Stream: Live from Covent Garden
An underwhelming night at the opera!
Let me begin by saying I love Covent Garden. It’s my favourite opera house in the world and I’ve been a friend of the Royal Opera for over 50 years. So like many other opera lovers I was excited when they announced they were going to stage a live performance on Saturday 13th June, free and widely available through YouTube. Sadly, it didn’t deliver much excitement; indeed, the Wigmore Hall live concerts have been more exciting and the programme of song and piano accompaniment would have been better heard and seen at a concert hall than on the stage at Covent Garden.
The problems began with the setting, in one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world they darkened the house lights so you couldn’t see it and instead put it on an empty stage with no backdrop and Tony Pappano on the piano accompanying socially distanced singers Louise Alder, Toby Spence and Gerald Finley. The only colourful moment came with the ballet reviewed below by Mary-Ann Connolly and recorded beforehand. With no audience to applaud and give atmosphere and no sets or scenes to enliven the evening was drab.
The lack of atmosphere was compounded by the choice of programme. It was very much a Lieder recital rather than an opera concert - indeed there were only two real opera items in the whole evening. It was also a very English programme music by Britten, Butterworth, Finzi and Turnage set to poems by Auden, Houseman and Shakespeare; it did not convey the international art form that opera is.
The songs themselves were performed reasonably; Louise Alder is a fine young singer and she put as much life as possible into Britten’s song cycle, ‘On This Island’, settings of poems by W H Auden. Her performance wasn’t helped by the lack of subtitles, which only appeared halfway through the next singer, Toby Spence’s set. He sang Butterworth’s setting of Housman’s poems from ‘A Shropshire Lad’ very nicely, but again with little atmosphere. This was followed by Gerald Finley singing three songs about pets by Mark- Anthony Turnage to poems by Stevie Smith, Thomas Hardy and Walt Whitman. Turnage is not the most accessible composer and these songs did little to lift the mood which was made more sombre by the entire cast ‘taking a knee’ in respect to Black Lives Matter. There was a little more warmth in Gerald Finley’s rendition of Britten’s fun song ‘The Crocodile’ and in particular his intense performance of Finzi’s setting of Shakespeare’s sonnet ‘Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun’.
However, the opera house only began to live with Louise Alder’s great coloratura performance of an aria from Handel’s ‘Alcina’. It left me thinking how much better it would have been to have this fine young opera singer singing more opera from this great opera house! We closed with some more opera, when Toby Spence and Gerald Finley concluded with the great duet from ‘The Pearlfishers’. Tony Pappano was a decent accompanist but again no substitute for an orchestra. Was it worth doing? Well I’m not sure it added a lot to what is available to opera lovers online, both live and recorded performances. I also have serious doubts that many people will pay even £4.99 for the next two live performances of this kind of programme, when you can get access to the whole of the Met’s amazing archive of operas for only £10 a month!
Reviewed by Hugh Kerr
Ballet Interlude - ‘Morgen!’
Wayne McGregor, the Royal Ballet’s brilliant resident choreographer, brought us reasons to be joyful in these sad times. Created especially for the first live broadcast from the stage of the currently closed Royal Opera House stage, he brought a new piece featuring principal dancer Francesca Hayward and first soloist Cesar Corrales. Partners in real life and evidently so much in love, they are positioned to be the next golden couple of the ballet world. McGregor with his fine taste in music and unique choreography brought us moments of beauty in this choreography of a ‘pas de deux’ to Richard Strauss’ Lied ‘Morgen’ (based on a poem by John Henry Mackay) – which he composed for his wife Pauline in 1894. Hayward, unusually for a dancer, recited the lyrics before she joined Corrales in an empty space. Gradually their partnership evolved as soprano Louise Alder commenced singing and the relationship developed, ending in a tender moment of embrace. These were not the passionate moves associated with MacMillan, but an interpretation of modern sensibilities and reserve. In a short conversation with Anita Rani the affable McGregor then explained the problems associated with dance in the pandemic. This new work provided a respite from what was an otherwise unsatisfactory programme and production.
Reviewed by Mary-Ann Connolly
