Opera; theatre; recital
I
Early in Act Two of Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute” there’s a moment rather like PMQs - Prime Minister’s Question Time - but among the priests. The question is asked: Does the young hero, Tamino, have the stuff to withstand the trials he is about to face? Sarastro and the Speaker remind each other that Tamino is (a) a man (b) a prince.
How odd it was this Tuesday to follow this scene at Covent Garden when both the nature of manhood and princeliness were the subjects of nationwide debate. Thanks to the person who on Thursday became Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, I half expected the priests to decide Tamino was fatally handicapped before he began.
“The Magic Flute” hardly needed Andrew to make its libretto problematic. Its characters are notorious for what they say about women and how they behave about race - yet Mozart’s music keeps telling us to take a more harmonious view. I caught two performances this month, both with the endearingly vulnerable Papageno of Huw Montague Rendall. Lucy Crowe’s Pamina had the elegance, distinction of line, and loveliness of tone to be expected of this singer, while Chelsea Zurflüh’s had more vocal brightness and human immediacy. Both Amitai Pati and Mingjie Lei sang Tamino beautifully, with Lei showing even greater beauty of vocal tone. Kathryn Lewek and Annie Fassea, from very different backgrounds, sang the Queen of the Night with remarkably similar brilliance; both have been led to prolong the first aria’s high F in a way that until recently was considered unstylish. Timo Riihonen was the more humanly open of two Sarastros, but Soloman Howard had greater firmness and power of vocal line. Marie Jacquot and Finnegan Downie Dear, the two conductors, both caught the opera’s many moods with grace.
David McVicar’s production, new in 2003 but to me, has the qualities of colour, variety, and fantasy this opera needs. The last several other productions of this opera I’ve seen have each struck wrong notes at several points: not so this one.
II.
Until at least the recent past, the class system of British society has run so deep that it underlay much of British acting like a wellspring. Patricia Routledge and Prunella Scales, who have both died in recent months, were among the many important actors whose skill lay partly in their way of placing their characterisations in terms of English class - often to great comic effect. Today, Harriet Walter is among the declining number of actors who emphasise class points in their characterisations. (In some roles, this is part of her brilliance, in others it diminishes her. Just how much attention should be paid to a character’s social standing?)
In tragedy, class tensions have long been part of the texture - that’s why so many tragedies have been about kings and queens. Class was surely an issue for Ibsen when he gave “Hedda Gabler” its name. Onstage, his protagonist is Hedda Tesman, married to an academic - but she still derives most of her identity from her maiden name and from her dead father, General Gabler. (The era 1980-2005 brought England a number of important British productions of this play: Walter was the most distinguished of the four Heddas I remember from that time, and certainly not only for how she placed Hedda’s status in the class system.
Perhaps it’s because class distinctions count for less in twentyfirst century Britain that Tanika Gupta has adapted Ibsen’s play into her “Hedda”, now playing at Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre. In this version, set in 1948, the decisive issue is race. This Hedda is a semi-retired movie star - inspired by the Hollywood actress Merle Oberon - who keeps hiding her Anglo-Indian ethnicity, as Oberon did. This Hedda has married a white film writer who’s casually racist in ways that, though shocking to a 2020s ear, may, in 1948, have been all too standard. Although this certainly changes Ibsen’s play, it catches much of Hedda - a woman both strong and weak, eager to claim an exalted place in the society she knows but afraid of challenging it. She seems strong-minded, she longs to shape the lives of others, but she is an ambitious conservative with no real forward vision beyond her own career. Ultimately, she commits suicide because she feels trapped by the narrow life she has unwisely chosen.
The central problem of the Orange Tree “Hedda” is that Pearl Chanda lacks the drive and wit that makes Hedda dominate those around her. Yet Hettie Macdonald’s production abounds in lively detail: Caroline Harker is outstanding as Aunt Julia: she uses her beautiful locution to characterise the kindness and politeness that Hedda readily disregards.
III.
Sometimes a good song recital illumines songs we thought we already knew, sometimes it enchants us by introducing us to songs to which we’re new. Both these things were true of Stéphane Degout’s Friday 24 October recital at the Wigmore Hall - but what this event also demonstrated is that a memorable song recital is made memorable primarily by quality of mind.
It’s a pleasure just to watch the straightforward way Degout stands while singing - opening his face, neck, and body directly to the hall with remarkable stillness and very few gestures. He sang Schumann (“Liederkreis”, opus 39) and a range of French mélodies. Several of the French songs use remarkable French poems, from Clément Marot (as set by Ravel) and François Villon (Debussy) to Baudelaire (three songs by the once prestigious Rita Strohl). Even in the Schumann lieder, where his very open vowels have nonetheless too backward a placement to sound Germanic, Degout’s love of words comes across vividly. He connects lines of poetry to lines of music. Although I’ve heard many singers deliver “L’Indofférent” from Ravel’s “Shéhérazade”, in which the single word of invitation “Entre” should always matter, Degout’s tone of gentle masculine seductiveness had a quality of intimacy, of velvet-covered magnetism and purposefulness, that was all his own.
@Alastair Macaulay 2025