Other Voices

I: Tom Stoppard; A Celebration, Thursday 9 July

Critics write the first stage of artistic history - even when we write adverse reviews of works that otherwise emerge in a positive light. To review an important premiere is a particularly important privilege of the job. While the playwright Tom Stoppard was alive, I reviewed productions of thirteen of his plays, notably six world premieres (I count “The Coast of Utopia trilogy as three).  I feel now that I am counting my blessings. These plays - and our correspondence about some of them - enriched my life, not least ewhen some of them proved flawed or over-ambitious. (I have never thought “The Invention of Love” a perfect play, but it moves and interests me deeply in its account of unrequited homosexual love and the strange but intense connection of personal feeling to objective scholarship. After writing to him about it more than a decade after I had reviewed its premiere, I discovered that it was particularly dear to his heart.)

On the afternoon Thursday 9 July, the National Theatre and Stoppard’s family staged a celebration of his life and work in the Olivier Theatre, framed by video excerpts of Stoppard himself speaking autobiographically to camera. Charles and Camilla - yes, them - were in the audience. The speakers onstage included Mick Jagger (marvellously eloquent as well as funny and self-deprecating), Trevor Nunn, and Richard Eyre (both of whom directed Stoppard premieres at the National and knew him as a friend over many years). The actors who read or recited parts of a dozen Stoppard plays included Glenn Close, Sinead Cusack, Stephen Dillane, Jennifer Ehle, Rupert Everett, Felicity Kendall, Jeremy Irons, Paul Rhys, Rufus Sewell, and Ed Stoppard (son and actor). Several of them reenacted roles they had created in Stoppard premieres - and/or in recent or current Stoppard revivals. (Harriet Walter seemed yet better as Lady Crome in “Arcadia” than when she created the role in the original 1993 production, while Rufus Sewell, that play’s original Septimus, now brought terrific panache to its modern scholar Bernard. Paul Rhys, the original younger Housman in “The Invention of Love”, brought yet greater depth of feeling to it  than when that play was new in 1997.) Stoppard was a long term member of the National’s board; several of his premieres - not least the miraculous “Arcadia” - took place there. This Thursday afternoon, the National did him proud.

II: La Fille du régiment, Tuesday 7 July

Until this century, Donizetti’s French comedy “La Fille du régiment” - once better known in Italian as “La Figlia del Reggimento” - has been known principally as a vehicle for singers: Lina Paglughi and Cesare Valletti around 1950, Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti in the late 1960s. It still needs (and gets) important singers, but in 2007 it returned to international repertory in Laurent Pelly’s inventive Covent Garden production, which made it a major event of physicality and design. Chantal Thomas’s Act One set combines crazy cartography with mock-Alpine scenery; Dawn French as la Duchesse de Crackentorp created a deliciously daft piece of surreal comedy. The production was hailed - on both sides of the Atlantic - as a triumph for the stratospheric coloratura acrobat Nathalie Dessay as the vivandièrr Marie and, as her successful suitor Tonio, the brilliant tenor Juan Diego Flórez, who made a sensation with his series of nine (yes, 9) well-struck top Cs. (It may be worth recalling that, only three years before the premiere of “La Fille”, the French tenor Gilbert Duprez, after spending years in Italy acquiring an Italian vocal method, had stunned France as the first French tenor to sing top Cs the modern way, from the chest.)

The big surprise, both at Covent Garden and the New York Met, has proved that Pelly’s production has survived that original cast several times over. As the vivandière heroine Marie, Sara Blanch essays none of the physical acrobatics that were Dessay’s great achievement (it was no surprise that Dessay’s soprano skills crumbled within a few years), but she, Blanch, is appealing in singing and physicality. Her singing of the aria “Il faut partir” transforms the whole opera with its pathos. As Tonio, almost twenty years after the production’s premiere, Flórez is back, after expanding his repertory with such roles as Rodolfo (“La Bohème”) and Werther. Amazingly, he still hits all of his nine top Cs with dazzling attack; as he says in a programme interview, the long lines of the Act Two aria “Pour me rapprocher de Marie” tax him more - and on press night, he sang the final note flat, though still delighting the audience .

The speaking role of the angrily dominating Duchess of Crackentorp has now been a fun vehicle for many comediennes and actresses in this production. On Tuesday 7, I greatly enjoyed the imperiously condescending performance of Tamsin Greig. (She even managed to work in a reference to the World Cup). Conductor Yves Abel shaped every facet of the score - the militaristic brio and the melting tenderness - most attractively.

III: La Boheme, Sunday 5 July

Richard Jones’s Royal Opera production of Puccini’s “La Bohème” is not yet nine years old. Its current revival is distinguished by superb singing by the Armenian soprano Juliana Grigoryan, with pianissimi both beauiful and eloquent; she also has admirably lucid diction. She is not to be confused with the more eminent, older, and internationally more established Lithuanian soprano Asmik Grigorian (who in turn. Is daughter of the superb Armenian tenor Gegham Grigorian: he appeared with both Kirov and Covent Garden companies in the last century). Julyana Grigoryan and Asmik Grigorian, both beautiful women, both sing Puccini. When Julyana, younger and even more glamorous, sang Kaprálová and Szymanowski with Edward Gardner and the London Philharmonic Orchestra this February, I wrote that hers, as glamorous in sound as she is in looks, could prove to be one of the great voices of our time; I feel the same now.

The same (one of the greatest voices of our day) has been said of the British-Italian tenor Freddie De Tommaso. Yet that’s not the way he’s singing. He’s Rodolfo to Grigoryan’s Mimì in this “Bohème” revival, but, although he tells her he’s a poet, nothing in his voice or utterance confirms his claim. (She’s the poet of the two.) His spreading vibrato suggests he’s more concerned with volume than with line. Can his considerable talent be saved before he squanders it?

Marina Monzó (Musetta) and Luca Micheletti (Marcello) are strong as both actors and singers. But Gianluca Burrato (Colline) and Modestas Sedlevičius (Schaunard) behave as if they are in different productions (Sedlevičius overacts and dances ballet steps; Burrato stands and delivers.)

Lorenzo Passerini, conducting, keeps creating long pauses in between sections of the opera, so that what has often seemed a brilliantly through-written work falls apart into multiple sections. The Jones production certainly has its good moments, but that’s how they feel this time around: as revived by Simon Iorio, those moments become isolated effects. Whereas Puccini creates an atmospherically real world in each act, Jones keeps showing us the bare bones of  each scene.

IV: Sonya Yoncheva at the Wigmore Hall, Thursday 9 July

It was hard not to feel that Sonya Yoncheva, making her debut at the Wigmore Hall on Thursday 9, was really showing us what popular operas she could be performing at Covent Garden. The second half of her programme consisted chiefly of the famous arias from three Puccini operas (“Bohème”, “Tosca”, “Butterfly”); her encores were from “Carmen” and “Manon”. In the first half, she sang Italian songs by Puccini, Martucci, Tosti, and Verdi.

Yoncheva has a touching voice, placed very much in the Italian style so that sung words reach us with the clarity of speech. She moves between loud and soft, affectingly; but her expressive range never proves large enough for any individual aria or song. Though she can pare away her vibrato when she’s singing softly, her usual method is to apply it and to create more volume than the Wigmore Hall needs:. And so even in the middle of her voice, she keeps sounding tremulous, just as she has sounded at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. She’s a beautiful woman - and both the gowns she wore (she changed from white and silver in the first half to blue in the second) were beautiful - and yet her personal manner, both to us and to her accompanist, the gallant Malcolm Martineau, is so emphatically ingratiating that she proves less allluring than we initially expect.

Verdi’s 1838 song “In solitaria stanza” is fascinating, because it shows the talent for long, arching phrases that Verdi is usually thought to have first developed in the 1853 opera “Il Trovatore”.  But rather than shape it as a song, Yoncheva presented it as a rough sketch of a big aria. Only in Tosti’s well-known “Ideale” did she show the right scale for her music and for the hall. In Butterfly’s “Un bel dì”, and in Carmen’s Habañera, she again found the right overall orchitecture, but even there she tried too hard. How should we react to her exaggerate way of sitting beside Martineau as if flirting with him during part of the Habañera? Ha not very ha.

V: Simon Keenlyside at the Wigmore Hall, Sunday 5.

In voice, face, and physique, the baritone Simon Keenlyside - also accompanied by the valiant Martineau, four days before Yoncheva - looks twenty years younger than he is: it’s a shock to find he is sixty-six. Singing Mahler and Richard Strauss lieder before the interval, it was easy to admire his intelligence and the firmness and handsome timbre of his voice. Still, he has a subtle version of Yoncheva’s problem: his style is just too big.

After the interval, he sang songs in English (Gurney, Warlock, Butterworth, Bridge) and in French (Fauré, Duparc, Poulenc). Here he was more relaxed. He then sang four encores in quick succession - Brahms, Mahler, Cole Porter, Grainger - less because the audience was stamping for more than because he longed to share songs he loved. He’s a marvellous and important singer, whom in opera I’ve revered on both sides of the Atlantic, but he hasn’t yet found the gift of planting words and lines in the air so that they seem arrive inside our heads.

VI:Akashi Odedra at Sadler’s Wells East, Wednesday 8

As an example of the lower pretentiousness, try Aakash Odedra’s hour-long dance solo “Songs of the Bulbul”. (A bulbul is a songbird.) Odedra, dressed in white, combines features of whirling-dervish turns and Indian Kathak footwork. These “Songs”have been made with choreographer Rani Khanam and composer Rushil Ranjan.

But Ranjan’s music is taped, with the overblown effects we associate with some film scores. It’s as much Western as Eastern in style - a Hollywood idea of India - with lighting effects that do more to suggest sublimity than does any of Odedra’s dancing. I’ve seen both whirling devishes (in Turkey) and Kathak dancing (in India, Britain, and America), to live music, and have felt the sublimity of the spells they can cast. What Odedra gives us is just prettily synthetic.

This was, however, my first experience of Sadler’s Wells East, some ten minutes’ walk from Stratford station: it opened eighteen months ago. It’s an excitingly large dance space, facing a steep auditorium that  contains 550 seats. I look forward to revisiting it in happier circumstances.

@Alastair Macaulay, 2026