Next season’s offerings from the vibrant world of opera
Lost in Translation. Paisley, a Cathedral city proximate to the lesser known Clydeside settlement of Glasgow, always keen to flex cultural muscles to reaffirm superiority, is to host the first performance of Verdi’s Macbeth using a libretto translated into Paisley dialect.
On October 6 and 7, Paisley Opera will feature the ‘Feegie’ Woods marching on Macbeth’s ‘Ferguslie’ redoubt. The idea is to bring Verdi and Shakespeare close to the local community. Good luck with that one, Jimmy.
Expect Duncan’s castle to be the ‘Wee Howf’ bar in High Street. To grab a flavour of the potential of Paisley-ese opera watch the pub’s Tik Tok welcome video, Banquo Has Landed. Readers will be relieved to learn the clip offers a translation button.
With the Scottish Opera Orchestra, a community chorus of moving birch twigs, the Right2Dance (get the trendy political barb) company, and translator, Lindsay Bramley’s Paisley lingo the opera is set to mark the reopening of the refurbished Paisley Town Hall. It looks magnificent. Shows what you can do when you throw the politicos out.
Not to be outdone, two hundred miles south of Paisley, Bradford is hosting its first opera festival, featuring Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. The libretto has been recast in Yorkshire dialect – ‘The Sublime Tyke Talk’ – by Ian McMillan, the Yorkshire poet and playwright. McMillan is convinced lines like ‘Gradely, gaffer’ (You’re a good boss) and ‘Up at sparrowfart’ (We all know what that means anyway) will have the locals piling in.
‘Opera in Bradford, for Bradford audiences in a very Bradford way’ effuses McMillan. The Alhambra Theatre is the city’s venue for only the occasional opera performance. The last was Puccini’s La bohème in March. I’m sure Mimi felt right mardy.
Which is a long way of getting round to the point that as the 2023-2024 opera season swings under way there are lots of undiscovered jewels – well, at least interesting operatic oddities – out there, apart from the mainstream old favourites on offer from well-established houses. Admit it. If Paisley and Bradford think it’s worth pushing out the boundaries of the operatic medium, this is clearly not a dying art form, panting on its last dialect.
Next week sees the world premiere of Bernard Foccroulle’s opera Cassandra at La Monnaie – Du Munt, Brussels. This is a transposition of the Cassandra story to the present day. Sandra divides her time between research into melting icecaps and stand-up comedy. I’m not sure if irony is intentional.
Just as Cassandra’s predictions of the fall of Troy were ignored, so Sandra’s family refuses to heed her prognostications of terrible tragedy. My own gloom-laden prediction is that I will be reviewing Cassandra for Reaction shortly. I wonder if Greta Thunberg will get a look in.
In November, La Monnaie presents The Tale of Tsar Saltan, by Rimsky-Korsakov. A dazzling score, featuring the famous interlude, The Flight of the Bumblebee and a poignant story of a disturbed childhood, true love, sibling jealousy, deceit, and revenge.
Rarely performed these days, I grabbed the chance to take in a performance in Kyiv in early 2020. Terrific stuff. A Pushkin story, and even a magic squirrel. The melodies are glorious. The Monnaie production with animated backdrops looks enchanting. Now that Ukraine is another country the opera will seem even more poignant.
And, just in case Spring happy moods are gaining the upper hand, in April 2024 along comes Ali. Ali Abdi Omar, to be precise, who was 12 years old when he left Somalia, travelling a dangerous road from the Horn of Africa to Europe.
The two-year journey of a child of modern days has been adapted by composer Grey Filastine and will show at La Monnaie from 21st – 27th April.
In 2019, Filastine decided to acquire an Indonesian pirate ship and, eventually, spend his time Covid-mask-avoiding on the high seas, staging an event sailing through the Panama Canal. Well, almost.
He did get his hands on a 1947 rust bucket of a North Sea fishing vessel rotting off a pier in the Netherlands. With his artistic collaborator Nova Ruth Setyaningtyas, an Indonesian (explains the pirate ship thing) vocalist, he renovated the boat to make it seaworthy again.
They left from Rotterdam in fall 2019, performed a dress rehearsal in the Canary Islands, crossed the Atlantic while skirting pirates off Venezuela, hung out with the autonomous Kuna Yala indigenous people who live off Panama, then passed through the infamous canal.
Filistine specialises in electronic music, vibrant voices and instruments, ‘to provide a sensory experience for his audiences’, according to the Monnaie blurb. Panamanians will surely flock to Brussels.
San Francisco Opera is premiering, in the US, a recent, provocative Kaija Saariaho opera, Innocence, that opened at Aix en Provence Festival in 2021. It features the consequences of a school shooting in Helsinki. All too topical in gun-toting America. Saariaho, probably the best-known Finnish opera composer of the era, died in June this year. Innocence is now her valedictory.
There has been a shooting at an international school in Helsinki: ten students and one teacher have been killed. A school student shot them with a weapon he stole from his father’s cupboard. Because he was underage at the time, he didn’t face criminal charges, but was handled by Child Protection and then processed to psychiatric care.
Ten years later, the shooter’s younger brother is getting married to a woman he met in Romania. The bride doesn’t know about the grim past. This younger brother wanted to marry someone who wouldn’t see him, first and foremost, as the shooter’s brother. The family has decided it would be better to hide the shooter-brother’s existence from the bride. Needless to say, the plot unravels at the ceremony and the young bride is forced to take an impossible decision.
In 2017 I found Saariaho’s much lauded mystical L’amour de loin love story by letter effort at the Met elliptical and numbingly boring. Maybe she will treat fact more compellingly than legend.
And, appropriately, Saariaho will feature in her native Finland with a performance of Adriana Mater, an intense work about the depiction of war from a pregnant woman’s perspective at next year’s Savonlinna Festival in July and August.
Also on the festival front, there will be Longborough’s complete Wagner’s Ring Cycle in June. Longborough has just announced its Executive Director, Jennifer Smith, is standing down this autumn to take up the post of Domestic Bursar at Balliol College. I am told the move was entirely unexpected. But as the Amy Lane productions of the four opera cycles are all complete, hiccups should be avoidable.
Glimmerglass – upstate New York – will feature Elizabeth Cree, a Kevin Puts bloodspillingthroatslicingstrangler of a piece in full Limehouse Golem cry. And, Calisto, written in the mid 17th century by Francesco Cavalli, as an overtly bawdy and baroque interpretation of the doings of transgender gods. Very à la mode. Worth an up-Otsego-Lake journey just for these two plus, bizarrely, The Pirates of Penzance. Apparently, G&S performances go down well with the summer students. Splice the mainbrace.
Meanwhile, Glyndebourne seems to have lost the plot. Or, more aptly, failed to uncover any new plots. Risk aversion is the order of the day. The Merry Widow, Carmen, Die Zauberflöte, Giulio Cesare and Tristan und Isolde, push no boundaries. No pulses are coursing. Has Glyndebourne lost its mojo? Welcome to pot-boilers in the country.
There are to be twenty-one performances of Carmen, seventeen of The Merry Widow and sixteen of Die Zauberflöte. Despite boasting of full houses in 2023, something is amiss in the garden of Sussex.
These mentions are merely a catch-my-eye lucky dip from what the vibrant world of opera has on offer next season. Who says opera is dead? Some traditional high-cost formats struggle but bubbling under the surface is a new and exciting generation. Dani Howard’s The Yellow Wallpaper currently playing at Sadlers Wells is just one such.
As Compo might well have addressed Nora Batty in The Last of The Summer Wine opera production of La bohème – ‘Ee by gum, thee tiny famble’s nithered. There’s nowt as reyt good as opra’. Those requiring a lesson in BBC ancient history – when comedy was amusing, and it was permissible to take the piss out of Yorkshire folk – click here.
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