The summer of opera has arrived
The pistol has been fired and the country house opera festivals are off. The going looks good: Glyndebourne heads the field, but coming up the rear this week are Iford, Holland Park and Garsington. Grange Park, The Grange and Longborough can’t be far behind – and don’t underestimate this year’s dark horse, Nevill Holt, or late entrant Dorset Opera. Phew!
Now comfortably settled into its elegant pavilion on Mark Getty’s Wormsley estate in the Chilterns, Garsington offers both high artistic quality and an excellent “visitor experience”. A focus of its season this summer is Richard Strauss’s operatic swansong Capriccio, a “conversation piece” that endorses the culture of a well-heeled hedonistic aristocracy and is therefore seamlessly suited to this exclusive landscape. Behind its varnish lie horrors. Conceived during Europe’s descent into barbaric totalitarianism and first performed in Munich while El Alamein was raging, it is the work of someone whose response to unparalleled devastation and massacre was to turn his face to the wall and lose himself in nostalgia for the ancien régime. Set in a place – Paris in the 1770s – where nobody does anything except sit about in salons talking about love and opera, it contemplates its navel through a score full of smug self-reference to Strauss’s glory days as the composer of Der
Rosenkavalier. There are no rough edges, no tricky questions asked. What a sticky sickly taste this sweet confection leaves.
Tim Albery’s immaculate production, designed by Tobias Hoheisel, cunningly leapfrogs the opera’s origins in mid 20th-century holocausts by presenting a pristine rococo drawing-room flanked by modern additions and inhabited by characters in modern dress. The Countess becomes a wealthy patron of the arts, troubled only by a few workmen in overalls peering sceptically through the French windows as her posh friends flirt, bicker and witter. It could be a glossy feature in The Tatler for all its moral or emotional urgency, but on those terms, one can’t imagine it more beautifully styled than it is here. Miah Persson is the acme of sophistication as the Countess, singing with all the silvery grace that Strauss adored (she must play the Marschallin soon) as she is courted by the suave poet Oliver and geeky composer Flamand, splendidly interpreted by Gavan Ring and Sam Furness respectively. Andrew Shore blusters amusingly as the bluff producer La Roche and Hanna Hipp wittily channels Bette Davis in All About
Eve as the acid-tongued actress Clairon. Smaller roles are all sharply focused, with special mention due to Graham Clark as the prompter Monsieur Taupe.
Douglas Boyd conducts a sumptuous account of the music – some of it so lovely, so fragrant, so delicately wrought. If only I could stop imagining bombs exploding in the background.
Over at Holland Park, something more demotic. Good honest opera at affordable prices – top whack £80 – giving opportunities to young native talent and making only minimal demands on the public purse. Welcome to Investec Opera Holland Park, which seems (on a smaller scale) to be doing the job that English National Opera has dismally failed to do for the last 20 years or more.
Recently ENO had the chance to employ IOHP’S savvy, seasoned, resourceful and popular director James Clutton as its new CEO: instead it plumped for Stuart Murphy, a subscription television executive with no experience of live opera or theatre whatsoever. Good luck to them – perhaps they know something that I don’t – but I think they’re crazy.
This summer’s programme at Holland Park opened with a highly acclaimed production of La traviata, which I have yet to catch. On the second night came Mozart’s Così fan tutte, directed by Oliver Platt.
Although it could have done with one more rehearsal – the physical comedy wasn’t sharp enough, leaving Sarah Tynan’s agile Despina undercharacterised – it’s a pleasantly conventional reading of this rather silly comedy, played out in a pretty rococo drawing-room and free of any ambitions to plumb putative moral, emotional, psychological or Marxistfreudian-deconstructive depths. The ending is presented as one of sour disillusion, rubbing against music that laughs the whole intrigue off, but the mood is otherwise sunny and uncomplicated. What lifts the quality of the evening is an outstanding pair of “sisters from Ferrara”. As Fiordiligi, Eleanor Dennis has a truly gorgeous soprano – glowing, ample, easeful – and her lovingly intense account of “Per pieta” was the show’s vocal highlight. Kitty Whately’s Dorabella was a strong contrast – bubbling with personality and fully mistress of both the melodramatics of “Smanie implacabili” and the insouciance of “E amore un ladroncello”.
Dane Lam conducted the City of London Sinfonia: once past some rough edges in the first act, his reading settled down nicely. The audience went home happy, and isn’t that the point?