Les folles journées

Triumph that fired on all cylinders

2009-06-17T11:33:00.004+01:00

(For more pictures, see Nathalie's Facebook album.)

Well, we're finished for another year. As usual, I woke up the Sunday after the final performance feeling like I'd just been let out of jail, or perhaps completed a long community service order, and could now enjoy the rest of my life.

Make no mistake: this was our most successful opera so far. There were a few minor pauses, missed entries and swopped lines, but overall both nights were a joyous, resounding triumph. It would be invidious to pick anyone out, because everyone contributed, and everyone was on top form. Congratulations all round, from singing to acting to costumes to orchestra to stagehands... and of course directing and conducting.

Audience response was fantastic too, form a near-full-house on the Friday night, and a more-than-full-house on Saturday. (They were a bit more savvy, because they knew the right bits to laugh. Or perhaps they just had better eyesight and were able to cope with the minuscule seven-point typeface on the printed libretto.)

More than ever I feel proud of our production, and what we've all achieved. Five years ago we were doing makeshift semi-staged affairs in Deptford Town Hall with a chamber ensemble. Last week - no doubt, this was the real thing, with the best set and costumes we've ever enjoyed, and a genuine opera-company feel. There'd been quite a bit of tension in the weeks leading up to dress rehearsals, but in the last few days it all came together and the spirit in the canteen - er, sorry, I mean dressing room - was really good.

Opera Gold has made another step forward this year, in terms of scale, style and standard. It's been a privilege and pleasure for me to share both onstage and backstage with so many talented, pleasant and fanciable people. Congratulations to all who have embraced this rare opportunity, and thanks to Nan for her sheer determination and unbounded generosity of spirit to keep making it all work so well.

That's all a bit serious, so before I go off into Gwyneth Paltrow mode and start thanking my marm and my parp and my fyemly and weeping down the front of my frock, here's some of the amusing images I'll take away with me from our fantastic Figaro of 2009...

• The dressing-room shriek of "Aaargh!!! Oh my God!" from Chris that had the ladies' chorus rushing over thinking he must have lost a finger in some sort of freak trombone accident. What's the matter, Chris? "There's a... there's a... cockroach!"

• Ros about to go on as Marcellina, realising the prop she needed was on the other side of the stage, requiring someone to go across the open door in full view of the audience. Thinking quickly, the slim Ros summoned the slightly less slim Nick to do the fetching instead. Manfully, he scrambled across the floor on his belly to get the prop, then threw it back across the audience-visible gap. Nobody noticed. Only then did we realise that had Ros waited 30 seconds, the door would have closed anyway, allowing her to fetch the prop at leisure. Well worth it to see Nick doing his Swampy impression though.

• Xenia, Anna and Nan in the dining room of Nan's house knee-deep in sewing machines and costumes. Most of those things you were wearing came from Streatham's charity shops, where Nan is a regular. You can just imagine the assistants there whispering after Nan's been on yet another wardrobe-bolstering spree: "Such a shame. She used to be an international opera singer, you know. Look at her now. Buys her clothes from Oxfam."

• Catching a sight of Ozzy Osbourne in the toilets during the interval, and realising it was me in the mirror in my Basilio wig.

Thanks again everyone, and congratulations. It's been fabulous, but for various reasons I just won't have the time to be involved next year.

Oh, I said that last year...

Crazy day? Well, a very long one

2009-06-11T13:31:00.003+01:00

Yesterday was supposed to be the Sitzprobe, but we didn’t do much sitting down. No doubt something to do with having to cover our backsides. It was a stage-rehearsal run-through with the orchestra and Cast B, minus recits, but do you know, it’s almost beginning to come together. Two weeks ago we were Ivan the Terrible; we’re not quite Peter the Great, but we’re probably Boris the Adequate.

Today was the Dress Rehearsal, a marathon session from before 2pm to after 9.30pm. The girls had some remarkable frocks, some with a good deal of civil engineering in the bustles and bodice. Ros’s looks like something out of those fetish parties in north London. Er, that a friend told me about. Helen’s Countess frock is spectacular and was quite a talking point, the talking usually being ‘please don’t keep treading on my frock’.

There was a camera crew in, doing a recruitment film for Goldsmiths. Clearly they think the sight of men poncing about in wigs, tights and exotic hairstyles is going to be a fee magnet for the Annual Report. They may be right.

I did a spoof to-camera piece in the style of a news reporter, a sort of Tim Sebastian in a frock coat. ‘The atmosphere here in Seville is tense,’ I informed the imaginary primetime audience, nodding in that way that reporters do to try and cover the time lag in the satellite link. ‘The wedding of Figaro and Susanna is scheduled for today, but sources close to the count say he is trying to stop it taking place. We also have as yet unconfirmed reports that the identity of Figaro’s parents may be revealed, and which could send shock waves through the community. Whatever happens, this is turning into a crazy day. Don Basilio, News at Ten, in Seville.’

I don’t think Armando Iannucci has anything to worry about.

Unfortunate Situation in Knightsbridge

2009-06-08T13:28:00.003+01:00

Our stage manager Nick’s Situation Opera did a staged Figaro with most of our cast last night (pic right: afternoon rehearsal). It was a benefit concert at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge (vicar: the Rev Richard Coles, one time member of 1980s pop combo The Communards, and rather successful guest on Have I Got News For You the previous week).

The concert was in aid of KwikPrint of Deptford, the only people who actually made any money out of it. It was meant as a fund-raising exercise for Helen, our Countess, to help her out with her Academy fees next year (new rules mean she’ll be rushed over seventeen grand for tuition, a sum so large Fred Goodwin could buy a round of drinks with it). But, sadly, the audience takings didn’t cover the cost of printing the programme.

Shame; the acoustics were good, the band and singers sounded great, and it was also priceless experience for all of us doing the staged Figaro later in the wek.

Actually someone else did benefit from the concert: the pub round the corner, who did an unexpected grand's worth of business between the band arriving and the bar closing twenty minutes later.

Why do we do it? Well, the buffet lunch helps

2009-03-28T20:36:00.000Z

What a week it's been: rehearsals, ooh, every other day. Almost like doing a real opera.

Wednesday we had some additional music run-throughs which were, frankly, a bit overdue. I pitched up at 4ish at Goldsmiths, and we hacked through the 'Jeremy Kyle show subtitle: Figaro can't marry Marcellina because she's his mum' recit and sextet.

What always amazes me about singing is just how much physical and intellectual detail is involved before you can get it even half-right. The position of your jaw in the Italian 'a' vowel sound (totally different from English); knowing when to put in a passing note, contrary to what the score says, in a recitative; where in your upper body that particular vowel sound should come from; striking that balance between speed and restraint in the recits... Even in the simplest diatonic phrases, the capacity to get it wrong is immense.

Thursday was the Act III finale, which involves the ambitious notion of a Wedding Dance. There was a fine turnout, and I was pleased to see friendly faces such as Helen C, Xenia et al. But the choreography turned out to be quite a dog's dinner, or cat's cradle, or elephant's tennis match, or something. Nan's proposal for us all to do a 'seeeeexy' knee-bend as part of this terpsichorean wish-list delivered big in amusement value, if less big as an aphrodisiac.

Helen and I had a good giggle because it took us back to primary school, this 30-odd class of nice-natured but short-attention boys and girls being encouraged by Miss to do something a bit beyond their current skill set, and reacting by going off into little groups playing cat's cradle or football in the corner.

Then there was Saturday. We had a music run-through at Nan's house. A few people were held up by the G20 demo in central London, or by their full-time jobs, and it was a shame, because by the time they arrived the lovely buffet lunch Nan had dished up had largely been scoffed. Those of us who cycled there, and so of course arrived early, profited.

Richard B came along to accompany. It continues to astonish me how much time, effort and energy people are willing to put in for free, or for ludicrously small amounts of money, to come together and make an opera. All for no real payback other than a few minutes of people smiling and clapping. Most of it really does seem to be the sheer enjoyment of making music.

Mozart's soundtrack for daytime TV

2009-03-07T17:18:00.003Z

I've been pretty busy in the last few weeks, hence the lack of posts. I was at the Coliseum on 25 February to see the UK premiere of John Adams's Doctor Atomic. It's really good, well worth seeing: not especially lyrical or memorable vocal writing - no wonder, when you have Peter Sellars's absurdly magpie libretto to sit. What on earth can a composer do with lumpy text such as 'the 32 points are the centers of the 20 triangular faces of an icosahedron interwoven with the 12 pentagonal faces of a dodecahedron'? What is this, Open University?

But it's a brilliantly inventive and exciting orchestral score, and any production which starts off with a massive projection of the Periodic Table gets my vote. My review's on the Sky Arts website. I did my best to schmooze, 'best' not being especially good. Maybe giving Radio 3 people my card doesn't give a serious impression when the card happens to be for my cycle-touring guidebook.

I was also doing an article for a forthcoming issue of the BBC Music Magazine on Barber's Adagio for Strings: one of those 'if you like that, then try these' pieces. It's a funeral favourite, of course, and was played at those of JFK, Roosevelt, and Einstein. But not Barber's: perhaps not surprisingly, given his irritation about how the Adagio overshadowed the rest of his output. I've tried to select some unusual pieces to try next, so rather than go for (say) Mahler's Adagietto and so on, I've gone for mostly living composers: Kancheli, Bryars, Sandström, Pärt, Silvestrov...

Anyway, the rehearsals are beginning to blur into each other, rather like us when we're not certain of our onstage positions in the mighty Act II finale.

In fact, last week's rehearsal, on 26 February, covered that finale. 'Covered', in the sense of 'with something unpleasant'. It's a long, long scene, and a combination of Nan's interjections and the odd minutes where people had forgotten their parts made it drag. The trouble is, when I say 'odd minutes', I mean minute 1, minute 3, minute 5...

So it ended with a few frayed tempers. Just as well we didn't have real flowerpots, or else they could have been flying around the Great Hall in yet another dispute about whether we'd just missed out two pages. But it was nothing that four pints couldn't put right, though, as Henry, Nick, Casey, Dan and I proved in the pub afterwards.

But this Thursday was better. We did our double-casts one at a time, instead of our simultaneous experiment of a fortnight ago.

And it was good entertaining stuff: No 17, the scene in which Figaro finds out the truth about his father and mother. It's all like a 1780s version of Jeremy Kyle. We should really have had subtitles: I FOUND MY FORCED-WEDDING BRIDE IS MY MOTHER... FATHER WAS MY DOCTOR. Shame we don't have the budget for surtitles in the Hall.

BOGOF (Buy one, get one free)

2009-01-30T13:24:00.004Z

We're double-casting, but have limited rehearsal time. Our staging rehearsals are therefore bizarrely taking place with both casts simultaneously. Yesterday was a fine example of this operatic two-for-one deal.

In the arias it's OK - there's just twice the volume, trios become sextets and so on. In the recits though it's a bit confusing, as my idea of the right timing is clearly different to Panos's, my twin Basilio. You know that off-putting echo you sometimes get in international phone calls? It's like trying to do a rehearsal by phone to Qatar.

Anyway, Panos is being very helpful, supplying other people's lines when they can't remember, which I know they appreciate, and has lots of suggestions on staging for Nan.

It did get a bit crowded, though, as we were working out our moves for the bit where Cherubino and the Count are hiding behind some chairs (a difficult feat to pull off with those skeletal plastic stacking models). Synchronised opera is unlikely to be the new minority sport at the 2012 Olympics.

At one point Panos managed to swop places, so that instead of me/Nat and him/Casey, it became me/Casey and him/Nat. Casey reacted with her usual fit of laughter and giggles. I wish I could swing that trick at times of stress, such as when buses cut me up as I cycle up Peckham High Street.

Anyway, we finished with Non più andrai, with the stereo Cherubinos of Miriam and Charlotte (picture). Nan suggested that Cherubino should be dressed in a military greatcoat, patently over-large for comic effect. Nick, the not exactly petite stage manager, provided his overcoat. As he said, if that isn't far too big, then you've got problems.

Final performance dates announced

2009-01-19T20:56:00.003Z

Our two performances will be:
Cast A - Friday 12 June 2009
Cast B - Saturday 13 June 2009.

Put that on the calendar section of your mobile phone before you lose it and have to create a Facebook group asking your friends to tell you their numbers again.

Well, I'm struggling to decide what to do with Don Curzio. The score clearly demands a stammer. In the John Eliot Gardiner CD that I've got (a terrifically characterised performance with cracking recits, by the way) the guy doing it really hams it up ("due mille pe-pe-pe-PEEEEEEEEEEEEE-zzi duri", that sort of thing).

Now, I'm a bit uncomfortable with this. Sure, that's what the score says, and no doubt it was hilarious laughing at people with speech impediments in the late 1780s, but then they also found cripples and dwarfs and foreigners unspeakably funny too.

Even up to the 1970s, stuttering was a cast-iron audience-pleaser. Sometimes it was at least done with wit - see for example Sam Kydd's elocutionally challenged factory worker in I'm All Right Jack, furious at a group of paparazzi: "Tell 'em to go and f, f, f, f, photograph something else", he says. But acts such as Jack Douglas or the Scaffold's 1968 novelty-single hit Lily the Pink plundered the pound shop of cheap laughs.

We don't do that sort of stuff any more, and quite right too. That's not political correctness, it's just good manners: a guy who can speak perfectly well ser-ser-ser-ser-stammering for comic effect is just sadistic and crass.

Well, I say I can speak perfectly well. I wasn't making much sense last Saturday night, but that was Hugh and Roger's party, and things always get a bit out of hand there.

So: what to do about Curzio and still respect the score? Well, it struck me that he could machine-gun stutter in the way that elderly Tory peers do on current affairs programmes. "Well, I, I, I, I, I, have seen the, the, the, the amendment, but when it comes to, to, to, to the vote, I, I, I, I..."

You get the sort of thing. Not a speech impediment, more an affectation; and wouldn't that be more in keeping with a doddery old milord anyway? Is that characterisation rather than stereotyping? Well, I hope so. Unless you have any better ideas...

New Year, new rehearsal time

2009-01-10T19:17:00.003Z

Happy New Year, folks. Our new rehearsal schedule for 15 January to 26 March is up on the operagold.co.uk website. Rehearsals are still on Thursdays, but half an hour later: 5pm to 7pm. Good news for all you students! An extra half hour in bed!

Anyway, one of my new year's resolutions is that I'll be more regular with blog updates here. In fact, it's my only new year's resolution that's still intact. And no, I'm not telling you what the others were. I doubt they'd make it through Google's filter, anyway.

A score to settle

2008-11-11T16:09:00.002Z

Hooray! Amazon delivered my score of Figaro today. It is, of course, the Schirmer edition, a blobby nth reprint of a postwar original lovingly put together by chaps in ties and hats, and ladies in smart skirts and nylons. It has those delightfully arch and quaint translations by Ruth and Thomas Martin ('Se vuol ballare' becomes 'Should my dear master want some diversion', for instance) that I remember from when we did Zauberflöte, OMG, three years ago.

It fell open at page 88, and the first words I saw were 'Basilio (maliciously)', which is probably a good omen, seeing as I will be Basilio on one of our nights in distant June next year, when because of the recession we will all be living in caves in hunter-gatherer communities.

Basilio is generally described as 'slimy', a bit like having Peter Mandelson for your music teacher, but he strikes me as just a bit cynical and a bit of a stirrer, so I can at least supply the first half the qualities required for the role.

After Grimes, it's rather nice to have music you actually can read through in bed and hear in your head, instead of having to pick out your line on a Yamaha keyboard while listening to your budget CD of the opera. It reminds you again of just how considerately Mozart writes: he'll stretch the proper singers, but for the comic side roles such as Basilio he writes comfortable, singable stuff, expressive and in character, yet well within the compass of someone whose full time existence is spent unknotting HTML style sheets in websites rather than practising scales.

Anyway, last night I was at the first night of ENO's Boris Godunov, and bumped into Nan and Andy, who were there with some friends (including Stewart, who does the lighting for Opera Gold). It was pretty good, and really gave you a feeling for the suffering of the Russian peasants, chiefly because they ran all two and a quarter hours of it without a break. That's right, no interval. Well, it saves on those costly interval drinks, I suppose. Whose bonkers idea was this? No doubt someone decided self-importantly that an interval would compromise the dramatic whole, or some such artsy tosh. Let's hope whoever it was gets stuck on the Trans-Siberian for six days without a working toilet.

I couldn't make rehearsals last Thursday as I was up north for work, on a damp and grey trading estate in Wetherby, which is about as pleasant as sitting in the Coliseum with a full bladder and realising there's still over an hour to go. But I've no excuse for missing this Thursday, so punctures permitting I'll see you there.

Website redesign

2008-11-03T08:38:00.002Z

When I first thought it was time to redesign the Opera Gold website, Hull City were in the bottom division. Last weekend they were in the top four of the Premiership. Following two losses (to Chelsea and Man U) they've slipped a bit, so I thought it was high time I actually did this darned redesign before they were back in the bottom division again.

So, over the weekend, apart from coping with Rebecca's relatives for dinner (who said those delightful things relatives do, such as "I used to live in London, you know. Princes Gate. You won't have heard of it, it was a rather nice area, you see") I spent hours hacking through style sheets and HTML when I should have been learning my recits and ensembles.

Anyway, the new-look website is now up, and it has the latest rehearsal schedule too, thanks to Nan.

I won't be there for Thursday's rehearsal (6 Nov) as I have to be on a trading estate in Wetherby for work. Life in the western world is just one long party.

Opera Gold new-look website
Latest rehearsal schedule

A whole new ball game

2008-10-25T18:37:00.013+01:00

I do a few reviews for HMV's free in-store music magazine. In the latest batch of CDs was a live recording, made on 8 May 1971, of Wagner's Parsifal from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, with Jon Vickers as Parsifal.

The cast list was a little more interesting from our point of view further down, though. For there, as Erster Knappe, was one Nan Christie. I emailed Nan to let her know. She was amazed - she had no idea it had been recorded, and remembered little of the occasion. Which is hardly a surprise: it was 37 years ago (Nan must have been a child prodigy) and she was only on stage for about five minutes, out of four and a half hours. (Goodall conducts with the urgency of a glacier outrunning a tectonic plate.)

Oh yes, I did listen to all four CDs of the review copy, honestly. I'm a professional, you know. I mean, I wouldn't do anything like listen to the football on Radio 5 at the same time.

Oddly enough, I remember that particular day very well: while she was doing her stuff on stage, I was watching Match of the Day, seeing Arsenal beat Liverpool in the FA Cup Final 2-1. Which tells you the extent of my musical background.

Anyway, I brought the Parsifal disc along to the rehearsal on Thursday (pictured above and below). We were hacking through the mighty end of Act II, the bit where the gardener comes in and Mozart does his showpiece ensemble composition stuff.

I'd hurtled from work to arrive late, then immediately missed the easiest of entries. I felt rather like Chris Iwelumo, the Scottish striker who came on as sub and immediately missed an open goal last week.

Compared to Grimes, of course Figaro is far far easier to sight-read and get in your head. Except that it's hard in a different way: there's tons of it, some of it very very fast, all that machine-gun buffo patter.

And the recitatives. We've never done that before – none in Grimes, Carmen or Magic Flute – so that'll take a lot of work.

After Grimes last June, I spoked to Natalie (one of the Nieces). (We were in the same year at Goldsmiths and were in Magic Flute and Carmen together too.) We agreed then that we definitely, certainly, would not be doing any more Opera Gold.

We're just too busy, we said, and have too many other things to do: Nat's now at the Academy, and I'm just up to my eyes trying to earn a living.

So, we confirmed to each other, there was simply no way we'd be doing Figaro.

You wouldn't be seeing us at rehearsals.

Oh no.

So, Nat's the one second from left in the picture below. I'm the one taking it.

Welcome to our civil Marriage

2008-10-10T14:32:00.008+01:00

Is Opera Gold coming of age?

Yesterday was the first meeting for our 2009 production, Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. The parts haven't been all assigned, or the auditions done, yet. So it was really a sequence of run-throughs of this duet or that aria, not a rehearsal.

But it was packed. Well, I counted 30. That's much more than last year. That's almost enough to have a chorus, dammit. It's probably more than the population of Iceland, or at least the solvent population of Iceland.

Why so many?

Partly because there are some welcome returning faces: Ros and Helen C, for instance, who finished at the same time as me in 2006. Ros was a show-stealing Papagena when we did Mozart last time, in 2005; Helen was involved then too, but both have been busy earning money to pay their council tax to invest in Icelandic banks.

Partly because we'll be double-casting for the two nights again this year, so it's just as well we have our growing band of regulars: Dan, Charlotte, Ryan, Casey et al.

And partly because we have a few singers from Trinity hovering around. We've had a few informal links with them recently: Mario, who sang Don Jose and Grimes for us, was a student there, and several Goldies took part in a Trinity-based production of Carmen last year. Helen B, who sang a fine Micaela, is one of the Trinity singers who was there yesterday.

That production included me, and you'll be pleased to know it was the first time I've worn eye make up. (Er, apart from once a long time ago, but look, I can explain everything, and the photos aren't as compromising as they seem, honest.) Anyway, my girlfriend howled with laughter when I rolled up home each night after Carmen having been too busy or lazy to wipe off my eye-liner. "You look just like your mum", she kept saying.

My mum's 74, so I'm not sure who this insulted more.

But I couldn't help feeling yesterday that we had, well, come of age somehow. We now have four (or possibly five) productions under our belts: Venus and Adonis, Dido and Aeneas, Magic Flute, Carmen, Peter Grimes. I hesitate to use a word like 'serious' - you can always tell when I'm taking the piss, because my lips are moving, or alternatively, my fingers are pressing some keys - but though we may be a small amateur outfit in scruffy south-west London, we're a genuine outfit. (At least, I hope that's what the several Trinity students think who've come along fondly hoping to plump up their CVs.)

I mean, Opera Gold even has its own page on Wikipedia, so we must be serious. (Mind you, it was me who put the page up.)

Having all those people chasing a limited number of parts, double-casting notwithstanding, means (as the astute Mr Crowhurst pointed out to me, possibly at length, possibly while Tim was trying to play the piano) there might be a few egos under pressure. But, to paraphrase the old saying, you can't make an opera without breaking egos. And a bit of friendly competition, done in the right spirit, is good for everyone. Just so long as I get the part, of course.

So, has Opera Gold come of age? Maybe that's meaningless. Maybe that was just a good line to start the first blog of the new season.

Just as well. When I came of age, at my 18th birthday party, I got off (a) my head on brandy and (b) with a girl called Gill who was wearing a man's three-piece suit and had muscles like an Olympic swimmer. It all ended rather strangely, in Cherubino-like circumstances. But look, I can explain everything, and the photos aren't as compromising as they seem, honest.

So there you are. Beware the coming of age.

See you all next week.

OperaGold site update, and Grimes DVD review

2008-07-08T14:41:00.000+01:00

Two items of news - neither, unfortunately, regarding our choice of opera next year! That won't be decided until October.

(1) I've updated the Opera Gold website with information about our Grimes performance back in June. If you have any photos or videos to add, email me.

(2) A new set of DVDs of Britten operas is out. One is of a 1969 BBC broadcast of Peter Grimes, conducted by Britten and with Peter Pears in the title role. There's a review of it on the Sky Arts website which is so good I could almost have written it myself.

Enjoy the summer break! Now we can start the nod-and-wink business of trying to guess what Nan has up her sleeve for our next production. Changing the subject completely, I'm just off for a haircut. And some orange juice. Haircut... orange juice... haircut... orange juice...

Back to real life. Damn

2008-06-09T08:55:00.000+01:00

Well, it’s over. Around 10.10pm on Saturday we chorused the final words of Peter Grimes, and nine months of slog, stress and singing was finished.

Those final words are ‘terrible and deep’, and in the last stages of rehearsals there were quite a few of us worried that our Grimes would be more terrible than deep. I was too jittery to post up any blogs here through May. Each week we’d stuttered through another scene with results rather like this:

Tim: Right, four before 46, one-two-three-four-one... (plays piano with left hand, conducts with right)
Chorus: Er... mm... ter... gri... Pe... er... mmmes... (shift in awkward silence)
Nan: Noooohhh! Stoppp! Look, we’ve got threee weeeks left, and you still don’t know it. Goohhh awayyy and learrrn it! And where's Mario/Hamish/Abby/Jenny/Hamish/Ryan/Rob/Dan?
Chorus: Er.. in Cardiff/at work/at work/in a recital/in a lecture/at work/in a seminar...
Tim: Four before 46, one-two-three-four-one (falsetto) Peee-tahhh Graimmmmmes...
(repeat ad nauseam)

The Bank Holiday Monday rehearsal on 25 May had been a profoundly depressing experience, enough to make you sail out till you lost sight of the Moot Hall and then sink your boat. It consisted of a few episodes of adequacy strung together by vast expanses of mumbling uncertainty. The slightest change to a stage direction – how about coming on from the left for this bit, not the right – would throw us into the sort of distressed confusion of a Saga coach trip stopping to find the toilets closed for cleaning.

The Sitzprobe on Monday 2 June, our first run-through with the orchestra, was all rather bitty. Understandable, given that it was only the second time we’d been in the same room as Mario, our Grimes. But then as Mario is a surgeon, being in the same room as him is not necessarily a condition to aspire to. It was then just 72 hours before public performance. If the opera had indeed been one on the slab for one of Mario’s operations, you suspect the anaesthetist would have been a given a subtle signal to save everyone needless stress and effort and ‘accidentally’ overdo the propofol. In my drunk scene I actually did have some anaesthetic of my own, in the off-licence plastic bag with two cans of Polish beer in it.

The first glimmer of hope – that we might just get away with it after all – came in the dress rehearsal on Thursday. This was down to two reasons (apart from most of us knowing most of our parts by this time, no doubt due to frantic last-minute exam-style cramming). First, the orchestra kept plugging away regardless when one of came in a bar too late or forgot a line, so we had to grope our way back without the noohh-stoppp business; second, Britten thoughtfully does that opera trick of giving one instrument your vocal line, so you can home in on the oboe or viola or whatever it is and just follow that line.

It was still ropey in most places, but it was getting there. Rather like those station announcements for a severely delayed rail service: ‘the train now approaching platform 6...’, goes the computer-generated voice, omitting to tell you that while it is technically approaching the platform, it’s still in Plymouth. I went out with Tim and Hamish for a few beers afterwards, and while we weren’t exactly brimming with confidence, we weren’t too scared to rush off home early to pore over the scores.

And so to Friday 6 June, the opening night. Traffic problems, a hot sunny day, and the belief that it was a 7.30pm not 7pm start, had kept a few people away. When the orchestra tuned up and we trooped on stage to the court scene, it looked only half-full. But that got up to over three-quarters by the time Act I started. And once that chopped-up sea shanty got cranking up to start the piece, with that immediate Brittenesque touch from bar 2 (the almost obsessive repetition of little melodic phrases, the morphing of rhythmic cells, conjunct lines that keep switching through modes or keys) the little miracle got going. There was a crackle in the air, and it wasn’t my off-licence plastic bag.

Read Vikram Seth’s novel An Equal Music if you haven’t already. It’s excellent: the story of how music briefly brings peace and transcendence to the awfully messy personal life of a quartet violinist. The central character, Michael Holmes (a northerner whose dad was a butcher, like me), discusses the effect music has on him in profound ways, but when it comes to what happens in a performance, he’s stuck. From the moment his quartet plays the first bar to the end, he blanks out; he’s immersed in the music, and has no recollection after what he was doing or thinking.

Well, it’s bit like that. I can remember everything about Friday evening up to when the court scene started; but between there and five past ten, nothing. Away with the musical fairies. As out of it as one of Mario’s patients, being filleted on the slab. I think that’s good. Mind you, I do remember the episode in a certain fisherman’s mad scene where he missed out two pages, to the consternation of conductor, tuba player, and backstage chorus. Fortunately Dan was on the money and worked out where we’d jumped to, and got us back in. Did anybody else have a memory lapse on the night? Perhaps, I can’t remember.

Then it was finished, we went to the pub, I drank with some friends who had very supportively come along (thanks Tim, Jen, Mark). One of them was a rather uncompromising friend, hereafter UF, who wasn’t all that encouraging. The orchestra was very good, UF thought, but there was a litany of quibbles, from inaudible passages here to unclear diction there to inauthentically tied cravats everywhere. I went home rather subdued and spent most of Saturday morning knackered and brooding. Much of what UF said was correct, but a bit unfair, I thought. This is not Covent Garden: our total costume budget was a hundred quid, as much as the ROH would spend on a single cravat. Anyway, I spent the afternoon practising and trying to address some of the points he’d raised about me, and feeling rather down about it all.

But Saturday night put pretty much everything right. Nan was looking happier than she had for about a month: reaction had been good from the college, which was very welcome since they had been very wary about putting in such big chunks of resources to support an opera. And there was a curious feeling among all the cast that tonight we’d nail it. Curious because the second night of Magic Flute and Carmen weren’t quite as electric as the first; less adrenaline maybe, a notable drop in voltage. Yet here we bucked the trend. Perhaps it was the feeling that the Friday ‘first night’ had felt more like a dress rehearsal, and Saturday was the true first night.

There were still a few slips, the usual collection of entries a bar early or late. But we got over them. In the court scene, we nearly got two bars ahead at one point, and I could see panic-stricken Tim miming ‘WATCH ME!!!!!!!’ at us, before cueing in the vast tenor chorus (ie me, Jonny and Will) in a gigantically exaggerated gesture that could have been seen on Google Earth.

And, well, it just felt great. The applause at the end had been OK on Friday; tonight it was huge, and that feeling as we all came on to do our slightly self-conscious bows was something very very special indeed. As I discuss at length in post-performance binges, it’s something money can’t buy. (Which is just as well, given the amount of unpaid leave some of us have taken...)

Big cheers, big applause. Big success. Everyone played their part literally and metaphorically. Nan’s usual talent for bringing in favours paid handsomely - Stewart C for example, who does the lighting for what’s effectively beer money. (Evidently we couldn’t even hire the equipment for three times what we slip him to come and do it all for us. Everyone mentioned about how much difference the lighting makes, giving the whole thing a really professional image.) Masumi, who did stage stuff and brought in her baby to one dress rehearsal, to much cooing from the female members of the cast. Roz, who helped out shifting stuff and supplied some invaluable vocals in the offstage chorus. Jo, who started as Nan’s hairdresser and ended up doing all the wigs and makeup. No doubt lots of other people too, who I’ve forgotten or neglected; apologies.

It was fabulous, one of the great nights of my life. Yes, it was a flawed student production, and if we had another night, we’d really nail it. But it was something very special. There’s a climax in Mario’s mad scene where he does two phrases starting on a high A and swoops down a seventh ('Come on! Land me!') and then, forced up to an A, 'Turn the skies back and begin again'. I was sobbing; it moved me in ways I can’t begin to express in, er, you know, what’s the word, er, words.

I went off to the post-match celebrations, swigging all that wine Nan had so generously provided for us and enjoying the free buffet provided by the Hobgoblin. I talked bollocks to Nathalie and Roz, and later on total bollocks to Ross and Casey. Like the performance it’s just one big happy blur. I cycled home through bustling, but traffic-free, streets at around three in the morning. On one particularly deserted stretch I contrived to fall off, sustaining nothing more dramatic than a bruise and a graze, but otherwise got out unscathed. It seemed a metaphor for the opera: minor problems here and there, but basically we got away with it. I thanked my lucky stars when I got home though. Let this be a lesson to anyone thinking of cycling home after a few drinks. If you leave for home at a sensible time, say half eleven, the streets will be busy and you might come to grief with a vehicle. So stay drinking until at least 3am, when the streets are empty. Phew.

Thanks especially to Nan and Tim for their unswerving mix of encouragement and backside-kicking. Thanks to Mario, Abby and Hamish for carrying off big parts so well. Thanks everyone. You were all stars.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m knackered. I’ve had enough of this opera thing, it was great while it lasted, but I want nothing whatever to do with any more opera ever again. I’ve got too many other things in my life to worry about.

Ever.

And that’s final.

Well...

Hmm.

Wonder what Nan has in mind for next year?

What you have to remember is, erm, oh, you know

2008-04-27T15:18:00.000+01:00

I've been up to my eyes with stuff lately, so haven't had time to update this blog since Easter.

The first rehearsal after the holiday, on 17 April, was an all-day affair, so we were all a bit hoarse by the end. Especially Nan, who spent most of it berating us for still not knowing the choruses well enough. The following week - last Thursday, 24 April - we were not quite as bad, and there were even some bits that all started and finished together, with lots of people singing much of the time.

Hmm. Those choruses are a bit tricky, and you have to remember quite a lot of counting. In the 'Grimes is at his exercise' sequence, for example, tenors have to remember the sequence 2-no-no-no-3-yes-no-yes-4-no-no-no-4-no-yes-yes-3-no-no-no-3-yes-no-yes+1-9-no-yes-yesx2-4-no-no-yes-yes. Which is just about possible, but the effort of remembering does tend to make you shuffle round like a bewildered care-home patient. (Which, coincidentally, was the subject of conversation over coffee afterwards with Abby and Caroline, both nurses experienced with the confused; they must feel at home in our rehearsals.)

But most of the time your counting is easily confounded. The highly varied nature of Britten's rhythmic chopping up, across the bar line, makes it very easy to get lost. If you've mentally based your entry on following someone else and they screw up, then you screw up too.

So chorus members, it's best not try to take your cues from the sops or altos, as they're not too sure of themselves. Don't rely on the basses or tenors, who aren't too secure either. Or the soloists, as half of them are unlikely to be there. Indeed, Mario is still slicing people up in Cardiff or something so we haven't seen him this term yet. We've had no Jenny either - she's doing jury duty, so we missed her in the court scene, ironically enough.

Anyway, that stuff I've been up to my eyes in has included having to finish my bike book 50 Quirky Bike Rides in England and Wales. It's finally going to press, only a year and half late, and will be out by June this year. I'm expecting that the royalty cheque will be enough to buy me a decent-sized pied a terre.

Oh, hang on, no, I mean pomme de terre.

I also reviewed Birtwistle's Punch and Judy, done by ENO at the Young Vic, for Sky Arts - it's up on their website. (Visit http://www.skyarts.co.uk/SkyArts/Opera/Default.aspx to see if they've got round to putting the review up on the website yet - the opera finished its one-week run last week...)

I was expecting it to be two hours of jagged orchestral torture, vocal screeching and 1960s expressionist hiccuping, but I was wrong. It was only 90 minutes. And actually it was rather good - being in the round at the Young Vic puts you within a string of sausages of the singers, and you feel the physicality and presence of the singers. You could even feel the heat from the baby Mr Punch gleefully incinerated at the beginning.

But I did come away feeling a little chastened. We've had seven months to work on Grimes and we're still struggling to do it without a score. Or even with one, actually. ENO's lot on the other hand had memorised 90 minutes of highly unmemorable and difficult music perfectly. How do they do it? Amazing. Well, I say perfectly – how would anyone know?

See you next Thursday. It's from 1pm to 5pm, so we'll have time to do the whole opera, seeing as we'll have all memorised it perfectly...

A sideways look at the world of Dr Crabbe

2008-04-12T12:04:00.000+01:00

Hope you enjoyed your Easter hols, everyone. Nice, wasn't it, waking up cosy in bed last Sunday to see two inches of snow outside, and thinking great, the cricket season starts this week?

Like most of us I've taken a couple of weeks off from thinking about Grimes. I've just started looking at the score afresh, uncluttered by preconceptions such as remembering any of the notes or the rhythms.

Next Thursday's rehearsal is the first of the summer term. It will also be, as you know from Nan's txts, an all-day affair. Principals at 11am, rest of chorus to join at 1pm. Rather like cricket, in fact: lunch and tea breaks, and perhaps some scampering off for rain or snow showers or bad light or another bollocking for not knowing the music well enough. I hope we perform as a team rather better than England's middle order.

I've got a temporary job which is based in Lincoln's Inn Fields, right in central London. Rather excitingly, it's just next door to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. This is another of those curious, free, London gems. In its display cases are jars of pickled foetuses, five-legged lizards, and skeletons of eight-foot Irish giants. Most entertaining are the gleefully annotated nubs of diseased offal hacksawed off some Regency pauper without the encumbrance of anaesthetic. ("This grapefruit-sized tumour was removed from a Mr Phillibert of Crouch End on 6 June 1784. His screams were said to be audible as far as Islington. He died at 6am the next day.")

It's only one of several attractions in the area for the lunchtime flaneur. The Oxbridge-like tranquillity of Lincoln's Inn itself, the weird and wonderful Soane Museum, are there too. But for sheer rubbernecked fascination, the Hunterian is something else, a show-and-tell casebook of eighteenth-century medical misfortune in freeze frame. After a while you get blase about it all, like the surgeon bantering about lunch while in the middle of slicing up somebody's pancreas. You happily work through your Sainsbury's egg and cress sandwich while staring at encephalitic skulls, monster cysts, prolapsed intestines and Mr Hunter's mighty surgical toolshed.

It's all a world that would have been familiar to two characters in Grimes: the dodgy pharmacist Ned Keene, who would probably have misappopriated the pickling alcohol and sold it off to Mrs Sedley, and Dr Crabbe, the non-singing physician, dismissed by Boles as a drunken charlatan ("He drinks! Good health to all diseases!"). So I'll count my visits as research.

Talking about surgeons, Mario, I hope we'll have the pleasure of your company on Thursday? I'll bring some egg sandwiches for the Tea Interval, and you can entertain us with stories from the operating table...

Nude women, and Britten (unlikely combination)

2008-03-07T06:48:00.000Z

I was away from rehearsal last week, as I was mired in my new job. I'm working at the National Gallery, on their website.

Some of it does involve looking at pictures of nude women. They may look fabulous and elegant in the pictures. But you later find out that they were tarts who are now at least 158 years old. Rather like online dating I suppose. At least that woman in Déjeuner sur l'herbe actually is an oil painting.

But the job is only for four weeks. And most of it actually involves putting up mundane details of events on the website. Such as informing people that at 1pm there will be a gallery talk on some 16th-century Madonna and Child, painted by a bloke who sounds like a pizza chain. Web services in most companies are not considered 'creative services': they come under the umbrella of marketing. Presumably the one they use to shelter under outside while having their hourly fag break.

Anyway, the rehearsal yesterday was a musical run-through with scores. We spent about half an hour in the Great Hall before Roger R came in and threw us out. This was because they had to prepare the piano for a Prepared Piano concert later that day. (There's some crack about nuts, screws and bolts here, but I'm too bored with Lynne Truss to work it out.)

It was annoying but quite amusing. Roger had the air of a building foreman telling you to go and park your car somewhere else. Look, we put up that notice of works on that lamppost six months ago. In half an hour there'll be a ruddy great skip going right here where your car is. Not my problem if you can't find another park, pal, etc.

So we trooped off to some pokey rehearsal room upstairs that happened to be free. Fortunately the zombie saxophonists and drummers who usually live up there must have been on lunch break, or not got up yet, or something.

And there we had the company of - for the first time - Peter Grimes himself. A teeny bit late, considering we started five months ago in October, you might think. But it does rather highlight the main problem we've had so far: that the most committed people are mostly (though not all) the ones with commitments, which means they can only make some of some of the rehearsals.

(It's the same principle that scuppers your love life after 30: all the lovers worth having who might make a commitment to you are taken, because they've made a commitment to someone else. Probably someone not as nice, but with better salary/legs.)

Take Dr Mario for example. He's an excellent, committed lyric tenor who will be a fabulous Grimes, and boy he'll look the part. You wouldn't get in a fishing smack with him lightly. (Er, I don't mean it that way. Mario's straight, as he confirmed with some entertaining post-rehearsal anecdotes, more Jon Vickers than Peter Pears.)

But he's also a full-time surgeon who lives and works abroad in a small developing country. (I think he's based in Cardiff.) So when your rehearsals are on Thursday mid-afternoon 200 miles away, that presents clear logistical problems. Sorry, guys, I've got to go and sing. Can you just see to that left ventricle, patch up the aorta and close the rib cage, and if there's any problems I'm on my BlackBerry?

He's not the only one. Hamish, Abby and others, and several chorus members, have to squeeze what they can - sometimes less than an hour - between work commitments. Stuff that has to be done to pay the bills: nursing or making photocopies or assessing the work of Gustave Courbet. At most rehearsals we've had about half the principals, max, and a chorus of two tenors. If we do make it all the way to a half-decent performance it'll be a miracle.

At least yesterday we had everyone, and some bits (some) actually sounded quite good. For an hour - at which point Hamish (Balstrode) and Abby (Ellen) had to scoot to a masterclass, and Dan (Swallow) had to go to I don't know where. So we were back to the Reduced Britten Company, like those Americans who do comedy potted Shakespeare plays with three people.

Still, there were two big positives. First, it was really nice to see Mario again - Charlotte (Mrs Sedley) hadn't seen him since she was dancing provocatively for him last summer on stage as Carmen. Second, Hamish's muttonchop sideboards are coming on a treat. By June he'll be a ginger Captain Birdseye.

Nan, of course, wasn't there. It was her birthday, and she thoroughly deserved a day off, and was off celebrating. We'd put together a special gift for her: Jonny (Hobson) had had the great idea of the Opera Goldies recording a CD for her. (Actually, Charlotte said it was her idea and that Jonny nicked it. Rock-Paper-Scissors, guys.) So last week, we whizzed through some of the songs and arias Nan's worked with us on, accompanied by the ever patient Richard Black on piano, and recorded them on to a CD. (I made a token contribution to the smugglers' quintet in Carmen, stepping straight off my bike, wheezing and croaking like Ian Paisley. Everyone else sounded fab.)

So we really hope Nan likes it. I knocked up the cover for the disc - email me if you want to see an image. If you need to ask why I called it the 'Opera Gold Omnibus', then you probably wouldn't understand the answer. Nan: hope you had a fabulous day yesterday. Happy Birthday, and love and thanks from us all.

Well, I suppose I'd better back to work. Back to Déjeuner sur l'herbe.

You don't have to be mad to be at ENO, but...

2008-02-23T20:08:00.000Z

Rehearsal last Thursday (21 Feb) was another dismal, shuffling affair, with the chorus doing their famous impression of Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Nan looking desperate, so we won't dwell on that.

Instead we'll dwell on ENO's Lucia di Lammermoor, which is really rather fab; here's the review I wrote for the Sky Arts website. (This was the performance that made national news because one of the principals lost his voice after the first scene, and a bloke from the audience came up to sing the part from the wings while the hoarse bloke mimed.)

Anyway, I went with Abby, and it was the most enjoyable evening I've had there in ages. Usually, when I go with a Goldie to ENO, it consists of
(a) people I used to work with desperately trying to avoid eye contact with me, and
(b) me opening up two tins of cider and a packet of cheesy wotsits in that area downstairs by the loos, where you can stand by a big square pillar and put your drinks on a ledge.

Well, this time, it was different, because it wasn't just me. It was also Abby trying to avoid eye contact, with the various people she's done voice coaching with and suchlike. She was concerned about being seen furtively swigging my bottle of Chilean Cab Sauv, instead of paying nineteen quid a glass or whatever it is at the bar, and thought this might adversely affect her future. (Merely being seen with me, of course, does the trick effectively enough.) So we both ducked and dived round the pillar as voice coach after voice coach, and journo after journo, swanned past.

It was ever so exciting. Then afterwards we had a quick one in that little pub down the Dickensian alley (the Lemon Tree?), or perhaps two, and tried talking French.

And at last, some good news: I have a job. Only for a month, but it's at the National Gallery, so I should get to look at a lot of pictures of nude women. Shame they all died in 1532.

Recruitment Agencies: Useful, just not for getting jobs

2008-02-12T09:41:00.000Z

Our Thursday staging rehearsals generally consist of us standing around knowing that whatever we're about to do will be wrong, and then getting shouted at. (Guys, this is all good practice for being married.) Don't get me wrong, it's rather fun, and is the most organised and pleasurable part of my week. Which tells you what a disaster the rest of my life is.

Well, no such luck last Thursday. It just turned into a music call. We all stood around the piano with scores and bashed through the church scene and its aftermath. This is the bit where I do my radicalising-imam thing, and soapbox the villagers into an attack against Grimes and Ellen. Which gives me the chance to do a lot of shouting, cursing, waving of hands and railing against the system. Recent graduates, this is all good practice for the experience of job-hunting.

Yes, I still haven't had any luck fixing myself up with any gainful employment since 21 Dec, despite being registered with about ten recruitment agencies. Honestly, they're all absolutely useless. Imagine the piercing intelligence of Jade Goody, the integrity of Heather Mills, the self-awareness of Michael Jackson, the ability to fulfill promises of Del Trotter, and the sense of humour of Margaret Thatcher, and you've got the average recruitment agency drone.

What happens is this. You see a job online. It suits you perfectly. So you apply for it. Ah, but you're not applying to the company. You're applying to the recruitment agency, who obviously are there to take a cut. What happens then is that you get a call from someone from the recruitment agency called Claire who suggests that you go in to their central London office and have a chat about your skills and requirements. So you take along your passport (to prove you're actually British and not an international spy) and chat to Claire for 45 minutes, who tells you at unnecessary length what a fantastic agency they are, asks you naive questions which are answered on the CV she claims to have read, and writes down copious notes in biro on her hardback jotter. Then you never hear from her again and she never returns your calls. Repeat ad infinitum.

Or is it me? Perhaps it's time to take a long, hard look in a mirror. Urgh. Actually this is what Nan keeps telling me to do. I don't like looking at myself. Apparently I'm doing the amateur thing of bobbing my head too much, leaning forward and straining from the neck, when I should be standing up straight and letting the body do the work. And I'm talking about the interviews with Claire here. With the singing it's even worse.

Still, all my job-hunting experiences have been useful for my Boles characterisation. When I want to vent spleen against Grimes and Ellen Orford, I obviously don't picture Mario and Abby, two of the most pleasant and talented people I know. (Er, that's meant to be a compliment, not a comment on how many people I know.) Instead, I picture Dave and Claire from the recruitment agency. It makes all that shouting a pleasure.

Of course, if you ARE from a recruitment agency and you're reading this, the above description doesn't apply to you. Oh no. Of course not. You're smart enough to have found this page, for one thing, and to have read it this far, for another. In which case, what on earth are you doing working in recruitment? Ah, but to change jobs you need... a recruitment agency to help you! Doh! I see your problem. Tell you what, if you fancy being surrounded by talented people for a change, come along to our rehearsals on Thursdays.

2008-02-03T18:25:00.000Z

Well, last Thursday's rehearsal went comparatively well. That's a bit like saying Derek Conway MP is honest compared to his Italian or Nigerian counterparts, but at least it was something of an improvement, with quite a few people knowing several of their entries.

And there was plenty of entertainment. We were doing the Pub Scene where Bob Boles, viz me, gets roaring drunk and tries to chat up one of the Nieces. My efforts to portray the beaming pisshead caused a fair bit of amusement, possibly for my staggering acting ability, possibly for my staggering, or possibly just because of the novelty of seeing me sober pretending to be drunk.

We also did a couple of run-throughs of that pesky 7/8 round about Joe and his idiot son going fishing and, do you know, we pretty much started and finished in the right place. I'm beginning to think that we might just get through this opera without having to take down our Facebook pages out of embarrassment.

In the evening I went out to ENO to review their re-run of Anthony Minghella's Madam Butterfly. (You can read it on the Sky Arts website.) It's really rather good, despite the odd sight of Butterfly's three-year-old boy being played by a wooden puppet. Actually the puppet was one of the best actors on stage. That's meant as a compliment to the blokes working him, not a dig at the singers, who were jolly good.

Though I was a bit distracted by Ashley Holland's Sharpless, who was a dead ringer for Hale of 1990s TV duo Hale and Pace. I kept expecting him to break off into an aria about 'the Management', though of course Puccini didn't do comedy very well. A bit like Hale and Pace I suppose.

I went with Casey, who is doing the Butterfly/Suzuki Flower Duet later this year with Jenny somewhere for someone. So she could come along and make some notes. Casey is playing the very Niece that I slobber over in that Pub Scene; so she was remarkably composed, considering that earlier that very day I'd been repeatedly groping her in E flat minor.

Nessun' dorma nelle montagne Lake District

2008-01-21T16:51:00.000Z

Not really a Grimes connection here, really, but I've just got back from a stag weekend up in the Lakes. Not, of course, mine. One of the lads in the room next to me heard me singing bits of Grimes in the shower and commended me the next morning on my singing. Actually, he thought he'd been hearing selections from HMS Pinafore, but I suppose he wasn't a million nautical miles away.

Anyway, the next day we all walked up to the top of the Old Man of Coniston and he insisted I sing Nessun' dorma at the summit, in the freezing cold fog. Which I did, after a fashion - probably the fashion of a Stars in their eyes contestant doing Russell Watson after nine pints of Bluebird the night before.

The party was amused, anyway, though they were keener on doing a team version of The hills are alive with the sound of music.

I can't make the rehearsal on Thursday, as I'm up north for a wedding. Not, of course, mine.

Good news and bad news

2008-01-17T19:49:00.000Z

I'm a firm believer in getting bad news out of the way first. So here's the bad news.

The Act I rehearsal today was really a bit rubbish.

We did the bit from Grimes's first appearance, bawling offstage for someone to come and help him bring in his boat, to the end of the 'storm' ensemble ('Now the flood tide and sea horses...').

Or rather, we didn't. Much.

Same old story: hardly anybody having memorised the parts well enough, with some honourable exceptions (Abby! That kind of attitude could take you places, you know... well, Manchester, anyway). At 2.35pm, we'd hacked through the entrails of Act I with about five per cent of singable words actually being sung. Nan was into her usual manic-laugh-despair state at this stage of proceedings.

It almost got called off then, and given up as a Concert Performance. (Er, it still might.) But it didn't, and the reason it didn't was because we did *another* run through of the whole of Act I up to page 86 without scores.

And, guess what. Most of us had been wandering around Act I to date with scores in hand, like befuddled American tourists with maps of central London confounded by the streets not being laid out on a grid like Atlanta, Georgia, but on a tangle of spaghetti like London, England. But once we'd been forced to put the libretti down and actually look up and watch each other and even, er, look at that bloke called Tim at the piano who waves his hands around in a rhythmic kind of way sometimes....

Well, put it this way. Before we put our scores down and were forced to sing from memory, it was worse than a scratch performance of Grimes by a bunch of Radio 4 comedians. And after we put our scores down and sang from memory, it was just about as good as a scratch performance of Grimes by a bunch of Radio 4 comedians.

Then we did it again from memory, the whole of Act I. And this time it was so good that Nan only gave us the same bollocking as she gave us at the same stage in the previous two years. That was with Carmen, which was a much easier opera, or even Magic Flute the same stage the year before, which was easier than that.

And the good news? Well, I made a very good curry. And also, Abby's got into the Royal Northern College, except that's kind of bad news as it means she won't be in next year's Opera Gold performance of Bohème or whatever (I'm guessing). She'll be up in Manchester. But it's good news for her, if not for her bank manager.

So, see, I was right about this business of memorising things. If you put in a bit of application in learning parts, you'll be like Abby, or me. And be confident on stage.

And, er, skint. But impressively skint.

Anyway, I'm off this weekend on a mountain-biking-stag do up to the Lakes. The weather forecast's terrible: torrential rain all Saturday and Sunday. Oh dear. We may end up being stuck in a pub.

The patience of jobless

2008-01-14T13:49:00.000Z

If you have neither a family nor a job, you're always having to justify yourself to people at parties. The first two questions they ask are usually 'Do you have a family?' and 'Do you have a job?'. Once you've answered No to both, they look blank fora few seconds, say Oh, then sidle off claiming they've left their drink in the kitchen.

Occasionally, people sympathise:
Them: "Mm. Must be tough without a job. Must be hard to know what your role is."
Me: "Well, fortunately, I DO have a role: that of an angry drunk who shouts constantly."
Them: "I see. And didn't you say something about being in an opera, as well?"

We had our first staging rehearsal on Thursday. Some bits went OK, mainly the bits that involved shifting scenery or making pretend paper fish for me to fillet.

The singing went less well, due to (a) the usual problem of nobody having quite got round to memorising their part yet, and (b) most of the principals being at work or in Cardiff or in a lecture or just AWOL. We did the court scene and the opening chorus of Act I, pretty dreadfully, and that's our main rehearsal for that bit gone.

So Nan is suggesting that we move rehearsals to Wednesdays, to give the principals a chance to be absent for different reasons. We'll vote on it next Thursday, except that nobody will be there as it's Thursday and nobody can make it on that day. Obviously I can make any day, as I don't have a job.

Still, I was pleased with my origami herring. You could tell it was a herring because I wrote HERRING on it in biro.

And there was some good news. Nathalie has got a place at the Academy, which is great, because we can make Opera Gold sound really cool and say our company includes members of the BBC Symphony Chorus (Dan) ENO (Abby) Trinity (Mario) and now the Royal Academy (Nat) etc. Congratulations Nat! Thoroughly deserved.

I'm not a member of anything just now, not even Goldsmiths, as I'm doing the rounds of Recruitment Agencies. Some people say Recruitment Agencies are useless, that they're just full of airhead 30-something women who get all enthusiastic and promise instant unlimited lucrative employment and then fail to return your calls.

Well, I'm currently on the books of about a dozen agencies, and I don't have a bad word to say about one of them. That one is TFPL. It's because they at least made me a cup of tea at interview before failing to return my calls. They haven't got me any work, though.

Enough moaning. Time to go and chase the fox out of the front room: the door is open to let the washing dry and they keep coming in and nosing around, perhaps trying to find that bar of chocolate I lost down the back of the sofa. Perhaps I do have a role after all.

You don't have to mad to do Grimes, but it helps

2008-01-09T14:55:00.000Z

This is about the time of year when Opera Gold starts to invade my daily conversation. There I am talking to someone at the checkout or the water cooler or the bar, and bits of Peter Grimes come out.

For example, I was in a tapas bar the other night. (Meson Don Felipe on the Cut, in fact - great atmosphere, but the food at Mar in Terra round the corner is better, we reckon.) Anyway, we'd troughed our main courses and glugged the wine, and the waitress came round.

"Would you like to see the dessert menu?", she said.

Out came this bit of Grimes in the Prologue as my instinctive reply:

And whenever I'm in a train that's spent ten minutes waiting in the middle of nowhere and then suddenly gets going again, I find myself doing a quick bit of Mrs Sedley:

And goodness knows what the Aussie barmaid at the White Bear round the corner thinks when I go in to order a beer and do an unconscious Balstrode quote instead:

At least all these involuntary outbursts are in English. For the last two years the checkout girls in Lidl have been listening to me gabbling in Bizet-era French and Mozart-period German. But then as nobody in Lidl has English as a first language it didn't seem all that strange.

There is, of course, a slight problem with all this: none of the bits are actually my part. This is what always happens. That mental CD of the opera keeps playing on shuffle through my head, but it's always Grimes or Balstrode or Mrs Sedley and never me.

See you at the first staging rehearsal tomorrow...

Happy New Year to all partners in Grimes

2008-01-01T18:08:00.000Z

There's now a group on Facebook for the Opera Gold Peter Grimes. Thanks Jenny, I think.

On it, you'll see amusing descriptions of each character on the Facebook group. Here they are with some additions and amendments:

Jenny Hunt - Auntie: Landlady of The Boar; dispenser of dodgy gin, and fixer for Ned Keene's three-in-bed quickies upstairs with the obliging nieces. Nod-and-wink vocal lines. Think Cilla from Blind Date with Cynthia Payne.

Ryan Webber - Ned Keene: Sex-crazed quack; gobby joker, Jack the Lad, initially chum of Grimes but turns against him. Jim Davidson with a chemist's shop.

Charlotte King / Ruth Willow Mariner - Mrs Sedley: Drug addicted fuss-pot; snobby retired old bag collecting reward points on Keene's Pharmacy clubcard. Think Heather Mills with an addiction problem in 20 years' time.

Dan Rudge - Swallow: Pompous, Captain-Mainwaringesque local magistrate, who can barely conceal his contempt for Grimes. Vocal lines mostly proclaimed rather than melodic.

Hamish Gallie - Balstrode: Retired sea-captain, wise village elder who's been around the block a few times; sticks up for Grimes at first but ultimately tells him to commit suicide. Bold, controlling, often ominous vocal lines. Think Alec Guinness (perh. as Col. Nicholson in River Kwai) with a pipe and a pint.

Jonathan Crowhurst / Ross Michalski - Hobson: Too pissed to walk home? Boy to be sent up a chimney? Call Yokel Taxis of the Borough. Anything and anyone carted anywhere, any time of day or night. The village carter, a dull-witted local who can't stand Grimes. Trigger from Only Fools and Horses, perhaps.

Nathalie Chalkley / Casey Evans - Nieces: Relaxing massages for gentlemen discreetly performed in the Boar's state-of-the-art shed. No job too big or small. Mostly girly, giggly melodic lines, but gorgeously moving trio with Ellen. Nowadays would be two girls both called Natasha from Eastern Europe.

Rob Ainsley - Bob Boles: Drunken, ranting, lecherous, Bible-bashing fisherman. The Borough's equivalent of the radicalising imam, a sort of Methodist Abu Hamza. Spends most of time shouting. Detests Grimes.

Abigail Sudbury - Ellen Orford: Curiously non-romantic 'romantic interest'. Lonely widowed schoolteacher, forlornly hoping that her compassion and kindness can redeem Grimes. Doesn't. Has softest, most palliative vocal lines of the whole opera. Possibly a young Maggie Smith.

Mario Sofroniou - Peter Grimes: Fisherman loner. Not evil, but stubborn, uncaring and desperately unwise. Craves ordinary respectability but won't make any compromises to get it. Most balanced man in the Borough - has chip on both shoulders. Like the man, vocal lines veer between extremes, often cutting abruptly across the chorus or even himself, trampolining between aggression and self-pity, restless lyricism and disjointed bullying.

Now, I'd just like to stress that the above description is of the roles, not of the people.

I've never gone fishing, for example.

Happy New Year, everyone. Hope 2008 brings you a very different kettle of fish.

The Rest Is Noise...

2007-12-10T19:55:00.000Z

...is the title of a new book on 20th-century music. Written by a very smart, very readable music journo called Alex Ross, it contains among its excellent, sharply observed essays an incisive examination of Peter Grimes. (There's an extract on this blog here.)

Ross is an American (the music critic for the New Yorker magazine; I don't know what the English equivalent would be) but has clearly visited Aldeburgh and understood its atmosphere, and that of the Britten clique. And if he hasn't, then he's got a far better storyteller's imagination than John Darwin.

It's not yet available in the UK, but there is at least one copy here, because I ordered it through the Barbican. When I've finished with it I strongly recommend that you get it out, or pester me for it. Or, if not, just wait for the programme notes I write for our production, because I'll probably steal all his choicest phrases and sharpest observations.

As for our rehearsal last Thursday, well, there's good news and bad news again. The good news is that we've actually covered all the chorus note-bashing, not just once but twice. That's twice more than we'd achieved at this stage last year with Carmen.

You don't want to know the bad news.

Anyway, next Thursday is principals... full-time jobs permitting. Nan keeps telling me the key to 'singing' Boles is actually to shout it most of the time, and look angry. Last Saturday I was at Southampton, seeing Hull City get hammered 4-0. As the Italians know, there's often a link between football and opera.

One good Turn deserves another

2007-12-01T08:53:00.000Z

My review of ENO's excellent Turn of the Screw is now up on the Sky Arts website. The 'opera-singer companion' I refer to was Nat, btw.

Last Thursday's rehearsal was the usual routine of half-assed mumbling that got better as it went along, eventually reaching near-adequacy.

There were some intriguing challenges of part-division in the lynch-mob chorus ("And cruelty becomes his exercise"... etc). Challenging because we had a chorus of two tenors and a tenor line split into two parts. Which would be OK except that one of the tenors, ie me, was also trying to sing Boles. Similarly, the two-strong bass section had two parts, but one of the basses was also singing Swallow.

That scene is supposed to be one of overwhelming terror and crowd-rule, as the entire village turns to hunt down Grimes. It should have the deranged ferocity of Sudanese lynch-mob demanding execution over the name of a soft toy. That's a bit tricky when you can fit the entire men's chorus into a Smart Car.

So ladies, we look to you for violence, chaos and irrational hatred, as you did so magnificently in Carmen! That fight scene was terrific - for a moment I thought I was back at my auntie's wedding reception.

And there's that weird, brilliantly effective section at the end where everyone is almost literally baying: that extended 'Ha ha ha, ha-ha-ha-ha ha' bit right at the top of everyone's register. It's cackling, vengeful music with an evil glint in its eye. Which, I can't help thinking, was Britten's mood when he was writing it: right, tenors, you lazy bastards, let's see you get this high C-flat at the end. That'll show you what happens if you don't sing with your body.

A really good Screw

2007-11-27T21:07:00.000Z

Purely in the spirit of research, you understand, I went to see some Britten last night: the opening night of ENO's Turn of the Screw, accompanied by Nathalie, who was quickest off the mark in snapping up my free spare ticket that I announced at last Thursday's rehearsal.

And there's good news. After a succession of turkeys from ENO recently (Carmen, Poppea) that should have been culled swifter than an H5N1-infested gaggle at a Bernard Matthews factory, their Turn of the Screw is absolutely brilliant.

I won't say too much more here until my review goes up on the Sky Arts website, but do go and see it. It's really heartening to see ENO back on top form. Unlike the tepid, polite spatter of applause that greeted Carmen or Poppea, this got a thoroughly deserved rainstorm of appreciation, particularly for Rebecca Evans (the Governess), who tackled a tough role with outstanding style and musicality, especially in the second half. (The kids were irritatingly good, too.)

It was interesting to listen to this - a work I knew vaguely from CD but not from live - with Grimes, whose music we all, ahem, know inside out now. Obviously the same composer: some startling linear and harmonic similarities - when the kids start singing in Screw, it's clearly almost-the-the same music as the Nieces from the storm scene in Grimes. And the same overarching themes of emotional claustrophobia, innate evil, suspicion, dark goings-on, and of course absolutely no warmth or good old-fashioned romantic love and still less any shagging. It hardly suggests all was comfy in Ben's head: I hope he got a kiss and cuddle and felt guilt-free and good about physical love on at least some occasions.

It was full, too. Just behind us in the audience was Alice Coote (who was Carmen in the Carmen I slammed). Luckily everything I'd said to Nat about AC while we were waiting for curtain-up was complimentary.

A titanic struggle

2007-11-25T09:34:00.000Z

Omigod. Only three rehearsals left before Christmas, following another limp performance on Thursday, and then we'll start on the staging. With the parts all committed to memory, oh yes. Just as securely and reliably as HMRC's data protection policy.

Well, we've been here before. At this stage last year in Carmen, if anything, things were worse, but there's a LOT more music in Grimes, and it ain't the sort you can busk your way through. Will it still go ahead? Well, it has to, because Tim has signed away all of Goldsmiths' performance budget for the next ten years - no, actually it's more than fifty quid - on the notoriously pricey orchestral parts. So we're committed now.

Our performance is 'good in parts' now, but so was the Titanic's. We're also suffering from the prevailing absence of many principals from rehearsals: no Mario/Grimes yet, hardly any Hamish/Balstrode, only sometimes an Abi/Ellen. Not their fault, they have full time jobs - Mario is doing what surgeons do, ie wielding a knife and forceps on voodoo dolls of account managers; Abigail is a nurse, so is used to being surrounded by bewildered people who've just been told if they don't change their lifestyle they have six months to live. Not sure what Hamish does but it's something of good to the community and I suspect he works harder than John Arne Riise (the over-paid and over-here Liverpool footy player whose payslip famously appeared on the Internet recently) and for less money.

I've made all the rehearsals so far, but luckily I don't have to work. I am employed full-time at the British Library.*

And as for how well I'm doing, er, what's for dinner love, see England have dropped down the FIFA rankings, oh look, there's a fox over there.

Can't really say if I'm optimistic or pessimistic about the production so far. As Chou Enlai is supposed to have said in the 1950s when questioned about the effects on history of the French revolution, it's too early to tell. I feel like a seasick-prone passenger about to embark on a long sea voyage: we'll get there, it might just be a long, long slog with a lot of ups and downs.

Unless we go by that Antarctic cruise ship that sank after hitting the ice of course. At least everyone got rescued. But let's not mention the Titanic again.

*Joke

Stick it up your fundamentalism

2007-11-07T10:19:00.000Z

Never mind counting sheep: Peter Grimes is a much better aid to sleep. Count all those missed beats jumping over the barline.

As I was doing this last night, it struck me how much the plot is Old Testament versus New. Bob Boles is a real Old fundamentalist, banging on about revenge; Ellen Orford is New Testament, talking forgiveness. She is educated (a teacher), reasonable, compassionate.

But, as we know, it's Boles, preaching fire and brimstone from his soapbox outside after the regular Sunday service, who fires up the crowd. They hound Grimes to suicide, and even Balstrode - hitherto a mediating, understanding and wise voice - turns against him. In that chilling section of spoken dialogue near the end, it is he who tells Grimes to sail out and sink his boat. The Old Testament world of vengeance, ignorance and mob rule wins out.

The parallels with today's fears of fundamentalism are pretty clear: it doesn't take a genius to equate Boles with the radical imam preaching to the disaffected young men outside the mosque.

But that, to me, raises a point about staging. If you spot such a parallel, do you then stampede into an updated production, moving The Borough to modern-day Iran or Afghanistan, making the church a mosque, Sunday Friday, and switching all Christian references to Islamic ones?

Well, maybe someone might; they've done worse, as anyone at the recent ENO Poppea, set in an aquarium or something, can tell you. But such updating sounds pointless to me, and not only because the clammy, foggy claustrophobia of Britten's fabulous music perfectly describes Suffolk but is less evocative of palm trees and deserts. Because to me, the whole point is that I, in the audience, make those connections for myself. Someone else might be put in mind of fundamentalist Christian communities in neo-con midwest US; others might make parallels with minority persecution on different grounds.

(Which makes me think of a mucky joke whose tag line answers the question 'on what grounds' with 'Hampstead Heath and Clapham Common, your honour', but the margin is not big enough to contain it here.)

Sadly, there are any number of types of witch-hunt that the Grimes putsch might suggest. But that, I'll say again, is why opera can be so powerful. To me the best option is usually to stick to the original staging and time. Then everyone can make the internal connections for themselves, without some clever director forcing us to see it their way. Boles is a hypocritic fundamentalist, a demagogue who takes the mob that follow him like sheep. That's not about religion, that's about human society and how easily it can be derailed. it's not a specific: it's a universal.

Good, that's sorted that one out. Be suspicious of updated operas. Now, time to get some sleep. Back to counting those sheep...

Mob rule

2007-11-02T13:46:00.000Z

By the end of yesterday's rehearsal we had finished our first sweep of the score. Hmm. 'Sweep' uncomfortably makes me think of Sooty's sidekick, who could only make staccato squeaks now and then. 'First pass through the score': that's better.

It's still all very fragmentary, and the clock is ticking. Next week is Reading Week (incidentally, have you ever met anyone who was actually born in Reading?) so there's no rehearsal, so we have in essence two weeks to learn this music, with all its tricky entries, odd spacings and absolutely wonderful expressive, atmospheric power. Because on the next sw... sorry, pass, through the score, we'll have to do a bit more than just nod our heads in time with Tim's piano.

After the rehearsal my friend Xenia, who's in the chorus, came up to me.

"What is Peter Grimes about?", she asked.

"Well," I replied, "it's about two hours 45 minutes, or if it's our orchestra doing the second interlude, perhaps nearer three."

OK, so I then gave her a proper synopsis: loner fisherman has apprentice die in fishy circumstances, village turns against him, fisherman manages to lose second apprentice in accident, goes mad, villagers hound him to suicide, his only friend Ellen Orford unhappy accessory to crime.

I fell to thinking, yet again, of parallels between Britten and Shostakovich. Britten said that Peter Grimes is about "a subject very close to my heart — the struggle of the individual against the masses. The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual". Shostakovich must have nodded in glum sympathy.

It's interesting that in the years following 1945, just as Grimes was playing to packed houses and being recognised as the first great English opera since - no, the first great English opera, and still the greatest - Shostakovich was embarking on his extraordinary 'middle period'. The two weren't to meet until 1960, but already they were explorers in similar territory.

Such Shostakovich works as the Violin Concerto No. 1 and the Symphony No. 10 are huge, dark, powerful, tragic works which seem exactly about the 'struggle of the individual against the masses'. The individual in the concerto is clearly the violinist, goaded and harassed by the jeering crowds in the second movement into a frantic display of resistant complicity. In the symphony the individual is signified by Shostakovich's musical signature D-E flat-C-B in the third movement, defiant against the baying brass and jabbering strings of the orchestra-mob.

And what could be more vicious than the Tenth's 'portrait of Stalin' in the second movement? It's surely no coincidence that the Concerto features a Grimes-like Passacaglia in its third movement, one of the most transparently haunting elegies for violin and orchestra ever written (and note how the cor anglais imitates the violin at one point, as if echoing its tragic tale).

So, a handy hint to all Grimes Goldies: spend the Reading Week listening to Shostakovich. Then, when we do that scary military-march to the tattoo of Jim Hobson's drum, you'll know all about baying mobs, out for blood, an eye for an eye.

And if no Shostakovich is to hand, then just read the tabloids' latest DNA revelation about the McCanns, or watch Jeremy Kyle. The spirit of the Borough is still alive and well.

When Britten met Shostakovich

2007-11-01T09:03:00.000Z

There's some interesting stuff about the links between Shostakovich and Britten in a blog posting by a US music journo called Marc Geelhoed.

(He's actually reviewing a new book called The Rest is Noise, which sounds fab, but being skint I'm obviously going to get the Barbican Library to order it for me.)

A parallel is drawn between the desolate soundworlds of Shostakovich (such as in the Quartet No. 8) and of Britten (such as in the final mad scene of Grimes, where Peter loses it completely). In particular, it's the obsessive woe-is-me repetition that interests him of, on the one hand, Shostakovich's D-E flat-C-B signature, and on the other, Grimes belting out his own name.

Grimes hounded by the slow-witted, suspicious inbreds of the Borough, Shostakovich by the Party: it's a telling comparison. The Quartet was written in 1960, 15 years after Grimes, which Shostakovich must have known well - he was a fan of Britten and became an acquaintance. Shostakovich was being pressurised to join the Communist party, something he'd avoided up till then; but, for reasons still unclear, he succumbed. Letters to his friend Glikman suggest that he was suicidal, and that the Quartet was some sort of suicide note - hence the saturation with DSCH. Grimes, of course, does end up killing himself.

And there are other bits in Grimes that sound very Shostakovich-like. The dark tragedy of the Passacaglia foreshadows that of the Passacaglia in Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1, written two years later. The very opening bars, with parping woodwind that usher the court into session, have typical early Shostakovich characteristics of odd, sideways harmonic shifting and skippy, jerky rhythms. Many of the bustling big orchestral stampedes - 'Grimes is at his exercise' for example - recall the Shostakovich juggernaut.

But it's the bleakness that's most telling. Most of Grimes is pretty bleak: grey shapes that appear out of the musical mist like ghosts, such as in the first Interlude, which provides the background for Act I. You can see where the opening of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 14, dedicated to Britten, comes from.

Both were master orchestrators, impeccable craftsmen, and geniuses who could push the aural envelope just far enough to make great, original music that still appeals to the normal listener. When I say 'normal listener', I obviously mean me.

And they did become friends. Shostakovich managed to come over to England in 1966 for the World Cup - he was a big footy fan - and had even learned some English. I have the irresistible image of these two great composers meeting up that year (they'd first met in 1960), and only one wanting to talk about football (I don't know that Britten was a fan of sport - there are references to him playing school cricket though):

BB: Dmitri Dmitrievich! Very nice to see you!
DS: Ah! Benjamin Robertovich! Khello! Khello! Pleased for see you! Tell me, what you think of manager A. Ramsey drop Greaves from team?
BB: Er, well, I don't really follow football, I'm afraid. I wanted to ask you about your Thirteenth Sym...
DS: Why England not play weenger? What team is Hurst? Is West Kham? Very unusual, two foot player. Shoot right foot, shoot left foot. Also, can khead ball. Need such player in Russian team.
BB: Um, yes. Now, I was talking to Slava the other day about your second cello concerto, and...
DS: And Bobby Moore! Best player midfield in world! He hev... he hev... ah, what is word... (to interpreter) Splyoozhy khoozhy blatchka natchka pleetky neetky?... ah, kharasho... (to BB) Ah! Veesion! Veesion! He hev veesion! Also Bobby Charlton, Martin Peters, Gordon Banks... (etc)

Time to go to rehearsal, I think.

When one thing leads to another

2007-10-29T11:07:00.000Z

Went to Nan's on Saturday afternoon. As ever with Nan and Andy's generous and good-humoured hospitality, one thing (running through some of the Bob Boles bits with Nan) led to another (dinner, a beer, and watching the DVD of the 1975 Covent Garden Peter Grimes until midnight with Abi, Nan and Andy).

Abi and Mario were there when I arrived, making a start running through the enormous challenges of Ellen Orford and Grimes. Mario had hurtled over for the weekend from Cardiff, where he is based as a full-time medic. He spends his working weeks doing whatever it is that surgeons do, mostly making PowerPoint presentations about next year's budget.

Abi stayed for the evening's viewing, and finished up as depressed as I was: it's really very affecting opera, Britten on top emotionally-disturbing form. Jon Vickers is a very powerful Grimes, a role he legendarily made his own: big and strong, gruff and frustrated, misunderstood, unable to connect with the villagers. And he sang fabulously. Heather Harper has a touch of the staring-eyed, flashy-teethed madwoman about her, an Ellen Orford with an emotional deathwish.

Bob Boles is fine in a shouty sort of way, but to me he looked like the Quaker Oats man rather than a scary, Paisleyesque, fire-and-brimstone misery-monger, and I hope my drunk is nastier than his. Norman Bailey, as Balstrode, is the commanding and peevish voice of reason, though put me in mind of a what-ho pipe-smoking yachtie from a 1970s Condor advert.

A very affecting production, though, so it's no wonder we went home feeling subdued, as Grimes meekly submits to cruel fate and sails out to commit suicide. I biked home through Brixton at midnight, which some people might think is the same thing, but it was fine. It's mostly downhill back to Kennington from Streatham; Brixton was buzzing and full of queues of people waiting to get their mobile phones stolen in clubs; it was dry and mild; and I was back home in as long as it takes for a deranged fisherman to scuttle his smack.

So: can we do it? Can we, a small scruffy South London college best known for trendy modern artists and a building made of giant tagliatelli, stage such a big opera as Peter Grimes? Of course! It doesn't need backdrops as it's all supposed to be on Suffolk's featureless, sparse, misty-grey, mud-brown coast anyway. All we need is a load of nets, some tables and mugs for the pub scene, and a few fishing boxes.

Oh, yes. The singing. That could be a challenge, guys.

Anyway, before watching Grimes, we saw a few highlights of the Charlton House concert last August. Abi and Nat did a lovely duet and looked and sounded like total pros; they have such lovely voices and stage presence.

In fact, there are many Goldies who you'd happily call proper singers, with the ability and drive to make a successful career of it. Professionals, in other words. Which raises the question of what I'm doing here, a website editor and arts journalist with a slapdash approach to life who started studying music older than the leaders of most EU accession countries. An amateur, in other words.

I think, mainly, it's because I've been blessed with one rare natural talent that I intend to exploit to the full, something given to very few people: the ability to turn up.

And when you do keep turning up for things - well, one thing leads to another.

Grimes doesn't pay

2007-10-27T13:37:00.000+01:00

You can find a PDF of the entire Peter Grimes libretto thanks to the relaxed attitude to legality of Italian state broadcasters RAI.

Looks dodgy copyright-wise to me, and the Britten estate will probably have a hissy fit if they find out. But seeing as I've just subsidised them to the tune of sixty quid by buying a legit score, I don't have much sympathy with them.

Whatever, download it before they find out and tell the Italians to take it down as soon as they can (ie sometime next summer).

Rustle, rustle, rebrand

2007-10-27T12:59:00.000+01:00

Following the excellent suggestion by my bodily modified colleague Mr Crowhurst, I've renamed this blog A Life of Grimes.

This narrowly beat 'Grimes Against Humanity' and 'Grimes of Passion'.

The rebranding has been carried out on a budget of two pounds fifty for a can of coke, packet of crisps and a sandwich.

Fishing trip goes adrift in Seven

2007-10-26T16:26:00.000+01:00

Third rehearsal yesterday. We hacked our way through that 7/8 round about Joe and his infernal relatives going fishing, which was clearly stolen from a Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, written 20 years later.

Actually, it went relatively well. We started together and finished together, many people sang when they were supposed to, Tim was still smiling at the end, and instead of looking desperate and miserable, Nan only looked deeply worried, so we're up on this stage last year.

It interested me that we had less trouble with the asymmetry of the time signature than Nan expected. I think it's because pop culture has embraced asymmetry in an occasional, but often memorable, way; so anyone younger than, say, David Bowie, has grown up with it, if fleetingly.

Now, Peter Grimes is full of passages in such odd time signatures (usually disguised by being written across the bar in 4/4, though there is a long hymny bit 15/8 sung in church by the Borough congregation). And classical composers had been banging away in all sorts of lopsided rhythms for ages (Shostakovich could get a big rollicking 7/8 going very nicely thank you - think of the hurtling section in the Piano Concerto No. 2).

But popular music has always been suspicious of it. Or at least, the producers have, ever worried that the feet of the great unwashed are unable to tap along to compound times. Dave Brubeck's Take Five in the 1960s was nearly spiked by the pradoocers, it's said, but the piece's three-two switching became the epitome of white-cool jazz. And what since then? Well, prog-rock used such arithmetical legerdemain all over the place: Yes were particularly famous for it.

I remember the theme tune to BBC's Look North being a clear Brubeck ripoff in the early 1970s, with a chunky piano stumbling along in 5/4 and everything. It seemed in the 1980s that unusual beats were a prerequisite for a TV theme tune with a punchy, thrusting, current-affairs, new-techie cachet (morning news broadcasts had quavers urgently going missing everywhere, and Tomorrow's World's theme was in 7/8, I seem to recall, though I was more concerned with looking at Maggie Philbin's knockers).

And the Stranglers' single Gordon Brown - sorry, Golden Brown - had three bars of three followed by one of four, which makes 13, which is pretty impressive for a punk band, but then they were always cut above the usual gobbing power-chord thrashers who, frankly, just scared me. I bet Maggie Philbin wouldn't have been impressed by the Pistols. No, more of an Abba fan, I expect.

And I'm now sitting at work listening to Pandora.com, the fantastic online radio station that generates playlists according to songs you say you like, and have been enjoying all sorts of spikily-rhythmed pieces from long-haired 1970s stalwarts such as Yes, King Crimson and UK, to mysterious modern bands from Quebec or Colorado with names like Miriodor or Thinking Plague or Godzik Pink. It's just fab.

Maybe I like all these odd rhythms because I'm so rubbish at dancing. If I try to waltz it comes out in five anyway.

So not many sevens flying around in pop culture to establish the idea of uneven rhythms in our young heads; but at least a few. So I wasn't entirely surprised that we could repeatedly count to seven en masse with reasonable reliability.

The only thing that worries me is the remaining 95 per cent of the opera.

More about that dodgy ENO Carmen

2007-10-24T09:27:00.000+01:00

My review of ENO's notorious Carmen is now up on line (on the Sky Arts website). In short, it's been panned by pretty much everyone.

Now, if you ask any critic, they'll tell you that they don't enjoy writing bad reviews. This is rubbish. They love writing bad reviews. It's much more fun.

For example... There is only about one way to say Alice Coote has a lovely, rich, well-controlled mezzo. But there are loads of ways to describe her curious posture on stage. An East German swimmer waiting for the starting-gun. A Dutch tennis player receiving serve. A drunk HR woman at the office Christmas party about to stage-whisper to you that her husband has left her. A circus mime artist pretending to shift a large wardrobe. See? Much more entertaining.

The intention here isn't to get at Alice C - I thought she sang really well, and if her Carmen came across as passionless, that was mainly down to the direction. Neither is the intention to get at Sally Potter's direction (though I did think it was a bit clueless at times: Why CCTV stop after Act I? Why dog get biggest round of applause of night? Why suddenly jump-cut to Spain? Why children wearing white Elvis wedding stuff? Why whizzy streetdance over wary, nervous music at start of Act III? Why seven-foot-tall transvestites? Why no dialogue? Why Carmen's entrance so flat? Why my packet of crisps at the interval more exciting than opera? etc. If I'd paid 140 quid for two posh seats for all that, I'd be hopping mad.)

I'm just making the point that, whatever they say, critics absolutely love productions such as this: ones that take risks and then fail. When they meet up with each other at some record industry bash, what will they be talking about over the glass of complimentary chilled white, poured by their Polish post doc waitress? ENO's fine Magic Flute? ROH's Elisir d'amore? Nope, they'll all slagging off Sally Potter, with a few rolls of the eyes, and loving every minute of it. Nobody loves a turkey, but everyone loves talking about it.

It was with this in mind that I told my friend Jo, who has tickets for tonight, to go along, and not to sell them on eBay. (Anyway, she'd be lucky to get a fiver for them.) Go expecting the worst, I said, and you might enjoy it.

Anyway, Bizet's music is robust enough to make it an evening well spent - you don't have to look at the stage. You can always close your eyes or read the surtitles or simply gaze around to see if there's anyone famous or with an amusing combover sitting nearby. But if you do watch the stage action closely, you'll come away with a dinner-party conversation to last you years.

And you might even think up a witty new way to describe Alice Coote's posture.

A Carmen travesty

2007-10-20T17:22:00.000+01:00

Went to English National Opera last night to see Sally Potter's Carmen. I was reviewing it for Sky Arts's website, and so had the luxury of press tickets. This means you get to see it free, and then get paid for slagging it off and telling people not to go, which is agreeable but seems a trifle unfair.

Anyway, it also means you have a spare free ticket, and so can take someone else along with you. Normally I go with someone from Goldsmiths, or one of my drinking chums, in which case I bring a bottle of cheap Cab Sauv, two plastic tumblers, and a saucer of crisps, and we have a quick party downstairs during the interval. This time I invited Nan, so I did things a bit posher, such as not picnicking next to the toilets, and having a shave beforehand.

I won't describe the ENO Carmen here, partly because the full review will appear on the Sky Arts website (www.skyarts.co.uk) in due course, mainly because it's a bit rubbish, with too many visual gimmicks at the expense of dramatic and musical coherence. What, for example, those three blokes in full female flamenco dancer gear were doing there, I don't know.

Still, they were rather striking, in their high heels, extravagant polka-dot gypsy dresses, and skyscraper mantillas, which made them about seven foot tall. I can see Dan getting ideas already...

Rhythm methods

2007-10-18T16:59:00.000+01:00

Second rehearsal today. We blundered our way through the chorus bits of the Prologue and of Act I, particularly the storm chorus. People complain about student behaviour sometimes, but I was pleased to see the altos, in particular, so well behaved. We didn't hear a peep out of them all afternoon.

The music in Grimes poses a lot of interesting problems. Few of these are related to notes: Britten naturally writes in quite a vocal way, with lots of stepwise, modal or harmonic movement. He's also very considerate at giving you your entry notes: the series of otherwise difficult D-sharps on which Bob Boles starts his rants in Act I, for example, are supplied helpfully a quaver in advance by the oboe. Except we won't have an oboe until June.

But the rhythms are something else. The choruses work in lots of short, repeated or sequenced phrases which overlap, but whose overlapping scheme is never that obvious. Successive entries of your phrase might come in on beat 1, then on beat 3, then beat 2 1/2 but half speed, then beat 1 1/2 but with half of it double speed and the other half half speed. And all this time you're being put off by the sopranos and basses who are doing the same sort of thing but in different ways, often from each other, but I don't think that was in the score. Not the altos, though, obviously.

Nan's hot tip is to practise the chorus parts by speaking the rhythms first, to get those cemented in the head, before proceeding to secondary issues such as notes, dynamics, etc.

As my guitar teacher was fond of saying, rather often in my lessons in fact, get the notes right but the rhythm wrong and everyone will notice; get the rhythm right and the notes wrong, and hardly anyone will notice. Well, for anything written up to 1913, that is. For rather a lot of music after say 1950, you can get the notes and the rhythm wrong, and even the composer won't notice.

When it's done right, all this chorus stuff in Grimes is really, really exciting. Britten has the skill to make these simple units build up, thanks to their varied overlaps, into genuine harmonic and textural momentum.

We're a bloody long way from doing it right.

Still, as Nan reminded us, when she was at Scottish National Opera the chorus managed to learn the whole darn opera in a week. Either they were fantastically committed, or there's nothing else do on an autumn evening in Glasgow. I suspect it's the commitment thing, though.

Paisley patterns

2007-10-17T11:46:00.000+01:00

I've now had a chance to look through the part of Bob Boles, the ranting, Bible-bashing, drunken, leering Methodist fisherman. Typecast again.

My mum thinks I ought to do it all in an Ian Paisley accent, which shows you why my mum isn't an opera director.

It's an enticing thought though. Perhaps I could bellow out "Harl it yerrsalf, Greymes!", or "This lost soul of a foshermon most be shonned bey ruspuctable soceyety!!", or - most excitingly, as Boles gets into brimstone mode while the chorus fret about the approaching storm in Act I - "Re-pant! Re-pant! Re-pant!!!!!", in the stentorian manner of Rev P shouting "Tharr shall bee noooooh sorrrrendooorrrr to the Ey Or Ay!!!!"

I suppose a Suffolk accent would be more appropriate, whatever that is. Like my Uncle Wally? No, come to think of it, he came from Norwich. He'd have been a rubbish Bob Boles anyway, about as fiery and threatening as Bernard Matthews trying to persuade Grimes to come and work in the marketing department of his turkey factory.

Second rehearsal tomorrow....

The nightmare starts here

2007-10-16T10:59:00.000+01:00

Friday 12 October

I bought Foyles's only score of Peter Grimes down Charing Cross Road on the way home from work last night. Even with ten per cent student discount it cost £60. This is a frightening amount of money, especially given the second-rate photoreproduction of Boozy & Dorks' edition, evidently done on Mr Blobby's disposable camera.

I mean, SIXTY QUID: I've spent less than that on all-you-can-drink weekend citybreaks (though, granted, these were to cheap, shabby, forlorn, economically desperate corners of the EU, such as Poprad in Slovakia, Szeczin in Poland, or Middlesbrough.)

But on the other hand, it is nearly four hundred pages, so that's only 14p per page, roughly the cost of photocopying it at Goldsmiths.

But on the other other hand, that's nearly four hundred pages of often very challenging music that we've got to learn by Christmas. It's as long as Carmen, with far less obvious notes.

Oh my God.

Saturday 13 October

Talking about cheap, shabby, forlorn, and economically desperate, here I am in Hull, seeing my mum and brother. He and I bike out on the 15-mile cycle path to the east coast. The path is final part of the 215-mile Trans Pennine Cycle Trail, and ends up in the resort – yes, as in 'last' – town of Hornsea.

This is exactly the coastline that Britten conjures up in Peter Grimes so effectively. It may be a hundred miles north of 'The Borough' (Aldeburgh), where Grimes is set, but geographically and atmospherically it's exactly the same. It's a marginal world, the edge of a flat, grey, featureless agricultural plain that transitions seamlessly into a flat, grey, featureless North Sea. The oxymoronic 'Amusement Arcades' are closed or empty, their lights hardly penetrating the mist (they call them 'sea-rokes' here, apparently). It's lunchtime but the tea rooms are shut. We have a sandwich on a bench overlooking the dreary, rust-coloured beach, then a couple of cheap pints in a friendly pub already festooned with Christmas lights and plastic Santas.

Grimes would feel at home here: mists, storms, big skies, small minds, claustrophobia, not many surnames in the phone book, surplus fingers, wary stares towards anyone who has something considered strange, such as a job. There's even a village called Aldbrough further up the coast, though not for long, because like most of the coastline it's crumbling into the sea with the feeble inevitability of a forgotten ginger biscuit left suspended in weak tea.

So the bike trip's all good research. Perhaps I can claim the cost of two pints of Tetley's and a pack of Seabrook's cheese'n'onion against tax. We cycle back home, and suddenly Hull seems vibrant and cosmopolitan.

Monday 15 October
On the train back to London. I really shouldn't do my score-bashing in bed. The last three nights have been turbulent, seething, mildly nightmarish. My customary bad-dream activities (pursuit by assassins, missing trains, unrevised-for exams, subsident housing, and the disturbingly Freudian one of trying to close a door that is too small for the frame) are all being played out to a Grimes soundtrack: one of the Sea Interludes, the Act I storm fugato, or that pesky 7-4 round of Joe Sr and Jr going fishing. Britten was pretty darn good at the nocturnal atmosphere, and there's a feeling of night-terrors-around-corner in a lot of his work (the Nocturnal for Guitar, for example, which I can't play either).

Then again, the blitzkrieg of wine and beer at these family weekends may have had something to do with it.

So. Peter Grimes, it is, then.

2007-10-11T20:51:00.000+01:00

Ah. Right. Opera Gold's 2008 production will be Britten's Peter Grimes.

It's a Big Ask. Not as big as the Ask in Chichester, where I had a sausagey pizza on a bike trip in 2005, but sizeable nevertheless.

Anyway, we had the first rehearsal today, piling through the Prologue and some bits of Act I. It was nice to see so many familiar faces: Dan, Jonny, Jenny, Nat, Jenny, Casey, Abi, Hamish, Ryan...

Jonny's appearance was particularly noteworthy. He sustained a broken thumb while playing cricket. (With a twig-snapping susceptibility to injury like that, he clearly has a future on a Central Contract for England.) So, he now has one of those 21st-century minimalist splints in his thumb: a metal spike through the bone that is pinioned at either end by a black stud, one such stud sticking out of the region between his thumbnail and joint, the other sticking out the top of his thumb, like two tiny licorice pellets.

At any other London Uni, people would be squirming, or sympathising, or pretending not to notice. But, this being uber-trendy Goldsmiths, everyone thinks it's a body modification fresh from LA, and they all say wow, that's really cool, where d'you get it done. They probably think 'Cover Point' is a tat parlour in Camden.

I might be doing Bob Boles, the drunken Bible-basher, so I've started preparation for the part by having a couple of cans of lager. I'll get round to the singing tomorrow.