Interview with Alessandro Corbelli

I was at Covent Garden again this week, this time to interview Alessandro Corbelli, an undisputed master of opera buffa and regular guest at the Royal Opera. He is currently appearing in Il Turco in Italia and will be staying on for the revival of La Fille du Régiment. Then in the autumn he's back for a new production of Adriana Lecouvreur. So there was much to discuss! Read the interview at: http://www.gavindixon.info/Interview_with_Alessandro_Corbelli.htm

Interview with Christopher Maltman

I was at the Royal Opera House earlier on this week to interview Christopher Maltman (sorry about the photograph Christopher). We were talking about his latest role, the Forester in The Cunning Little Vixen. Plenty of musical challenges there that you won’t find in Mozart! It’s his first Janacek, but it sounds like ideal casting, a part that requires both convincing acting and a strong baritone voice. The first night is on Friday (19th March), and you can read the interview at: http://www.gavindixon.info/Interview_with_Christopher_Maltman.htm

Tamerlano at Covent Garden

An interesting evening at the Royal Opera House last night. They were putting on Tamerlano as a vehicle for Plácido Domingo, but he'd pulled out. The rest of the cast managed OK without him, although the big names - Christine Schäfer, Christianne Stotijn - were comprehensively upstaged by singers in the minor roles - Renata Pokupić and Vito Priante. Read the full review at http://www.gavindixon.info/15.3.10_Tamerlano_ROH.htm

I like Despina, she’s not quite as stupid as Dorabella.

I visited the Royal Opera House last week to interview Helene Schneiderman about her role as Despina in the upcoming revival of Jonathan Miller’s Così fan tutte. She has sung Dorabella in the same production, so she is going from victim to collaborator in Don Alfonso’s scheme. In this production, Despina is not in it for the money, she just wants to have fun. In fact, the whole production sounds like a lot of fun. It opens on Friday (29th Jan at 7pm). In the mean time, you can read the interview here.

34 Year Old Opera Fan: a Demographic Anomaly?

Reading Rupert Christiansen’s review of the Royal Opera’s newly revived Rake caused me a few concerns. Firstly, I thought the review itself is grossly unfair: ‘a superficially bright idea’, ‘precise to the point of being pedantic’, ‘no fun at all’. I have my own issues with Stravinsky’s score, but in my view the fault is his alone. And it takes a stern sole indeed to miss the fun in this production.

But on a more personal note, I was even more worried by the demographic that the Telegraph’s dating service has allotted for me on the basis on my online reading. My possible mates, as selected for the page on which the review appears, are lined up above. Am I exceptional in enjoying opera in my early-(OK, mid-)thirties? Of course, none of these gentlemen would seem out of place in a Covent Garden audience, Alf1 is even suitably attired. But with no disrespect to him, Seabirdsailor or John555, you guys are just not my type.

The Rake at Covent Garden: Too Spectacular for its own good?

Just a few despatches from the opening night of The Rake’s Progress revival at Covent Garden. Most readers will already have seen the spectacular production stills from the previous staging (the concept is Hogarth’s London transferred to 1930s Hollywood), though I have to say it is even more breathtaking in the flesh. The revival has a new cast, and all put in excellent performances. Top honours go to Kyle Ketelsen as Nick Shadow, followed at a hair’s breadth by Toby Spence in the title role. Spectacle is the key to this production, and the staging of each scene combines jaw-dropping visual innovation with a loyalty to the essence of the story. And the direction is impeccable, with every potential visual gag or sly interaction exploited to the full.

But there is one serious flaw in the whole conception, and it’s the music. I don’t want to come over all Adorno about Stravinsky’s neo-classicism, but the music in The Rake’s Progress really is at the workaday end of his Mozartian spectrum. Certainly, it is skilfully crafted, and his arias and recitatives do everything the story needs. But that’s all they do, and the work is functional to a fault. In more modest stagings, the composer’s lack of ambition is less glaring, but in a spectacular production like this, you begin to wonder why so much effort was put into making something so visually powerful out of such a slender musical offering. Bizarrely, the scene changes become the focus of the audience’s attention. Cast and orchestra do everything they can for Stravinsky, but the uncharacteristic modesty of his score puts his music in an unusually subsidiary position to the spectacle.

La Bohème with a Limp

Physical ailments are never far from the character’s minds in La Bohème. Fitting, then, that the new revival of the Covent Garden staging went ahead without recasting, even after Roberto Aronica, its Rodolfo, tore a knee cartilage in rehearsals. He is now walking with a limp and with the aid of a stick. The director John Copley, apparently took this in his (able-bodied) stride and adapted the production accordingly. The critical reaction has been largely positive; Tim Ashley observed that the limp 'looks incredibly natural - as if this were the way Puccini always intended the role to be played'.

Reading this, I was reminded of a recent episode of the Simpsons, in which Homer becomes an opera singer (Season 19, episode 2). It transpires (for typically convoluted reasons) that Homer has a fine operatic tenor voice, but only when he lies flat on his back. The episode culminates in a performance of La Bohème with Homer in the lead role and the staging adapted to accommodate his unusual condition. At the Royal Opera’s curtain call, roles were reversed, with Cristina Gallardo-Domâs as the recently deceased Mimi assisting the still living (if slightly lame) Rodolfo onto the stage. Fortunately for her, Aronica’s condition was not as disruptive as Homer’s, and she was not required to rise from her death bed repeatedly in the closing scene to allow Rodolfo to sing each of his lines lying down.

Stomach Staples & Strauss

Ariadne auf Naxos opens with an extended backstage prologue, in which cast changes are imposed at short notice by unseen authorities. The history the Royal Opera’s current production seems to be a case of life imitating art; Deborah Voigt was initially booked for the title role but was then sacked because she was too large for the costume. She finally appears in this, the third revival having lost around ten stone through a gastric bypass procedure. Celebrity stomach surgery is currently hot news in the UK, with the daytime TV presenter Fern Britton recently at the centre of a tabloid hypocrisy witch hunt for secretly having her stomach ‘stapled’ while advocating more traditional weight loss regimes to her viewers. No surprise, then that Deborah Voigt has also come under tabloid scrutiny (although slightly more surprise that it is deemed worthy of a front page slot in the Metro, London’s freebie commuter celebrity gossip rag). In fairness, though, Voigt has been very open about the whole affair. It was she who broke the news of her having been dropped from the production, and she has given numerous interviews on the subject since (including this one) and has even appeared in a YouTube self parody, in which she confronts the black cocktail dress that was the initial source of her woes.

But something doesn’t add up. Peter Katona, the casting director who made the decision to sack Voigt from the first production, was adamant that she would not look right in the dress that he had planned for the part. The opera has a 1930s setting, but could hardly be described as revolving around the styling of this single dress. Voigt does indeed look more agile in her now less-than-Wagnerian frame, but the amount of movement required is minimal and could surely be tackled by an overweight singer, even one weighing twenty five stone.

Whatever their reasons, the management have finally come round to the right choice for the part. It took Voigt the first ten minutes or so to settle her voice into the role, but after that she was pure Strauss. She still has the projection and support of a singer of her earlier frame, though a slight brittle edge is now apparent. Most importantly though, she has the star quality needed for the final scene, and her closing duets with Robert Dean Smith as Bacchus carry the evening.

The ravishing bitter-sweet closing scene is Strauss’ party piece as far as opera is concerned, and I couldn’t help the feeling that, in the case of Ariadne, it is the work’s single redeeming feature. The story is ludicrous, even in opera terms (it is about a pantomime troupe invading the performance of a classical tragedy), and the characters are stubbornly two dimensional (perhaps that’s why Voigt had to slim down to fit the role). But it all trundles on for a few hours until it is time for the grand closing scene. Sadly, the performance took a similar approach, with competent but uncommitted playing up until the closing numbers. Mark Elder conducts with a firm hand, and emotions are never allowed to boil over. Perhaps he was just trying to maintain some order in this bizarrely incoherent score, but more Staussian passion would have been welcome throughout, not just in the send-you-home music.