A whole new ball game

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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.