Brian Dickie

The pleasures of Gütersloh

  Photo: Kai Uwe Oesterhelweg

Eddie Mofokeng (South Africa) Sophie-Magdalen Reuter (Germany) Michael Rakotoarivony (Madagascar) Jolana Slaviková (Czech Republic) Daniil Chesnokov (Russia) Zlata Khershberg (Israel) Martin Mkhise (S.A.) Amelie Baier (Germany) Damir Rakhmonov (Uzbekistan) Pijarin Wiriyakasadul (Thailand) and Patrick Reiter (Austria)

The grand finale of the week of masterclasses on Saturday evening was at the Bertelsmann Stiftung's beautiful establishment on the edge of the charming town of Gütersloh - a place I have spent so many happy days in over the twenty years or so that I have been involved with Neue Stimmen.  The eleven singers involved (alas the twelfth was to have been the super Ukrainian soprano Olga Rudyk who was indisposed) bear testament to the extraordinary international vision of the competition and these masterclasses. It was a splendid meeting of youth from around the world, each of whom were inspired by their encounters with their colleagues from such diverse backgrounds.  To have a singer from Madagascar and one from Thailand in this group was remarkable.

But above all they benefited from working with two exceptional "masters" - Brigitte Fassbaender and Wolfgang Brendel.  And what a pleasure it was to spend some time with these two great personalities and artists.  Brigitte is the daughter of Glyndebourne's first Figaro, Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender.  He was a remarkable artist of great intelligence and versatility, excelling in Mozart as well as Verdi.  He was married to the actress Sabine Peters and their daughter Brigitte inherited the gifts of each parent - a formidable combination!  What a privilege for these young singers to have the accumulated wisdom and experience of such people passed on to them!

Wofgang Brendel now teaches at Indiana University in Bloomington, a school with a remarkable collection of distinguished vocal faculty, including my old friends Timothy Noble and Carol Vaness. He was the most charismatic German baritone of his generation, and remains an utterly irresistible personality - his infectious passion and enthusiasm, his enjoyment of life and celebration of music are just hugely valuable to the young singers he was working with at the beginning of their careers.  What a joy it was to see this "electricity"!

But none of this could have been done without the quartet of pianists/coaches that were assembled for the masterclasses. Our old friend Rafaelle Cortesi, who has been with Neue Stimmen as long as I have, since 1999, was the leader and foundation of the team, and was joined by three accomplished and authoritative newcomers to the Neue Stimmen team. These included the Canadian Anne Larlee, now on the music staff of the Frankfurt Opera, and she really made her mark in Saturday evening's concert with immaculate playing of exceptional grace and musicianship.  The other two were the Italian Fabio Vettraino, currently teaching in the Music Hochschule in Detmold, and Markus Zugehör, working in the opera studio at the Berlin Staatsoper.

I think that my travels for 2018 are now over.  Christmas will soon be with us and another year has passed - how swift is the passage of time!  But this week I am at Lucia at ENO tomorrow evening, and Cendrillon at Glyndebourne on Wednesday.  So there is plenty more excitement to come!  Keep reading!

Katie Mitchell Jenufa

Photo:Ruth Walz/DNO

Hanna Schwarz, Annette Dasch, Pavel Cernoch, Henry Waddington in the Dutch National Opera's Jenufa

My short trip to Amsterdam on Thursday on the way to Gütersloh was filled with pleasures additional to that of being in this excellent city. I took the Eurostar, a great new addition to their schedule taking just 3 hours 40 minutes St Pancras to Amsterdam's Centraal station with none of the hassle of dealing with the increasingly unpleasant Heathrow airport, and airport transfers generally.

I spent a happy couple of hours with Rosy Joshua's studio artists each of whom sang a little which we mixed with discussion about the whole ugly business of auditioning which is the lot of singers as they embark on their careers.  The studio has a small group of just 6 young artists, two sopranos, a mezzo, a tenor, a baritone and a bass-baritone, in addition to a pianist/trainee coach-repetiteur.

It was huge pleasure to see Polly Leech, a recent graduate of London's National Opera Studio, as well as Cody Quattlebaum who had made a strong impression in the Glyndebourne Cup competition earlier this year.  The babies of the group are the two 23 year old sopranos, the magical Armenian Julietta Aleksanyan, and a vivacious Italian who was a prizewinner at the last ASLICO competition, Gloria Giurgola.  The elder statesman in the 29 year old Dutch/Canadian tenor Lucas van Lierop, a graduate of McGill and Yale. The baritone is South African Martin Mkhise, a Neue Stimmen finalist last year, who was not with us in Amsterdam but is in Gütersloh for the Masterclasses about which I report tomorrow.

It is a finely balanced little group who will get fabulous experience participating, as they will, in major DNO productions as well as pursuing their rigorous programme of advanced development and training.  They are in the best hands possible with the new director of DNO Sophie de Lint and Rosy.  Sophie's legacy in Zurich with Brenda Hurley, where they developed the outstanding Zurich Opera Studio, convinces me that Amsterdam will become one the most important "go to" places for young singers in the coming years.

And now to the main point - Katie Mitchell's overwhelmingly effective production of Jenufa.  Those of us who saw her production of Pelléas in Aix in 2016 will see her fingerprints all over this - well it is the same designer Lizzie Clachan which helps!  There will be those who quibble at her approach and point out all kinds of oddities.  But the fact is that the piece is revealed in all its gory detail with a fierce no holds barred honesty that takes us on relentlessly to its horrific conclusion.  Good if uncomfortable stuff.  The musical performance was led superbly by Tomáš Netopil with the outstanding Netherlands Philharmonic - another exceptional Czech conductor to treasure. The cast was uniformly well chosen with veteran Hanna Schwarz as the grandmother, Annette Dasch (Jenufa), Evelyn Herlitzius (Kostelnička), Pavel Černoch a wonderful Laca, and Norman Reinhardt (Števa).  It was an impressive line up.  

And how good it was to see dear Henry Waddington as Stárek.  It was the last performance of the run so there was a little party afterwards - seeing Henry brought back lovely memories of Garsington's Falstaff this past summer.  But the real wow moment of the party was encountering Sophia Burgos who had the small role of Jana.  She told me that she knew me......it turns out that her life was changed by participating in Chicago Opera Theater's programme with the city of Chicago, After School Matters, back in 2008 when she was a school kid of 17.  She is referred to in this link though not by name. She had planned to go to veterinary school - but instead decided on opera!  She got into Eastman and went on to what is now a flowering young career.  She will be back in Amsterdam next season to sing Despina.  What a great story - what a small world!!

I am now it Gütersloh where we have the Masterclass showcase concert this evening.  All about that tomorrow!

Wexford retrospect

I had another magical three days in Wexford - not a drop of rain, mild and mostly sunny.  Yesterday morning I left the bright blue skies and autumn chill, armed with bread and cheese from the spectacular shop attached to Greenacres, Wexford's primary source for the best things in life!

Photo: Clive Barda

But the main reason for being here is of course the opera, in fact four operas of which three are extremely rare to encounter, and the fourth the European premiere of William Bolcom's Dinner at Eight, first performed in Minnesota in March last year.  William Bolcom crafted three large scale operas which I saw in Chicago over the many years that I have been going, and indeed living there.  These were McTeague, A View from the Bridge, and The Wedding.  They were all extremely effective pieces and warmly received by that discriminating though conservative audience.  Dinner at Eight is on altogether a smaller scale but with Mary Dunleavy (third from left above) spectacularly leading the very strong cast, it made for an evening hugely enjoyed in Wexford.  Happy memories of Mary in Intermezzo and Falstaff at Garsington in recent seasons......

My first evening, Friday, I was at a verismo double bill, pieces by Franco Leoni and Umberto Giordano. The Leoni was L'Oracolo, famously recorded by Joan Sutherland and Tito Gobbi, but otherwise although premiered at Covent Garden in 1905 (conducted by André Messager!) and briefly performed with success at the Met in 1915, it has scarcely been seen since.  But kudos to David Agler for resuscitating it for opera collectors to check out.  It could be another 100 years before it is seen again so you must move quickly!

The Giordano, Mala vita, is an altogether more substantial item and a terrific half evening with fine singing and conducting (the excellent Francesco Ciluffo) with both pieces benefiting from splendid productions by the very gifted Rodula Gaitanu.

The third evening was a real rarity Mercadante's Il bravo. The narrative is almost incomprehensibly confusing, even by operatic standards, and I read the synopsis three times and was none the wiser.  But its full of splendid music and was superbly conducted by Jonathan Brandani.  The Wexford Orchestra is an outstanding group of players and he got energetic idiomatic and precision playing from them.  Bravo indeed! The production was by the Barbe and Doucet team who will be responsible for the new Zauberflöte at Glyndebourne next year.  Lets see how that works out.  They produce beautiful images but telling the story with clarity was beyond them, or possibly anyone!

A real Saturday morning joyful event was the Tom Walsh lecture given by Thomas Allen.  It turned out to be a splendid 75 minute "lecture recital" with a delightful mix of Tom's favourite things spanning his remarkable career since he emerged, in the Glyndebourne chorus, in 1969!  He was utterly charming and elegant as always.  And was accompanied brilliantly by Stephen Higgins.  The full house at St Iberius church reveled in this hour of music making.

For some reason my blogging software is not allowing me to post pictures.......if it corrects this I will add some later today or tomorrow!

A month off the blog

The last month has been something of an experiment - a trial to see what might happen if I went silent for a few more weeks following my time away during the holiday month.  Well there was nothing much although there were some indirect messages from all over the world asking other friends whether I was ok! These included most recently someone from Hong Kong, someone I have not seen for years, who evidently was a regular reader and was feeling deprived!

Well the few weeks have turned into five, and I think that it is about time to get going again.  You have missed out on very little really but there is action coming up, beginning with the opening of ENO's Porgy and Bess last night. And next week I will be in Wexford, then Amsterdam and Gütersloh, so there should be some good stuff to write about.  In the meantime I have been feeling guilty on the one hand (at first) and then relieved (of the self imposed obligation).  But this thing has been going now for more than 13 years so I guess I can't just give it up!

My last posting was on September 6th. The memorable events since then, ones of which I would normally have written more detailed accounts, began with the magnificent celebration of the life of Peter Hall, part one in Westminster Abbey and part 2 at the National Theatre.  That was September 11, the anniversary of Peter's death.  I was fortunate to have worked with Peter closely for 20 years, far less though than so many of the others there  whose professional lives had been intertwined with his for up to six decades. For us all it had been a privilege and a joy.  It was a very moving day of celebration of the life of a remarkable man and colleague and friend.

© Tristram Kenton

Eric Greene and Nicole Cabell in English National Opera's Porgy and Bess October 2018

But now we go forward......and I was fortunate also to have played a small part, together with my dear friend and colleague Sarah Playfair, in putting together, at the early stage, the cast of ENO's Porgy and Bess which opened to tumultuous applause last night, a standing ovation comparable to that we experienced at Glyndebourne on that July evening back in 1986.  Sarah and I had been standing in for three months pending the appointment of a new casting director.  And that was Michelle Williams who joined to company in March of 2017 and did a magnificent job in completing the work that we had begun.  She did all the really difficult stuff, dealing with replacing those that dropped out, and above all building the remarkable ensemble upon which a successful production of Porgy has to be based.

Our process was complicated by the fact that there were two co-producers, the Metropolitan Opera and The Dutch National Opera, each with different requirements and constraints.  Anyway we were thrilled to end up with the company we engaged.  If you want to see alternatives you can go to Amsterdam in January and New York a year or so from now!  Eric Greene, the Porgy, is well known here for his exceptional work with Graham Vick's Birmingham company, and Nicole Cabell, winner at Cardiff in 2005, is an old friend and colleague from Chicago where she was a member of the Ryan Center a good few years ago.  We also had the special opportunity of having John Wilson to conduct, the best possible person to get this piece off to a flying start. He will not be with it in Amsterdam, nor in New York I think.

St Louis's James Robinson, whose production of Nixon in China with my company in Chicago in 2006 was one of our great hits, makes a long overdue ENO debut - perfect "casting" for this piece in the Coliseum.  And his creative team blended this whole ensemble into a memorable evening which you must ALL manage to get to, be it here in London or Amsterdam or New York. George and Ira Gershwin would have been thrilled that their vision has once again been realised with a proper opera company lavishing its unique expertise on this truly great American opera.

That is all for this week.  Things get hectic in Wexford a week from now!  What a joy it will be to be back there.