We have lift-off. Another season of the Proms, the largest and least elitist music festival in the world (more than 1,000 £6 tickets available every day) is well under way, having scorched off the launchpad with a moon-walk anniversary theme in a heady week when the operatic stage gave us triumph, tragedy – and real disappointment.
Apart from a storming performance of Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass, the most significant moment in Prom 1 wasn’t a musical one. Instead, it was the warm embrace of congratulation between two super-talented women, New Yorker Karina Canellakis, the first woman to conduct the First Night in the Proms’ 125-year history, and Canadian composer Zosha Di Castri, whose Long Is the Journey – Short Is the Memory opened the festival. Slowly, men are losing their grip on these key events. One small step for womankind... In just 15 minutes, Di Castri’s music took us into space and back with an ethereal, appropriately weightless work that allowed the BBC Singers to excel and challenged the players of the BBC Symphony Orchestra to produce all manner of sci-fi effects.
Omer Meir Wellber becomes chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic this month, an appointment that, judging by his Proms debut (Prom 7), has already put a rocket under the orchestra. His reading of Schumann’s single-movement Symphony No 4 felt like a statement of intent. The energetic 37-year-old was in total command, leaping in the air like a tennis player to emphasise an entry, crouching down to demand a pianissimo, reaching out to almost touch the music at the end of his fingertips. And his programming is interesting. He paired Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 15 in B flat major, played with expressive delicacy by Yeol Eum Son, with his fellow Israeli Paul Ben-Haim’s Symphony No 1 in the first half, and Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces with the Schumann in the second.
The Prommers roared their approval at the close of Ben-Haim’s symphony, written in 1940 but here getting its first Proms outing. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Ben-Haim settled in the nascent Israel, achieving an east-west synthesis in style, and while claiming his first symphony was not programmatic, acknowledged that “the terrible rampage of underworld forces” against the Jewish people had a powerful impact on the piece. It’s all too evident in the terrifying force of the outer movements, the music moving relentlessly to massive, ear-splitting climaxes, thrillingly played by the newly inspired Philharmonic.
Opera Holland Park is on a roll this year, with three new productions that offer, in turn, searing verismo emotion, absurd farce and probably the best singing you will hear this summer. Renowned for its exploration of the more obscure repertoire, OHP returns to L’arlesiana, Francesco Cilea’s 1897 heart-on-sleeve drama that tells of a woman we never meet, the object of young Federico’s infatuation. The revelation that she is another man’s lover tears him apart, not least because his overbearing mother has so much to say on the matter.
Cilea’s vividly coloured score, superbly played by the City of London Sinfonia under the detailed direction of Dane Lam, takes this mundane tale of a broken heart to the level of grand tragedy, driving it ever onwards towards doom. The Australian tenor Samuel Sakker, as Federico, is fluent and passionate, if a little stolid; as Vivetta, the village girl whose secret love for him is revealed, Fflur Wyn sings with particularly touching grace, and Yvonne Howard is superb as Rosa Mamai, the mother who despairs at her son’s broken heart.
Also this season, OHP has yoked Tchaikovsky’s last opera, Iolanta, to Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s hilarious one-act Il segreto di Susanna, from 1909. At first sight they have little in common, but both pieces feature central female characters whose lives are blighted by controlling men: Susanna her ridiculously suspicious husband and Iolanta her well-meaning but misguided father. And both deal with secrets that must be exposed for the women to find true happiness.
Susanna’s husband, Count Gil (the bass Richard Burkhard), smells cigarette smoke in their elegant apartment, primly maintained by Sante, the silent butler, played with exquisite comic timing by John Savournin. Gil suspects she has a lover, never twigging until the last that Susanna (the irrepressible soprano Clare Presland) is a secret smoker. Wolf-Ferrari fashions a mercurial score that nods directly to the 19th-century bel canto tradition while spicing it with a Debussyan aesthetic, particularly when the woodwind imitate the curlingly seductive rise of cigarette smoke. John Wilkie’s clever direction is matched by John Andrews’s intelligent and often mischievous conducting.
But the sensation of the evening is undoubtedly the fairytale-fable Iolanta. Stirringly conducted by Sian Edwards, it features some truly outstanding singing from Natalya Romaniw as the blind Iolanta, and her lover, Vaudémont, sung by the British tenor of the moment, David Butt Philip. With Mikhail Svetlov giving King René some Russian heft, they are a formidable trio. Go and hear them.
Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte is a fantastical and outlandish piece, but at its heart lie several profound statements about love, constancy and duty. Glyndebourne’s Festival Opera’s new production – confining the whole piece within an opulent Viennese belle epoch hotel – is spectacular to look at but disappointingly runs scared from any display of solemnity, reducing so many key moments to operatic episodes of MasterChef or Bake Off.
The French-Canadian directing and design duo Barbe & Doucet, making their Glyndebourne debut, conjure their hotel from a dozen beautifully drawn backdrops, in the manner of a toy theatre. The Queen of the Night manages the hotel, while her nemesis, Sarastro, is head chef, down in his cellar-kitchen-temple. The Three Boys are feisty little bellhops. Hero Tamino enters in his pyjamas, dreaming of being chased by a dragon made of plates and soup tureens. Quite why he would agree to rescue the Queen of the Night’s daughter Pamina from Sarastro when all the queen has to do is pop down in the lift and fire him seems not to have occurred to anyone.
It would appear Barbe & Doucet formed the hotel idea and then shoehorned the opera to fit, regardless of the plot or, more important, the score. Thus the birdcatcher Papageno, singing of charming the birds from the trees, is made the hotel laundryman, delivering feather pillows; Sarastro’s high priests are ranks of pastry chefs whose toques light up when they perform their masonic rituals; Tamino and Pamina’s trials of fire and water are nothing more arduous than knocking out a casserole and doing the washing up.
And puppetry spoils rather than informs some fine set pieces. When Papageno discovers Pamina and they sing the best duet in the piece, Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen, puppeteers dance around them with half-formed mannequins as partners, and the duet of the Two Armed Men – usually a highly mystical moment – is sung by two priest chefs steering two giant robots made of kitchen hardware.
Caroline Wettergreen, as Queen of the Night, adds some spectacular octaves to her already stratospheric opening aria, and always reliable Brindley Sherratt manages to maintain his dignity as Sarastro, even when an orange lightbulb comes on in his hat, but otherwise the singing is undistinguished. Björn Bürger (Papageno) is engaging enough, but Barbe & Doucet’s restoration of the entire dialogue drags him down in a sea of verbiage just when you want the action to move on, and having him playfully stuffed in an oven seems heedless of the darkness that was to fall over 20th-century Austria.
Star ratings (out of five)
Proms 1 & 7 ★★★★
L’arlesiana ★★★★
Il segreto di Susanna/Iolanta ★★★★★
Die Zauberflöte ★★★
• The First Night and Prom 7 are both available to watch on BBC iPlayer. The Proms continue until 14 September
• L’arlesiana and Il segreto di Susanna/Iolanta are in rep at Opera Holland Park, London, until 2 August/3 August respectively
• Die Zauberflöte is in rep at Glyndebourne, East Sussex, until 24 Aug
