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Favourite Lenses: Why I keep coming back to the Sigma 45mm

noreply@blogger.com (Tam Pollard) — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 11:42:00 +0000

Barbican light and shadow

For my first post in over seven years, I'm taking a bit of a new direction. One of the reasons I've spent less time writing here, is that I've been spending more time working on my photography. This is a post about that, hopefully the first of many.

Probably ninety percent of the time when I go out with my camera, the lens I have fixed to it is a 50mm, or something close to it. It's one of the main reasons I use a camera most of the time and not a phone. Most phones use a wide angle lens. A 50mm, and other normal lenses, offer a much tighter field of view. You can't fit everything in, and so you have to frame more carefully. It's also said that it's close to the field of view of the human eye. That's probably why it's been such a popular choice with photographers over the years. For that reason I have quite the collection of them.

I love the Sigma 45mm lens, even among my collection of 50mm lenses it's one of my absolute favourites. The eagle eyed will notice that 45 is not 50, but it's fairly close and only a little bit wider. It's small and I always like small lenses. Always with cameras and lenses I've tended to prioritise compact size so that it doesn't get too in the way or become too heavy when carried around all day. When coupled with my Sony A7C camera, it makes for a nicely inconspicuous package.

The Sigma 45mm is part of their contemporary i series of lenses which are available for both Sony e-mount cameras and L mount cameras. It features an all metal construction, and the feel in hand of the manual controls really is something. I know it isn't, but the focus ring is well enough damped that it almost feels like it's mechanically coupled and physically moving the glass elements even though I know it isn't. This compares extremely favourably to the somewhat loose rings on many modern lenses and from a tactile perspective it almost feels like I'm using one of my vintage manual lenses. Of course, none of that directly affects image quality, but I do think there's something in whether equipment sparks joy: the more pleasure the more you use it and the better the results. It's another one of the reasons I take so few photos on my phone.

None of that, though, is what makes the 45 particularly interesting. What does is Sigma's deliberate decision not to try and fix some of the lens's optical flaws. I don't want this blog to be about technicalities and jargon, but in modern lens design, manufacturers add more and more glass elements of complex shapes to edge ever closer to what can sometimes be a sterile perfection. Sigma chose to go down a different route. At first glance, this may seem crazy, but those imperfections actually improve the way the images look, particularly in it renders the out of focus areas. That means that portraits are actually a speciality of this lens, unusual for an F2.8 lens which is comparatively slow for a portrait lens, meaning it can't just blow out the background through sheer power. For those more interested, Sigma has a nice article on their design decisions. But enough words. The best way to illustrate that would be with some portraits, but I don't want to post family photos publicly. However, here are a few examples which show its out of focus performance.

The Titanosaur at the Natural History Museum

Fairground lights

Photographer at the Barbican centre

It also has a decent close focus capability, meaning it's great for photographing plants you might come across wandering around. Not as good as a dedicated macro lens, but very handy in an all round lens. It's sometimes criticised for being soft close up wide open, but this is irrelevant to me: if I'm at near macro distances I'm stopping down for depth of field anyway.

Flower photography

It also renders colour very nicely. As some who shoots primarily in black and white, a surprising number of my favourite images with this lens are in colour. Of course you can fix colour later in post production, but the bit I enjoy about photography is going out and about taking pictures. I don't enjoy the editing nearly as much: it's a chore. So the better a result I can get straight out of the camera the better.

Eltham Palace Christmas Lights

Autumn leaf

If there is a criticism, it's autofocus. Performance is not on a level with my best Sony G or GM glass, or Sigma's art lenses. That's not to say AF is bad, I don't think I've lost many images to it, but I find that at night, in continous tracking mode, particularly when the aperture is closed down, it can struggle to lock on and isn't as sticky. It's not enough that I wouldn't recommend it because of this, but it is there in my experience and may be noticeable to those who are particularly obsessive about autofocus performance. And my experience isn't universal. I've seen people on online forums say they wouldn't have known about the AF concerns without the forum posts and showing some excellent images to back up that argument. As it happens, it's been a while since I've shot the lens in the dark, so I do plan to take it out over the next few weeks and check I still feel the same way about the autofocus. And that shouldn't be too hard this time of year in the UK. But on one level, it doesn't really matter: I'll still love this lens regardless.

Staircase

You can view the images from this post, along with a few more of my favourites with this lens, in full resolution in my gallery.

View Full Sigma 45mm Gallery

Ariodante at the Royal, or, Mijnssen At War With the Work

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 17:25:00 +0000

Note: This is a review of the matinee performance on Sunday 14th December 2025.

After seeing this director's unpersuasive production of Parsifal at Glyndebourne last summer I wasn't optimistic about her Royal Opera debut. As this long afternoon wore on I got increasingly fed up till by Act Three of a work I treasure I just wanted it to get on and finish.

The problems with Jetske Mijnssen's production are substantial. To begin with she has decided to mess around with the plot and the text in three ways. Dalinda (usually a servant) is here turned into Princess Ginevra's sister. When I first caught on a subtitle early in Act One, and not having read the programme, a reference to the King of Scotland as Dalinda's father I thought it must be a typo but I was wrong. This is a bizarre, problematic and poorly executed decision. Bizarre because elsewhere in Act One Mijnssen seems keen to try and find a class angle to the work - but she's removed the most obvious such angle from the original - the relationship between the servant Dalinda and Count Polinesso. It's problematic because a key strand of the plot is the King's anxiety about the succession - but the security of that succession becomes much less of an issue if there are two daughters. It's poorly executed partly in consequence of the generally weak movement and through characterisation of the production as a whole, but also in small ways. The most obvious of these is despite the alteration of the subtitle text already mentioned this isn't consistently followed through and elsewhere Dalinda will keep addressing her sister as "Principessa" when clearly it ought to be "Ginevra". Mijnssen's next intervention is to make the King seriously ill (those familiar with the work will know that he is usually still alive when the curtain falls, not so here). Putting him in a wheelchair and then a hospital bed just puts additional barriers in the way of effective personnel management for no dramatic gain. The other problem is the number of times he's allowed to fall on the floor - so that one gets distracted as the show goes on wondering if it's about to happen again (this is one of a number of instances that suggest that the domestic staff, sizeable in number, ought to be fired). Mijnssen's third change to the plot is not to allow Ariodante and Ginevra to be united at the end in defiance of text and music. This is because Mijnssen like too many contemporary directors is desperate to make A Point. In this case about the emancipation of women which seems for directors these days to mean that you cannot both be an independent woman and have a happy relationship. The text doesn't require there to be an immediate marriage at the end, and there are plenty of more subtle ways in which a more talented director could convey the fragility of this relationship. Mijnssen sadly hits us ineffectively over the head with her Point. This also reflects the director's general lack of confidence in the audience - there are a whole series of obvious bits of direction that suggest that she thinks the audience can't read the subtitles or are too unintelligent to follow the drama - the one that immediately comes to mind is the King cradling a sheet like his daughter for fear we will not otherwise understand that's who he's singing about.

Related to the overt textual changes Mijnssen also makes other choices about character interpretation which while not so directly at odds with the text are detrimental to developing a convincing drama. The key instance here is her muddled characterisation of Ariodante and Ginevra. In Act One Ginevra is portrayed as an overbearing, flirtatious, vile to her staff aristocrat of a type we have oft seen before, and Ariodante is well not very persuasively heroic. This treatment of Ginevra in particular causes major problems in later Acts - given her characterisation in Act One it seemed to me much more likely that she would immediately fight back against her accusers - but of course this could only be done by doing much more substantive surgery to the work which Mijnssen (or perhaps more likely the House management) does not dare to do. Having made her an unsympathetic figure in Act One gets in the way of her plight really moving later on. With Ariodante it is both difficult to see quite what Ginevra sees in him or why the King thinks he's the solution to the succession and so again this diminishes one's ability to care about his fate later. Not unlike her Glyndebourne Parsifal, Mijnssen does have one fresh insight with a minor character - her treatment of Lurcanio as a bit bookish, hesitant, yet capable of lashing out is a clever reading. But Mijnssen is so bad at following things through that she fails to make what she could of this. As I watched Act Three I kept thinking of little ways she could have developed the characterisation in harmony with music and text, but the opportunity is wasted.

The second major problem with Mijnssen's approach is that she clearly completely distrusts the da capo aria. What this means is that every time the A section of an aria returns, and this being Handel this is a lot of occasions, Mijnssen inflicts some unnecessary business on the viewer. It is almost never effective and almost always detracts from what the current singer is singing about. There's also a musical problem here (we'll come on to the broader musical issues later). I think there is a tendency in Handel singing in recent years to simply make the return of the A section just an over-decorated reprise. But truly great Handel singing makes you feel that in a da capo aria you have gone on an emotional journey and that repeat of the A section is distinctive in a deeper way than simply the addition of more decoration. Singers like Anne Murray (my first Ariodante) absolutely used to do this. This cast by and large don't. If as an opera director you don't understand or trust the musical style, as Mijnssen's approach suggests is the case here, then you shouldn't direct the work.

The third problem is that the combination of over-busyness, poor movement (there's a tiresome amount of aimless wandering about in this production), and failure to support the development of effective detailed characterisation from the ensemble meant that this work which should be one of the most moving in the repertoire left me emotionally cold. To give an example of what can be achieved in this show - I once saw a concert performance at the Barbican where Dalinda and Lurcanio, both in concert dress, crawled across the stage on their knees in their reconciliation aria and it was powerfully moving. Nothing in this staging got anywhere near that experience. The most egregious failing comes near the start of Act Two. We end Act One at a banquet - not a persuasive choice to begin with - and meaning that we have to put up with the army of servants laying the table reminiscent of her weak staging of the Parsifal transformation scene (with addition of evidently plastic glass dropped off-stage). Act Two opens with the wretched table still on stage. When Ariodante declares his intention to kill himself he seizes a knife off the table and we're then treated to Lurcanio gathering up all the other knives, and a cheap laugh from some in the audience. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that Mijnssen was actively seeking to undermine the seriousness of Ariodante's threat to kill himself, indeed perhaps even seeking that laugh (rather as I often think directors of Much Ado, a play with many affinities to this opera, don't take seriously Beatrice's demand that Benedick "Kill Claudio"). I suspect it also links to her overall Point - Ariodante's agony cannot be placed on the same level as Ginevra's - an interpretation again at war with the work. We then have to put up with the army of servants removing the table in a scene (I think it was during the A section repeat of Lurcanio's aria stopping his brother's suicide) where all the focus should be on the brothers' relationship. It all diminishes what should be the intense build up to Ariodante's Scherza infida, one of the finest arias Handel ever wrote.

There are all sorts of smaller failings of personnel management I could mention - the handling of the apparent infidelity in Act Two where it is inexplicable that Ariodante doesn't immediately confront the pair and discover the truth, or Ginevra's self-harm at the end of that Act when first it makes no sense that in this palace oversupplied with servants nobody interrupts her, and secondly that when a servant does finally arrive on the scene the only thing it apparently occurs to them to do is relieve her of the weapon and wander off. When Act Three opened with that other tiresome directorial tick of putting all the ensemble dotted around the stage when they're not supposed to be there hearing things they're not supposed to hear and followed it up in due course with Ginevra doing violence to the hospital bed to indicate she was in the grip of strong emotion I'm afraid I lost all patience.

Two other points to mention before we leave the production. The dumb show in the overture is a sign of the busyness to come, is never referred to again, and would be much better cut. Fabrice Kebour's lighting in Act Three particularly is yet another instance in opera these days when one wonders if the palace has paid the electricity bill and it became very difficult from the Amphi to meaningfully make out faces, again for no dramatic gain.

Poor productions can sometimes be rescued by outstanding musical performances but I'm afraid this was not an ensemble to erase memories of Nicholas McGegan and the great ENO cast (Murray, Roocroft, Garrett, Robson, Howell etc.) or Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques. Thinking it over afterwards and discussing it with family who had been sitting downstairs we came to agreement that the main culprit was Stefano Montanari's conducting. Partly it's a failure to keep things moving - this is not to say that some numbers aren't taken very fast (too fast sometimes to my ear for the comfort of his singers) but the overall sense of a dramatic forward momentum, a pulse, is lost. Some of his pauses seemed to go on forever, particularly in Act Three and not with a meaningful dramatic or emotional impact. But he also loses the character range of Handel's music. Handel really does go in this opera from rage to despair to radiant joy and points in between - but Montanari's interpretation flattens this. To give one example, Ariodante's great aria Dopo notte late in Act Three should have a transformative feeling to it, it should feel like a blaze of light after darkness, and Montanari didn't find this (though again the production gives no assistance).

The singing ensemble do their best with what Mijnssen and Montanari give them and all of them make some strong vocal contributions across the evening but they're not able collectively to restore the emotional punch which production team and conductor have contrived to remove. This is a weaker production than Mijnssen's Parsifal but on many occasions there musical performances, particular John Relyea's Gurnemanz, transcended the production's flaws - no performer here, at least from my perch in the Amphi, managed a similar feat. I expected to find the English text of that ENO production come back to my mind to some extent but I also expected that more point would be made of the Italian text than most of the ensemble manages. It's a strong libretto in the main, in my view, but it is not well put across in this performance.

As I noted at the outset this work is very close to my heart. It was the first Handel opera I ever saw, in the original run of the Alden production at the Coliseum with that exceptional line up of singers already mentioned. A teenager at the time I was both very moved by the drama and not confused by the plot. I last saw it staged in Vienna in 2008 (another poor production) and I really wanted this to be a great new interpretation. Sadly it isn't. There seems little hope of ENO in its present state revisiting the work. Mijnssen's Glyndebourne Parsifal had enough points of interest and potential to give the director some benefit of the doubt. This production, apart from its take on Lurcanio, has really nothing insightful to say about the work and much of the time is maddeningly at war with it. Sadly, therefore, I cannot recommend picking up a ticket.

Hamlet at the National, or, But He Hasn't Fired!

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 18:17:00 +0000

Act 3 Scene 4 is a fairly crucial moment in this play. For any readers who may need their memory refreshing this is the scene where Hamlet kills Polonius in the presence of his mother Gertrude. Or, rather, this is the scene in which, as a general rule, Hamlet kills Polonius. Not so in Robert Hastie's confused new production for the National. In this version Hamlet makes a gun-like imitation with one hand, from behind him three shots are fired, and Polonius stumbles out and fairly rapidly dies. I was so baffled by this that I began to doubt whether I'd seen what I thought I'd seen and had to double check with an usher on my way out. The only explanation that I could come up with is that we are supposed to believe that the ghost of the king is behind the curtain from which the shots come, and that his supernatural powers are somehow sufficient to allow him to manifest as a result of his son's presence and fire real bullets. But it took me some thinking afterwards to achieve this rationalisation - in the moment in this production it is simply incomprehensible. And it causes huge problems for the rest of the show. Because it seems clear to me that a key driver of Ophelia's madness is not simply the death of her father but the fact that the man she's in love with has killed him. Similarly Laertes's animus against Hamlet is driven by the fact that Hamlet has killed his father. But we in the audience can see perfectly well that this isn't what has happened. More to the point it should be equally apparent to Gertrude who is watching at the time. It makes it really very difficult to take seriously either Ophelia or Laertes's motivations in the remainder of the second half, which significantly undermines the drama.

Nor, sadly, is this Hastie's only misstep. He sets the play in a single grand hall space (designed by Ben Stones) - walls and the floor are occasionally moved - but this does little to create effectively distinctive environments. We seem vaguely in modern day Denmark, judging by the painted flag, the guns and Claudius's water bottle but this undermines chunks of the text - particularly the apparent ability of Polonius to order his daughter around the way he does (there are other issues with the direction of Ophelia that we'll come on to). Hastie seems to have very little idea what he wants to do with the play - he keeps in a lot of stuff that other versions I've seen have cut - and this is not to the benefit of Shakespeare exposing the fact that the drama often drags. Hastie's readings such as they are lack consistency - he seems to change his mind about whether there has really been a ghost, and whether Hamlet is mad or feigning which get increasingly badly in the way of dramatically convincing characterisations. There's very few moments when the director manages to bring an element out afresh - it's telling that the two which stuck in my mind a few hours afterwards - an exchange between Hamlet and Rosencrantz (I think), and Horatio's care for Hamlet - are both minor relationships.

Hastie's handling of the Players is also poor. My recollection is they are often portrayed as not very talented but I do think that you've got to make the play within a play genuinely sinister otherwise it's inexplicable that it upsets Claudius. In this case it's like a surfeit of the worst of contemporary direction - microphones on stands and plastic chairs (I was painfully reminded of Jamie Lloyd's dire Cyrano) - and I'm afraid I had difficulty holding in laughter. Siobhan Redmond's (First Player) one substantial speech, replete with over-emphatic delivery and excessive gesturing becomes an endurance test (overdone gesturing is a general problem in this ensemble). A further error is retaining Hamlet and Horatio's exchange about watching every expression on the king's face and then placing Horatio behind Claudius in the scene that follows.

Hastie also inflicts an excessive soundscape on us, courtesy of composer Richard Taylor. A besetting sin of too many current productions is the apparent need felt to add a dramatic score to high tension moments (think equivalents of Frasier "ominous organ music indicating trouble ahead") as if there's a fear that we won't otherwise get that it is supposed to be a such a moment. Too many current directors don't seem to understand that in most cases good acting and movement will achieve a far more powerful effect. As too often recently the result here for me was to undermine rather than reinforce the text.

The ensemble stranded in this show are generally solid but they are all ill served by the direction, and nobody is compelling enough to transcend it. I previously saw Hiran Abeysekera (Hamlet) in Melly Still's marvellous RSC Cymbeline and I'm sorry that he hasn't come on more since then. Too often he rushes the text - most notably in "To be or not to be" which really went for nothing. He just isn't ultimately able, though Hastie undoubtedly bears a lot of responsibility, to compel the way he needs to - especially in a show running to nearly three hours. Alistair Petrie has good delivery as Claudius but I'm not sure wholly convinces as a murderer. Hastie's direction of Francesca Mills (Ophelia) is exceedingly odd. He has her play the part as a boisterous footballer's wife type which really doesn't work because I simply did not believe she would either go to pieces in the latter stages the way she does, or kill herself - I though it much more likely that she'd be the one howling for revenge against Hamlet. Tom Glenister's Laertes does some nice character work in the margins but isn't on stage enough to rescue things.

This is a show that starts solidly, and then goes downhill. By the latter stages I just wanted them to kill each other so I could go home. Between this and Bacchae an underwhelming start to the new Artistic Director's tenure.

Staggered Booking at the Edinburgh International Festival Redux, or, You Cannot Be Serious

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 10:15:00 +0000

On the 3rd November I received an e-mail sent to all the various levels of Edinburgh International Festival Members. At this time of year I don't tend to pay too much attention to these - they're usually just announcing events in Edinburgh that I won't be able to attend, or reminding me about things that happened at the previous Festival. Not so this one. To my surprise and almost immediately my very considerable annoyance this one informed me that: "We're excited to announce that a selection of performances for the 2026 Festival will go on sale next month to members of the public." This reverses the Festival's normal practice of opening booking for the complete programme at the same time by membership tier, a practice that applies across every other comparable Festival I regularly attend (and indeed to handling of booking for regular orchestral and opera seasons across the UK).

The Festival has been here before, such that I still almost cannot believe I've had to write this post. Back in 2014 then Festival Director Fergus Linehan proposed to announce the concerts/recitals programme and open booking for it in advance of the rest of the programme. We, and we suspect many other regulars, made strong representations against this proposal and the Festival reversed course. At the time we had thought that was the end of the matter. In the following year, 2015, it became clear this was not so. The Festival tried a variant on the idea, this time opening booking for 2016's flagship opera (Bellini's Norma) in advance of all the rest of the programme. We wrote at length about why this was in many ways an even more problematic decision than either the concerts/recital idea or the staggered booking, also for the 2015 Festival, for Antigone (staged play). Again we suspect we were not alone in our views because after the Norma episode staggered booking was abandoned.

Let me now explain how I experience the Festival, and why I so deeply object to this proposal. My reasons for doing so will become clear when discussing the EIF Press Office response to questions I put to them. I travel from the East Midlands to Scotland for the Festival each year, and have done so since I left Edinburgh in 2008. In most years I spend 1-2 weeks in Edinburgh. I plan which 1-2 weeks to come for on the basis of the complete programme. In former years I often used to do two EIF shows a day and sometimes three. As my work life has got more pressured I am more selective. Now I will think twice about doing a second show on the same day as a long opera, or even about going to a morning recital the day after that long opera. I particularly want to know which concerts/recitals are on alongside staged opera so I can make an informed decision about how to balance the two in my schedule. Even with theatre I will look now to see if I can slot plays in to an evening without staged opera or a concert I want to hear in the Usher Hall, rather than having to find a matinee space. In sum, I depend on knowing the full programme in order to construct my Festival diary. Staggered booking complicates all of this for, for me, no benefit whatsoever. I do not want the trouble of having to try and rearrange a show booked in November because in March I find it clashes with something else I really want to see and one of the other performances would be better. And if I have to make that rearrangement there is no guarantee by that stage that I will be able to get the seats I might want for that other performance (undermining a key benefit of Membership).

On Tuesday 4th November I wrote to the Festival Press Office to ask the following questions. On Friday 7th November (after I'd followed up with them for reasons that I'll explain later) a Festival spokesperson offered the responses in italics:

1) What research of booking arrangements at comparable Festivals did the EIF undertake before taking this decision, and can you provide me with any examples of comparable Festivals who organise their booking in this way?

The Edinburgh International Festival continually reviews its own audience data and feedback to inform how and when we put tickets on sale. While we stay aware of changes or initiatives in the performing arts sector, our focus is on what best serves our audience rather than replicating models used elsewhere.

2) What formal audience research did the Festival conduct with its existing audience before deciding to stagger booking again in this way (considering that the proposal in 2014 to open concert booking before the opera programme was known was abandoned because of serious unhappiness among regular patrons and the experiment with opening booking for Antigone/Norma before the rest of the programme was known was not repeated)?

Our planning draws on regular post-Festival surveys, focus groups, one-to-one interviews, ticketing and consumer trends, discussions with peer organisations, feedback from members, audiences, and box office data. Audience members have told us they appreciate the option to book early for major events, particularly those who travel from further afield, book in groups, or prefer to plan ahead to secure accommodation in August. The pre-sale responds directly to that feedback, while the introduction of free ticket exchanges for all Members provides added flexibility.

3) What review did the Festival Management conduct of the discussions and decisions around previous experiments with staggered booking in 2014/2015 before deciding to experiment with it again for 2026 and what were the Festival Management's grounds for thinking that the circumstances that made it objectionable in 2014/2015 had been removed?

We are aware of both the successes and the concerns surrounding the Festival's pre-sales a decade ago, and those experiences have directly informed our planning for 2026. The last time the Festival placed tickets on sale in November, was in 2015, for Norma starring Cecilia Bartoli which attracted exceptionally strong sales and audience interest. This year we're offering tickets for a selection of major international performances that will also be supported by free ticket exchanges for Members throughout the March pre-sale.

Some points in response. We suspect the Festival is suffering the same confusion in 2025 as it suffered in 2014-15 between timeliness of information and timing of booking. We have long called for earlier information about programming - specifically the restoration of the release that used to be provided in the McMaster era around about Christmas with key performances by week. If you have the programme information, you can be reasonably confident in the case of Edinburgh (especially if you are a Member) that you will be able to secure tickets for that event (whether for a group or an individual) and you would therefore be perfectly safe in going ahead and booking travel and accommodation in advance of Festival booking opening. The key thing here is early information NOT early booking.

A note about the nature of the Festival's audience also seems relevant here, and is why I mentioned my geographical location earlier. The most recent Annual Report, covering the 2024 Festival, states that 71% of the audience comes from Scotland (one suspects the bulk of that is Edinburgh based or travelling in for the day rather than paying to stay in the city), 17% from the rest of the UK and 12% from outside the UK (p.9). To base this significant change to Festival booking on the alleged desires of a minority of the audience seems questionable, especially when as this blog makes clear not all of that minority are in support of this change.

The thing about the high tickets sales for the 2015 Norma is that show would have likely sold out regardless of when the Festival put it on sale because of the star name attached and the fact Norma hadn't then been seen in Scotland for years - so it actually doesn't tell us much about whether or not staggered booking was in and of itself a good idea. It does seem revealing that the Festival did not repeat the experiment until now. Free exchange is the minimum that can be done to mitigate staggered booking but it doesn't solve the fundamental problems outlined earlier.

What also gives me cause to doubt that the Festival appropriately reviewed the 2014-2015 experiments was both the manner in which this proposal emerged and their responses to me last week. The original Members newsletter requested us to "keep this information under your hat" until the 18th November. When I wrote to the Membership department I was advised that the information about changes to booking arrangements was "under media embargo". Although I wrote to the Press Office on Tuesday afternoon it took until Friday afternoon and a follow-up e-mail to get a response. During that time I found myself having to consider whether I was bound by the claim of a "media embargo" (something the Press Office ultimately walked back on), and whether the Terms & Conditions of Membership required me to keep information published in the newsletter confidential (they do not). As I pointed out to the Press Office a public discussion of these proposals on or after the 18th November would be pretty futile when booking for the top tier of membership is scheduled to open on the 20th. It seemed to me that the Festival had assumed that Members would be delighted by this early intelligence, and that it had not occurred to them that anybody would raise concerns. If there'd been a proper review of what happened in 2014-15 it would have been very easy to establish that I was still a member and I was almost bound to raise concerns.

One other point I've wondered about is whether there is a financial imperative driving this. It was very clear last year that the Festival was facing funding challenges - the Usher Hall programme was notably thinner than normal, and there was only a single staged opera. Does the Festival need an early influx of box office funds?

Unless there is such a financial imperative, nothing material has in my view changed since we argued against this approach to Festival booking in 2015. The overall mix of performances at the Festival hasn't changed. The existence of an audience we regularly see at performances across the Festival's genres hasn't changed. Other Festivals we regularly attend (Aldeburgh, Proms, Glyndebourne, Chichester) haven't changed their booking practice to adopt a similarly staggered approach. Maybe the Edinburgh International Festival really now has got a different audience to all those other Festivals. Maybe the majority really does want staggered booking. But I hope if other Members (and indeed the broader audience) share my unhappiness about this they will make that known to the Festival. Personally I consider staggered booking as mistaken in 2025 as it was in 2014-15. The Festival is a big part of my cultural life and I'm unlikely in the end to walk away from it over this. However, they have succeeded in making this loyal supporter very angry and while I am sure they will not reverse course this year I sincerely hope this experiment will not be repeated again.

EIF 2025 - Orpheus and Eurydice, or, Spectacle over Emotional Depth?

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 08:59:00 +0000

As on other occasions, I'll start with some caveats. This is one of those works I've never really got on with. I've seen it staged at least twice, an unsuccessful version heavy on dance during the McMaster era, and a production at the Royal Opera with John Eliot Gardiner's forces bought in. I have an idea that the EIF has done it in concert since then, though I can't recall if I attended. So I wasn't terribly enthused when this year's programme was announced and this was the main staged opera. However, it is certainly worth seeing. The individual elements - music, dance, circus aerials are all superbly done. I was less convinced that they cohered into a completely successful whole (though the performance earned a partial standing ovation from others).

The conceit of Yaron Lifschitz's production is that Orpheus (Iestyn Davies) has been confined to an asylum following Eurydice's (Samantha Clarke) death. It is never entirely clear whether any of the drama that follows is taking place anywhere outside Orpheus's mind. The final scene strongly suggests that Orpheus has never left the asylum but I felt to really hit home this needed to be more clearly established through the rest of the drama. I do think the interpretation is a valid, and potentially enormously powerful one. I also think it's a powerful idea to subvert the apparently happy ending and it seems to me the text is ambiguous enough to sustain such subversion. But because of broader production issues it didn't hit me emotionally to the extent that it had the potential to do.

A major issue here is precisely those spectacular circus aerials delivered by the Circa Ensemble. Circus aerials of this kind are edge of the seat stuff. But it's a different kind of jeopardy to a narrative in which Orpheus really has lost the love of his life and gone mad. Although circus performers make us fear the possibility of an accidental death from acrobatics gone wrong we ultimately do not really think that such an accident will occur. The thrill of that risk is at odds with a wish to evoke the different emotional trauma of the death of a beloved and I think gets in the way of the Orpheus/Eurydice drama hitting home.

As the show went on I also wasn't always persuaded by the marriage between the movement of the circus performers as multiple doubles of the two lovers and the emotions and thoughts being conveyed by the sung text. To give just one example when Eurydice is singing about the peace of death a number of her doubles are performing acrobatics which certainly didn't fit my idea of being at peace. Relatedly, I began to wonder if, as with many operatic directors and indeed my previous reaction to this work, Lifschitz was worried that the work could be dull. The movement is much of the time very busy. It gets away with this where many productions fail because that busyness is nearly always spectacular, but for me it was again ultimately at the cost of emotional depth. The simpler sequences - for example Orpheus unmasking and losing each of the doubles before the final terrible loss - are often powerfully suggestive and I wished the production team had showed that restraint more often.

One particularly good example of the kind of issues that arise is an extraordinary sequence performed by Davies. Singing throughout, he slowly mounts a human ladder of circus performers, until at the end he is singing standing on an acrobat's shoulders. It's a remarkable performance and could have been powerfully related to the text dealing with Orpheus's search through the underworld for his lost wife. But ultimately I found myself impressed more by it in terms of Davies as performer negotiating this hugely challenging ask, than emotionally moved by Orpheus's desperate search.

The last scene generally goes over the top. Orpheus daubs the while walls with the phrase "The Triumph of Love" using blood from bowls brought on by members of the chorus. Around him the acrobats cavort and the chorus forms into various tableaux. A descent into madness would have been far more powerful if done with more restraint.

As noted at the outset this is a musically superb production. Iestyn Davies deserves the highest praise, on stage throughout and managing the physical challenges thrown at him without flinching while singing outstandingly. Samantha Clarke also sings very strongly, doubling as Eurydice and Love - though that doubling decision was another directorial choice that didn't entirely persuade me. In the pit Lawrence Cummings keeps the score moving along, and draws excellent, committed playing from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. In advance I wondered how the work would fare in the vast Playhouse but at least from the front Stalls the sound was excellent.

Overall, there is much to admire in this production, and it is definitely worth picking up a ticket if you can. But I ultimately felt it could have been more than it is and it left me, while admiring both singers and acrobats, frustrated by thoughts of what could have been.

Parsifal at Glyndebourne, or, Blazing Music Fights Increasingly Incoherent Production

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Tue, 27 May 2025 08:17:00 +0000

Note: This is a review of the performance on Sunday 25th May 2025.

Let us start with the positives of this new Glyndebourne Wagner. Musically it is performed to a very high standard. At the centre is a warm, dramatic, deeply felt Gurnemanz from John Relyea. The measure of his achievement can be found in Act Three when he continues to radiate conviction, and really moved me in his moment of recognition of the returned Parsifal, despite the directorial incoherence going on around him (not least it being visually completely clear to all from the moment he comes in who Parsifal is). Next in vocal honours I would place Ryan Speedo Green's Klingsor who again by sheer energy and vocal force managed to temporarily distract me from the mistaken staging choices of Act 2 - more exposed during the longer scenes that followed. He too fully commits himself to director Jetske Mijnssen's Act Three "vision". In the title role I was hugely impressed by Daniel Johansson, particularly in Act Two where his cry of "Amfortas, die Wunde!" and the scene that follows was delivered with that heroic, anguished ring that Wagner asks for from his heroic tenors and too rarely receives. I was reminded of Andreas Schager's unforgettable Siegfried in the Barenboim Proms Gotterdammerung. Kristina Stanek (Kundry) has a voice to pin you back in your seat, as with others copes brilliantly with directorial demands, but her major Act 2 scene suffers particularly in terms of creating emotional and dramatic impact from those demands. Auden Iverson's Amfortas is strongly and movingly sung. Lastly we have John Tomlinson's Titurel, for which he predictably received some of the loudest applause at the curtain. Mijnssen's additions are most thought through and effective with respect to Titurel and Tomlinson executes these mostly effectively and at times movingly, though there is a tendency to overdo things. The voice divided opinion in my party. For me, force of presence largely persuaded me to overlook vocal shortcomings. The supporting roles of knights, flower maidens and a senior knight who doesn't seem to get a clear credit in the programme all made fine contributions.

In the pit Robin Ticciati shaped a convincing account, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra played superbly. There were many places where the musical forces combined to deliver real emotional punch (& even in Act One some places where that was also in harmony with the staging). I would note two shortcomings. The first is not Ticciati's fault but there were places where he was inclined to my ear to take a slower tempo, for example in processional sequences and initial sections of the Act Two Kundry-Parsifal scene, and this combined with Mijnssen's failure to build drama in the staging led to a sense that musically we needed to get moving more. Second, the placing of the offstage voices was unsatisfactory from my seat in the front left Stalls. Indeed at one point it almost sounded as if those voices were being piped in, though I'm sure that was not the case. I found myself recalling longingly the superb effect achieved in this venue's Madame Butterfly a few years ago when the chorus were positioned around the back of the Stalls for the Humming Chorus. There is nothing comparable here and I did wonder if Ticciati had taken the necessary care to send people out around the auditorium to check the sound and the balance - we missed the expertise that a conductor such as Donald Runnicles brings to such matters.

And so to turn fully to Mijnssen's production. This is overall coherent, if, as we shall see, flawed, in Act One. It goes off the rails in Act Two, and by Act Three was increasingly confused and at war with the text. Act One opens with a pointless bit of dumb show of Amfortas in his hospital bed - presumably from the usual current directorial fear that otherwise the audience won't grasp what has been happening (given that Gurnemanz explains it all in detail this seems particularly odd). There's also a projection of a Biblical line about Cain and Abel - one of the production's ideas, it gradually becomes sort of clear, is to recast Amfortas and Klingsor as those fated brothers - but it is too confusingly worked through to hit home. Once the curtain arises permanently for Act One we were in a rather dimly lit columned space (designer Ben Baur) that increasingly reminded me of a rundown Oxbridge college, with the conclusion of the Act staged, unsuccessfully, as a version of high table. Normally I find highly annoying directorial decisions to bring on characters where they normally don't appear, but Mijnssen's decision to have Titurel on stage throughout Act One is one of her few ideas that really does work. There are a number of touching scenic pictures - Gurnemanz/Titurel looking out at the rising sun early on, and the general atmosphere of warmth between them throughout the Act. Similarly, the staging brings out the tensions of the Titurel-Amfortus relationship with far more point than I have previously seen. The trouble with Act One is that pretty much every time a good bit of thought through direction is getting going something more ineffective is inserted. To give some examples, it's very difficult to do the swan business convincingly and this doesn't succeed - it's partly a problem that the surtitles are asserting the swan is only wounded when we can see quite clearly this swan has ceased to be. The transformation staging simply consists of setting the room and then the table for dinner and there just isn't enough for the ensemble to do to last out the music, nor is it in sufficient keeping with the majesty of that music. Then there's the fact that the Grail Knights, at least so far as I could see, were only allowed either the body or the blood but not both which made no sense. I was not unpersuaded by the idea of the Knights wanting to set upon Parsifal but I was totally unconvinced that Gurnemanz would be in such a trance (or were we to think him asleep - even more unpersuasive) as not to notice them beating up Parsifal and/or that were he to notice he would not stop them. Lastly, Gurnemanz was clearly directed to sob loudly over the final chords - the same emotion could be conveyed by an actor of Relyea's calibre without the disruption to the musical mood.

But overall there's enough dramatic punch, and interesting ideas that do come across in Act One to forgive the problems. As soon as the curtain rose on Act Two things worsen. We're in exactly the same space as in Act One. Has Klingsor broken into the castle (I forgot to mention that he bafflingly wanders in during the ritual at the end of Act One so it is in that sense plausible that Grail security is not up to the mark)? Has he built his own version of the castle complete in nearly every detail? Nothing in the staging really explains this decision, and it has the further unsatisfactory consequence of subjecting us to the same wearying to look at dismal environment in an act where in theory there is supposed to be more colour. Perhaps it's simply an indication of budgetary limitations. Then the sets of curtains, almost never a good idea in operatic productions - past horrors came quickly to mind - start getting opened and closed so that additional bits of set can be wheeled in. In this case we get a blasted heath with dead trees, which looks like it's wandered out of a different show altogether, plus Amfortas's bed, now occupied by Herzeleide (Parsifal's deceased mother). There are very good reasons why most directors don't decide to show us Herzeleide. The whole of the Kundry-Parsifal-Herzeleide scene is weakly directed - too much ineffective wandering or standing about waiting for the next move, so it was, to be frank, a bit of a relief dramatically when Klingsor reappears. The fight is sadly also not well handled. One other point has to be mentioned here. Klingsor brandishes a flick knife - we've previously seen this in pointless dumb show in Act One involving young versions of Amfortas, Klingsor and Kundry - and I assumed, because there was no other directorial explanation offered at this stage, that the flick knife was representing the Spear.

And so to Act Three. We begin with yet more tiresome dumb show. There now, for reasons that never became clear to me, were old versions of Klingsor and Kundry floating about the place, plus an aged man in stiped pyjamas who looked like he might have wandered in from a nearby lunatic asylum and who perhaps was supposed to be the even older Titurel. All of these hang about the bed, again centre stage, containing Amfortas. Readers familiar with the work may recall that Gurnemanz has to tell Parsifal what has been going on in his absence which is rendered rather silly when he (and we) can see most of it right in front of us. There's particularly acute muddle at the very opening of the act when Mijnssen's appears to want us to take the text about animal moaning where Wagner is clearly referring to Kundry as referring to Amfortas. Processional failings are repeated - in this case all we get is a funeral procession that circles round the bed about three times for no obvious reason except to expose as in Act One that Mijnssen can't think up enough to do for the amount of music there is. It never became clear to me why the dumb show characters were there, or why some characters have doubles and others don't. Climate change is obviously acute in Grail-land where spring means snow. But the most problematic aspect is in the treatment of the Spear. Out of nowhere, as far as I were concerned, we were suddenly asked to believe that Klingsor (also wandering about in defiance of the text) was embodying the Spear. Nothing has been done to set this up earlier in the staging, and it remains confused in Act Three since at other times characters clearly behave as if the flick knife, still very much present, is in fact the Spear. Overall, this is a production with too many ill thought out ideas that fail to cohere, and too many places where one feels Mijnssen simply doesn't know what to do with the actual text - difficult though it is. The pity of it is that some of the ideas are interesting, and she is clearly capable of thoughtful direction of the leads. More restraint and careful thinking through needed next time. One last point. In the second interval I discovered speaking to friends that the whole thing was supposed to be Chekhov influenced - I make it a point not to read directorial programme notes before seeing a show on the principle that if the ideas can't be effectively communicated to me through what is on stage then they have failed - until I had this interval conversation I was completely oblivious to any kind of Russian influence in the staging.

Musically this is a rich enough performance to make it worth picking up a return if you missed out during booking. But it would take some pretty starry casting to persuade me to revisit this production. Mijnssen is next due in the UK to direct the Royal Opera's new Ariodante, a work I adore, sadly on the strength of this Parsifal the omens are not good.

Die Walkure at the Royal, or, Simple is Best

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Mon, 26 May 2025 14:46:00 +0000

Note: This is a review of the performance on Sunday 4th May 2025, drafted soon afterwards but delayed in posting.

After the opening instalment of the new Barrie Kosky Covent Garden Ring last season my views were mixed. This is a much stronger addition which, if only the director could be persuaded to some judicious re-staging and trimming for the full cycle could be really outstanding.

The environment retains the rather spare look of the Rheingold but we do, thank goodness, get an impressive amount of real fire for the closing moments. That third act, once we're down to just the principals and Valkyries is the strongest piece of directing I've seen from Kosky - one which focuses in on the characters and their emotions. He thus ensures that the sister/father-daughter relationships really hit home. In particular, as the Wotan-Brunnhilde scene unfolds Kosky gets that electricity from touch or the lack of it which I've argued for years is one of the most powerful tools directors have.

Kosky also brings this careful direction to bear at points in the first two acts, but on both those occasions fussy and sometimes confusing elements interfere. The Siegmund-Brunnhilde scene suffers worst - this should be directed as a really tightly focused encounter between them. Here the tree trunk from Rheingold reappears and we're back to performers popping up from its holes or having to navigate their way over or around it. As a result the scene fails both dramatically and musically to build the kind of tension it can. In Act One Kosky seems a bit unclear as to when he wants audience or Siegmund to notice the sword. The sword is well concealed until Siegmund's spring monologue at which point lighting and movement seemed to me to suggest he might have seen it (& I certainly spotted it at that point) - but going back afterwards the text suggests to me that really Siegmund shouldn't see it until Sieglinde points it out. Hunding's house is an unpersuasive construction signified by a single flat with two doors and if you stop and think about the position of those two doors and what is supposed to lie behind them, plus the location of the table/chairs it makes increasingly less sense. The handling of that table/chairs is mistaken - if you're going to have a full scale meal then put them on stage from the beginning - it makes no sense given the apparent size of the Hundings' living area that they're kept stacked off stage. Kosky then gives himself further problems by resorting to the cliche of having Hunding kick over the furniture to ensure we know he's angry, and Sieglinde then clearing the mess up when it seems pretty clear that Hunding wouldn't willingly leave her alone with Siegmund and I'm fairly sure the music doesn't require him to do so. Lastly, Hunding's Act One costume is bizarre, particularly giving him a gun - I puzzled over how that was going to work in the fight but needless to say Kosky reverts to giving Hunding an axe to match Notung. The last is the right decision but then why give Hunding a gun to begin with, and why on earth would he abandon it for an axe when the gun would clearly secure victory far more easily.

Kosky's most significant misstep is the determination to have the naked Erda wandering around in nearly every scene, sometimes along with other characters revolving on one of two tiny revolves (it's a case in miniature of NT Olivier revolvitis). The Erda device should be completely cut - it adds nothing and is often unhelpfully distracting. We can work out that the world is at stake without it (& indeed I do wonder if you don't know the work and you haven't seen the Rheingold quite what you would make of it). There's also a textual problem created by having her hear most of the Wotan-Brunnhilde Act Three confrontation. In the Wanderer/Erda scene in Siegfried she tells him to ask Brunnhilde's advice and seems surprised to discover what Wotan has done in this opera - it'll be interesting to see if Kosky tries to deal with this in how he stages that scene or just ignores it.

Musically this is a very strong evening. I felt Christopher Maltman (Wotan) had really come on from Rheingold and was a consistently commanding presence physically and vocally. In particular he paced Act Three really well - finding the necessary punch in his opening anger while still retaining sufficient weight and warmth for the conclusion - his "Leb wohl" was deeply moving. There is a lot to like in Elisabet Strid's Brunnhilde - she's a compelling stage presence, like Maltman carrying easily to the Amphi - and she sings impressively in Act Two. I thought she tired a little in the latter stages of Act Three but that's a small point. The human trio give a fine account vocally of Act One with Natalya Romaniw's Sieglinde especially standing out for me. Soloman Howard's Hunding also deserves particular credit for his fearless handling of his death. The Valkyries are a superb ensemble - their massed outbursts thrilling. In the pit the Orchestra played magnificently and I was far more persuaded by Pappano's reading than in Rheingold - just occasionally in the latter stages of Act One and the Brunnhilde-Siegmund scene I thought he let the tension drop but that may have been an effect of staging issues. Act Three was a seamless, totally compelling whole.

Altogether, for all my quibbles, this is a very strong evening of opera and bears encouraging signs for the rest of the cycle.

Richard II at the Bridge, or Making the Text Live

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 15:06:00 +0000

The last time I saw this play it was an RSC production at the Barbican featuring a mesmerising performance from David Tennant in the title role. The time before that was as part of the equally unforgettable RSC History Cycle at the Roundhouse. This new production from Nicholas Hytner at the Bridge was therefore up against stiff competition.

The first test of any Shakespeare production, and quite a few recent ones I've seen have not passed it, is whether the text is well delivered such that it ceases to be a barrier. While not completely flawless I'm pleased to say that the standard from this ensemble is very high. The money speeches are all there (Gaunt's "this sceptered isle", Richard's various monologues etc.), but there's also much fine work from those in the smaller roles. Hytner also effectively finds humour, though I sometimes found the tendency of the audience to laugh in moments of tension a bit baffling.

Hytner and designer Bob Crowley's production is more mixed - serviceable but not often freshly illuminating in itself. The best work comes from Hytner's partnership with movement director James Cousins. There's welcome fluidity to many scenes. Effective tension is found in the physical placing of performers, and this too mitigates the shortcomings over the broader production. The direction of Jonathan Bailey's Richard in particular helps to illuminate the text. In the early scenes much is made, subtly, of how Richard carries himself physically and looks on others, thus later a line about having only lately learned that his look now doesn't achieve the same effect has the more punch. Similarly there's a finely judged symmetry between the way he regally stretches out both hands in an early scene, with the parallel moment after his fall when the same gesture conjures an image of one to be crucified. Bruno Poet's lighting also contributes strongly, highlighting protagonists, lingering on observers foreseeing doom.

It's not that the broader production is seriously flawed but it fails to give us much in the sense of place. It's at its best when barest - the admittance of various bits of furniture and other objects - a large kitchen table that seems to have wandered out of a vicarage, the hospital bed, the excessive artillery piece - don't add to the drama, rather slowing it and causing one to notice the operation of the stage lifts.

The most serious problem is Carolyn Dowling's intrusive, ineffective soundscape. I was not surprised to discover reading her bio in the programme afterwards that she was also responsible for sound design for the Almeida's Summer and Smoke and several undistinguished Norris era NT productions. In this case the problem is that the soundscape seems to necessitate the miking of the entire company (unless that's also a consequence of the thrust stage configuration). The show survives better than many straight plays I've seen in recent times that include miking - and at least we're not subjected to people seizing handheld microphones and shouting into them - but it does have the usual effect of flattening dynamic range.

Turning to the ensemble I've already mentioned Bailey's strong performance in the title role - drawing the eye while not seeking to dominate except as the text requires. He's well matched by Royce Pierreson's Bolingbroke - one regrets that we don't get to follow that King's maturity and end into the Henry IV plays. There's fine supporting character work from Michael Simkins's York. I hadn't recalled the role of Aumerle from either of the two previous versions of this play I've seen and on this viewing it's a bit of a confused piece of writing. I mention this to commend Vinnie Heaven who throws himself into fitting it all together - strutting arrogantly alongside Richard in the early scenes, playing the gage on gage scene with great wit, and making the best of the discovery and pardon sequence. Altogether he's a lively presence with an expressive face and I look forward to seeing him in further roles. Stephan Boyce, in as understudy for Northumberland, did a superb job and was deservedly singled out at the curtain call. Many of the junior Lords and supporters despite often having brief scenes to work with successfully made them tell.

Overall, while a mixed production the quality of the acting and movement makes this well worth seeing.

London Tide at the National, or, Missing the Original's Points

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Sun, 05 May 2024 11:36:00 +0000

Note: This is a review of the matinee on Saturday 27th April 2024.

The omens for this show were mixed. On the one hand adaptor and would be lyricist Ben Power was behind the superb Lehman Trilogy, on the other hand I'd only encountered PJ Harvey's music once at an Edinburgh International Festival performance and the experience made me pretty doubtful as to whether she was suited to theatre. I also need to note that the show was up against tough competition - I consider the 1998 BBC TV version of this, my favourite Dickens novel, as a masterpiece of adaptation. Following an indifferent first half I found myself post interval increasingly infuriated.

The show clocks in at around three hours. That BBC adaptation was 4x90 minutes so some cutting of Dickens's substantial text is clearly unavoidable. But Power makes bizarre, and in the second half maddening, decisions (spoilers follow). The most serious of these is to decide that this is really a story about a certain kind of female empowerment. Yes two of the principal characters are women (Lizzie Hexham and Bella Wilfer) and yes there is social commentary in their stories but it is also the case that their love stories are central and, if you want to emphasise the social point, that of class rather than female emancipation from men is much more central to the Dickens original and would enable a much truer adaptation. In order to achieve his lecture about women's potential in the person of an independent Lizzie at the conclusion Power has to significantly mess around with the original. This is not simply by the refusal to allow Lizzie to marry a reformed Wrayburn but to make a joke of Headstone's violent attack on Wrayburn, and to substantially diminish Wrayburn's moral journey. Power similarly diminishes Bella's story. Dickens's novel is full of issues of class and wealth but this version makes almost nothing of this.

At the secondary character level it's understandable to get the audience out in three hours that things have to be cut, but again the choices are most peculiar. The Wilfer family get an excessive amount of stage time, Gaffer Hexham gets his own pointless musical number, and the expansion of Miss Potterton's role is irritating - to favour these characters and completely cut Silas Wegg and Mr Venus, I mean really? It's perhaps unsurprising in a version that isn't too keen on exploring the meanings of love that Mrs Boffin is cut completely, though again it diminishes several storylines that do survive. Betty Higdon can be dispensed with from a plot point of view but it's a curious decision given the desire to stress female empowerment since it also means that the key meeting between Lizzie and Bella is cut and the show's replacement attempts to link them feel forced.

Despite these significant cuts Power's adaptation lacks pace and dramatic tension. It still runs a long three hours, the songs don't help, and Power still fails to establish motivation in crucial instances. The most obvious is around the desperation of Wrayburn and Headstone's search for Lizzie. I thought longingly of the superb sequence in that BBC adaptation as Headstone follows Wrayburn through the London streets, driven ever more insane by his rival - a sequence that powerfully illustrates how Headstone is gradually goaded to murder - there's nothing comparable here.

Much has been made by the National of the songs being contributed by PJ Harvey but I'm afraid they would all be better cut. Half of them deliver essentially the same let's describe London message, Sondheim needed only a few phrases to establish a comparable London far more convincingly, though these songs are also hampered in creating atmosphere and place by a considerable production issue we'll come on to. The other half for individual characters tell us nothing that the adaptation doesn't convey in other ways. Music and lyrics are unmemorable, and the latter not always clearly sung - indeed the only phrase that I recalled even a couple of hours later was "London isn't England" which felt like tiresome point making. The whole situation is not helped by the fact this is mostly not a vocally strong cast. The band are located to the right (from the audience's point of view) but it's never really satisfactorially established why they need to be so visible, apart from the fact that it makes the bare stage slightly less so.

That bigger production issue is that it seems as if the show might have been designed to announce to the audience that the National has a funding problem. The stage is largely bare for the entirety of the show. Perhaps this is why the production team felt they had to keep projecting the location names for fear we might not be able to tell from the onstage action. To try to disguise the empty stage the production resorts to overuse of raising and lowering the lighting rig. Occasionally this does manage to suggest the river Thames, but overall it fails to create a convincing world, and my partner who is much less familiar with the source material didn't recognise that the lighting rig was doing this until we were dicussing it afterwards. Power's Lehman Trilogy had a similarly spare staging, but used what it possessed with far more imagination, assisted by superior text and I'm afraid it has to be said a higher class ensemble.

The set problem is not assisted by the personnel management of director Ian Rickson and movement director Anna Morrissey. The choreography in the musical numbers is thin and undistinguished, and elsewhere the production team rarely succeed in creating that electricity in touch or relative position of performers that for me is at the heart of great theatre, and is even more needed when the ensemble is so exposed by the staging.

That ensemble is solid but fails to transcend the flaws of the adaptation and production. Bella Maclean's Bella and Ami Tredrea's Lizzie are stronger than their male lovers. Ironically perhaps the figure who gets closest to capturing a character with the richness of the original is Peter Wight's Noddy Boffin - the one moment when I felt that we might really be getting at something behind the text was in one of the scenes when he's talking about his secretary, but unfortunately, again, Power's adaptation doesn't build on this having cut all the complexity of Boffin's discovery of that secretary's true identity.

One other problem has to be mentioned. There are two crucial acts of violence, and both here are frankly risibly staged. Headstone gives Wrayburn from my viewpoint what appeared to be a single blow on the shoulder rather than the head and the next time we see Wrayburn he is nevertheless bandaged round the head and yet pretty quickly up and about. The attempt to make plastic sheeting double for the Thames in the drowning at the end is equally poor.

I want to end with one cut I haven't yet mentioned which goes to the heart of the flaws of this show. In the original novel and the BBC adaptation we end with Mr Twemlow, a very minor figure in the rest of the novel but elevated at the conclusion to the voice of the public as Dickens would encourage them to be. In the BBC version for me his quiet tolerance and Lightwood's acknowledgement are really moving. The problem with so much of our strident one-sided political theatre (and indeed political life more broadly) is that I don't think it can see any longer how powerful that quieter voice can be. Dickens (and the BBC version) are I think clear whose side they're on but they have still left space for debate - but debate is, I'm afraid, exactly what so much contemporary theatre particularly during Norris's reign at the National has shied away from. Instead, as so often in the Norris era, this play ends with lecture. Overall, a dull and ultimately irritating afternoon.

Macbeth at the Donmar, or, "Have you really paid £65 to see a radio play?"

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 14:56:00 +0000

Note: This is a review of the matinee on Saturday 13th January 2024.

When it was announced that audience members would have to wear headphones for the duration of this show I strongly considered not booking. The only thing that changed my mind, apart from my completionist tendencies, was the presence in the cast of David Tennant. He gives a fine performance. Indeed, the acting and verse speaking is strong across the company. Unfortunately this is not enough to transcend the fundamentally flawed concept, and dull staging.

That central concept is the aforementioned requirement that we all wear headphones so that a soundscape can be overlaid on the actors speech. Some evidently find this makes for a more intimate theatrical experience. I found the opposite. Although the audio does have dynamic range it isn't the same as the spoken dynamic range that a small space like the Donmar conjures without artificial aid. The effect is especially jarring when the accompanying soundscape is minimal and you just have performers talking, and even more so if you're a Donmar regular as I am, looking down at an ensemble you would usually be listening to without effort and feeling, because of the headphones that while they are physically right in front of you, their voices feel both overly close and oddly removed. I would also say that overall I found the audio sound too loud, though I gradually got used to it as the afternoon wore on (there did not appear to be any mechanism to adjust it). It fundamentally feels to me a waste to inflict this barrier on Shakespearean verse speaking of the calibre an actor like Tennant posssesses.

I might have been more forgiving if I'd found the soundscape more compelling but it's undermined by directorial confusion and, ultimately, I wasn't persuaded you couldn't achieve many of the same effects by a more standard approach to sound design. In advance, not being a fan of sudden shocks, I'd feared the possiblilities of this kind of approach (Shakespeare more as horror movie if you will) but surprisingly the production, apart from a couple of absolutely blackouts, does little of this kind. Early on I thought that perhaps the justification for the approach was to put us more inside the characters heads - so the witches are invisble in the opening scene but we hear the standard dialogue, so I assume we were intended to wonder whether Macbeth and Banquo are alone in seeing them, or if the voices are only in their minds. But director Max Webster is inconsistent - in the witches second scene a bevy of them and other apparitions are clearly present on stage. We also see, I think, the ghost of Lady Macbeth's dead child at an earlier point. Here, as with the headphones, I couldn't avoid the conclusion that Webster just doesn't trust what theatre on its own terms is capable of, or the audience's ability to imagine. While we're on the subject of ghosts there's also one serious directorial misstep. I was seating at the end of the central block, second row in the Circle. In the banquet scene the decision was taken to place Banquo's "empty" chair front stage centre - in other words invisibly to me and I would imagine others in the Circle. As far as I could judge Webster chose the empty chair approach, but for that to have the impact it should it's vital that all the audience see the empty chair - and it's inexcusable in a space the size of the Donmar not to make sure that's the case.

The staging itself is drearily reminiscent of Webster's similarly bare Henry V for the same venue in 2022. There's a single white square on which most of the action takes place, and an enclosed box along the back of the type beloved of far too many current directors and which I have rarely found persuasive. At least there wasn't much action shut into the box (as I feared when I first saw the set there would be). Apart from some chairs in the box and occasional swords and cups there's nothing else in the way of set or props until the very end. The actors with the exception of Cush Jumbo's Lady Macbeth are predominantly Scottish but otherwise there is little concrete sense of place or time, though the costumes have an archaism which led me to think we were somewhere in the past. This creates one especially bizarre effect. About forty minutes in the Porter (Jatinder Singh Randhawa) decisively breaks the fourth wall with the mocking question used in the title of this review. It's the most mistaken textual interpolation I've seen for some time because it is fundamentally accurate and it does the production no favours to directly point this out - indeed I felt I was being treated with contempt. Randhawa follows this with a joke about Braverman which feels like it has wandered in from a completely different show - there is absolutely nothing else to suggest we are in the present. This scene ends with little lecture-like

remarks, look Webster/Randhawa seem anxious to point out, we understand the clever thing Shakespeare was doing here. The majority of the audience seemed to enjoy this version of the scene, but while they laughed I was rendered pretty angry.

Webster also struggles with the end. The pacing drags anyway in the run in to the final battle. My clearest memory of the end (from the TV series Slings & Arrows) is "Hail to thee, King of Scotland". It turns out, checking online afterwards, that this is pretty nearly right, with just a short speech for Malcolm following. Webster however transposes dialogue between Siward and Ross from just before this to the very end - heard over our headphones after the company have left the stage. It makes for an unsatisfactory petering out of the show.

Lastly on the production side I'm afraid as in his Henry V the fight scenes are unsatisfactory. It is very difficult in the Donmar because of the small space and the proximity of the audience, but Webster doesn't help himself by the box at the back which restricts manouvres still further. He then goes for a balletic approach which coupled with Alasdair Macrae's celtic style score struck me more like a military review than a bloody battle for a kingdom (the score as has too often been the case in London theatre in recent years is overly intrusive). The Macbeth/Macduff final confrontation was just baffling - not so much in terms of Macbeth's behaviour since he is obviously unhinged by this point but in Macduff's delay in running him through. When we finally see blood it is too little too late, and as with other occasions when Webster does decide to show it's a puzzle as to why.

As noted at the outset the cast do their very best with this unsatisfactory set up. The text is delivered to a very high standard. Tennant is especially compelling and the desperate weariness of "Tomorrow and tomorrow" was one moment that really conjured theatrical stillness and focus and almost made all the rest fall away. He and Cush Jumbo's Lady Macbeth are a more convincing couple than the last time I saw this play at the National, but I wasn't entirely convinced the production had really got a sufficiently clear idea about what they think of each other - there wasn't ultimately enough of that electricity of the small touch or look which makes for really great theatre. As an aside Jumbo is bafflingly required to double as Lady Macduff's maid/kinswoman in a way which makes no sense. Among the rest I would single out Cal Macaninch's Banquo whose presence is compelling (it's a pity the text doesn't give him more stage time), and Moyo Akande's Ross who solid throughout suddenly blazes late on with a very fine understated performance of the moment when she informs Macduff of the death of his family.

There was the longest returns queue I've seen for years when I arrived at the Donmar, but despite the strong cast there are too many other issues with this show to make it worth, in my view, queueing up if you haven't secured tickets. After what appeared the warm audience reaction to the Porter's scene, I realised later, I had subconsciously been preparing myself for a rapid standing ovation at the end but interestingly, only a handful rose - even when Tennant took his bow. Others have clearly got a lot more out of this than me, but if you don't have tickets, I'd suggest waiting for Tennant's next, hopefully un-miked, stage Shakespeare.

Das Rheingold at the Royal, or, An Analytical Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 07:25:00 +0000

It was interesting to see this production so close to Barrie Kosky's Dialogues at Glyndebourne earlier in the summer. There as here the production can be defended on a textual basis (and there are some striking close readings) but the overall argument for me came at a cost of emotional engagement and dramatic tension.

Kosky's central thesis appears to be that the Earth (Erda) is being exploited and ruined by everybody else on stage. He thus makes the character of Erda much more present than would usually be the case. Almost the first image we see (before a note has been played) is a practically naked Erda walking very slowly across the stage. The most effective deployment occurs in Scene 3 when she, or more precisely her breasts, are hooked up to Alberich's mining machinery. Elsewhere I wasn't convinced having her hovering around in scenes, so far as I could judge from the Amphi largely ignored by everybody else, added a great deal. And I think it comes at a cost - sometimes this is just distracting (some of the wandering about as with other aspects of the movement), but it also for me reduced the impact of Erda's intervention in the final scene. I'm sure the intention is to heighten not diminish our concern for her, but I'm afraid for me it had rather the opposite effect.

The approach does offer Kosky a clever solution to the Entry of the Gods into Valhalla given the evident financial limitations of the production. A spotlight on the figure of Erda cleverly implies the Gods moving through space to some place in the skies. We'll come back to the rest of the ending later.

The main bit of set (designer Rufus Didwiszus) is a very large tree branch, plus the tree itself (plainly the damaged world ash) which reminded me rather too much of Christopher Alden's Opera North Norma some years back now - though I was interested to find re-reading my post on that show that his tree annoyed me less at the time than I'd thought it did. I was baffled by the fact that we open with the backstage shutter raised - except that presumably it is in some way supposed to explain, within the world of the production, the fact that that shutter has to be raised and lowered in full view later in order to clear the tree for the Entry of the Gods. I couldn't make out how the shutter and the backstage space beyond it related to the main stage in terms of the production and as a result I found that set change cumbersome. Generally speaking, despite the fact that the set is minimal, set changes are noticeable and contribute to a failure to keep the drama moving along enough - the Glyndebourne Dialogues had similar problems.

Kosky's solution to the problem of the gold seemed plainly inspired by "golden flood" in the text and works well in the opening scene and in relation to the mining environment of Scene 3 but gets into difficulty when it comes to securing Freia's release. Kosky plays up the humiliation angle here (again defensibly in textual terms) by having the liquid gold poured over Freia in a bath that has to be wheeled on for this purpose. This slows things down when they really need to keep moving to the climactic confrontation. In addition, because some of the buckets to be carried by the supernumeries would plainly have offered too much risk of spillage it's visibly clear (at least I should think from anywhere higher than the Stalls) that not all the hoard has been used to cover Freia when we get to demands for Tarnhelm and Ring. Because Kosky then insists on sending everybody off for the Erda-Wotan confrontation (despite the fact the stage is almost entirely darkened) a giant has to wheel the bath off, making it evident that this is a physical challenge which, for his character, it shouldn't be. As an aside Kosky really does nothing in costume or staging to set the giants physically apart from the gods. Other productions I've seen (the Albery Scottish Opera Ring which I still pine for someone to revive especially) have also got much more out of Fasolt's love for Freia, Kosky lets it pass as far as I could see unmarked.

Kosky goes for a familiar approach with the Gods of diminishing their stature to begin with, portraying them as croquet playing empire builders, dangerously close to caricature, with Froh and Donner particularly mocked - notwithstanding the failure to make the giants look like giants there is no doubt who would win in a fight. While I'm perfectly prepared to accept that the Gods have sown the seeds of their own demise before the curtain opens I personally think it's a mistake to make that too obvious. I do think they need a bit more grandeur and glamour, done straight not mocked as seemed to me the case with the costuming for the Entry of the Gods, to give the drama somewhere to go in the later operas.

I mentioned earlier the feeling that this is a financially limited production. This shows in the dropping of the curtain for all the major scene changes (so that the ash tree can be re-dressed), and in that Entry of the Gods. I quite liked the rainbow confetti effect but there wasn't for me enough to it to cover the amount of music it has to match. It also doesn't find the same kind of point that Albery got with his rising rainbow cages in which the Gods stood eating apples and tossing the cores nonchalently away. With some things the production doesn't even try - the Tarnhelm transformations are just feeble (again I pined for the flame & giant claw of the Albery Rheingold), and there's no attempt to give even a hint of a magnificent palace (unless brightly lighting the proscenium arch in the interludes was supposed to convey that it was standing in for Valhalla).

No movement director is credited so I assume that Kosky is responsible for the people management. From the Amphi I rarely thought the production found the tension in interactions and small looks and gestures that regular readers will know I highly prize. There are some pretty clumsy entrances (the first entry of the Giants in particular has none of the drama thundering in the music), and rather too many occasions when people seem to be scurrying ineffectively round the tree branch. Ideas are also not always followed through. It's clever to have the giants scoop up the apples before making off with Freia, and to have Loge grab the only one remaining and torture the Gods by refusing to surrender it is a nice touch. But the Gods crawling across the stage towards him was overdone and given they're supposed to be desperate that none of them snatched up the mostly eaten apple after Wotan has discarded it was annoyingly inconsistent.

There are some minor sillinesses - the attaching of what looked like a fake penis to Alberich in Scene 1 - yes we know the Rhinemaidens are emasculating him you don't need the attempted cheap laugh, and the overdone killing of Fasolt with I think Donner's hammer which having to my eye been invisible to that point spends the early part of that scene leaning conspicuously and bizarrely against the wall. Characters are remarkably careless with their treasured objects in this production - Alberich leaving the Tarnhelm lying about for anyone (in this case Wotan) to casually pick up was also odd. We'll draw a veil over Fasolt's overdone screams (a repeat of a similar misstep in Dialogues).

Overall, though, it's not that it's a production to have one desperately closing one's eyes, or reduced to bafflement, but it left me too much at an emotional distance, and too often noticing the clunkiness of scene changes, or wondering why characters were moving in a particular way. It also doesn't do enough to keep the drama moving forward.

And that brings us to the second snag of the afternoon. The Orchestra play beautifully and it's a powerful and deserved gesture to bring them on stage for the curtain call. But I remain unpersuaded by Pappano as a Wagnerian. Rheingold can be both disjointed and the conversations can have their longuers. I personally think that this makes musical momentum crucial and, for me, Pappano didn't find enough of it. Two places in particular where I sought more dramatic build were the confrontations with the Giants in Scenes 2 and 4. I also found Erda's monologue painfully slow.

The standout performance among the singers for me was Sean Panikkar's Loge, this was my first encounter with him. He has a lovely stage energy which carried easily to the Amphi, and was married to well characterised singing. The three Rhinemaidens (Katharina Konradi, Niamh O'Sullivan and Marvic Monreal) were similarly impressive particularly in their opening scene. The other roles are all solidly sung. Christopher Maltman (Wotan) and Christopher Purves (Alberich) both had vocally commanding sections but at other times, in the Amphi at any rate, either needed more heft, or the balance with the orchestra needed more checks.

In sum what this afternoon never really succeeded in doing was suppressing the critic in me and making it just a matter of emotional engagement with these characters and their dilemmas. And because I personally rate achieving emotional punch over intellectual argument in live performance I ultimately found this a mixed afternoon. That said, the intellectual argument has enough points of interest to make me curious as to how Kosky's interpretation will develop through the cycle. And it also has to be admitted that Rheingold is not the easiest show to achieve that emotional punch with - for that the big test will be Die Walkure, which presumably we can expect next season.

Dialogues des Carmelites at Glyndebourne, or, A Minority Opinion

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 10:19:00 +0000

Note: This is a review of the performance on Saturday 29th July 2023.

I feel obliged to preface what follows with a few caveats. First, I am very much in a minority in not being overwhelmed by this production (though my partner was in agreement) both as regards the critics and the rest of the audience at the performance I attended if the applause for Barrie Kosky's appearance was any guide. Second, I've seen a few Kosky productions over the years (usually in Edinburgh) and I can't think of a single one that really blew me away compared to his unstaged concerts of Yiddish opera and Weill. Third, I was very tired. Nevertheless I have to come back to this - the previous occasion I saw this opera live, the Royal Opera House/Robert Carsen production (reviewed here) - I found it overwhelmingly powerful. This performance, for me, did not achieve a similar punch.

My first issue was designer Katrin Lea Tag's set. It's a roughly triangular room, the white walls oddly stippled, and with a single narrow entrance/exit at the rear. This has to serve as the Marquis's house, all of the various rooms in the convent, and the execution space at the conclusion. I never really felt I had a concrete sense of where we were supposed to be, despite the period costumes of the opening scene. Having, for about two thirds of the show, only the single point of access at the back coupled with the closed in nature of the rest of the set should create the claustrophobic atmosphere the work needs, but I can only say I found it much less effective in this regard than the Carsen production where so much of that effect was achieved by the bodies of the mob - with a consequent much greater sense of their threat. That one point of access also makes set changes, despite the minimal amount of set, cumbersome to achieve (though I think a factor here may also be Kosky's determination to slow down the action which we'll come back to). After the interval (spoilers) one of the walls is breached. Others in my party found this an enormously effective coup de theatre but again I found the mob here, despite the spitting and physical violence, less threatening than I recall it in the Carsen production. There are also smaller annoyances, the (presumably) blood trickling down the wall in the first half I thought excessive, the production of the flowers from under one of the walls cumbersome.

My second difficulty after the set design was Kosky's approach to the work's themes. He leans into an idea of hysteria - most particularly with Sally Matthews's Blanche, but also with what I found the tiresome heavy breathing of the Chevalier, and the outbreak of panicked cries from one of the nuns just before the final scene. Now I'm not saying that the text doesn't support the idea of hysteria - whether religious or revolutionary, but I do think that Kosky is ultimately reluctant to see a positive power in faith (with the exceptions of Madame Lidoine, and perhaps in part of Constance). I found this problematic. On this occasion, unlike with the Carsen production, I wasn't convinced as to why they'd agreed to take the vow, or why they go on to execution, or, perhaps most problematically, why Blanche returns at the last to join the other nuns in death. It also seemed to me that the undermining of nobility in faith is at odds with Poulenc's music where the setting of the religious texts in particular is so powerfully asserting it.

The one character who seemed to me to really transcend this was Golda Schultz's utterly compelling Lidoine - for me the finest performance of the evening. Vocally she transfixed me from her first entrance, and after an opening scene where she over gestures (echoes of Sellers) I found her acting compelling. The tableau of her knelt in agonised prayer was one occasion when Kosky's approach of lingering on images at the end of scenes really worked for me. She was similarly deeply moving in the prison scene, and it strikes me as revealing that she achieves that with virtually no movement at all.

I've made a few mentions now of the way the action is slowed, particularly it seemed to me after the interval, by lingering on tableaux at the end of each scene. Part of my objection to this was that I increasingly felt Kosky was determined to impose particular views on me about character and my instinct was to rebel. But I think my more serious objection is that it slows down the drama when it most needs to keep moving forward to the grim tragedy of the final scene.

I've already mentioned Golda Schultz's spell-binding performance. Of the rest of the singers Karen Cargill's powerful, forbidding Mere Marie and Florie Valiquette's Constance are also especially strong - and I would note that Constance's comments here about the old Prioress did make me think anew about the idea that the Prioress has got Blanche's death by mistake. I previously heard Sally Matthews sing Blanche at the Royal Opera. Vocally she is very fine but because of the production the character didn't move me as it did there. I also felt that Katarina Dalayman's Old Prioress was not in the same league as Deborah Polaski at Covent Garden. Again, I'm not convinced that Kosky's approach of overdoing the spasms and the groaning is helpful. I'm perfectly prepared to concede that this, like the heavy breathing and the panicked cries may be more true to life, but I do think on stage such things easily tip over into seeming excess - and here they did for me. How much more powerful, I wonder, might that panic in the final scene have been if we'd had nothing similar earlier on? But the other problem for me is I think the Old Prioress needs more vocal heft, in particular when she commits Blanche to Mere Marie's care. At the Royal Opera the moment had a terrifying power - here the same effect was in the orchestra, but Dalayman didn't have the vocal weight to match it, at least from where I was sitting. The ensemble of nuns sang powerfully and movingly, and the mob chorus were similarly vocally impressive.

In the pit the London Philharmonic were on outstanding form and Ticciati both loved details and where needed drove the drama home. I did sometimes want more momentum but I suspect its absence was not a consequence of Ticciati lingering too much musically but of Kosky's pauses between scenes.

As I noted at the outset I am very much in a minority on this one, but I can only come back to where I started. In advance I expected to be emotionally harrowed. Instead, I found myself too often at a distance, and remembering aspects of the Carsen production and feeling that this version was falling visually and emotionally short.

Wozzeck at the Royal, or, In Bafflement

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 11:53:00 +0000

Note: I've struggled to get back to blogging since the pandemic. On several occasions I've written pieces off line, put off publishing them here, and the moment passed. I originally wasn't going to write about this performance because it seems clear to me that I haven't got to grips with the work, but thoughts have been nagging at me so I've decided to set them down but I think this probably has to be considered a reflection rather than a standard review.

This was my second attempt to get to grips with this opera. I previously saw it at ENO in (Google informs me) 2013, a performance which has not lodged in my memory at all. I also saw a theatrical mash-up of the work with Schubert's Winterreise, entitled Woyzeck in Winter at the Barbican in 2017 - and it is the reimagined Schubert elements of that which have remained with me. The presence of Christian Gerhaher in this new Royal Opera production, and the fact that the work is widely regarded as so influential in the genre, persuaded me to give it another hearing. I still find myself baffled.

The evening did not begin auspiciously for me. Upon entering the auditorium the audience is greeted by a line up of loos across the front of the stage and I had the ominous feeling that I had seen this before. This is of course literally true - I thought of the ENO Bieto Masked Ball - but it also seems to me more broadly true about the production and the work. The overall message of the latter seems to me to be that people behave awfully and the world is going to hell. I can see that back in 1925 this was much more unusual certainly in operatic terms, I feel like contemporary theatre is replete with plays along these lines, and awful behaviour and people seems to be the default setting of much contemporary opera. The trick then, as far as plot and characters are concerned, presumably must be either to somehow make this fresh, or to take the audience in a vice like grip so that despite the familiarity of the world one cannot turn one's head away. This performance achieved neither for me.

I also clearly struggle to engage with Berg's musical world. I think I've heard his Violin Concerto live a couple of times and found it compelling, but I can't recall other pieces that have gripped me. As opera I can hear that for its time it was doing new things - in particularly shying away from distinct musical numbers, from individual arias, but also, it seems to me, from Wagner or Strauss through composition. There are echoes of both those composers which I confess made me long to be listening to them. There is fleeting lyricism and climaxes that from glancing at other accounts are supposed to be shattering. But on this hearing I found the whole very stop/start, disjointed. It didn't seem to me to build up musical momentum and emotionally I was left cold. I did wonder if, in the hands of another conductor (Pappano was on the podium), different effects might be achieved.

Contrary to others, I've been underwhelmed by Deborah Warner's recent Britten stagings for the House and this didn't change my mind. It seemed to me that Warner couldn't decide between a realist or an abstract staging. The set is minimal and from the Amphitheatre it feels open and often bare - as with her Billy Budd I felt it worked against the sense of claustrophobia it seems to me the work needs. The general appearence is grotty and rundown - it probably has to be for this work - but I felt I'd seen it before. I noticed the set being moved and the revolve revoliving too often in ways which seemed to slow down the dramatic momentum. I was also unpersuaded by the little square of fore-cloth dropped between each scene and onto which there is some kind of clever light or filmic projection effect applied - this seemed to me obviously intended to emphasise the idea of a world going out of control but it felt overdone.

As I so plainly struggle with the work I don't think I can comment on the individual performances. The thing that most forcibly struck me is that it seems an odd role for Gerhaher since on this hearing it gives so little scope for the warmth, feeling and beauty that so moved me when hearing him as Wolfram in Tannhauser or most recently as Germont pere. Players and singers certainly all give committed performances but none of them got to me emotionally.

I wasn't originally going to blog about this show. As an operagoer of approaching 30 years one has a feeling with a work like this that is so widely recognised as influential that it must be some kind of failing in oneself not to get it. Work has been very stressful in the last few weeks, and I was tired, so perhaps that was a factor (though on other occasions I've been transported from such concerns by live performance). Will I try again? Perhaps for a particular conductor/director combination, or out of completionism at say the Edinburgh Festival, but I do feel the forces would have to be very persuasive. In the meantime, I remain baffled and unmoved.

BBC Classical Music "Strategy" Update, or, A Disappointing (to put it mildly) Response

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 11:25:00 +0000

Since we last wrote on this senior BBC management (Davie, Moore, Clarke and Webb) have sent replies to at least two of the groups who collectively protested the original strategy. These replies are as un-reassuring as the press release announcing the pause of the decision to close the BBC Singers. They continue to present arguments which date back to the first announcement of the new "strategy" and which we (and others) have taken to pieces. You can read our previous posts on the matter here, here, and here.

I'd much prefer not to have to keep on writing about this situation. I'd also much prefer it if what passes for the press in this country would question senior BBC management robustly about this "strategy" but unfortunately outlets seem to have swallowed the argument that the BBC Singers have been saved, are treating debate as over, and it has faded from mainstream coverage. So I'm afraid it is necessary to repeat myself.

The same reply was sent to both the 800 composers led by Exaudi and to the BBC Young Musicians (I imagine it has probably gone to other groups as well (though individuals who contacted BBC management directly do not seem to be deemed worthy of receiving the response - or at least it has not yet been sent to me). I propose to deal with it point by point.

1) "...we have received approaches from a number of organisations offering alternative funding models for the BBC Singers. If viable, this would secure the future of the Singers....We are still committed to invest more widely in choral singing across the UK, and we want to improve access to the classical sector with a new national choral development programme."

This was all either in the press release announcing the pause or in the original press release on the "strategy" (for links see our past posts). The questions remain as before. With respect to the Singers - How does partially privatising them square with the BBC's public service broadcasting mission - is this option being considered for other aspects of current BBC work? Why is it appropriate for the Singers but not for other areas? Further, what confidence can we have about the long term security of this possible arrangement given the current highly fragile nature of arts funding?

With respect to choral singing - is the money to be invested equivalent to the money that will be saved by partially privatising the Singers? What exactly does "invest more widely in choral singing" mean in practice? How was it decided, and on the basis of what evidence, that that wider investment was a more justifiable use of public money than continuing to fully fund the Singers? With respect to the choral development programme - why is this a job for the BBC? Again, how was this decided?

2) "We will continue to engage with the Musicians' Union and other BBC unions about our proposals for the BBC's English orchestras. We have made it clear that we are committed to meaningful consultation with all the unions involved and to avoiding compulsory redundancies wherever possible. The ambition is to have ensembles which allow us to perform a wider range of repertoire and at more venues. We're aiming to get to 50 new venues in the 2024/25 season across the UK, which will help us to fulfil our responsibility to provide for all our audiences."

It is disappointing, to put it mildly, to find the BBC senior management still peddling what I'm afraid can only be termed nonsense about redundancies to the orchestras being necessary to enable performance of a wider range of repertoire in a wider range of venues. You simply do not need to make redundancies to enable you to do either of those things and senior management should stop claiming otherwise. Either admit that the only justification for these proposed cuts is the need to save money - in which case it should be demonstrated that cuts are being applied equally across the board and if that is not the case justification supplied as to why some areas are being more heavily hit than others - or come up with a justification that can actually be supported by reasoned argument and appropriate evidence. (And by the way the BBC has also still never explained why the English orchestras and their audiences should be treated differently to the Scottish and Welsh orchestras and audiences). Lastly, on this, I should like to see a list of the 50 proposed new venues, specifics on exactly why visits to them wouldn't be possible simply with different configurations of the orchestras as presently constituted, and what repertoire the BBC thinks cannot currently be performed.

3) "We have the ambition to double our funding for music education and launch a range of new training initiatives. We know there is a crisis in music education and we want to do more to address it by being much more active in schools."

BBC senior management continues to refuse to answer basic questions about this. Why is it appropriate for the BBC to spend money on this but not to continue to fully fund the English orchestras? Why should the BBC be taking responsibility which should surely rest with the government for music education? Why has the BBC continued to refuse to supply any data on what education work is already being undertaken, and what it is proposed to do differently so that the licence fee payer can judge whether this decision stands up. Will the amount of money being put into whatever these initiatives are be equivalent to the amount saved from the proposed orchestral redundancies?

4) "All of us are committed to the BBC's role in showcasing the UK's music industries, across the board, and in nurturing emerging talent."

The use of the term "music industries" here may be significant. Is money being diverted from support for classical music to other musical genres? How does the different support balance out and the classical music "strategy" fit with a broader musical strategy? - assuming such a thing exists - I certainly have not seen it. The paragraph goes on to argue that there needs to be "refreshment" because there have been no significant changes to the Performing Groups "in recent years". I am all for periodic review of organisations. That should involve a thorough consideration of all the appropriate evidence, and, where change is deemed appropriate, a reasoned argument based on that evidence for the proposed changes. As I have documented on this blog several times the BBC has failed to demonstrate that they have done this.

5) "While the conversation over the last few weeks has at times been difficult, it is important that the BBC can discuss how the licence fee is best spent."

If only we were having such a discussion. What in fact we are having is a good many of us pointing out the many flaws in, and questions posed by, the BBC's classical music "strategy" and receiving, after some delay, a response from managers which largely fails to address the flaws or to respond to the questions. To repeat myself, it should not be good enough.

Once again, I ask the BBC senior managers who are signatories to the response discussed above to respond properly to questions asked. Then I might find it possible to believe the protestation at the end of the letter that "It is core to the BBC's public service mission to inspire and entertain young and old alike, to appreciate the joys of classical music". As it stands this feels like a rather empty pledge.

BBC U-Turn on Singers Closure?, or Questions that Senior Management Still Need to Answer

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 11:53:00 +0000

What was a rumour (on Lebrecht's blog) last night appears to be fact this morning with a BBC press release announcing that the decision to close the BBC Singers has been "paused" by the corporation. This is, as far as it goes, good news, but there remain major questions for senior management at the corporation to answer.

First, and purely with respect to the Singers, what is to happen going forwards and on what timeline? There's a troubling statement in the report that implies the pause is because "a number of organisations came forward to offer alternative funding". Maybe this is (as my brother suggested to me this morning) just a fig leaf to cover management's retreat on closure. But it seems equally plausible that the BBC still intend to save the money, or some of the money, closure would have afforded by passing the cost to some other body. How would the corporation justify this in relation to their public service broadcasting remit? And if the Singers are now to be partially dependent on some kind of additional external funding source what safeguards will be in place to maintain that in future years (bearing in mind that the broader situation with arts funding for individual organisations is perennially uncertain).

Secondly, is the proposed 20% cut to the three English Orchestras (BBC Symphony, BBC Philharmonic and BBC Concert) still going ahead? The press release is ambiguous stating "We will continue to engage with the Musicians' Union and the other BBC Unions about our proposals on the BBC's English Orchestras. We are committed to meaningful consultation and to avoiding compulsory redundancies, wherever possible." The BBC should make its intentions about this crystal clear. If it does intend to proceed with the cut, it needs to explain why cutting the orchestras by 20% is acceptable if cutting the BBC Singers is not. Such a cut will be as damaging to the BBC's classical provision and the broader classical music world as the proposal to close the Singers. I really hope campaigners who have been so vocal about the threat to the Singers will be equally vocal about what appears to be the continued threat to the orchestras.

[Update: This tweet from BBCSO Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo confirms that the 20% cut to the English orchestras is still going ahead].

Thirdly, where does all this leave the BBC's classical music "strategy" which I think it is ever clearer was little more than an after the fact attempt to justify the proposed cuts? Presumably it will now need to be completely rethought? Who is in charge of doing that and what timeline are they working to?

As they have done since the odd interview following publication of the original strategy document senior BBC managers seem to be hoping they won't need to answer any of these questions in direct interviews. Some may argue that we should give the BBC leadership space to execute this U-turn but my own feeling is that the way senior management has approached this whole area to this point, coupled with the mismanagement we have seen in other areas (the Lineker affair) makes it very difficult to trust them unless decisions are really transparent. There are too many key questions left unanswered by today's press release, with too many outstanding risks to the BBC's Performing Groups and the BBC's classical music provision more broadly. Management needs to publicly explain itself in order to regain trust. Pressure must be maintained until they do so.

The BBC Classical Music Cuts, or, We Must Have Accountability and Standards in Senior Public Appointments

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 13:39:00 +0000

Just over ten days ago now I wrote at length here about the BBC's new classical music strategy, of which the most notable element is the proposal to close the BBC Singers and to make 20% cuts to the three English orchestras (BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, BBC Concert Orchestra). I asked a whole series of questions about the evidence (& mostly lack of it) underpinning the strategy and about the strategy itself.

Since I published that blog post, public criticism of the cuts and the strategy has gathered pace. A letter was leaked which is damning of BBC management's conduct in relation to this strategy and particularly the BBC Singers closure (the letter was also reported on by The Times). Later in this blog I will attempt to summarise what has so far been said and done and indicate the steps readers can take to amplify that criticism should they wish.

However, my focus here is on what I regard as the key issue with the BBC's response, or rather lack of it so far, which speaks to other recent problems at the corporation and to the broader damage that has been done to how publicly funded organisations operate by the current government.

Publicly funded organisations like the BBC should be subject to standards of competence and accountability. This is all the more the case for individuals who hold senior managerial positions in such organisations and receive very substantial salaries. The behaviour of senior BBC management both in approving the original classical music "strategy"/press release and in their subsequent response to the significant protests and even more significant questions asked of that strategy, demonstrates that those standards are very substantially eroded. This should be a matter of concern to all of us, whatever our views on the specifics of this particular case.

Let us start with the strategy itself. If you are a Manager (on a substantial salary) in the public sector, and you have ultimate executive responsibility for a strategy on a particular issue, then the taxpayer (in this case the licence fee payer) has the right to expect that that strategy, particularly where it involves job losses, possesses a rigorously constructed argument, underpinned by appropriate and sufficient evidence. This is not the case with the classical music "strategy" as I and others have shown.

Further, if a strategy not so based, is then subjected to legitimate and substantive criticism, the licence fee payer has the right to expect that senior management, who are responsible for the strategy, will respond to the substantial questions. Of course this may not be pleasant for the managers concerned (though had they developed the strategy robustly in the first place they could have avoided the situation) but it is one of the main things by which such individuals may justify their positions - in other words, not by doing the nice bits of the job (accepting awards, opening new buildings, claiming credit for commissions) but by dealing with the nasty bits - in this case publicly accepting ownership of cuts and publicly responding to legitimate criticism of them and the "strategy" underpinning them.

Since the odd interview immediately following the original press release, I have not seen one senior BBC manager give a single interview or respond in substance in any other way. These individuals appear to be assuming that they can get away with doing this. They may, sadly, be right, but it is a terrible indictment of the standards of our public life if they are able to do so.

Now, if this was a one off for the current senior BBC management, it might be said that perhaps I should be more forgiving about it. But it isn't. We've just seen a similarly woeful piece of senior management mishandling with the Lineker episode. To be clear, this is irrespective of what your view may be of Lineker's tweets. First, if you take a senior presenter off air in that way then I would expect the manager concerned (in this case the Director General) to have gamed out likely scenarios that might follow so that preparations could be made in advance to manage those scenarios. I think it is completely clear from the fiasco of 11-12th March that no such planning was undertaken before the Lineker decision was made. Secondly, once it becomes clear you have a fiasco on your hands an effective manager would take immediate and rapid steps to get the situation back under control. Again, it was very clear over the weekend in question that there was no such managerial grip. Finally, once a senior manager has got a fiasco under control (as the Director General eventually did on Monday 13th) such a manager would make clear that a proper investigation of a situation, which had evidently been very poorly handled, would be undertaken. And because this is a publicly funded organisation, the public (or the licence fee payers if you prefer) should reasonably be expected to be reported to on what the outcome of that investigation was, and what steps management proposed to take to prevent a recurrence. Instead the Director General appears to be behaving as if nothing really went wrong, and certainly as if there is no particular mismanagement on his part for which he should be answerable.

I suggest all this has its roots in our current governmental culture. That's to say we have a government for whom, in recent years, mismanagement has been the norm, and one which seeks to evade responsibility for that mismanagement far too frequently. That culture has got into other publicly funded organisations either through direct appointment (I needn't rehearse here the significant ethical problems with the appointment of the current BBC Chair) or indirectly because the wider environment has made acceptable such behaviour. It seems unlikely that my writing one blog about this will do anything about it, but it's about the only thing I have the power to do. And I refuse to close my eyes and say all this is acceptable, there's nothing we can do.

The BBC should be one of the great organisations of this country. I don't want to see it destroyed (though plenty on the government benches do and lacking the courage to own that policy themselves are seeking to enact it by other means). And so all we can do is to fight for what it should be. To fight for accountability and standards in its management and governance. To be, as my co-religionist George Fox wrote in 1663 "of good faith and valiant for Truth."

Bluntly the conduct of senior BBC management in this matter thus far has been shameful. It is not too late for redemption. I continue to hope a call for accountability and standards may be heard.

What Steps Can You Take?

1) Sign the petition - at the time of writing over 141,000 have already signed.

2) Complain direct to the BBC or to your MP. This blog post provides the e-mail addresses for three of the senior BBC executives involved, a link to the BBC complaint form, a link which allows you to find the contact details of your MP and a short text you can either use verbatim in your communications or adapt - It is worth noting the laziness of the BBC response others have received which is little more than a regurgitation of the original press release (the serious inadequacies of which we have previously discussed).

What Steps Have Others Taken?

There have been a series of collective letters from different classical music sub-groups protesting the closure decision - almost all the current conductors of and composers/artists in association with the BBC Performing Groups (many of whom, see for example the Twitter feeds of Chief Conductor, BBCSO Sakari Oramo and Principal Guest Conductor, BBCSO Dalia Stasevska have been vocal in protest on social media), nearly 800 composers (a public statement from the great John Adams attracted particular attention), the UK's freelance professional choral ensembles (notably one of the groups that in theory the BBC press release seemed to be promising more air time to by axing the Singers), 220 amateur choirs with over 18,000 members, the chief conductors of all the European radio choirs, past and current winners of the BBC Young Musicians competition, a group of our leading classical singers (including current and former members of the BBC New Generation Artists scheme), the UK's specialist music schools and the UK's classical music publishers.

Notable individuals and organisations have also spoken out. Those I spotted include the Shadow Minister for the Arts and Civil Society Barbara Keeley, MPs Anna Firth and Stephen Doughty, the Principal & Chair of the Royal Academy of Music, the Michael Tippett Foundation, the former Cabinet Minister David Miliband, and the podcaster and commentator Alistair Campbell. It was also reported this morning that Cabinet ministers (or at least Dowden, the quotation from Mordaunt in the piece is more ambivalent) have expressed concern - although they have a get out from actually doing anything of BBC independence and there's no question it would be problematic if the government openly told the BBC to reverse course - though if this is the only way to stop these cuts we might have to accept it as the lesser of two evils. There have also been plenty of letters to the editors of various newspapers and criticism in a number of Radio 4 interviews.

There has also been commentary from various arts journalists, perhaps most notably late last week when The Times's Richard Morrison proposed that a boycott of the BBC Proms might be required. What has been much less in evidence is front page coverage, although the management failures are as egregious as those exposed by the Lineker debacle (arguably more so since they may result in costing multiple employees their livelihoods).

The BBC's New Classical Music "Strategy", or Could We See Your Evidence Please

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 13:16:00 +0000

Yesterday the BBC released their new classical music strategy. At first glance, and for obvious reasons, most attention has focused on the decision to close the BBC Singers, but reflection on the strategy as a whole exposes a whole lot of contradictions and questions which are pretty troubling.

The press release presents five summary bullet points and I propose to comment on each of these in turn:

1) Creating agile ensembles that can work flexibly and creatively, working with more musicians and broadcasting from more venues – up to 50 – in different parts of the country, and reducing salaried orchestral posts across the BBC English Orchestras by around 20%.

You plainly do not need to reduce the size of your orchestra through redundancies in order for it to perform in more flexible configurations or in different venues. During Covid, for example, BBC Orchestras performed and broadcast in differing sub-sections. Major orchestras have long had sub-groups spun out of them (the Twelve Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic come immediately to mind - the full list of their sub-groups is remarkable and demonstrates my point even more clearly) without having reduced the size of their overall orchestra to create them - and indeed the high quality of such sub-groups is at least to some extent a function of the relationship they already have as a result of being members of the main orchestra. Then there's the question of what does "working with more musicians" mean here? If the BBC means it can collaborate with more soloists/freelance groups by sending smaller ensembles to smaller venues as already explained there is no requirement that the BBC orchestras be subject to redundancies in order to do that (unless it is simply a question of money which the press release several times attempts to argue has not been the main driver of these decisions). An alternative interpretation is that by reducing the size of the orchestras the BBC is trying to throw a sop to the profession by saying this is okay really because it will open up more opportunities for freelance performers to work with us. I highly doubt that the amount of work that might be generated via this will be equivalent to the job losses the 20% cuts will occasion, and it seems to me that any limited good for freelancers is undone by the fact that the cuts are potentially increasing the pool of freelancers looking for work in an already difficult marketplace by 20%.

A further point about this is that there is a contradiction in only applying it to the English orchestras. It is of course perfectly obvious why the BBC has only applied it to the English orchestras because it would clearly have been politically very difficult if not impossible to get agreement to cuts to the Scottish and Welsh radio orchestras. But if the English orchestras are going to provide the best public service by the method outlined for them here, the BBC ought to explain why the same doesn't apply to their Scottish and Welsh equivalents. As it is we can reasonably ask why is England not entitled to radio orchestras of the same kind as Scotland and Wales.

Finally on this one it is worth noting that one thing that the 2022 Classical Review demonstrated (a review which the BBC claims yesterday's decisions build on) is that most of the BBC Orchestras already serve a geographically wide range of venues (see pgs.17-20). Of course it is always good to look at how provision can be expanded but it is not clear to me that there was a major problem with the diversity of venues served by the ensembles which this new strategy solves.

2) Reinforcing the distinctiveness of the BBC’s five unique orchestras, artistically, educationally and geographically serving their own audiences whilst fulfilling their collective role in providing the widest range of content across Radio 3 and BBC platforms.

There's not a lot that can be said about this since it lacks specifics (we'll deal with the education point under the next heading). Basically without a much clearer evidence based statement that explains exactly what the orchestras were doing before, what the BBC wants them to do in future, and, perhaps most critically, why and how this distinctiveness will be reinforced by cutting the English orchestras by 20% it is impossible to judge whether the strategy is well devised to achieve this aim.

3) Doubling funding for music education and launching new training initiatives, providing more opportunities for people to engage with classical music, building audiences and creating extraordinary experiences.

This focus on music education poses a number of questions that the press release simply doesn't engage with. First, it is again worth going back to that 2022 Classical Review. Music Education is not a central focus of that document. Apart from some passing references there is one page (30) which focuses directly on it, acknowledging the increased attention the sector has given to this area. But there is no comprehensive data provided on what the BBC, and perhaps more significantly (given the decisions in this press release) its performing groups, were doing on education. Nor does the press release provide any specifics on these proposed new initiatives. So, once again, it is impossible to judge what, if anything, was insufficient about the BBC's music education provision and whether this strategy can remedy that. Again we should bear in mind the cuts to ensembles which seem likely to reduce the amount of education work their members can do for the simple reason that there will be fewer of them - will the BBC have to hire new staff to do this work - so we lose musicians for educators? Is that the right decision for a publicly funded broadcaster? We'll be revisiting some of this again in talking about the Singers decision below because it is also linked to an education narrative.

The 2022 Review does make one other specific point about music education. Funding by government (local and national) for music education has declined (29) and the report states bluntly "the UK's classical music sector does not realistically have the capacity to 'plug the gaps' in national music education provision" (30). Is it the role of the BBC to attempt to plug those gaps? It appears that somebody in the BBC hierarchy, or, equally probably, someone in government has decreed that this is indeed what the BBC should be doing. This of course forces the BBC to spread its dwindling resources more thinly (dwindling because government refused to allow a licence fee increase - there are parallels with the difficulties of my own sector where tuition fee income has not kept pace with inflation but that would be for a whole other blog), and to make up for the music education funding government refuses to provide. It also strikes me as yet another instance of this government ducking responsibility - I can just see future Education Secretaries declaring that any future perceived or actual deficiencies in music education are the BBC's fault and nothing to do with government. And we as licence fee payers are asked to accept this judgement without sight of any of the evidence on which it is based or an adequate explanation as to how the decision has been arrived at.

To be clear, I am not in any way seeking to devalue the importance of high quality musical education provision. My questions are who should be funding it, who should be the providers, and is it right (as seems effectively to be happening here) that the jobs of professional musicians should be cut to enable that funding? (BBC Front Row last night - link at the end of this blog - directly asked that question to Simon Webb (Head of Orchestras & Choirs) who avoided answering it.

4) Creating a single digital home for our orchestras, giving audiences access to the full range of our high-quality orchestral content, including new and archive performances, educational content and concert listings.

When I first read the press release this one didn't really register with me, but the more I've thought about it the more puzzled I've become. I've begun to wonder if somebody at the BBC has been dazzled by the Berlin Philharmonic Digital Concert Hall and decided we must have one of those. The question that I would like answered here is - why, exactly? The BBC has two digital platforms for streaming already - BBC Sounds for radio/audio and BBC iPlayer for television. Why cannot a corner of these existing platforms be adapted to provide a clearer home for the performing groups? Or is that in fact the intention and it's just being jazzed up here (frankly I'd settle for better management of the existing BBC Sounds so that downloaded recitals/programmes are not too often cut off before pieces and programmes have actually finished). We should be shown what the costings for this flight of fancy are, what is being cut (if anything) to enable it, and what alternatives have been considered.

As an aside I would be most interested to know how big the BBC anticipates this archive as being. I think it would be great if performances from many of the major Festivals BBC Radio 3 covers could remain in an ever increasing archive but I rather suspect there will be rights issues. As it is there is already a substantial archive of individual classical pieces which the BBC somehow managed to get permission for during the pandemic - does the BBC just envisage repackaging that? As with so much in this press release there is a lot that is unclear.

5) Taking the difficult decision to close the BBC Singers in order to invest more widely in the future of choral singing across the UK, working with a wide range of choral groups alongside launching a major choral development programme for new talent.

As I noted at the beginning this is the element of the announcement that has understandably caused the most concern. Others have spoken far more eloquently than I could about the importance of the BBC Singers as a performing group - and I think have provided clear answers to the question I posed on social media yesterday as to whether this was an ensemble that was being duplicated by the existing non-BBC classical music provision - the clear answer is no and I see no strong evidence that the non-BBC sector would fill the gap if the closure goes ahead (& it's striking to see many of our finest non-BBC vocal ensembles speaking out so strongly against the decision - in other words the "high quality ensembles" who would in theory receive more broadcasts by the closure of the Singers do not favour the decision). What I want to focus on here is the justification the BBC provides in the above sentence.

Again there are no specifics as to what "invest more widely in the future of choral singing" means. It is thus impossible to judge whether what the BBC plans to do is work that is either already being done by other bodies or could be better done by other bodies. I wonder this particularly with regard to "a major choral development programme for new talent".

The press release also states later on that it wants to enhance and enable "emerging and diverse choirs" - as with so much else in the document with no specifics on what this in practice means. Such groups are admirable but they are not equivalent to a professional group of the standard of the Singers. Why is it right that the BBC should support those groups and not a professional choir? And it poses the same contradiction as we saw with the English/non-English orchestras. If the BBC should be supporting "emerging and diverse choirs" & education in place of a full-time professional chamber choir, why should it be supporting full-time orchestras rather than supporting emerging and diverse orchestras and education?

One of the BBC Executives fronting up this announcement yesterday, Charlotte Moore (Chief Content Officer) makes the claim that even if there have been difficult financial pressures these decisions are still the right ones on their merits independent of cost considerations for the BBC for the future. I'm afraid that from where I'm sitting I do not find this convincing. I regret to say that it reminds me of the recent attempts of the Arts Council to justify cutting funding to English National Opera after the fact. In this case it seems to me that this is a set of decisions driven by a combination of financial and governmental pressures which has produced a set of after the fact justifications that lack an appropriate evidentiary basis (or at least that evidentiary basis has not been presented to us as audience members/licence fee payers) and do not, as I hope this piece goes some way to demonstrate, stand up to scrutiny. This whole strategy should be subjected to a pretty complete rethink and when it comes forward again should be accompanied by an appropriate level of detail and evidence base. Sadly, it seems unlikely this will happen, and, as with ENO, we are likely to end up losing/weakening excellent ensembles and making permanently weaker the overall cultural music provision in this country without, I suspect, achieving real improvements in other areas (like music education). I hope I'm proved wrong.

Postscript: You can hear Simon Webb, Head of Orchestras & Choirs trying to defend the strategy on BBC Radio 4's Front Row which I suggest reveals, perhaps unintentionally, how strongly this is being driven by a requirement to find significant savings (starts at 12mins in).

Editorial Note: Updated 14/3/23 with a new link to the 2022 Classical Review as the old one had broken. There's also a covering note which summarised the Review back in May 2022.

EIF 2022 - There's Runnicles with Fidelio, or, A Powerfully Felt Performance

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 09:34:00 +0000

Regular readers will know we are admirers of Donald Runnicles at this blog, well our name is a bit of a giveaway. His performances of concert opera at the International Festival over the years have consistently been highlights, and it's been really excellent news that after the baffling gap of the Mills era, Linehan has in recent Festivals resumed inviting Runnicles to give concert opera. I sincerely hope Nicola Benedetti will continue to do so when she takes over as Artistic Director next year.

My history of staged Fidelios has been pretty dismal, in fact I think I've probably seen more failed productions of this opera than of any other. The last time the Festival included the work was a candidate for the worst opera staging I've ever seen, and since then the Royal Opera and Glyndebourne have added problematic productions. It occurred to me after this performance that directors perhaps start from the premise that the work is a problem and feel they have to do drastic things to it - not least because of the chunks of spoken dialogue. Somewhat to my surprise Runnicles had decided to include some narrative summary between the musical numbers here - adapted by Sir David Pountney and delivered by Sir Willard White (also singing Don Fernando). The odd thing for me was that as the performance went on I think I was tending to tune the summary out and feeling the musical performance as a compelling drama in its own right. Maybe it's because I now know the work well and my mind could fill in the gaps, but I also think it's to do with how much is there in the libretto and Beethoven's music, assisted here by the deeply felt performances of all the musicians on stage. In other words it really struck me that actually this work doesn't have to be nearly such a problem piece as directors have so often seemed determined to treat it - everything you need is there for powerful emotional drama - done more straightforwardly on stage as it essentially was here it could be gripping, moving - as this was for me.

That understanding of the piece was clear from the Overture - it wasn't so much the sense of excitement in the opening chords, but Runnicles and the Philharmonia's shaping of that darker, ominous passage that follows on - they crept in and we seemed to linger for a few moments the atmosphere building around us before the mood moved on. Throughout the piece Runnicles maintained that dual approach - combining the sense of momentum and drama with the capacity to linger as appropriate for emotional effect.

One of the things I suspect I wasn't fully aware of before Radio 3's various 2020 Beethoven programmes was how difficult his writing in this opera is for the singers, particularly the two leads. I'm pleased to say that both Emma Bell (Leonora), substituting for an indisposed Jennifer Davis, and Clay Hilley (Florestan) gave really strong, dramatically gripping performances. I think I have heard Bell in similar heavy rep in London before but I don't recall the voice at the top of the range having such volume at its command and being able to soar in quite the way that Bell did in this performance. She was also physically convincing as the character - appropriately costumed and with expressive face and small gesture doing much to pull us into the drama. As far as I can recall Hilley has never appeared on the London stage and on this showing that's a missed opportunity for London houses. He too has the power for the part but, like Bell could also sing beautifully and movingly at a lower volume (something that in my experience singers in these roles are often less able to do). Towards the end of the second act there was perhaps the odd moment of strain for both singers but in these taxing parts this was minor.

The supporting roles were, with one exception, strongly taken. In the Act 1 quartet ("Mir ist so wunderbar") Gunther Groissbock's Rocco threatened to overpower the other singers at times, but thereafter he settled and balanced in the ensembles, while coming across richly in solos and in sum giving a moving account of a role than can be a bit one dimensional. Kim-Lillian Strebel's Marzelline was nicely characterised, her lighter voice contrasting well with Bell, and also complemented by Gideon Poppe's Jaquino. Late on Sir Willard White made an authoritative Fernando. The only weak link was Markus Bruck's Pizarro - he certainly looked the part but unfortunately lacked the heft to go vocally toe to toe with either Rocco or Fernando, or to cut across the orchestra in his solos.

The chorus's contributions are small but absolutely critical and were superbly sung by Philharmonia Voices (director Aidan Oliver). Particularly notable was their ability to bring off the electrifying speed of Runnicles's tempi in the Act 2 Finale.

This performance marked the conclusion of what has been a quite superb EIF residency from the Philharmonia Orchestra. Despite this being their fifth consecutive night on stage, and all in demanding and lengthy works, they showed no signs of flagging but played their hearts out for Runnicles and for us, as they have done in all their performances this opening week. The Festival has been lucky to have them and I hope they will swiftly return.

For me, the fundamental test of most opera performances is whether I'm moved by the drama. This is in theory harder to achieve in concert opera because the imagination has to get past the absence of staging. For me, this performance entirely succeeded - I was gripped dramatically pretty much from the opening chords and on several occasions had tears in my eyes. I'm pleased to say that I think the performance was being recorded, presumably for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3, so do listen out for it.

EIF 2022 - The Pulse at the Playhouse, or, Simply Mesmerising

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 16:17:00 +0000

At the start of this performance, Gravity & Other Myths and the National Youth Choir of Scotland conducted by Mark Evans lulled this viewer into thinking he had seen it before. The Choir are singing numbers - 1,2,3,2,1 etc. (I suspect a Glass setting) and the movement of the acrobats recalled to mind the work of others - William Forsythe's choreography, Glass's Einstein on the Beach. Then the acrobats subvert it as they climb on one another's shoulders - forming first a set of two person towers, and then moving up to three - the moment when the set of trio towers cross through each other was the first of a stunning series of acrobatic peaks. From then on I was gripped by a show of mesmerising movement and acrobatics which makes full, successful use of the often tricky Playhouse space.

Gravity & Other Myths have three styles - those breath-taking set pieces, the ground level collective movement (both as individuals and in small groups - there are some lovely human mobile moments late on), and individual turns - the guy towards the end who slid along on his back and then bounced upright as though made of rubber particularly sticks in my mind.

The movement is accompanied by very fine singing from the Choir, who move around the stage, at times intermingling with the acrobats - it's the kind of collaboration that I suspect only the International Festival could put together, and one I imagine those singers will remember the rest of their lives. The stamina the Choir show, they're singing pretty much non-stop for about 70 minutes, is particularly note-worthy.

What, for some reason, especially moved me, was the trust and teamwork that makes all this possible - it's a showcase for the amazing things humans can do as a unit. One performance remains tonight - not to be missed.

EIF 2022 - Rusalka at the Festival Theatre, or A Superb Substitution

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 15:44:00 +0000

When the 2022 EIF programme was announced I confess to a lukewarm reaction to Rusalka as the sole staged opera simply because it's never been one of my favourite works and I've seen it a couple of times and not been wowed. I booked for this run of performances more for completionist reasons. As it turned out this is a show that is well worth seeing and makes a very strong case for the merits of the piece.

Before we go on to any other aspects of the evening Elin Pritchard, stepping in to the title role for the indisposed Natalya Romaniw must be singled out for special praise. Pritchard gave a compelling singing-acting performance. It obviously must have helped that she covered the role during the Garsington run, but had an announcement not been made I doubt anyone would have realised she was stepping in. Both as an individual and in her interactions with the rest of the ensemble, aided by Jack Furness's thoughtful direction of people, she really brought the character and the story to effective, moving life. The moment in the third act when she kisses the Prince & Dvorak's score climaxes was especially powerful. She also has a voice of distinctive character with great power at the top of the range, and is clearly thinking about the text she is communicating - the force of some of the repeated single words in the lower register particularly struck home.

As already noted Jack Furness's production, working in harmony with Tom Piper's designs, is beguiling. The rising and falling central green disc with the pool beneath and the human world above is a clever choice - and though it rises and falls quite often it never feels excessive. The single circular hole provides a particularly well designed mechanism for displaying Rusalka's movement between worlds without overdoing it. The pool effect works specially well the darker Malcolm Rippeth's lighting is. Hats off are due to the ensemble who manage to appear and disappear beneath the disc as if by magic - quite how they get in and out at the back (or could it be underneath?) began to fascinate me. Furness and choreographer/movement director Fleur Darkin also conjure a powerfully forbidding human world in Act 2. There's a dark, troubling edge to the moment when the Prince might make love to Rusalka were they not interrupted, and the decision to set the later scenes in the possible marital bedroom powerfully captures the potential for individual isolation in that, in theory, uniting space. Just occasionally I thought the symbolism was overdone - particularly the Prince cutting open the dead deer and offering the bleeding heart to the Foreign Princess - but that may be a matter of individual taste.

Furness also adds a team of six aerialists to the mix - this adds colour and beauty to the nymphs choral scenes, which also feature fine vocal and acting contributions from the trio of principal nymphs (Marlena Devoe, Heather Lowe, Stephanie Wake-Edwards). The acrobatics are most extended in the Third Act choral scene but while this scene is beautiful to look at and listen to it can't quite disguise the fact that Dvorak's dramatic structuring here is flawed - on this viewing that chorus seems to me an unnecessary interruption at the point when the narrative wants to drive forward to the climactic encounter between the Prince and Rusalka.

The rest of the principal roles are all well and in many cases very strongly taken. I would particularly single out Gerard Schneider's Prince who manages to move in Act 3 despite his caddish behaviour in Act 2, Christine Rice's finely characterised & mysterious Jezibaba (I speculated what miserable encounter with the human world fuels her hatred), and Musa Ngqungwana's powerful Vodnik. The Garsington Chorus are in fine voice and again giving dramatically effective performances - there's some particularly touching, simple, movement for the women with the joining of hands and turning of backs when Rusalka is cast out.

In the pit the Philharmonia Orchestra continued the superb work they've shown throughout their residency this week (which I've realised is a real exercise in stamina - I just hope they'll still have energy for the Runnicles Fidelio on Wednesday evening). The playing has beauty, drama and character, the whole shaped with great effectiveness and drive by Douglas Boyd on the podium.

Altogether this is a really strong evening at the opera and thoroughly justifies its place in the programme. One performance remains tonight - do catch it if you haven't already done so.

EIF 2022 - Burn at the King's, or, Mr Cumming is Self-Indulgent

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 15:41:00 +0000

I was sceptical about this show in advance. When it began with a projection of the title (a theatrical tick I particularly dislike) on the back video screen my scepticism increased. The subsequent hour did not change my mind.

There's no doubt that Alan Cumming is a compelling stage presence - having that indefinable quality of charisma I've observed in very few performers in my years of theatregoing and which renders the individual inherently watchable. He is also a very effective deliverer of text. But neither these qualities nor throwing the kitchen sink at the staging can disguise the fundamentally thin character of this show.

Burn has been created by Cumming and Steven Hoggett (who also co-choreographs) by, as far as I could make out, stitching together a greatest hits of Burns poems with excerpts from his letters to form a loose biography (with the odd addition - at least I presume the obligatory new work inclusion of "f***ing" was an addition). The last time the Festival tackled Burns was the late night cabaret show Had We Never at the Portrait Gallery in 2017 - a far more powerful and illuminating experience. By contrast this show never persuaded me that this essentially biographical narrative needed to be put on stage, or that the staging illuminated either the life or art in a fresh way.

A significant issue here is the slightness of the choreography by Hoggett and Vicki Manderson. They were presumably constrained by Cumming's physical capacities but it rarely compels attention in itself. The piece alternates between set pieces and textual delivery with accompanying gesture which tends to be rather obvious reinforcement of particular words. Anna Meredith's score is loud and repetitive.

In the interludes the creators throw stage illusion, overblown projections (the horse when we talk of horses feels particularly strained), and lighting changes at the enterprise - all of which outstay their welcome.

I'd seen a tweet about the use of Auld Lang Syne at the end but when it comes it rather indicated I thought doubts about tone. It feels tacked on post-applause and neither Cumming nor the audience seemed clear whether the audience was supposed to join in (which at this performance bar a single enthusiast upstairs they didn't).

A few in the Stalls gave this a standing ovation. Cumming's qualities as a performer go some way to lift the afternoon but it is ultimately a thin, missable, show.

Samson et Dalila at the Royal, or, I'm Sorry, Mr Jones, We're Fresh Out of Pillars

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 14:36:00 +0000

I have a recollection of listening to a classic recording of this opera, I suspect one of a number of opera CDs inherited from a beloved uncle, and finding it enjoyable. There's certainly a lot of beautiful music in the piece, and I'm not sorry to have heard it live, but it is also not a mystery to me that it has largely fallen out of the repertoire.

The first problem lies with the way Saint-Saens structures the piece. The drama has an episodic feel, and tension both musically and dramatically has a tendency to drop. The balance between ensemble spectacle and exploration of the principal characters doesn't seem quite right. Most seriously there appears to be a glaring omission to stage a key plot point - that is so far as I could judge Dalila never does get the secret of Samson's power out of him at the climax of Act Two thus making it inexplicable that he can't escape from the mob.

That scene is one of several that isn't particularly helped by the staging, of which more shortly. But, first a word or two about the musical standards which were generally high. The vocal highlight for me was SeokJung Baek's Samson - to my ear he had the heroic ringing tenor the role requires and his voice carried effectively throughout up to my perch in the Amphitheatre. I also found him a compelling stage presence, and one which matched well with his vocal style. To my ear Elena Garanca was a shade below. She often sang very beautifully, and at key moments was in possession of striking vocal power. But at other times to my ear she didn't always come over the orchestra. I also thought she wasn't entirely helped by the direction, particularly in the last act - I assume that throwing off the jewellery and watching in what might have been distress from a distance was intended to indicate some degree of remorse but it didn't come across entirely convincingly. The supporting roles were all well taken, and the chorus sing strongly (despite not being very well directed).

In the pit the Royal Opera Orchestra played for Pappano with a great deal of beauty and passion. To my ear it was clear that Pappano loved the score but I thought he loved it perhaps a bit too much. As a work it strikes me as not dissimilar to Smyth's The Wreckers which I saw at Glyndebourne the previous weekend. Neither score, most of the time, generates enough of its own forward dramatic momentum, so the conductor must keep things moving. Ticciati at Glyndebourne, to my considerable surprise, did so. Pappano tended too often to linger.

And so we come to Richard Jones's production. It starts, movement-wise, solidly, if a bit obviously, with various individuals being set upon by the regime's soldiers. As a whole, until the last act, I didn't hate it but it never really caught fire. It looks much of the time as if the House is on an economy drive. The main piece of set is a very small room for Dalila which has to be wheeled about to give us the inside and outside of the house. The inside never feels claustrophobic but rather simply constricting for the performers. There's the usual garish Jones wallpaper. When one is noticing the set moving about all the time a production has, I think, failed. There's an awful lot of chorus parading in the show, none of which particularly grips here - the worst moment is the celebration in the temple in Act 3 - the music has a certain G&S tinge to it at this point, and the choreography (by Lucy Burge) rather reinforced the feeling that we had wandered into HMS Pinafore. We'll draw a veil over what my brother referred to afterwards as the Smurf except to say that it adds nothing.

But the biggest problem comes in the final moments. Having now seen this staging I conclude that there are two ways to destroy the temple - either you do it all extremely simply, probably with lighting and a fairly bare stage. Or you need a really impressive set. Jones's approach falls between two stools, and the feeble attempt at a collapsing ceiling reminds one of the kind of easily escapable traps that 60s TV heroes had to get out of each week. The problem is compounded by the fact that Jones has earlier in the act had Samson handcuffed to one of the proscenium pillars thus suggesting they are part of the temple - yet, needless to say, they do not collapse.

I'm glad to have had an opportunity to hear the work live and the performance is musically sufficiently fine to make it worth catching, especially if like me you've never heard it live. The production for me, apart from the failure of the last scene, is serviceable if uninspired. Altogether certainly a much pleasanter afternoon than the previous day's dreary reinvented Young Vic Oklahoma.

Oklahoma at the Young Vic, or, A Dissenting View

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 07:51:00 +0000

Oklahoma is not a musical about which I previously had strong opinions. I saw it once more than a decade ago in an amateur production in Edinburgh (I think put on under the auspices of the Catholic Chaplaincy) and it didn't leave me with a desire to see the show again. I mention this to stress that I don't think I arrived at this performance wedded to the view that the show should be staged in a particular, say traditional way. I wouldn't even say, based on that one previous viewing, that I thought it was a show that especially needed a revival. Given those feelings and the fact I didn't need to see it in order to tick it off my list of unseen musicals, I really only booked because the production came trailing so much praise from its New York City run and because I thought it might be thought provoking. I left the theatre bored and baffled.

The problems start with the failure of the set (co-designed by Laura Jellinek and Grace Laubacher) to give much in the way of a sense of place. We're in a bare space with two trestle tables making a T and a further single line of tables down the right and left sides separating audience from playing area. The railings of the upper level have been covered over with wood on which guns are hung. The thing never loses the sense of being a hall which could, frankly, be any number of places. The corn fields and farm drawing on the back wall is nice to look at but feels increasingly disconnected from the action. Productions with little sense of place seem to be in vogue these days (see most recently the Donmar's Henry V) and was one of a litany of things about this production that struck me as wearily familiar rather than daringly original. It is worth noting here that it may be that if seated downstairs the show works differently (we were in the gallery).

The more serious issue is how little perception directors Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein show for the characters or the narrative, instead I felt I was watching a parade of tired directorial ticks. To name a few: I can think of only one show (Melly Still's brilliant From Morning to Midnight at the National) which has made the device of having your ensemble sit round the edges of the action whenever they're not in a scene work - this show was not an exception. Particularly in Act 2 Fish and Fein had plainly directed that ensemble to deliver line after line in a monotone thus robbing scenes and relationships of drama (I have seen this in failed EIF theatre productions again and again). There's periodic use of handheld microphones (Hamilton is the only show I recall that made this work). The pacing was glacial. When the handheld camera appeared (a curse of modern stagings) I wanted to scream.

The dream ballet undoubtedly makes this a difficult show to revive, but I assumed that the concept must at least be aimed at making that element work, or at least jar less than it might otherwise do. But no. It's relocated to the start of Act 2, musically re-orchestrated so it sounds like some drug-fuelled Hendrix riff. John Heginbotham's choreography is very poor. By the end Fish and Fein resort to throwing the kitchen sink at it culminating in a resolution to the need to get the shoes they've dropped from the ceiling off-stage which is just laughable.

The most convincing performance is given by Patrick Vaill as Jud whose glowering presence works best within the straightjacket of the production. Stavros Demetraki brings welcome energy to his scenes as Ali Hakim despite being given silly things to do (particularly the moment when he has to start stripping off in front of Ado Annie the directors apparently fearing we have failed to grasp that he wants to sleep with her). The interpretation of Laurey is problematic - I do think that for the narrative to work there needs to be at least a degree of ambiguity in what the character thinks about love and sex, but I'm afraid Anoushka Lucas's performance for me lacked that. There was a knowingness to her behaviour almost from the outset that jarred with the text.

The re-orchestrations/re-arrangements of the score by Daniel Kluger seem to have essentially two ideas - mostly to make everything sound like a country and western song, and to bring in the occasional contemporary riff. More recent musicals have married traditional Broadway with other sound worlds to far stronger effect. Overall, the sound world becomes tiring to listen to and the score feels flattened - by the end I was longing for more colour.

And then there's the ending. By this stage I was pretty completely disengaged and just wanting the thing to be over. To explain the problems spoilers follow. Jud turns up at Curly and Laurie's wedding and presents a box containing a gun to Curly. In so far as anything in what follows is clear I think we must assume that, in this reading, Jud wants Curly to kill him. But the fact that Curly does so, after another interminable pause, I found inexplicable. That Curly and Laurie are spattered in blood as a consequence just struck me as yet more evidence for directors who didn't trust the audience to draw their own conclusions - no, we must have a visual cue that the blood is on them, that they will carry this blood with them for the rest of their lives, etc.

It's perfectly clear that the directors want to use this production as a vehicle to comment on contemporary issues around sexuality, violence and possibly race in American society. To my mind, as an American historian who watches a lot of live performance trying to do this, this show did not find anything original to say on these points. It's worth pausing here just a moment and considering the show's treatment of race a little further - because it repeats difficulties I've seen in other stagings (normally UK originated ones) seeking to address race in the US. The show is color-blind cast, and most of the time does not suggest this is an environment in which race relations is a central or problematic issue. There were three episodes when the opposite seemed to apply: the dream ballet, Ado Annie's father settling her marriage with the pedlar, the judge overruling the federal marshal in the final trial. The problem with all of these instances is that they are isolated rather than being embedded in a consistent representation of either that character or the broader state of race relations. As a result they lack impact.

I don't dispute for a minute that the original show has a lot of elements that make it challenging to stage today and I think to do other in a production now than to try and engage with them would be foolish. But this attempt came across to me as a dull cocktail of currently popular directorial devices which left me uncaring about any of the characters or relationships. No need to queue for returns.

Housekeeping Note: My party were seated in seats J42-45 (the front row of the upper level immediately above the band). These seats are sold for £58 each - the second price level. I cannot recall any indication when I bought them that the view was restricted and the price certainly doesn't reflect that. But there is a significant restriction to the view and I can only assume nobody involved in pricing went and sat up there for the full run of the show. Not good enough.

Peter Grimes at the Royal, or, In the Shadow of Past Glories

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 09:06:00 +0000

This production has garnered pretty much universally high praise. In advance I was sceptical, having not been wholly convinced by Deborah Warner's Billy Budd for the House back in 2019. From my vantage point in the Amphitheatre I thought the production strengthened as the evening went on, but despite some fine individual performances it never gripped me with the emotional intensity of either the Snape Maltings concert/Grimes on the Beach experience or the Bergen Philharmonic/Edward Gardner concert performance at the Edinburgh Festival.

The main reason for this is a production which can't decide between abstract or realist approaches. The contrast shows up between the Prologue and Scene 1. The Prologue plays out on a bare stage. Grimes (Allan Clayton) appears to be almost dreaming it. Nearly the only light comes from the electric torches everybody is holding (from the Amphi much of Act 1 is too dark generally, though this is rectified in the later Acts). Scene 1 by contrast is a rather cluttered fishing market set-up, with a low wall which did remind me of Aldeburgh. We never get back to quite the spareness of the Prologue but the show has an uneasy feeling of being caught between those two approaches. For me it thus never fully achieved immersed me in its world. Elements of geographical confusion - particularly as to where Warner imagines the sea to be (in Act 1 it could be in at least three directions) - also do not help.

Warner's approach to the Prologue is also flawed in another respect. She plays it very much as if Grimes is already mad. This causes problems for dramatic tension as the show goes forward - if we're already shown Grimes as mad from the outset there isn't far enough for the character to go in the body of the opera. If the rest of the staging had been played more abstract, or there was more of a sense that we are reliving the story through Grimes it might have worked, but as already noted this isn't how Warner proceeds.

As with Warner's Billy Budd there is no movement director credited, and the movement is similarly uneven. Contrary to others I rarely felt the massed chorus as threatening in the way they have to be. There are several reasons for this. As with her Billy Budd the stage is often too open when we need a claustrophobic environment. But the bigger issue is Warner overeggs things at key points - the injury to Ellen Orford (Maria Bengtsson) in Act II Scene 1 and to my mind more seriously the insistence on giving the mob guns in Act 3 (which never get fired) and having them beat a dummy on a pole to the floor in time with several of those shattering "Grimes!" chords - in both cases for me these effects diminished rather than emphasised the feeling of threat. The moment that most genuinely chilled me in the whole evening was the chorus's denunciation of Ellen for "leading us a dance" - the movement as they surround her is much more understated and consequently far more threatening. Elsewhere there were too many individual moments when I was puzzled by movement choices - the most glaring is the bizarre decision to have Balstrode (Bryn Terfel) send Ellen off-stage in the middle of Act Two Scene 1, through the mob who have just been assaulting her. I don't recall other productions sending Ellen off-stage at that moment and it doesn't make much sense to do so because you then have to bring her back almost immediately for the quartet of the women. My feeling is that quartet is expressing their commonality of experience so it also didn't make sense to me that none of the other three are allowed to go near Ellen during it, particularly weird given she is in evident physical distress following Grimes's assault.

There are strong moments. The opening of Act Two is the best section of the piece - Ellen's interaction with the apprentice and her confrontation with Grimes are powerfully done (though the litter pickers who intrude towards the end are superfluous). There's also much to commend in Grimes's mad scene. But the show never fully gripped me emotionally.

Musically the highlight of the evening is unquestionably Clayton's Grimes. I don't think I have ever heard that mad scene sung live with that combination of power, beauty and feeling. He's also powerfully moving in his scenes with Ellen and with the apprentice in Act Two. I was more doubtful about the other two leads. Bengtsson sings with great beauty and, as already noted, is a fine actress, but I wanted a little more power to cut through the texture in places in Act One, and her diction could be strengthened (her performance didn't erase memories of the late, great Erin Wall in Edinburgh). Previously I've always found Balstrode a moving, sympathetic character, but Bryn Terfel/Warner's reading here seems to push against this. From where I was sitting he finds less subtlety in his interactions with Grimes and Orford than either the Aldeburgh or Edinburgh singers did, and there are some particular missteps - I didn't believe Balstrode would join in the dancing in the pub - he's a character more apart than this - and the handling of his exit after saying he'll help Peter sink the boat is unsatisfactory.

The supporting roles are in the main very well taken. There's particularly fine character work from Jacques Imbrailo as Ned Keene and James Gilchrist as the Reverend. The four women blend finely in the quartet. Moving John Tomlinson's Swallow up the curtain call pecking order from where the character would normally feature is, shall we say, generous.

The chorus sing well, but as a rule didn't shatter me as their counterparts at Snape and Edinburgh did (but in both cases those singers were working with superior acoustics). The orchestra plays very finely, but I wasn't quite as convinced by Mark Elder's conducting as I had expected to be. He takes to my ear a more spacious approach than Gardner in Edinburgh. Looking back I find that I had a similar issue with Ivor Bolton's conducting of Warner's Billy Budd. There's no question there's both beauty and power, but just occasionally I wanted a bit more drive. Again, it didn't take me in a grip in the way that both Steuart Bedford and Edward Gardner did. One thing that may also have been a factor here, though, is Warner's fussy approach to the interludes - I would dispense with all the projected text "Interlude I" and so on, and the lighting effects and just play them to a black curtain - everything needed is in the music - the additional images are a distraction.

As I was leaving the auditorium an audience member in front of me remarked to his companion that the production was one for Remainers. I don't think Warner's interpretation is quite that overt, but the shadow of facets of Brexit is certainly present - especially in the Act 3 mob scene. But I've been pondering the remark since and I think it may get at the reasons why the production didn't fundamentally work for me. There are two aspects here. First, the familiarity of the environment. I feel I've seen a lot of theatre set in these kinds of decayed urban spaces since the Brexit vote and I'm unconvinced that Warner finds anything fresh to say about this kind of place. Secondly I'm doubtful that a Brexit environment is an effective lens through which to read this work. If Grimes were being sung by a singer of colour, of had a non-English accent, if the libretto was not so explicit about him being a native of the town then it might fit better - but none of those things apply here. This may explain why the assault on Ellen, whose English is accented, came across to me as more telling. When you add to this the fact that the production, to my eyes, is so explicit about both Grimes's madness and his violence I think it makes it further difficult to read the mob's attitude to him as the product of wider dissatisfactions - their terrible behaviour is explicable in terms of how this individual is portrayed.

Down in the stalls at this performance my parents were much warmer in their reaction. Maybe I was tired, maybe I've got more fussy post-pandemic in a context where theatregoing still has an increased stress. I can only say that, whatever the reason, compared to the previous live performances I found myself often at an emotional distance, arguing with the show, rather than compelled to attend.

Henry V at the Donmar, or, Back to the Same Old, Same Old

noreply@blogger.com (Finn Pollard) — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 09:37:00 +0000

Note: This is a review of the preview matinee on Saturday 19th February 2022 and written shortly afterwards. In view of the Covid cancellations and delayed press night I decided not to post until after the press night which has now taken place.

Henry V feels to me like one of the more frequently staged Shakespeares (certainly among the history plays) and a new staging consequently runs up against the challenge of how to make the work fresh. It is a challenge which this production sadly fails to meet.

This was my first encounter with director Max Webster, though family members had recently reported positively on his Life of Pi. Webster and designer Fly Davis go for a very bare staging. There's a metallic like backdrop and a three level raked bare platform on which virtually the only furniture in three hours are occasional plastic chairs which look more suited to a classroom than a throne room. There is little concrete sense of place at any point - the single sustained exception is the Henry/Mountjoy scene towards the end of the first half. For atmosphere Webster is reliant, as far too many current directors seem to be, on projections supplied on this occasion by Andrzej Goulding. These are used in three ways - to explain elements of the plot (fair enough on the Salic Law speech, superfluous when we're on the road to Agincourt), to project the faces of the two monarchs, and to reinforce the text (waves to make clear that we're travelling by sea when the Chorus is describing this). As a whole the projections make little impression, and particularly in that last instance, suggested to me a lack of confidence in the audience to use their imagination. Overall the environment is dull to look at, and feels like a repeat of an approach I've seen often before.

The setting is compounded by another decision common to Shakespeare stagings in recent years - the swapping of swords for guns. In my experience it is really difficult to make this work for the simple reason that these plays are full of death but it is rarely possible when using guns to have any convincing onstage deaths. This production doesn't avoid this pitfall. There are a couple of moments which feel genuinely violent - usually when we are dealing with individual confrontations (or when Pistol considers suicide) but the ensemble scenes rarely find that sense of threat. There are two further contributory factors here. The first is Benoit Swan Pouffer's undistinguished movement direction. His background, per his programme bio, is almost entirely in ballet and it shows - too often the ensemble movement feels too pretty, and rather than creating a sense of momentum slows everything down. The second is Andrew T. Mackay's oratorio like score. In order to perform this four members of the cast are singers with operatic backgrounds all doubling up in various small roles. The score in itself didn't for me merit this, and I'm afraid despite their best efforts this casting contributes to what is overall a set of only solid performances with often not enough variation when doubling. Of the score itself, at times it is overly intrusive - a setting of "In darkness let me dwell" (I couldn't quite make out if it was Dowland's or a variant on it) before Henry tours the camp on the eve of Agincourt felt like another occasion when the production team didn't trust the text to make the necessary effect on its own, but the music ended up diminishing the text. In many of the battle scenes it contributes to slowing down the action, having a kind of deadening effect where what is needed is an intensification of the drama. Altogether I increasingly started to feel that the production team were going for filmic effects which did not work effectively in the theatre setting.

The final problem with the production, and one which partly arises from the combined effects of the dull staging, and the slowing created by movement and score, is that pacing almost uniformly is too slow. At the outset Webster, mistakenly in my view, crowbars in bits of Henry IV involving Prince Hal, Falstaff and so on carousing. This failed to make me care about the fates of his former friends, nor did it add any additional weight to what is still an abrupt transformation into the King - I'd suggest that much more crucial to explaining this is the deathbed encounter with his father and that if you're going to bring in anything from Henry IV to a Henry V staging done in isolation it should be that. But I also think that, if you're doing Henry V as a standalone production you're much better off to be very subtle in the links drawn backwards and forwards and to trust to your audience to make connections. Beyond that this production rarely generates momentum - it very much feels three hours in length.

It's difficult to work out what was the driver for another Henry V staging - the most obvious explanation is that Kit Harington wanted to have a go at the lead and it was hoped he would be good box office. There is a lot of promise in Harington's performance - much of the textual delivery is strong and there are at least a couple of really fine moments - his response to the French Ambassador at the beginning and, in the best scene in the whole afternoon, his encounter with Mountjoy on the eve of Agincourt. But he hasn't quite yet got the full measure of the different changes of mood, of character which the part requires, and he doesn't yet quite command throughout in the way that I think the character needs to. He also sounded under vocal strain in places, a bit worrying considering this is only the beginning of the run.

Of the ensemble the best performances come from David Judge, doubling as Mountjoy/Nym, and Anoushka Lucas as Katherine. In a show as already noted replete with doubling Judge stands out for really distinguishing his two roles - he both carries himself, and speaks quite differently. Notice in particular his sense of authority in that scene with Henry, contrasted with the beaten down Nym when he finds Pistol has married his girl. Others in the ensemble could learn from him. The production seeks to make something of Katherine, often a rather thankless role, and Lucas brings a welcome energy to her scenes such that it's a pity the role isn't larger. One frustration though, is the wooing scene. Webster seems to want to subvert this and when Henry first tries to kiss Katherine it is chilling, but we're soon back in a familiar reading - it doesn't feel properly thought through. The rest of the ensemble are solid. They deserve credit for nearly all of them being bilingual, though I wasn't ultimately convinced that having the French scenes delivered in French added a great deal beyond novelty to the production, but most of them don't distinguish their different roles sufficiently, and the performances rarely exerted a sustained grip on me.

At the very end Webster has Chorus repeat the final lines about bloody England. This seems to aim for contemporary resonance but it feels unfocused and, as elsewhere, lacking trust in the text and in the audience to draw their own links. Overall, this is an overlong afternoon, without enough strong performances to lift a dull production, and without much fresh to say about a familiar text. Missable.