Cardiff
Gary Raymond
There is a glaring irony in that a play about an all-consuming obsession with one thing (fame) has no real idea of what it itself is supposed to be. Say It With Flowers, a purported biography of iconic lounge singer Dorothy Squires, teases at the sequins of the musical, the psychological drama, the tragi-comedy, the biopic, gritty realism, expressionism, and soap opera, but eventually falls between the cracks of all these. It makes for a frustrating two hours.The life of Squires was full of incident, scandal and fractured relationships. She was a star, the spotlight kid, who set off from her Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Janáček’s opera subjects – the 300-year-old opera singer, the composer with a mad mother-in-law, the Siberian prison camp – are by any standards a fairly rum collection. But The Cunning Little Vixen is arguably the most deviant of the whole bunch. Its foxy heroine (out of a Prague newspaper cartoon strip) is captured by the local Forester, lectures his hens about their subservience to the Cockerel, slaughters the lot of them, runs off, marries, starts a family, then allows herself to be shot by the poacher. All very charming, random and pathetic, one might feel. But Janáček typically has Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Last week Lulu, this week Cio-Cio San, next week the Vixen Bystrouška. These are the three exemplars of David Pountney’s “Free Spirits” – as he labels his first themed season with WNO. But it’s hard to see poor little Butterfly, pinned to a board by the cruel American sailor-lepidopterist, as a free anything. Like a trapped fly, Suzuki calls her; and if there’s a free spirit in Puccini’s opera, it might rather be Pinkerton himself, “dropping anchor at random,” as he boasts to Sharpless: not such an inspiring thought.Joachim Herz’s production, now 35 years old, was rough and aggressive when Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Since I last reviewed Opera’r Ddraig (no longer offered as Dragon Opera in their publicity) two years ago, this company of students and postgraduates has moved house, and this year is staging its main show, Offenbach’s delightfully absurd Orpheus spoof, in the cavernous old Coal Exchange down by Cardiff Bay.It isn’t a happy move, and I hope won’t be permanent. The Exchange is a high, flat hall with, of course, no orchestra pit, and the show’s director, Imogen Tedbury, has put up a steeply terraced stage which makes for excellent sight-lines but badly inhibits stage movement, entrances and Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What-ifs and might-have-beens are usually as pointless in music as in any other walk of life. Still one can’t help wondering how Alban Berg would have completed – and, no less interesting, revised – his opera Lulu, if he hadn’t been stung by some philistine insect in the summer of 1935 and died of the resulting septicaemia that Christmas Eve, with the last act unfinished and barely half-orchestrated.Berg’s earlier opera, Wozzeck, is taut and perfunctory, like the Büchner play it’s based on. Lulu, a setting of a pair of wordy plays by the proto-expressionist Frank Wedekind, is brilliant, Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The Britten centenary will, among much else, inspire performances of his comparatively under-regarded instrumental works - pieces like the cello suites and the string quartets, already sampled in brilliant performances at last week’s Wye Valley Chamber Music Festival. But I personally remain an adherent of his vocal music, and especially of the Spring Symphony, which I first got to know – and vainly to imitate – as a Cambridge undergraduate decades ago. It was a treat to revisit this dazzling score on Friday, so early in the festivities, in an exemplary performance under David Atherton Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Speaking about the Requiem he composed in 1990 in memory of the London Sinfonietta’s long-time artistic director Michael Vyner, Hans Werner Henze always talked as a believing atheist. “Paradise is here or ought to be,” he insisted, “not later, when nothing else happens;” and “In this world there is no hereafter, only presence: you can meet angels and devils in the street at any time.”So it was a surprise to find a lot more spiritual power radiating from the three movements of the Requiem that Christoph Poppen conducted in this concert by the Welsh National Opera Chorus and Orchestra than from Read more ...
stephen.walsh
For some reason, the Welsh have revived their Così fan tutte, from last year, with positively unseemly haste – if not quite so unseemly as the haste with which their La Bohème, from this spring, was wheeled back on last month barely three months after its first airing. It looks as if the outgoing intendant John Fisher, never notable for lively repertory planning, was either clearing his desk, or had simply scarpered. His successor, David Pountney, has bravely been much in evidence on company first nights this year, but cannot yet be blamed for what he, and we, are hearing and seeing.This Così Read more ...
simon.broughton
“Come to the front with those guns. You need to frighten those poor Brits – pah, pah, pah, pah, pah!” Michael Williams hurls his fist forward as if wielding his own weapon as he urges the demonstrators with their sticks and guns forward. The crowd of black singers in front of him are recreating an anti-apartheid protest in Cape Town Opera’s production of Mandela Trilogy, which gets its European premiere in Cardiff on 20 June.Williams is the librettist and director of Mandela Trilogy and managing director of Cape Town Opera. And I’m in the Opera’s rehearsal room in the Artscape in Cape Town to Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Of all Romantic operas, La Bohème is perhaps the one that responds best to what one might, for want of a better phrase, call straight theatrical treatment. It’s pure genre: no hidden meanings, no contemporary significance. “Scenes from the life”, as Murger called his book, now barely readable. Puccini’s opera, likewise, is short on continuity, long on atmosphere, very long on sentiment. Why would anyone bother with it?Annabel Arden’s new production for WNO answers that question more than convincingly. She makes no great statements; we’re not lectured on art as redemption or disease as moral Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Welsh National Opera has a good track record with Wagner. Its Meistersinger of two summers ago is already the stuff of legend (and alas not likely to return to reality); farther back one recalls a more than respectable Parsifal, a notable Ring cycle, and an old Tristan under Goodall that’s still talked about in hushed whispers.This more recent Tristan, itself almost two decades old, belongs strictly to a new era. Nowadays WNO does original language and books international singers, which in theory – if not always in practice – lifts its productions out of the provincial league. It also has the Read more ...
Gwyneth Lewis
Like many students, I read the Oresteia by Aeschylus as an undergraduate as part of a compulsory Tragedy paper. A while ago I was asked would I do a new version of the Oresteia. I’m not a Greek scholar so I feel I have no authority to offer a "translation". However, I was up for writing a completely new play.Aeschylus’s Oresteia tells of Agamemnon returning from the Trojan war and being murdered by his wife Clytmnestra because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia as part of the campaign. In Aeschylus, Clytemnestra is a wicked man-woman who upstages her husband, takes a lover and is later Read more ...