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The Guardian
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Pimpinone review – hot-to-trot comic opera from the underperformed Telemann
Spare a thought for Georg Philipp Telemann. Friend to Bach and Handel, and godfather to Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel, he penned more than 3,000 works including 29 extant operas. Yet, for all his fecundity of invention and consistent quality, we hear his sparkling music far less often than he deserves. If people are unsure where to begin, how about Pimpinone? First performed 300 years ago in Hamburg, its three acts were intended as comic intermezzi for a production of Handel's opera seria Tamerlano (total running time a gruelling five hours!) With an easy to follow plot and laugh-out-loud musical numbers, it would have come as welcome light relief, assuming people stuck around to listen. The Royal Ballet and Opera's staging, with singers, conductor and director drawn from its Jette Parker Artists programme, reveals a work that's on the slight side, but one with plenty of charm and sexual politics not a million miles from our own time, hence its interest beyond the recording studio. The work is subtitled 'The Unequal Marriage Between Vespetta and Pimpinone or The Domineering Chambermaid', which pretty much sums it up. In Act I, working-class Vespetta – the name means little wasp – lands a job as housemaid to Pimpinone. Gifts aside, by Act II she's ready to quit until he offers to marry her. In Act III, after much comic quarrelling, he grudgingly grants her some genuine freedoms. Sophie Gilpin sets it in the 1960s, bringing a modern slant to issues of equality and female emancipation. It works well. Vespetta is first discovered performing as part of a festive bash at Pimpinone's pad. With lights and tinsel, she's literally done up like a Christmas tree (witty set and costumes by Anna Yates). Isabela Díaz has great fun with her lively opening aria, slipping into flats to soothe sore feet. A playful actor, her bright soprano with attractive upper extension does the rest. Pay rises, prenups and miniskirts attend her shimmying up the greasy pole of social mobility, and we root for her all the way. Grisha Martirosyan is her nice-but-dim Pimpinone complete with porn tash and dubious taste in multicoloured shirts. His thrusting baritone has depth and power at the top, and he's funny too, especially in the panting syncopations of his hot-to-trot opening aria. Later on, he reveals a nice line in comedy falsetto, while Díaz shows off her nimble technique in a pair of teasing vocal minuets (though both might have sung more softly at times). Peggy Wu conducts a crisp performance with players drawn from the English National Opera Orchestra. Continuo pickups might have been quicker off the mark and more imaginatively decorated, but otherwise her approach, like Gilpin's, allows Telemann's neatly revived confection to shine. At Linbury theatre, London, until 17 May
The Guardian
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Opera director Netia Jones: ‘AI is not going away. Either you batten down the hatches or you ride the wave'
Born in London, where she still lives, to an artist mother and musician father, Netia Jones is the new associate director of the Royal Opera. Known for using immersive installations, film and VR, her operas include Alice in Wonderland, Least Like the Other with Brian Irvine, which won the Ivor Novello best opera award, and Peter Grimes, which finished its run last week at the Gothenburg Opera House. Next year she will curate the Royal Ballet and Opera's first opera and technology festival, RBO/Shift. The first opera you ever saw, when you were 10, was Peter Grimes. How has it been to revisit the tragic fisherman's tale?Relentless! It's such a brilliant story but so bleak; it gets under your skin. Doing it in Gothenburg, which was cold and very wet, was perfect, although not the best thing for your mental health. And you were obsessed with it as a child, too?I was – drawing posters for it for weeks afterwards, and, funnily enough, it was here, at the Royal Opera House. I've realised something recently, actually. Kids don't come to the opera with any preconceptions. I've overheard the school matinees here, and the kids go wild. They just erupt. They're the best events any opera house can do. Why?Because when the singers come off stage, they're so excited. Kids don't mind about the niceties of when they should applaud or cheer, and I love that, because making opera is a kind of insanity. No one makes money making operas, but hundreds of people come together to make each one anyway, and that's extraordinary, isn't it? I think you really feel that something special is happening watching one when you're young. Opera is still seen as elitist to many, though. How would you convince someone to try it?The first thing I'd say is you don't have to like it. It's not like it's really superior. Most of the people that I know are not opera-goers, and they only come along because I drag them along, but they do tend to respond well. Anyway, opera isn't one thing. It's disparate – it can be on a small scale, or very technical, or full and lavish, or avant garde and German! Any tips for nervous opera-goers?It's useful to know the story before you come. If you did that with a play or film, it wouldn't work. In opera, we don't have spoiler alerts. You directed the first VR opera, Current, Rising and engage with AI in your work. How would you win over tech-sceptics?With any technological development, some people will use it to do bad things, some will use it to do good things. That's got nothing to do with the technology – it's just how we are as humans. But as artists, we must explore technology in all its guises because we are trained to create rather than to destroy. If you're coming to technology thinking 'What is the most beautiful, poetic, or positive thing we can do with this?', you think of how it enables all kinds of openings, allows multiple voices and improves access. Aren't you scared of AI?I know AI is the topic of the moment, but it's not going away. Either you batten down your hatches and the storm rages outside, or you ride the huge wave which is coming. I think it's better to be riding the wave than being overwhelmed by it. We can't be blind to the dangers and risks, but the whole AI story isn't just about worrying if machines are going to create operas or make everybody unemployed. It's about how we, the humans in the loop, can be enabled to imagine new futures when we're using it. It must help your optimism that you work in an environment where people aren't just stuck behind laptops.I've been lucky enough to work in every single opera-house department, seeing people's hands in vats dying fabrics, or embroidering, or building sets, or welding. Those jobs will never go away. I don't believe that opera is going to go away either. It has been with us for 300 years, and it will carry on, because it's not a medium: it's an art form. It's like Janus, the two-headed god, looking back into the past as much as it looks into the future. You studied modern languages at university. Has that been helpful?It's super useful to be able to speak the local language to people in [backstage] workshops. Recently, I learned Swedish for Peter Grimes with an AI buddy, which is so sad. I now have little conversations with my AI Swedish best friend! Speaking other languages is also important post-Brexit, as you can't be isolationist in opera. Opera, by its very nature, is international, and the best way of making work is to be open to other voices. Think about Mozart. He was travelling around Europe, picking up the best things from all of the countries, including the UK. This melting pot created his amazing work. You also work outside opera, working in video art and producing performances by artists like gothic singer-songwriter Keeley Forsyth. What do those experiences give you?Keeley's phenomenal. Her compositions really draw you into this shattering world of what it is to be human. I spend lots of my time outside opera, anyway – I'm more likely to be listening to Father John Misty than I am to Verdi, to be honest. But to me music is music, and to be able to do different projects concurrently means a great deal to me. It keeps you fresh – plus I don't see boundaries in my work. We're so susceptible to putting fences between things as human beings, but you shouldn't just do one thing with blinkers on for the rest of your life. That exchange with other ideas and other people is everything.
The Guardian
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Peter Grimes review – Netia Jones's brutal new production electrifies
With music that surges, pitches, billows in every bar, and a story dragged towards doom with riptide inevitability, Peter Grimes (1945) is ruled by the sea. No revelation there: on many occasions its composer, Benjamin Britten, said as much himself. He and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, who created the role of Grimes, spent most of their adult lives near the Suffolk coast, the North Sea a steely backdrop. In a new staging for Gothenburg Opera, conducted by Christoph Gedschold, the British director-designer Netia Jones has ditched the usual sea-as-metaphor idea, a handy cover-all for life's existential questions, and embraced maritime reality. To underline the point, costumes, faded and weather-beaten, have been sprayed with salt. Workers gutting fish in white aprons are spattered with blood. Every detail reminds us of a sea that is not figurative but harsh and physical. Newly appointed associate director of the Royal Opera, London, Jones is a radical creator who uses video to original effect. This was her Gothenburg debut. She has removed the opera from its original East Anglian fishing village setting, taken from The Borough (1810), a collection of poems by George Crabbe, to a libretto by Montagu Slater. The locale is now a remote island community off Sweden's west coast in a fictional present. Gothenburg's seafaring history – this is a port city with a Viking past – is also acknowledged. Its traditionally shaped 1,276-seat opera house, opened in 1994, is airy and ship-like, with decks, railings and walkways. Generous public funding covers 72% of its annual budget (compared with 14%, in 2022/23, at the UK's Royal Ballet and Opera). We should say, too, that Gothenburg Opera's pioneering record of sustainability – green power, food waste turned into biogas, recycled costumes – has led the way for other opera companies (though I'm not sure any has followed their example of keeping 50,000 bees and selling the honey). Outside in the harbour, hulls, piers and cranes shape the skyline. Jones and her team have built on all this in Grimes. What you see on stage distantly echoes what you pass on your way to the venue. Ingenious use of video projections, all filmed in the Gothenburg archipelago and to the north beyond, keeps turbulent sea and clouded sky to the fore. Action takes place on a pontoon, waters lapping below. The rest of the set is minimal. The pitched roof of Grimes's hut mirrors that of the wooden church in which hymn-singing parishioners praise the Lord – one of Britten's characteristic musical cross-fades – before bullying the lone outsider in their midst. Colour is subdued, monochrome until, explosively, all turns lurid red for the midsummer fires and festivities, which render ordinary, hard-working people a vindictive mob (lighting design by Ellen Ruge). The sight of an effigy of Grimes hanging from a boom hook, which might usually hold a few tonnes of raw fish, is electrifying. Every character in this large cast, mostly Swedish, singing in good, clear English, is well delineated – all worthy of mention, but with Åke Zetterström an unusually sympathetic Balstrode leading the ensemble. In the title role, the tenor Joachim Bäckström, radiant-toned and detailed, conveys the frustration of the grizzled, poetic fisherman whose carelessness towards his boy apprentices is left uncertain and complex. The massed singing-shouting of 'Peter Grimes!' by the excellent Gothenburg Opera chorus had the intensity, the ugliness, the displaced grief of a war cry. By the end, when his tormentors sing the name again, pianissimo, tuba playing its soft, fog-horn call, they sounded like briny wraiths. The handling of the female roles revealed anew their importance to the story: the widowed schoolmistress Ellen Orford, courageously delivered by the brilliant young soprano Matilda Sterby; Auntie (a benevolent, warm-hearted Katarina Karnéus); and her twin-like, spirited nieces (Sofie Asplund and Mia Karlsson). Ellen is disturbingly, unwittingly instrumental in the tragedy. Her own dreams blind her to the truth of the situation. Auntie and the nieces are too often typified as near-sluts: not here. Their quartet, in which they meditate on the difficulties of being women in a male-dominated world, is among the most rhapsodic passages in the opera – along with the orchestral sea interludes, which act as chapter headings as the work unfolds. Hardly well known to most opera-goers in Sweden, Peter Grimes is nevertheless not new to the country. The first ever performance outside the UK, in March 1946, was in Stockholm, with more recent stagings there, in Gothenburg and elsewhere. This production, which opened last weekend, raises an always affecting work to a different level of emotional impact. That the cast, chorus and superb orchestra were all outstanding was an equal part of the equation. The work closes, as a new day begins and the nets are brought in, with a muffled thud. At the end, the whole audience slowly rose as one, less out of normal curtain-call hoorays and excitement, though there was that too. It was more as if we were stunned at the way human cruelty, laid bare, could go hand in hand with music of such restless, elliptical and violent beauty. Peter Grimes is at Gothenburg Opera House, Gothenburg, Sweden, until 1 April
BBC News
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Chance to Dance in Bradford shows ballet is for everyone, say pupils
School children from Bradford have praised an "amazing" dance programme that has shown them ballet is for pupils, aged eight and nine, have been taking part in the Chance to Dance scheme, which provides classes led by the Royal Ballet and Opera (RBO).The RBO started working in the city in 2023, when it launched a four-year project aimed at broadening access to arts education for young is preparing the children to take part in Sing, Dance, Leap - a mass performance by 2,000 children in June, to celebrate Bradford's year as UK City of Culture. Some of the pupils involved in the project put on a show at St George's Hall last week."I was a little bit nervous but the more I did it, the more confident I got," said said he had been surprised at how much "strength and discipline" it required."Some people thought it was only for girls but it is also for boys," he added. Umayyah, a pupil at Thornbury Academy, said it had been a surprise to get the opportunity to take part."It started in year three," she explained."Some Chance to Dance people came to our school and they chose the best dancers to carry on."She said she now wanted to do ballet "constantly"."Ballet just makes me happy," she said. Fellow dancer Noor said she had been very nervous - but soon learned she loved ballet."It's the teamwork, the respect in our sessions," she said."My favourite thing is working very elegantly, and very smooth and sharp movements."I think it's absolutely perfect for anyone."Abdullah said he had also been nervous and "scared" at first but it had made him "really excited to learn new skills".He said he would like to go on to become a professional dancer."Ballet is not just for girls, it's even for boys, it is for anyone," he said."It doesn't matter who you are, anyone can do ballet." Tom Whitehead, Bradford-born principal character artist with the Royal Ballet, said he hoped the project would help improve the accessibility of the art said: "For me it's super important, I feel very fortunate that I fell into ballet and dance."I don't think then ballet and the arts were accessible to everybody, they weren't the norm."He said he thought Billy Elliot, Strictly Come Dancing and Chance to Dance were "so valuable" in exposing young people to the world of dance - and the project was worth the work even if only one child took an interest."What I get from these children is a reminder of the essence and purity of movement and why projects like this absolutely fill me with joy and pride," he said."I am really proud to come back to Bradford and hopefully excite these young people and inspire these young people and encourage them."Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North or tell us a story you think we should be covering here.
New York Times
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In ‘Festen,' a Nightmare Birthday Becomes an Opera
Mark-Anthony Turnage has a habit of provoking stuffy opera fans. The revered British composer's 1988 debut, 'Greek,' appalled some audiences by transposing Sophocles's 'Oedipus Rex' into to a cursing, brawling working-class London family. And some critics hated the pole dancers onstage in 'Anna Nicole,' his opera about the tragic life of the Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith. Now, Turnage is preparing to present 'Festen,' in which a patriarch's 60th birthday party descends into chaos after a speech exposes a family's deepest secrets. When 'Festen' premieres on Tuesday at the Royal Ballet and Opera in London, the show's dark subject matter looks set to upset traditionalists, too. Based on Thomas Vinterberg's cult Danish-language movie of the same name, 'Festen' includes descriptions of child abuse and suicide. The opera's 35-strong cast will fight, engage in simulated sex and hurl racist abuse at the show's only Black character. Yet Turnage insisted in a recent interview that he hadn't set out to challenge anyone — except himself. 'Part of me thinks, 'Why don't I just do a nice fluffy story that will be performed a lot?'' Turnage said. 'But I know if I did, it wouldn't be any good.' 'I need to be provoked,' Turnage added. 'I need an extreme or strong subject to write good music.' This 'Festen' premiere comes just over 25 years after Vinterberg's movie won the jury prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. Released as 'The Celebration' in the United States, 'Festen' was created under the banner of the Dogme95 movement, which required movie directors to follow 10 strict rules. Those included only using hand-held cameras and a ban on music, unless it occurs naturally in a scene. Vinterberg said by phone that he was curious to see how the operatic adaptation would work, given that his movie was mainly about characters concealing their emotions. In opera, by contrast, 'You've got to sing out everything — there's no hiding,' Vinterberg said. Turnage said he came to 'Festen' by accident. He first watched the movie in the mid-2000s, and loved its dark humor, he said, but its operatic potential didn't occur to him straight away. Then, during a binge-watch of Vinterberg films in 2019, Turnage said he realized: 'Wow! This has got all the elements for a grand opera.' The dinner party's guests could be the opera chorus, Turnage recalled thinking, while the movie's speeches — including one in which Christian, the movie's middle-aged lead, accuses his father, Helge, of abuse — would make great arias. 'I could see the people singing onstage,' Turnage said. 'I could see music in it.' The movie also spoke to him personally, Turnage added. While his own family gatherings had none of the horrors of 'Festen,' he said he identified with Christian confronting his father. Turnage said his own father, who died last year, had spanked him as a child, and was 'quite brutal' when he did. The composer said he was still angry about that. 'I wanted my dad to say, Sorry,' Turnage said. 'I knew he never regretted it.' For the 'Festen' libretto, Turnage turned to Lee Hall, a lyricist best known for 'Billy Elliot.' It was a relatively easy task, Hall said, because Vinterberg's screenplay was so dramatic and concise — all he had to do was 'lift the movie gently into a new medium.' Turnage said the music features some jazzy moments, like in his recent guitar concerto 'Sco,' as well as lush strings reminiscent of old movie soundtracks. The opera's set pieces, he added, include a grotesque arrangement of 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' and a 'drunken conga' in which the dinner party guests dance tipsily across the stage. Because the music and libretto came easily, Turnage said, the hardest parts of making 'Festen' work had fallen on Richard Jones, the director, who had to choreograph dozens of singers dancing, eating and arguing their way through the troubled evening. Jones, who also directed 'Anna Nicole,' said in an interview that 10 singers, portraying chefs and waiters, will serve the birthday party's guests a real three-course banquet during the opera, and the singers would eat it onstage. The cast, led by Allan Clayton as Christian and Gerald Finley as Helge, will appear to drink continually, Jones said, and act progressively drunker. The creative team and the Royal Ballet and Opera had tried to protect the performers as they dealt with the opera's dark subject matter, Jones added. During rehearsals, Turnage and Hall replaced a song featuring racist epithets that appears in the movie after some chorus members said they were uncomfortable with singing those words. (The chorus now sings 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' instead.). The company had also employed two drama therapists to counsel singers if they found the subject of child abuse troubling, Jones added. To appreciate the broader message of 'Festen,' the audience would have to look past the abuse, Hall said, and see that 'the leitmotif of the whole project was our collective collusion in denial.' 'Festen' is a broadside against pretending that problems don't exist, rather than tackling them, he added — and that goes for subjects like climate change, as well as child abuse. To highlight that, Turnage and Hall have tinkered with the ending. In the movie, the abusive father arrives at breakfast the next day, and gives a speech of his own, in which he tells his children he loves them, even if they now hate him. But one of his sons ushers the patriarch away. In the opera, Hall said, the father's comeuppance won't be so clear. If all the evening's provocations weren't quite enough, for movie buffs, that could be a sacrilege too far. Though not for Vinterberg. The director said he couldn't remember whether Turnage had asked permission for the change. 'But, whatever,' he added. 'It's hereby granted.'
