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Susan’s Bookshelves: Mozart in Italy by Jane Glover

I knew just two things about Mozart’s travels in Italy: First, that he was commissioned to write an opera for Milan when he was only 14. Second, that he heard the Allegri Miserere in the Sistine Chapel, returned to his lodgings and wrote it down from memory thereby “spoiling” a Vatican secret and enhancing his own reputation.

There was, obviously, much more to his three tours of Italy between 1769 and 1773 than that. Jane Glover, who subtitles her excellent book “Coming of age in the land of opera”, is able to detail those three gruelling trips in exquisite detail because so many letters have survived along with the writings of contemporaries such as  Dr Charles Burney. The first tour involved the whole family –  Wolfgang’s father, Leopold, his mother Maria Anna and his older sister Nannerl. Thereafter it was just Leopold and Wolfgang to the chagrin of the women left behind in Salzburg but those separations at least meant there were many more letters than there might otherwise have been. Wolfgang’s letters to Nannerl are sparky and often silly thus revealing a lot about the jokey, sibling affection between them

Leopold was something of a mixed blessing as a parent. He was an assiduous cultivator of “useful” contacts, a calculating organiser and his attitude sometimes alienated people. He also had a somewhat cavalier attitude to his court post in Salzburg seeming to think that he could walk away from it for long periods and still be paid. Glover describes the tone of a letter he wrote to his employer in 1777 as “By turns petulant, bossy, self pitying, rebellious, recriminatory and always seeking to inhabit the higher ground of moral superiority”. Of course, as Wolfgang grew up he and his father – from whom he seems to have inherited the inability to manage money – didn’t always see eye to eye. Nonetheless, Wolfgang was devastated by Leopold’s death in 1788.

Glover argues that Mozart fell in love with opera in Italy where he saw many productions, wrote three commissioned operas (and many other compositions) and worked with the finest singers in Europe.  His opera Lucio Silla (K135) ran in Milan for 26 performances despite the opening show starting three hours late because of the delayed arrival at the theatre of the Archduke and Archduchess. Returning home and writing for singers in Austria and Germany was a disappointment because standards were much lower. And he always wrote for specific voices. Once Mozart met a singer and learned what he or she could do the music was tailored accordingly.

It took days to travel between one city and another in the eighteenth century. Coaches were uncomfortable and roads very uneven. When the going, quite literally, got rough Wolfgang took refuge in composition. Glover asserts that he could “remove himself from uncomfortable, or even harsh, reality, and escape to another realm in his imagination, where his creativity blossomed and bore fruit.” I love the idea, for example, that he wrote a string quartet in Bolzano in late September 1772, en route from the Brenner Pass to Milan. They were delayed by heavy rain, and it was a town detested by both Leopold and Wolfgang.  The composition was probably K155 which I’ve played many times. There are six of these, known as the Milanese quartets written in his spare time on that tour. They are all, of course, delightful and beloved of amateur string players.

Glover argues that although he never returned to Italy, after the third trip, it had taught him much at the most receptive time of his life. Thereafter  he would  “bring Italy with him whenever he wrote for an opera house or for exceptional singers”. The 1780s brought new opportunities and Glover traces the influence of all Mozart’s great operas back to his Italian experience.

Of course I have been familiar with Jane Glover’s work as a conductor and music educator (TV and radio) for decades. She is a multi-talented woman. This book is as beautifully written as it is informative. It’s also accessible. You don’t need a music degree to enjoy this one.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Wives of Halcyon by Eirinie Lapidaki

The Caretaker

Harold Pinter

Directed by Justin Audibert

Chichester Festival Theatre, Minerva

Star rating: 4

As Virginia Woolf said of Middlemarch, The Caretaker is a play for grown ups. Pinter’s 1960 masterpiece combines enigma and economy. Compared with many of the shows I see it is, frankly, like a glass of pure lemonade after months of gloopy, over-sweet hot chocolate.  And of course it comes with a wealth of potential for interpretation.

Enter Justin Audibert and his trio of talented actors each of whom inhabits his character totally in a production which sees each man as deeply troubled, lonely misfit trying somehow to find a way of surviving life. The storyline, is simple (homeless man is invited to stay by a man with mental health issues in a house which belongs to the latter’s brother). The subtext is anything but. And it’s a play without any sort of solution or resolution. These people will simply continue indefinitely with their pitiful struggles and tensions.

Ian McDiarmid as Davies is variously querulous, boastful, anxious, exploitative, vulnerable and very anxious about newly arrived black people about whom he carps constantly because he sees them as a threat.  He stammers when he gets excited and sleeps noisily – which infuriates Aston (Adam Gillen) and impresses and amuses the audience. Under the Falstaffian bravado, he is deeply relieved to have been offered a bed. McDiarmid does the repetitiveness and impassioned conversation of a damaged person with total conviction. It’s a fine performance.

Gillen’s character is brain damaged and he talks in a very convincing flat monotone.  His star moment, though, comes in the famous monologue at the end of the first half when he describes the electro-convulsive treatment he’s been forced to undergo. He makes it horrifyingly moving and as he speaks, Simon Spencer’s lighting design gradually reduces and dims and Jonathan Girling’s music cuts in underneath him. No wonder, at the performance I saw, the stunned audience shuffled out for interval drinks and lavatories much more quietly than usual.

Jack Riddiford as Mick, Aston’s intensely impatient and angry brother, speaks with high speed fluency, and yet he is clearly very protective of his brother. The relationship between him and Aston is complex. And he’s resentful of Davies – a hint of jealously in this production so the fury when Davies maligns his brother is very plausible. But Mick is also an escapist dreamer of impossible dreams and Riddiford captures that too – in contrast with Davies who says he never dreams, although we don’t quite believe him.

Stephen Brimson Lewis’s set is gloriously grey, tatty, junk-strewn and squalid. The window on the back wall has only a sack for a curtain over which we see grey light coming into the room and, at one point, rain. It’s a near perfect setting for this powerful, intelligent play which sends you away pondering.

The Barber of Seville
Opera Holland Park
Performance date: 13 June 2024
Star rating: 4

An unseasonably gusty, chilly London evening was transformed into a balmy summer in Seville at Opera Holland Park. Director Cecilia Stinton utilised every inch of the vast performing space, starting with a delightful set of cameos for the all-male ensemble through the overture, setting up a band that will grudgingly perform (albeit well-oiled with alcohol and cash) in Count Almaviva’s (Elgan LlŷrThomas) attempted wooing of Rosina (Heather Lowe).

The fine chemistry between these two actors is clear from the outset: Llŷr Thomas, reminding me a floppy-haired Hugh Grant of the mid-1990s, sings with a brilliance….. whilst Lowe as the feisty, clever Rosina covers the vast tessitura the role demands with the perfect blend of assertiveness and
coquettishness.

On summoning Figaro, ostensibly a barber but actually a general fixer, Paul Grant rises to the challenge of perhaps the best-known aria of them all with a fizzy effervescence that carries the character through the entire piece. Stephen Gadd, meanwhile, presents a delightfully pompous Dr Bartolo, Rosina’s guardian, who wishes to marry her himself.

The Act 1 finale, building from duet to sextet is a fine example of the Rossini crescendo. Rising and falling in waves as the characters’ utter confusion and misunderstandings ebb and flow. it was among the finest renditions I’ve ever heard, in which the main characters are joined by Jihoon Kim’s sonorous Dr Bartolo and Janis Kelly’s exasperated housekeeper.

A delightful touch in the music lesson scene was a semi-breaking of the fourth wall, conductor Charlotte Cordery being temporarily replaced at the podium by Almaviva. And it is Rossini’s sparkling score (written at the ridiculously precocious age of 23) that is the absolute star of the show. In difficult playing conditions (a particular nod to David Smith for the continuo, played
presumably with fingers he could barely feel) The City of London Sinfonia’s players under Cordery zipped along delightfully.

I enjoyed the bustle of this production (rarely have I seen so many props used, or actors cover so much ground), Despite the coldness of the evening, it left me with the warm glow of satisfaction of an evening very well spent.

 

Three Men in a Boat

Adapted for the Stage by Clive Francis from book by Jerome K Jerome

The Mill at Sonning

Directed by Joe Harmston

 Star rating: 4

Well we all know what happens. Three chaps, inferentially Etonians, set off along the Thames in a small boat with their dog and there are episodic encounters – humorous ones.

Clive Francis’s adaptation sits neatly on The Mill at Sonning’s big stage with Sean Cavanagh’s set providing an oval, green quasi pond on the which the “boat” can be foot paddled. None of it is fussy. There’s a lot of mime – the oars and Montmorency the dog, for example, are left to our imagination. Meanwhile, Tom Lishman’s sound design gives us bird song, watery noises, a thunderstorm and more while Mike Robertson’s lighting provides lots of atmosphere. And each time they reach a new spot on the river (including Sonning – nice touch) there’s a black and white photograph projected on to the back screen. It’s a show laden with wit, charm and deftness of touch.

James Bradshaw as George, Sean Rigby as Harris and George Watkins as K (aka Jerome K Jerome) are all effective actors. Bradshaw and Rigby in particular are very good at stepping briefly into other roles such as a very funny episode in a riverside inn when four different men claim to have landed the trout displayed in the bar. All are played by Rigby,  altering his voice, bearing and position of his striped blazer each time. They banter, josh and are wickedly superior to most other river users. It’s entitlement played for laughs and yet another comedy rooted in social class. And I liked the way Joe Harmston and his cast dug out a few innuendoes and leaned on them,. The songs are fun too. Rigby agrees to sing a “comic song” and makes a glorious mess of confusing two patter songs from HMS Pinafore and Trial by Jury. And the three of them sing the Eton Boating Song in harmony.

Enjoyably entertaining as it is, it feels lightweight – but at the very end it changes direction and finds itself a purpose which is what gained it my fourth star. Jerome K Jerome’s novel was published in 1889 but this production shunts it forward 20 years so that we’re in that hedonistic, peaceful “Edwardian summer” when young men who didn’t, apparently, need to work for a living could simply don their striped jackets and go off on a carefree boating trip. But of course that freedom and innocence didn’t last.  The world was hurtling towards 1914 after which nothing would ever be the same again. It meant that we left the theatre in a more sombre mood than I thought we would at the start of the show: bitter sweet nostalgia imaginatively done.

 

 

The Valentine Letters

Steve Darlow based on Gepruft by Frances Zagni

Directed by Jo Emery

Fighting High Productions

Jack Studio

 

Star rating: 3

 

An epistolary play is a brave idea. If the script is based  entirely on letters than there is no scope for dialogue and that takes a lot of managing. Director Jo Emery and her cast of three do their best with this true story (the original letters are in the Imperial War Museum at Duxford) and most of the time it more or less works.

It is, of course, a very familiar story. My generation grew up with accounts of how our parents and their contemporaries coped during World War 2. Both my own parents (my father was in the RAF like John Valentine) and my in-laws had wartime marriages and endured long separations. I worked for a head teacher who was born in 1947. She had siblings born in 1936 and 1938. Her father was taken prisoner at the beginning of the war and her parents were apart for six years.

Nonetheless, there are now two generations beyond me,  many of whom won’t know these stories, so The Valentine Letters details something worth sharing. John Valentine (Tom Hilton) and his wife Ursula (Katie Hamilton) marry and a child Frances (Charlotte Dummond-Dunn) is born. Then John is in an operation over Germany which goes wrong but is actually one of the luckier ones because he bales out and ends up as prisoner of war in Germany for four years.

The play is constructed round Frances finding and reading her parents’ powerful love letters after they’re both dead and in places it’s quite moving. She acts as a sort of narrator/commentator as they – on opposite sides of the stage write letters to each other. And of course Ursula sends parcels.  All three actors are adept at conveying a great deal of facial emotion as the letters gradually chart the four years of separation and privation – during which Ursula buys a house and tries to make a home, John tries to learn the violin and Frances grows from a baby into a little girl. It isn’t plain sailing even after the release of prisoners in spring 1945 because John is seriously ill by then. It’s a survival story in every sense.

Dramatically though, it feels a bit flat because there are three characters on stage who, for a very long time, are in separate zones. For all that, each of these actors turns out a convincing performance with Hilton and Hamilton nailing 1940s RP pretty well whereas Frances speaks differently – as she would.  And they, and the play, give us a strong, pretty natural sense of how the letters range over very ordinary things (washing socks and cycling in the rain) to big dreams and hopes of being reunited eventually.

Giffords Circus

Avalon 2024

Directed by Cal McCrystal

Chiswick House Gardens

Star rating: 2.5

 

It’s a very long time since I saw a circus. In fact I’ve not been since my bad old childhood days when we got lions perched on pedestals, dancing elephants and seals balancing balls on their noses. So I was curious to find out what a modern circus is, or does.

The answer – at least  under Cal McCrystal’s directorial hand – is a big glitzy panto, complete with rhyming couplets in a sawdust-floored Big Top spliced together with stunning and varied acrobatic acts. It’s glitzy, slick, fast paced  entertainment with each act well timed so that the pace never flags and you never get bored.

Giffords Circus Band is a six piece delight. They play almost continuously, timing everything perfectly to what’s happening in the ring which means they have to be exceptionally alert and versatile– and they certainly meet the challenge as we range from pop to folk to Paul Dukas, Simon and Garfunkel and music intended to evoke the Arthurian period. James Keay, MD has done a fine job. Sometimes there are vocals. The band’s own David Meredith is good but Nell O’Hara who floats rather unmemorably around the action singing, lacks the necessary presence and vocal power.

Although the clowning – mostly focused on Tyler West who’s a dwarf – brought gales of laughter from the press night audience and West is very competent at what he does, it did nothing for me. I remain unamused by “sizeist” stuff and by nonsense with audience plants. And when it got to two small girls, who clearly weren’t plants, the laughter at their reactions then, as far as I’m concerned it’s a turn off.

It’s the skilled and immensely talented physical performers who are, after the band, the real stars of this show. Dylan and Asia Medini, for example, are brother and sister. They do a startlingly good roller skate act on a small, pliable, circular base. I sat, heart in mouth, reflecting  first on the trust that such a performance requires and second the decades of practice it must have taken – probably since they were tiny children, She also does a fabulous hooping act with shiny hoops spinning in all directions at once and he contributes a clever balancing “rola bola” act. We also get The Godfathers who do hand balance and vaulting and  Nick Hodge who’s a wizard on the Cyr Wheel and very skilled on ropes – among others. They all excel at what they do.

My main issue with this show, however is the inclusion of animals. Yes, the use of wild ones is now banned in the UK, thank goodness. But, I now learn that it is still permissible to train and use domestic animals. This show included one act with a Shetland pony and another with four dogs. According to Giffords website these animals are loved and cared for, fully licensed and approved and all the rest of it. And I’ve no doubt that’s true, although they’re also exposed to the stress of bright lights, long journeys and performance routines.  Pat Clarrison and Pip Ashley, for example, have “rescued” all four of their dogs who live with them in their trailer as family. Latrova Donnert comes from an equestrian family and the Shetland pony she works with in this show is trained by her father to do these pointless tricks. In both cases the animals are constantly fed treats to reward their obedience. I found these acts  demeaning and utterly repellent in concept. I couldn’t decide whether the nausea I felt was caused by the appalling smell of the popcorn being munched by the women next to me or by the distressing spectacle in the ring: probably a combination of both. I hope passionately that someone in the new government finds time to push through an amendment so that the Wild Animals in Circuses Act  2019  comes to include ALL animals. I probably would not have agreed to see and review this show, had I known that it exploits animals who, unlike humans, have not chosen circus life.

The Sorcerer

WS Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan

Charles Court Opera Company

Wiltons Music Hall

 Star rating: 4

I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that I prefer my G&S, a century and a half after it was written, done chamber-style rather than by the big casts for which it was intended. Charles Court Opera Company – with its trademark cast of nine – has triumphed again.

The Sorcerer (1877) was the the first full length collaboration between Messrs Sullivan and Gilbert. And it has never achieved the  lasting popularity of, say, The Gondoliers or The Mikado. I’m a G&S buff but I’ve seen it only half a dozen times before, unlike their best known operas each of which I’ve seen 50 times or more. And it’s a shame because there are some lovely things in it.

The story – one of Gilbert’s whackier ones – gives us an English village in which a couple  about to marry decide that they want everyone in the village to be as happy as they are. So they bring in John Wellington Wells, the eponymous sorcerer, to administer a love potion (at a very English village tea party) which puts everyone to sleep. When they wake, hormones are astir … Think A Midsummer Night’s Dream spliced with John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos. It’s all characteristically dotty and shot through with unlikely subplots.

And it works very nicely in this production (pared down to under two hours)  for several reasons. First, director John Savournin trusts his material. He allows Gilbert’s humour to do its stuff without messing about with it. His cast spit out the spoken lines with facial expressions, pregnant pauses and telling gestures  and it’s funnier than it’s ever been.

Second, even in the finest, professional, large scale production, G&S choruses often sound muddy. Here – usually delivered by just two or four singers –  they work like exquisite cut glass. You can hear every one of Gilbert’s hilarious words and, even better, Sullivan’s delicious harmonies. Music Director David Eaton, who accompanies from piano near front stage left, has done an outstanding job with these accomplished singers.

Then you bring in G&S royalty in the shape of Richard Suart to sing John Wellington Wells. He has done these patter roles with many different companies right back to the D’Oyly Carte so he knows exactly what to do. Not that he’s in any way samey. This Wells is a rather slimy and totally convincing, smooth-talking car salesman type in sheepskin jacket and feathered trilby hat: perfect for the 1960s ambience of this production. Suart delivers the best known song in the piece with verve and freshness although I did lose the occasional word from Row L.

Other glories in this enjoyable show include Meriel Cunningham as Constance – she is hilarious as a frumpy, naïve girl in love with the vicar (Mathew Kellet – fine work). She can communicate more about sexual yearning with one lift of her foot than a bitch on heat and she does the extremes – lots of loud crying – brilliantly. And it goes without saying that her singing is top notch too.

Robin Bailey sings beautifully as Alexis and Matthew Palmer is richly, ridiculously funny as Sir Marmaduke. Every performer here is hughly skilled vocally as well as knowing how to command the stage and light it up. It’s what makes a Charles Court Opera Company show work so well.

A word of praise, too for Lucy Fowler’s set and costumes. Her main set device is an open sided tea van decorated with “flower power” and lots of pink. And the costumes are lovely –  the dressing gown worn by Catrine Kirkman (great performance) as Lady Sangazure looked as if it was straight from Biba. Where can I buy one?

I recently had a very pleasant short holiday in Bath, a city I hadn’t visited for some time. One of the things I learned while there is that Anna Sewell (1820-1878) lived in Bath for a while with her parents from 1860. And that reminded me that it’s many years since I read her very famous (and only) novel, Black Beauty, so I have now revisited it.  And first surprising thing is that, although it’s been marketed and perceived as a childrens’s novel since its publication nearly 150 years ago in 1877, she intended it for adults.

In case you’ve grown up on a different planet let me remind me that it’s a first person narrative by a horse who’s sold and resold several times, which Sewell uses as a vehicle to promote animal welfare – this, bearing in mind that, when all road transport was dependent on horses, welfare issues weren’t necessarily top of the agenda for most people. What fun it is, incidentally, to reflect in the 21st century that we still measure vehicle capability in “horsepower.”

What, as a mature adult, I liked about Black Beauty is that it isn’t anthropomorphic. Black Beauty and the other horses he is associated with can talk to each other. And they understand what human beings are saying although they cannot speak to them. Apart from these devices to allow the story to be told, Sewell’s horses are horses through and through. They eat grain and love apples. They sweat and get ill if they’re not rubbed down. They adore meadows and hate dark stables. They swish off flies. Their knees are vulnerable. When they can no longer work they will be shot and sent “to the dogs”. And I suppose they mate – or are gelded –  but this is Victorian England so she never mentions it.

Sewell’s purpose is to raise awareness of horse needs and feelings. I was never a horsey child and this was where I first learned about the cruelty of the check rain – the habit of strapping a horse’s head at an unnaturally high angle for reasons of fashion. It is desperately uncomfortable for the horse and makes it difficult to exert the power required, for example, to drag a heavy load uphill. Humane drivers and grooms will give a horse its head. And there’s the origin of yet another everyday expression. I suppose it’s inevitable that so many of our idioms are horse-related. People used horses for thousands of years. We’ve had mechanised road transport for barely 125 years.

“Flogging a dead horse” is another. Sewell is moving on the use of the whip. Through her equine narrator, she asserts that it should rarely be necessary and then – if the driver is competent and the animal complaint because it’s never been ill-treated – only a brush across the horse’s back. A well-treated horse, we learn, almost always knows what its driver or rider needs. And we see Black Beauty in a whole range of working situations: mount for a lady in a big house, carriage horse, cab horse, haulier’s horse, pulling a hearse and a lot more. And other horses tell him about their experience elsewhere – in the hunt, for instance.  In the end, with narrative neatness, he comes more or less back to where he started and the novel ends quite hopefully. It certainly drives home the message that horses were a key part of almost every aspect of everyday life in 1877.

Sewell’s message doesn’t stop with horses either. She also brings in a pitiful litter of puppies whose ears have been cruelly mutilated (“cropped”) for no reason other than fashion. She presents them in pain and bleeding and it’s quite distressing.

I do like the way though that Beauty and his fellow horses have some nasty experiences but also some very good ones. Many people are kind, decent and good at we’d now call “empathy” with animals. Her point of view is balanced and reasonable. And it was very innovative at the time to take an animal as your post of observation.

Poor Anna Sewell’s life was beset by illness. She had a serious accident in childhood which affected her for a long time. In adult life she was ill – and bed-ridden – for many years before her early death at age 58, probably from tuberculosis but maybe hepatitis – or both. She lived only five months after the publication of Black Beauty but it was an instant success so presumably she died secure in the knowledge that she had achieved something worthwhile. I hope so.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Mozart in Italy by Jane Glover