Review of Albert Herring at Clonter Opera

Jack Roberts (Mr Upfold), Flora Birkbeck (Florence Pike), Erin Rossington (Lady Billows), Jordan Harding (Mr Gedge), Thomas Stevenson (Supt Budd), Lydia Shariff (Mrs Herring) and Daniel Kringer in Clonter Opera's production of Albert Herring

Eric Crozier and Benjamin Britten, after Maupassant

Clonter Opera

Clonter Opera Theatre

14, 16, 17, 19, 21 and 23 July 2022, 2 hours 35 minutes plus supper interval (30 minutes, or 70 minutes in some performances)

I love it when an opera company announces Albert Herring. It’s an affectionate send-up of the hypocrisies and absurdities of rural British life, almost like The Archers set to music.

Not precisely the same, of course, but you have the figures of the vicar, the police superintendent, the headmistress of the village school, the mayor, the titled lady who lives in the big house and her housekeeper – and the younger generation: lovebirds Sid and Nancy, and a few schoolchildren.

Then there’s Albert. He’s the son of the greengrocer’s shop owner, Mrs Herring, and a young man very much under his mother’s thumb. The story begins when the worthies are seeking a girl of pure and impeccable character to be their Queen of the May … but none of the candidates actually qualifies, on moral grounds. Only shy Albert seems to be an innocent – so they make him King of the May.

Sid and Nancy spike his lemonade with rum at the village fete to celebrate his coronation (what better piece could have been chosen in this year of jubilee fetes left, right and centre?), and with his prize money in his pocket, all unknown to everyone and particularly his mum, Albert goes out on the razzle that night.

What happens next you need to see the opera to enjoy best, so I won’t spoil it, but this is operatic comedy, one of the best ever written. It’s a demanding piece, too, but Clonter Opera, the finishing school based on a Cheshire farm near Jodrell Bank, helping young singers find a bridge between conservatoire training and the professional world, has put all its resources into this production and come up with something rather special.

It's one of the few mainstream operas that a small-scale but well-equipped theatre such as Clonter’s can put on with the orchestral score exactly as written, as Britten wrote it for just 13 players, and the professional Clonter Sinfonia do sterling duty in the pit, under the acute and supportive baton of music director Philip Sunderland.

The production by Michael McCaffery, sets the story in 1947 – that was the year of the first performance, just 75 years ago – rather than 1910, and the set and costume design by Bettina John quietly underscore an important aspect of the score: the post-war sense of rejuvenation that was sweeping through Britain at the time. This is an opera that tells us, without ever stating it out loud, that the older generation, with their prejudices and stuffiness, are on the way out, and the future belongs to the young; and John’s design has detailed and authentic-looking sets of dull and faded interiors, contrasting with brightly coloured (and sometimes near-surreal) costumes for the characters who parade through them. The Clonter stage revolve is skilfully used to produce successive backdrops, as in the original scenario, and we hear the full musical entr’actes that cover the scene changes (one reason why the full running time is quite long).

As a vehicle for young voices to show their potential and young performers their abilities, Albert Herring could hardly be bettered. The character studies of  Erin Rossington (Lady Billows), Flora Birtbeck (Florence Pike), Jordan Harding (Mr Gedge), Jack Roberts (Mr Upfold) and Thomas Stevenson (Supintendent Budd) were all engagingly realized and strongly sung, and I think that Rosalind Dobson (Miss Wordsworth) has a particular gift for comedy, with just the right touch of exaggeration and an ability to keep reacting in character.

The three children were each played by first-year students of the Royal Northern College of Music – Eirwen Roberts, Myome Mortimer-Davies and Samuel Horton – who enjoyed their opportunities for fun and games; and Lydia Shariff, as Mrs Herring, was able to convince us (more than most) that she was a generation older than her real age.

But the stand-out performances in a gifted ensemble were from Daniel Kringer, as Albert, Thomas Chenhall, as Sid, and Frances Gregory, as Nancy. Albert is a difficult role to play: he’s not a village idiot, rather a young man who’s never had a chance to spread his wings until the incidents the opera portrays, and he shames his elders in the end. Daniel Kringer’s voice quality was very durable and his diction excellent, and his acting showed Albert learning from his experiences, right through to the fascinating line, “I didn’t lay it on too thick, did I?” (which leaves us wondering whether he’s smart enough to have been kidding the lot of them with his lurid account of a night on the tiles).

And in this he’s in cahoots with Nancy and Sid, the young couple who are well aware of the ways of the world, and the flesh. Thomas Chenhall and Frances Gregory showed themselves to be mature voices and accomplished actors, well equal to the world of the professional stage – in which they’re each already busily engaged.

 

 

Reviews of Buxton International Festival operas 2022

La Donna del Lago at Buxton International Festival:  Máire Flavin as Elena (red dress) 

Credit Genevieve Girling

La Donna del Lago

Tottola and Rossini, after Walter Scott

Buxton International Festival

Buxton Opera House

8, 12, 15,17, 22 July 2022, 2 hours 50 minutes

 

After the outright cancellation of 2020 and constrained conditions of 2021, Buxton International Festival is back and firing on all cylinders this year. And its operatic flagship is a masterwork by Rossini.

Written in 1819, it was inspired by Walter Scott’s poem, The Lady of the Lake, and is an early example in European opera of full-blown Romantic ideas coming to the fore – war and peace, love and rivalry, wild and remote locations, supposed ancient traditions and figures from the past. There’s even a reference (not taken from Scott) to characters in the writings of the mythical Scottish bard, “Ossian”, a literary fake that hoodwinked most people at the time.

And musically we find Rossini on the cusp of using new-fangled Romantic language in his otherwise cute-and-classical writing: off-stage horn calls, tremolando strings, the sound of the harp to convey local colour (no matter that there’s nothing specially Scottish about it). At the same time he was going all out for popular appeal, and one of the climactic numbers is a competitive duet for love-rival tenors in which the dramatic tension is reflected vocally by bursts of repeated high Cs (and more) from both of them.

The story is fairly simple: Elena (the Lady in question) is the daughter of a chieftain whose loyalty used to lie with the King but who’s now mixed up with rebel Highlanders. He’s betrothed her to their leader, but she really loves another. The King, disguised, comes across her and falls for her, too (hence the two-tenors rivalry). Battle goes badly for the rebels, but Elena seeks to save her father and her true love, and in the end … Well, I won’t give it all away.

Director Jacopo Spirei and designer Madeleine Boyd have staged the opera in a way that conveys general impressions – ragged clothes for the Highland warriors, shiny techno-style costumes for the King and his forces; a interior/exterior set to provide the lakeside locale for the first act and a geometric, power-lit coldness for the King’s palace in the second … showing there’s a clash of cultures as well as of loyalties, a nice gloss on the storyline. The use of a tiny model boat to represent what the script says is Elena’s offer to her visitor of a trip across the lake got a bit of a titter from the audience – but what else can you do on a stage like Buxton’s?

What you need for this opera to work is two tenors with first-class Italian-style top registers: tick – Buxton has Nico Darmanin and John Irvin. You also need a really good bass-baritone and a virtuosic wide-ranging mezzo (for the trouser role of Elena’s warrior true love: tick – Buxton has David Ireland and Catherine Carby. And above all you need an utterly wonderful soprano as Elena: Buxton has Máire Flavin, and her rondó finale at the end brings the whole thing to a triumphant close, as it did on the first night in 1819 and needs to every time.

So the casting is top-class. So is the chorus, all 22 of them plus some minor role singers, too. Buxton has nobly managed so often in the past with a small-scale body, but at last it’s great to hear a full-throated crowd of them in the bright Opera House acoustic.

And the musical direction, by festival artistic director Adrian Kelly, is full of energy and impact. The Northern Chamber Orchestra plays with precision and panache, and the whole thing rattles by with both brilliance of coloratura technique and glorious tone production from all the principals.

(Giulio Cilona conducts on 12, 15 and 17 July).

Antonio e Cleopatra

Ricciardo and Hasse

Buxton International Festival

Buxton Pavilion Theatre

13, 16, 20, 22 July 2022, 1 hour 25 minutes

 

This is Buxton International Festival’s second fully home-grown opera production for 2022. Antonio e Cleopatra is a “serenata” – a baroque mini-opera employing a tiny orchestra and a smaller cast … the title tells it all, as there are just two of them.

It was written in 1725 by Johann Hasse, a German who, like Handel, had his first successes in Italy, and created for production in Naples – then part of the Holy Roman Empire of the Habsburgs.

As the state museum in Vienna will proudly tell you, the Habsburg imperial crown, inherited from Charlemagne, has symbols that show supposed continuity from the Caesars, and this piece makes the point by having Cleo and Mark Antony finally console their unhappy lot (after the battle of Actium) by looking to a future world ruled by Kaiser Charles VI and his missus, Kaiserin Elisabeth. Very loyalist, if a tad historically unlikely.

So how to present a two-acter in which the lovers (both written for high voices) spend the whole time telling each other how they feel, and nothing actually happens? This is baroque opera, and the convention is that each aria (always in da capo repeat-the-beginning-after-a-middle-section form) represents one emotion only – despair, anger, renewed love, determination, regret, resignation, heroic fatalism, etc. The succession gives the singers opportunities to show what they can do in each mood, and that’s the drama.

Director Evangeline Cullingworth (with the help of designer Grace Venning) seems to find parallels in the agonies of a penniless (or even homeless) young couple of the present day. We’re in a near-bare bedroom, and they have nothing but the clothes they stand up in and one big suitcase of a few remaining treasured things. These turn out to include bits of Roman armour, a pair of angel wings, some wigs, theatrical costumes, imitation pistols and hair brushes. Perhaps they have been acting in some dead-end theatre, as finally they dress up in full Carry On Cleo mode for the suicide pact that ends the piece?

The props, of course, give them something to do as they emote their way through Hasse’s arias (plus a couple of duets, one to close each act), with all those repeats. The vocal music is extremely taxing, though, and the quality of the two singers – Thalie Knights, as Antonio, and Ellie Neate, as Cleopatra – is what the audience has come to hear. They are top-class young artists, well able to embellish their repeats tastefully, and in Ellie Neate’s case making the most of her frequent bursts of high-powered top notes (originally written for Farinelli). The first-act closing duet, “Un solo sospiro”, verges on the Handelian in its variety of emotive resource and showed the two both at their best.

Musical direction from the harpsichord is by Satoko Doi-Luck, with a tireless in-period string quintet beside her.

 

Viva la Diva

Donizetti after Sografi, English version by Kit Hesketh-Harvey

Salzburg State Theatre in association with Buxton International Festival

Buxton Opera House

10, 14, 19, 21 and 23 July 2022, 2 hours 55 minutes

 

It’s good to see that Buxton International Festival can laugh at itself. Here we have an adaptation of material originally written to be a comic opera about opera, by Donizetti, turned into a tale of the auditions, rehearsals and final chaotic performance of a piece by the “High Peak Festival” – guess what that might be.

There’s the aspiring hopeful from the Royal Northern College of Music, the heavyweight star soprano with equally nasty minder from eastern Europe, the mezzo who flounces out to be replaced by the grande dame of the local musical scene, the tiny Italian tenor with a sore throat, the dodgy impresario who can’t quite find the cash to pay everyone on time, and the hapless director trying to hold it all together.

So far, so good, as ideas. In practice, Viva la Diva turns out to run 40 minutes longer than they estimated when the festival programme was printed, and it’s not quite as funny as it thinks it is. Maybe that’s to do with the inevitable in-jokes of opera singers sending themselves and their colleagues up, maybe it’s because Kit Hesketh-Harvey’s English words to fit around Donizetti’s tunes, full of internal rhymes and cleverness, still aren’t as tight as a script for a comic opera should be (he also gets extended mileage out of imagined absurd surtitle translations of an Italian libretto – OK first time but not worth doing over and over). Maybe the extra length is to do with preparations for the second act, which is technically quite ambitious, but if you’re going to do an exercise in The Opera That Goes Wrong (as this does), you have to be sure we know which bits are gags and which are not.

There was a feeling of improv creeping in, as if the presence of a male in drag (George Humphreys, stealing the show as supposed contralto Lady Agatha Wigan) turns everything to panto in British theatreland.

Many of the rest of the cast are capable of strutting their stuff as genuine bel canto singers, and I suppose they needed to have the opportunity to prove it, but the progress of the plot is slowed by rather too much Donizetti in the process. So full marks to everyone for singing really well at times and acting funny at others, to conductor Iwan Davies and repetiteur Katie Wong for both being and portraying their roles, to the Northern Chamber Orchestra for both their excellent playing and for pretending to go on strike, and to director Stephen Medcalf and the technical team for everything that went wrong properly.

Review of Opera North's Parsifal at the Bridgewater Hall

 

Richard Farness conducting the Orchestra of Opera North in Parsifal

The first of Opera North’s concert hall presentations of Parsifal was a magnificent musical experience, but, to anyone who saw the fully staged version in Leeds, it also showed how much the resources of a real theatre were absent.

Of course you never miss what you didn’t know about. The soloists – and, particularly, those with lesser roles now honoured with red chairs of their own front-of-stage – were all keenly able to convey character and emotion through simple gestures and intelligent positioning alone, and the story was easier to follow in some ways by using one’s own imagination than when interpreting a director’s spin presented as graphically as this had been.

“Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them …” said Shakespeare’s prologue to Henry V, and it was that sort of exercise. Think, when Parsifal says he’s holding a spear, that he really is, and so on.

What’s more, the Bridgewater Hall acoustic added a dimension of clarity and thrill to the sound of singers and orchestra that few theatres could emulate. Wagner designed the whole work to be a kind of quasi-religious experience, and the hall’s near-cathedral-like resonance helped give that feeling.

But perhaps the leading Flowermaidens, seated in black dresses, could not manage to be alluring quite as much as the writer-composer might have liked, and the full chorus, powerful in numbers and voice as they always are, looked the same in serried ranks, whether personifying chaste knights, temptresses or the angelic host.

As in some other Opera North concert-hall versions of operas, without even electronic projected settings (and they used only the minimum stage lights, not the full available rig) the music was the point, and the whole point. Richard Farnes, seen this time in a centre-stage spotlight, was visibly the Wagner conductor par excellence, guiding every note and nuance, pacing the whole huge structure with both dramatic excitement and meditative depth, and the orchestra played wonderfully for him. They, and he, know that it often matters to hold the decibels down a little bit so that voices can be heard without strain, but when they (especially their warm and wonderful brass) really opened up, the result was spine-tingling. And the chorus, too, made glorious sound.

The principals, as I’ve said in another place, are about as near to a dream line-up as you could get, and every one of them was on form for this performance. Brindley Sherratt sustained his rich tone throughout the marathon but also managed to grow older for the final act by stance and demeanour alone; Derek Welton made Klingsor a really vicious-looking but wonderful-sounding baddie; Robert Hayward was noble and affecting as Amfortas, and Katarina Karnéus conveyed remarkable depths of psychology while singing superbly. Both she and Toby Spence (who filled the space with some ringing top notes) seem to have abandoned the beatific grins of the Leeds first night and found a subtler way of portraying blessedness: that’s good.

Review of Concerto Budapest with Angela Hewitt

                                

Angela Hewitt (cr Fotograf Ole Christiansen)

Touring international orchestras are back, thanks to the mighty IMG, and the Bridgewater Hall mustered a small but very enthusiastic audience to welcome Concerto Budapest (formerly the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra) and its chief conductor and artistic director, András Keller, along with Angela Hewitt, the peerless pianist who is always a draw in her own right.

The programme offered to Manchester (slightly different from other venues so far on the tour) had two pieces full of folksong and dance and two mainstream classical ones.

Top of the menu was Kodály’s Dances of Galánta – played for the first time on the tour but no doubt bread-and-butter to these musicians back home. Their string tone is rightly something to be proud of, and the eight celli made a superb start to the piece (the following string playing wasn’t as clean and precise as the Bridgewater Hall acoustic really needs, but it takes a little time to adjust to it – there’s an awful lot of side-to-side resonance in this hall). The music has something of the sound of traditional ‘gypsy’ bands in it, and by the fast bit near the end there were grins all round – they were enjoying doing it.

Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody no. 1, played after the interval, had much of the same feel to it (and gave the percussionists of the orchestra something to do: their two harps and a most self-effacing pianissimo triangle made their delicate contribution).

But before that there was Angela Hewitt. You could hardly get more mainstream than Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23 in A major (K488), and she plays it with good old-fashioned well-pedalled smoothness and grace. The orchestra, too, was suavity personified, and its principal bassoon had his best vibrato to show off, along with the principal oboe’s most expressive style, in the second and final movements.

Angela Hewitt’s playing is beautifully proportioned and finely calculated. Mozart’s (his own) first movement cadenza brought a flash of drama to the narrative … and I loved the way (being a director-from-the-keyboard herself on other occasions) she conducted the players back into action herself at the recapitulation. She played the gloriously elegiac central Adagio una corda but with some surprise emphases to stimulate the imagination.

To remind us of her expertise in interpreting baroque keyboard music for the modern piano, she returned with an encore in the shape of a Scarlatti sonata.

Last there was Beethoven’s Fifth. Strings were slightly reduced for this (they had been cut right down for Mozart), but there were modern timpani. There was plenty of energetic articulation in the opening movement, and intriguing crescendos on held notes from the wind players. The speeds of the remainder were mainly brisk, though sometimes variable in a nicely Romantic way, and the horns and trumpets (three of the latter, with shared duties on the top line, to keep their sound brightly dominating everything else) made a powerful contribution.

Review of Northern Chamber Orchestra with leader Nicholas Ward and soloist Craig Ogden

 

Nicholas Ward (left) and Craig Ogden

The highspot of the weekend Manchester Guitar Festival at Chetham’s School of Music was a concert on Sunday afternoon by the Northern Chamber Orchestra in the Stoller Hall, featuring Craig Ogden as soloist in both Malcolm Arnold’s Guitar Concerto and Peter Sculthorpe’s Nourlangie.

But the concert – a repeat of one given in Macclesfield Heritage Centre the night before – was important for another reason: it was the final performance by the NCO with Nicholas Ward as leader and artistic director. Nick has been in the leader’s chair since 1984, and I’ve followed the fortunes of this remarkable ensemble, player-led both organizationally and musically, throughout that time. His departure is a wrench.

Nick’s whimsical and sometimes far-ranging spoken introductions to the music played in their concerts have long been a welcome part of their special atmosphere: you know that this is real chamber music, played by friends among friends. His inspiring musical contribution, literally leading by example, has also been something to savour, making the sound of the NCO one that can vary from subtlest intimacy to extraordinarily big effects. There was one right at the start, as for this performance he had a strings strength of 17, augmented to 27 by musicians from Chetham’s School for the opening Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, by Vaughan Williams – one of three wonderful examples of string writing on the programme. Designed for a cathedral acoustic, the varied textures and sense of the past brought to new life were equally entrancing in the bright, reflective Stoller Hall, and this was no routine performance but full of passion.

Percy Grainger’s setting of the Londonderry Air (Irish Tune from County Derry, as he called it), with a horn added to the texture, was equally beguiling. Then we heard a special piece for the occasion: the NCO’s own composer-player James Manson’s Bânjöeš Yètí, based on a Moldovan folk tune but completely in the English pastoral tradition in nature, with lovely roles for solo clarinet, horn and flute – and, of course, a violin solo.

And so to the guitar pieces. The Arnold concerto should be heard much more often: it’s got sweet and wistful tunes in each of its three movements, of the sort he crafted so well, and the central one of the three is both long and rather mysterious, partly like a score for a Hitchcock thriller (as it’s been described), with portamento slides on the violins and the menace of thudding bass notes – but also by turns energetic and finally haunting.

Craig Ogden’s mastery of his instrument needs no endorsement from me: his playing is always crystal-clear, super-sensitive and beautiful to listen to. And so it was again in Sculthorpe’s piece, which brings on an array of percussion (thunder sheet, gong and cymbals included) to present its ingeniously developed themes.

Finally it was strings alone again, for Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro. For me it’s one of the most glorious things ever created, and the sound of Nick Ward and the NCO playing it, molto sostenuto and molto espressivo (as it says towards the end) is the way I shall remember the enriching time that his leadership of this orchestra has given us.

Review of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet with Gábor Takács-Nagy and Manchester Camerata at the Stoller Hall, Manchester

 

Mozart’s late piano concertos are among his greatest and subtlest creations, and consequently both immensely rewarding and, by the same token, very challenging.

The ongoing recording project by Manchester Camerata under its music director, Gábor Takács-Nagy, with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet as soloist, brought a fascinating concert at Chetham’s on Friday night. Word had clearly got around: there was hardly a spare seat to be found.

Takács-Nagy and the orchestra, led by Caroline Pether, got things off to a fizzing start with the Marriage of Figaro overture – contemporary with the C minor concerto, K491 and no. 24, which was to follow it. It was meant to be a fresh take on a familiar piece, said the maestro, and so it proved. With 20 strings in total, the balance was bound to favour clarity in the wind lines, and they emerged prominently, even from a big round sound underpinned by modern timpani.

Big sound was a characteristic of Bavouzet’s approach to the concerto, too, with plenty of pedal used on the Schimmel instrument to underscore the music’s tragi-Romantic qualities. He knows how to be self-effacing, too, and let the woodwind soloists have their fair share of the limelight, but the piano has necessarily to claim much of it. He had a grand and dramatic first movement cadenza to offer (by Hummel), which contributed to the solemn and weighty effect.

The slow movement of K491 is a puzzle: such a simple, seemingly childish, opening tune surely requires some decoration, but how much? Bavouzet began very modestly, indeed making it seem a mere formality, and though the ingenuity increased (and there was more in the finale), I wasn’t quite convinced it was being used to heighten the emotional impact of the music (as classical embellishment really should). The finale itself presents its problems, and conductor and soloist must have decided it needed some drama to finish, with a touch on the accelerator when the minor key signature returned.

The second half of the concert began with a real curiosity: an overture for a play by Goethe (Erwin und Elmire) written by Princess Anna Amalia von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, a contemporary of Mozart. Made-up name, I thought when I first saw it (we are near April Fools’ Day, after all), but apparently she did exist. Was it a bit cynical to dig up her efforts under the ABO Trust’s programme to promote historical women composers? The fact that her composition, a pleasant exercise in Empfindsamkeit, survived probably only illustrates another inequality (of aristocrats versus mere professional musicians) in her day. But at least – unlike Mozart – she believed in the employment prospects of second flutes.

The other piano concerto was no. 25 in C major, K503. It had all the virtues of the previous Bavouzet/Takács-Nagy major key concerto interpretations – lightness of spirit, conversational interplay between soloist and orchestra, well crafted contrasts and, in this case, a bit of a tempo change in the first movement to energise proceedings. The big cadenza (by the young American virtuoso Kenneth Broberg) was a real turn, involving a near-quotation of La Marseillaise which encouraged many a chuckle among its listeners.

In the lovely Andante slow movement Bavouzet soon began to charm with some melodic embellishment, very tasteful again. The finale was full of brilliance and romped home with a dizzying sprint of an Allegretto.

 

CD review

It's almost Christmas again, and here's a suggestion for something to get for a pianist who wants to venture into the unknown a bit ...

Eric Craven: Pieces for Pianists volume 1 (performed by Mary Dullea, Métier msv 28601).

Eric Craven is a composer who knows his own mind but doesn’t impose his own will. These 25 short pieces for piano, published in ‘progressive’ order like an old-fashioned collection of classics designed to be an aid to learning, are notated in an unusual way.

There are no key signatures (though the score is entirely precise about which notes are to be played and their relative time values, and there are bar lines) and the performer can decide their own tempo, dynamics, phrasing, articulation and pedalling. Craven calls it ‘my Non-Prescriptive Low-order format’.

Mary Dullea is a distinguished musician and recording artist who appreciates the freedom this gives in executing them and the element of improvisation and potential continuing variation that’s essential to their realization in practice. Recording them inevitably archives one particular way on one particular day, and I was a bit surprised at first how little extra characterization she seeks to impose on the music in these versions – but I guess she’s keen to let the music ‘speak for itself’ even under Eric Craven’s conditions.

She rightly divines echoes of a variety of other composers’ styles to be found in them, and just occasionally you ask yourself why she took certain decisions (such as keeping the pedal down for a bar or bars when a seemingly sequential or parallel passage had different treatment) … but the point of the recordings, which vary in duration from 1 minute 20 seconds to 4 minutes 49 seconds, is really just to say ‘Here they are – make of them what you will’, and I can only repeat that invitation.