DORSET OPERA FESTIVAL 2013

DO Programme 2013

Craig Brown is just one of many writers to pay tribute to an inspirational English master, and in my own small way, I would like to pay my debt to Bill Currie, English master (and Colonel in Chief of the Cadet Corps) at King Edward’s School in Bath.  It was Bill who introduced us to Coleridge’s famous remark about the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ which is necessary to take a work of fiction on its own terms.  Bill was the author of a number of books about his times at KES, and less well known, he produced many little editions of ‘crammer’ notes about literature for the publishing firms which specialise in helping the less gifted among us learn the rudimentary concepts behind some of the great works that examiners send to try us.  Among these, Bill produced a masterly crib to W.B.Yeats, though his researches on Yeats led him to believe, as he confessed to me many years later, that despite the quality of the writing Yeats himself was ‘a great big fake’.  Still, when called upon to believe in the fiction before us on stage or in film, Coleridge’s words through the medium of Col. W. T. Currie tend to come back to me.

Before turning to opera, which is where one’s disbelief is sorely tested, parenthetically, the web leads one on to read about a wonderful term in this regard – that of ‘cognitive estrangement’.  This is defined by James and Mendelssohn in the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction as ‘the sense that something in the fictive world is dissonant with the reader’s experienced world’.  Science Fiction is the genre par excellence where disbelief must be suspended in order to enter the new world.  But of course, the frisson of science fiction is that all of what one is reading might well be true.  Many of the classic works of science fiction from the 19^th and 20^th centuries have in fact come true.  Space exploration, and the Roraima plateau of Professor Challenger’s Lost World, are examples.  In opera, the dichotomy between the fictive and experienced reality can be substantial.  The consumptive heroine who sings at full blast only minutes before her death (where would the 19^th century novel, play, and opera be without tuberculosis?  Dicken’s description of the death of Smike comes to mind, but the list is long).  So, to engage our passions and interest, such productions must be of the very highest quality.  Was this the case with Dorset Opera Festival 2013?

In brief, the answer is yes.  In their bicentenary year, DO chose works by Verdi and Wagner, and works that were remarkably dissimilar.  La Traviata is full of expressive and poetic melody.  I hadn’t seen it for many years, but as the action unfolds, one cannot help but be overwhelmed as the music of yet another aria starts up and one thinks, ‘Oh yes, I know this, how wonderful’.  In the Flying Dutchman, rarely performed, the familiar music is limited to the overture and incidental music; but it is remarkable how familiar the style is, and how little Wagner changed some of his leitmotivs in subsequent operas.  With only a few tweaks, it’s clear that the Dutchman’s theme, and some of the sea motifs become Siegfried and some of the Rhine music.

We went to see La Traviata on an English summer evening of beauty and heat, picnicking in the grounds of Bryanston School, and then filing into the auditorium for a hugely enjoyable performance of superb musical playing, great sets, choral ensembles, and stunning soloists, particularly Violetta and Germont.  The heat of the evening lent a rather healthy colour to the skin of Jessica Muirhead, the British-Canadian soprano, but some white makeup and pallid lighting enhanced the illusion of the tuberculous patient in the final scene.  Very early in the 2013 plans of DO it was announced that Jonathan Miller was to be the director of the production.  Predictably it was a sell out.  Some friends were only able to get tickets front right, where their view was a little infringed upon by the double basses, but as one of them remarked, ‘I was trying to empathise with the dying heroine in the final act, only to have my eye caught by the trumpeter in the orchestra pit, who was reading a magazine throughout.  “Railway Modeller” I think it was...’  Yes, only a few toots were required at key moments in La Traviata.  As a doctor myself, I was deeply touched at the devotion to duty of Violetta’s physician, who turned up at seven o’clock in the morning (it’s true, it’s in the libretto), even though streptomycin had not yet been invented, purely to confirm that our heroine had only hours to live.  ‘The doctor is allowed to tell white lies’, he assured us.  I may yet need to use that before the GMC one day...

I feel sure that the brass section’s copies of the “Railway Modeller” had been left behind for the following evening when I attended ‘The Flying Dutchman’.  Again, a wonderful heroine, in Lee Bisset, slinking around the stage in a red dress, and a rather surprising fur coat.  Perhaps her would be lover, Erik the huntsman, had lovingly crafted it from the skins of his prey?  Her outfit was attuned to the black spars and the red sails of the eponymous voyager, whose sea chest labelled FD had been carelessly left on the stage.  To a Poole sailor, the FD is evocative of the much lamented Olympic class sailing dinghy, and the great Rodney Pattisson, Britain’s greatest Olympic sailor until Ben Ainslie.  Further inland, in Blandford Forum, the weather had changed, torrential rain swept Dorset, and on stage storms swept the coast of Norway.  Wagner’s love of brass was well in evidence, and our trumpeter was surely far too busy to think about the 4-6-2 of Sir Nigel Gresley.  Once again, disbelief was difficult to suspend, particularly in the frequent references to the pale face of the accursed Dutchman, when the character was portrayed by the handsome black African-American bass-baritone Mark S. Doss.  But what a voice and presence!  On an evening when members of the audience were once again fainting with the heat in the auditorium, Mr Doss striding around the stage in a giant nautical greatcoat and gumboots, and Ms Bisset in her fur coat should be congratulated for their stamina, as well as their wonderful singing.

There is a little difficulty in staging the ‘Dutchman’ in that Acts 2 and 3 take place in differing locations, which at the Met would no doubt require two intervals, together with much scene changing.  DO chose to put their one interval after act 1, which resulted in two ‘halves’ of 50 minutes and 90 minutes respectively.  There has to be an interval between Acts 1 and 2, because the contrast is enormous.  Act 2 opens with as close as Wagner can get to a scene of happy domesticity; with a spinning song which is so melodic one assumes it must have been written by Brahms.  The scene soon changes however, and since this is Grand Opera, we know that things are not going to end well.  To see two opera seria in successive nights and to get away with a body count of three (two if you don’t count the fact that Mr Doss is officially dead anyway) is pretty good going.

I could ramble on, like the three Norns at the beginning of Götterdämmerung, but I won’t.  Well done, Dorset Opera, you were fantastic.

Letter to America - November 2011

Letter to America – created November 6^th to 9^th, 2011

This post is primarily created for Lindsay’s cousin, Tod, who lives in Lancaster, PA.  Tod is an opera buff, and this Saturday, November 5^th we have been together, ‘in a virtual sort of way’, as Tod observed.  We’ve been to ‘The MET Live’ to see Siegfried, Lindsay and I in Poole, and Tod and Annie in Pennsylvania.

The week in Dorset has not been notable for good weather.  It has been grey and dry or grey and rainy.  On Tuesday evening, Penny Jarvis from the hospital came round to show us her pictures and tell us about her charitable fund raising ascent of Kilimanjaro.  It was impressive, in a practical way, with helpful information about everything from clothing to toilets.  Helpful at least if we ever get around to doing it.  We sponsored Penny as did many other people, but I was left feeling that we hadn’t given her enough, considering the miserable weather she encountered.  Wednesday evening was our usual visit to ‘The Lighthouse’ for the BSO concert.  Remarkable young conductor, Krysztov Urbanski, and a lovely concert, somewhat underattended.  The programme started off with Sibelius Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, and continued with the Dvorak violin concerto (Alina Pogostkina on her 1709 Strad).  The second half was Smetana’s Ma Vlast.  Sometimes I think the inhabitants of Poole only turn out if it’s the principal conductor, Kirill Karabits, or if there’s a piano concerto on the programme.  The hottest feature of the evening was Lindsay’s Keralan vegetable curry, served afterwards.

Our most unusual event this week was our visit to Ronnie Scott’s on Thursday evening, to hear the American chanteuse, Stacey Kent.  This was rather impulsively booked only a few weeks earlier, and given the rotten weather it wasn’t a journey we looked forward to.  We first heard Stacey Kent in slightly strange circumstances.  When we were walking the Lycian Way in Turkey this May, our first hotel was a little lodge called the ‘Olympos Mountain Lodge’, an hour and a half west of Antalya.  The music in the lodge was streamed from the manager’s Apple Mac.  Soon we recognised Pink Martini’s ‘Sympathique’, sung in French.  Shortly after this, another song in French with a rather similar feel, but not Pink Martini.  We aked the owner.  ‘Stacey Kent’, he replied, with a surprised air, as if we should have known.  Soon, back at home, we were the owners of her album ‘Raconte-moi’.  Our journey to London was something of an ordeal.  It took us two hours to get to Kensington, where we parked near the Albert Hall, avoiding the crowds arriving for ‘An evening with Engelbert Humperdinck’ and took a cab into Soho.  A rainy, dark, miserable and traffic crowded night in London.  My team at Royal Bournemouth Hospital had done a fantastic job in getting through my cardiac catheterisation list by 4pm, so we were able to walk into Ronnie Scott’s at about 6.30pm.  We had only managed to get restricted view seats, but arriving so early we were allocated the best possible restricted view seats, and they were fine.  Now I hadn’t been to Ronnie’s for around 25 years, and indeed the atmosphere is still great: intimate, and nobody is that far from the performers.  My memories of past visits are so vivid – because of the quality of the artists.  The last visit was to see the legendary guitarist Joe Pass, and before that I sometimes used to go around Christmas time when George Melly and John Chilton’s Feetwarmers always had a one week slot.  The opening act was the James Pearson trio – all very good, fantastic piano by JP.  When Stacey came on, she was as good as we’d hoped and we also found the band members outstanding.  The pianist was so good, so restrained and elegant.  The drumming was genuine accompaniment and not obtrusive, and the bass was a perfect counterpoint – all notes audible and in harmony.  Then of course, there was Stacey’s husband, Jim Tomlinson on tenor sax.  Wonderful, warm sounds, reminiscent of Stan Getz.  In fact, an article about Stan Getz specifically mentions JT as making music in the Brazilian traditions of the Great Stan.  Musically, the Brazilian numbers, mostly by the famous Antonio Carlos Jobim, were my favourites.  Stacey’s sets, as far as I can recall them and notated them were as follows:

Breakfast on the morning tram

It might as well be spring

They can’t take that away from me

Dreamer (Jobim)

Quiet nights of quiet stars (Jobim)

Mon amour

Sait-on jamais

So nice

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Waters of March (Jobim)

How insensitive (Jobim)

The Ice Hotel

Postcard lovers

Cambaya (the train)

S’wonderful

Samba triste (?or samba sarava)

What a wonderful world

The songs about the Ice Hotel and the Postcard Lovers were co-written by Jim Tomlinson (music) and Kazuo Ishiguro (lyrics).  Kazuo is something of a Stacey Kent fan – he chose one of her songs in his Desert Island Discs, and has been pleased to revert to what is apparently his first love – song writing.  He was in the audience for the set, so we felt doubly privileged – for the remains of the day at least.  We enjoyed a good meal as well.  We could have stayed until the wee small hours and listened to the second set by the James Pearson trio – but I guess not many of the aficionados present came from Dorset, so at about 11pm we set out into drizzly Frith Street and walked down to Shaftesbury Avenue.  No cabs of course.  We were almost at Piccadilly Circus before we were picked up and then had to travel back to the Albert Hall.  By the time we arrived back in Kensington all of Engelbert’s fans had long since gone home to their cocoa and hot water bottles, so there wasn’t exactly a crush.  Good journey home but it was 1.30 am before we were in bed.

We slept in a little on Friday, and prepared ourselves for our other major cultural endurance event to come that weekend – the visit to Poole Lighthouse for the aforementioned Met Live performance of Siegfried on Saturday.

After writing this, I felt it was a little uninspired, and felt that only a determined friend or a serious Stacey Kent fan would bother to read on after the introductory paragraph.  After going to bed, I watched a film about the making of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, the Simon and Garfunkel album.  It was made in honour of his 70^th birthday (October 13^th).  I was so inspired I wanted to get up and write on.  It brought back memories of working in the research lab at Will Rogers Hospital, Saranac Lake, upstate New York, in summer 1970.  I worked with a local lad – David Meyer – who had an 8-track stereo player, and the tapes we played all summer were ‘Bridge’, Chicago, and the Crosby Stills and Nash album.  When I left David gave me a copy of the album on vinyl.  Happy memories.  But, remarkably, some of the best quotes in recent weeks have come from the sports section of the Telegraph, and here is one: ‘Nostalgia is the neurotic inability to be able to deal with the present’.  So – I need to move on, but one day, will we look back and say ‘Do you remember when we heard Stacey Kent at Ronnie Scott’s?’

There are Wagnerophiles everywhere, some more likely than others.  To use Shaw’s description, I should perhaps call them Wagnerites.  I wouldn’t really count myself in that number, though I do admit to going to Tristan and Isolde this year, so perhaps I’m changing.  In the audience at the Lighthouse was one of our oncologists, who I wouldn’t have picked as a Wagnerite, and our recently retired Danish cosmopolitan ‘Renaissance Man’, (well he is an artist) neurophysiologist, Christian Wulff (who I wasn’t surprised to see).  Now Tod was enthusiastic about our trying Siegfried.  He called it more ‘approachable’.  There certainly is a lot more going on, with evil dwarfs, dragons, a magical bird, and the occasional leitmotif for one to hang one’s craving for musical recognition on.  I recall going to Gotterdammerung at Covent Garden, before the days of surtitles, and listening to the three Norns groping around in the semidarkness for what seemed like about 2 hours during the first act, not understanding a word and not particularly enjoying the music.  It took several hours and several acts to get to Siegfried’s Death music – magnificent.  As the two old ladies said, talking about Wagner:

‘Wagner has such wonderful moments, dear.’

‘Yes, and such awful half hours.’

But thanks to the magnificent set, the magnificent sound, the quality of the singers, I found that I really enjoyed Siegfried, and could even go back and do it all again.  Jay Hunter Morris, who sang Siegfried, was terrific, and the behind the scenes filming during the intervals showed him as a refreshingly unaffected opera star, from little ol’ Paris, Texas.  In fact his off stage persona conveyed exactly the right heroic naïveté that his on stage character is meant to have.  His recent job working in a health club presumably gave him the magnificent biceps that one needs when forging a magic sword from little pieces.  It certainly helped to have Rene Fleming doing the interviews, and scarcely gave us time to produce our pseudo-Glyndebourne feast (champagne, salmon en croute, dips etc) that we had planned on for the intervals.  It did feel slightly incongruous eating such a wonderful picnic in the unattractive surrounds of Poole Lighthouse.

On Sunday, we had a rather tedious journey to Taunton, to a luncheon party of Susanna Joy’s.  The lunch was good, but it was four hours of driving.  Sobering moment – driving under the M5, queued all around Taunton, because of the major motorway crash there on Friday, the worst in the UK for twenty years.

So that’s the diary.  Lots of other little happenings.  England play an international football match this week, and there is ‘poppy rage’.  They are not being allowed to wear poppy emblems on their shirts.