News & Reviews

Just a follow up to my brief email the other day following our trip to Berlin and Dresden.
 
We really had an extremely good and enjoyable trip. Both Hotels were excellent but did think that the one in Berlin should not charge for WiFi to residents, nearly everywhere now it is free if you are staying in the Hotel.
 
The Opera seats were excellent.
 
Overall, very good indeed, and we look forward to our next one.

Overall it was very enjoyable and the Hotel was good too. They gave us a superb room just as we requested, with a balcony and a view of the lake/river. So we managed to watch the fireworks without getting wet (it was raining). The hotel also has free wifi now. Transfer between airport and hotel was efficiently done in a timely manner. So keep using the company and this hotel.

No doubt, we will book more with you and for Zurich (we have one in May with you already).

We had a wonderful time [and have recommended you to someone from the UK who did his with another company this time - paid a little bit more!] I guess he will be calling you some time. 

Happy New Year!

Daniel Barenboim has been appointed music director of Teatro alla Scala in MIlan. He takes up the appointment on 1 December and his contarct runs for five years.

Welsh National Opera has veered between mediocrity and magnificence. David Pountney will steady the ship

For a man who is directing an opera about the Holocaust, and (possibly an even more harrowing assignment) also in his first week running Welsh National Opera, David Pountney looks surprisingly relaxed. But then, he’s been around the operatic block a few times. Just turned 64 (“I’ve reached Beatledom,” he beams), he was one of the radical wits who passed through Oxbridge in the 1960s and proceeded to take over the arts world.

At 27 he was already director of productions at Scottish Opera. Then came a decade running English National Opera in tandem with Mark Elder and Peter Jonas — the self-styled “Powerhouse” team. (None of them was ever accused of undue modesty.) Pountney directed 20 operas at the Coliseum in that heady decade and managed to create a furore with most of them. “British opera productions had been very genteel and decorative, and I suppose my generation rebelled against that,” he says. “We wanted to apply the lessons we’d learnt from the continentals. But all that’s been done now, hasn’t it? There’s still a hunger for really exciting work, but I don’t think it has to be ideological in the same way.”

Since then Pountney has not only been freelancing round the world, but also running the Bregenz Festival on Lake Constance in Austria — winning much acclaim in the process by championing rarely heard operas. So why has he taken on the daunting mantle of chief executive and artistic director at WNO? It’s a company with a fantastic history. But it also has considerable financial problems — and, in recent seasons, a record of swerving bewilderingly from magnificence (Die Meistersinger with Bryn Terfel) to mediocrity (a disastrous Fidelio two months later).

“Well, by the time I finish I will have done ten years in Bregenz [he still has two summer seasons to supervise] and I felt I’d learnt a lot about running a company,” he says. “And as a freelance director I’ve been going round the world, seeing how badly run other places are. I wanted to put all this experience into doing a real job with a real company.”

But WNO, which has been leaderless since the unlamented John Fisher departed nearly a year ago, is a hell of a challenge — particularly with public subsidy being cut everywhere. “I think they have been very daunted by financial anxiety,” Pountney says, diplomatically. “And I’m assuming that they have chosen me [he was asked to apply for the job] because they think I will lead them more strongly on the artistic front. That’s what the company needs. I started working with WNO in the 1970s, at a very exciting time when the company was being very bold. I want us to get back to that.”

Is that even possible? “Very definitely. I’m working on a lot of options for co-producing with other European opera houses, and thus being able to do more adventurous work without spending more money — because more money is something we ain’t going to have.”

Will they actually have less money? “Thanks to the Welsh Assembly the cuts at WNO are not as drastic as, for example, Opera North has to make,” Pountney says. “I’ve planned to the end of 2014; we’ve budgeted for those plans, and we think we can stick to it.”

So WNO won’t be doing what Scottish Opera has done: dumped its chorus and put its orchestra on part-time contracts? “Certainly not. I started my career at Scottish; watching the decline of that company has been a horror story.”

Pountney says that he won’t direct more than one opera a year. “To do more would be wrong, because the company can afford only three new shows a year.” His first, a real statement of intent, will be Berg’s pervy masterpiece Lulu, in 2013. “Lothar [Koenigs, WNO’s music director] has his eye on the German repertoire, and to balance that I have a very specific plan for part of the Italian repertoire that I’d like to cultivate. And we definitely want to do more modern pieces. Truly modern pieces, I mean — 21st century.”

Does WNO’s audience cry out for that? “I think music went through a horrible period of dogmatic Modernism, and that turned the audience away,” Pountney replies. “But that period has been over for 20 years. There are some wonderful recent pieces around. In the long run we would want to commission a new opera too.”

Has Pountney any plans for WNO to attract new audiences and offer radical new approaches by working occasionally in former industrial spaces, as ENO and others are doing? “Ah, what a friend of mine calls shite-specific work,” he quips. “Well, my wife [Nicola Raab] has just directed Parsifal in a former Soviet shipyard in Tallinn, so I know how fabulous these things can be. And of course Wales, sadly, is full of disused industrial sites. But they are very expensive shows to mount, because you have to bring all the theatrical apparatus with you.” So Pountney needs to find some Welsh billionaires? “I need to find several of those.”

And what about his personal ambitions. After 40 years directing opera, are there any whales that have escaped his net? “Oh yes. The Ring, for example. I’m saving it for my Indian summer. And there’s a pile of Mozart I’ve never done: Così, Figaro, Idomeneo. I’ve done such a lot of out-of-the-way repertoire. That’s why people usually gee me up.”

Which brings us to Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The Passenger, the remarkable work that Pountney introduces to English National Opera next week, having first staged it in Bregenz last year. Weinberg, a Polish Jew who was befriended by Shostakovich and composed a vast number of symphonies, string quartets and film scores, knew a thing or two about totalitarian oppression. His parents perished in a Nazi camp and he ended up in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union, where his father-in-law was killed by Stalin’s secret police. In Zofia Posmysz’s novel The Passenger he found his ideal subject-matter. Posmysz, herself an Auschwitz survivor, imagined a chance meeting on a ship after the war between an SS overseer and a former inmate. That triggers extended flashbacks to the concentration camp.

“It was Weinberg’s first opera,” Pountney observes, “yet he seems to know exactly how to set this story to music. By using voices and instruments with incredible sparseness, he creates a sense of timelessness — because in a prison, time just disappears. And he avoids any kind of operatic grandstanding. One feels that both Posmysz and Weinberg are the authentic voices of the Holocaust.

It’s not like so often nowadays, when you have the uncomfortable feeling that authors or directors are ‘quoting’ the Holocaust simply to raise the emotional temperature. In Bregenz the impact on the audience was astounding. Of course, in a German-speaking country there is a very particular resonance. But I think it will have a big impact here too.”

Welsh National Opera opens its season with Don Giovanni tomorrow at the Millennium Centre, Cardiff (029-2063 6464). The Passenger opens at the London Coliseum (0871 9110200) on Monday.

We enjoyed the break......The Mastersingers was a production disgrace and will stop us even considering another visit as it was produced by a member of the Wagner family with no respect for the traditions of Bayreuth. It received, quite rightly, a terrific hiss and boo reception when the curtain fell. The singers and orchestra were well received.

Dear Andrew,

We are now back in the UK having had a memorable visit to Lucca.

The city was a real joy, the hotel was excellent, the staff being exceptionally friendly and helpful. The breakfasts were all one could wish for and the open bar ( free) until 1900hrs was greatly appreciated.

The transfers went smoothly and on time, we decided against taking a taxi to  Torre del Largo - cost 165 euros! and instead took the shuttle, just 50 euros, which picked us up from the hotel and returned us there. In addition it enabled us to meet some fascinating and interesting fellow opera lovers!

Butterfly was perhaps a little disappointing but La Boheme was magical. We were glad to be in the gold sector as I suspect the acoustics towards the rear of the auditorium were not too good. If I had one suggestion it would be to ask them to produce a souvenir programme in English.

We enjoyed two other musical events in Lucca and also visited a remarkable sculpture exhibition by Tony Cragge, a totally unexpected pleasure.  We had planned to travel outside the city but the temperature during our stay varied between 34 - 39 degrees centigrade and the best place for the afternoon was our air conditioned bedroom!

What a wonderful 70th birthday present!