What a wonderful week of opera it has been for me, with Opera Holland Park’s opening production of Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West on Tuesday preceded a few days earlier by two other masterpieces from the 20th-century repertoire. These were Grange Park Opera’s season opener, Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, and Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites at the Royal Opera House, which I saw on its first night last Thursday.
Of the last, I can only say that I share the view of the Daily Telegraph’s opera critic Rupert Christiansen, expressed in his four-star review on Monday, that this is the best opera written in his — for which can also be substituted my — lifetime. (Were I ten years older, I might nominate Grimes as a rival. This was premiered in 1945, six years before my birth.) The Covent Garden production, sensationally conducted by Simon Rattle in his first Opera House engagement since 2007, is one not to be missed. Nor need it be, aurally at least, for there is to be a live broadcast of it on BBC Radio 3 this Saturday at 7pm. Sir Simon is doing sterling work for the station at present, incidentally, with his Sunday night concert at the Barbican featuring the London Symphony Orchestra (Schumann’s Symphony No 2 and the Beethoven Violin Concerto) also relayed live.
For so mighty a work, performances of The Carmelites in Britain are comparatively infrequent, and, therefore, tend to stick in the mind. My first was by Welsh National Opera and given at Oxford’s New Theatre (then called the Apollo) in the closing weeks of the 20th century. Just the thing to bring on millennial angst, you might think, with its closing parade of 16 nuns advancing to meet their maker, courtesy of Madame Guillotine, ecstatically singing Salve Regina, their voices steadily silenced as the blade falls.
Stephen Barlow conducted a fine revival last year at Grange Park, where he is in charge of the current Grimes. This lucky gentleman is married to Joanna Lumley, who was present at Friday’s first night, when Stephen Fry, David Dimbleby and Jeremy Paxman — resplendent in a bottle green velvet jacket — were also among the celebrities.
Fry later tweeted to his myriad followers: “A random Dalek [part of the local scenery] joined me in seeing a superb production.”
Notices about the place explained why camera crews were following the stars. They were shooting a series for BBC TV focusing on how the good and the great enjoy themselves during the ‘season’.
After a recent visit to Covent Garden, where I suffered through the marathon Parsifal on a very narrow, armless seat, we went for a box for The Carmelites. This did not involve the lavish expenditure you might expect, since it offered ‘limited view’ of the proceedings. Not so very limited, as it turned out, since all four of us were able to see more than half the stage.
Besides, there were compensations. One was to look directly down on Rattle working energetically to encourage exquisite sounds from players and singers. Another was to inspect the two harpists (this is a big orchestra) in the box opposite. Both were women.
“Why are harpists always women?” I asked. “I know a male harpist,” said one of our companions, a piano student at the Guildhall School of Music. “But he is a transvestite.”
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