Master Class – Tyne Daly does Callas

Earlier in the week, I dropped in on Master Class at the Vaudeville Theatre, the start of a run through to April.  Tyne Daly takes on Maria Callas, alternately developing and humiliating three students for the pleasure of an audience and it was my first encounter with the play.

I hadn’t expected it to be so out-and-out comedic at the beginning, but it darkens as it develops.  There are some great one-liners dotted through it, and each anecdote gets brought up short with a ‘But that’s another story. This isn’t about me.’  The staging is effective, directed by experienced opera director Stephen Wadsworth.  I do suspect that the transitions from the master class setting to the more intimate ‘flashback’ confrontations with her husbands, each time in a theatre setting and with Callas giving us both roles in the dialogue, would confuse some who weren’t so ‘up’ on her life story.

Daly is, of course, the centre of attention for most of it and, with the usual caveats that always apply to a portrayal of someone we know well from film or television, she is highly effective and certainly unflagging.  She has captured the Greek-American sound of the spoken Callas effectively, and the construction of the piece is adept in how it skirts around the protagonist having to sing.

The three singers that are the subject of the class are also very engaging, particularly the tenor Garrett Sorenson (a graduate of the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist programme) and mezzo Naomi O’Connell (a Julliard graduate).  They act tremendously well, as well as singing forcefully, aided by the small Vaudeville theatre to sound astonishingly gutsy.  Dianne Pilkington is a more conventional music theatre voice, but she puts across the first student’s insecurities effectively.  Jeremy Cohen accompanies with flair, as well as giving a good turn as the nervous, doting accompanist (whose name Callas has forgotten from just yesterday).

Each of the arias (Amina’s Ah! non credea mirarti from La Sonnambula; Recondita armonia from Tosca; and Lady Macbeth’s Vieni! t’affretta! from Macbeth) are fascinatingly pulled apart as the singers’ interpretations are refined and the essence of opera (in particular, that singing is dramatic communication, not a static act) is uncovered for them and for us.  There is a moving display of the singers singing whilst Callas translates with dramatic urgency, pushing their engagement with the text.  The pieces that the students bring to the master class seem fantastically challenging, almost surprisingly so.

Ultimately, enjoyable though the piece is, there is a tinge of camp mawkishness about it, to which you just have to surrender yourself but which lends the piece (to choose an apt metaphor) a rather broad vibrato as it swings between its themes.  Terrence McNally also wrote The Lisbon Traviata: a rather harrowing portrayal of psychological disintegration, infused with bitchy queeniness and set against a backdrop of Callas’s coveted bootleg 1958 Traviata recording from the São Carlos theatre).  He clearly has his themes, therefore, and Masterclass is imbued with similar dark undertones in its more intimate moments.  However, it is most effective when confronting the audience with the deconstructed opera extracts and, with however broad a brush, conveying something of the complex power of the art-form.

*That* Traviata…

At the end of my scribblings on the Traviata in November last year, which starred Aily Pérez, I noted that her husband, Stephen Costello, would be singing Alfredo alongside Netrebko in the new year, and concluded the piece with:

Given Ms Netrebko’s track record, there must be a fair chance of a last-minute call to get husband and wife together on stage…

Sure enough, the cancellation came, this time due (not unreasonably) to having to have surgery on her foot.  There was a tense few days and then we were told that Ermonela Jaho, who was the principal protagonist for the post-Christmas run of Traviatas, would step in.  So it seemed that the prophecy was not to be fulfilled.  However, at the last minute, Jaho also fell ill and, lo! Pérez is summoned from her rehearsals for the same piece in Hamburg.  Opera does like a good off-stage drama, and sure enough there was a bit of a buzz for the first performances together of this husband-and-wife team in this repertoire.

The RO’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

This was to have been one of two performances of the Royal Opera’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, nearly identical but crucially different,  that we would have seen in the space of about 11 days.  However, it was not to be.  The cast of the Covent Garden run – with one crucial substitution – will take the stage of Symphony Hall, Birmingham, for a one-off performance of the Royal Opera in the regions.  Bryn Terfel was to have replaced Wolfgang Koch as Hans Sachs, which is a pretty major substitution in the context of the work, let alone that it brings in the great Bryn.  But the vicissitudes of the winter season got the better of Mr T and he had to withdraw because of a chest infection.  Wolfgang Koch, as one would expect, replaced him.

Well, that was 2011…

Roundups (or should that be ’rounds-up’?) of the past year seem to be all the rage, so I thought I’d join the party. And, rather than just write it up, I thought it deserved the infographic treatment (click on the image, left), which was a neat way of whiling away a few leisurely Christmas hours and learning a bit about my Adobe software along the way.

Hänsel and Gretel at the King’s Head

Although, on the face of it, Hänsel und Gretel seems an obvious choice for the small-theatre treatment, the lusciousness of the Romantic score appears to defy reduction to a single piano.  The through-composed structure also lends itself better to bigger operatic presentation, where the lack of linear breathing space has compensations in the expanse of the visual presentation.  The relentlessness of the score, with no stops for a bit of more manageable-scale dialogue, becomes very wearing ‘up close’.  The small King’s Head theatre room’s lack of flexibility in stage effects and lighting also robbed the performance of any of the aura of the magical, dimming an opera that relies on the fantastical to make its impact.

A Traviata that wowed

In the midst of the wall-to-wall Traviatas that make up the Royal Opera’s Christmas/New Year period, I hadn’t expected anything too special of this performance when I booked it.  The bigger money was on Netrebko in January.  I came out of the theatre last night severely doubting that January’s performance will out-do this one.

There’s little needs saying about the production: it delivers, and continues to do so handsomely and straightforwardly.  A succession of casts both great and not-so-great have passed through it since it debut’d in 1994.  This was definitely one of the best.

Snoop backstage at ENO

A couple of weeks back, we did the backstage tour of the Coliseum and I had intended to write it up but never got around to it.  And then I remembered I had some photos that I took, so I needed to do something with them.  Anyway, herewith the photos.  I can’t recommend the tour highly enough.  Compared to the ROH tour I remember doing a few years back, it was a much more relaxed affair and we got into all sorts of interesting places in the backstage warren.  I seem to remember photography not being allowed on the ROH tour, although that might have changed now.  It’s a real pleasure being able to flex your photographic muscles in an interesting building like this.

Looking down on Ruddigore

Tricky to write too much about this Opera North performance of Ruddigore at the Barbican Theatre.  From row B of the (two-row) Balcony, which sits under a rather dramatic overhang so that one feels a little ‘packed away’, it is difficult to properly appreciate what gave every appearance of being a strong, spirited performance of a relative G&S rarity.

I sonnambuli

It wasn’t only Amina who gave an impression of sleepwalking through yesterday evening’s La Sonnambula at Covent Garden.  There was a subfusc dreariness that settled over the whole enterprise.

Admittedly, it picked up in the second half, but the persistent lack of spirit was never far from the surface.  I think this is to be mostly attributed to Daniel Oren’s soporific, even limp, reading of the piece, but the lead soloists are also to share some of the responsibility.

The Dutchman that flew, except when it didn’t

Tim Albery’s production of Der Fliegende Holländer returned to Covent Garden and, better late than never, I’m able to jot down my thoughts on the last night, 4 November.

It was notable for a very split approach to the pacing of the drama: onwards from the meeting of Senta and the Dutchman, right through to the conclusion, it was electric; Senta’s Ballad, however, seemed to me a perverse essay in how slowness can be confused with profundity and, momentarily, it threatened to derail the whole two-hour-and-a-half hour enterprise.