Results tagged “covent garden” from Slipped disc

The Lebrecht Interview with tenor Ian Bostridge goes out tonight on BBC Radio 3 and all week on-line.  

Great-grandson of a professional footballer, born on the 'wrong' side of the river, Bozza was an Oxford academic with a research line in witchcraft when the urge to be a singer overcame an innate shyness.

His struggle between the two worlds is all too visible on stage. In an intense conversation, we look into his tensions, his motivations and whether he can ever live up to his role-model.

And that's not grandad, the Tottenham Hostpurs goalie.

Coming up tonight on The Lebrecht Interview on BBC Radio 3 is Michael Kaiser, in very sober mood.

Known as Mr Fix-it, or the Turnaround King, for his record in hauling back arts orgs from the brink of bankruptcy, Kaiser - presently chief of the Kennedy Center in Washington DC - surveys the post-crash arts landscape and comes up with few new solutions.

A lot of companies will go to the wall, he says. Tune in to hear which, and why.

And how Michael Kaiser ticks.

I'm on my way down, heavily flu-stricken, to St Martin-in-the-Fields to read a poem by William Blake at the memorial service for my friend Ewen Balfour. Somehow, I don't think it's going to be a solemn occasion. With Ewen, it never was.

Ewen was one of those people who made things work so well that you only noticed they were hanging by a thread when he stepped out of the frame. As director of public affairs at the Royal Opera House in the late 1980s he defused local opposition to the restoration, sneaked Princess Diana in when Prince Charles was not around, tranquilised a restive press and was so incredibly effective at managing relationships that, when he was sacked by a new boss, Jeremy Isaacs, the opera house fell apart faster than an atom at Los Alamos. When I came around to chronicle its collapse, Ewen was selectively indiscreet but never judgemental of those who had done him wrong.

He went on to launch Valery Gergiev at the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra which, like the ROH, spiralled into nonentity after Ewen's departure. For the next 15 years he handled a range of accounts for Brunswick, the public relations group. His influence reached into the most surprising places, the Prime Minister's office for one, and whenever Ewen rang to see if I might 'possibly accommodate him for lunch', I always knew the time would not be wasted.

He was such fun, his laugh so infectious, his joy at great art so naive that one was forced to step back and look at it again. He was the great, or possibly great-great, nephew of the founder of what would become the state of Israel, but he never traded on his family's political past and never treated anyone other than for what they were. In an occupation that invents image, Ewen was scrupulous with truth. He died in December and you can read an obit here.

I shall read William Blake for him this morning if it croaks the last of my voice.

Having waited a lifetime for Korngold's Dead City to come around, I need never see it again.

No discredit to the Covent Garden production - a rehire from Salzburg, Vienna and San Francisco - nor to the London cast. Stephen Gould and Nadia Michael gave their all in the central roles and Ingo Metzmacher conducted with delicacy and conviction.

Seeing the work on stage, however, rather than hearing it on record and radio, I was forcibly struck by its irredeemable flaws - a libretto of plodding banality and a plot that arouses neither sympathy nor empathy with any of the characters.

The story: man loses wife, locks himself in a room, fantasises about a dancer, tries to throttle her, leaves the room. There is not enough there for an opera, and the leaden lines that were cobbled together by the composer and his father are either lumpen or artificial, putting the whole show at several removes from reality. There is no depth, no philosophy, no meaning. Were it not for the composer's Jewishness, the Nazis would never have banned it.

Korngold's music is demonstrably derivative - Puccini, Strauss, Mahler and a straight lift from Lehar that I'd never spotted before - and the return of its one great aria at the close is a cynical bid to simulate feeling for a cut-out who never becomes a character.

I'm glad to have seen Dead City and I urge everyone to catch it while you can because it is, as I have argued elsewhere, a birth moment for modern opera. But I'm not expecting it to hang around in repertoire for very long. The piece has too many flaws. It did its job. It's over.