PERSPECTIVE — As several articles in The New York Times and Opera (with Opera News) have made clear, opera as an art form has been under attack from bureaucrats and cost-cutters on all ends of the British political spectrum as elitist. (Covent Garden, the comparatively well-funded London home of international opera, recently restyled its resident company as the Royal Ballet and Opera.) Add to this the challenges engendered by Brexit in terms of visa difficulties both in hiring (for UK companies) and in free interaction between artists who are no longer members of the European Union. Yet whatever problems the future holds, Britain retains an admirable range of classical vocal music experience accessible to a visitor.
The Welsh National Opera, launched modestly in Cardiff in 1946, grew steadily in reputation and artistic scope, in good part due to its acclaimed chorus, allowing it to tackle early- and middle-period Verdi works. (Sad to relate, the British Arts Council decided this month to reduce the WNO calling card to 20 members.) Many important conductors, directors, and singers have worked with this very ambitious troupe, whose annals make impressive reading.
The company has long toured in western England to stay visible artistically and afloat financially. Having a new David McVicar-helmed Il trittico in the repertoire, featuring rising Welsh-Ukrainian star soprano Natalya Romaniw as Giorgetta and Angelica, WNO announced a tour — but it’s hard to tour Il tabarro with its barge. Unfortunately, when the stage crew arrived at Southampton’s splendid Mayflower Theatre, they found themselves unable to move the very tall Gianni Schicchi set in timely fashion, so on short notice we got just that final comedy on Nov. 13. (I’d have welcomed the nun’s story Suor Angelica being enacted on Charles Edwards’ incredibly cluttered late-1970s senior bachelor pad, but no one asked me.)
So, no Romaniw this trip. The British audience accepted the evening’s realities rather more graciously than might have been the case Stateside; fortunately, Puccini’s brilliant score and Giovacchino Forzano’s libretto make Schicchi one of the few fail-safe operatic comedies. McVicar’s direction adopted the over-the-top tone of U.K. television comedies such as The Benny Hill Show and lowered it; everyone and everything, save perhaps Haegee Lee’s naively charming but vocally merely decent Lauretta, was pretty skeevy here.
Experienced character-playing and expert teamwork went a fair way to compensating for not much vocal freshness, though impressive bass Wojtek Gierlach’s Simone proved outstanding, and tenor Trystan Llŷr Griffiths — if somewhat adenoidal on Rinuccio’s highest notes — showed why he, too, is counted as a rising star in the U.K. Uruguayan-Italian Dario Solari deployed a substantial if occasionally juddery baritone very well as a fairly young Schicchi. His textual alertness and feisty humor anchored the production, along with a fine orchestral performance, with Edmund Whitehead capably taking over this last show in the run on the podium from the accomplished Alexander Joel. I certainly hope to hear the valiant WNO again in a full evening of opera.
Some of my earliest operatic experiences occurred at the English National Opera, London’s “Volksoper” descended from a venture launched in 1931 to provide low-cost but high-quality, dramatically cogent opera in English translation to a wide public. (Compare the much-missed original New York City Opera, though their linguistic focus varied over the decades.) The ENO — a particular target of recent government cutbacks and strictures — has been ordered to move its operations to Manchester, though that Midlands metropolis is served by Leeds’ very estimable Opera North, a thoughtless affront to the ENO’s orchestra, chorus, and staff.
Management of late has leaned heavily on reviving Greatest Hits stagings, which afforded me the chance finally to see (live) Jonathan Miller’s once revolutionary 1982 Rigoletto, set in 1950s Little Italy. Its innovations — the transposition in time, the laddish mobster choristers sporting sunglasses inside, the Duke’s signature aria sung along with a jukebox — now seem everyday, but were indeed novel in their time and, with the nicely Edward Hopperesque sets (Patrick Robertson and Rosemary Vercoe), still work. It’s an internally consistent vision, not done for its own sake like the Met’s Vegas 1960 and so-termed Weimar takes on this opera. Though as with the Vegas setting, one wonders: Does no responsible adult ask why Gilda’s not in school?
The musical performance Nov. 16 under Richard Farnes (who led a very creditable Met Falstaff in 2019) proved brisk and satisfying, and ENO also can boast access to a superb chorus. (Oddly, their wordless contribution to the storm trio — one of Verdi’s most-copied innovations — was noticeably trimmed.) Rigoletto is here the bartender in the headquarters of “The Duke,” a flashy playboy mob boss.
Weston Hurt, an accomplished if under-recognized American baritone active for many years at Caramoor, NYCO, Bard, and elsewhere, made a deeply impressive showing. It’s not a big bruiser of a voice, but through keen dynamic gradations he traced the long lines beautifully and had plenty of power for climactic notes. His lean but elegant approach reminded me of two favorite Rigolettos, Pablo Elvira at NYCO and Alan Opie at Opera Philadelphia. A detailed, persuasive actor, Hurt offered a complete interpretation, willing to make the man a frustrated, bitter character not asking for much sympathy.
Chinese tenor Yongzhao Yu had the range, vocal projection, and agility for his employer, but in faster passages he (as a non-native speaker) articulated the words less than comprehensibly — a problem translated opera brings to the fore, especially opposite Hurt’s utterly crystalline diction.
Yu’s fellow newcomer to ENO, the young German-based British soprano Robyn Allegra Parton, made a sympathetic and comely Gilda. A lyric coloratura, she lacked some of the expansiveness of Nadine Sierra’s recent showing in the part at the Met. But for a light-voiced singer, Parton has a relatively dark timbre, so she never strayed into Tweety Bird territory, and her top notes carried well. Still, the very best voice onstage was that of the youthful bass William Thomas, limning an uncompromising Sparafucile. (In Miller’s original cast, future Wagnerian luminary John Tomlinson made a stir in this role.) Like most Monterones, the capable veteran David Kempster sang too gruffly, but the smaller roles were done with high competence. Sarah-Jane Lewis wielded a nice timbre as Giovanna. The audience received this fine performance very warmly indeed.
The following day, I found my way to the Jacksons Lane Arts Centre’s black-box venue in North London’s Highgate neighborhood (think, perhaps, the semi-leafy parts of Queens) to check out the Hampstead Garden Opera, which has generated a certain buzz. This company produces two minimally, but fully staged operas per year but receives absolutely no government funding, relying on grants and donations to serve a wide public at low prices. They presented a rewarding modern-dress production of Eugene Onegin. Tchaikovsky intended his 1879 “lyric scenes” for a conservatory cast, and the HGO’s mission is to provide experience for very young professional singers. The nine principal roles were double cast and, though levels of sung Russian varied, they all did quite admirably.
The only name I knew was that of Jolyon Loy, who’d covered the title role for Covent Garden’s recent minimalist production by Ted Huffman. Huffman’s assistant director Eleanor Burke crafted an entertaining and ultimately moving show here, seemingly set in the 1990s in a remote rural setting (Iowa? Devonshire?). What the ensemble’s relation was to Mme. Larina remained unclear, but alcohol abuse seemed to extend to everyone save Tatiana; and Lenski and Olga were sexually active from minute one. The opera’s two party scenes turned stylized and vaguely nightmarish, with M. Triquet being a louche Cabaret Emcee who certainly had an eye (and, after the public argument, possibly more) for Loy’s aptly Byronic Onegin; both men arrived flat-out drunk at the duel, with Triquet as Onegin’s second. Burke certainly underlined both parties’ sense of hostility towards Onegin.
With a good ear for this often almost balladic score, Oliver Cope conducted a very skilled chamber group of a dozen players, off to one side. Radiating bad-boy charisma, Loy sang very well, secure in range and intonation. His Tatiana and Lenski (Hasmik Harutyunyan and Matthew Curtis) had larger instruments. The Armenian soprano enacted the heroine beautifully and showed a lovely middle range, occasionally shading flat on top. Curtis sounded like a Peter Grimes, sometimes holding on too long to strong top notes as tenors will do; he needed the most linguistic polish, noticeable partly because Arina Mkrtchian’s sonorous Olga fared best in that respect.
Like most Gremins, Jacob Bettinelli did better with his showstopper aria’s “big-tune” A sections than with the rhythmically tricky bridge between them. Everyone performed solidly, with manifest commitment: a fine experience for my two neighbors, 20-something first-time Onegin-goers who hope to keep up with Hampstead Garden Opera’s offerings.
From an age demographic point of view, I was happy to see a decent percentage of younger people attending a song recital — a stirring account on Nov. 19 of Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch at the venerable Wigmore Hall. The venue has a wise policy of extending £5 seats to those under 35. Wolf could be a hard sell even at the height of touring recitals with full press coverage. But expert pianist Malcolm Martineau and two heralded singers, soprano Erin Morley and baritone Huw Montague Rendall, drew and held a substantially attentive crowd, treating the cycle almost as a staged event, with eye contact and blocking between the two soloists expounding on different aspects of romantic love.
Morley’s lovely voice, very musically used, is a bit weak in its lower range and lacks much of a color palette. A pleasure to hear, she never seemed fully to be living her well-enunciated texts. Whereas Montague Rendall, established on the opera stage as a leading Pelléas and Papageno, is the genuine article Lieder singer, fully alert to expressive shades of verbal meaning and able to convey them in terms of dynamics, tone color, and weighting. The hall, seating less than 600, has admirable acoustics and sightlines. Among the many vocalists booked into Wigmore in the next few months alone: Joyce DiDonato, Stéphane Degout, Lucy Crowe, and my would-have-been Suor Angelica, Natalya Romaniw.
