|
|
|
|
|
Dial M for Mozart
Aces high: the three boys, Henry Balding, Finlay A'Court and Ben Miller make a flying visit The Magic Flute Nevill Holt, Market
Harborough WHILE opera in
Birmingham thrives, with Graham Vick’s cutting-edge Birmingham Opera
Company, and regular visits from Welsh National Opera, and Nottingham
can similarly count on Opera North, some outer reaches of the Midlands
traditionally do less well. However in one area
things are looking up. Thanks to some inspired leadership from a
seemingly eternally young Midland entrepreneur, David Ross, who dreamed
up phone giant The Carphone Warehouse with his friend Charles Dunstone
while both were boys at Uppingham School, there is to be a regular
home-grown opera festival at Nevill Holt, partway between Uppingham and
Market Harborough. This fledgling company, with proven young talent
at the helm and a desire and determination to strike out on its own
while accepting nothing but the best in production values and musical
standards, is now, from 2013, a reality. To be fair, Nevill Holt, a hilltop eyrie on the
Leicester-Rutland border, which overlooks the strikingly beautiful
Welland Valley (in Northamptonshire), has already had a run-in
apprenticeship for opera: in fact, a second-to-none, top-class training.
Seeing an opportunity, Ross, who has invested
some millions in purchasing and restoring the Jacobean mansion Nevill
Holt, induced the powers that be to step in and help him form an
offshoot at his newly purchased manor house: a former Prep School whose
formidable character and notable war record still shows on the
castle-like complex’s display boards.
Young performers got showcased. The Grange
Park-led project proved a gold mine for young hopefuls looking to carve
a name in opera, and to some extent it still is; for one of Nevill Holt
Opera’s prime aspirations, now that it has officially gone solo this
season, and especially now that it has a purpose-built opera venue
cleverly adapted out of the capacious former stables (this being hunting
country par excellence), is to develop youthful talent to the
full. And some talent they have amassed. In this first
official season the new company has delivered a Mozart Magic Flute
that - from the overture’s famous first bars - proved out of this world
for directorial invention, wry wit, subtle visuals and tip-top musical
standards that surely put it on a par with Grange Park itself. For a start, in its Artistic Director (also
conductor) and accredited Stage Director, the former still in his
mid-thirties, it has acquired a pair of prodigious and proven talents.
Oxford graduate Nicholas Chalmers, who ultimately carries the can but is
also a conductor of patent intelligence and rare musical sensitivity, is
a young force to be reckoned with. An ex-Oxford organ scholar (at Lincoln College:
one predecessor was the prodigiously talented present music director of
Merton, Ben Nicholas), Chalmers holds chorus master responsibilities in
London (including, early in his career, at ENO); heads another stage
company (Second Movement Opera); and is the leading light of Northern
Ireland Opera, a new company that has transformed operatic standards in
Belfast (till recently at all-time low), scoring critics’ accolades with
a line of hits including Menotti, Britten, Puccini’s Tosca (the
Irish Times award for best opera) and Wagner’s The Flying
Dutchman, with Verdi’s Macbeth on the menu shortly.
The musical range and intellectual adroitness of
this young man who now heads up the whole Nevill Holt outfit is evident.
What is not, is the detail: the command Chalmers at so modest an age has
of his players, the thoroughness and acuity of his leads to singers, his
sheer competence, or the old head on young shoulders that manages the
difficult but vital balances in Mozart with singular deftness and
artistry.
His pedigree shows that Chalmers is a young man
on his way: but command of this significant English provincial outfit,
and at so crucial a time, will test even his skills. This Magic Flute
boded well, for him and for the company, although doubtless there are
significant tests, and some key artistic decisions, yet to come. Chalmers’ achievement, and Nevill Holt’s, might
be infinitely less were it not for his Second Movement collaborator and
Northern Ireland Opera’s own Artistic Director, Oliver Mears, who turned
his prodigious talents to staging this Flute. Mears has proved
himself way beyond the obvious venues: not just at Edinburgh, or with
Pimlico Opera (Grange Park’s other alter ego), but at Aldeburgh,
Leeds with Opera North, and with one of the great European touring
companies, Holland’s National Reisopera. To direct Martinů in the Czech
Republic requires just plain chutzpah. Simon Lima Holdsworth, the Nevill Holt Designer,
is effectively the third of the team, having shared in, or more likely
generated, many of the other pair’s biggest Northern Ireland successes.
It was his designs for this Magic Flute – Sarastro’s conference
room (a visually knockout opening to Act 2), the elaborate wall
cupboards which conceal Tamino’s surprisingly lifelike snake, indeed all
the (thanks to a chorus of astounding all-round talents) perfectly, and
silently, manoeuvred three dimensional flats and blocks that kept
reshaping themselves into wholly new spaces – that made the impact of
this Mozart so strong. Presumably Mears, not he, did any ‘choreography’,
for at one point four male members of the chorus pirouetted with garden
shears in one of the funniest such set pieces I can remember; abetted by
the snipping image, their masculine prowess seemed even more in doubt
for the fact they could easily have been Matthew Bourne protégés in
tutus and ballet shoes. Young baritone Aaron O’Hare was the plum –
musically as well; but then we all acquire our favourites (nice to see
chorus getting full individual credits in the programme, a rare
departure, a bonus for company spirit and yet another plus to Nevill
Holt’s entire administrative thinking). This well-managed company’s casting is exemplary.
I ought to pick out Australian Alison Bell (Queen of the Night) first,
for I slightly thumbs-downed her performance elsewhere.
Monostatos (Daniel Norman) plans to have his wicked way with Pamina (Rhian Lois) despite Papageno (Alexander Robin Baker) Bell is a contemporary performer too, soaring
high for the avant-garde Hungarian Peter Eötvös, Berio and Stravinsky,
and in the famously off-the-stave top part in Mahler’s early Das
Klagende Lied. Why did one blow more cold than hot over her
Queen of the Night? Not because of her ability to pinpoint that
chillingly difficult coloratura: she had that, and mostly the notes, in
buckets. But it’s because a top drawer icy monarch manages to import
something of the mystery of the nocturnal into that rendering. This fell
a bit in between: neither razorish nor mysterious. Certain organ stops engender harmonics that make
your hair stand on end, and the human voice in high tessitura does much
the same (witness Cyndia Sieden, Ariel in Thomas Adès’ The Tempest
at Covent Garden, Copenhagen, Strasbourg and Santa Fe, or Marlis
Petersen as the Nachtigal/Nightingale in Walter Braunfels’ The Birds
of Aristophanes in Geneva/Lausanne). Beautifully introduced by
Holdsworth’s black starry sky design, Bell had it all going for her.
What she offered was a vocally agile monster, but somehow neither a
compelling nor an electrifying one. Elsewhere, happily, it’s all praise. Anthony
Gregory’s Tamino delighted from his first serpentine entry: not the most
mellifluous, ie honeyed, of tenors, but a voice full of character and
allure. Chalmers three ladies were sensuous and so staggeringly together
– a kind of rhythmic showpiece at the very start of the show –it was
difficult to tell if this was owed more to them or to the conducting.
Natasha Day, Claire Presland and Laura Murphy were their names, Murphy
especially wonderful on the all-but-contralto lowest (mezzo) part. The Papageno, Alexander Robin Baker, was singing
the role for the first time. You’d think he had done it many times over,
and on some pretty good stages too. All the laughter was there, clever
touches and little half-gestures, as much performer as director; but a
poignancy too of a rather unusual kind. When he gets is Papagena
(Caroline Kennedy), he gets a soul mate too: she will be capable of more
than doing the washing up and nurturing their doubtless Bach-size
family. Rhian Lois’s Pamina was not just charming, but increasingly
cogent: I wasn’t convinced by Mears’s and Holdsworth’s handling of the
initiation – just a fraction weak – but she was clearly a fit candidate,
and as with good Paminas, you felt if things didn’t go right she could
revert to being a Queen of the Night, like mummy, herself. There was a
hint of steel. Some of the comedy stemmed, unwittingly, from
Richard Wiegold’s wonderfully richly sung Sarastro. Partly because he
tends to deliver his masonic arias like a small prep school boy on
speech day (all the funnier as,
Anthony Gregory, a fine Tamino with a voice full of character and allure Nevill Holt boldly resisted the idea of falling
back on girls (or the three women) to sing the symbolically crucial
boys’ triad. Instead, enter Dulwich College, in South London, which
served up three delicious imps in Henry Balding, Finlay A’Court and Ben
Miller. Balding, small, with the red freckled look, was the cheeky one,
fabulous in upper register (after a fractionally uncertain initial start
by all three). A’Court, more respectful and deferential, still looked as
if he had apples in his pockets and probably a catapult too, and sang
like a star, as befitted one who had sung Britten’s mischievous,
apple-nicking Harry in Albert Herring at Toulouse. But perhaps the pearl of this trio, who arrived
in a plane (small models flitting across the upper curtaining or
cyclorama were a scrumptious feature of Mears’s production, capturing in
modern (or at least 1930s) terms the flavour and spirit of Schikaneder’s
impudent masterpiece to perfection) and were inclined to hilarious
mishaps) was the alto, Ben Miller: a 13-year-old former member of the
much-praised Bromley Boy Singers in Kent, with real depth in the voice,
fabulous in low register, and if a shy actor, still a potentially good
one. Which just about sums it all up. Nevill Holt’s
Magic Flute excelled in every single department. It put not a foot
wrong. If it can deliver a chorus like this one, such imagination and
consistent ideas, such flair in the young and very young, and such
beauty in the female casting to offset the character of the male, there
seems very little it cannot go on and achieve. Might Mears and Chalmers
bring their Macbeth from Northern Ireland? Now that would be a
coup for Nevill Holt. Still fledging, or only just fledged, it’s not yet
in a position to risk staging rare operas. But it has the ability to
make a hugely good job of the regular repertoire. And they don’t look like sitting on their
laurels. Ross can look back on season number one with huge satisfaction
and pleasure. Though he does not sugar daddy the productions – some five
sixths of the income has to be generated by the two immensely capable
administrators from ticket sales, sponsorship and arm-twisting – he, and
his beautiful manor, are the inspiration and provide the confidence
behind the whole outfit. His own top-notch opera company may not be this
unstoppable still-young telephone and internet entrepreneur’s only
ambition; but on this showing, it’s one he has certainly fulfilled.
|
|
|
|
The
quality of productions there at Alresford was frankly second to none for
an out-of-London company. Imaginative repertoire flourished, alongside
the classics, and conductors and stage directors of real talent were
engaged. Grange Park hurtled quickly to the top.
He
is also – commendable for one not long out of nappies himself -
committed to bringing on younger talent. 
Her
past credits lie seemingly somewhere between the impressive and the
astounding, for she has clearly worked wonders with some of the classic,
most challenging big roles: Olympia, Lakmé , Strauss’s frisky, trilling
Zerbinetta, Wagner’s exquisite Wood Bird (Siegfried, notably for
Longborough). 
over
and above massive voice, he is in fact a huge as well as touching
presence) and partly because despite handsome scarlet hunting jacket he
seems less in control of affairs than his acolytes, notably Paul Carey
Jones’s splendidly delivered (and more baritone than bass-baritonish)
Speaker.