Concluding its annual programme of opera with Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, the Royal Academy of Music, currently in exile while the Sir Jack Lyons Theatre is being renovated, decamped to Shoreditch Town Hall, giving most of us tame opera-goers a pleasing sensation of edginess. In this production, directed by John Ramster the setting was updated to the present day, all sharp-checked suits and mobile phones. Nerone is seen taking part in a photo-shoot that brought a kind of ultra-dictatorial fashion-house idea to mind. As temporal updates go, it wasn’t hugely revelatory, but didn’t detract either. For directing though, it was really quite moving, at times horrifying in its depiction of unrestrained and unrestrainable power. Nerone was sexually monstrous – forcing a guard to pleasure him by hand whilst excited by Poppea on the phone, sticking a wig and a mask on (the same?) guard in the second act and raping him, whilst his utter amorality was shown to be entirely matched by Poppea. In climax of the opera, their famous duet “Pur ti miro”, they consummated their nuptials by strangling Cupid. The symbolism, throughout the performance, was exceptionally high; a brutally effective exploration of power and tyranny. It certainly made the heavily-disclaimed Royal Opera’s Lucia seem prim in comparison. The cast were all of very high standard. Nerone was sung by Eve Daniell, a soprano rather than a tenor or counter-tenor, and on the strength of her voice alone, this was excellent casting. She took a little time to warm up; her duet with Poppea “Signor, deh, non partire!” was slightly underwhelming and Daniell’s voice seemed slightly constrained, but she really came into her own during Nerone’s argument with Seneca, relaxing the voice and displaying a comfortable top and a crystalline tone that belied the malice behind it. Projection and denunciation was of a very high quality. Daniell’s acting captured the psychotic whimsy and lust of the character well. Mezzo Emma Stannard delivered an alarmingly ferocious Poppea, at one moment feisty, the next playful – the term ‘man-eater’ describes her portrayal aptly. Her voice is powerful and well-coloured, very much a character voice. I was impressed with the level of differing emotions she was able to inject into her singing; initially austere, submissive, but later full of glee. Reining in the volume a little would benefit her at times. Timothy Murphy (Seneca) and Claire Barnett-Jones (Ottavia) © Robert Workman Counter-tenor Patrick Terry’s Ottone was...
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Awaiting the construction of their new concert hall, the Royal Academy of Music have been trying out different venues in the past year. For their final opera of the season, Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea,they chose Shoreditch Town Hall (a space new to me) in the middle of a very lively and cosmopolitan part of London. There was some awkwardness in the staging arrangement as the audience enter past what would normally be back-stage, but they coped with this well. The staging was simple, a three-sided box with three entrances on either side, and five in the rear wall. There were very few props, with much depending on Jake Wiltshire’s excellent lighting to provide mood, most prominently at the end of Act 1 when Seneca’s death is depicting by a flood of red light. Poppea is one of the more complex operas to stage, with many characters and a myriad of interconnections between the roles. John Ramster’s production combined with excellent singing, and particularly acting, to bring a real insight in to the sorry tale. Key is the role of Nerone, here acted and sung splendidly by Eve Daniel in a very imposing trouser role. Tall and imposing in stature, she was ideal for the role. She seemed to relish the conflicting aspects of the young psychopath, ranging from sheer brutality, delivered without any qualms, to a very brief, but telling look of a vulnerable young boy. As the scheming Poppea, Emma Stannard was similarly adept at character portrayal. The gentle countertenor Patrick Terry’s hapless Ottone was perfectly matched by Claire Barnett-Jones’s far from gentle Ottavia. Seneca was the imposing bass, Timothy Murphy, brilliantly grasping the inner conflicts and external stoicism of the voice of reason in a world that is so far from reasonable. One of the joys, and complications, of Poppea is the multitude of characters, several of which are ideal for cameo performance. Drusilla is one such, sung with conviction be Lorena Paz Nieto. I also liked Alys Roberts’ portrayal of Amor, ever present on the stage, quietly manipulating things. The final duet between Nerone and Poppea, Pur ti miro, pur ti godo, can be interpreted in many different ways, but this was one of the most powerful and they sing for their (apparent) love for each other, while slowly strangling Amor to death. A powerful conclusion to a well produced, very well acted, and well sung...
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‘The plot is perhaps the least moral in all opera; wrong triumphs in the name of love and we are not expected to mind.’ John Ramster’s production of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, performed in Shoreditch Town Hall by Royal Academy Opera, is a brilliant illustration of Raymond Leppard’s pithy summary. Updating the opera to a generic ‘present’, Ramster sets out to impress upon us that this ‘shocking story of a psychopathic despot and his gold-digging mistress [is] so fresh and current that it could be taken from a sensational novel set to be published next month’. With their Marylebone home currently undergoing major renovation and re-design, the singers studying on the Royal Academy Opera programme find themselves nomadic, and Shoreditch Town Hall is their fourth temporary home, after performances at Hackney Empire, the RADA Studios and Ambika 3 ( May Nght). Built in 1865, and with a heritage as one of the grandest Vestry Halls in London, the venue was established as an independent arts and events venue in 2004. With its high ceilings, Italian marble panelled walls and Matcham style balcony the Assembly Hall certainly evokes the soon-to-fade glories of Imperial Rome, but the room presents some challenges — not least the proximity of the motorbikes and buses which can be heard roaring through this regenerated and ‘hipsterfied’ hotspot. Designer Louis Carver does well to overcome the potential acoustical and sight-line problems. He confines the action within a raised white cube, the back-wall of which presents the shimmering blue and green plumage of a peacock, its head turned to admire its own beauty. It’s a fitting image of Roman pomp and pride, not least because the peacock’s meat and tongue were a favourite Roman gastronomic delicacy and the bird’s glorious feathers were a common decoration in mosaics and frescoes. But, more than that, Roman mythology endowed the peacock — created by Juno from Argus, whose hundred eyes symbolize the vault of heaven and the ‘eyes’ of the stars — with the power to ‘see everything’, and here the tail feathers create an air of tense ‘watchfulness’. The protagonists — and there are a lot of them in Francesco Busenello’s libretto — enter through apertures in the peacock’s tail and side walls, and the stepped platform which raises the singers aloft emphasises both the hierarchies of the heterogeneous Imperial court and the courtiers’ propensity for self-adulation. Though Monteverdi’s opera...
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May Night, 11th March 2016 – RAO Ambika P3, London Rimsky-Korsakov’s Boris may have been consigned to the dustbin of history — I have seen it only once, when the Bolshoi brought its dusty 1948 staging to the Coliseum in the late 1990s — but his enchanting operas are long overdue for revival. The Royal Academy of Music staged Mayskaya noch’ (May Night), excellent in almost every respect, in the week before Boris opened, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Gogol’s story is of a young man thwarted in his amours by his randy father, his cronies and his dead stepmother (a witch who leads a vindictive horde of rusalki, women who have drowned themselves because of unrequited love). The plot might strike modern audiences as silly, but Rimsky’s score is a gem, and the RAM did it proud under the confident baton of its new music director, Gareth Hancock. There wasn’t a weak link among the singers, all of whom deserve to be singled out, but I can’t omit Mikhail Shepelenko’s small-voiced yet idiomatic Levko, Emma Stannard’s bright, feisty Ganna, Timothy Murphy’s strong-voiced, lustful mayor and Claire Barnett-Jones, hilarious as his roly-poly sister-in-law. Hugh Canning – The Sunday Times http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/real-tsar-quality-k27g7nd3j...
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May Night, 11th March 2016 – RAO Ambika P3, London Teeming with life and joy: Rimsky-Korsakov’s May Night from Royal Academy Opera Delightful revival of one of Rimsky-Korsakov’s rarely performed operas We don’t see enough Rimsky-Korsakov operas in the UK. He wrote fifteen of which only the last, The Golden Cockerel is anything approaching a regular if infrequent visitor (I have managed to accumulate a total of six of them in my forty year opera going career). It was welcome indeed to catch his second opera May Night(dating from 1880) performed by Royal Academy Operaat Ambika P3 on Friday 11 March 2016. We caught the alternative cast, with Mikhail Shepelenko as Levko, Emma Stannard as Ganna, Phil Wilcox as Kalenik, Timothy Murphy as the Headman, Claire Barnett-Jones as the Headman’s sister-in-law, Martins Smaukstelis as the Distiller, Lorena Paz Nieto as Pannochka and Henry Neill as the Clerk. The production was directed by Christopher Cowell, choreographed byMandy Demetriou, designed by Bridget Kimak, with lighting by Jake Wiltshire. Gareth Hancock, the new director of Royal Academy Opera, conducted the Royal Academy Sinfonia. Ambika P3 is not a theatre, it is a huge semi-industrial space that was a former testing lab at the University of Westminster, and is now used as an arts venue. For the opera, Royal Academy Opera along with a team from Rose Bruford College had to build the whole technical infrastructure of a theatre. The space does not lend itself easily to such use, the flow of audience to and from the theatre and the toilets, got confused with performers moving from the theatre to their backstage areas. And performing such a large-scale piece with so many performers certainly put pressure on resources. But it was well worth it, the space is highly atmospheric and enabled Royal Academy Opera to perform a piece which would not fit into their existing opera theatre (which is currently being re-built). Over 40 singers were accompanied by an orchestra of 55 (including piano and two harps), and an off-stage band of 13. Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera is based on a tale by Gogol and set in a village in the Ukraine, far from authority, where the say of the Headman (Timothy Murphy) goes. In the original, the old manor house is to be pulled down and replaced by a distillery, hence the visit of the Distiller (Martins Smaukstelis). Christopher Cowell and Bridget Kimak updated...
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May Night, 8th March 2016 – RAO Ambika P3, London A rite of spring: Rimsky-Korsakov’s May Night The operatic productions put on termly by our music conservatoires provide an invaluable training ground for young singers getting to grips with the classic roles of the repertoire. But they also play a vital role in keeping some of the peripheries of that repertoire alive, mounting works that the professional opera companies don’t or won’t do, and thus giving the students a taste for adventure while giving audiences something different. A case in point is Royal Academy Opera, which has followed last term’s Le nozze di Figaro with one of the sorely neglected works of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. May Night, sung here in the original Russian, was the composer’s first folk opera, and was premiered in Moscow in 1880. It may lack the musical sophistication of his later, more exotic fairytale works such as The Golden Cockerel or Tsar Saltan, but there’s a freshness about his folk-imbued idiom that is very much of its place and time, and which sets him apart from the more cosmopolitan Tchaikovsky and epic Mussorgsky. The plot of May Night, based on a story by Gogol, is sheer hokum and one in which realism and the supernatural sit together uneasily. A libidinous father is thwarting his son’s marital ambitions because he’s after the same girl. The son persuades his friends to help him play tricks on the old man in revenge, but only achieves victory over his father with the intercession of a Rusalka, a water sprite that traditionally wreaks havoc during the so-called Green Week that marks the arrival of spring in rural Russian folklore. Christopher Cowell’s production injected a little social realism into the story, setting it during the early years of the Soviet Union at a time when rural life was belatedly experiencing industrialisation, signified here by the plan to upgrade the village distillery in which he sets the entire action. Much of the plot rests on the rights and responsibilities of the social hierarchy, with the father’s position as local Headman (mayor) putting him under the thumb of the military Commissar, whose supposed diktat that his son must have his girl holds sway (the letter containing this command is the son’s reward from the Rusalka for saving her from the witch in their midst). Designer Bridget Kimak and her student team from the Rose Bruford College of Theatre...
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