35 Nights, (and one birthday afternoon) at the Opera by Steve Gladwin

Our Carers group in Welshpool 'met' for their first zoom session about six weeks ago. The first question we were asked was, 'what is the thing which has saved you during lock down? I had no hesitation replying 'music'.

I might have added, 'in particular 25 live operas from the Met, because that's been a large part of our lives over the last fourteen weeks, A great many people don't like opera. They just don't get it, and they really do think that its still all about fat women in horned helmets and long funeral scenes. But that's just Wagner!

The three conclusions I have to after watching a glut of free opera are as follows.

*I still really love opera and pretty much everything about it.

*My idea of the Metropolitan Opera productions in New York being staid and unadventurous and hardly ground-breaking is well out of date.

*Thank the gods we live in an age where opera singers can act as well as they can sing.

From the Met's facebook page.

In watching thirty five live stream broadcasts so far, I can hardly include them all, so you'll forgive me if I just dance about the subject like a ballerina, (please don't picture that!), looking at a few themes, production styles and characters and above all not taking anything too seriously - because that's the best way to approach opera!

Tenors

I've clearly been out of touch recently because there seem to be an endless supply of really good tenors of the likes of Jonas Kaufman, Juan Diego Flores, Piotr Bezcala, Matthew Polenzani, Yusuf Efrayzov, Joseph Callega, Charles Castronovo, to name just a few. What's more, none of these indulge in the ancient art of 'mooing', where singers of the old school would tackle the problem of the passagio - sort of a springboard towards the next high or loud passage - by leaping off gracelessly into space and not really worrying where they landed. Worse by far, both tenors and sopranos, (some of them very famous) would negotiate the actual passagio approach by sliding their way right up to it like a reverse cat down a blackboard, ensuring that the audience were forced to stick cheese in their ears in the manner of Madame Edith's unwilling clientele in 'Allo, Allo'.

Producer's  Theatre

Speaking as someone who believes in and often used to practice some fairly radical production ideas, it's good to see the adventurousness of many of the productions on offer. Many of these production ideas work beautifully - something which has to be admitted, even if you don't really like them. Who could fail to fall in love with Richard Jones production of Hansel and Gretel, for example, where the whole of the set, is created in giant-size, so that it looms down on the children, and the role of the witch is given against most tradition, to the late English tenor Philip Langridge, (who we get to see putting on his fat-suit too). Or June Tamor's magical 'Magic Flute', where for the first time the trial scene has a real sense of fear and-dare I say it- actual trial, where the two human armed men are positively dwarfed by the massive god like versions above them. Or Anthony Minghella's stunningly beautiful and moving Madame Butterfly, where waving flags and streamers. and  shadow and rod puppets are almost only a prelude to the living sense we experience when we first see Cio Cio San's so convincing rod puppet operated son. I don't think I've ever seen a non-human creature give over such a sense of love and protection.

At the opposite end of the scale is the farce which constituted an otherwise beautifully sung version of Bellini's 'La Somnambula', where the Tyrolean Austrian setting was kicked into a corner by a producer who for her own inexplicable reasons decided to set it in a rehearsal room. An already creaky plot is made even more unwatchable by adding a failed attempt at alienation, where we are supposed to care about the players as much as the played.

But to off-set that there is the Israelis desert set of Salome, with its fearsome guards and raised-up platform for Salome's confrontations between the prisoner John the Baptist and the eponymous princess herself. There is the Las Vegas 'Rigoletto', where the machinations and cruelty of the court of Mantua re-invented as a fifties Tony Soprano, really bring home the story's tragedy.  In the second act of Prince Igor, the decision to have the concussed bass Ildar Abrezakov and his traumatised army walking through an endless Elysian style field of waving wheat takes a little getting used to, but is as effective a way of portraying PTSD as you're likely to find. Like 'Rigoletto', it makes the opera feel so 'current'. Topping all perhaps is the stylised and meticulously imagined production of Parsifal, which never stops moving and spends Act Two within a bloody womb like structure, (I guess you have to be there!). At the opposite and more traditional end of the scale, David McVicar, renowned for the reasonably radical, provides an absolutely authentic 'Tosca', where you can imagine Gobbi and Callas entering all three specific realised locations at any minute.

Jonas plus blood bath.

Divas

Thankfully I saw no diva-like behaviour, just an endless stream of sopranos and mezzos giving generously of their spectacular best. This included the opportunity to see a slim and impassioned Luciano Pavarotti in  'Tosca' and 'La Boheme' with great mezzo Shirley Verrett, and great soprano Renata Scotto respectively. Scotto turns up again with Placido Domingo in an almost overwhelmingly intense production of 'Manon Lescaut', where the desert which stays safely outside Las Vegas in the aforementioned 'Rigoletto' more or less eats poor Manon alive at its tragic conclusion. Domingo and particularly Scotto are stunning, and you just have to ignore this being one of the classic 'not really dead yet', scenes. 'Rigoletto itself incidentally, can out 'death' the lot, with its classic and extended 'somehow alive after being stabbed and tied up in a sack' entry.

I also discover the incredible talent that is the French soprano Natalie Dessay, (now retired, alas) for the first time in a very modern production of 'La Traviata', where everything is dominated by a huge clock ticking down the last hours of Violetta's life and is set within a great, dream-like amphitheatre cum bull-ring to represent this particular blood-sport. Having said that you soon concentrate on the singing with a cast including Natalie Dessay and tenor Matthew Polenzani and later the much missed and entirely great Dmitri Hvorostovsky, a Siberian baritone with such an incredible voice that he beat Bryn Terfel into second place in the 1989 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World.

The electric Natalie Dessay in a different 'Traviata

I ended up ordering a lot of Natalie Dessay from amazon, as both voice and acting skills got right under my skin. What interests me most about her is that she does not regard herself as a singer, but as an actor who taught herself to sing so she could be an opera star. Her acting is so visceral and realistic at times, so on edge and almost over the top, that you feel you might tumble off with her. The voice - she is a specialist colaratura soprano - so that involves a lot of high notes and runs - means she is highly skilled at playing many of opera's mad heroines. 

She's not the only soprano to put her all into her performances either. The great Swedish soprano and first winner of Cardiff Singer of the World prize Karita Mattila offered an at times almost out of control princess Salome.The eight minute sequence of her cavorting with Jokanaan's severed head makes you feel as if you're intruding on something private. 

Portraying Agony

The male equivalent performance of Natalie Dessay, or Renata Scotto or Karita Mattila is provided by another Swede, baritone Peter Mattei in the thankless role of the grail king Amfortas in Wagner's Parsifal. The jury may be still out on the question of how to portray total, consuming endless agony while trying to maintain the role of king and spiritual leader, but I suggest anyone goes to Peter Mattei for advice, or maybe to his two minders.

Amfortas is consumed by a sinful agony in his loins, due to being stabbed there by the magician Klingsor following his seduction by the wild woman/witch/foolishly laughed at Christ as he carried his cross to Calvary and has had to wander the world ever since character, Kundry. Peter Mattei is so convincing in his portrayal of this agony that I was continually wincing. But he did get to share it around a bit, for pity those two minders who the producer has persuaded to act literally as physical supports, including actually being arm rests and shoulder raisers. You can only imagine them nightly comparing their bruises after each incredible performance and secretly plotting to do over the producer.

Only days before Peter Mattei was to be seen as the most ebullient and priapic Figaro imaginable in the title role of 'The Barber of Seville.' Perhaps he needed a sit down after all that.

Most Revealing Moment

This didn't even come onstage, but in the wings at the interval of Gluck's French opera, 'Iphigenie en Tauride', which is an alternative take on the fate of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's oldest daughter.

Old friends on and off stage - but maybe a bit of wishful thinking!

Met legends Susan Graham and Placido Domingo are playing the leading roles and Natalie Dessay as presenter, is interviewing them. The two are obviously pals, but Susan obviously wears the trousers, (which as a person renowned for many of the trouser roles played by mezzos, she often does). Placido is bemoaning the fact that he and Susan must always play brother and sister rather than lovers. Susan comes over as being a bit relieved, but Natalie can't resist a bit of Gallic mischief, when she suggests how brother and sister might sometimes ignore that. At this point and in a suitably world weary way, Susan Graham takes off one of the tenor's clutching hands and says. 'Oh, he's tried that on, don't worry. Let's not go there.'

In the age of the me too movement, where both former music director James Levine, star tenor Vitorio Grigolo, (sacked by the Royal Opera and later the Met, for groping) and Placido are either unemployed or quietly retired, this exchange seems to me to bridge the gap between the traditional, but old, and the new acceptable.

Why Like Opera?

I said at the beginning of this that a lot of people either hate or don't get opera and I can see why, but my nights on the sofa at at the Met have reminded me of all the reasons why I do love it and one or two which might put me off it.

Yes, opera is way out of date and often misogynist, where the plots of Gounod's Faust and Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, would hardly pass muster if they were offered by a composer and librettist. Yes, there is an awful lot of money being spent to please a group of patrons who for a long time had far too much control on production style.

But the stories and the singing and acting and spectacle remain magical. At a time when we sorely need magic more than ever, I can only be grateful to the Met, as I equally am to the National Theatre and a host of others, for providing it a'plenty and taking us away from the limitations and miseries of this time in all our lives.

And if I had to choose just one of the productions I've seen, it would be tough, but not impossible. I think it would be the one that both Rosie and I enjoyed right at the beginning, when reigning Met queen and all round good sport, Joyce Di Donato, Rossini tenor  Juan Diego Flores and the magnificent all-round baritone Peter Matttei as Figaro got together in a rollicking Barber of Seville, which seemed to be everything an opera should be.

Oh, and as for the birthday afternoon, that refers to mine, when having decided not to watch an opera in the evening, we instead discovered a DVD my dad had recorded for us years ago of Donizetti's 'Daughter of the Regiment' with Natalie Dessay, Juan Diego Flores and veteran comic bass Alessandra Corbelli. We could not but give in and didn't regret it.

NB A great many of the operas mentioned here, including the Parsifal, Madame Butterfly, Manon Lescaut and Hansel and Gretel, but not alas the Barber, are available on Amazon, should you have an arm and a leg to spare.

Last gasp in the desert. A must see!

One soprano - a lot of ironing!