For reasons we need not examine here, my wife and I occupied the Royal Box at Covent Garden for the opening night of the Bolshoi run of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. Since the Royal Family were in Balmoral, we occupied it on our own, and very comfortable it was.
The angle of vision is slightly limited – you don’t see right of stage – but you overlook the orchestra pit and can hear just how much of the fifth and sixth symphonies is anticipated in the opera score. The Bolshoi orchestra has a fabulous woodwind section, and its strings sound in pretty good form. Dmitri Jurowski, Vladimir’s brother, conducted.
The production is four-square Russian with minor variants. Lensky doesn’t get shot in a duel; he dies in a firearms wrestling accident with Onegin. Although the duel is meant to be in winter, everyone wears summer suits; and the entire action takes place around a large dinner table. All very Stanislavskian.
Few of the singers are known outside Russia. Tatyana Monogarova seemed to be playing Ophelia rather than Tatyana in the first two acts, but woke up in the third. Onegin was Mariusz Kwiecin, a sweet-voiced Pole. Alexei Dolgov as Lensky was the one who could act and the best musical moment came from Anatoly Kotscherga as Gremin.
It’s a classic Bolshoi show, on for another week. I’d recommend it to the Royal Family if they get back early from their hols, and I can assure them we left the box as we found it.
For reasons we need not examine here, my wife and I occupied the Royal Box at Covent Garden for the opening night of the Bolshoi run of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. Since the Royal Family were in Balmoral, we occupied it on our own, and very comfortable it was.
The angle of vision is slightly limited – you don’t see right of stage – but you overlook the orchestra pit and can hear just how much of the fifth and sixth symphonies is anticipated in the opera score. The Bolshoi orchestra has a fabulous woodwind section, and its strings sound in pretty good form. Dmitri Jurowski, Vladimir’s brother, conducted.
The production is four-square Russian with minor variants. Lensky doesn’t get shot in a duel; he dies in a firearms wrestling accident with Onegin. Although the duel is meant to be in winter, everyone wears summer suits; and the entire action takes place around a large dinner table. All very Stanislavskian.
Few of the singers are known outside Russia. Tatyana Monogarova seemed to be playing Ophelia rather than Tatyana in the first two acts, but woke up in the third. Onegin was Mariusz Kwiecin, a sweet-voiced Pole. Alexei Dolgov as Lensky was the one who could act and the best musical moment came from Anatoly Kotscherga as Gremin.
It’s a classic Bolshoi show, on for another week. I’d recommend it to the Royal Family if they get back early from their hols, and I can assure them we left the box as we found it.
It’s getting worse, year by year. American orchestras, whose players once went off to shoot bear or pool in the Adirondacks, now oblige staff to report to work ever earlier in August to rehearse the Aix-Proms-Lucerne-Salzburg-Lübeck festival programme. Pallid and jet-lagged, the musicians return to open the home season with as much enthusiasm as an England goalkeeper facing a penalty kick.
Festivals have become an etiolating factor in our lives, stealing our precious summers, weakening marriages, depriving children of parents at leisure, eating away at fantasy and freedom with the scant reward of late-night microwaved meals and far too much to drink. The festival transaction has got out of hand.
— From the Lebrecht Conversation in the September issue of The Strad, out now.
Discuss below. Especially if you are a player, or a festival manager.
Waiting for someone in the lobby of English National Opera, I let my eye roam idly over the list of private donors who heped towards the restoration of the glorious Coliseum.
There, in the middle, was a ‘Mrs Doris Lessing’ (she collaborated on an opera some years back with Mr Philip Glass) and there, just below, were ‘Sir Charles and Lady Mackerras’.
Now that’s noble, I thought.
Charlie, as I recalled when he died last month, had a wretched time as music director of ENO in the 1970s. The orchestra didn’t respect him, the singers were unfriendly and the management were too busy fighting fires on other fronts to give him much support. It may have been one of the most miserable times in his life.
Yet when the company was in dire need two decades later, who steps up to the plate with a cheque but Sir Charles and Lady Mackerras. That’s the mark of a decent man, a really good person.
