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AND HEARD OPERA / CONCERT REVIEW
Jette Parker Young Artists'
Programme Summer Concert: Mozart, Strauss and
Rossini opera excerpts:
Various artists, The Orchestra of Opera North; Richard
Farnes and Andrew Griffiths (conductors). The Royal
Opera House, Covent Garden, London 20.7.2008 (JPr)
It was end of term for the Jette Parker Young Artists
Programme and time for their summer concert. Many in
the audience, I suspect, will have noted the
acknowledgements to Jette Parker without having any
idea who she is. For those interested, Jette Parker is
one of a group of philanthropists in the USA and UK
without whom many important arts activities would not
be possible.
Jette and Alan Parker established the Oak Foundation
and Oak Philanthropies Ltd both of Geneva, Switzerland
in 1998 though they have another base in Colby, Maine
in the USA. The Oak Foundation supports many
different kinds of non-profit organizations throughout
the world including some concerned with human rights
activities. It supports the International Council for
the Rehabilitation of Torture Victims for example,
which has had a major impact on the torture abolition
movement and has funded a global network of
rehabilitation centres to restore the lives of torture
victims. The Foundation also makes important
contributions to the promotion of worldwide public
health.
The Jette Parker Young Artists Programme was set up in
2001, as their publicity material explains, ‘to
support the artistic development of professional
singers, conductors, directors and répétiteurs at the
start of their careers … The Young Artists spend two
years at the Royal Opera House as full-time salaried
company members’. The singers receive coaching and
regular stage work, the répétiteurs and conductors
join the music staff for rehearsals and the stage
directors assist on Royal Opera productions, as well
as devise the staging of this annual concert.
Selection for to the programme is by an annual
competition consisting of auditions and intervews.
‘Home-trained’ the Young Artists may be but I
struggled to find anyone home-grown in this concert,
not that there is anything wrong with that but I do
wonder where Brits get their experience? This is the
stuff for a different article of course, so
meanwhile let’s just celebrate the talent of the
current generation. The scenes chosen - the
whole of Act IV from Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro,
the fugue, duet and octet from Strauss’s Capriccio
and four national songs and the Gran
pezzo concertato from Rossini’s Il viaggio a
Reims - were not easy options since
all were ensemble pieces featuring singers in various
disparate roles.
Figaro
and Capriccio were presented in the same basic
Act IV set by Tanya McCallin for The Royal Opera’s
current Le nozze di Figaro and the Rossini was
a concert staging performed in front of a red curtain
with two chandeliers and a mix of costumes from
two earlier stagings. McCallin’s set is not
particularly like Seville but more the Vienna that
Mozart knew. In David McVicar’s production, images of
trees, falling leaves and lighting changes help
distinguish that the action is outdoors though the
furniture from the palace makes this fact a little
ambiguous. For the concert, young Bulgarian
director, Vera Petrova, kept us firmly indoors with a
long dining table alongside a mix of formal dress and
particularly entertainingly urban street wear, such as
Cherubino's baseball cap typically on backwards.
Mozart’s garden setting negates all the characters’
social positions and allows master and servants
finally to be reconciled; therefore it was an error on
Petrova’s part to miss the opportunity to reflect
this. The two highlights should have been when
Figaro muses on the inconstancy of women (Aprite un
po' quegli occhi) and Susanna’s love song (Deh,
vieni, non tardar) which Figaro overhears but
fails to realise is meant for him. The former showed
up that Figaro, Krzysztof Szumanski, would have made a
fine Count and equally Jacques Imbrailo, who was
indeed a
fine Count, would have been an even better Figaro.
What was beyond doubt was Kishani Jayasinghe has star quality
as a compelling actress with a bright clear
voice.
JOHAN%20PERSSON.jpg)
Le nozze di Figaro:
Kishani Jayasinghe
The
McCallin design was an entirely suitable setting for an excerpt from
Capriccio, Strauss’s debate about the relationship in opera
between words and music. It is a conversational piece and the
extract
included (in translation) lines like; ‘I formulate my thoughts in
words and not in music’, ‘An opera is an absurd thing’ and - to the
director -‘We’re startled by your imagination but we doubt whether
your ideas can ever be staged’. Perhaps any Strauss experts reading
this can point me to where the
debt that music indubitably owes to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger
(end of Act I) which in turn involves its own heated discussion on the
aesthetics of song, is discussed in the operatic literature. Thomas Guthrie, a rare Brit, brought us some
images from the seventies in his direction; Vuyani Mlinde (La Roche)
was Shaft with shades, flares and an afro hair cut, the Italian tenor was
Elvis and had his moves but sadly not his voice and Anita Watson’s
drunken Italian soprano, Clairon was a platinum blonde Marilyn
Monroe. Mlinde has a wonderful easy stage presence and smooth bass
voice and Watson followed up her warmly sung Countess Almaviva with
another well characterized bit-part. Also featuring strongly was
Kostas Smoriginas’s Count and Pumeza Matshikiza who was the first
person we saw in this concert as a scatter-brained and rich-toned
Barbarina. She now showed that she could equally well portray a haughty
Countess. Both these singers have a secure future in opera, I
suspect.
JOHAN%20PERSSON.jpg)
Capriccio: Monika-Evelin Liiv
and Haoyin Xue
So then, to the final music from Rossini’s ‘cantata scenica’ Il viaggio a Reims,
written in 1825 for the coronation of Charles X for all the major singers of the Théâtre-Italien: and here for the ten Young Artists previously showcased and a more senior guest, Elizabeth Sikora who was Marcellina in Figaro. Monika-Evelin Liiv completed a triptych of fascinating characters as a mini-dressed and black-booted Polish Marchesa, after her Cherubino and as the actress Clairon in Capriccio. Still dressed as Elvis, Haoyin Xue’s Russian general found some solid top notes but still displayed the intonation problems that spoilt his earlier Italian tenor while Ji-Min Park had a rather sweeter tone as the Cavalier but still seemed an over-schooled tenor. Kishani Jayasinghe was a very perky Tyrolean innkeeper, Krzysztof Szumanski’s bass-baritone resonated as the German major, Kostas Smoriginas was a wonderfully vain flamenco dancing Don Alvaro and Jacques Imbrailo completed a personally triumphant night as Lord Sidney with a strong rendition of ‘God Save the King’ in Italian.
JOHAN%20PERSSON.jpg)
Il Viaggio a Reims: The Ensemble
With
the Royal Opera House Orchestra possibly away already on holiday, the
Orchestra of Opera North were in the pit and played well throughout
the evening. Some looseness of balance between pit and stage, thinness of
textures and a lack of Mozartian style was evident when the young
conductor, Andrew Griffiths had the baton for Figaro but the
orchestral sound seemed to gain much more focus for the Strauss and
Rossini under Opera North's Music Director, Richard Farnes.
Although this
was a
rather short afternoon, it was great fun all the same for an
atypical Covent Garden audience, full of family and friends of
the artists as well as Covent Garden regulars able to populate
the stalls due to the more-than-fair ticket prices for this Sunday
matinee. Towards the end, the smell of the curry undoubtedly
waiting to be enjoyed at the post-performance party wafted
enticingly throughout the auditorium.
Jim
Pritchard
All photographs © Johan Persson
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