The great Kani is a dervish dressed as a traffic cone
Wasfi Kani, founder and CEO of Grange Park Opera swept onstage pre-performance and self-described as a traffic cone. A Brazilian traffic cone. The yellow dress extended from the apex of her head in an isosceles triangle to her feet. The enormous bright green wrap finished the illusion. Kani was impersonating a national flag. She turned to demonstrate the ensemble needed only a number and name on her back to make her Pelé.
Well, maybe another foot in height would have helped. She confessed she was so interested in football that she had been pressing for someone to invent a radio which, when the words ‘And now the sports news’ were heard it turned itself off. I’ve emailed with the good news that someone already has. “Alexa, stop when you hear the words ‘Boris Johnson’.” Works for me.
The doyenne of Grange Park Opera was on her customary manoeuvres. What am I talking about? ‘Doyenne’? She is an enforcer, a dervish whirling through crowds, holding unsuspecting men up by the ankles and shaking them to see what largesse falls from their trouser pockets. At least, dressed in high viz she can be spotted bearing down across the Grange Park lawns. Time enough to duck behind one of the convenient, numerous boxwood hedges and play possum.
Kani offers a litany of thanks and requests for support before every performance. She makes huge efforts to meet and greet. Beware being identified as meriting a legendary ‘library fine’ for some piffling misdemeanour. You can escape wrath only by coughing up.
This time she flourished a debit card. Clearly fallen out of some guy’s pocket as he went hedgeways. “The name on it is Peter Warburton”. A squeal and a sheepish hand rising from Row 3. “Excellent. You can pick it up at the interval from the goodies stall. I suggest an £100 donation”. Boxed in, indeed.
Kani is disliked, indeed looked down on, in some operatic circles as a Princess Pushy type – so indiscreet. And, some say she has left havoc in her wake taking the Grange Park opera company on a long journey from The Grange, in Hampshire via Nevill Holt, Leicetershire, eventually to West Horsley Place, Surrey.
The house is a Grade 1 listed, unspoilt Jane-Austen-ish manor house nestling in the only bit of Surrey free from mansions, tarmac and shopping trolleys, dating back to 1425, home of the late Bamber Gascoigne, who decided to dedicate the property to opera. The beloved University Challenge quiz-master’s final “Your starter for ten”. Kani accepted the challenge.
The anti-Kani faction is ill-informed and misplaced. No English country-house opera company can survive without its Wasfi Kani. The fact that Wasfi Kani is very good at being …… well …… Wasfi Kani, is to her credit. The hellcat impresario whose sole ambition in life is to protect her opera kittens. Good on her! Also delivers stonkingly good operas with great casts.
And this season the kittens have produced three fabulous operas in the Theatre in the Woods. Werther, Jules Massenet; Tosca, Giacomo Puccini; and Tristan and Isolde, Richard Wagner. I was able to take in only Werther and Tosca.
Werther is a love triangle based on a tale by Goethe. Much influenced by Wagner, the tragedy steps firmly and intentionally on ground broken by Wagner in Tristan, Massenet was – as was pretty much every other composer in the 19th and early 20th century – hugely influenced by the bulldozer of Bayreuth. Werther deftly exploits the device of leitmotif to characterise the work from beginning to protracted deathbed end.
At the heart of the opera is a doomed and unconsummated love affair between the poet Werther and Charlotte, the eldest daughter of a town Bailiff. We are in Wetzlar, Hesse, the heart of Germany.
It is July and the bailiff, widowed, is teaching his younger children to sing Christmas carols, even though it is July. There are two older sisters, Charlotte, the eldest who acts as surrogate mother and Sophie, the practical oil in the family machinery. Charlotte’s mother’s dying wish was that she should marry Albert, a respectable local.
Charlotte agreed, all the while harbouring the hots for Werther, the anguished poet who is deeply in love with her. From curtain up the audience is shouting, “Forget boring Albert and leg it with Werther”. The obvious thing for any sensible lass to do. She pays no heed. Duty, coupled with the need to have an opera that lasts for four acts and more than ten minutes, requires Charlotte to stick to her fiance, yet still maintain contact with Werther through a protracted correspondence which she guards jealously.
The work pivots on this delicious ambiguity and is made more poignant by the fact that Albert obviously knows what’s up, aware that to acknowledge reality would destroy his marriage and wisely keeps stum. He knows Charlotte, for all her seething emotions, will stand by her marriage vows. All Albert has to do is hide behind the box hedge. And hand over the fatal pistols when Werther asks.
Here is how the tragedy unfolds:
Act 1
The Bailiff is teaching his children a Christmas carol. Two friends – local bucolic pub crawlers – arrive and Charlotte dresses for a dance. Since fiancé Albert is away, she will be escorted by Werther, a gloomy friend who writes poetry.
Werther arrives and is moved to see Charlotte prepare supper, just as her dead mother had. They leave for the ball. Albert returns unexpectedly and is surprised that Charlotte is out. He will return in the morning. Werther and Charlotte come back very late; he has fallen desperately in love with her. Charlotte promised her dying mother she would marry Albert. Werther is in despair.
Act 2
Three months later, Charlotte and Albert are married and are walking about the town. Werther is miserable and Sophie tries to cheer him up. Werther draws Charlotte aside and reminds her of their first meeting. Charlotte begs Werther to go away but she agrees to see him at Christmas. Albert realizes that Werther loves his wife.
Act 3
It is Christmas Eve and Charlotte rereads Werther’s letters, wondering how he is. Sophie tries to cheer up her sister. Werther arrives and reads some of his poetry. Not always a good move. Charlotte realizes she does indeed love him. They embrace for a moment, but she dismisses Werther who leaves with thoughts of suicide. Albert returns home to find his wife distraught. Werther sends Albert a message asking to borrow his pistols. Charlotte has a dreadful premonition.
Act 4
Charlotte arrives too late to stop Werther from shooting himself. While he is dying, she declares her love. There is one kiss. He asks for forgiveness. The last Act is infused by offstage singing, the children’s chorus carolling of God’s love and salvation.
This tear-jerker works only if the roles of Werther and Charlotte are performed by stand-out singers. Leonardo Capalbo, an Italian-American lyric tenor was superb as Werther. Heroic anguish is his thing, and he has a hugely versatile voice. Long-haired head tossing had been perfected for this performance and he played the gloom-merchant with subtlety. When hope beckoned, in the form of Charlotte’s encouragement he acted and sang radiantly. But these were only flashes of sunshine in a thundercloud sky.
Ginger Costa Jackson, also Italian-American, but a mezzo-soprano with a growly low register debuted as Rosette in Massenet’s Manon in 2005. She has had a sparkling international career since and transformed the usual Charlotte, a maternal country girl with an inconvenient love interest, into a ferocious Carmen-like tortured being, engaging the audience with a glaring stare as she was forced to recognise her love for Werther, while still holding to her vows.
Jackson’s voice was utterly compelling. Especially as she sank into her lower register, an ominous place in which only the most intense emotions dwell. If I had dared, I would have asked the traffic cone how she came to be cast. But that will have to wait for a braver day.
The Gascoigne Orchestra, conducted by Christopher Hopkins, delivered a well-balanced emotional performance of Massenet’s luscious score. This is a ‘sung through’ opera with no ensembles and only occasional arias. This works with a tightly written libretto, without endless recaps à la Handel, and often Mozart. Édouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann, co-librettists, produced a forward driving narrative. Would that the surtitles had been better. They missed much of the nuance. Fortunately, diction was clear and the sung French easy to understand.
The staging was spare, only trees painted on moving flats with token chairs and a table. I heard some interval chatter of the “I like proper scenery” variety, but Director, John Doyle’s conception worked. There was no clutter. And, in consequence the stage direction had to be pin-sharp. The deft use of the children, who were used to shift the furniture and, impressively, during the entre-act music before Act 4 transform the setting into the dying Werther’s bedroom, was inspired and imbued with dignity.
In Act 4, never in the field of operatic performance was so much emotion evoked by so spare a single chair. Finally, the remaining spotlight on Charlotte went down as she gathered a bouquet of daffodils from her sister’s basket and symbolically laid it on the now dead Werther’s grave-to-be. Gut wrenching, as it should be.
Tosca was delivered by the BBC Concert Orchestra, maestro Mark Shanahan wielding the baton. Director, Stephen Medcalf, decided to avoid the potential bouncing diva trap, so in the final scene Tosca impaled herself on a soldier’s bayonet rather than leap the Castel Sant’ Angelo balcony.
I think moving the action on to a period which never really happened – German occupied Italy (the Italian war zone was occupied only between 9th July 1943 and 2nd May 1945, one year, 9 months, three weeks and one day) – a huge mistake. Puccini’s Tosca is all about Italian nationalism. Having Scarpia’s henchman marching about with Swastika armbands made no sense.
Hello, is anyone out there unfamiliar with the plot? Tosca? Alright, alright. As it is my worthy, meticulous yet tolerant editor, Mattie Brignal’s last day at Reaction before moving on to the Telegraph – and he won’t let me get away without a link to the synopsis – here you go.
I don’t know what the Grange Park casting team has been smoking this season, but we should all have some. Izabela Matula, the red-headed Polish soprano simply blazed. They were lucky to catch her. Matula is performing the same title role in Innsbruck, Dussëldorf and Innsbruck (yep, Innsbruck has an opera house) as well as Grange Park this summer.
The litmus test for Toscas is, I think, the Visse d’arte (I lived for art) aria in Act 2. It is one of the moments in opera when the character confides innermost thoughts to the audience directly. Pretty difficult in the middle of a stage with evil Scarpia standing by. Matula did it. By Jove, she did it. Words hardly do justice to the completely compelling moments she conjured up.
“Visceral” will have to do. After this tour de force, no doubt in the mind of the audience. A bit of a flibberty-jibbet in Act 1 with her petulant jealousy of the Countess, the subject of Cavaradossi’s painting, here Tosca shows her true mettle. This is a life bottled up in an aria, based on four ominously descending notes, flying free. The true Tosca, fighter for her lover’s life, is revealed. Pure, dead, brilliant performance, Izabela Matula.
Otar Jorjikia, a Georgian tenor – “who performs in Zurich, Bregenz, Tbilisi, Wroclaw, Parma, Warsaw, Toulouse, Basel, Baden-Baden, St Petersburg …. and others” – was the artist turned freedom fighter, Cavaradossi. Another great casting for Grange Park.
His light-hearted dismissal of Tosca’s unfounded jealousy in Act 1 morphed into political resolution as he resisted Scarpia’s torture. At the end, told by Tosca that the firing squad was fake, he seemed less than convinced. Fabulous, nuanced performance.
Scarpia, Brett Polegato, a Canadian baritone, was pure evil, spookily convincing. Scarpia is such an easy role to overplay. Polegato allowed his character’s lust to burn slowly under the surface to explode only at the moment of his violent assault, resulting in his death at Tosca’s hand.
At The Theatre in the Woods, West Horsley Place, magic is to be found. The atmosphere is intimate. The walk from The Car Park in the Fields is a mere 100 yards. Quirky sculpture dots the orchard. Catering in the main house is excellent. Renting a picnic marquee for a small party is a good plan. Or sit by a box hedge with a picnic in one of the garden’s wrought-iron love chairs, ready to leap should a yellow and green Kani-Cone hove into sight. No English country house opera can trump Grange Park.
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