Review of La Vie Parisienne at the Royal Northern College of Music

It’s always a thrill to see young performers at the RNCM visibly mature and gain in confidence as the first night of a new show there takes place.

Offenbach’s operetta, La Vie Parisienne, was not an easy ask for them. It needs to have froth and fizz and lightness all the way through, and things like that don’t come instantly when you’re nervous and haven’t done the piece with a full live audience before. Even the orchestra seemed to take time to enter into the spirit of the evening.

But the foundations were there. Director Stuart Barker had the massed forces on stage (with the first of two teams of principals, as the operetta is, as usual, double-cast) well drilled and aware of their positions. Simone Romaniuk had created an incredibly versatile, inventive and adaptable design – magically transformed, as it should be, for each new scene while we heard the entr’actes – with clear, colourful sets and evocative projected backdrops. She also created the lovely costumes, putting the story into the 1930s with a sure hand (we find the lifestyle of drone-like English aristos and the foppish Parisian demi-monde quite believable in the era of Jeeves and Wooster).

So we’re seeing a day in the life of Raoul de Gardefeu, who wants to tempt English Lord Ellington and his wife to sample Parisian delights apart from each other, so he can seduce the noble lady. Lord E fancies a night with the high-class escort Métella (a pun in that name, I guess), but we know he’s never going to get that far, and he just gets drunk. There’s a sub-plot involving a Brazilian millionaire also out on the town and the humble glove-maker Gabrielle, who turns out to have a lot more to her than first meets the eye. Act Two is set at the Moulin Rouge and then a posh restaurant, with attendant can-can dancers and similar delights. In the end Lord and Lady are reconciled, everyone else pairs off happily, and Parisian life goes on.

Using Alistair Beaton’s English translation, and with voice-coaching by Natalie Grady, the show was done, and heard, in plain English (no surtitles). Half of the skills called for were those of acting, not just singing, and in the cast that I heard some performers were really good at that. Some also have personalities and voices that work just beautifully in operetta style, too – I can mention Fiona Finsbury’s Métella, John Ieuan Jones’ Lord Ellington, Matt Mears’ Brazilian and Charlotte Trepess’s Gabrielle in particular (but I haven’t seen the other cast at all) – and everyone threw themselves into the movement and dancing, which was skilfully contrived by the amazing Bethan Rhys Wiliam.

By the time we were in the Moulin Rouge the soufflé had really risen, under the sure hand of conductor Andrew Greenwood, and it was no wonder the sails of that windmill in the backdrop suddenly accelerated.

Article published in Mancherster Evening News 2 December 2016

IT will be an all-singing, all-dancing Christmas show this year at the Royal Northern College of Music – Offenbach’s La Vie Parisienne.

The college’s opera department, under the leadership of Professor Lynne Dawson and Kevin Thraves, is out to wow audiences with the classic operetta, which will be conducted by Andrew Greenwood (in charge of the award-winning RNCM performances of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream last year) and directed by Stuart Barker, director of training and productions at British Youth Opera.

I had the chance for a peek at rehearsals, as the cast and chorus were on stage learning their steps from choreographer and production assistant Bethan Rhys Wiliam, in the set designed by Simone Romaniuk – cleverly adaptable from being a railway station in Act One to the Moulin Rouge in Act Two (and two other places besides).

Kevin Thraves, RNCM deputy head of opera and chorus master for the show, told me: “Bethan is working on this show full-time now, as it’s a piece that’s full of dancing. It’s a light-hearted French romp, with disguise, mistaken identities, love and infidelity – and everything works out OK in the end, with toasts to Paris and the Parisiens.

“This year is its 150^th anniversary, and we’re using the English translation by Alistair Beaton, a writer, satirist and theatre director – he’s translated a number of operas, and this one was originally done for the D’Oyly Carte company in 1995.

“We’re doing six performances this time, with two matinees, and they are selling really well. There are 16 principal roles, and we have double-cast it, so a lot of students get their chance to shine. There are 40 in the chorus, mainly our undergraduates, and around 40 in the RNCM Opera Orchestra.

“RNCM Junior Fellow in Conducting Manoj Kamps is assistant conductor and will take the performance on December 13 himself.

“Stuart Barker is really well used to working with young singers, and he’s doing a lot of improvisation work with the cast and chorus – he likes to draw little stories out of them as they perform.”

Among the principals are singers Alexandra Lowe and Neil Balfour, who have had major roles in RNCM opera before. And the thrill of a show at the college is always that you may see a new star born …

La Vie Parisienne is at the RNCM on December 7, 9, 11 (matinee), 13, 15 and 17 (matinee).

Article published in Manchester Evening News 25 November 2016

SUNDAY night sees one of the peak events of the entire Hallé season in Manchester, when Sir Mark Elder conducts a concert performance of the complete Das Rheingold, the first part of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

The line-up of soloists – and there are a lot of them in Das Rheingold – is truly impressive. Bass-baritone Iain Paterson is Wotan, Susan Bickley is Fricka, and soprano Emma Bell is Freia. The giants, Fafner and Fasolt, are sung by Clive Bayley and Reinhard Hagen, and Susanne Resmark is Erda.

The three Rhinemaidens are to be Sarah Tynan, Jennifer Johnston and Leah-Marian Jones, while Samuel Youn will now be singing Alberich, and Nicky Spence takes over as Mime.

Will Hartmann as Loge, David Stour as Donner, and David Butt Philip as Froh, complete the list.

Sir Mark is planning that this performance will result in a Hallé recording, as the previous ones of Götterdämmerung and Die Walküre have done.

“This is music I’ve lived with since I was very young,” he says. “I prepared Die Walküre and Das Rheingold for Solti when I started out at Covent Garden. It’s like re-opening an old friendship and trying to make it richer. And this great, great music should sound incredible in our wonderful acoustic at the Bridgewater Hall.

“I think the orchestra are going to be very struck, though, by what a different experience is from the other parts of the drama,” he adds.

“The others are so complex by comparison. But it’s a piece of absolute brilliance in the nature of what he wanted it to be.

“The words were the last to be written: he had the whole scheme in front of him by then, but he wanted to introduce the drama in the characters we find here. It shows us that Wotan’s greed was no different from Alberich’s.

“Alberich’s rage, when he loses the ring, is for me the most moving part of the piece.”

He points out the range of characters depicted in Das Rheingold. “Loge, for instance, has to be a German tenor. We have got Will Hartmann – who played a crucial part in Szymanowski’s ‘King Roger’ with me when we did it at the Bregenz Festival. He’ll be a great person to introduce to the Manchester audience.

“And Susanne Resmark was my Mistress Quickly when I did Verdi’s ‘Falstaff’ at Glyndebourne – she’s a great character.”

Manchester Evening News article 18 November 2016

THIS is a milestone year for choral group St George’s Singers of Poynton. The choir was formed 60 years ago, with 23 members. Today it has over 100, drawn from Cheshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Greater Manchester, and is recognised as one of the most innovative in the north, under musical director Neil Taylor.

It’s celebrating with major concerts in Manchester and Stockport, including (on April 22 next year at the Royal Northern College of Music) great choral works from the past 600 years, and (on June 25) Verdi’s Requiem with Stockport Symphony Orchestra and the Sheffield Chorale, at Gorton Monastery.

But first there’s the German Requiem by Brahms, on 26^th November at the RNCM, when SGS are joined by the Northern Chamber Orchestra and international star soloists Elizabeth Watts – a former member of Norwich Cathedral Girls’ Choir, a group founded by Neil Taylor – and Marcus Farnsworth, their president.

I spoke to Marcus Farnsworth as he was appearing in opera in Boston, USA. His link with SGS began when he was at Manchester University and a choral singer at Manchester Cathedral alongside its then conductor, Stephen Williams. “He created the role of assistant musical director for me in 2004,” he says. “They’re an amazing bunch of people – always happy, incredibly enterprising and energetic. Now I’m an advocate for the choir, I can help with contacts for soloists, and it’s a feather in my cap, too, to be linked with them.”

Neil Taylor, recently organist at Sheffield Cathedral and now living in Macclesfield, became conductor 10 years ago. He says: “I think it’s the passion you can sense in the room when you work with them … and a determination to do everything as well as they possibly can. There’s an unimpeded lack of fear, and they’re willing to tackle anything.

“The thing that attracted me here was the variety in their repertoire that had been brought by my predecessor – they’re up for anything, and that’s really refreshing.

“They work with anyone from professional orchestras (as in the Brahms Requiem) to school groups. Two weeks after the Brahms we’re doing a Christmas concert (it’s on December 10 at Norbury Church, Hazel Grove) with Bradshaw Hall Primary School Choir and the Youth Brass Band for Stockport.”

If you’d like to join in with St George’s Singers, there’s a Singing Day for all comers on January 21 at St George’s Church, Poynton (see www.st-georges-singers.org.uk).

Review of Opera North's Il Tabarro and Suor Angelica

The best performance of the whole week from Opera North was that of Il Tabarro, one half of the Puccini double bill presented as their third programme. It was a revival (by Michael Barker-Caven) of David Pountney’s clearly told, dramatic, moving and dark production, first seen here five years ago as one of the ‘Eight Little Greats’.

Il Tabarro is about adultery, jealousy and murder – always great subjects for opera. Bargeman Michele finds his wife, Giorgetta, is having an affair with Luigi, one of his deckhands … and you can imagine what ensues.

The casting was on a level Opera North don’t always achieve. Giselle Allen is one of the best soprano voices they regularly call on, and her acting skills are second to none. David Butt Philip is that rare thing, a really beautiful young English tenor voice (RNCM and Samling in his training and already spotted by Sir Mark Elder among others) and sang and characterized his Luigi powerfully. Ivan Inverardi is the real thing when it comes to Italian baritones, made for the part and good to hear.

The lesser roles of La Frugola (Anne-Marie Owens), Tinca (Stuart Laing) and Talpa (Richard Mosley-Evans) were also very strong.

On top of that we had one of the most experienced and inspirational opera conductors around with Jac van Steen in the pit. His strengths outclassed those of his colleagues heard at The Lowry this week, with a warm string sound from the orchestra, sympathetic accompaniments and spine-tingling climaxes just right for Puccini.

The new production in this pairing – Suor Angelica, which is the third piece Puccini wrote, alongside Gianni Schicchi, to make up his ‘Triptych’ – was directed by Barker-Craven and had the same sure hand on the orchestra. It wisely took the same realistic, slightly updated approach to the setting and story-telling … yet the story itself gives enormous problems. There has to be some kind of staged ‘miracle’ at the end, as Angelica, the woman who was banished to a convent by her aristocratic family for having a baby outside wedlock, and then learns the child has died, finds divine forgiveness despite taking her own life by poisoning. This was done by filmic means, with somewhat incongruous imagery mixed together – as good a solution as any, but the deliberately sentimental intention of the authors is still hard to convey today.

The singing, though, was first-rate. Anne-Sophie Duprels’ rich tone suits Angelica well, and young, RNCM-trained soprano Soraya Mafi made a real impression as the cheerful and well-intentioned Sister Genoveva, her pure and lovely voice contrasting effectively. Patricia Bardon was a trifle too witch-like as The Princess (dressed in glaring 1960s yellow), but her vocal quality is, as ever, superb. The remainder of the roles demonstrated the excellent quality of the singers’ ensemble that Opera North is now able to field.

Review of Opera North's Der Rosenkavalier

Don’t say masterpieces from the past can’t find new relevance today. As we came out for the second interval of Der Rosenkavalier, after the scenes in which Baron Ochs, the overweight, uncouth, ill-mannered, women-abusing buffoon of the story, becomes the chief butt of amusement, you could hear it all around: ‘He’s Donald Trump, isn’t he?’

But there was more than that to Opera North’s revival of David McVicar’s production, which began life at Scottish Opera and was last seen here in 2002.

I liked the production a lot first time round. It’s realist, set in the period the story is meant to occupy (Maria Theresia’s imperial Vienna), and catches a sense of crumbling grandiosity in its design. It tells the story clearly, comedy and sentiment included, while keeping a clear focus on the pain of the mature woman (the Marshallin) who gives up her toy-boy lover, Octavian, for the greater good and to bring happiness to him and his true love, Sophie. Their youthful ardour wins.

There’s gentle satire in the behaviour of Faninal, the nouveau-riche who wants to marry his daughter into the aristocracy, and a host of comic bit-parts for minor characters.

Composer and author Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannstal brought a conscious echo of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro (and other Beaumarchais-based tales) to the piece by having Octavian – the ‘Knight of the Rose’ of the title – sung by a woman. He has to don women’s clothes, like Cherubino. (Opening with girl-on-girl action, as some might put it, in a bedroom scene may have incongruous resonances for us, but in 1911 was probably a safer way to represent sex than with a male and female. So you just have to get over that).

The major roles cast list here included several notable singers trained at the Royal Northern of Music, among whom Helen Sherman (Octavian) was the stand-out. Her voice was strong, secure and finely modulated, and her acting superb. Fflur Wyn (Sophie) also brought lovely tone to her role and a sense of stagecraft, though some of the delicacy she essayed did not meet quite sufficient gentleness from the orchestra pit.

Likewise Henry Waddington as Ochs, though looking and acting the part with magnificent presence, could not always summon the weightiness he wanted. William Dazeley was well cast in the other baritone role of Faninal, where his airiness seemed just right.

Ylva Kihlberg (previously star of Opera North’s The Makropulos Case and Jenůfa) was a very fine Marshallin. No one could write soaring melody for the female voice quite like Richard Strauss, and the final trio for the three girls was beautiful.

This is the first full show to be conducted by Opera North’s new music director, Aleksandar Marković, since he took over. He brought energy and precision to the score, and though he has not completely mastered stage-pit balance in the quirky Lyric Theatre acoustic yet, drew some moments of exquisite delicacy.

Review of Opera North's Billy Budd

(This review is based on the opening night at Leeds Grand Theatre)

Billy Budd is widely considered one if Britten’s greatest operas. Written in 1951, with a libretto by E M Forster and Eric Crozier based on Herman Melville, it had pretty well all the firepower of the British arts establishment behind it when it launched, as a follow-up to Peter Grimes, the sea-faring story that made Britten’s operatic reputation just after the war.

This time we’re on board a British warship in the Napoleonic era, guarding the seas against the French. Billy is a young able seaman who is ‘impressed’ – ie signed on against his will. His nemesis is the evil master-at-arms, John Claggart, and the captain caught in a desperate moral dilemma is Edward Vere.

Claggart falsely accuses Billy of fomenting mutinous talk, and when Billy (who has a recurring stammer) can’t speak but hits him in reply, his fate is sealed by court martial – hanging from the yardarm.

Vere’s decision to order Billy’s death, in accordance with King’s Regulations, though he is manifestly a good and noble lad, is at the heart of the opera. It’s about good and evil personified, and the place of law when they clash. Above all, it’s about Captain Vere, the original Peter Pears role, here played by the masterly Alan Oke. I thought he was really excellent, portraying a man genuinely (literally?) caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, and singing with distinction throughout.

There has always been a focus on a sub-text of homosexuality perceived in this piece: it has an all-male cast, a title-protagonist who is meant to be physically as well as morally admirable, and of course Melville, Forster and Britten were all gay. Its date, however, ensured that such matters were left to a spectator’s imagination and could be disregarded altogether – and director Orpha Phelan seems to have followed that sensible principle.

(More to the point in today’s world might be the fact that the piece reflected an artistic environment where women played hardly any part anyway … how much do we want to endorse that?)

Roderick Williams (Billy) and Alastair Miles (Claggart) were both in excellent voice, but had the unenviable tasks of appearing totally noble and totally evil, respectively. The former was as good as anyone might hope: the latter even (on first night) picked up a few pantomime-style boos!

There is a magnificent augmented chorus, and one smaller role that stood out was Stephen Richardson as Dansker, the older, good-guy crew member.

What remains most clearly in the mind from this production is the skillfully contrived set, the realistic costuming (both by Leslie Travers) and the energy and clarity with which the story is told.

And there’s a great coup de theatre at the beginning of Act Two, where the ship prepares for action against a ‘Frenchie’. With the full cast on stage and eager for battle, a magnificent orchestral backdrop and two huge guns lowered over the stage and tilted to point at the audience before ‘firing’, the effect is genuinely scary.

Be prepared for loud bangs, we were warned as we entered the auditorium, and it was an accurate prediction: wisps of fire-cracker ash hung in the air for minutes afterwards.