Leeds Town Hall and streaming, and our cast in Salford were exactly the same, the major change being that the conductor this time was Paul Daniel, not Mark Wigglesworth.

The opera is presented in the version edited by David Pountney, where all the spoken dialogue is replaced by a narrator device: the actor-singer who is Don Fernando (Matthew Stiff), and normally only appears at the end to save the hero and heroine and sort everything out, is on-stage the whole time, presenting his report of the story for a ‘truth and reconciliation commission’.

It actually works better this way than in the original, which is a Singspiel with somewhat indifferent narrative concepts and verbal writing and can often seem in the opening scenes as if it’s going to be in a similar vein to parts of The Magic Flute. (Pountney’s text was also used in the Hallé concert performance of Act Two under Sir Mark Elder in February 2020, in the Bridgewater Hall – and with two of the same cast).

All the virtues of the previous Opera North cast were present in this live performance, and more so: especially Rachell Nicholls as Leonore (the heroine who enters a prison disguised as boy to seek out her kidnapped and starving husband, Florestan – OK it’s not exactly everyday credible stuff, but the important thing is how Beethoven’s music lifts it), and Brindley Sherratt as Rocco, the head warder who has touches of a comic Everyman-in-any-humble-job about him. His daughter Marzelline (Fflur Wyn) falls for the supposed young ‘Fidelio’ who is really Leonore, somewhat upsetting her real aspiring suitor, Jaquino (Oliver Johnston).

The other two key roles are Don Pizarro, an out-and-out villain who is the reason for Florestan’s disappearance and who wants him murdered before help can arrive – he was wonderfully acted by Robert Hayward, who fixed the audience with an evil scowl from the moment he walked on the stage and never let up on the nastiness – and of course Florestan himself (Toby Spence), who has to languish unseen until Act Two but makes up for it with some glorious proto-Heldentenor style singing.

The orchestra was down to single (hardworking!) woodwind, two horns, two trumpets, no trombones, in a score reduction by Francis Griffin. The chorus on stage was pretty generous for a socially distanced ensemble these days.

It was good to see Paul Daniel, one of their great former music directors, back on the Opera North podium. His sense of rhythmic propulsion was as enlivening as ever, and he went for some effects (such as the near-inaudible introduction to the Prisoners’ Chorus – itself magnificently sung by the Opera North men) that were highly daring and not always rewarded by the purity of wind intonation that this adaptation of the scoring absolutely requires.

Vocal highlights included Rachel Nicholls’ ‘Abscheulicher!’ and ‘Komm’ Hoffnung’, as you might expect – fine though the other voices are, hers has a mesmerizing extra quality to it – and of course ‘O namenlose Freude’ with Toby Spence, and the final quintet, where each of Fflur Wyn, Oliver Johnston, Brindley Sherratt and the two just named show their all strengths and characterisation qualities at the same time.

 

Review of the Hallé's live Bridgewater Hall concert on 4th June 2021

Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé 

The Hallé was back playing for a live audience in the Bridgewater Hall – and what a sense of achievement that simple fact gave.

Sir Mark Elder told the evening audience (the second of the day) how much the orchestra had missed them. We’d missed seeing the band in person, too, but it surely raised their spirits to see most available seats filled and a standing ovation at the end, instead of just microphones and film cameras. A Thursday night reception for the Hallé’s music is, after all, something in Manchester’s lifeblood and has been since 1861.

If these were ‘normal’ times, we’d be seeing the Hallé Proms, and this concert and the ones to follow in the ‘Summer Season’ look in some ways like Proms programmes – but there’s been more to their planning than just providing a set of accessible, optimistically-charged orchestral pieces. There’s a bit of a Stravinsky commemoration built in, for instance, with both Petrushka and The Firebird figuring.

The first outing was certainly accessible and optimistically charged, though. Glinka’s overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla ensured that: Sir Mark gets just the right tempo to bring the bounding first tune (with a thrill of a crescendo on its upward scale) and the lilting second one both to life. And the full Petrushka score (1947 version) did that in spades, too, the opening Shrovetide Fair music, taken at a relatively steady pace, revealing secrets and details that aren’t always appreciable when the music emerges in slightly less rhythmically accurate form from a theatre pit, and later solo roles in the orchestra including sweet and winsome flute playing by Amy Yule and impactful and exciting trumpets.

Elgar’s Enigma Variations have been a Hallé staple almost from the day they were written, and Sir Mark and the orchestra brought them to glorious life once again: the opening theme as much caressed as played, the characters of the ‘friends pictured within’ brought vividly to life, and Nimrod, the great slow movement, made the centrepiece it was surely always designed to be; the strings, guest-led by Magnus Johnston, producing wonderful tone.

Indeed, one of the most rewarding things about this concert was the sense of aural splendour that seems to come with hearing the orchestra in its newly distance seating plan on the much expanded platform, with the brass firing salvoes from above in what would usually be choir seats. It’s like listening in quadraphonics rather than stereo and almost a new experience in itself … perhaps one we’ll miss if and when we can return to what we once called normal.

A streamed recording of the concert will be available from 10 June: link www.halle.co.uk/whats-on/summer-2021-concert-1-stream/