• Blog
  • Clients
  • About Me

Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Tag Archives: English Touring Opera

Review: Patience (English Touring Opera)

16 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Post, English Touring Opera, Gilbert and Sullivan, Reviews, Wolverhampton Grand Theatre

Patience ETO

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre on Monday 10 April 2017.


You have to be pretty silly to take Gilbert and Sullivan seriously. But a lot sillier not to. With the CBSO’s superb concert performance of The Yeomen of the Guard still fresh in the memory, English Touring Opera’s staging of Patience arrived in Wolverhampton (it visits Cheltenham and Warwick shortly). Patience is G&S’s satire on Aestheticism: the 19th century fad for languid sighs, poetic airs and generally wafting about trying to live up to one’s blue china.

And if we don’t see it more often, that’s probably why. Gilbert’s never sharper and Sullivan’s score is Mendelssohn-level ravishing, but unless you’ve got a sensational Reginald Bunthorne (G&S’s version of Oscar Wilde), you haven’t really got a show. The great news is that ETO have. Bradley Travis drifts in wearing a velvet beret and brandishing a peacock-feather quill. With a hand to the brow and an infinite variety of languorous poses, he sashays away with every scene in which he appears.

Which, given the quality of the rest of the cast, is saying something. Ross Ramgobin is dapper and droll as his rival Grosvenor, Lauren Zolezzi is picture-perfect as the milkmaid Patience and Valerie Reid gets the audience very much on side as Lady Jane – another of Gilbert’s ladies of a certain age. The singing throughout is both clear and expressive; Ramgobin’s baritone is particularly handsome and Zolezzi shapes a line with real style.

Add lovesick maidens, a detachment of heavy dragoons who deliver patter songs with rollicking vigour, Liam Steel’s lively direction and Timothy Burke’s luminous, feather-light conducting, and it’s hard to imagine Patience being revived more persuasively. Or indeed a funnier, fresher or more delightful night at the opera. Abandon any lingering prejudices about G&S: this was delicious.

April scribblings

29 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Post, English Touring Opera, Gavin Plumley, Gramophone, Johann Strauss, Mozart, Opera North, The Arts Desk, The Spectator, Welsh National Opera

Twenty minutes ago in Lichfield we had a hailstorm. Now it looks like this:017

I’ve given up trying to wrap my head around the seasons because this month it’s been pretty much non-stop scribble scribble scribble, as George III supposedly said to Dr Johnson. I’ve had reviews in The Spectator for Birmingham Conservatoire’s Anglo-French triple-bill and the RAM’s May Night, reviewed a new opera and a Shakespeare celebration for The Birmingham Post and taken the road to Buxton to cover English Touring Opera’s spring season (well, 2/3 of it) for The Arts Desk. Not that I need much excuse to visit Buxton Opera House: this has surely got to be Britain’s best drive to work. Bit of RVW on the stereo: magic.

A515 Buxton

And last night I heard the UK premiere of a masterpiece – also for The Arts Desk.

On top of that, I’ve been working with The Philharmonia, Performances Birmingham, the CBSO and Warwick Arts Centre on their 16-17 season brochures. It’s a privilege to see what’s coming up next season but a couple of things are so exciting that it’s been quite hard to bite my tongue. And programme notes for two great festivals: four heavyweight programmes for Salzburg – any chance to write about Mozart is always a pleasure – and a whole raft of really wonderful English music, including some real favourites of mine, for the Three Choirs (it’s in Gloucester this year, btw).

Those came courtesy of two great colleagues, Gavin Plumley (he’s got a Wigmore Hall debut coming up and knowing the care and expertise he brings to everything he does, it should be superb) and Clare Stevens, who’s currently blogging the story of her grandmother’s experiences in the Easter Rising of 1916: a really remarkable piece of family history. I’ve also written about a couple of fascinating programmes for the Wigmore Hall and the Barbican and an article on Verdi’s Falstaff for the CBSO’s in-house magazine Music Stand. And did you know that Arthur Bliss wrote a Fanfare for the National Fund for Crippling Diseases? Don’t ask…

And that’s not to mention my most exciting project so far for Gramophone: a reassessment of Carlos Kleiber’s classic 1976 recording of Die Fledermaus, co-written (to my astonishment and awe) with one of the greatest living experts on operetta, Andrew Lamb. A huge privilege and actually enormous fun; I think it’s being published in the July edition, though meanwhile Gramophone has been keeping me busy with everything from Johann Strauss and Balfe to Cecil Armstrong Gibbs. Full list here. They know me too well already…

Anyway, tonight it’s Mark Simpson’s new opera Pleasure at Opera North (for The Spectator); the next few weeks of opera-going will take me to Guildford, Cardiff, Wolverhampton and Glasgow, so if I’m quiet again for a bit, my apologies.

English Touring Opera in Malvern

26 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Elgar, English Touring Opera, Malvern, The Arts Desk, The Tales of Hoffmann

I made three trips to Malvern on successive days last week, to cover English Touring Opera’s delicious all-French autumn programme in its entirety. I’m glad I did, mostly because their new production of The Tales of Hoffmann (I’m a massive sucker for operetta composers going “straight”) was an absolute zinger. My review of The Tales of Hoffmann and Massenet’s Werther is here, and of Pelleas et Melisande, here.

011

014

But also because as the afternoon sun vanished over Herefordshire it lit up the Malvern Hills like a beacon, and I was able to make a very long-planned trip to the grave of Sir Edward Elgar, his wife Alice and his daughter Carice. It’s clear that there’s a fairly regular stream of visitors, which, in a small way, is a happy thought. He’s where he wanted to be – and people still care.

008 001002 004

Far away, long ago.

19 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

English Touring Opera, Joseph Roth, Slovenia

“The station was tiny, just like the station in Sipolje, which I had dutifully committed to memory. All the stations in the old Dual Monarchy resembled each other, all the little stations in the little provincial towns. Yellow and tiny, they were like lazy cats that in winter lay in the snow, in summer in the sun, sheltering under the crystal glass roofs over the platform, and guarded by the emblem of the black double eagle on yellow ground…”

218

I’m gradually coming to realise that when I take holidays, I’m trying to travel to a different time, as much as a different place.

Anyway, I’m back now. Three operas to review this week, and I’m looking forward to them all.

Stane Kumar: Snow on the Karst

Stane Kumar: Snow on the Karst

Review: English Touring Opera – The Wild Man of the West Indies

23 Saturday May 2015

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Donizetti, English Touring Opera, Reviews

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (you should really go out and buy the paper!) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Warwick Arts Centre on 23rd April 2015.


1 Wild Man
Donizetti’s 1833 opera Il furioso all’isola di San Domingo is a real rarity. The Cervantes-derived story – of a nobleman unhinged by heartbreak, on the loose in the Spanish Caribbean – sounds bizarre, and sure enough, this is one of those operas whose plot summary reads like an absolute car-crash. In fact, as Iqbal Khan’s new production for English Touring Opera demonstrates, it makes perfect dramatic sense when imaginatively staged – and packs a real emotional punch as it does so.

It’s an opera semiseria: a misleadingly unwieldy term for a drama that interleaves comedy and pathos rather more powerfully (to this ear) than some of Donizetti’s outright tragedies. And it could hardly be better-served than by Khan’s production. Florence de Maré’s semi-abstract set suggests the stormy seas that drive the plot, while Mark Howland’s lighting poetically evokes both the colours of the Caribbean evening and the characters’ emotional state.

At the heart of it all was Craig Smith, as the “Wild Man” Cardenio himself: Smith’s warm vocal tone and sympathetic characterisation (little vocal tics suggested his mental affliction) made him a figure of wounded dignity. Sally Silver as his penitent wife Eleonora and Nicholas Sharratt as his brother Fernando delivered swashbuckling high notes and moments of poignant sorrow; Silver, in particular, made convincing emotional sense of the redemptive final scenes.

Peter Brathwaite played the slave Kaidamà as light relief, somewhere between Ariel and Leporello; Njabulo Madlala and Donna Bateman made their roles as sympathetic as slave-drivers can be. The orchestra under Jeremy Silver rose to the vocal characterisation on stage with some wonderfully stylish playing: string portamenti and vibrato-free passages brought out all the fantasy and colour of this entertaining and touching operatic rediscovery.

 

Review: English Touring Opera – The Siege of Calais

16 Saturday May 2015

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Post, Donizetti, English Touring Opera, Reviews

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (you should really go out and buy the paper!) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre on 14th April 2015.


2 Siege

English Touring Opera has form with Donizetti, and it was director James Conway’s production of Anna Bolena that first convinced this born Wagnerite of Donizetti’s power as a musical dramatist. So we had high hopes for Conway’s adaptation of The Siege of Calais.

A defensive programme essay from Conway triggered some doubts. Act 3 was omitted outright and its material largely redistributed elsewhere. Conway’s intention seems to have been to throw the focus onto the moments when Donizetti’s patchy, bel canto-by-the-yard score comes up to the level that the drama demands; moments in which Conway and his company clearly believed passionately.

Samal Blak’s set created a timeless atmosphere of war-torn desolation, and in that handful of inspired numbers – most notably the extended finale, when the six burghers of Calais volunteer to die for their fellow citizens – this production worked nobly on its own terms. Throughout the excellent cast, characterisation was naturalistic and affecting.

Craig Smith was a craggy, dignified Eustachio, while Paula Sides as Eleonora and Catherine Darby in the trouser-role of her husband Aurelio both stood out vocally. Their poignant Act 2 duet was a high point – as was the way Darby’s voice gleamed through the glorious sextet that preceded the burghers’ final march to their fate.

The orchestra, under Jeremy Silver, did wonderful things with Donizetti’s woodwind writing; in fact, the only real problem with this production (if you can accept Conway’s rewrites – this is hardly William Tell, after all) was Donizetti himself. It’s always refreshing to see a rarity done with such conviction, but it was hard not to wonder what ETO might have achieved in an opera that the director believed to be stageworthy as written.

Review: English Touring Opera – La Boheme

15 Friday May 2015

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

English Touring Opera, Puccini, Reviews

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (you should really go out and buy the paper!) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre on 13th April 2015.


1 Boheme
Could you love anyone who didn’t love La Bohème? Illica and Giacosa’s libretto sketches out the discomfort and poverty with deadpan precision. But once Puccini does his thing, who wouldn’t wish themselves in that freezing Parisian garret, losing their heart while the smoke of a thousand chimneys curls into the evening sky?

Yet Bohème is an opera that thrives on realism. And in James Conway’s new production for English Touring Opera, that’s what it gets, in a rough, bracing blast. There’s no watercolour sentimentality about Florence de Maré’s grungy, semi-abstract sets: a column of skulls stands macabre sentry over Act 4 and Act 1 is so dimly lit that the performers’ faces are sometimes barely visible.

But the strengths of this approach shone through in the interaction of the characters. There was a plausibly combative edge to the flatmates’ banter, and for all the sheen of his singing, David Butt Philip’s was a darker and more brusque Rodolfo than we’re used to seeing. Ilona Domnich matched him with a hesitant, nuanced Mimi; for once, you could spot the potential faultlines in their relationship.

They headed a cast in which there were no weak links; Grant Doyle was a likeably bluff Marcello, Sky Ingram an arresting Musetta with a vampish edge, and Njabulo Madlala and Matthew Stiff rounded out Schaunard and Colline engagingly. As always with ETO, lustrous singing came as standard, and under Michael Rosewell the orchestra made the score sound exuberantly fresh. Birmingham is fortunate to have opera of this quality so close at hand; if you haven’t yet made the short trip to see ETO, you’re missing something wonderful.

The Ice Break

24 Friday Apr 2015

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Birmingham Opera Company, Birmingham Post, Donizetti, English Touring Opera, Tippett

The best bit about my job is that I get to see – if not quite as much opera as I’d like – pretty well as much opera as is available to be seen in the West Midlands. This month’s reviews have ranged from a community opera in a Worcestershire country church to the Royal Opera House’s live cinematic relay of Brecht and Weill’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, as well as English Touring Opera’s annual spring triple bill.

Two of ETO’s offerings were Donizetti rarities – one (The Wild Man of the West Indies) a triumph, one (The Siege of Calais) a heroic failure – and while it’s always nice to have the chance to see unknown works done with such conviction and quality, the heart sinks slightly at the news that there’ll be more Donizetti next season. I’m not entirely sure the West Midlands needed two productions of Anna Bolena in one decade (let alone Maria Stuarda) – at least, not when that decade hasn’t seen a single professional production of Peter Grimes, Der Freischutz or Un Ballo in Maschera (to choose just three from a long list) in the region. On the other hand, if ETO’s forthcoming Pia de’ Tolomei is anything like as wonderful as their production of The Wild Man of the West Indies (aka Il Furioso all’isola di San Domingo), which I saw last night at Warwick Arts Centre, I’ll feel very churlish indeed for saying so.

Anyway, although The Birmingham Post is currently struggling to post reviews online, it did manage to get one if my recent reviews up within 48 hours of filing. And happily, it’s my review of what might just turn out to be the greatest thing I’ll see all year. Following on from last year’s tremendous ETO King Priam, the Tippett revival really seems to be gathering steam. And about time too

2014 appears to have vanished…

05 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Post, Elgar, English Touring Opera, Henze, Lichfield Cathedral Chorus, Michael Seal, Royal Opera House, Sinfonia of Birmingham, Tippett, Welsh National Opera, Wolverhampton Grand Theatre

Everyone’s doing it so, a few days late, five selected musical highlights of 2014.


Welsh National Opera: Boulevard Solitude I know, I know…I’m supposed to go for WNO’s Moses und Aron, but I can’t help feeling that a really stupendous musical performance – plus an understandable missionary zeal amongst my colleagues – can’t quite make up for a production that basically avoided the issue. (Review here). Henze’s Boulevard Solitude, though…what a score! What a set of performances! And how they all came together to do exactly what this opera is surely supposed to do. (Review here).


English Touring Opera’s Spring Season ETO’s annual spring seasons at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre are a guilty pleasure for me – and a secret one, apparently: you’d think the music-lovers of Birmingham (population 1.1 million) would have worked out by now that with a 20 minute train-ride they could be seeing opera of this quality. Apparently not, judging from the empty seats for the Britten (though it can’t have helped that the Grand’s box office had mixed up the dates for Paul Bunyan and The Magic Flute – leading befuddled first-timers in the audience trying to work out why Papageno was strumming a guitar). They missed a Magic Flute that charmed and probed in equal measure, and, as I hoped, turned out to be the perfect choice of first live opera for my 12-year old godson  (“I didn’t know it would be like panto” he said when we saw it in Sheffield a month later). (Review here) A big-hearted, beautifully-designed Paul Bunyan (Mark Wilde as understatedly magnificent as always) that made the best possible case for – sorry – an absolute car-crash of a piece (Review here). And – thanks to the belated discovery that Cheltenham and back is do-able in a night from Birmingham – a shattering, monumental King Priam. (No review: there purely for pleasure) A tremendous achievement: god, Tippett is undervalued, isn’t he? Quite indecently excited now at the prospect of Birmingham Opera Company’s forthcoming The Ice Break.


Lichfield Cathedral Chorus: The Apostles Local choral societies don’t get national reviews. But I’ve been trying to persuade the Birmingham Post for some time that something a bit special is happening at Lichfield Cathedral (and not just because it’s 3 minutes from my front door). The cathedral’s musical team of Ben Lamb, Cathy Lamb and Martyn Rawles are young, gifted, and ambitious in the best possible way (the budget for the orchestra and soloists for this performance alone apparently cleaned out the Chorus’s coffers for the foreseeable future: respect due). And there’s no getting around the fact that Elgar’s choral writing taxed the Chorus beyond its limits. But the soloists were first-rate, the orchestra (Alex Laing’s DECO) was on fire and the sweep, musicality, and sense of shared adventure about the whole enterprise…well, it glowed in exactly the way it must have done in Elgar’s imagination. Grass-roots music making in the UK, and a living amateur tradition, continues to give us something as stirring – and as profoundly musical – as the most lavishly-funded international orchestra or opera house. (I submitted a review to the local paper but it never appeared in print. Two weeks later a review at three times the length by a writer I don’t know did appear, which I suppose is the main thing, but still…*rolls eyes*.)


Royal Opera House: Die Frau Ohne Schatten I adore Strauss and having missed the last UK production of FrOSch in the 90s, I realised that I couldn’t really risk waiting 20 years for another chance. Having shelled out for the necessary hotels and train tickets, and booked two days off work (in the absence of weekend matinees, the only way to do it from the Midlands) I can only say that boy, it was worth it. I can add nothing to the praise that’s already been heaped on this production: it echoed in my head for days afterwards. Yes, London receives an indefensible 15 times as much arts subsidy per head as the rest of the UK; an attempt to buy a drink in the Floral Hall left images of underfunded education projects, rejected funding grants and decades of shoe-string compromises in the regional arts swirling furiously in my mind. (“We don’t serve Prosecco” sniffed the barman – well, there’s one thing that the Royal Opera House has in common with Wolverhampton Grand Theatre, then.) But with singing like we experienced that night, you can at least hear where the £££s are going. File under “sinful pleasure”. Normal service will be resumed shortly.


Mihkel Poll in Sutton Coldfield It’s received wisdom that small local music clubs are dying out. Martyn Parfect, who runs the Sutton Coldfield Philharmonic Society, merely sees that as a provocation – he thinks big, and never bigger than when he’s twisting the arms of international soloists to play in Sutton’s Victorian linen-cupboard of a Town Hall. Pianistically, Pohl’s performance of Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto with local semi-pro band the Sinfonia of Birmingham was as fine as you’d expect. What lifted this to another level was watching and hearing the effect that an artist of his calibre had on the orchestral players – and the masterly (there’s no other word for it) way that the conductor, my colleague Michael Seal, coloured the music and shaped the concerto’s architecture in one huge, cumulative symphonic line. It’s always nice to be able to give a glowing review to artists you like and admire; in this case, no critical detachment was required. The performance set its own terms (Review here).

Contact Details

38 Beacon Street
Lichfield
United Kingdom
Staffordshire
WS13 7AJ

07754 068427

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets

Archives

  • June 2020 (1)
  • October 2019 (2)
  • January 2018 (1)
  • December 2017 (2)
  • November 2017 (2)
  • October 2017 (1)
  • August 2017 (2)
  • July 2017 (1)
  • June 2017 (3)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (2)
  • February 2017 (2)
  • December 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (3)
  • August 2016 (1)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (3)
  • March 2016 (6)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (3)
  • December 2015 (6)
  • November 2015 (4)
  • October 2015 (6)
  • September 2015 (5)
  • August 2015 (5)
  • July 2015 (8)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (12)
  • April 2015 (1)
  • February 2015 (1)
  • January 2015 (2)
  • December 2014 (4)
  • November 2014 (3)

Archives

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Richard Bratby
    • Join 26 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Richard Bratby
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...