All badged up

The overarching message from today’s exercise in re-badging my leather jacket, now returned from the cleaners, seems to have been that you can make statements without appearing to do so.

I started badging it some years ago, seeing it as a very personal form of ‘rock chic’ and absolutely refusing to add any obviously ‘political’ badges.

Over the last few years, it’s attracted plenty of comment and enquiry. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think it says more about me and what I believe in than if I’d dressed the jacket in rather more obvious pins.

Loosely, there are themes. And as Thomas Mann once said: “Everything is politics”.

So here’s a guide to my newly badged jacket.

From top left (approximately) – travel is good. We start with a flag pin representing Lübeck. This was my destination as a 50th birthday ‘thang’: I’d never been out of the UK on my own before this and it was a (long overdue) rite of passage to prove I could travel to ‘Abroadland’ all on my own.

I chose Lübeck because of Mann and Günter Grass and because I’d spent around 10 years teaching myself a bit of German so felt a certain confidence in the idea that I might be able to communicate at a basic level.

It was a fabulous and seminal trip.

Füssen? More German stuff – Bavaria; the Alps; simply gorgeous. Ties in with the edelweiss pin.

Then Thomas Mann – I have spares ope this pin; that’s how important it is to me. I loved Buddenbrooks … but then I read Death in Venice and my mind was well and truly blown.

The travel section includes Collioure – of course – plus Vienna, Sorrento and Sicily: all are special to me.

Beethoven is crucial: I love classical music and Ludwig in particular. And his 250th birthday is next year, so it would be poor tom leave him out.

That Concorde? A lovely pin, bought in Folkstone, together with a Spitfire pin. But at present, wearing a Spitfire could send out all the wrong signals, while this suggests European co-operation.

The Royal Opera House? Well, if you read this blog regularly, you’ll know why.

The Haring ‘resist’ pin? Haring at Tate Liverpool was my art revelation this year and resisting the Establishment and racism and bigotry in general is good.

The birds? Well, I saw a kingfisher this year and interacted with a raven (my absolute top bird). I love corvids in general, including those beauties, magpies. Red squirrels – only seen in Germany and Austria – but wonderful nonetheless.

Stephen Sondheim is a god, Star Wars is a big part of my cultural life, along with The Wizard of Oz (and as some of you will know, I’m a ‘friend of Dorothy’), while Captain Haddock represents comics and cartoons, and Shakespeare … well, I ‘dig’ The Bard big time.

This is how to make comments about yourself but leave others imply enjoying the colour!

A tremendous Tosca with Terfel in top form

Bryn Terfel as Scarpia

According to operbase.com, Tosca is the fifth most popular opera in the world. Of Puccini’s works, only La bohème ranks higher.

Finally getting to see Tosca, it’s not difficult to see why it rates so highly. The current Royal Opera revival of Jonathon Kent’s production is a traditional take, but certainly doesn’t suffer for that.

At its most simplistic, this is effectively a battle between love and lust. The story is played out against a background of the struggle between the Italian monarchy and the forces of republicanism, led by Napoleon, in 1800.

This is a tale of celebrated singer Floria Tosca and her love for painter Mario Cavaradossi. The latter is on the republican side and, when his old friend Angelotti, a former consul of the Roman Republic, escapes prison, he vows to help.

Unfortunately, Cavaradossi’s lover, Tosca, is a tad jealous – laughs in the first act – and this allows local chief of police Baron Scarpia to go fu-on Iago with her and unleash the green monster, with disastrous effects.

Unusually, this doesn’t just mean that the female lead herself dies – or that takes an entire act to die or, indeed, that Cavaradossi is a stereotypical operatic tenor wimp.

There are some really interesting themes here – not least in Puccini’s treatment of religion. Tosca is pious – to the extent of setting out candles by the body of Scarpia after she kills him. Shortly before taking up the knife, she sings the great aria, Vissi d’arte, which asks: “why, why, Lord, ah, why do you reward me thus?”

Now of course, if we’re to get all theological over this, then Tosca clearly doesn’t understand that the Judea-Christian god can do whatever he damn well pleases and it’s all and always okay. For instance, let us not forget that being ‘tested’ is good.

But there is a sense here that Puccini might be daring to suggest that all her prayers and good acts mean absolutely nothing. And given that she leaps to her death at the end – and therefore ensures that she cannot be buried in consecrated ground – we have all sorts of possible philosophical ideas that we could explore.

Kristine Opolais as Tosca

This is a wonderful production: magnificent sets and a cracking performance from the house orchestra under Puccini expert Alexander Joel (Billy’s half bro).

Before the performance, the audience was informed that both Kristine Opolais as Tosca and Vittorio Grigóla as Cavaradossi were a tad ‘under the weather’, but were hoping to give of their best. 

If Grigóla was ‘under the weather’, I’d worry about seeing him when he was on top form. He’s got one heck of a pair of lungs in him even when not at his best. Of course, he doesn’t always belt everything out at maximum volume, à la Ethel Merman, but it says something that such a comparison occurs at all.

And given that his performance at curtain call was like someone who was celebrating after just setting the 100m record for the universe, it’s tough to comprehend what the capital’s weather had done to him.

Opolais may have lacked some volume, but she more than made up for it in nuance and subtlety.

And here’s the thing: Bryn Terfel is basically global number one Scarpia at present – and it’s really not tough to see why. He’s superb in the role, lifting it far above simple panto villain. His scenes with Opolais crackle, which merely shows how her scenes with Mr I Like Me Who Do You Like lack any real frisson.

The Other Half and I had caught Terfel once before, as Hans Sachs in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, but it had been a lukewarm meeting.

This, however, made it absolutely clear why Terfel is a global opera star. A fantastic performance.

That said, it’s a fabulous production as a whole, with fabulous music and I’d watch it again tomorrow if I had the chance.

       

Subversive Faustian stuff

It’s four and a half years since The Other Half and I started going to the Royal Opera House fairly regularly. We’d been to the English National Opera on a handful of occasions – triggered by being able to get into Terry Gillian’s Damnation of Faust – but nursed a view that we’d ideally like to see operas in their original languages.

Since we started doing just that, one of the things I’ve learned is that it wasn’t just Wagner and Verdi who wrote long operas.

And one of the conundrums I’ve faced is how I can love opera so much when so many of the characters – not least from 19th and early 20th century works – are so unsympathetic.

Last Thursday was a perfect illustration of both points: to start the Easter weekend, we’d got tickets for Gounod’s Faust – a work that neither of us was familiar with, although both of us know the general Faust legend.

Obviously Goethe didn’t have a monopoly on telling the story and indeed, Gounod’s version takes only that which would suit a sentimental French audience, according to Rupert Christiansen in the Faber Pocket Guide to Opera.

Faust is an elderly scholar realising that his dedication to the job has cost him happiness and love (and coded within that, lust). He’s full of regret. Méphistophélès appears and offers him a second chance – if he’ll subsequently serve Méphistophélès in hell. Faust agrees.

Faust sees Marguerite, whose brother, Valentin, has just left for war. He falls in love/lust and is helped to win the virginal naif by Méphistophélès.

Then, after Faust has seemingly abandoned his pregnant love, Valentin arrives home home from war, wanting only to tell everyone about it. He learns what’s happened to Marguerite and challenges her lover. Faust, with help from Méphistophélès, kills him. As Valentin dies, he curses … Marguerite.

The pregnant Marguerite – gone bonkers in her abandonment – gives birth, kills the child and awaits the guillotine. Méphistophélès teases Faust, but then helps him enter her cell, with the possibility of aiding her escape. Marguerite remembers her love for him and decides not to flee. Faust sees her soul ascend to heaven. He, meanwhile, is abandoned by Méphistophélès.

Point one – it’s overlong. The third act in particular is self-indulgent – which is not to say that the music is bad, because it isn’t. It’s just too long. We reach a point where Gounod is simply repeating himself: albeit tunefully.

Point two – Marguerite has little real depth as a character, but in terms of our sympathy, she’s a victim of a patriarchal situation that says how she must behave. Interestingly, her neighbour Marthe is an older woman and a widow, and seems to be able to be as sexual as she likes without anyone going dotty, which suggests that sexual mores are not fixed simply in that society.

Clearly, Marguerite is the victim here and we sympathise with her – as much as her rather one-dimensional character allows.

Next up – Valentin. Well, what an arse. Comes home from war, full of himself, and then blames his sister because she took a lover and he cannot control his jealousy.

Okay: I do actually know that this was penned in the late 19th century, but he’s still a tit. He probably killed people, yet he’s offended that his sister has had a lover and got knocked up. And when his own impetuous stupidity leads to his death, he blames her!

So: not a shred of sympathy there.

For Faust, I can have a modicum of sympathy. In Death in Venice, Thomas Mann rather more adroitly explores the idea of a life spent in dedicated work and the regret it creates, but without creating victims. Here, while one can sympathise with that aspect of Faust’s situation, one cannot sympathise with is his subsequent decision to abandon Marguerite.

Which brings us to Méphistophélès.

Frankly, I’m in love (lust) with Méphistophélès. No crap ‘morals’. No hypocrisy. Since my own faith fled – late, unexpectedly and without any real challenge, I have found myself considering the idiocy of putting the issue of who and how you shag (assuming consenting adults) over whether you lie, con, cheat etc.

I know which I consider to be what morality is about.

I would also suggest that, if god really does exist, then the devil – Méphistophélès – is going to have the best parties and the best discussions.

The ROH has assembled a magnificent cast for the fifth reveal of David McVicar’s production, which is set on the even of the Franco-Prussian War.

Michael Fabiano is a wonderful Faust, while Irina Lungo wrings as much from Marguerite as I suspect is possible. Stéphane Degout is as good as Valentin can be and Carole Wilson deserves praise for her earthy Marthe.

But what made my evening was Erwin Schrott’s Méphistophélès. A deliciously naughty, witty, sexy performance – not least in the penultimate act, when McVicar has Méphistophélès appear as a queen; in full drag.

Even in 2019, it is a fabulously subversive moment that sums up why, given the choice, I’d opt for Méphistophélès every time. And Schrott is not only a superb bass-baritone, but also a wonderful actor, who makes his role every bit as dangerous and as enticing as Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Show.

And that, my friends, is why this is such fantastic stuff.

A Carmen foundering in a sea of confusion

It’s sometimes easy to forget, when theatrical productions cause outrage and shock, that such outrage has a long history. It’s also easy to make the mistake of imagining that a present-day audience is probably beyond shock.

Just taking London’s Royal Opera House as a single example, the last three years have seen outrage and upset at Rossini’s William Tell (a rape scene in a 2015 production), while Katie Mitchell’s 2016 production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor included a miscarriage on stage and was booed enough to be reported by a faux-scandalised general media.

Since the latter is, of it’s very nature, a dark and violent story, one wonders whether some of this outrage is not because some in an audience do not expect art to challenge them, but to perform a service of being comfortable.

Back in November, The Other Half and I saw Salome at the Staatsoper in Vienna. Written by Richard Strauss, it premiered in 1905 in Dresden, since the Vienna censor would not allow Gustav Mahler to stage it there (in London, it was banned by the Lord Chamberlain and only produced at Covent Garden in 1910 – on condition it did not show the Baptist’s severed head). For all that it relates a Biblical story, this psychologically dark work is completely a product of fin de siècle Vienna, where the art of the likes of Klimt and Schiele mixed with the beginnings of Freudian psychoanalysis and the late Romantic music of Strauss, Mahler and others to create a cauldron of revolutionary intellectual and cultural activity.

The Vienna production of this one-act work opens on a set that glows with a palette straight from Klimt, but is essentially a very traditional one. We thoroughly enjoyed it (Lise Lindstrom in the title role was particularly wonderful). And indeed, we enjoyed the piece itself so much that we leapt at the opportunity to see it again, at the Royal Opera House in late January.

Directed by David McVicar, with the excellent Malin Byström in the lead, this production originally saw the light of day in 2008. Influenced by Pasolini’s Saló – itself a version of Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom – it is set in the basement of a 1930s house, with evidence of debauchery and hints toward violence always evident and a design that clearly nods toward a pre-war Nazi Germany.

It has some really radical departures from tradition – not least in the Dance of the Seven Veils, which doesn’t see Salome’s flesh revealed, but moves through a series of rooms to reveal the sexual longings for her of Herod, her step father. 

And all of this against Strauss’s wonderful music. The entire London production is filled with danger: it is very, very clever, but it works and is very, very satisfying.

About a year ago, The Other Half and I made our first visit to an opera house outside the UK – to La Fenice in Venice, where we saw Carmen. This was Calixto Bieito’s 1999 version of Bizet’s work. The Catalan’s work is considered so shocking that, according to the LA Times, his “scandalous productions are regularly seen in Europe's major opera houses but are generally thought too risqué for American audiences”.

From our perspective, it was not difficult to see why it was controversial, but finding some YouTube footage from last year’s La Fenice run and watching it again today, we have found our conclusion remains the same: it was very good.

Yes, there are changes from Bizet’s original; yes, it has been set in the second half of the 20th century; yes, there’s a tiny bit of (male) nudity and there’s violence (how do you imagine Carmen without violence?) and yes, there’s lots of on-stage business.

But let’s fast forward to this year and the first staging at the Royal Opera House of Barrie Kosky’s 2016 Carmen.

Kosky has decided to stage it on a towering staircase that could be anything from sporting bleachers to a Ziegfeldian theatre set to an amphitheatre to a bull ring – whatever takes off in your own mind, really.

There’s potential here, but also the core of the problem: instead of directing for the audience, the director is directing only for himself and his own vision. Everything is open to whatever interpretation that each member of the audience puts on it, based on their individual responses, ideologies, prejudices, experiences and so forth.

The programme essays – ROH programmes are expensive by West End standards, but contain more serious content than any other programmes I’ve ever bought – reveal the influences behind the production as ranging from Brechtian alienation, through Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret, Chicago and The Scottsboro Boys.

Into that mix, add in ‘bricolage’ – the incorporation of themes, references and ideas from popular culture. Or ‘cultural mash up’, as we might say if we were not so eager to make it sound intellectually posher than it might be. Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! did this well … in an original, deliberately playful work. T-shirts in my wardrobe that combine the minions with Doctor Who or The Big Bang Theory do it well too. Such mash-ups can be enormous fun. Indeed, the current TV incarnation of Doctor Who uses such an approach a lot – in something that is an ongoing original work that has been evolving down the decades.

In other words, these are not attempting to foist a new approach onto an established work. Or to be even more specific: are not attempting to foist a search for meaning onto a work that was never created with such a thing in mind.

Bieito’s Carmen maintained the heart of the piece: whatever he did with it, he did not try to make it something that it is not.

McVicar’s Salome does throw ideas into the mix – but this is a work that has always had philosophical and psychological depths to it, thus offering a greater opportunity for serious consideration.

Carmen is essentially a potboiler. What makes it so special is the music – but that’s true of a great deal of opera. As someone once commented to me, it’s the music that gives opera it’s great sense of emotional truth.

There are operas that offer a more philosophical and intellectually challenging basis for productions: perhaps exactly why Wagner has been subjected to some really barking interpretations.

But in some ways, rather that – and even rather this Kosky production – than lazy repetition and stagnation. Coming away from Covent Garden last night, the OH and I discussed at length why we didn’t like it and have continued the same dialogue today.

It’s important to note that Kosky is hardly alone in such a postmodern approach – and that the OH and I thoroughly enjoyed his production of Shostakovich’s The Nose at the ROH a couple of years ago; evidence that this approach can work … in the right circumstances.

Here, there are elements that do work: some of the pre-recorded voiceovers really add to the story (but other do not). Some of the costuming of Carmen is excellent – the initial matador costume manages to see her fully covered in clothing that traditionally male, yet utterly sexual. Think Dietrich making a top hat and tails look fabulously sexy.

French mezzo Gaëlle Arquez, as the eponymous femme fatale on the night we saw it, is a fabulous talent of whom I very much want to hear more.

The parameters set out by her opening recorded dialogue about Spanish words and ideas to describe the physically perfect woman make it clear why the make-up of much of the female chorus is the way it is.

Yet there is far, far too much ‘business’. In Bieito’s take, there is stage business – yet it all helps to establish what’s going on. Here, some of it simply business for the sake of business – and it distracts from the whole, while that set adds nothing obvious.

The choruses in Bizet’s work are important, but if they’re on stage so much, as here, it diminishes their impact.

What particular irked me – by the interval, it had become actively annoying – is the small troupe of dancers, who gurn and cavort, with stylistic nods to Bob Fosse, but add absolutely nothing that I can discern to the story or my ability to understand or interpret it.

Of course, I could suggest that life is a cabaret, old chum, and that their mugging simply emphasis that, but if the viewer has to search for any old reason to explain something, even when it adds nothing to the whole, then that is part of the problem. This production also blends the episodes in the three acts into something far less distinct than usual, with a result that is, in terms of the story, more confusing than one would wish for.

Radical and controversial can be inspired. But radical and controversial for the sake of see only disappointment and frustration looming large. And it is impossible to think that this production is anything but the latter.


ENO’s Tristan strikes the wrong chord (June 2016)

A Catalan Carmen casts off any staleness (March 2017)

Nessan dorma hits the heights in this Turandot revival

Bread and circuses for the masses have overlapped with the cruelty of a regime more than once down the centuries, and they meet head on in Puccini’s swansong, Turandot, which is currently on revival at the Royal Opera House, London.

The curtain rises on Peking, where a mandarin is announcing that, as per the law, the Prince of Persia is to be beheaded at moonrise after failing to answer three riddles in an attempt to win the hand of the Princess Turandot.

When excited crowds are repelled by guards, they knock over a blind man in the process. His slave, Luì, calls for help. Seeing the incident, a young man recognises his father, the deposed king of Tartary.

Later, he sets eyes on Turandot and, instantly in love, decides to take the riddle challenge.

He solves all three riddles, but the princess says she will not marry him, saying she must stay pure.

The prince sets her a challenge: if she can guess his name by the next morning, she can have him executed – and thus escape the marriage.

She has attempts made to torture the name from Luì, who is in love with the prince, but the slave girl grabs a knife and kills herself rather than give up his name.

Turandot is astonished by these events, while the bloodthirsty crowd, now shamed, quietly follows Luì’s body out.

The prince reproaches Turandot for her cruelty, then kisses her. The kiss starts to thaw the ice princess and he gives her his name – Calaf – placing his life in her hands.

She calls everyone together – including her father the emperor – and says she has his name: “it’s love!”

Left unfinished at the time of the composer’s death in 1924 – the first two acts were complete, together with substantial amounts of the third – it was finished by Franco Alfano and first performed in 1926 at La Scala.

Like more than one of Puccini’s previous works, it has been viewed negatively ever since.

In his 1956 book, Opera as Drama, critic and musicologist Joseph Kerman wrote that “dramatically it is a good deal more depraved” [then Tosca], although Sir Thomas Beecham (who had met the composer and conducted his works) once observed that anything Kerman said about Puccini could “safely be ignored”.

Almost 90 years later, in 2013, Michael Tanner in the Spectator called it “an irredeemable work, a terrible end to a career”.

Many complaints revolve around the rush from Luì’s sacrifice to Calaf’s rough kissing to Turandot’s thawing, but since this part of the work was Alfano’s, it’s easier to see why problems might occur.

The Royal Opera House’s current production – first seen in 1984 – helps to deal with this by having Luì’s cortege return to the stage to dampen the celebratory mood at the end.

When discussing La traviata a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that, while honour as a concept might be considered less of an issue in Western society than it once was, as long as ‘honour’ crimes exist (and they do so across a variety of cultural and religious traditions), then the core themes of Verdi’s work remain salient.

I’d add that if ‘honour’ is not a major theme in UK culture today, we still have serious class and other divides that carry with them similar attitudes.

The overarching point is that these operas remain so alive and so popular because, like Shakespeare, they deal with universal themes of the human condition.

Over on Twitter a year or so ago, it was suggested to me that, however thin or preposterous the plots may seem, opera can convey an underlying truth.

It’s a complex truth – and partly emotional, since we respond to music in a particular way. Here, when Calaf sings that iconic aria, Nessun dorma, the eyes are pricked, the spine tingled and the skin goosebumped.

In this revival, Roberto Alagna gave it everything required to produce just such a response, in a performance that also managed to find some sense of real emotion in a difficult character.

As a slight aside, how I wish audiences would not burst into applause so quickly after a big aria like Nessun dorma: leave it a moment to bask in the magic. And magic it is – one of those moments that really screams out how great opera can be.

Lisa Lindstrom has returned to Covent Garden to play Turandot, her mannered, choreographed movements and the purity of her voice perfect for the ice princess so determined to remain aloof.

Yet both these stars are usurped by Aleksandra Kurzak as Luì, whose soprano soars in her arias and who acts with a poignant mix of fragility and sacrificial strength.

Brindley Sherratt as Timur (Calaf’s blind and aged father), Leon Košavić, Samuel Sakker and David Junghoon Kim as ministers Ping, Pang and Pong respectively, and the Royal Opera Chorus all deserve special mention, while the use of dance certainly adds to the production.

Dan Ettinger conducts the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, which does sometimes seem to be competing with the singers.

Having originally seen this production on television a couple of years ago, I knew I liked Andrei Serban’s staging, but seeing it live really opens everything up and I appreciated it even more. It manages to be both claustrophobic and yet epic, which suits the tensions inherent in the piece perfectly. Sally Jacobs’s costumes are equally spectacular.

Puccini’s music is fascinating – not least as this is his most tonally-adventurous score, peppered with Chinese music to give it an element of authenticity.

The whole is thoroughly marvelous – and whatever you think about the plot, Nessun dorma live, sung as well as here, will live with you for a very, very long time.

And there are free YouTube and outdoor BP screenings this Friday night. So to find out more, visit the Royal Opera House site here. Make sure you have hankies.