Reaction’s self-help guide to the best opera to beat the blues
Storm Gerrit? Henk? Feeling battered this winter? Even though there is nary a seasonal snowflake in sight to sparkle a tree. Escape post-Christmas gloom. Abandon the Flagellants’ January resolution torture. You know you will anyway. Around 1 February. Tumble down the 2024 rabbit hole of summer opera festival delight instead.
Put down that cruise brochure. Why does anyone want to spend time bobbing up and down at sea in a sideways skyscraper anyway? You can’t dock in Venice, Amsterdam hates you and Barcelona treats cruisers as “plagues of locusts”. And all the bores you hated, but thought were dead, have been reborn as cruise ship lecturers, droning on in a perpetual wide Sargasso Sea. May of them are old friends. Now, who does opera-themed cruises?
Get a life. This is the Reaction self-help guide to the best of summer opera joy. And there is plenty on offer.
In “Most Ambitious” category comes Longborough Festival Opera. In June and July, the Cotswolds-based company is boldly going where no country house opera has gone before. Mounting a full Wagner Ring Cycle.
Last year was my first visit to Longborough, for Wagner’s Götterdämmerung – and I discovered I had been missing out. The setting is magnificent. Elegant and not over-grandiose. Martin and Lizzie Graham, owners of Longborough House and founders of the festival, originally Banks Fee Opera, (a place, not a funding device) in 1991 are huge Wagner fans.
I was reminded of Glyndebourne pre-refurb. A small, spare, auditorium, 500 well-worn seats bought from The Royal Opera House in a yard sale; a decent orchestra pit allowing the sound of the in-house orchestra to reach every nook and cranny; well-considered sight-lines, the stalls sufficiently raked to afford an unobstructed view from Row N; a stage depth sufficient to lend perspective; excellent catering; and sufficient garden space for that English opera festival picnic.
The feel was of an eclectic, loyal audience. Conversation with fellow opera goers was welcome. Sadly, unusual. At Glyndebourne, the impression is too often that it’s the audience that is there to be seen, not the performance.
The cycle is directed by Amy Lane, who I consider a “very good thing”. Last year, as director of Copenhagen Opera Festival, she delivered the stunning premiere of Dani Howard’s The Yellow Wallpaper.
Snafu! Longborough’s Ring Cycle is already sold out. I hit the “buy” button for mine at 06:00 on the day booking opened. You will now have to kill a friend with tickets to see it. But there is plenty more on offer at the Chipping Opera of rural England. Puccini’s La bohème. Or take the kids to The Implausible Potions of Dr Dulcemara, delivered by Longborough’s Playground Opera education arm.
Then again, if all else fails, and you are not up to bumping off a ticketed pal, take part in Longborough’s The Ring Cycle Quilt Raffle – very Chipping Norton-esque – then plan for 2025. The draw takes place on 22 May, Wagner’s birthday.
In the “Across the Pond” corner, an away weekend at Glimmerglass in upstate New York promises an unforgettable experience. Last year, Handel’s Rinaldo was outstanding. This year the theme is Identity and Illusion and the new artistic director, Rob Ainsley, is offering no fewer than five mainstage productions.
Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, an ideal vehicle for all the young students attending Glimmerglass to put their talent on display; Cavalli’s La Calisto; Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci; Kevin Puts’ Elizabeth Cree and Rumpelstiltskin and The Unlovable Children, by Jens Ibsen and Cecilia Raker.
Music Director, Joseph Colaneri, is always on hand for pre-performance talks and mingles with the audience. The campus atmosphere of Glimmerglass and its “out of this world” setting beside the forested Lake Otsego is – in the true sense of the word – unique.
The “Close to Town” category. Garsington, only an hour out of London via the M40, is offering a sparklingly innovative season. Rameau’s Platée, a comic-tragic opera featuring grand choruses and fabulous dances playing out in a world of glamour and deception.
This is Garsington’s first essai into the world of French Baroque opera – made possible courtesy of a special partnership with The English Concert. English Concert’s high standards were in evidence recently at New York’s Carnegie Hall in Handel’s Rodelinda.
Director Louisa Muller and designer Christopher Oram will be joined by conductor and French Baroque specialist Paul Agnew, who makes his Garsington debut.
A close relative to the familiar myth of Semele, Platée is a character whose self-deception and entrancement places her in the middle of a heartless plot, devised by the gods to cure Juno of her obsessive jealousy over Jupiter and his romantic attachments. Jupiter pretends to fall in love with Platée only to abandon her once Juno arrives, proving she has no reason to be jealous. An everyday story of “influencer-folk”. Sounds like a gem in the making.
The other Garsington shows are Mozart’s Le Nozze de Figaro, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream – ideal for the open-to-daylight Garsington stage so long as it’s not chucking it down – and Verdi’s seldom performed comedy, Un Giorno do Regno.
A tale of thwarted love, mistaken and assumed identities, the plot revolves around an ordinary man becoming “King for a Day”. I have high hopes that the director, Christopher Alden has set the work in Liz Truss’s No 10. “The use of new powers to disentangle unhappy betrothals results in a maelstrom of madness and delusional behaviour filling the story with twists and turns”.
The only thing missing is a bonkers New Year’s resignation honours list. Sound familiar? Hum, ho. I’m not holding my breath. Young Verdi may have been cutting his teeth, but the music and vocal lines are pure and fresh.
In the “Bloody Hell, it’s still Daylight” category, Finland’s Savonlinna Opera Festival 2024 is the only qualified entrant, so wins by default. No fewer than seven productions this year in the 15th century castle in the lake.
Standout is Adriana Mater, an opera exploring the impact of war on women – sadly au courant in too many world conflict theatres – by Kaija Saariaho, the acclaimed Finnish composer who died in Paris in June last year, which will be a fitting memorial to her talent.
Also showing – Verdi’s Nabucco, Wagner’s Lohengrin, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Smetana’s The Bartered Bride and Janáček’s Káťya Kabanová. A remarkably combative offering from Nato’s second newest member.
Savonlinna is an unforgettable experience. I find it particularly useful that long-suffering, non-opera-loving spouses have the option to go jumping in the lake.
Others on the “Reaction Hit List” – Grange Park Opera – yet to announce it programme; former Nevill Holt Opera, now Nevill Holt Festival and under a “will it survive” cloud is staging only one opera, Mozart’s The Magic Flute; and Glyndebourne in the Sussex Downs is shirking innovation this year, presumably to “pack ‘em in”. Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow? Really?
Still, Handel’s Giulio Cesare, directed by David McVicar and featuring American counter tenor Aryeh Nusbaum Cohen (familiar to Reaction readers) as Julius Caesar will be a Glyndebourne must-see.
So, opera is dying, is it? In spite of English Arts Council cuts forcing English National Opera to relocate to Manchester, face strike action by its chorus, and lose Martin Brabbins, its musical director; New York’s Met cutting productions by 20% this season; and Scottish Opera being hollowed out instead of boosted by its SNP “don’t care” funders, summertime at home and abroad offers operatic riches almost beyond belief.
And, as I was writing this self-help opera addicts column, BBC Radio 3’s breakfast host, the imperturbable Petrarch – or is it Petroc? – Trelawney, read out a weather forecast, announcing the temperature in Drumnadrochit.
Did Petroc know something I didn’t? Drumnadrochit, opera destination inconnu? I checked. Sure enough, Scottish Opera toured there in Summer 2021 with Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore. Apparently, they performed out of a sort of camper van. Maybe that’s where Peter Murrell, former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s spouse, got the inspiration to buy one for his referendum-campaigning mum.
Little was written at the time about the performance, but much was made of the attendance of a vocal local, Joey the parrot. Even life in Drumnadrochit is opera.