Hinterland

There are plenty of good reasons for booing at the opera, but a dastardly villain is not one of them

As Douglas Boyd, director of Garsingston Opera in Buckinghamshire, noted last week, it’s nice to have an audience. And, indeed, after the horrors of the past year, it is nice for those of us who enjoy music to be allowed out to hear it performed live.

Garsington – like Glyndebourne (which it is fast rivalling in terms of quality), Grange Park Opera and the Grange – is one of those country house opera festivals that proliferate and seem always to begin with G. Before last year’s lockdown, I wrote here how Garsington – which has now been at Mark Getty’s estate at Wormsley for a decade, having moved from the Oxfordshire village of the same name, where it was founded by Leonard Ingrams in 1989 – has been steadily improving as it has put down deeper roots. No allowances needed to be made for either of the two productions I saw there last week: Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, in a most opulent rococo staging that catapulted one straight into the Vienna of the mid-18th century, and Eugene Onegin, by Tchaikovsky, in a simplistic, almost spartan staging of exactly the type the composer wanted, to ensure Pushkin’s story was told comprehensibly and without frills.

In Rosenkavalier, Miah Persson, the Swedish soprano, sang the Marschallin with a remarkable command and immense dignity that marks her out as one of the global stars of opera. Hanna Hipp as her toyboy, Octavian, and the Knight of the Rose of the title, was highly assured, if perhaps mildly uncharismatic for one whose role in the opera has to veer between high emotion and broad comedy.

The star of the show for me, however, was American bassbaritone Derrick Ballard, as the preposterous and loathsome Baron Ochs, cousin of the Marschallin and the sort of man for whom the #MeToo movement was invented. He is not only pursuing the daughter of a rich man but also someone he believes to be a maid in the Marschallin’s household – who is actually Octavian. Ballard’s timbre was magnificent, his acting perfect and he filled his character as Strauss would have dreamt of him doing; he stole the scene whenever he was on stage.

It was distressing, then, that the rapturous applause he received at the end was punctuated by some boos, which I thought outrageous: but I was told a habit is growing (and I have never experienced it before) of booing the role and not the singer. I strongly believe this should stop, because it could demoralise excellent singers. (On the other hand, I am entirely in favour of booing at operas – it is an expensive night out and if some aspect is rubbish, then a properly targeted gesture of disapprobation is a perfectly traditional way of making the point.)

In both operas the Philharmonia Orchestra, under Jordan de Souza in the Strauss and Douglas Boyd in Onegin, played sublimely, though perhaps at times the Strauss lacked pace to the extent that it seemed over-long. In Onegin there was no such problem, as the action drove relentlessly on to the final scene of the anti-hero’s despair, the

The loathsome Baron Ochs is the sort of man for whom #MeToo was invented

audience borne along by Tchaikovsky’s utterly compelling music. The Moldovan soprano Natalia Tanasii was an entirely convincing Tatiana, radiating naivete, but Jonathan McGovern as Onegin seemed, frankly, miscast: there was something shambolic and unconvincing about him from the moment he appeared, and he was far outshone by his rival, Lensky, sung by Sam Furness. Mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, as Olga, Tatiana’s lethally flighty sister, sang fabulously, with an almost Ferrier-like quality.

We were socially distanced in the audience, with parties sitting together but two or three seats left between them and others; and we had to sit in masks. The last consideration seemed fatuous: not only were we in a considerable and well-ventilated space, but the demographic of Garsington (like that of almost all opera houses) was such that virtually everyone had long since had a second vaccination. Any unvaccinated staff could be masked, and the players segregated from the disease-ridden punters. The net effect is that two productions with long waiting lists could, without harming anyone, have been sold out, with consequently better effects on Garsington’s finances: but that is our Covid management for you, and it is not over yet.