THRONE INTO CONFUSION

Vivaldi’s L’Incoronazione di Dario at

Garsington Opera

Reviewed by Julia Gasper 3 June 2008

Garsington Opera, one of the great treats of the summer in Oxford, will not last forever. Now that its fans know that only three more seasons will take place at the Ingrams’ enchanting manor-house, we appreciate each remaining production even more keenly.

Yesterday the 2008 season opened with a revival of Vivaldi’s L’Incoronazione di Dario, a real humdinger of an opera. It has wonderful melodies, virtuoso arias, touching duets, striking characters, intrigue, comedy and melodrama. What a jewel they have recovered from oblivion! There could be no better place to enjoy it than here, with the familiar loggia in the background and the occasional dove flying in and circling over the audience’s heads.

After the death of the King of Persia, his only heirs are his two daughters, and whoever marries the elder one, Princess Statira, (the delightful Renata Pokupic, soprano) will be the next king. Not surprisingly she attracts a crowd of suitors, including the hero, Dario (the stunning tenor Paul Nilon) and a couple of rivals. Even her tutor is in love with her. Statira is naïve and simple, wanting to marry nobody or all her suitors at once. She does not realize that her younger sister Argene (sung brilliantly by Wendy Dawn) has fallen passionately in love with Dario herself and is scheming to get him and the throne. As Argene’s plots proceed from the ingenious and comical to the unscrupulous and desperate, the danger to the credulous Statira grows and grows. Meanwhile another, foreign, princess, the deserted Alinda, pursues one of Statira’s suitors, Oronte, who has heartlessly abandoned her.       

The mix of modern and antique costume works well in this production, and the action on stage is vigorous and riveting, particularly the fight scenes, which drew applause. When Dario rushes off stage to pick some flowers with his sword and returns, presenting them to the coy Princess Statira, there was more laughter. Does he eventually win his love? Well, the opera is called The Coronation of Dario. There is no forgiveness for the erring Argene, who plots to cast her sister out to be eaten by lions and bears. Well, we were never a close family. She ends up as a tragic figure, led astray by an irresistible passion.      

During the long interval we were free as ever to wander in the equally irresistible gardens, thankful that Sunday was a fine day. The honey-coloured rose still clambers over the dove-cote. The freckled foxgloves, in mauve, white, pink and palest lilac, grow tall and stately here. There are irises, purple, golden and palest buff, yellow poppies suffered to wander unreproved, lavender not yet in bloom but already sweetly-scented, delphiniums and lupins, the casual tumble of catmint, white peonies (the only pleasing kind), aubretia cluttering the steps, and a laburnum entwining its blossoms and branches with a walnut tree near where a trickle of water from the pool makes a soft gurgle. A rosemary bush runs totally wild, and just when you think this is the perfect English garden, you come across an olive tree, small and silvery, not quite sure whether it is real or part of a stage set.         

 Follow the curving stone steps under the gloomy branches of a yew-tree to find the topiary walk, leading to the poplar in the far corner of the garden, its vertical line, like a church steeple, providing such an important marker and boundary. Statues, standing in niches cut out of box hedge, look over the lily-pond towards the gabled manor-house itself, listening to the fountain and the evenings canzonettas of birds.      

Whatever happens to Garsington Opera in the future, (and I pray it will find another venue not too far away, perhaps somewhere such as Wytham?) nothing will ever spoil the memory of this annual delight.

L’INCORONAZIONE DI DARIO Performers
 

• Dario PAUL NILON

• Statira RENATA POKUPIĆ

• Argene WENDY DAWN THOMPSON

• Oronte NICHOLAS WATTS

• Alinda SOPHIE BEVAN

• Niceno RUSSELL SMYTHE

• Alinda KATHERINE MANLEY

• Flora ANTONIA SOTGIU

• Conductor LAURENCE CUMMINGS

• Director DAVID FREEMAN

• Designer DAN POTRA

  Garsington Opera - Performance schedule          

The Pirates of Penzance,

Shamelessly Silly.

A Review by Julia Gasper.

21^st May 2008.       

Pirates were good box-office long before Johnny Depp cornered the market. Gilbert and Sullivan got there first with their shamelessly silly operatic spoof the  Pirates of Penzance now being revived by Oxford Operatic Society and directed by the very talented Ann Robson. There is plenty of dancing, action and stage comedy here, making every scene fun to watch, and it says something about this production that at the end of the show the audience was not only clapping, but doing so in time to the music.

 There may be people who are too sophisticated to enjoy a chorus of comic policemen, bending at the knees in time to the rhythm and twirling their truncheons, or a fine array of sabre-waving pirates in stripey breeches and buckled swashes, but they are missing something. They might find themselves tapping along too if they went to see it, and got carried away by the G and S high spirits. As the Pirate King, Stephen Pascoe very nearly steals the show, with his fine voice and commanding stage presence. Deon Adams updates the part of the hero Frederic, giving us a passable impression of Tom Jones, wiggling his hips, while the veteran Ronald Hewitt, as Major-General Stanley, gives us a cracking rendering of that classic G and S hit “I am the very model of a modern Major-General…” He has appeared in fifty productions of the Oxford Operatic Society, and is still going strong.

 Some of the pleasure in this sort of production is nostalgia, of course, and there is nothing wrong with that from time to time. Yet some of the humour comes over as quite fresh and undated. When the Major-General asks “Have you ever know what it is to be an orphan?” and the pirate king replies, “Oh yes, orphan,” and the Major-General says, “Orphan? Do you mean, having no parents, or orfen  in the sense of frequently?” - this is as funny as ever to the post-Pratchett and post-Monty Python generation, because it is just so shamelessly silly. Dave Crewe, as the Sergeant of Police, is very entertaining, and it is nice to see him paired off at the end with Frederic’s former nanny, Ruth (Marilyn Moore) who, though rejected as too old for the twenty-one year old hero, looks so very fetching in her scarlet pirate breeches, that we feel the Sergeant of Police has got a lucky deal.

 The female lead, Mabel, is taken by the 17-year-old Frankie Williams, whose performance is very promising. Her costumes were unflattering - though most in this production are, along with the scenery, excellent - and like all of the lead singers she was over-amplified. The microphones they wear do not only increase the sound but distort it so that the tone and timbre are often impaired, and although the New Theatre is a big place, I think that the mikes could be turned down quite a bit. The singers are all aware of the need to be heard – OK – but they are sacrificing beauty of tone to mere volume throughout. Added to that, the orchestra consists only of wind instruments and a piano, which produce rather a harsh sound. If those issues could be addressed before the production ends on 24^th May, the later audiences would, I’m sure, enjoy it even more thoroughly.

 NEW THEATRE OXFORD : OFFICIAL WEBSITE

Educating Agnes at the Oxford Playhouse.

Sleaze Faces the Squeeze:

Measure for Measure

performed by the Creation Theatre Company.

Julia Gasper 26 March 2008

 At the end of this production, prison bars surround and trap the characters who have just been paired off in the obligatory happy ending. The same prison bars we have seen earlier caging the desperate Claudio, the defiant Pompey and their fellow-victims now return and close in around the entire cast, sentenced to marriages that are incredible or can scarcely offer any hope of happiness. The spotlight in the final tableau is on Angelo, shackled now to Mariana but gazing with longing at the upturned face of Isabella, the girl he really desired. Lucio is forced, under protest, to marry a woman he made pregnant, and restore her honour, whether she wants it or not. And Isabella, the novice nun, shrinks from the offered hand of Duke Vincentio, whom she had taken for a monk and confessor only a few hours before. Being ruler of this city-state, he is hard to refuse, but she is the girl who just wanted to remain a virgin in a convent. Marriage is synonymous with happy endings - isn’t it?  (Photo; Actors Isabella (Amy Stacy) and Claudio (Richard Neale)

 The prison bars are an inspired way of showing the unsatisfactoriness of the ending of one of Shakespeare’s least-known and least loved plays – a play that is roughly categorized as a comedy but often labelled a Problem Play. As much to do with lust as with love, taking for plot the result of a morality drive in a sleazy city overrun with brothels and permissiveness. A bawd and a pimp number among its characters, and Shakespeare outdid himself in sexual innuendo. At the same time it explores, in a disturbing and Lacanian way, the idea of justice and who has the right to impose punishment, giving a wider significance to the prison bars, the prop and symbol that runs through the entire production.

We have come to expect a high standard from the Creation Theatre Company, and this production, directed by Charlotte Conquest, does not disappoint. I have never seen a better Isabella than Amy Stacy. Every line, every nuance of this constantly changing role was full of insight, and she achieved the formidable task of making Isabella sympathetic to a modern audience  - at least, most of the time. She was helped by a powerful performance by Adam Newsome as Angelo. When stirred by desire and unhinged by power, he becomes really menacing and scary. Thus Isabella’s horror of his base demand for her virginity, as the price of her brother’s life, is rendered more emotional and more humanly understandable. Her eventual joy at seeing that Claudio is still alive manages to convince us that she loves him deeply. Will he ever forgive her for the choice she made? It is possible that, overjoyed just to be alive, people may overlook such things. 

 The role of “the old fantastical Duke of dark corners” is difficult for other reasons. Vincentio does not have to convey strong emotion, but he has to convince us that he is more than just an eccentric schemer who likes to put people through ghastly ordeals in order to test them and find out how they would react. In some respects he represents mysterious Providence, but this like everything else in the play is left thoroughly unsatisfactory. If the almighty is omniscient, why would he need to test people? Would he go around in disguise? Would he really resort to such ploys as the “bed-trick” – substituting partners in the dark – to arrive at a truly fair resolution? There is certainly enough frailty revealed by the characters in this story, in fact, the real problem is that so much has been revealed, there may be too much to forgive. Noel White acts a Vincentio who is uncertain and feeling his way, rather than all knowing and all-powerful. He needs to know Angelo better, and he needs to prove that his usual laissez-faire policies are better than severity and coercion. He is desperately improvising his way out of one problem after another.

 This is a production that has no weak roles and no weak scenes. Mistress Overdone’s costume is a masterpiece. A few of the jokes in the original script have been cut. Notes in the programme show that the production has taken notice of the editorial theories of Gary Taylor. Personally, I believe that Shakespeare wrote the comic dialogue between Froth and Escalus, about “what was done to Elbow’s wife?...” which is worth including, and I would have liked more of Lucio’s comic innuendos and interruptions left in (“Do you know this woman?” “Carnally, he says…”). One or two tiny details of pronunciation could be improved: when Vincentio in Act V refers to Angelo’s “desert” the stress must go on the second syllable. As for the name “Lucio”, while Italians would pronounce the c “ch” as in “church”, Shakespeare probably meant it to be pronounced like an “s” so that there is a pun on “loose” i.e. lax behaviour. 

 This is the first Creation Theatre Company production to be given at the North Wall Arts Centre in South Parade, Summertown. This venue, which only opened last year, may not be familiar to a lot of people, so it would be a good idea for the company’s website and publicity leaflets to say a bit more about where it is, how to get there by public transport if necessary and where the best places are to park. There is a yellow sign out on the ring road directing people to the production, but most would prefer a detailed map before they set out! The theatre is small but has comfortable seats and good acoustics, also a rather intriguing little gallery running all around the top, which must have dramatic potential. The building used to be a swimming-pool – quite apt really for a play that throws us in at the deep end of emotion and perplexity.

Mort Comes To Oxford

A review by Julia Gasper.  Wednesday, 05 March 2008

 If you thought it was cold last night, you should have been at the coldest place in Oxford, which was the Studio of the Old Fire Station. The director of this student production, based on Terry Pratchett’s book, got a bit carried away with the dry ice. Clouds of the stuff wafted everywhere and the audience was nearly frozen to its seats.

Nobody but Terry Pratchett could create a comic role out of a door-knocker. I am happy to say that this production rises to the challenge splendidly. The talking door-knocker, at the house of Cutwell the magician, is  done with a gargoyle that actually moves and speaks the words. Death, (James Utechin) is not easy to represent on stage, and the programme note jests when it suggests that we might recognize this seven-foot skeleton, with blue-gleaming eyes and black robes, as the young Remus Lupin from one of the Harry Potter films. No, we don’t recognize him, through his white mask, but we are suitably awed, terrified and curious to know if he is really that tall. Rob Hemmens, as Mort, is made for comedy and does not really need the West-country accent that comes and goes. And does Albert, (Liam Welton) the two-thousand-year-old magician who works as Death’s cook, need to be quite such a Cockney?  

 It is curious that in this version, dramatized by “Mr Briggs of Abingdon, Oxford”, Mort never falls in love with Princess Keli (acted with appropriate haughtiness by Harriet Tolkien). It seems that he knocks her assassin down and strikes him dead out of sheer clumsiness, rather than heroic defence of a lady. All the complications of the plot -   in which history goes wrong and people start to get utterly confused  - thus arise by accident, rather than through his youthful warmth of heart. I miss this aspect of the story, as Mort’s final turnabout when he marries Death’s plump and passionate daughter Ysabell (acted amusingly by Kate Morris) instead of the Princess should be a surprise. Some changes of costume for the final scene could give it greater impact: time of course is lacking but if the happy couple, now suddenly transformed to Duke and Duchess of Sto-lat, could just have a cloak of ducal style thrown over their previous costume, and maybe some sort of little coronet shoved on their heads, it would make a lot of difference. The point, that Death has decided to break the rules and permit a deviation from destiny, would then come over much more clearly. Mort has made it, and nobody is ever going to call him “Boy” again.

Among minor comic parts, Cutwell, Albert and the long-winded bishop are all very enjoyably played. The scenery is splendid and the lighting and costumes a lot better than some student productions. MORT is one of Terry Pratchett’s funniest stories, a modern classic, and his many fans should not miss this treat. Just go in a fur coat.

Terry Pratchett's Agent Colin Smythe Ltd. Book Publishers

Tom Stoppard’s  Indian Ink

Julia Gasper.Thursday, 14 February 2008

There are several outstanding performances in this student production of Tom Stoppard’s play Indian Ink. Set in the 1930s, the last days of the British Raj, it tells the story of a fictional English writer called Flora Crewe who visits India when dying of tuberculosis. She encounters an English civil servant, an Indian artist and an anglophile Rajah who went to Harrow and collects vintage cars.

 Like Stoppard’s better-known Arcadia, it plays with time and creates a dual-layered story by introducing an absurd academic, Eldon Pike, who is trying, fifty years later, to reconstruct what happened to Flora. He has only her letters to her sister to go on, and an unfinished portrait. What really went on in Flora’s encounters with these three men? For a woman supposedly suffering from terminal TB she is certainly no slouch when it comes to “Shringar” – erotic love. All three of the men find her desirable and stimulate her to write, but did any of them bed her? Eldon Pike is clearly in love with Flora himself and will not rest until he has found the truth. His earnest footnotes provide a parodic commentary on the stories we see unfold before us.

If the Rajah looks strangely familiar to the audience, it is because he is played by Krishna Omkar, captain of the winning team in last year’s University Challenge. Omkar here gives another brilliant performance, doubling as the Rajah’s grandson, who tries courteously to satisfy the insatiable curiosity of Pike about everything remotely connected with “F.C.”  Saatvic as Nirad Das, the Indian painter, also gives a fine and fascinating performance as a sensitive and warm-hearted man whose enthusiasm for everything English (except their rule) does not diminish in any way his love for his Hindu culture. Viral Thakerar does well in the less demanding role of Das’s son, while Rohan Keswani carries off the comic role of Dillip and the very different one of Mr Coomaraswami with terrific applomb. The director was very fortunate to find Indian actors who can handle these roles so capably and entertainingly.

The main weakness of the production is that the leading lady, Anna Popplewell, as Flora Crewe, is meant to be a 1920s woman, aged thirty-five, and suffering from tuberculosis, but does not really convince us of any of those things. She cannot help being young, pretty and bouncing with health, but she could be more suitably dressed and made-up, and coached in the mannerisms and deportment of a woman of her great-grandmother’s generation. Her hair is far too long and her skirts far too short. Her pastel eye-shadow and knee-length shift dresses date her firmly in the 1960s. When the play jumps back and forth between the past and the present, costumes and hair-styles are the main indicator that enables the audience to sort out which is which. So they are crucial. The wardrobe-mistress needs to find Flora Crewe some suitable dresses by tonight, calf-length with little peplums and draped bodices. If they cannot find her a wig that resembles the hairstyles of 1930, they should do up her hair in a chignon that makes it look no longer than the nape of the neck. Or just chop it off for the sake of art! 

Flora’s heels should be much higher and in the outdoor scenes she should wear a hat, preferably a solar topee. Her dress for the dance-scene should be something slinky cut on the cross, at least ankle length. Her dressing-gown should be long and trimmed with quilting or contrasting bindings. Some Art Deco jewellry would help – jet earrings, perhaps, and necklaces made of sparkling faceted beads. She should definitely be wearing red lipstick and rouge, and there should be shadows under her eyes, but no colour or shimmer on her lids. Her eyebrows should be plucked or powdered over. Makeup should also be used to give her hollow cheeks, and a corset might create the illusion that she is wasting away. Dark grey stockings could also make her legs look thinner so that the idea of her dying of consumption becomes slightly more plausible.

Indian Ink is running at the Old Fire Station Studio until Saturday 16^th February, so there is still time for the director, Joe Thomas, and the designer, Lilli Carr, to make these little adjustments that would help the production to be an all-round success.

OXFORD FLOCKS TO MOZART’S PASTORAL OPERA

Julia Gasper 4 June 2007

 Two live sheep will be appearing on (9, 13, 18, 24, 28 June, 1, 4, 9 July 6.30pm ) stage in the new Garsington Opera production of Mozart’s Il Rè Pastore (The Shepherd King).

 I am told that the sheep studied at the Royal College of Music before winning prizes at various singing competitions around the country – which is a shame, as Mozart did not write any arias for them. But being sheep, they may just momentarily up-stage some of the other characters, which include a beautiful shepherdess, a shepherd who is really a Prince, a fugitive princess, and Alexander the Great, the benign ruler obligatory in operas written for the Hapsburg court. 

We are very fortunate to have the up-and-coming soprano Lucy Crowe singing the role of the heroine, Elisa. Lucy, who trained at the Royal Academy, sang at Garsington two years ago, when she took the part of Susannah in another Mozart opera, the Marriage of Figaro. Since then she has sung the role of Agrippina in Poppea at the Coliseum, and has been booked to sing the lead in Der Rosenkavalier at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden in 2009. Lucy has been dashing up and down between Oxford and London to rehearse at Garsington in between singing in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Despite the torrential rain of the Bank Holiday weekend, (and actually there is an aria in Il Rè Pastore, sung by Alexander, that is meant to represent storm and driving rain!) she is thrilled to be back at Garsington, which she considers an ideal venue for performing Mozart.

   “It’s so tranquil and beautiful,” she says, “you can really believe that you are back in Mozart’s time when you perform here. When rehearsals are manic, the surroundings of gardens and the rural views are perfect for creating the atmosphere we need. And the house has an amazing feel to it. I’m really excited to be back here at Garsington. Both of my solo arias are very demanding – the first one, when Elisa expresses her love for Aminta, and the second, a complete contrast, when she is separated from him, she thinks, forever. She gets quite angry.” In the opera, Lucy will be tightly laced into a corset (she took a deep lungful of air before they measured her for it) and sings opposite another soprano, Cora Burggraf, as Mozart wrote the role of Aminta for a castrato, Tommaso Consolo.

 This is not a juvenile work. Mozart was a veteran of nineteen when he wrote it. He was already the best opera composer in the world, and while he enjoyed writing things that are exceedingly challenging for the singers, he understood that each part needed to have music that was individually crafted to the character. Additions had to be made to the old libretto by Metastasio to permit Mozart to write an exciting finale for all five singers in ensemble – a tour-de-force ending that became very much his hallmark. As there are three sopranos altogether, and two tenors, this is a unique piece of writing and very demanding for all the soloists.

The courtiers of Vienna loved to watch stories set in an idyllic Arcadian world, where nothing but flowers bloom beneath the shepherdesses’ dainty feet, and after two and a half Acts of thwarted love, tyrannical decrees, misery, anguish, bewilderment and shock revelations, everything returns to being idyllic. Even the sheep live happily ever after. Whatever the weather brings in the next week or so before the opening night, we can look forward with great excitement to what promises to be a really sparkling and memorable production.

BOX OFFICE: 

• Tickets £80 - £135

• Telephone 01865 361636 Garsington Opera, Garsington, Oxford OX44 9 DH www.garsingtonopera.org

About Lucy Crowe

  January 2007

Lucy was born in Staffordshire and studied at the Royal Academy of Music, where her teachers included Beatrice Unsworth and Clara Taylor.  She received the Royal Overseas Gold Medal in 2002, won the Second Prize at last year’s Kathleen Ferrier Awards and is a Wigmore Young Artist.

She has sung with the English Concert under Andrew Manze in Poland and Belgium, ‘Dido and Aeneas’ with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Richard Egarr at the Barbican and at the BBC Proms, Vaughan Williams ‘Pastoral Symphony’ with the City of London Sinfonia under Richard Hickox, ‘Messiah’ under Trevor Pinnock in Canada, Harry Christophers in Japan and Sir David Willcocks at the Royal Albert Hall and Gounod’s ‘Messe Solennelle’ in St Sulpice, also under Sir David Willcocks.  At the Aldeburgh Festival she has sung ‘Acis and Galatea’ (Galatea) under Richard Egarr, Britten’s ‘Praise we Great Men’ with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo, and Mendelssohn’s ‘Lobgesang’ under Paul Daniel. She recently toured Italy and Portugal with Trevor Pinnock and sang with the English concert at Wigmore Hall and in Malaga.

Opera engagements include, most recently, a highly successful Sophie in ‘Der Rosenkavalier’ for Scottish Opera.  Other engagements include Susanna in ‘Le Nozze di Figaro’ for Garsington Opera, Michal in Handel’s ‘Saul’ and Susanna for Opera North, the ‘Early Earth Operas’, an education project with the English National Opera;  ‘Mitridate’ with the Classical Opera Company; the title role in ‘The Cunning Little Vixen’ with British Youth Opera, Narcissa in Haydn’s ‘Philemon und Baucis’ in the Eisenstadt Haydn Festival under Trevor Pinnock and Juno in Purcell’s ‘The Fairy Queen’ for the London Bach Festival at The Linbury Studio, Covent Garden. 

Lucy has given recitals at, the Brighton, Belfast, Norfolk and Norwich Festivals, at St Martin in the Fields, Chelsea Arts Club, National Portrait Gallery and Wigmore Hall. 

Her current and future engagements include Poppea in ‘Agrippina’ and Drusilla in ‘The Coronation of Poppea’ for ENO, Elisa in ‘Il Re Pastore’ for Garsington Opera and Nanetta in ‘Falstaff’ for Scottish Opera.

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