Today, thanks to GodDaughter2, who is a singing student, I got to see a dress rehearsal of a new opera being staged by English National Opera called Jack The Ripper: The Women of Whitechapel.  I had my camera with me, but these places don’t encourage photography, so I was assuming I’d emerge from the Coliseum with only the memories of what we’d seen and heard.

The story was, of course, gruesome, and GodDaughter2 grumbled about the lighting, which was relentlessly dark and depressing.  However, the music was pleasingly tonal, drenched in melodies, and most especially in harmonies, of a sort that seemed, in my youth half a century ago, like they’d vanished from the world of new opera for ever.

Back in that stricken post-Schoenbergian musical no-man’s-land, posh music was thought to “progress”, like science.  And it had progressed up its own rear end into unmelodious, unharmonious, unrhythmic oblivion, and because this was progress, no way back was permitted.  But then, that was all blown to smithereens by the likes of Philip Glass and John Adams.  Iain Bell, the composer of Jack The Ripper, operates in the musical world established by those two American giants.

So even though we were about a quarter of a mile away from the action, up near the ceiling, and thus couldn’t make out anyone’s face, just being there was a most agreeable experience.

And then come the curtaln call at the end, there was another nice surprise:

That being the final surtitle of the show, to be seen in the spot up above the stage where all the previous surtitles had been saying what they had been singing.  So I got my camera out, cranked up the zoom to full power, and did what I could.

The curtain calls looked like this:

I was particularly interested in the lady in the yellow dress, on the right of the four ladies (guess what they all had in common), because that lady was Janis Kelly, who is GodDaughter2’s singing teacher at the Royal College.

Rather disappointingly, for me, was that most of the photos I took of Ms Kelly were better of the lady standing next to her when they were taking their bows, a certain Marie McLaughlin:

But I did get one reasonably adequate snap of Ms Kelly, suitably cropped (the photo, I mean) to remove Ms McLaughlin, whose nose had been sliced off in the original version that had emerged from the camera:

My camera now has much better eyesight than I do, and the gap seems to grow by the month.  Okay, that photo is rather blurry.  But there was a lot of zoom involved. I only managed to decipher about a third of those surtitles.  One of the key members of the cast was black, but I only found this out when I got home and saw her in one of my photos (see above).

I hope a DVD, or perhaps some kind of internetted video, of this production emerges.  And I think it might, because this is a show full of pro-female messages of the sort that appeal to modern tastes, and featuring one of the most spectacular exercises in toxic masculinity in London’s entire history.

I’m now going to read the synopsis of the show at the far end of the first link above, to get a a more exact idea of what happened.

I left it too late and I am now too tired to do anything here today, so here’s a random quota photo:

Taken in May 2015, from the South Bank, looking north across the River.  I’m pretty sure that’s the Royal Opera House Covent Garden.  But feel free to disagree.

I hope - although I promise nothing - to do better tomorrow.

I was reading this piece by Will Self about the baleful effect upon literature of the internet, screen reading instead of proper reading from paper bound into books, etc.  But then I got interrupted by the thought of writing this, which is about how a big difference between reading from a screen, as I just was, and reading from a printed book, is that if you are reading a book, it is more cumbersome, and sometimes not possible, to switch to attending to something else, like consulting the county cricket scores (Surrey are just now being bollocked by Essex), seeing what the latest is on Instapundit, or tuning into the latest pronouncements of Friends on Facebook or enemies on Twitter, or whatever is your equivalent list of interruptions.

This effect works when I am reading a book in the lavatory, even though, in my lavatory, there are several hundred other books present.  The mere fact of reading a book seems to focus my mind.  Perhaps this is only a habit of mine, just as not concentrating is only a habit when I am looking at a screen, but these onlys are still a big deal.

The effect is greatly enhanced when I go walkabout, and take a book with me.  Then - when being publicly transported or when pausing for coffee or rest or whatever - I cannot switch.  I can only concentrate on the one book, or not.

It’s the same in the theatre or the opera house, which friends occasionally entice me into.  Recently I witnessed Lohengrin at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.  The production was the usual abomination, but the orchestra and chorus were sublime, as were occasional bits of the solo singing.  And I now know Lohengrin a lot better.  Why?  Because, when I was stuck inside the ROH, there was nothing else to do except pay attention.  I could shut my eyes, which I often did.  But, I couldn’t wave a mouse or a stick at it and change it to The Mikado or Carry on Cleo, even though there were longish stretches when, if I could have, I would have.  It was Lohengrin or nothing.

I surmise that quite a few people these days deliberately subject themselves to this sort of forced concentration, knowing that it may be a bit of a struggle, but that it will a struggle they will be glad to have struggled with.  I don’t think it’s just me.

This explains, among other things, why I still resist portable screens.  Getting out and about is a chance to concentrate.

Recently I bought a CD set of Showboat, and yesterday I listened to it.  Showboat is not really my kind of thing.  When it comes to singing, I tend to prefer either Schubert or the Rolling Stones.  I bought this Showboat to learn more about a lady called Janis Kelly.  As you can see to the right there, she is one of the star singers in this recording.

Janis Kelly is something of a legend in the classical singing world.  She is a fine singer in operas and music dramas of all kinds, and she sang the part of “Magnolia” in this performance of Showboat.  She is also a much admired singing teacher, of the sort that singers she has taught spend the rest of their careers boasting that they were taught by, in their CVs and programme notes.  And, Janis Kelly just happens to be GodDaughter2’s singing teacher at the Royal College of Music.  (GD2’s graduation recital being further evidence, to my ears, and eyes, of Ms. Kelly’s teaching prowess.)

Janis Kelly sounded great on this recording, but what surprised me was how much I enjoyed the recording as a whole.  I am used to hearing shows like Showboat performed in a style that is aimed at audiences who basically prefer pop music to classical or orchestral music, and which typically uses pop brashness and pop exuberance to cover for the small number of musicians being deployed.  This version of Showboat, however, was “orchestrated”, by Robert Russell Bennett.  The sleeve notes claim that this orchestration is based on the “original 1946 score”, and (I’m guessing) might well be closer to what its composer, Jerome Kern, would have wanted than was any performance that Kern himself ever heard.  This is a performance which makes clear the direct line from opera to operetta, to the music of Kern.  Under the baton of John Owen Edwards, the orchestra makes a far lovelier sound than the din I was expecting.

Mercifully, what has not been opera-ed, so to speak, is the singing style.  Where an operatically-inclined manner is appropriate, that is what happens, as when Janis Kelly sings, for example.  But when it comes to a character like Ellie, sung by Caroline O’Connor, we get the full Broadway closely-microphoned belting style, a style that someone like Franz Lehar, or for that matter Franz Schubert, could never have imagined.

Further proof of the excellence of the singing in this performance is that, in the best Broadway style, and even when the singing is rather operatic, you can hear every word they sing.  Had this show been sung in the full-on operatic style throughout, to emphasise that this is directly descended from Verdi and Wagner and Puccini, that would never have happened.  (I’m still grumbling to myself about a performance of Madam Butterfly at the English National Opera (where everything is sung in English), where most of the solo singers might as well have been singing in Japanese for all the sense I could make of what they were singing.)

My feeling about opera is that I tend not to like how it is sung (too wobbly and verbally incomprehensible (see above)), but I love the sound that it makes, in between the singing.  When it comes to singing, I tend to prefer the Abba style to the noise made by the average opera singer.  (Above average opera singers are a different matter entirely.  (Today I listened to Act 1 of this, also on CD, and it sounded stupendous.)) But as for what accompanies that singing, give me the sound of an opera orchestra every time, over the brash, jazz-band-based instrumental belting, banging and twanging that you mostly get when listening to “music theatre”, provided only that the music is the kind that works orchestrally, which in Showboat it is.

This Showboat, then, is for me the ideal compromise, between Broadway and the opera house, being the best of both and the worst of neither.  Not bad for a fiver, which is all Amazon charged me for it.

This afternoon, I will journey to the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, to see and hear the first night, no less, of Lohengrin.  It will be deep into the darkness of the evening before I journey back home.  It will take, I believe, the best part of four hours.

According to this Summary and Comment:

It is difficult to find a role which is more handsome than Lohengrin. This is the reason why “Lohengrin” gained popularity among opera fans. The entrance scene on stage by a magic swan boat, and the dialogue scene with Elsa are outstanding.

In addition, the music of the scene of Elsa and Lohengrin’s wedding is known as the Wedding March. You can hear this March at many weddings these days.

That’s the conclusion of the comment bit about Lohengrin.

At the beginning of the summary bit, we learn that Lohengrin is set in “the first half of the tenth century”.

But if this ROH graphic (see here) is anything to go by, it will look, this evening, like this:

But, he’s holding a sword.  And notice that shadow.  With luck, this will be effective rather than clunky, mindful rather than mindless updating of the setting.  I shall see.

And hear.  What I hear will not be updated and made more relevant.  That I can already be sure of.

Yesterday GodDaughter2 arranged for me to accompany her and and a selection her singing student friends to a dress rehearsal of the ENO’s La Traviata.  Like every show at the E(nglish) NO, It was sung in English. It was also somewhat strangely directed, as operas tend to be nowadays.  So, the students were all grumbling afterwards.  What were those peculiar gestures the soprano kept on doing?  “Such torture” to have listen to it in English!

As for me, my problems were that we were the usual third of a mile up and away in the sky (but with no windows through which I might have taken photos of London’s Things), and I couldn’t properly see what was happening down there in the distance, beyond the woman in front of me’s head and those brass railings that she was able crouch down and look under.  I wasn’t bothered by all the strange “acting” that the singers were apparently doing, because I could hardly see it.  It was all I could do to decypher the English crib (and thank goodness for that) above the stage, of what they were singing (in English also (but as often as not you still can’t make out the damn words (because of how they sing them))).  But the music, by Giuseppe Verdi, which I knew only as a random bunch of tunes that I had just about quarter-heard before, is so good that I was kept constantly entertained.  Plus, I understood enough of what was going on to really enjoy it, and to really learn something.

It’s quite a story.  A young woman (the Traviata of the title) is trying to juggle short-term pleasure with and against long-term romantic fulfilment, is fretting about whether her true love can truly be depended upon, but also doesn’t want to get her true love into social trouble because of her lurid past causing everyone to think he could have done better, which will dishonour his entire family and make his younger sister much less marriageable.  Plus, she is not in the best of health and has to keep seeing a doctor.

I can remember, way back in the sixties, when it was believed that all that social pressure stuff was dead in the water.  Plus of course, in the sixties, everyone was far too young to be having any health problems.  Girls could shack up with guys and have consequence-free sex, and then live happily ever after with … whoever.  I think I remember thinking, even at the time: well, we’ll see.  And it turns out that young girls can now be “ruined” a lot like they were in olden times, that “society” has not gone away, that people still get ill, even sometimes ill because of sex, and that La Traviata is still bang up to date.

The Father of the Traviata’s True Love very much wants True Love to stop being Traviata’s True Love, and begs Traviata to give him up.  For the ENO, yesterday, this Father was sung by Alan Opie.  He was especially good.  A bloke had come on at the beginning and said that, what with this being only a dress rehearsal, some of the singers might be holding back a bit, saving it for the real show.  But you could definitely tell that Opie was the real deal.

Yesterday I attended a Royal Opera House Covent Garden dress rehearsal, of Puccini’s Turandot.  Never having seen Turandot on stage before, I learned a lot.  The singing was pretty good, especially the choral singing, but maybe I say “especially” about that because I generally prefer choral singing to “operatic” solo singing.  The staging looked appropriately splendid and exotic.

But the best fun of all was, afterwards, finding this bizarre piece of writing by Michael Tanner, for the Spectator.  What is bizarre is that Tanner disapproves of the characters and he disapproves of the “happy ending” at the end of Turandot, like some myopic Victorian moralist objecting to King Lear because of what sort of people they are and because of what happens at the end of that.

Turandot is obviously a very wicked and tyrannical ice-queen type of a woman.  But Calaf earns Tanner’s special condemnation.  This is because Calaf, being from Asia in olden times rather than the Home Counties of England now, prefers conquest, sexual and political, to the love of a good woman.  He is going to subjugate Turandot, sexually and politically, or die trying, and damn the consequences.  But in Michael Tanner’s world tenors are not supposed to think and behave like that.  Their job is to embody virtue, not watch while the slave girl who has been in love with Calaf throughout the opera is tortured and then commits suicide to spare herself more torture. After which Calaf carries right on with subjugating Turandot.  But the fact that Calaf is not the sort of person whom Tanner would want marrying his sister is rather beside the point.  Or to put the same point a quite other way, it is exactly the point.  It isn’t just the setting of Turandot that is exotic.  These are profoundly different sorts of people to those that Michael Tanner, or for that matter I, approve of.

This is like denouncing the Ring Cycle because Wotan is a god rather than a geography teacher, or because the dragons in the Ring Cycle do not behave like hedgehogs.

Calaf was also criticised by Tanner for standing still and just singing, instead of doing lots of “acting” in the modern style.  But Calaf’s whole character is that of a would-be ultra-masculine tyrant.  And tyrants instinctively exude power and strength, for instance by standing still in a very masculine chest-out pose, and singing very sonorously, rather than by doing lots of fidgety acting.  It is their underlings and victims who do all the acting, by re-acting to people like Calaf.

However, it often happens that critics who denounce works of art in rather ridiculous ways nevertheless understand them very well, and often a lot better than the people who say that they like them.  They absolutely get what the artist was doing.  It’s just that they don’t happen to like it.  I recommend Tanner’s piece as a way of understand how very different Calaf and Turandot are from their equivalents in, say, La Boheme.

Michael J and I were thinking of going to Lords today, to watch the cricket. As it turned out, he had other business (good luck with that mate - he knows what I mean), and we scrapped the idea.

Just as well we did. Had we gone, at the sort of time we probably would have gone, then according to the radio commentators I was listening to this morning we would have been stuck in a huge queue outside the ground, while everything interesting that was going to happen all day happened, in the morning.  Lords beat the drum, sold tickets for the last day for a mere tenner, but then didn’t open enough gates when lots of people showed up.  Very bad.

They said the blockage was something to do with “security”.  The terrorists have won!

By the time many of those unfortunates who did accept this offer got into the ground, it was effectively all over. Bangladesh had five wickets left, but lost them too quickly to make a proper fight of it.  The only excitement concerned whether one of the England bowlers would five wickets in the innings (which he did), and then ten wickets in the match (which he didn’t).. This is a new chap called Finn, who is very tall, who is, they say, quite fast, and who keeps falling over after bowling, which is not what you want, is it?

Surrey, my county team, are meanwhile showing signs of life. (I realise that now, absolutely nobody is reading this. Did you know that all rabbits born on a Thursday have poisonous bites? It’s true. If nobody dares to disagree in the comments, I will draw the inevitable conclusion, although it is true about the rabbits, if not widely known. I looked for this at Snopes. There is nothing there about this not being true, so it must be.) They won both of their limited overs games the weekend before last, the first with an improbably good late batting performance when all looked lost, and the second by taking two early wickets and never letting up, winning crushingly with vast numbers of overs and wickets to spare. (I wonder if those links will last.) Both are great ways to win, from the morale point of view. Then, in the next unlimited overs game, they looked on a hiding to nothing, until a big last wicket stand by Surrey’s two South African fast bowlers got them to first innings near equality, when a huge first innings deficit followed by defeat on the last day looked inevitable.  Instead, following that big stand Surrey managed to bowl the other fellows out cheaply and then win, with the South Africans also getting lots more wickets. First unlimited overs win for Surrey since the last time they had an unlimited overs w, a long, long time ago.

Although, one of those South African fast bowlers, Nel, was fined and banned for two games for misbehaving, in the very game he did so well in. Nel is a schizophrenic sort of a person (persons?), with an alter ego called “Gunter”, and it was presumably Gunter who did the misbehaving. It usually is, according to what I’ve read. So why was Nel expected to carry the can?  As commenter Yorvik says:

All well and good banning Andre for two matches but wouldn’t it be better to ban this Gunter chap for life? He seems to be the one causing the problems.

Indeed.  I mean, in Gotterdammerung, we don’t blame Siegfried for what he did when magically disguised as someone else, even though his behaviour was far worse. Did Nel/Gunter refuse to recognise the love of his life and cause her, with his various miscalculations, culminating in his death, to give up on everything and jump into a bonfire? On a horse? I think not. (Incidentally, I rather think that Siegfried’s alter ego may also have been called Gunther, in the sense that he was disguised as another character in the thing called Gunther. (I have many recordings and DVD’s of the Ring Cycle, but have never really got stuck into them all for a solid fortnight, ignoring everything else. I just like the way it all sounds.) So anyway, how about that? Does Nel like Wagner, I wonder? Please add Wagner comments to prove that you have read this far.)

So anyway, Surrey are now playing Glamorgan. The first day was lost to bad weather, and during the second Glamorgan made nearly 400. But Surrey are now batting, and at tea have reached two hundred plus for three.  Two of their newly acquired players, an unproven but presumably promising young chap fresh out of college and a very expensive new wicket-keeper that they have recently bought from a Poor County somewhere to the west, who is both a very good wicketkeeper and a dashingly free hitting batsman, flailed away to put on nearly a hundred for the first wicket. The wicket-keeper in particular really put his pedal, as they say in other places to the ones I generally frequent, to the metal. He got a dashing eighty something, at about a run a ball.  He generally gets out for a dashing 25 at a run a ball, so this could yet get interesting.  On the other hand, Surrey have also bought in a prestigious new batsman, Younis Khan, who recently retired in a huff from being a Pakistan test cricketer.  He got out for a duck.  On the other other hand, Ramprakash is now on 70.

England have now duly won their game against Bangladesh.  It was all over by tea.  And oh dear, the Surrey game just got interesting but not in a good way, with Surrey losing two sudden wickets, Ramps and new dashing young captain Rory Rory Hamilton-Hamilton-Hyphen-Brown-Hyphen-Stroke-Undeserved-Good-Looks for a golden duck.  What’s a golden duck?  It’s a duck made of gold.  What did you think it was?  Plus, did you know that they have recently discovered that there are certain very small physics type particles that have the ability to travel faster than the speed of light?  Yes.  But the bad news is: they don’t go much faster. About ten percent faster, which is nothing. Apart from setting the scientists at each other’s throats, because for them this is a big drama, it will hardly make any difference.  Science fiction, for example, where the entire Galaxy is shrunk by warp speed travel back to the size of medieval Europe with everybody just a day or two away and all fighting each other like in Star Wars, will continue to be science fiction rather than any sort of guide to the actual real future.  Mobile phones may get ten percent faster when you are talking to Australia or the Moon or something.  Other than that, nothing very significant, unless you are a theoretical scientist.  It’s amazing what a persevering reader can learn from the blogs, don’t you think?

I read The Lebrecht Weekly so you don’t have to, but I do recommend his latest piece, a lovely portrait of Jonathan Miller, he from Beyond The Fringe, but more to Lebrecht’s point, the operatic director.

Miller is one of very few opera directors who can lay claim to lasting innovation. With a 1982 Rigoletto set among the 1950s mafiosi of New York’s Little Italy, he invented the time-shift opera - underscoring the drama by placing the work in a different period. ‘There were other directors who did opera in modern costumes,’ he concedes. ‘I think I was the first to update the context.’

This is no small achievement. Rigoletto is still in repertoire at ENO a generation later. His Armani-suited Cosi fan tutte is on its fourth revival at Covent Garden. He has four shows on the go at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, including a Pelleas et Melisande placed in Marcel Proust’s Paris and a Rosenkavalier taken out of baroque pantaloons and relocated to Richard Strauss’s living room.

‘By and large,’ Miller explains, ‘if a composer has conspicuously backdated a work, I get worried about historical kitsch. Put Rosenkavalier in 1911, when it was written, and you suddenly hear the shot in Sarajevo. The Marschallin goes around the house trying to stop the clocks. It’s not because she’s old – she’s 35 – it’s because she knows the old world is finished. Octavian will die on the first day at the front.’

Every production he creates is rooted in a philosophical rationale and a specific visual impetus. The time-traveller of modern opera, Miller as Doctor Who is an omnivorous intellectual with an eye for telling detail. His ENO Boheme has been shifted forward from the 1850s of Murger’s novel and the 1890s of Puccini’s opera to Paris in the year of hunger, 1932. ‘I’ve always been obsessed by the photographic world of Brassai, Cartier-Bresson and Kertezsz, men looking for work stacking their bicycles against a wall, lesbian girls looking through café windows. I cannot bear to see artists in smocks and berets in Boheme. These characters are not artists. They are rich young men living a couple of years in a squat before they go back to work in Daddy’s firm.’

Boheme is his first return to the Coliseum for 12 years and it is only with kindly tuts and shushes on my part that he is deflected from having a go at the company’s present management and slamming the door in his own face once again. Miller lacks some neurological barrier that stops the bile rushing unchecked from brain to mouth. His litany of those who did him wrong, or damage art, is limitless, acute and often unrepeatably hilarious. He dismisses ‘Jurassic Park singers’ of the Pavarotti and Domingo style, ‘over-applauded and overpaid, can’t act their way out of a paper bag’. The last boss of the Met, who booted him out after he tried to stop Cecilia Bartoli singing two extra arias, enters the Miller lexicon as ‘that Tony Soprano’. Lately, he lashed out at the casting of a West End Hamlet ‘with the man from Doctor Who’. He seems incapable of suppressing rage yet, in rehearsal, you could not find a gentler, more avuncular manner of connecting singers with their inner selves.

He found a way of stopping the formidable Anghela Gheorgiu from over-emoting in the last act of La Traviata. ‘I said to her: “Take it from me, I’m a doctor. Dying is a fulltime business. You haven’t time to do a lap of honour. Chances are you’re incontinent, anyway. Do stay in bed.” She resisted me. Then she suddenly started crying and talked about sitting beside her sister as she was dying …’

That’s well over half of the piece, but highlighting and copying is so easy.  I kept on not wanting to stop.

They’ve just been talking about Shakespeare operas on BBC Radio 3’s Music Matters, and someone just identified Humphrey Searle’s Hamlet as the worst Shakespeare opera ever, “plonker” being the exact word.  I saw that!  When I was hoovering up Hamlet productions prior to directing Hamlet myself at Essex University, the only play I have ever directed.  It was indeed astonishingly bad.

In the far-off doomed days of my Culture Blog, I even blogged about it, in connection with another silly Shakespeare opera of more recent vintage by Thomas Adès.  Here is the restored version of that posting, stripped of its two comments which are now lost for ever.  Read that to find out what was so particularly plonking about this particular Shakespeare opera.

The best, they all agreed, was Verdi’s Otello.

Alex Singleton and I have just fixed to do our Gilbert and Sullivan chat on Thursday 28th.  So, fingers crossed for that.  Meanwhile, the decision to have fixed topics and a generally more disciplined approach to our ongoing classical music chat project continues to work wonderfully, at any rate for me, even before a recording button has been so much as pressed.  There’s nothing like the chance to show off and the prospect of making a fool of myself to get me doing my homework.

I continue to read Hesketh Pearson Gilbert and Sullivan with extreme pleasure (see also this earlier posting here), and there follows another snippet from that delightful book.  Something I did not know until now was that the premier of The Pirates of Penzance was given in New York, in December 1879.  Gilbert and Sullivan both went there to do their own ‘official’ production of their first big hit, HMS Pinafore, in order to cash in on American enthusiasm for that piece, but American reluctance to bother with copyright law.  And having gone there to do Pinafore, they stayed to do their next collaboration, not at all coincidentally given a title which included the word Pirates.

During recent years, American orchestras have been pricing themselves out of the classical music recording business, and even American classical repertoire has been recorded by cheaper European orchestras, rather then by the ensembles for whom it was originally written.  Well, it seems that this American tendency towards orchestral bolshiness is not new.  Here is Pearson’s account (pp. 90-91 of my 1954 Penguin paperback edition) of the difficulties that Sullivan had with the orchestra of the Fifth Avenue Theatre, where The Pirates had its first performance.

Just before the opening night he had trouble with the band, the members of which voted that The Pirates came under the heading of Grand Opera, which entitled them to higher rates of pay.  The position was not improved by the manager of the theatre, who told them that they should be content with the high honour of being conducted by England’s greatest composer, for it occurred to them that they should be paid more for the high honour as well as for the Grand Opera, and they raised both points when threatening to down instruments. Sullivan adroitly turned the tables on them.  He disclaimed the greatness that had been thrust upon him and said that he felt the honour of conducting such a brilliant orchestra. He even hinted that his work was not worthy of them and that if they felt so too, he should wire at once to England for a less sensitive orchestra.  They agreed to abase themselves on the same terms as before.

That’s pure Sullivan.  On the surface all obligingness and ingratiation, but underneath it a determination to get the job done, albeit with much nerve-wracking and exhaustion- and illness-inducing procrastination and deadline stretching, and to profit from it as much as possible.

Pearson’s account continues:

On the night of 30th December, after the final dress-rehearsal, Sullivan returned to his hotel and began work on the overture, finishing at five o’clock on the morning of the 31st, and rehearsing it six hours later.  He was not well enough to eat that day, so went to bed in the afternoon and tried to sleep.  Still feeling wretchedly ill and worn out with fatigue, for he could not sleep, he rose, dressed slowly, and wandered off to a club, where he had twelve oysters, and a glass of champagne.  More dead than alive, he went on to the theatre, took his place in the orchestra, lifted his baton, and The Pirates of Penzance swept New York off its feet.

A composer-conductor’s lot is not a happy one, or not the way Sullivan did it.  But when the first performance of a new Gilbert and Sullivan opera began, Sullivan’s agony tended to end, with Doctor Music chasing away his miseries, at least while the show lasted.

But for Gilbert, who took care of everything on the stage, the worst part of his ordeal would then begin.  He would pace about outside, doing all manner of weird and irrelevant things, returning only at the end of the show to learn how it had gone, and to join with Sullivan in accepting the applause, which was generally tumultuous.

Here is the July manifestation of what we hope will be an approximately monthly Alex Singleton/Brian Micklethwait mp3 chat about classical music.

We began by talking about Gramophone, the classical recordings magazine which started a long time ago, hence the name.  Then we briefly talked about the idea of including little snippets of music in these mp3s of ours, much as Rob Cowan and Leif Ove Andsnes do in their conversation on the latest Gramophone cover CD.  (I mistakenly said that this was in the BBC Music Magazine cover CD, when in fact it is the latest Gramophone CD.  Apologies all round.) Alex and I like the idea of including bits of music, but I fear the (not that great unless you’re me) technical complexity of doing that, and we both fear the cost of such snippets.  Could we perhaps find bits of music that we could use for free?  All suggestions welcome.

That muddle about saying BBC Music Magazine instead of Gramophone was only the first of several cock-ups I perpetrated.  I simply could not remember a couple of names of operas which I should have know (a symptom of advancing years I fear), namely (now I can think of them) Lakmé and The Abduction from the Seraglio.

The worst mistake I made by far was getting my Richard Strauss chronology in a twist.  I accused him of getting nastier and more bitter in his composing as he got older, when in truth it was the opposite.  I had the two somewhat scary Strauss operas, Elektra and Salome, in mind.  As this chronology shows, they are early works.  Der Rosenkavalier came just after those two, and Arabella was much later.

I hope the above blemishes do not spoil things for those of you who decide to give this mp3 a go.

We also talked about Mozart’s operas, in particular The Marriage of Figaro, which Alex especially likes, and The Magic Flute, which is my favourite Mozart opera.

I also mentioned a couple of more recent operas, namely Nixon in China by John Adams and Akhnaten by Philip Glass.  There seems to be no DVD of Akhnaten, and the only DVD I can find of Nixon in China is this, which seems to be a somewhat sub-par exercise in pointing a camera at a stage production.

Next month: Saint-Saens!  Don’t ask me why, but I will ask Alex.  He asks the questions, and chooses the subject matter.  Happily, I very much like Saint Saens, especially Piano Concerto No. 4, the first Piano Trio and the sublime Carnival of the Animals.  We both like the Organ Symphony.