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Spectator
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Brave and beautiful: Longborough's Pelléas et Mélisande reviewed
King Arkel, in Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, is almost blind, and he rules over a kingdom of darkness. Debussy's score is so luminous that it's easy to forget just how dark it supposedly is, this mythical realm of Allemonde – even despite the libretto's references to gloomy caves, shadowy castles and forests that block out the sunlight. Many productions take their visual cues from the music rather than the words, providing endless opportunity for shimmering effects and the subtle play of light and shade. Jenny Ogilvie's staging for Longborough Festival Opera doesn't just embrace the darkness; it goes all in. Shadows texture the huge, brutalist wall of Arkel's castle and occasionally – briefly – it's pierced by shafts of sunlight. But the visual default here is inky blackness, in which occasional points of light are almost characters in their own right. A single lightbulb darts about like a moth; a fluorescent bar makes a foil sheet glitter like water. Occasional low washes catch faces in profile and turn the scene icy-blue, or flood it with soft gold as the two lovers accept their destiny. It's a hugely impressive achievement; one of a growing list of recent opera productions in which the lighting designer (here, Peter Small) makes the running. Still, gloom has its drawbacks. I was sitting five rows back from the orchestra, and even there the mystery sometimes felt a little too profound. How it came across to visually impaired audience members, I wouldn't like to guess. On the other hand, the Longborough auditorium is so compact that no one is very far from the performers, and there are huge benefits in staging a lush, late-romantic opera in a venue where both orchestra and cast can whisper or roar without inhibition. As Pelléas, Karim Sulayman was practically conversational, in a role usually sung by a rather heavier voice. He barely needed to project at all – the embodiment of openness against Brett Polegato's tormented, slow-burn Golaud. As a lover, Sulayman made a desperately naive counterpart to Kateryna Kasper, a Mélisande who gave nothing away. And I mean nothing. Dressed like some Singer Sargent heiress, with a face that flickered between radiance and china-doll blankness, Kasper was as enigmatic (and as compelling) as Debussy and Maeterlinck surely intended. Bell-like and bright at volume, she placed her quieter phrases gently into the silence – a sonic equivalent of those solitary light sources, throwing the surrounding performances into powerful relief. She was especially potent alongside Julian Close's Arkel, a role that feels even more tragic when the old King is as compassionate, and as majestically sung, as he was here The conductor was LFO's Wagnerian-in-chief Anthony Negus, a master of intimacy coupled to long-range command. In this venue you can really feel the grain of the orchestra, and Negus stretched velvet expanses of shadowy sound between sudden, flashing glimpses of ecstasy – moments when the orchestra was as agile (and as soft) on its feet as a cat. True, not everything in Ogilvie's production worked, and in the last scene – with the dying Mélisande encased in a Damien Hirst fishtank – you could practically hear the collective 'eh?' from the audience. But by then, a spell had been cast. There's an authority and assurance about this Pelléas that feels like a company stepping up to the next artistic level. It was brave, and – at its best – very beautiful indeed. Grange Park Opera also deserves points for courage; its new production of Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa delivers a brutal torture scene immediately before the picnic break. Big respect, too, for the way that GPO has given director David Pountney a platform for his ongoing love affair with the Slavic operas that no one else will touch. Mazeppa was a Ukrainian Cossack leader who rebelled against Peter the Great, but Pountney avoids overt point-making, which is probably wise. A couple of years back an opera at Grange Park featured a simulated storming of the theatre by Vladimir Putin's Spetsnatz. Impressive, but giving your audience heart attacks is not a sustainable business model. Anyway, the setting – a generic modern war zone – is vividly realised; the singing sounds admirably Eastern Bloc and Pountney does his best to energise the story, presenting Mazeppa (David Stout) as a hairy biker and his child bride Mariya (Rachel Nicholls, who can do melancholy as well as cold steel) as a sort of groupie. The main problem is Tchaikovsky, who can't decide whether Mazeppa is hero or monster, and never quite gets a grip on his material. A string of extended lyrical soliloquies and duets works a treat when you're adapting Eugene Onegin, but it's less effective when your story climaxes with the Battle of Poltava. Still Mazeppa is a bucket-list opera for Slavophiles, and for the foreseeable future we're unlikely to see it done better. Or, to be honest, at all.
Spectator
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Summer opera festivals have gone Wagner mad
Another week, another Wagner production at a summer opera festival. This never used to happen. When John Christie launched Glyndebourne in the 1930s, he hoped to stage the Ring. So he gathered a team of refugee musicians from Germany, who quickly assured him that it was impossible and he should stick to Mozart. The man who changed all that was Martin Graham, the plimsoll-wearing founder of Longborough Festival Opera, who died in April at the age of 83. Graham was irrepressible; a self-taught enthusiast. With no one around to tell him it couldn't be done, he pushed ahead regardless, staging the Ring cycle twice in as many decades. And now look. We've got Parsifal at Glyndebourne (its third Wagner staging), a chamber-sized Tristan coming up at Grimeborn and a full Ring cycle starting next year at Grange Park Opera – which, having built its own back-garden theatre, has followed the Martin Graham playbook still further by importing Longborough's music director Anthony Negus. Meanwhile in Notting Hill, Opera Holland Park has taken a first step into the Bayreuth club with The Flying Dutchman, Wagner's shortest opera, and the least Wagnerian that actually sounds Wagnerian, if that makes any sense. It certainly makes sense for OHP, which is still operating on a Covid-era stage that places the orchestra in the middle of the performance space. That's not invariably a bad thing: the orchestra is the sea on which this drama sails, and with Peter Selwyn conducting, the City of London Sinfonia went at Wagner's (moderately reduced) score with suitably salty vigour. The apron stage thrust the singers towards the audience, the roof of OHP's tent was configured to suggest sails, and out among the shrubs and the five-a-side pitches, the peacocks gave their best impression of seagulls. There was plenty to admire in Julia Burbach's production, too, plus a few things that weren't so great. Senta (Eleanor Dennis, bright and austere) was on stage almost throughout and her rusty skeleton of a house is tilted like a shipwreck. When Daland (a bluff Robert Winslade Anderson) brings the Dutchman (Paul Carey Jones) home to meet her, gravity propels her towards him – a neat visual metaphor. Neal Cooper as Erik, and Angharad Lyddon, as Mary, found more (both musically and dramatically) than you'd have thought possible in these thankless roles, while the masked ghost crew stalked the action in silence. The Holland Park set-up gives the big choral scenes a real physicality. The negatives? OHP performs the opera in its three-act form, which is unusual these days but valid enough. A pity, though, to lose the orchestral postlude that Wagner added in a later revision, and there was some curious textual jiggery-pokery at the end of Act One, introducing a female chorus into an act where Wagner's sonic palette is built around the darkness of male voices. Possibly it's authentic – Wagner tinkered with The Flying Dutchman a lot, and it'd take a musicologist to unpick all the variants – but it rang false, even if the score as presented was a better fit for Burbach's vision, which was more concerned with obsession and social isolation than transcendence. The City of London Sinfonia went at Wagner's score with suitably salty vigour Again, that's a valid approach, but it meant that the ending of the opera was confusing. Senta simply wandered off stage. And it was a bumper night for 21st-century-opera-director mannerisms (chilly, distant lovers; domestic violence; silent doppelgangers populating the overture) though if you're a regular operagoer, you price that in. Overall, though, the energy and atmosphere won through, crowned by Carey Jones's weatherbeaten Dutchman: rough in all the right places and positively sulphurous in the depths. Carey Jones was a formidable Wotan at Longborough. Clearly, a rising tide lifts all boats – even ghost ships. It's not every year, moreover, that the UK sees two different but comparably fine productions of Verdi's Simon Boccanegra. Close on the heels of Opera North's touring production, Grange Park Opera has opened its season with what turns out to be a revival of David Pountney's 1997 staging for Welsh National Opera; complete with costumes in the colours of renaissance frescos and shifting, sea-dappled abstract sets by the great Ralph Koltai. Insert your own bitter aside about how a national company has been defunded by the Arts Council (Welsh and English: both are culpable) to the point that only private festivals can now afford to revive classic productions that were once public property. What matters here is that Grange Park has done it proud, with excellent singing in every role. Otar Jorjikia, as a purposeful Gabriele, made a particularly strong pairing with Elin Pritchard's Amelia: a performance in which pathos burned as bright as passion. Gianluca Marciano conducted vividly, and Simon Keenlyside was a noble Boccanegra – by turns expansive, belligerent and vulnerable in one of Verdi's most Shakespearean title roles.
Telegraph
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Wahnfried, review: Getting to the ugly heart of Wagner
What do you do when you've done the Ring? Longborough Festival Opera has built a great reputation for its economical stagings of the operas of Richard Wagner's Ring, and completed its latest cycle last year. This season, they have shaken up their programming by importing a contemporary opera that starts with the German composer's death in 1883 and takes us to the 1920s with the rise of Nazis. This ambitious if flawed 2017 work by composer Avner Dorman and librettists Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz, receiving its UK premiere, tackles the contentious and difficult issues around Wagner's legacy and influence, notably his anti-Semitic views. The main character is the fiercely racist British writer and philosopher Houston Chamberlain (a huge role for Mark le Brocq, magnificently sustained). Described by critic Alex Ross in his fine book Wagnerism as a 'British botanist turned Symbolist Wagnerite turned German racial ideologue', Chamberlain idolised the composer and left his first wife to marry Wagner's youngest daughter Eva (both wives are played by Meeta Ravel here). The important question the opera raises is how much Chamberlain, through his writings, was a decisive influence in ensuring that Wagner's anti-Semitic racism was by taken up by the Nazis, or whether Wagner would have achieved that all on his own. Dorman's lively, spiky music and Polly Graham's energetic direction turn Chamberlain into a deluded individual, whose quest to be seen among the German greats of Goethe and Kant is doomed to fail. In the relentlessly skittish first act, we see the Wagner family at the family home of Wahnfried in the wake of the composer's death, fighting and struggling to craft his legacy. This mission is led by his restrained wife Cosima (Susan Bullock) who is trying to erase his revolutionary past and form his biography with the help of Chamberlain. The music here echoes 1920s neo-classicism and the edgy spirit of the Weimar Republic, plus a few pre-echoes of The Rake's Progress. Act Two offers some deeper set-pieces in a solo lament from a conflicted Siegfried Wagner (powerfully declaimed by Andrew Watts), who is hiding his sexuality and is expected to be a great composer like his father, and in the confrontation between Chamberlain and Hermann Levi, the Jewish conductor whom Wagner had supported and who premiered Parsifal (Edmund Danon, strongly serious). Wagner himself hovers in the background in the form of the ever-jokey green ghost the 'Wagner-Daemon' (an agile Oskar McCarthy), smirking at his family's pretensions and putting Chamberlain in his place as a mere footnote to history. Inevitably this story leads towards the appearance of a none-too-heavily disguised youthful Hitler – known as the 'Master's Disciple' (Adrian Dwyer) – visiting Wahnfried in 1923 and proclaiming Wagner as his inspiration. Siegfried's wife Winifred (Alexandra Lowe) is immediately besotted with him. The orchestra explodes sonically, but the implications of this disturbing moment for the future are left unexplored. There is total commitment from the cast, with fine singing and acting throughout; Justin Brown, who commissioned the opera, conducts with vigour, and the orchestra, community chorus and young actors bound with energy. But, because this clever show fails to elicit sympathy for these unattractive characters – least of all Wagner – there is an emotional emptiness at its heart.
Economist
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Economist
In Pope Leo XIV, the Catholic church chooses a middle path
The choice of Robert Prevost reflects a desire for unity and compromise. But insofar as Pope Leo XIV represents a middle path, how will he lead on the church's trickiest questions? The Trump administration has axed Biden-era export controls on AI chips. Good. Now they must enact simpler, more-effective ones (11:29). And remembering Martin Graham, founder of the Longborough Festival Opera (19:34). Runtime: 27 min Economist Education is running a new six-week online course on international relations—a window into shifting geopolitical trends and a guide to navigating uncertainty and risk. Listeners to 'The Intelligence' can save 15% by clicking here and using the code INTELLIGENCE.
