Christopher Morley looks at an exciting spring ahead for opera in Birmingham.
The opera comes to town in the next few weeks, when Birmingham sees a range of operatic activity in a variety of venues.
Sharp-eyed fans will notice that the current notorious cuts in arts funding have led to the dropping of one day from the week of Welsh National Opera’s regular visits to the city. WNO’s forthcoming season at Birmingham Hippodrome begins on Wednesday (Tuesdays used to be the opening night), but the good news is that it kicks off with a new production of Johann Strauss’ effervescent Die Fledermaus.
By general consensus, WNO’s last production of this amiable operetta was a bit of a car-crash, the action under the supervision of the Catalan director Calixto Bieto demanding all kinds of cavortings from everyone involved, not least the variously-aged lady members of the WNO Chorus. I seem to remember multiple sofas being part of the set-up, and I also remember a huge sigh of relief from all concerned when the whole gruesome run was over.
In more than 40 years of reviewing Welsh National Opera, I can only remember two consummate turkeys. Bieto’s Fledermaus was certainly one. The other was a production in 1993 of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin which involved a railway line crossing the stage for some reason, and replaced WNO’s earlier production of that heartbreaking opera which had been utter perfection (anyone lucky enough to have seen that one will know exactly what I mean).
This new production of Die Fledermaus seems to be an apology making amends all round, not least to Johann Strauss himself. The respected director John Copley returns after his iconic Tosca of several decades ago, the wondrously-named Stuart Hopps is the choreographer, and the cast is a starry one.
Nuccia Focile is the flighty Rosalinde, with her own real-life husband, Paul Charles Clarke, as her ardent lover Alfred. Her stage husband Eisenstein is sung by Mark Stone, a singer also with a strong reputation in English song, and David Stout, one of our most versatile performers, not least for his appearances with the Orchestra of the Swan, plays “the Bat” himself, Dr Falke.
Welsh National Opera’s other production is Verdi’s Il Trovatore, a garish melodrama of witchcraft, reconciliation and execution, famous for its Anvil Chorus. The cast here includes two graduates from Birmingham Conservatoire: George Newton-Fitzgerald, and Philip Lloyd Holtam, who used to be a singing policeman based in Handsworth until he gave up his high-revving motorbike for the high notes of a tenor.
Simultaneously, over at the Crescent Theatre in Sheepcote Street, Birmingham Conservatoire’s School of Operatic and Vocal Studies stages its annual major production.
