A year after premiering acclaimed French playwright Florian Zeller’s The Truth, the Menier Chocolate Factory now hosts The Lie – which, as the name suggests, acts as a companion piece of sorts.
Guy Johnston: Tecchler’s Cello - From Cambridge to Rome (King’s College Cambridge)
A decade after his masterpiece, The Tree of Wooden Clogs, won the 1978 Palme d’Or at Cannes, Italian director Ermanno Olmi took Venice’s 1988 Golden Lion for The Legend of the Holy Drinker (La leggenda del santo bevitore).
Is there anything more terrifying for a playwright than the first day of rehearsals? For months, even years, you’ve been working and reworking the text, saying the words aloud to yourself in an empty room and imagining the actors saying them to a packed auditorium.
Anyone who likes playing “Spot the weirdo” will find themselves instantly at home in Howard Brenton’s new play, which has its world premiere in this West End fringe venue, a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus. Its subject is Swedish playwright and writer August Strindberg, and the psychological crisis which he suffered while he was living in Paris in 1896.
“I’m not in the mood” – “non sono in vena” – sings aspiring poet Rodolfo as he settles down to write a lead article. Was it me, or had the mood not settled by the premiere of the Royal Opera’s first new production of Puccini's structurally perfect favourite for 43 years? The singing was good to occasionally glorious, Antonio Pappano’s conducting predictably idiomatic and supportive.
Jean Gabin’s gangster’s paradise says more about him than the bullets he later lets fly. France’s greatest male star made a barnstorming comeback to pre-eminence as sharp-suited, drolly masterful Max in Jacques Becker’s Touchez Pas au Grisbi (1954), after wartime exile and post-war doldrums.
I hate biopics about artists in which the portrayal of “genius” is hyped to the point where it becomes a ludicrous cliché. Although I appreciate that, as far as entertainment goes, seeing pigment brushed onto canvas is on a par with watching paint dry, I still can’t forgive directors who resort to dramatic extremes in the hope of evoking the tribulations of the creative process.
The two haunting series of crime novels by Fred Vargas, the writing pseudonym of a French archaeologist and historian, have acquired a worldwide following: quirky, idiosyncratic, eccentric and beautifully written, they are highly individual and, for some perhaps, an acquired taste. But once hooked, you cannot help but follow through.
Unless you're an undiscriminating fan of bel canto, the lesser Italian and French operas of the 1830s and '40s - that's to say, not Verdi's Nabucco and Macbeth or Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini - need to be approached with caution. Once you've lowered expectations to a simpler level of compositional style, you then have to hope for stylists of the first order to make it work. That doesn't happen too often these days, but the inspirational company Opera Rara, responsible for this often spectacular programme of operatic excerpts, knows where to find them. In soprano Joyce El-Khoury, tenor Michael Spyres and, an equal partner in the pleasures of the evening, conductor Carlo Rizzi conducting an amazingly idiomatic Hallé, it found the magic recipe for showcase success.
It was as well to have it announced that the Lebanese-Canadian soprano was recovering from a cold; catarrh stops the flow in lyric lines, and that was occasionally apparent. But what a spectacular voice this is, allied - as with Spyres - to supreme musicianship. The top makes the ears ring, but can also be reduced to a sliver of sound in true bel canto style; the stage presence is perfect, dramatic evocation economical but crystal-clear. El-Khoury, Spyres and Rizzi (pictured below by Neil Bennett) between them managed to rebirth the excerpts from the one opera I thought I knew well, Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, culminating in a shared ability to sing the eight-bar melodic phrases of the Act 1 duet in a single breath. Sheer artistry.
But what of the unfamiliar, its presence linked by repertoire for two apparently great singers of the 19th century, Julie Doras-Grace and Gilbert Duprez? The best cases were made for an aria and duet from Halévy's Guido et Ginevra - interestingly orchestrated in what, we were told, are reminiscences of the hero's early Romance, and with a high quotient of melodic originality - and the Act 1 air from Auber's Le lac des fées. Spyres always makes a good case for an unorthodox turn of phrase. His beaten-bronze sound in the French repertoire is ideal; even if the high notes are never actually thrilling - he got there without the bottling which troubled me in the Royal Opera's Mitridate - the middle range is perfectly valorous, and he always projects the meaning of the text.
More stock-in-trade were the numbers from Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable - lovely phrasing of the crucial word "grâce" from El-Khoury, though - Rossini's Otello (the hero's entrance cavatina) and Hérold's Le Pré aux clercs, bland material despite the violin solo beautifully taken by Hallé leader Simon Blendis. The Hallé's first trumpet, Gareth Small, also gilded his bel canto spotlight with handsomely applied vibrato to the Halévy aria and the Pas de Six from Donizetti's La Favorite, much more original as ballet music than Verdi's Paris divertissement for the recast I Lombardi, Jerusalem. Verdi's glory days as a dance master were yet to come, while Donizetti surprises us with orchestral sophistication, especially in a delicious duet for the two oboes.
It was hard not to feel a sudden affection for this pisseur of 70-odd operas at his best; time to go and listen to the Opera Rara recording of Les Martyrs featuring the evening's two stars - appropriately they served up a powerhouse duet from that rediscovered grand opera as their encore - plus their two discs, soon to be released but available last night, including the concert's plums. Not, perhaps, since Nelly Miricioiu revived the bel canto art towards the end of her career have its possibilities seemed so exciting.
Next page: watch a short excerpt of El-Khoury, Spyres and Rizzi recording the Act 1 Duet from Lucia di Lammermoor